CHAPTER VIII.

Produced by Joshua Hutchinson, Tonya Allen, and Project

Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS

VOL. V, MAY, 1860, NO. XXXI

INSTINCT.

"Instinct is a great matter," quoth Falstaff, when called upon to find

out a device, a "starting-hole," to hide himself from the open and

apparent shame of having run away from the fight and hacked his sword

like a handsaw with his own dagger. Like a valiant lion, he would not

turn upon the true prince, but ran away upon instinct. Although the

peculiar circumstances of the occasion upon which the subject was

presented to Falstaff's mind were not very favorable to a calm

consideration of it, he was undoubtedly correct in saying that instinct

is a great matter. "If, then, the tree may be known by the fruit," says

Falstaff, "as the fruit by the tree, then, peremptorily I speak it,

there is virtue in that Falstaff"; and it is proper that his authority

should be quoted, even upon a question of metaphysical science.

That psychological endowment of animals which we denominate instinct

has in every age been a matter full of wonder; and men of thought have

found few more interesting subjects of inquiry. But it is confessed

that little has been satisfactorily made out concerning the nature and

limitations of instinct. In former times the habits and mental

characteristics of those orders of animated being which are inferior to

man were observed with but a careless eye; and it was late before the

phenomena of animal life received a careful and reverent examination.

It is vain to inquire what instinct is, before there has been an

accurate observation of its manifestations. It is only from its outward

manifestations that we can know anything of that marvellous inward

nature which is given to animals. We cannot know anything of the

essential constitution of mind, but can know only its properties. This

is all we know even of matter. "If material existence," says Sir

William Hamilton, "could exhibit ten thousand phenomena, and if we

possessed ten thousand senses to apprehend these ten thousand phenomena

of material existence, of existence absolutely and in itself we should

be then as ignorant as we are at present." But this limitation of human

knowledge has not always been kept in view. Men have been solicitous to

penetrate into the higher mysteries of absolute and essential

existence. But in thus reaching out after the unattainable, we have

often passed by the only knowledge which it was possible for us to

gain. Much vague speculation concerning instinct has arisen from the

attempt to resolve the problem of its ultimate nature; and perhaps much

more might have been made out with certainty about it, if no greater

task had been attempted than to classify the phenomena which it

exhibits and determine the nature of its manifestations. In regard to

instinct, as well as everything else, we must be content with finding

out what it seems to us to be, rather than what it is. Even with this

limitation, the inquiry will prove sufficiently difficult. The

properties of instinct are a little more inscrutable than those of the

human mind, inasmuch as we have our own consciousness to assist us in

this case, while we are left to infer the peculiarities of instinct

from its outward manifestations only. And moreover, the inquiry

involves an understanding of the workings of the human mind; for it is

only when viewed in contrast with the rational endowments of man that

the character of instinct is best known. All other questions connected

with the subject are subordinate to this one of the apparent difference

between instinct and reason.

Many definitions have been given of instinctive actions. These differ

widely in their extent, and are for the most part quite inadequate.

Some writers have ranged under this term all those customary habits and

actions which are common to all the individuals of a species. According

to this definition, almost every action of animated life is

instinctive. But the general idea of an instinctive action is much more

restricted; it is one that is performed without instruction and prior

to experience,--and not for the immediate gratification of the agent,

but only as the means for the attainment of some ulterior end. To apply

the term instinct to the regular and involuntary movements of the

bodily organs, such as the beating of the heart and the action of the

organs of respiration, is manifestly an extension of the ordinary

acceptation of the term. Organic actions of a similar character are

also performed by plants, and are purely mechanical. "In the lowest and

simplest class of excited movements," says Müller, "the nervous system

would not appear to be concerned. They result from stimuli directly

applied to the muscles, which immediately excite their contractility;

and they are evidently of the same character with the motions of

plants." Thus, the heart is excited to pulsation by the direct contact

of the blood with the muscle. The hand of a sleeping child closes upon

any object which gently touches the palm. And it is in this way,

doubtless, that the Sea Anemone entraps its prey, or anything else that

may come in contact with its tentacles. But so far are these movements

from indicating of themselves the action of any instinctive principle,

that they are no proof of animality; for a precisely analogous power is

possessed by the sensitive plant known as the Fly-Trap of Venus

(_Dionoea muscipula_): "any insect touching the sensitive hairs on the

surface of its leaf instantly causes the leaf to shut up and enclose

the insect, as in a trap; nor is this all; a mucilaginous secretion

acts like a gastric juice on the captive, digests it, and renders it

assimilable by the plant, which thus feeds on the victim, as the

Actinea feeds on the Annelid or Crustacean it may entrap." In the

animal organization a large class of reflex actions are excited, not by

a direct influence, but indirectly by the agency of the nerves and

spinal cord. Such actions are essentially independent of the brain; for

they occur in animals which have no brain, and in those whose brain has

been removed. However marvellous these functions of organic life may

be, there is nothing in them at all resembling that agency properly

called instinct, which may be said to take the place in the inferior

tribes of reason in man. To refer these operations to the same source

as the wonderful instinct that guides the bird in its long migratory

flight, or in the construction of its nest, would be to make the bird a

curiously constructed machine which is operated by impressions from

without upon its sentient nerves.

Those actions have sometimes been called instinctive which arise from

the appetites and passions; and they have been referred to instinct,

doubtless, because they have one characteristic of instinct,--that they

are not acquired by experience or instruction. "But they differ," says

Professor Bowen, "at least in one important respect from those

instincts of the lower animals which are usually contrasted with human

reason. The objects towards which they are directed are prized for

their own sake; they are sought as _ends_; while instinct teaches

brutes to do many things which are needed only as means for the

attainment of some ulterior purpose." When the butterfly extracts the

nectar from the flowers which she loves most, she meets a want of her

physical nature which demands satisfaction at the moment; but when, in

opposition to her appetite, she proceeds to the flowerless shrub to

deposit her eggs upon the leaves best suited to support her

unthought-of progeny, she is not influenced by any desire for the

immediate gratification of her senses, but is led to the act by some

dim impulse, in order that an ultimate object may be provided for to

which she has no reference at the time. We are surprised to find it

declared, in the very interesting "Psychological Inquiries" of Sir B.C.

Brodie, that the desire for food is the simplest form of an instinct,

and that such an instinct goes far towards explaining others which are

more complicated. It is true that the appetites and passions of animals

have an ultimate object, but they are impelled to action by a desire

for immediate gratification only; but when we speak of an instinct, we

mean something more than a mere want or desire,--we have chiefly in

view the end beyond the blind instrumentality by which it is reached.

When we watch the movements of a young bee, as it first goes forth from

its waxen cradle, we are forced to recognize an influence at work which

is unlike reason, and which is neither appetite nor any mechanical

principle of organic life. Rising upon the comb, and holding steadily

with its tiny feet, with admirable adroitness the young bee smooths its

wings for its first flight, and rubs its body with its fore legs and

antennae; then walking along the comb to the mouth of the hive, it

mounts into the air, flies forth into the fields, alights upon the

proper flowers, extracts their juices, collects their pollen, and,

kneading it into little balls, deposits them in the sacks upon its

feet; and then returning to its hive, it delivers up the honey and the

wax and the bread which it has gathered and elaborated. In the hive it

works the wax with its paws and feelers into an hexagonal cell with a

rhomboidal bottom, the three plates of which form such angles with each

other as require the least wax and space in the construction of the

cell. All these complex operations the bee performs as adroitly, on the

first morning of its life, as the most experienced workman in the hive.

The tyro gatherer sought the flowery fields upon untried wings, and

returned to its home from this first expedition with unerring flight by

the most direct course through the trackless air.

This is one instance of that great class of actions which are allowed

on all hands to be strictly instinctive. In the fact, that the occult

faculties which urge the bee to make honey and construct geometrical

cells are in complete development when it first emerges from its cell,

we recognize one of the most striking characteristics of instinct,--its

existence prior to all experience or instruction. The insect tribes

furnish us with many instances in which the young being never sees its

parents, and therefore all possibility of its profiting from their

instructions or of its imitating their actions is cut off. The solitary

wasp, for example, is accustomed to construct a tunnelled nest in which

she deposits her eggs and then brings a number of living caterpillars

and places them in a hole which she has made above each egg; being very

careful to furnish just caterpillars enough to maintain the young worm

from the time of its exclusion from the egg till it can provide for

itself, and to place them so as to be readily accessible the moment

food is required. But what is most curious of all is the fact that the

wasp does not deposit the caterpillars unhurt, for thus they would

disturb or perhaps destroy the young; nor does she sting them to death,

for thus they would soon be in no state of proper preservation; but, as

if understanding these contingencies, she inflicts a disabling wound.

Yet the wasp does not feed upon caterpillars herself, nor has she ever

seen a wasp provide them for her future offspring. She has never seen a

worm such as will spring from her egg, nor can she know that her egg

will produce a worm; and besides, she herself will be dead long before

the unknown worm can be in existence. Therefore she works blindly;

without knowing that her work is to subserve any useful purpose, she

works to a purpose both definite and important; and her acts are

uniform with those of all solitary wasps that have lived before her or

that will live after her; so that we are compelled to refer these

untaught actions to some constant impulse connected with the special

organization of the wasp,--an innate tact, uniform throughout the

species, of which we, not possessing anything of the kind, can form

only a poor conception, but which we call instinct.

There have been some philosophers, however, who have exercised their

ingenuity in tracing so-called instinctive actions to the operation of

experience. The celebrated Doctor Erasmus Darwin gave, as an

illustration of this view, his opinion that the young of animals know

how to swallow from their experience of swallowing _in utero_. Without

going into any refutation of this position, we would only remark, in

passing, that the act of swallowing is not an instinctive action at

all, but a purely mechanical one. Would not Doctor Darwin have rejoiced

greatly, if he could have brought to the support of his theory the

observation of our own great naturalist, Agassiz, who, knowing the

savage snap of one of the large, full-grown Testudinata, is said to

have asserted, that, under the microscope, he has seen the juvenile

turtle snapping precociously _in embryo_?

But not only is instinct prior to all experience, it is even superior

to it, and often leads animals to disregard it,--the spontaneous

impulse which Nature has given them being their best guide. The

carrier-pigeon or the bird of passage, taken a long distance from home

by a circuitous route, trusting to this "pilot-sense," flies back in a

straight course; and the hound takes the shortest way home through

fields where he has never previously set foot.

The existence of instinct prior to all experience or instruction, and

its perfection in the beginning, render cultivation and improvement not

only unnecessary, but impossible. As it is with the individual, so it

is with the race. One generation of the irrational tribes does not

improve upon the preceding or educate its successor. The web which you

watched the spider weaving in your open window last summer, carefully

measuring off each radius of her wheel and each circular mesh by one of

her legs, was just such a web as the spider wove of old when she was

pronounced to be "little upon the earth, yet exceeding wise."

This incapacity for education is what so widely separates instinct from

the rational powers of man. Man gathers knowledge and transmits it from

generation to generation. He is not born with a ready skill, but with a

capacity for it. His mind is formed destitute of all connate knowledge,

that it may acquire the knowledge of all things. "Man's imperfection at

his nativity is his perfection; while the perfection of brutes at their

nativity is their imperfection." No rational being has ever arrived at

such perfection that he cannot still improve; he can travel on from one

attainment to another in a perpetual progress of improvement. He is,

moreover, free to choose his own path of action; while the being of

instinct is governed by a power which is not subject to his will, and

which confines him to a narrow path which he cannot leave. But

instinct, within its narrow limits, in many cases quite transcends

reason in its achievements.

"Man's attainments in his own concerns,

Matched with the expertness of the brutes in theirs,

Are ofttimes vanquished and thrown far behind."

Perhaps man has never made a structure as perfect in all its

adaptations as the honeycomb. Yet when Virgil spoke of the belief that

bees have a portion of the mind divine, nothing was known of the

wonderful mathematical properties of this beautiful fabric; and the

demonstration of them which has been made within the present century is

beyond the comprehension of far the larger part of mankind. If the bee

comprehended the problem which it has been working out for these many

ages before man was able to solve it, would its intellectual powers be

inferior to his in degree, if they were the same in kind? The

water-spider weaves for herself a cocoon, makes it impervious to water,

and fastens it by loose threads to the leaves of plants growing at the

bottom of a still pool. She carries down air in a bag made for this

purpose, till the water is expelled from the cell through the opening

below. The spider lived quite dry in her little air-chamber beneath the

water ages before the diving-bell was invented; but that she understood

anything of the doctrines of space and gravity, no one would venture to

assert.

It has been the belief of some philosophers, and poets as well, that

man has taken the hint for some of the arts he now practises from the

brute creation. Democritus represents him as having derived the arts of

weaving and sewing from the spider, and the art of building of tempered

clay from the swallow; and we also read in Pliny's "Natural History,"

that the nest of the swallow suggested to Toxius, the son of Coelus,

the invention of mortar. According to Lucretius, men learned music from

the song of birds, and Pope describes them as learning from the mole to

plough, from the nautilus to sail, and from bees and ants to form a

political community. Perhaps we were behind the beaver in felling

timber, in leading dams across rivers, and in building cabin

villages,--behind the wasp in making paper, and behind the squirrel and

spider in crossing streams upon rafts. So, if man had needed any

example of war and violence and wrong, he had only to go to the

ant-hill and see the red ants invade the camps of the black and bear

off their little negro prisoners into slavery.

Whatever truth there may be in these ideas, it is at least conceivable

that man may have profited from the example of these animals. He has

copied from patterns set by Nature in tree and leaf and flower and

plant; he has formed the Gothic arch and column from the trunks and

interlacing boughs of the lofty avenue, the Corinthian capital from the

acanthus foliage embracing a basket, and classic urns and vases from

flowers. But no one could describe one species of the brute world as

having derived a similar lesson from another, and much less from trees

and plants. No species of animals has learnt anything new even from

man, except within the narrow sphere of domestication.

It is only in particulars that instinct appears superior to reason in

the works it achieves. When an animal is taken, ever so little, out of

the ordinary circumstances in which its instincts act, it is apt to

behave very foolishly. If a woodpecker's egg is hatched by a bird which

builds an open nest upon the branches of a tree, when the young bird is

grown large enough to shuffle about in the nest, induced by its

instinct to suppose that its nest is in a hole walled round on all

sides by the tree, with a long, narrow entrance down from above, it

does not see that it has been inducted into the open nest of another

bird, and is sure to tumble out. The bee and the ant, in a few

particulars, show wonderful sagacity; but remove them from the narrow

compass of their instincts, and all their wisdom is at an end. That

animals are so wise in a few things and so wanting in wisdom in all

others shows that they are endowed with a mental principle essentially

of a different nature from that of the human race. "They do many things

even better than ourselves," says Descartes; "but this does not prove

them to be endowed with reason, for this would prove them to have more

reason than we have, and that they should excel us in all other things

also"; for reason can act not only in one direction, but in all.

But it will be said that instinct is not invariable,--that it often

displays a capacity of accommodating itself, like reason, to

circumstances, and is therefore a principle the same in kind with

it,--or else that the animal has something of the rational faculty

superadded to the instinctive. But does the animal make these

variations in its conduct from a true perception of their meaning and

purpose?

It is very natural for us to ascribe to reason those actions of other

animals which would be ascribable to reason, if performed by man. "If,"

says Keller, (an old German writer,) "the fly be enabled to choose the

place which suits her best for the deposition of her eggs, (as, for

instance, in my sugar-basin, in which I placed a quantity of decaying

wheat,) she takes a correct survey of every part and selects that in

which she believes her ova will be the best preserved and her young

ones well cared for." The fly, in this instance, apparently exercises

an intelligent choice; but does any one doubt that the selection she

makes is determined wholly by a blind, uncalculating instinct? The

beaver selects a site for his dam at a place where the depth, width,

and rapidity of the stream are most fit. There is a tree upon the bank,

and food and materials for his work in the vicinity. If a man should

attempt to build a beaver's dam, he would abstractly consider all these

elements of fitness. The outward manifestations of the quality of

abstraction are equally observable in either case. But we must not

hastily conclude, because the beaver in one instance acts in a manner

apparently reasonable, that he has any reason of his own; for, when we

come to study the habits of this animal, we find that he displays all

the characteristics of the instinctive principle. If animals are

endowed with instincts which apparently act so much like reason in the

ordinary course of their operations, we should not at once conclude

that there is any need of endowing them with a modicum of reason to

account for their deviations from this course, which do not outwardly

resemble the acts of reason any more strongly. And besides, it is said,

that, if we refer the variations to an intelligent principle, we must

refer the ordinary conduct to the same principle. To use an old

illustration,--if a bird is reasonable and intelligent, when, on

perceiving the swollen waters of the stream approach her half-finished

nest, she builds higher up the bank, she was intelligent while making

her first nest, and was always intelligent; for how otherwise, it is

asked, could she know when to lay down instinct and take up reason?

Instinct aims at certain definite ends; but these ends cannot always be

reached by the same means, especially when places and circumstances are

not the same. Accommodation is necessary, or it could not always

produce the effects for which it is intended. Would the instinct of the

spider be complete, if, after it has guided her to spin a web so neat

and trim and regular, it did not also lead her to repair her broken

snare, when the cords have been sundered by the struggles of some

powerful captive? But this pliancy of the spider's instinct is no more

remarkable than the contingent operation of the instincts of many

species of animals. "It is remarkable," says Kirby, "that many of the

insects which are occasionally observed to emigrate are not usually

social animals, but seem to congregate, like swallows, merely for the

purpose of emigration." When certain rare emergencies occur, which

render it necessary for the insects to migrate, a contingent instinct

develops itself, and renders an unsocial species gregarious.

It is probable that most of our domesticated species, exhibiting as

they do in that condition attainments foreign to their natural habits

and faculties in a wild state, were endowed with provisional instincts

with a view to their association with man. But generally the docility

of animals does not extend to attainments which are radically different

from their habits and faculties in a wild state. Casual acquirements,

which have no relation to their exigencies in their natural condition,

never become hereditary, and are not, therefore, instinctive. A young

pointer-dog, which has never been in the fields before, will not only

point at a covey of partridges, but will remain motionless, like a

well-trained dog. The fact that the sagacity of the pointer is

hereditary shows that it is the development of an instinctive

propensity; for simple knowledge is not transmitted by blood from one

generation to another. We have heard of a pig that pointed game, and of

another that was learned in letters; but we ascertain in every such

instance that their foreign acquirements do not reappear in their

progeny, but end with the pupils of the time being. The pig's

peculiarity of pointing did not arise from the development of a

provisional instinct, because it does not become hereditary; but the

same act in the pointer-dog is instinctive,--for, when once brought out

by associating with man, it has remained with the breed, being a part

of the animal's nature, which existed in embryo till it was developed

by a companionship with man, for whose use this faculty was alone

intended.

Although the animals which especially display these exceptional or

contingent instincts are those which are fitted for the use and comfort

of man and may be domesticated, it is doubtless true that many other

species are in some degree provided with them, and that they thus have

a plasticity in their nature which enables them to exercise, under

particular circumstances, unlooked-for attention, foresight, and

caution. And besides, it is only in analogy with the laws of the

physical world that instinct should admit of a slightly diversified

application.

It is to be noticed in this connection that many animals are gifted

with a wonderful sensibility of the senses,--the action of which is

sometimes mistaken not only for the action of instinct, but for that of

reason also. The acuteness of the sense of smell in the dog, which

enables him to trace the steps of his master for miles through crowded

streets by the infinitesimal odor which his footsteps left upon the

pavement, is quite beyond our conception. Equally incomprehensible to

us are the keenness of sight and wide range of vision of the eagle,

which enable him to discover the rabbit nipping the clover amid the

thick grass at a distance at which a like object would be to us

altogether imperceptible. The chameleon is enabled to seize the little

insects upon which it feeds by darting forth its wonderfully

constructed tongue with such rapidity and with such delicacy of

perception that "wonder-loving sages" have told us that it feeds upon

the air.

It has been the belief of some observers that some animals have senses

by which they are enabled to take cognizance of things which are not

revealed directly to our senses. It is easy enough to conceive of

beings endowed with a more perfect perception of the external world,

both in its condition and the number of objects it presents, than we

have, by means of other organs of outward perception. Voltaire, in one

of his philosophical romances, represents an inhabitant of one of the

planets of the Dog-Star as inquiring of the Secretary of the Academy of

Sciences in the planet of Saturn, at which he had recently arrived in a

journey through the heavens, how many senses the men of his globe had;

and when the Academician answered, that they had seventy-two, and were

every day complaining of the smallness of the number, he of the

Dog-Star replied, that in his globe they had very near one thousand

senses, and yet with all these they felt continually a sort of listless

inquietude and vague desire which told them how very imperfect they

were. But we shall not travel so far as this for our illustrations. We

have all seen in the fields and about our houses birds and insects

which seem to take cognizance of the electric state of the atmosphere;

and we have learnt to feel quite sure, when, early in the morning of a

summer's day, we see fresh piles of sand around the holes of the ants,

that a storm is approaching, although the sky may as yet be cloudless

and the air perfectly serene. In like manner birds perceive the

approach of rain, and are all busy oiling and smoothing their feathers

in preparation for it; and then, before the clouds break away, they

come out from their retreats and joyfully hail the return of fair

weather. So, by some analogous sense, the birds of passage are informed

of the approach of winter and the return of spring.

It is doubtless true that in some animals the senses are immediately

connected with instincts which assist and extend their operation.

Metaphysicians and physiologists are agreed that the perception of

distance is an acquired knowledge. The sense of sight by itself

principally makes us conversant with extension only. The painting upon

the retina of the eye presents all external things with flat surfaces

and at the same distance. Before we can have any correct ideas of

distance, we must be able to compare the result of the sense of sight

with the result of the sense of feeling. By experience we in time come

to judge something of distance by the size of the image which an object

makes upon the retina, but more by our acquired knowledge of the form

and color of external things. It is true that the eyes of many animals

are constructed like those of man; but they do not learn to judge of

distance by the same slow process. It is known from experiment that

some animals have a perfect conception of distance at the moment of

their birth; and the young of the greater part of animals possess some

instinctive perception of this kind. "A flycatcher, for example, just

come out of its shell, has been seen to peck at an insect with an aim

as perfect as if it had been all its life engaged in learning the art."

And so when the hen takes her chickens out into the field for the first

time to feed, they seem to perceive very distinctly the relative

distance of all objects about them, and will run by the straightest

course when she calls them to pick up the little grains which she

points out to them. Without this instinctive power of determining the

relative distance and figure of objects, the young of most animals

would perish before their sense of sight could be perfected, as ours

is, by experience.

We have now noticed the chief characteristics of instinct: its

existence prior to all experience or instruction; its incapacity of

improvement, except within the narrow sphere of domestication; its

limitation to a few objects, and the certainty of its action within

these limits; the distinctness and permanence of its character for each

species; and its constant hereditary nature. In regard to the

uniformity of instinct throughout each species, it may be further

remarked, that this seems to be very constantly preserved in the lowest

divisions of the animal kingdom. Among the Articulates, also, instinct

appears almost unvarying; and it is in this department among the insect

tribes that the most striking manifestations of instinct are to be met

with. When we arrive among the higher orders of the Vertebrates, we

find in some species that each individual is capable of some

modification of its actions, according to the particular circumstances

in which it finds itself placed. But throughout the long series of

animals, from the polype to man, there is instinctive action more or

less in amount in every species, with, perhaps, the exception of man

alone. The variety of that endowment, which is adapted to definite

objects, means, and results, in each particular one of the five hundred

thousand species estimated to be now living, may well call forth our

admiration and astonishment at the magnitude and extent of the

prospective contrivance of the Creator. How various the relations of

all these animals to each other and to the inanimate world about them!

and yet how admirable the adjustments of that immaterial principle

which regulates their lives, so as to secure the well-being of each and

the symmetry of the general plan!

There has been much diversity of opinion as to the existence of

instincts in the human species,--some making the whole mind of man

nothing but a bundle of instincts, and others wholly denying him any

endowment of this nature, while others still have given him a complex

mental nature, and have, moreover, declared that intellect and instinct

in him are so interwoven that it is impossible to tell where the one

begins and the other ends. But we believe, with the author of "Ancient

Metaphysics," that in Nature, however intimately things are blended

together and run into each other like different shades of the same

color, the species of things are absolutely distinct, and that there

are certain fixed boundaries which separate them, however difficult it

may be for us to find them out. In regard to intelligence and instinct,

the two principles seem to us to be not more distinctly and widely

separated in their nature than in the provinces of their operation.

Sir Henry Holland, who believes that intelligence and instinct are

blended in man, admits that instincts, properly so called, form the

_minimum_ in relation to reason, and are difficult of definition from

their connection with his higher mental functions, but that, wherever

we can truly distinguish them, they are the same in principle and

manner of operation as those of other animals. He makes one

distinction, however, between the instincts of man and those of lower

animals,--that in the former they have more of individual character,

are far less numerous and definite in relation to the physical

conditions of life, and more various and extensive in regard to his

moral nature. But, on the other hand, Sir B.C. Brodie seems to be of

opinion that the majority of instincts belonging to man resemble those

of the inferior animals, inasmuch as they relate to the preservation of

the individual and the continuation of the species; and that when man

first began to exist, and for some generations afterwards, the range of

his instincts was much more extensive than it is at the present time.

When authorities so eminent as these differ so widely upon the

question, to what human instincts relate, we see at least that it is

very difficult to define and distinguish these instincts, and we may be

led to doubt their existence at all. Of that marvellous endowment which

guides the bee to fabricate its cells according to laws of the most

rigid mathematical exactness, and guides the swallow in its long flight

to its winter home, we agree with Professor Bowen, that there is no

trace whatever in human nature. The actions of man which have been

loosely described as instinctive belong for the most part to those

classes of actions which we have already shown to be in no proper sense

of the word instinctive, that is, those concerned in the appetites and

in the functions of organic life. There are also numerous automatic and

habitual actions which are liable to be mistaken for instincts. Some

have included in the category of instincts those intuitive perceptions

and primary beliefs which are a part of our constitution, and are the

foundation of all our knowledge. But these propensities of thought and

feeling are of a higher nature than mere instincts; they are immutable

laws of the human mind, which time and physical changes cannot reach:

they do not seem to depend upon the physical organization, but to be

inherent in the soul itself. If these are instincts, then, why are not

all the ways in which the mind exerts itself instincts also, and reason

itself an instinct?

There is hardly any human action, feeling, or belief, which has not

been ranged under the term instinct. Hunger and thirst have been called

instincts; so have the faculty of speech, the use of the right hand in

preference to the left, the love of society, the desire to possess

property, the desire to avoid danger and prolong life, and the belief

in supernatural agencies, upon which is engrafted the religious

sentiment. We cannot, in this paper, attempt to analyze these and many

other similar examples which have been given as illustrations of

instinct in treatises of high repute, and show that they do not at all

come within that class of actions which we contrast with reason. In

regard to those actions of early infancy which have often been adduced

as illustrations of instinct, the physiologists of the present day are

agreed that they are as mechanical as the act of breathing. To place

these upon the same level with the complex and wonderful operations of

the bee, the ant, and the beaver, is to admit that the instincts of the

latter are merely reflex actions following impressions on the nerves of

sense.

On the other hand, whether the animals inferior to man ever exercise

any conscious process of reasoning is a question which has often been

discussed, and upon which there is no general agreement. Instances of

the remarkable sagacity of some domesticated animals are often adduced

as proofs of reasoning on their part. Some of these wonderful feats may

be traced to the unconscious faculty of imitation, which even in man

often appears as a blind propensity, although he exercises an active

and rational imitation as well. Sometimes the mere association of

ideas, or the perception by animals that one thing is accompanied by

another or that one event follows another, is mistaken for that higher

principle which in man judges, reflects, and understands causes and

effects. When the dog sees his master take down his gun, his

blandishments show that he anticipates a renewal of the pleasures of

the chase. He does not reflect upon past pleasures; but, seeing the gun

in his master's hand, a confused idea of the feelings that were

associated with the gun in times past is called up. So the ox and the

horse learn to associate certain movements with the voice and gesture

of man. And so a fish, about the most stupid of all animals, comes to a

certain spot at a certain signal to be fed. These combinations are

quite elementary. This is quite another thing from that reciprocal

action of ideas on each other by which man perceives the relations of

things, understands the laws of cause and effect, and not only forms

judgments of the past, but draws conclusions which are laws for the

future. We find in the brute no power of attending to and arranging its

thoughts,--no power of calling up the past at will and reflecting upon

it. The animal has the faculty of memory, and, when this is awakened,

the object remembered may be accompanied by a train or attendance of

accessory notions which have been connected with the object in the

animal's past experience. But it never seems to be able to exercise the

purely voluntary act of recollection. It is not capable of comparing

one thing with another, so far as we can judge. If the animal could

exercise any true act of comparison, there would be no limit to the

exercise of it, and the animal would be an intelligent being; for the

result of a simple act of comparison is judgment, and reasoning is only

a double act of comparison. We have the authority of Sir William

Hamilton for saying that the highest function of mind is nothing higher

than comparison. Hence comes thought,--hence, the power of discovering

truth,--and hence, the mind's highest dignity, in being able to ascend

unassisted to the knowledge of a God. Those who hold that the minds of

the inferior animals are essentially of the same nature with that of

the human race, and differ only in degree, should reflect that the

distinguishing attribute of the human mind does not admit of degrees.

The faculty of comparison, in all its various applications, must be

either wholly denied or else wholly attributed. Hence, Pope is not

philosophical, when he applies the epithet "half-reasoning" to the

elephant. "As reasoning," says Coleridge, "consists wholly in a man's

power of seeing whether any two ideas which happen to be in his mind

are or are not in contradiction with each other, it follows of

necessity, not only that all men have reason, but that every individual

has it in the same degree." We gather also from the same acute writer

that in the simple determination, "black is not white," all the powers

are implied that distinguish man from other animals. If, then, the

brute reasoned at all, he would be a rational being, and would improve

and gain knowledge by experience; and, moreover, he would be a moral

agent, accountable for his conduct. "Would not the brute," asks an able

writer in the "Zoölogical Journal," "take a survey of his lower powers,

and would he not, as man does, either rightly use or pervert them, at

his pleasure?"

It has been suggested by some one, that, by the law of merciful

adaptation, which extends throughout the universe, thought would not be

imprisoned and pent up forever in an intelligence wanting the power of

expression. But it is also to be noticed that the want of an articulate

language or a system of general signs puts it out of the power of

animals to perform a single act of reasoning. The use of language to

communicate wants and feelings is not peculiar to "word-dividing men,"

though enjoyed by them in a much higher degree than by other animals.

Doubtless every species of social animals has some kind of language,

however imperfect it may be. "We never watch the busy workers of the

ant-hill," says Acheta Domestics, (the author of "Episodes of

Insect-Life,") "stopping as they encounter and laying their heads

together, without being pretty certain that they are saying to each

other something quite as significant as 'Fine day.'" And when the

morning wakes the choral song of the birds, they seem to be telling

each other of their happiness. But though animals have a language

appropriate to the expression of their sensations and emotions, they

have no words, "those shadows of the soul, those living sounds." Words

are symbols of thoughts, and may be considered as a revelation of the

human mind. It is this use of language as an instrument of thought, as

a system of general signs, which, according to Bishop Whately,

distinguishes the language of man from that of the brute; and the same

eminent authority declares that without such a system of general signs

the reasoning process could not be conducted.

It is true, that we often see in the inferior animals manifestations of

deductions of intellect similar to those of the human mind,--only that

they are not made by the animals themselves, but for them and above

their conscious perception. "When a bee," says Dr. Reid, "makes its

combs so geometrically, the geometry is not in the bee, but in that

great Geometrician who made the bee, and made all things in number,

weight, and measure." Since the animal is not conscious of the

intelligence and design which are manifested in its instincts, which it

obeys and works out, the conscious life of the individual must be

wholly a life within the senses. The senses alone can give the animal

only an empirical knowledge of the world of its observation. The senses

may register and report facts, but they can never arrive at an

understanding of necessary truths; the source of this kind of knowledge

is the rational mind, which has an active disposition to draw out these

infallible laws and eternal truths from its own bosom. The main

tendency of the rational mind is not towards mere phenomena, but their

scientific explanation. It seeks to trace effects, as presented to us

by the senses, back to the causes which produced them; or contemplating

things wholly metaphysical, it seeks to follow out the laws which it

has itself discovered, till they have gone through a thousand probable

contingencies and lost themselves in numberless results. It is on

account of this capacity and tendency of the human mind to look through

fact to law, through individuals to classes, through effects to causes,

through phenomena to general principles, that the late Dr. Burnap was

led to declare, in a very interesting course of lectures which he

delivered before the Lowell Institute a few years since, that he

considered the first characteristic difference between the highest

species of animals and the lowest race of man to be a capacity of

science. But is not the whole edifice of human science built upon the

simple faculty of comparison?

This is the ultimate analysis of all the highest manifestations of the

human mind, whether of judgment, or reason, or intellect, or common

sense, or the power of generalization, or the capacity of science. We

have already quoted Hamilton to this effect, and we, moreover, have his

authority for saying that the faculty of discovering truth, by a

comparison of the notions we have obtained by observation and

experience, is the attribute by which man is distinguished as a

creature higher than the animals. We might also cite Leibnitz to the

effect that men differ from animals in being capable of the formation

of necessary judgments, and hence capable of demonstrative sciences.

But notwithstanding it seems so apparent that what is customarily

called reason is the distinguishing endowment which makes man the

"paragon of animals," we very often meet with attempts to set up some

other distinction. We cannot here go into an examination of these

various theories, or even allude to them specially. We will, however,

briefly refer to a view which was recently advanced in one of our

leading periodicals, inasmuch as it makes prominent a distinction which

we wish to notice, although it seems to us to be only subordinate to

the distinguishing attribute of the human mind which we have already

pointed out. It is said that self-consciousness is what makes the great

difference between man and other animals; that the latter do not

separate themselves consciously from the world in which they exist; and

that, though they have emotions, impulses, pains, and pleasures, every

change of feeling in them takes at once the form of an outward change

either in place or position. It is not intended, however, to be said

that they have no conscious perception of external things. We cannot

possibly conceive of an animal without this condition of consciousness.

A consciousness of an outward world is an essential quality of the

animal soul; this distinguishes the very lowest form of animal life

from the vegetable world; and hence it cannot possibly be, as has been

suggested by some, that there are any animate beings which have no

endowments superior to those which belong to plants. The plant is not

conscious of an outward world, when it sends out its roots to obtain

the nourishment which is fitting for itself; but the polype, which is

fixed with hundreds of its kind on the same coral-stock, and is able

only to move its mouth and tentacles, is aware of the presence of the

little craw-fish upon which it feeds, and throws out its lasso-cells

and catches it. The world of which the polype has any perception is not

a very large one. The outer world of a bird is vastly greater; and man

knows a world without, which is immeasurably large beyond that of which

any other animal is conscious, because both his physical organs and his

mental faculties bring him into far the most diversified and intimate

relations with all created things. He sees in every flower of the

garden and every beast of the field, in the air and in the sea, in the

earth beneath his feet and in the starry heavens above him, countless

meanings which are hidden to all the living world besides. To him there

is a world which has existed and a world that will exist. "Man," says

Protagoras, "is the measure of the universe." But he has a greater

dignity in being able to apprehend the world of thought within. "Whilst

I study to find how I am a microcosm or little world," says Sir Thomas

Browne, "I find myself something more than the great." Man can make

himself an object to himself and gain the deepest insight into the

workings of his own mind. This internal perception seems never to be

developed in other animals. We have already observed that they have no

thought of their own. The intelligence and design which they often

manifest in their actions are not the workings of their own minds. The

intelligence and design belong to Him who impressed the thought upon

the animal's mind and unceasingly sustains it in action. They

themselves are not conscious of any thought, but only of "certain dim

imperious influences" which urge them on. They are conscious of

feelings and desires and impulses. We could not conceive of the

existence of these affections in animals without their having an

immediate knowledge of them. Even "the function of voluntary motion,"

says Hamilton, "which is a function of the animal soul in the

Peripatetic doctrine, ought not, as is generally done, to be excluded

from the phenomena of consciousness and mind." The conscious life of

the irrational tribes seems, then, to be a life almost wholly within

the senses. They have nothing of that higher conscious personality

which belongs to man and is an attribute of a free intellect.

A general statement of the points made out in the foregoing inquiry

will more clearly show our conception of the nature and limitations of

instinct. First, we limited the word instinct so as to exclude all

those automatic and mechanical actions concerned in the simple

functions of organic life,--as also to exclude the operations of the

passions and appetites, since these seek no other end than their own

gratification. Then it was shown that instinct exists prior to all

experience or memory; that it comes to an instant or speedy perfection,

and is not capable of any improvement or cultivation; that its objects

are precise and limited; that within its proper sphere it often appears

as the highest wisdom, but beyond this is only foolishness; that it

uses complex and laborious means to provide for the future, without any

prescience of it; that it performs important and rational operations

which the animal neither intends nor knows anything about; that it is

permanent for each species, and is transmitted as an hereditary gift of

Nature; and that the few variations in its action result from the

development of provisional faculties, or from blind imitation. We were

led to conclude that instinct is not a free and conscious possession of

the animal itself. We found some points of resemblance between

intelligence in man and instinct in other animals,--but at the same

time points of dissimilarity, such as to make the two principles appear

radically unlike.

This brief summary presents nearly all that we can satisfactorily make

out respecting instinct; and at the same time it shows how much is

still wanting to a complete solution of all the questions which it

involves. And then there are higher mysteries connected with the

subject, which we do not attempt to penetrate,--mysteries in regard to

the creation and the maintenance of instinctive action: whether it be

the result of particular external conditions acting on the organization

of animals, or whether, as Sir Isaac Newton thought, the Deity himself

is virtually the active and present moving principle in them;--and

mysteries, too, about the future of the brute world: whether, as

Southey wrote,

"There is another world

For all that live and move,--a better world."

If we ever find a path which seems about to lead us up to these

mysteries, it speedily closes against us, and leaves us without any

rational hope of attaining their solution.

MY OWN STORY.

"Oh, tell her, brief is life, but love is long."

"What have I got that you would like to have? Your letters are tied up

and directed to you. Mother will give them to you, when she finds them

in my desk. I could execute my last will myself, if it were not for

giving her additional pain. I will leave everything for her to do

except this: take these letters, and when I am dead, give them to

Frank. There is not a reproach in them, and they are full of wit; but

he won't laugh, when he reads them again. Choose now, what will you

have of mine?"

"Well," I said, "give me the gold pen-holder that Redmond sent you

after he went away."

Laura rose up in her bed, and seized me by my shoulder, and shook me,

crying between her teeth, "You love him! you love him!" Then she fell

back on her pillow. "Oh, if he were here now! He went, I say, to marry

the woman he was engaged to before he saw you. He was nearly mad,

though, when he went. The night mother gave them their last party, when

you wore your black lace dress, and had pink roses in your hair,

somehow I hardly knew you that night. I was in the little parlor,

looking at the flowers on the mantelpiece, when Redmond came into the

room, and, rushing up to me, bent down and whispered, 'Did you see her

go? I shall see her no more; she is walking on the beach with Maurice.'

He sighed so loud that I felt embarrassed; for I was afraid that Harry

Lothrop, who was laughing and talking in a corner with two or three

men, would hear him; but he was not aware that they were there. I did

not know what to do, unless I ridiculed him. 'Follow them,' I said.

'Step on her flounces, and Maurice will have a chance to humiliate you

with some of his cutting, exquisite politeness.' He never answered a

word, and I would not look at him, but presently I understood that

there were tears falling. Oh, you need not look towards me with such

longing; he does not cry for you now. They seemed to bring him to his

senses. He stamped his foot; but the carpet was thick; it only made a

thud. Then he buttoned his coat, giving himself a violent twist as he

did it, and looked at me with such a haughty composure, that, if I had

been you, I should have trembled in my shoes. He walked across the room

toward the group of men.--'Ah, Harry,' he said, 'where is Maurice?'

'Don't you know?' they all cried out; 'he has gone as Miss Denham's

escort?' 'By Jove!' said Harry Lothrop,--'Miss Denham was as handsome

as Cleopatra, to-night. Little Maurice is now singing to her. Did he

take his guitar under his arm? It was here; for I saw a green bag near

his hat, when we came in to-night.' Just then we heard the twang of a

guitar under the window, and Redmond, in spite of himself, could not

help a grimace.--Is it not a droll world?" said Laura, after a pause;

"things come about so contrariwise."

She laughed such a shrill laugh, that I shuddered to hear it, and I

fell a-crying. "But," she continued, "I am going, I trust, where a key

will be given me for this cipher."

Tears came into her eyes, and an expression of gentleness filled her

face.

"It is strange," she said, "when I know that I must die, that I should

be so moved by earthly passions and so interested in earthly

speculations. My heart supplicates God for peace and patience, and at

the same moment my thoughts float away in dreams of the past. I shall

soon be wiser; I am convinced of that. The doctrine of compensation

extends beyond this world; if it be not so, why should I die at twenty,

with all this mysterious suffering of soul? You must not wonder over

me, when I am gone, and ask yourself, 'Why did she live?' Believe that

I shall know why I lived, and let it suffice you and encourage you to

go on bravely. Live and make your powers felt. Your nature is affluent,

and you may yet learn how to be happy."

She sighed softly, and turned her face to the wall, and moved her

fingers as sick people do. She waited for me to cease weeping: my tears

rained over my face so that I could neither see nor speak.

After I had become calmer, she moved toward me again and took my hand:

her own trembled.

"It is for the last time, Margaret. My good, skilful father gives me no

medicine now. My sisters have come home; they sit about the house like

mourners, with idle hands, and do not speak with each other. It is

terrible, but it will soon be over."

She pulled at my hand for me to rise. I staggered up, and met her eyes.

Mine were dry now.

"Do not come here again. It will be enough for my family to look at my

coffin. I feel better to think you will be spared the pain."

I nodded.

"Good-bye!"

A sob broke in her throat.

"Margaret,"--she spoke like a little child,--"I am going to heaven."

I kissed her, but I was blind and dumb. I lifted her half out of the

bed. She clasped her frail arms round me, and hid her face in my bosom.

"Oh, I love you!" she said.

Her heart gave such a violent plunge, that I felt it, and laid her back

quickly. She waved her hand to me with a determined smile. I reached

the door, still looking at her, crossed the dark threshold, and passed

out of the house. The bold sunshine smote my face, and the insolent

wind played about me. The whole earth was as brilliant and joyous as if

it had never been furrowed by graves.

Laura lived some days after my interview with her. She sent me no

message, and I did not go to see her. From the garret-windows of our

house, which was half a mile distant from Laura's, I could see the

windows of the room where she was lying. Three tall poplar-trees

intervened in the landscape. I thought they stood motionless so that

they might not intercept my view while I watched the house of death.

One morning I saw that the blinds had been thrown back and the windows

opened. I knew then that Laura was dead.

The day after the funeral I gave Frank his letters, his miniature, and

the locket which held a ring of his hair.

"Is there a fire?" he asked, when I gave them to him; "I want to burn

these things."

I went to another room with him.

"I'll leave everything here to-day; and may I never see this cursed

place again! Did she die, do you know, because I held her promise that

she would be my wife?"

He threw the papers into the grate, and crowded them down with his

boot, and watched them till the last blackened flake disappeared. He

then took from his neck a hair chain, and threw that into the fire

also.

"It is all done now," he said.

He shook my hand with a firm grasp and left me.

A month later Laura's mother sent me a package containing two bundles

of letters. It startled me to see that the direction was dated before

she was taken ill:--"To be given to Margaret in case of my death.

June 5th, 1848." They were my letters, and those which she had

received from Harry Lothrop. On this envelop was written, "Put these

into the black box he gave you." The gold pen-holder came into my hands

also. _Departure_ was engraved on the handle, and Laura's initials were

cut in an emerald in its top. The black box was an ebony, gold-plated

toy, which Harry Lothrop had given me at the same time Redmond gave

Laura the pen-holder. It was when they went away, after a whole

summer's visit in our little town, the year before. I locked the

letters in the black box, and,

"Whether from reason or from impulse only,"

I know not, but I was prompted to write a line to Harry Lothrop. "Do

not," I said, "write Laura any more letters. Those you have already

written to her are in my keeping, for she is dead. Was it not a

pleasant summer we passed together? The second autumn is already at

hand: time flies the same, whether we are dull or gay. For all this

period what remains except the poor harvest of a few letters?"

I received in answer an incoherent and agitated letter. What was the

matter with Laura? he asked. He had not heard from her for months. Had

any rupture occurred between her and her friend Frank? Did I suppose

she was ever unhappy? He was shocked at the news, and said he must come

and learn the particulars of the event. He thanked me for my note, and

begged me to believe how sincere was his friendship for my poor friend.

"Redmond," he continued, "is, for the present, attached to the engineer

corps to which I belong, and he has offered to take charge of my

business while I am a day or two absent. He is in my room at this

moment, holding your note in his hand, and appears painfully

disturbed."

It was now a little past the time of year when Redmond and Harry

Lothrop had left us,--early autumn. After their departure, Laura and I

had been sentimental enough to talk over the events of their visit.

Recalling these associations, we created an illusion of pleasure which

of course could not last. Harry Lothrop wrote to Laura, but the

correspondence declined and died. As time passed on, we talked less and

less of our visitors, and finally ceased to speak of them. Neither of

us knew or suspected the other of any deep or lasting feeling toward

the two friends. Laura knew Redmond better than I did; at least, she

saw him oftener; in fact, she knew both in a different way. They had

visited her alone; while I had met them almost entirely in society. I

never found so much time to spare as she seemed to have; for everybody

liked her, and everybody sought her. As often as we had talked over our

acquaintance, she was wary of speaking of Redmond. Her last

conversation with me revealed her thoughts, and awakened feelings which

I thought I had buffeted down. The tone of Harry Lothrop's note

perplexed me, and I found myself drifting back into an old state of

mind I had reason to dread.

As I said, the autumn had come round. Its quiet days, its sombre

nights, filled my soul with melancholy. The lonesome moan of the sea

and the waiting stillness of the woods were just the same a year ago;

but Laura was dead, and Nature grieved me. Yet none of us are in one

mood long, and at this very time there were intervals when I found

something delicious in life, either in myself or the atmosphere.

"Moreover, something is or seems

That touches me with mystic gleams."

A golden morning, a starry night, the azure round of the sky, the

undulating horizon of sea, the blue haze which rose and fell over the

distant hills, the freshness of youth, the power of beauty,--all gave

me deep voluptuous dreams.

I can afford to confess that I possessed beauty; for half my faults and

miseries arose from the fact of my being beautiful. I was not vain, but

as conscious of my beauty as I was of that of a flower, and sometimes

it intoxicated me. For, in spite of the comforting novels of the Jane

Eyre school, it is hardly possible to set an undue value upon beauty;

it defies ennui.

As I expected, Harry Lothrop came to see me. The sad remembrance of

Laura's death prevented any ceremony between us; we met as old

acquaintances, of course, although we had never conversed together half

an hour without interruption. I began with the theme of Laura's illness

and death, and the relation which she had held toward me. All at once I

discovered, without evidence, that he was indifferent to what I was

saying; but I talked on mechanically, and like a phantasm the truth

came to my mind. The real man was there,--not the one I had carelessly

looked at and known through Laura.

I became silent.

He twisted his fingers in the fringe of my scarf, which had fallen off,

and I watched them.

"Why," I abruptly asked, "have I not known you before?"

He let go the fringe, and folded his hands, and in a dreamy voice

replied,--

"Redmond admires you."

"What a pity!" I said. "And you,--you admire me, or yourself, just now;

which?"

He flushed slightly, but continued with a bland voice, which irritated

and interested me.

"All that time I was so near you, and you scarcely saw me; what a

chance I had to study you! Your friend was intelligent and sympathetic,

so we struck a league of friendship: I could dare so much with her,

because I knew that she was engaged to marry Mr. Ballard. I own that I

have been troubled about her since I went away. How odd it is that I am

here alone with you in this room! how many times I have wished it! I

liked you best here; and while absent, the remembrance of it has been

inseparable from the remembrance of you,--a picture within a picture. I

know all that the room contains,--the white vases, and the wire

baskets, with pots of Egyptian lilies and damask roses, the books bound

in green and gold, the engravings of nymphs and fauns, the crimson bars

in the carpet, the flowers on the cushions, and, best of all, the

arched window and its low seat. But I had promised myself never to see

you: it was all I could do for Laura. She is dead, and I am here."

I rose and walked to the window, and looked out on the misty sea, and

felt strangely.

"Another lover," I thought,--"and Redmond's friend, and Laura's. But it

all belongs to the comedy we play."

He came to where I stood.

"I know you so well," he said,--"your pride, your self-control, even

your foibles: but they attract one, too. You did not escape heart-whole

from Redmond's influence. He is not married yet, but he will be; he is

a chivalrous fellow. It was a desperate matter between you two,--a

hand-to-hand struggle. It is over with you both, I believe: you are

something alike. Now may I offer you my friendship? If I love you, let

me say so. Do not resist me. I appeal to the spirit of coquetry which

tempted you before you saw me to-night. You are dressed to please me."

I was thinking what I should say, when he skilfully turned the

conversation into an ordinary channel. He shook off his dreamy manner,

and talked with his old vivacity. I was charmed a little; an

association added to the charm, I fancy. It was late at night when he

took his leave. He had arranged it all; for a man brought his carriage

to the door and drove him to the next town, where he had procured it to

come over from the railway.

When I was shut in my room for the night, rage took possession of me. I

tore off my dress, twisted my hair with vehemence, and hurried to bed

and tried to go to sleep, but could not, of course. As when we press

our eyelids together for meditation or sleep, violet rings and changing

rays of light flash and fade before the darkened eyeballs, so in the

dark unrest of my mind the past flashed up, and this is what I saw:--

The county ball, where Laura and I first met Redmond, Harry Lothrop,

and Maurice. We were struggling through the crowd of girls at the

dressing-room door, to rejoin Frank, who was waiting for us. As we

passed out, satisfied with the mutual inspection of our dresses of

white silk, which were trimmed with bunches of rose-geranium, we saw a

group of strangers close by us, buttoning their gloves, looking at

their boots, and comparing looks. Laura pushed her fan against my arm;

we looked at each other, and made signs behind Frank, and were caught

in the act, not only by him, but by a tall gentleman in the group which

she had signalled me to notice.

The shadow of a smile was travelling over his face as I caught his eye,

but he turned away so suddenly that I had no opportunity for

embarrassment. An usher gave us a place near the band, at the head of

the hall.

"Do not be reckless, Laura," I said,--"at least till the music gives

you an excuse."

"You are obliged to me, you know," she answered, "for directing your

attention to such attractive prey. Being in bonds myself, I can only

use my eyes for you: don't be ungrateful."

The band struck up a crashing polka, and she and Frank whirled away,

with a hundred others. I found a seat and amused myself by contrasting

the imperturbable countenances of the musicians with those of the

dancers. The perfumes the women wore floated by me. These odors, the

rhythmic motion of the dancers, and the hard, energetic music

exhilarated me. The music ended, and the crowd began to buzz. The loud,

inarticulate speech of a brilliant crowd is like good wine. As my

acquaintances gathered about me, I began to feel its electricity, and

grew blithe and vivacious. Presently I saw one of the ushers speaking

to Frank, who went down the hall with him.

"Oh, my prophetic soul!" said Laura, "they are coming."

Frank came back with the three, and introduced them. Redmond asked me

for the first quadrille, and Harry Lothrop engaged Laura. Frank said to

me behind his handkerchief,--"It's _en règle_; I know where they came

from; their fathers are brave, and their mothers are virtuous."

The quadrille had not commenced, so I talked with several persons near;

but I felt a constraint, for I knew I was closely observed by the

stranger, who was entirely quiet. Curiosity made me impatient for the

dance to begin; and when we took our places, I was cool enough to

examine him. Tall, slender, and swarthy, with a delicate moustache over

a pair of thin scarlet lips, penetrating eyes, and a tranquil air. My

antipodes in looks, for I was short and fair; my hair was straight and

black like his, but my eyes were blue, and my mouth wide and full.

"What an unnaturally pleasant thing a ball-room is!" he said,--"before

the dust rises and the lights flare, I mean. But nobody ever leaves

early; as the freshness vanishes, the extravagance deepens. Did you

ever notice how much faster the musicians play as it grows late? When

we open the windows, the fresh breath of the night increases the

delirium within. I have seen the quietest women toss their faded

bouquets out of the windows without a thought of making a comparison

between the flowers and themselves."

"My poor geraniums!" I said,--"what eloquence!"

He laughed, and answered,--

"My friend Maurice yonder would have said it twice as well."

We were in the promenade then, and stopped where the said Maurice was

fanning himself against the wall.

"May I venture to ask you for a waltz, Miss Denham? it is the next

dance on the card," said Maurice;--"but of course you are engaged."

I gave him my card, and he began to mark it, when Redmond took it, and

placed his own initials against the dance after supper, and the last

one on the list. He left me then, and I saw him a moment after talking

with Laura.

We passed a gay night. When Laura and I equipped for our ten miles'

ride, it was four in the morning. Redmond helped Frank to pack us in

the carriage, and we rewarded him with a knot of faded leaves.

"This late event," said Laura, with a ministerial air, after we had

started, "was a providential one. You, my dear Frank, were at liberty

to pursue your favorite pastime of whist, in some remote apartment,

without being conscience-torn respecting me. I have danced very well

without you, thanks to the strangers. And you, Margaret, have had an

unusual opportunity of displaying your latent forces. Three such

different men! But let us drive fast. I am in want of the cup of tea

which mother will have waiting for me."

We arrived first at my door. As I was going up the steps, Laura broke

the silence; for neither of us had spoken since her remarks.

"By the way, they are coming here to stay awhile. They are anxious for

some deep-sea fishing. They'll have it, I think."

I heard Frank's laugh of delight at Laura's wit, as the carriage drove

off.

It was our last ball that season.

It was late in the spring; and when Redmond came with his two friends

and settled at the hotel in our town, it was early summer. When I saw

them again, they came with Laura and Frank to pay me a visit. Laura was

already acquainted with them, and asked me if I did not perceive her

superiority in the fact.

"Let us arrange," said Harry Lothrop, "some systematic plan of

amusement by sea and land. I have a pair of horses, Maurice owns a

guitar, and Redmond's boat will be here in a few days. Jones, our

landlord, has two horses that are tolerable under the saddle. Let us

ride, sail, and be serenaded. The Lake House, Jones again, is eight

miles distant. This is Monday; shall we go there on horse-back

Wednesday?"

Laura looked mournfully at Frank, who replied to her look,--

"You must go; I cannot; I shall go back to business to-morrow."

I glanced at Redmond; he was contemplating a portrait of myself at the

age of fourteen.

"Shall we go?" Laura asked him.

"Nothing, thank you," he answered.

We all laughed, and Harry Lothrop said,--

"Redmond, my boy, how fond you are of pictures!"

Redmond, with an unmoved face, said,--

"Don't be absurd about my absent-mindedness. What were you saying?"

And he turned to me.

"Do you like our plan," I asked, "of going to the Lake House? There is

a deep pond, a fine wood, a bridge,--perch, pickerel,--a one-story inn

with a veranda,--ham and eggs, stewed quince, elderberry wine,--and a

romantic road to ride over."

"I like it."

Frank opened a discussion on fishing; Laura and I withdrew, and went to

the window-seat.

"I am light-hearted," I said.

"It is my duty to be melancholy," she replied; "but I shall not mope

after Frank has gone."

"'After them the deluge,'" said I. "How long will they stay?"

"Till they are bored, I fancy."

"Oh, they are going; we must leave our recess."

Frank and she remained; the others bid us good-night.

"I shall not come again till Christmas," he said. "These college-chaps

will amuse you and make the time pass; they are young,--quite suitable

companions for you girls. _Vive la bagatelle!_"

He sighed, and, drawing Laura's arm in his, rose to go. She groaned

loudly, and he nipped her ears.

"Good-bye, Margaret; let Laura take care of you. There is a deal of

wisdom in her."

We shook hands, Laura moaning all the while, and they went home.

Frank and Laura had been engaged three years. He was about thirty, and

was still too poor to marry.

Wednesday proved pleasant. We had an early dinner, and our cavalcade

started from Laura's. I rode my small bay horse Folly, a gift from my

absentee brother. His coat was sleeker than satin; his ears moved

perpetually, and his wide nostrils were always in a quiver. He was not

entirely safe, for now and then he jumped unexpectedly; but I had

ridden him a year without accident, and felt enough acquainted with him

not to be afraid.

Redmond eyed him.

"You are a bold rider," he said.

"No," I answered,--"a careful one. Look at the bit, and my whip, too. I

cut his hind legs when he jumps. Observe that I do not wear a long

skirt. I can slip off the saddle, if need be, without danger."

"That's all very well; but his eyes are vicious; he will serve you a

trick some day."

"When he does, I'll sell him for a cart-horse."

Laura and Redmond rode Jones's horses. Harry Lothrop was mounted on his

horse Black, a superb, thick-maned creature, with a cluster of white

stars on one of his shoulders. Maurice rode a wall-eyed pony. Our

friends Dickenson and Jack Parker drove two young ladies in a

carriage,--all the saddle-horses our town could boast of being in use.

We were in high spirits, and rode fast. I was occupied in watching

Folly, who had not been out for several days. At last, tired of tugging

at his mouth, I gave him rein, and he flew along. I tucked the edge of

my skirt under the saddle-flap, slanted forward, and held the bridle

with both hands close to his head. A long sandy reach of road lay

before me. I enjoyed Folly's fierce trotting; but, as I expected, the

good horse Black was on my track, while the rest of the party were far

behind. He soon overtook me. Folly snorted when he heard Black's step.

We pulled up, and the two horses began to sidle and prance, and throw

up their heads so that we could not indulge in a bit of conversation.

"Brute!" said Harry Lothrop,--"if I were sure of getting on again, I

would dismount and thrash you awfully."

"Remember Pickwick," I said; "don't do it."

I had hardly spoken, when the strap of his cap broke, and it fell from

his head to the ground. I laughed, and so did he.

"I can hold your horse while you dismount for it."

I stopped Folly, and he forced Black near enough for me to seize the

rein and twist it round my hand; when I had done so, Folly turned his

head, and was tempted to take Black's mane in his teeth; Black felt it,

reared, and came down with his nose in my lap. I could not loose my

hands, which confused me, but I saw Harry Lothrop making a great leap.

Both horses were running now, and he was lying across the saddle,

trying to free my hand. It was over in an instant. He got his seat, and

the horses were checked.

"Good God!" he said, "your fingers are crushed."

He pulled off my glove, and turned pale when he saw my purple hand.

"It is nothing," I said.

But I was miserably fatigued, and prayed that the Lake House might come

in sight. We were near the wood, which extended to it, and I was

wondering if we should ever reach it, when he said,--

"You must dismount, and rest under the first tree. We will wait there

for the rest of the party to come up."

I did so. Numerous were the inquiries, when they reached us. Laura,

when she heard the story, declared she now believed in Ellen Pickering.

Redmond gave me a searching look, and asked me if the one-story inn had

good beds.

"I can take a nap, if necessary," I answered, "in one of Mrs. Sampson's

rush-bottomed chairs on the veranda. The croak of the frogs in the pond

and the buzz of the bluebottles shall be my lullaby."

"No matter how, if you will rest," he said, and assisted me to remount.

We rode quietly together the rest of the way. After arriving, we girls

went by ourselves into one of Mrs. Sampson's sloping chambers, where

there was a low bedstead, and a thick feather-bed covered with a

patchwork-quilt of the "Job's Trouble" pattern, a small, dim

looking-glass surmounted by a bunch of "sparrow-grass," and an

unpainted floor ornamented with home-made rugs which were embroidered

with pink flower-pots containing worsted rose-bushes, the stalks,

leaves, and flowers all in bright yellow. We hung up our riding-skirts

on ancient wooden pegs, for we had worn others underneath them suitable

for walking, and then tilted the wooden chairs at a comfortable angle

against the wall, put our feet on the rounds, and felt at peace with

all mankind.

"Alas!" I said, "it is too early for currant-pies."

"I saw," said one of the girls, "Mrs. Sampson poking the oven, and a

smell of pies was in the air."

"Let us go into the kitchen," exclaimed Laura.

The proposal was agreeable; so we went, and found Mrs. Sampson making

plum-cake.

"The pies are green-gooseberry-pies," whispered Laura,--"very good,

too."

"Miss Denham," shrieked Mrs. Sampson, "you haven't done growing

yet.--How's your mother and your grandmother?--Have you had a revival

in your church?--I heard of the young men down to Jones's,--our

minister's wife knows their fathers,--first-rate men, she says.--I

thought you would be here with them.--'Sampson,' I said this morning, as

soon as I dressed, 'do pick some gooseberries. I'll have before sundown

twenty pies in this house.' There they are,--six gooseberry, six

custard, and, though it's late for them, six mince, and two awful great

pigeon pies. It's poor trash, I expect; I'm afraid you can't eat it;

but it is as good as anybody's, I suppose."

We told her we should devour it all, but must first catch some fish;

and we joined the gentlemen on the veranda. A boat was ready for us.

Laura, however, refused to go in it. It was too small; it was wet; she

wanted to walk on the bridge; she could watch us from that; she wanted

some flowers, too. Like many who are not afraid of the ocean, she held

ponds and lakes in abhorrence, and fear kept her from going with us.

Harry Lothrop offered to stay with her, and take lines to fish from the

bridge. She assented, and, after we pushed off, they strolled away.

The lake was as smooth and white as silver beneath the afternoon sun

and a windless sky; it was bordered with a mound of green bushes,

beyond which stretched deep pine woods. There was no shade, and we soon

grew weary. Jack Parker caught all the fish, which flopped about our

feet. A little way down, where the lake narrowed, we saw Laura and

Harry Lothrop hanging over the bridge.

"They must be interested in conversation," I thought; "he has not

lifted his line out of the water once."

Redmond, too, looked over that way often, and at last said,--

"We will row up to the bridge, and walk back to the house, if you,

Maurice, will take the boat to the little pier again."

"Oh, yes," said Maurice.

We came to the bridge, and Laura reached out her hand to me.

"Why, dear!" she exclaimed, "you have burnt your face. Why did you,"

turning to Redmond, "paddle about so long in the hot sun?"

Her words were light enough, but the tone of her voice was savage.

Redmond looked surprised; he waved his hand deprecatingly, but said

nothing. We went up toward the house, but Laura lingered behind, and

did not come in till we were ready to go to supper.

It was past sundown when we rose from the ruins of Mrs. Sampson's pies.

We voted not to start for home till the evening was advanced, so that

we might enjoy the gloom of the pine wood. We sat on the veranda and

heard the sounds of approaching night. The atmosphere was like powdered

gold. Swallows fluttered in the air, delaying to drop into their nests,

and chirped their evening song. We heard the plunge of the little

turtles in the lake, and the noisy crows as they flew home over the

distant tree-tops. They grew dark, and the sky deepened slowly into a

soft gray. A gentle wind arose, and wafted us the sighs of the pines

and their resinous odors. I was happy, but Laura was unaccountably

silent.

"What is it, Laura?" I asked, in a whisper.

"Nothing, Margaret,--only it seems to me that we mortals are always

riding or fishing, eating or drinking, and that we never get to living.

To tell you the truth, the pies were too sour. Come, we must go," she

said aloud.

Redmond himself brought Folly from the stable.

"We will ride home together," he said. "My calm nag will suit yours

better than Black. Why does your hand tremble?"

He saw my shaking hands, as I took the rein; the fact was, my wrists

were nearly broken.

"Nothing shall happen to-night, I assure you," he continued, while he

tightened Folly's girth.

He contrived to be busy till all the party had disappeared down a turn

of the road. As he was mounting his horse, Mrs. Sampson, who was on the

steps, whispered to me,--

"He's a beautiful young man, now!"

He heard her; he had the ear of a wild animal; he took off his hat to

Mrs. Sampson, and we rode slowly away.

As soon as we were in the wood, Redmond tied the bridles of the horses

together with his handkerchief. It was so dark that my sight could not

separate him from his horse. They moved beside me, a vague, black

shape. The horses' feet fell without noise in the cool, moist sand. If

our companions were near us, we could not see them, and we did not hear

them. Horses generally keep an even pace, when travelling at

night,--subdued by the darkness, perhaps,--and Folly went along without

swaying an inch. I dropped the rein on his neck, and took hold of the

pommel. My hand fell on Redmond's. Before I could take it away, he had

clasped it, and touched it with his lips. The movement was so sudden

that I half lost my balance, but the horses stepped evenly together. He

threw his arm round me, and recoiled from me as if he had received a

blow.

"Take up your rein," he said, with a strange voice,--"quick!--we must

ride fast out of this."

I made no reply, for I was trying to untie the handkerchief. The knot

was too firm.

"No, no," he said, when he perceived what I was doing, "let it be so."

"Untie it, Sir!"

"I will not."

I put my face down between the horses' necks and bit it apart, and

thrust it into my bosom.

"Now," I said, "shall we ride fast?"

He shook his rein, and we rode fiercely,--past our party, who shouted

at us,--through the wood,--over the brow of the great hill, from whose

top we saw the dark, motionless sea,--through the long street,--and

through my father's gateway into the stable-yard, where I leaped from

my horse, and, bridle in hand, said, "Good night!" in a loud voice.

Redmond swung his hat and galloped off.

Early next morning, Laura sent me a note:--

"DEAR MARGARET,--I have an ague, and mean to have it till Sunday night.

The pines did it. Did you bring home any needles? On Monday, mother

will give one of her whist-parties. I shall add a dozen or two of our

set; you will come.

"P.S. What do you think of Mr. Harry Lothrop? Good young man, eh?"

I was glad that Laura had shut herself up for a few days; I dreaded to

see her just now. I suffered from an inexplicable feeling of pride and

disappointment, and did not care to have her discover it. Laura, like

myself, sometimes chose to protect herself against neighborly

invasions. We never kept our doors locked in the country; the sending

in of a card was an unknown process there. Our acquaintances walked in

upon us whenever the whim took them, and it now and then happened to be

an inconvenience to us who loved an occasional fit of solitude. I

determined to keep in-doors for a few days also. Whenever I was in an

unquiet mood, I took to industry; so that day I set about arranging my

drawers, making over my ribbons, and turning my room upside down. I

rehung all my pictures, and moved my bottles and boxes. Then I mended

my stockings, and marked my clothes, which was not a necessary piece of

work, as I never left home. I next attacked the parlor,--washed all the

vases, changed the places of the furniture, and distressed my mother

very much. When evening came, I brushed my hair a good deal, and looked

at my hands, and went to bed early. I could not read then, though I

often took books from the shelves, and I would not think.

Sunday came round. The church-bells made me lonesome. I looked out of

the window many times that day, and, fixing on the sash one of my

father's ship-glasses, swept the sea, and peered at the islands on the

other side of the bay, gazing through their openings, beyond which I

could see the great dim ocean. Mother came home from church, and said

young Maurice was there, and inquired about me. He hoped I did not take

cold; his friend Redmond had been hoarse ever since our ride, and had

passed most of the time in his own room, drumming on the window-pane

and whistling dirges. Mother dropped her acute eyes on me, while she

was telling me this; but I yawned all expression from my face.

As Monday night drew near, my numbness of feeling began to pass off;

thought came into my brain by plunges. Now I desired; now I hoped. I

dressed myself in black silk, and wore a cape of black Chantilly lace.

I made my hair as glossy as possible, drew it down on my face, and put

round my head a band composed of minute sticks of coral. When all was

done, I took the candle and held it above my head and surveyed myself

in the glass. I was very pale. The pupils of my eyes were dilated, as

if I had received some impression that would not pass away. My lips had

the redness of youth; their color was deepened by my paleness.

"How handsome I am!" I thought, as I set down the candle.

When I entered Laura's parlor, she came toward me and said,--

"Artful creature! you knew well, this warm night, that every girl of us

would wear a light dress; so you wore a black one. How well you

understand such matters! You are very clever; your real sensibility

adds effect to your cleverness. I see how it is. Come into this corner.

Have you got a fan? Good gracious! black, with gold spangles;--where

_do_ you buy your things? I can tell you now," she continued, "my

conversation on the bridge the other day."

She hesitated, and asked me if I liked her new muslin. She did look

well in it; it was a white fabric, with red rose-buds scattered over

it. Her delicate face was shadowed by light brown curls. She was

attractive, and I told her so, and she began again:--

"Harry Lothrop said, as he was impaling the half of a worm,--

"'Redmond is a handsome fellow, is he not?'

"'He is too awfully thin,' I answered, 'but his eyes are good.'

"He gave me a crafty side-look, like that of a parrot, when he means to

bite your finger.

"'Your friend, too,' he added, 'is really one of the most beautiful

girls I ever saw,--a coquette with a heart.'

"'Let down your line into the water,' I said.

"He laughed a little laugh. By-the-by, there is an insidious tenacity

about Mr. Harry Lothrop which irritates me; but I like him, for I think

he understands women. I feel at ease with him, when he is not throwing

out his tenacious feelers. Then he said,--

"'Redmond is engaged to his cousin. The girl's mother had the charge of

him through his boyhood. He is ardently attached to her,--the mother, I

mean. She is most anxious to call Redmond her son.'

"'Didn't you have a bite?' I said.

"'Well, I think the bait is off the hook,' he answered; and then we

were silent and pondered the water.

"There are some people I must speak to,"--and Laura moved away without

looking at me.

I opened my fan, but felt chilly. A bustle near me caused me to raise

my eyes; Redmond was speaking to a lady. He was in black, too, and very

pale. He turned toward me and our eyes met. His expression agitated me

so that I unconsciously rose to my feet and warned him off with my fan;

but he seemed rooted to the spot. Laura took care of us both; she came

and stood between us. I saw her look at him so sweetly and so

mournfully, that he understood her in a moment. He shook his head and

walked abruptly into another room. Laura went again from me without

giving me a look. Maurice came up and I made room for him beside me. We

talked of the riding-party, and then of our first meeting at the ball.

He told me that Redmond's boat had arrived, and what a famous boat it

was, and "what jolly sprees we fellows had, cruising about with her." I

asked him about his guitar, and when we might hear him play. He grew

more chatty and began to tell me about his sister, when Redmond and

Harry Lothrop came over to us, which ended his chat.

The party was like all parties,--dull at first, and brighter as it grew

late. The old ladies played whist in one room, and the younger part of

the company were in another. Champagne was not a prevalent drink in our

village, but it happened that we had some that night.

"It may be a sinful beverage," said an old lady near me, "but it is

good."

Redmond opened a bottle for me, we clinked glasses, and drank to an

indefinite, silent wish.

"One more," he asked, "and let us change glasses."

Presently a cloud of delicate warmth spread over my brain, and gave me

courage to seek and meet his glance. There must have been an expression

of irresolution in my face, for he looked at me inquiringly, and then

his own face grew very sad. I felt awkward from my intuition of his

opinion of my mood, when he relieved me by saying something about

Shelley,--a copy of whose poems lay on a table near. From Shelley he

went to his boat, and said he hoped to have some pleasant excursions

with Laura and myself. He "would go at once and talk with Laura's

mother about them." I watched him through the door, while he spoke to

her. She was in a low chair, and he leaned his face on one hand close

to hers. I saw that his natural expression was one of tranquillity and

courage. He was not more than twenty-two, but the firmness of the lines

about his mouth belied his youth.

"He has a wonderful face," I thought, "and just as wonderful a will."

I felt my own will rise as I looked at him,--a will that should make me

mistress of myself, powerful enough to contend with, and resist, or

turn to advantage any controlling fate which might come near me.

"Do you feel like singing?" Harry Lothrop inquired. "Do you know

Byron's song, 'One struggle more and I am free'?"

"Oh, yes!" I replied,--"it is set to music which suits my voice. I will

sing it."

Laura had been playing polkas with great spirit. Since the Champagne,

the old ladies had closed their games of whist for talking, and, as it

was nearly time to go, the company was gay. There was laughing and

talking when I began, but silence soon after, for the wine made my

voice husky and effective. I sang as if deeply moved.

"Lord!" I heard Maurice say to Laura, as I rose from the piano, "what a

girl! she's really tragic."

I caught Harry Lothrop's eye, as I passed through the door to go

up-stairs; it was burning; I felt as if a hot coal had dropped on me.

Maurice ran into the hall and sprang upon the stair-railing to ask me

if he might be my escort home. That night he serenaded me. He was a

good-hearted, cheerful creature; conceited, as small men are apt to

be,--conceit answering for size with them,--but pleasantly so, and I

learned to like him as much as Redmond did.

The summer days were passing. We had all sorts of parties,--parties in

houses and out-of-doors; we rode and sailed and walked. Laura walked

and talked much with Harry Lothrop. We did not often see each other

alone, but, when we met, were more serious and affectionate with each

other. We did not speak, except in a general way, of Redmond and Harry

Lothrop. I did not avoid Redmond, nor did I seek him. We had many a

serious conversation in public, as well as many a gay one; but I had

never met him alone since the night we rode through the pines.

He went away for a fortnight. On the day of his return he came to see

me. He looked so glad, when I entered the room, that I could not help

feeling a wild thrill. I went up to him, but said nothing. He held out

both his hands. I retreated. An angry feeling rushed into my heart.

"No," I said, "Whose hand did you hold last?"

He turned deadly pale.

"That of the woman I am going to marry."

I smiled to hide the trembling of my lips, and offered my hand to him;

_but he waved it away_, and fell back on his chair, hurriedly drawing

his handkerchief across his face. I saw that he was very faint, and

stood against the door, waiting for him to recover.

"More than I have played the woman and the fool before you."

"Yes."

"I thought so. You seem experienced."

"I am."

"Forgive me," he said, gently; "being only a man, I think you can. Good

God!" he exclaimed, "what an infernal self-possession you show!"

"Redmond, is it not time to end this? The summer has been a long

one,--has it not?--long enough for me to have learned what it is to

live. Our positions are reversed since we have become acquainted. I am

for the first time forgetting self, and you for the first time remember

self. Redmond, you are a noble man. You have a steadfast soul. Do not

be shaken. I am not like you; I am not simple or single-hearted. But I

imitate you. Now come, I beg you will go."

"Certainly, I will. I have little to say."

August had nearly gone when Maurice told me they were about to leave.

Laura said we must prepare for retrospection and the fall sewing.

"Well," I said, "the future looks gloomy, and I must have some new

dresses."

Maurice came to see me one morning in a state of excitement to say we

were all going to Bird Island to spend the day, dine at the

light-house, and sail home by moonlight. Fifteen of the party were

going down by the sloop Sapphire, and Redmond had begged him to ask if

Laura and I would go in his boat.

"Do go," said Maurice; "it will be our last excursion together; next

week we are off. I am broken-hearted about it. I shall never be so

happy again. I have actually whimpered once or twice. You should hear

Redmond whistle nowadays. Harry pulls his moustache and laughs his oily

laughs, but he is sorry to go, and kicks his clothes about awfully. By

the way, he is going down in the sloop because Miss Fairfax is

going,--he says,--that tall young lady with crinkled hair;--he hates

her, and hopes to see her sick. May I come for you in the morning, by

ten o'clock? Redmond will be waiting on the wharf."

"Tell Redmond," I answered, "that I will go; and will you ask Harry

Lothrop not to engage himself for all the reels to Miss Fairfax?"

He promised to fulfil my message, and went off in high spirits. I

wondered, as I saw him going down the walk, why it was that I felt so

much more natural and friendly with him than with either of his

friends. I often talked confidentially to him; he knew how I loved my

mother, and how I admired my father, and I told him all about my

brother's business. He also knew what I liked best to eat and to wear.

In return, he confided his family secrets to me. I knew his tastes and

wishes. There was no common ground where I met Redmond and Harry

Lothrop. There were too many topics between Redmond and myself to be

avoided, for us to venture upon private or familiar conversation. Harry

Lothrop was an accomplished, fastidious man of the world, I dreaded

boring him, and so I said little. He was several years older than

Redmond, and possessed more knowledge of men, women, and books. Redmond

had no acquirements, he knew enough by nature, and I never saw a person

with more fascination of manner and voice.

The evening before the sailing-party, I had a melancholy fit. I was

restless, and after dark I put a shawl over my head and went out to

walk. I went up a lonesome road, beyond our house. On one side I heard

the water washing against the shore with regularity, as if it were

breathing. On the other side were meadows, where there were cows

crunching the grass. A mile farther was a low wood of oaks, through

which ran a path. I determined to walk through that. The darkness and a

sharp breeze which blew against me from limitless space made me feel as

if I were the only human creature the elements could find to contend

with, I turned down the little path into the deeper darkness of the

wood, sat down on a heap of dead leaves, and began to cry.

"Mine is a miserable pride," was my thought,--"that of arming myself

with beauty and talent and going through the world conquering! Girls

are ignorant, till they are disappointed. The only knowledge men

proffer us is the knowledge of the heart; it becomes us to profit by

it. Redmond will marry that girl. He must, and shall. I will empty the

dust and ashes of my heart as soon as the fire goes down: that is, I

think so; but I know that I do not know myself. I have two

natures,--one that acts, and one that is acted upon,--and I cannot

always separate the one from the other."

Something darkened the opening into the path. Two persons passed in

slowly. I perceived the odor of violets, and felt that one of them must

be Laura. Waiting till they passed beyond me, I rose and went home.

The next morning was cloudy, and the sea was rough with a high wind;

but we were old sailors, and decided to go on our excursion. The sloop

and Redmond's boat left the wharf at the same time. We expected to be

several hours beating down to Bird Island, for the wind was ahead.

Laura and I, muffled in cloaks, were placed on the thwarts and

neglected; for Redmond and Maurice were busy with the boat. Laura was

silent, and looked ill. Redmond sat at the helm, and kept the boat up

to the wind, which drove the hissing spray over us. The sloop hugged

the shore, and did not feel the blast as we did. I slid along my seat

to be near Redmond. He saw me coming, and put out his hand and drew me

towards him, looking so kindly at me that I was melted. Trying to get

at my handkerchief, which was in my dress-pocket, my cloak flew open,

the wind caught it, and, as I rose to draw it closer, I nearly fell

overboard. Redmond gave a spring to catch me, and the boat lost her

headway. The sail flapped with a loud bang. Maurice swore, and we

chopped about in the short sea.

"It is your destiny to have a scene, wherever you are," said Laura. "If

I did not feel desperate, I should be frightened. But these green,

crawling waves are so opaque, if we fall in, we shall not see ourselves

drown."

"Courage! the boat is under way," Maurice cried out; "we are nearly

there."

And rounding a little point, we saw the light-house at last. The sloop

anchored a quarter of a mile from the shore, the water being shoal, and

Redmond took off her party by instalments.

"What the deuse was the matter with you at one time?" asked Jack

Parker. "We saw you were having a sort of convulsion. Our cap'n said

you were bold chaps to be trifling with such a top-heavy boat."

"Miss Denham," said Redmond, "thought she could steer the boat as well

as I could, and so the boat lost headway."

Harry Lothrop gave Redmond one of his soft smiles, and a vexed look

passed over Redmond's face when he saw it.

We had to scramble over a low range of rocks to get to the shore.

Redmond anchored his boat by one of them. Bird Island was a famous

place for parties. It was a mile in extent. Not a creature was on it

except the light-house keeper, his wife, and daughter. The gulls made

their nests in its rocky borders; their shrill cries, the incessant

dashing of the waves on the ledges, and the creaking of the lantern in

the stone tower were all the sounds the family heard, except when they

were invaded by some noisy party like ours. They were glad to see us.

The light-house keeper went into the world only when it was necessary

to buy stores, or when his wife and daughter wanted to pay a visit to

the mainland.

The house was of stone, one story high, with thick walls. The small,

deep-set windows and the low ceilings gave the rooms the air of a

prison; but there was also an air of security about them: for, in

looking from the narrow windows, one felt that the house was a

steadfast ship in the circle of the turbulent sea, whose waves from

every point seemed advancing towards it. A pale, coarse grass grew in

the sand of the island. It was too feeble to resist the acrid breath of

the ocean, so it shuddered perpetually, and bent landward, as if

invoking the protection of its stepmother, the solid earth.

"It is perfect," said Redmond to me; "I have been looking for this spot

all my life; I am ready to swear that I will never leave it."

We were sitting in a window, facing each other. He looked out toward

the west, and presently was lost in thought. He folded his arms tightly

across his breast, and his eyes were a hundred miles away. The sound of

a fiddle in the long alley which led from the house to the tower broke

his reverie.

"We shall be uproarious before we leave," I said; "we always are, when

we come here."

The fun had already set in. Some of the girls had pinned up their

dresses, and borrowed aprons from the light-house keeper's wife, and

with scorched faces were helping her to make chowder and fry

fish. Others were arranging the table, assisted by the young men, who

put the dishes in the wrong places. Others were singing in the best

room. One or two had brought novels along, and were reading them in

corners. It was all merry and pleasant, but I felt quiet. Redmond

entered into the spirit of the scene. I had never seen him so gay. He

chatted with all the girls, interfering or helping, as the case might

be. Maurice brought his guitar, and had a group about him at the foot

of the tower-stairs. He sung loud, but his voice seemed to

fluctuate;--now it rang through the tower, now it was half overpowered

by the roar of the sea. His poetical temperament led him to choose

songs in harmony with the place, not to suit the company,--melancholy

words set to wild, fitful chords, which rose and died away according to

the skill of the player. I had gone near him, for his singing had

attracted me.

"You are inspired," I said.

He nodded.

"You never sung so before."

"I feel old to-day," he answered, and he swept his hands across all the

strings; "my ditties are done."

After dinner Laura asked me to go out with her. We slipped away unseen,

and went to the beach, and seated ourselves on a great rock whose outer

side was lapped by the water. The sun had broken through the clouds,

but shone luridly, giving the sea a leaden tint. The wind was going

down. We had not been there long, when Redmond joined us. He asked us

to go round the island in his boat. Laura declined, and said she would

sit on the rock while we went, if I chose to go. I did choose to go,

and he brought the boat to the rock. He hoisted the sail half up the

mast, and we sailed close to the shore. It rose gradually along the

east side of the island, and terminated in a bold ledge which curved

into the sea. We ran inside the curve, where the water was nearly

smooth. Redmond lowered the sail and the boat drifted toward the ledge

slowly. A tongue of land, covered with pale sedge, was on the left

side. Above the ledge, at the right, we could see the tower of the

light-house. Redmond tied down the helm, and, throwing himself beside

me, leaned his head on his hand, and looked at me a long time without

speaking. I listened to the water, which plashed faintly against the

bows. He covered his face with his hands. I looked out seaward over the

tongue of land; my heart quaked, like the grass which grew upon it. At

last he rose, and I saw that he was crying,--the tears rained fast.

"My soul is dying," he said, in a stifled voice; "I am not more than

mortal,--I cannot endure it."

I pointed toward the open sea, which loomed so vague in the distance.

"The future is like that,--is it not? Courage! we must drift through

it; we shall find something."

He stamped his foot on the deck.

"Women always talk so; but men are different. If there is a veil before

us, we must tear it away,--not sit muffled in its folds, and speculate

on what is behind it. Rise."

I obeyed him. He held me firmly. We were face to face.

"Look at me."

I did. His eyes were blazing.

"Do you love me?"

"No."

He placed me on the bench, hoisted the sail, untied the helm, and we

were soon ploughing round to the spot where we had left Laura; but she

was gone. On the rock where she was, perched a solitary gull, which

flew away with a scream as we approached.

That day was the last that I saw Redmond alone. He was at the party at

Laura's house which took place the night before they left. We did not

bid each other adieu.

After the three friends had gone, they sent us gifts of remembrance.

Redmond's keepsake was a white fan with forget-me-nots painted on it.

To Laura he sent the pen-holder, which was now mine.

We missed them, and should have felt their loss, had no deep feeling

been involved; for they gave an impetus to our dull country life, and

the whole summer had been one of excitement and pleasure. We settled by

degrees into our old habits. At Christmas, Frank came. He looked

worried and older. He had heard something of Laura's intimacy with

Harry Lothrop, and was troubled about it, I know: but I believe Laura

was silent on the matter. She was quiet and affectionate toward him

during his visit, and he went back consoled.

The winter passed. Spring came and went, and we were deep into the

summer when Laura was taken ill. She had had a little cough, which no

one except her mother noticed. Her spirits fell, and she failed fast.

When I saw her last, she had been ill some weeks, and had never felt

strong enough to talk as much as she did in that interview. She nerved

herself to make the effort, and as she bade me farewell, bade farewell

to life also. And now it was all over with her!

* * * * *

I fell asleep at length, and woke late. It seemed as if a year had

dropped out of the procession of Time. My heart was still beating with

the emotion which stirred it when Redmond and I were together last.

Recollection had stung me to the quick. A terrible longing urged me to

go and find him. The feeling I had when we were in the boat, face to

face, thrilled my fibres again. I saw his gleaming eyes; I could have

rushed through the air to meet him. But, alas! exaltation of feeling

lasts only a moment; it drops us where it finds us. If it were not so,

how easy to be a hero! The dull reaction of the present, like a slow

avalanche, crushed and ground me into nothingness.

"Something must happen at last," I thought, "to amuse me, and make time

endurable."

What can a woman do, when she knows that an epoch of feeling is rounded

off, finished, dead? Go back to her story-books, her dress-making, her

worsted-work? Shall she attempt to rise to mediocrity on the piano or

in drawing, distribute tracts, become secretary of a Dorcas society? or

shall she turn her mind to the matter of cultivating another lover at

once? Few of us women have courage enough to shoulder out the corpses

of what men leave in our hearts. We keep them there, and conceal the

ruins in which they lie. We grow cunning and artful in our tricks, the

longer we practise them. But how we palpitate and shrink and shudder,

when we are alone in the dark!

After Redmond departed, I had locked up my feelings and thrown the key

away. The death of Laura, and the awakening of my recollections, caused

by the appearance of Harry Lothrop, wrenched the door open. Hitherto I

had acted with the bravery of a girl; I must now behave with the

resolution of a woman. I looked into my heart closely. No skeleton was

there, but the image of a living man,--_Redmond_.

"I love him," I confessed. "To be his wife and the mother of his

children is the only lot I ever care to choose. He is noble, handsome,

and loyal. But I cannot belong to him, nor can he ever be mine.

"'Of love that never found his earthly close

What sequel?'

"What did he do with the remembrance of me? He scattered it, perhaps,

with the ashes of the first cigar he smoked after he went from

me,--made a mound of it, maybe, in honor of Duty. I am as ignorant of

him as if he no longer existed; so this image must be torn away. I will

not burn the lamp of life before it, but will build up the niche where

it stands into a solid wall."

The ideal happiness of love is so sweet and powerful, that, for a

while, adverse influences only exalt the imagination. When Laura told

me of Redmond's engagement, it did but change my dream of what might be

into what might have been. It was a mirage which continued while he was

present and faded with his departure. Then my heart was locked in the

depths of will, till circumstance brought it a power of revenge. I

think now, if we had spoken freely and truly to each other, I should

have suffered less when I saw his friend. We feel better when the

funeral of our dearest friend is over and we have returned to the

house. There is to be no more preparation, no waiting; the windows may

be opened, and the doors set wide; the very dreariness and desolation

force our attention towards the living.

"Something will come," I thought; and I determined not to have any more

reveries. "Mr. Harry Lothrop is a pleasant riddle; I shall see him

soon, or he will write."

It occurred to me then that I had some letters of his already in my

possession,--those he had written to Laura. I found the ebony box, and,

taking from it the sealed package, unfolded the letters one by one,

reading them according to their dates. There was a note among them for

me, from Laura.

"When you read these letters, Margaret," it said, "you will see that I

must have studied the writer of them in vain. You know now that he made

me unhappy; not that I was in love with him much, but he stirred depths

of feeling which I had no knowledge of, and which between Frank, my

betrothed husband, and myself had no existence. But '_le roi s'amuse._'

Perhaps a strong passion will master this man; but I shall never know.

Will you?"

I laid the letters back in their place, and felt no very strong desire

to learn anything more of the writer. I did not know then how little

trouble it would be,--my share of making the acquaintance.

It was not many weeks before Mr. Lothrop came again, and rather

ostentatiously, so that everybody knew of his visit to me. But he saw

none of the friends he had made during his stay the year before. I

happened to see him coming, and went to the door to meet him. Almost

his first words were,--

"Maurice is dead. He went to Florida,--took the fever,--which killed

him, of course. He died only a week after--after Laura. Poor fellow!

did he interest you much? I believe he was in love with you, too; but

musical people are never desperate, except when they play a false

note."

"Yes," I answered; "I was fond of him. His conceit did not trouble me,

and he never fatigued me; he had nothing to conceal. He was a

commonplace man; one liked him, when with him,--and when away, one had

no thought about him."

"I alone am left you," said my visitor, putting his hat on a chair, and

slowly pulling off his gloves, finger by finger.

He had slender, white hands, like a woman's, and they were always in

motion. After he had thrown his gloves into his hat, he put his finger

against his cheek, leaned his elbow on the arm of his chair, crossed

his legs, and looked at me with a cunning self-possession. I glanced at

his feet; they were small and well-booted. I looked into his face; it

was not a handsome one; but he had magnetic eyes, of a lightish blue,

and a clever, loose mouth. It is impossible to describe him,--just as

impossible as it is for a man who was born a boor to attain the bearing

of a gentleman; any attempt at it would prove a bungling matter, when

compared with the original. He felt my scrutiny, and knew, too, that I

had never looked at him till then.

"Do you sing nowadays?" he asked, tapping with his fingers the keys of

the piano behind him.

"Psalms."

"They suit you admirably; but I perceive you attend to your dress

still. How effective those velvet bands are! You look older than you

did two years ago."

"Two years are enough to age a woman."

"Yes, if she is miserable. Can you be unhappy?" he asked, rising, and

taking a seat beside me.

There was a tone of sympathy in his voice which made me shudder, I knew

not why. It was neither aversion nor liking; but I dreaded to be thrown

into any tumult of feeling. I realized afterward more fully that it is

next to impossible for a passionate woman to receive the sincere

addresses of a manly man without feeling some fluctuation of soul.

Ignorant spectators call her a coquette for this. Happily, there are

teachers among our own sex, women of cold temperaments, able to

vindicate themselves from the imputation. They spare themselves great

waste of heart and some generous emotion,--also remorse and

self-accusations regarding the want of propriety, and the other

ingredients which go to make up a white-muslin heroine.

Harry Lothrop saw that my cheek was burning, and made a movement toward

me. I tossed my head back, and moved down the sofa; he did not follow

me, but smiled and mused in his old way.

And so it went on,--not once, but many times. He wrote me quiet,

persuasive, eloquent letters. By degrees I learned his own history and

that of his family, his prospects and his intentions. He was rich. I

knew well what position I should have, if I were his wife. My beauty

would be splendidly set. I was well enough off, but not rich enough to

harmonize all things according to my taste. I was proud, and he was

refined; if we were married, what better promise of delicacy could be

given than that of pride in a woman, refinement in a man? He brought me

flowers or books, when he came. The flowers were not delicate and

inodorous, but magnificent and deep-scented; and the material of the

books was stalwart and vigorous. I read his favorite authors with him.

He was the first person who ever made any appeal to my intellect. In

short, he was educating me for a purpose.

Once he offered me a diamond cross. I refused it, and he never asked me

to accept any gift again. His visits were not frequent, and they were

short. However great the distance he accomplished to reach me, he staid

only an evening, and then returned. He came and went at night. In time

I grew to look upon our connection as an established thing. He made me

understand that he loved me, and that he only waited for me to return

it; but he did not say so.

I lived an idle life, inhaling the perfume of the flowers he gave me,

devouring old literature, the taste for which he had created, and

reading and answering his letters. To be sure, other duties were

fulfilled, I was an affectionate child to my parents, and a proper

acquaintance for my friends. I never lost any sleep now, nor was I

troubled with dreams. I lived in the outward; all my restless activity,

that constant questioning of the heavens and the earth, had ceased

entirely. Five years had passed since I first saw Redmond. I was now

twenty-four. The Fates grew tired of the monotony of my life, I

suppose, for about this time it changed.

My oldest brother, a bachelor, lived in New York. He asked me to spend

the winter with him; he lived in a quiet hotel, had a suite of rooms,

and could make me comfortable, he said. He had just asked somebody to

marry him, and that somebody wished to make my acquaintance. I was glad

to go. My heart gave a bound at the prospect of change; I was still

young enough to dream of the impossible, when any chance offered itself

to my imagination; so I accepted my brother's invitation with some

elation.

I had been in New York a month. One day I was out with my future

sister, on a shopping raid; with our hands full of little paper

parcels, we stopped to look into Goupil's window. There was always a

rim of crowd there, so I paid no attention to the jostles we received.

We were looking at an engraving of Ary Scheffer's Françoise de Rimini.

"Not the worst hell," muttered a voice behind me, which I knew. I

started, and pulled Leonora's arm; she turned round, and the fringe of

her cloak-sleeve caught a button on the overcoat of one of the

gentlemen standing together. It was Redmond; the other was his

"ancient," Harry Lothrop. Leonora was arrested; I stood still, of

course. Redmond had not seen my face, for I turned it from him; and his

head was bent down to the task of disengaging his button.

"'Each only as God wills

Can work; God's puppets, best and worst,

Are we; there is no last nor first,'"

I thought, and turned my head. He instinctively took off his hat, and

then planted it back on his head firmly, and looked over to Harry

Lothrop, to whom I gave my hand. He knew me before I saw him, I am

convinced; but his dramatic sense kept him silent,--perhaps a deeper

feeling. There was an expression of pain in his face, which impelled me

to take his arm.

"Let us move on, Leonora," I said; "these are some summer friends of

mine," and I introduced them to her.

My chief feeling was embarrassment, which was shared by all the party;

for Leonora felt that there was something unusual in the meeting. The

door of the hotel seemed to come round at last, and as we were going

in, Harry Lothrop asked me if he might see me the next morning.

"Do come," I answered aloud.

We all bowed, and they disappeared.

"What an elegant Indian your tall friend is!" said Leonora.

"Yes,--of the Camanche tribe."

"But he would look better hanging from his horse's mane than he does in

a long coat."

"He is spoiled by civilization and white parents. But, Leonora, stay

and dine with me, in my own room. John will not come home till it is

time for the opera. You know we are going. You must make me splendid;

you can torture me into style, I know."

She consented, provided I would send a note to her mother, explaining

that it was my invitation, and not her old John's, as she irreverently

called him. I did so, and she was delighted to stay.

"This is fast," she said; "can't we have Champagne and black coffee?"

She fell to rummaging John's closets, and brought out a dusty,

Chinese-looking affair, which she put on for a dressing-gown. She found

some Chinese straw shoes, and tucked her little feet into them, and

then braided her hair in a long tail, and declared she was ready for

dinner. Her gayety was refreshing, and I did not wonder at John's

admiration. My spirits rose, too, and I astonished Leonora at the table

with my chat; she had never seen me except when quiet. I fell into one

of those unselfish, unasking moods which are the glory of youth: I felt

that the pure heaven of love was in the depths of my being; my soul

shone like a star in its atmosphere; my heart throbbed, and I cried

softly to it,--"Live! live! he is here!" I still chatted with Leonora

and made her laugh, and the child for the first time thoroughly liked

me. We were finishing our dessert, when we heard John's knock. We

allowed him to come in for a moment, and gave him some almonds, which,

he leisurely cracked and ate.

"Somehow, Margaret," he said, "you remind me of those women who enjoy

the Indian festival of the funeral pile. I have seen the thing done;

you have something of the sort in your mind; be sure to immolate

yourself handsomely. Women are the deuse."

"Finish your almonds, John," I said, "and go away; we must dress."

He put his hand on my arm, and whispered,--

"Smother that light in your eyes, my girl; it is dangerous. And you

have lived under your mother's eye all your life! You see what I have

done,"--indicating Leonora with his eyebrows,--"taken a baby on my

hands."

"John, John!" I inwardly ejaculated, "you are an idiot."

"She shall never suffer what you suffer; she shall have the benefit of

the experience which other women have given me."

"Very likely," I answered; "I know we often serve you as pioneers

merely."

He gave a sad nod, and I closed the door upon him.

"Put these pins into my hair, Leonora, and tell me, how do you like my

new dress?"

"Paris!" she cried.

It was a dove-colored silk with a black velvet stripe through it. I

showed her a shawl which John had given me,--a pale-yellow gauzy fabric

with a gold-thread border,--and told her to make me up. She produced

quite a marvellous effect; for this baby understood the art of dress to

perfection. She made my hair into a loose mass, rolling it away from my

face; yet it was firmly fastened. Then she shook out the shawl, and

wrapped me in it, so that my head seemed to be emerging from a

pale-tinted cloud. John said I looked outlandish, but Leonora thought

otherwise. She begged him for some Indian perfume, and he found an

aromatic powder, which she sprinkled inside my gloves and over my shawl.

We found the opera-house crowded. Our seats were near the stage. John

sat behind us, so that he might slip out into the lobby occasionally;

for the opera was a bore to him. The second act was over; John had left

his seat; I was opening and shutting my fan mechanically, half lost in

thought, when Leonora, who had been looking at the house with her

lorgnette, turned and said,--

"Is not that your friend of this morning, on the other side, in the

second row, leaning against the third pillar? There is a

queenish-looking old lady with him. He hasn't spoken to her for a long

time, and she continually looks up at him."

I took her glass, and discovered Redmond. He looked back at me through

another; I made a slight motion with my handkerchief; he dropped his

glass into the lap of the lady next him and darted out, and in a moment

he was behind me in John's seat.

"Who is with you?" he asked.

"Brother," I answered.

"You intoxicate me with some strange perfume; don't fan it this way."

I quietly passed the fan to Leonora, who now looked back and spoke to

him. He talked with her a moment, and then she discreetly resumed her

lorgnette.

"What happened for two years after I left B.? The last year I know

something of."

"Breakfast, dinner, and tea; the ebb and flow of the tide; and the days

of the week."

"Nothing more?" And his voice came nearer.

"A few trifles."

"They are under lock and key, I suppose?"

"We do not carry relics about with us."

"There is the conductor; I must go. Turn your face toward me more."

I obeyed him, and our eyes met. His searching gaze made me shiver.

"I have been married," he said, and his eyes were unflinching, "and my

wife is dead."

All the lights went down, I thought; I struck out my arm to find

Leonora, who caught it and pressed it down.

"I must get out," I said; and I walked up the alley to the door without

stumbling.

I knew that I was fainting or dying; as I had never fainted, I did not

know which. Redmond carried me through the cloak-room and put me on a

sofa.

"I never can speak to him again," I thought, and then I lost sight of

them all.

A terribly sharp pain through my heart roused me, and I was in a

violent chill. They had thrown water over my face; my hair was matted,

and the water was dripping from it on my naked shoulders. The gloves

had been ripped from my hands, and Leonora was wringing my

handkerchief.

"The heat made you faint, dear," she said.

John was walking up and down the room with a phlegmatic countenance,

but he was fuming.

"My new dress is ruined, John," I said.

"Hang the dress! How do you feel now?"

"It is drowned; and I feel better; shall we go home?"

He went out to order the carriage, and Leonora whispered to me that she

had forgotten Redmond's name.

"No matter," I answered. I could not have spoken it then.

When John came, Leonora beckoned to Redmond to introduce himself. John

shook hands with him, gave him an intent look, and told us the carriage

was ready. Redmond followed us, and took leave of us at the

carriage-door.

Leonora begged me to stay at her house; I refused, for I wished to be

alone. John deposited her with her mother, and we drove home. He gave

me one of his infallible medicines, and told me not to get up in the

morning. But when morning came, I remembered Harry Lothrop was coming,

and made myself ready for him. As human nature is not quite perfect, I

felt unhappy about him, and rather fond of him, and thought he

possessed some admirable qualities. I never could read the old poets

any more without a pang, unless he were with me, directing my eye along

their pages with his long white finger! I never should smell tuberoses

again without feeling faint, unless they were his gift!

By the time he came I was in a state of romantic regret, and in that

state many a woman has answered, "Yes!" He asked me abruptly if I

thought it would be folly in him to ask me to marry him. The question

turned the tide.

"No," I answered,--"not folly; for I have thought many times in the

last two years, that I should marry you, if you said I must. But now I

believe that it is not best. You have pursued me patiently; your

self-love made the conquest of me a necessary pleasure. That was well

enough for me; for you made me feel all the while, that, if I loved

you, you were worth possessing. And you are. I like you. But my feeling

for you did not prevent my fainting away at the opera-house last night,

when Redmond told me that his wife was dead."

"So," he said, "the long-smothered fire has broken out again! Chance

does not befriend me. He saw you last night, and yielded. He said

yesterday he should not tell you. He asked me about you after we left

you, and wished to know if I had seen you much for the last year. I

offered him your last letter to read,--am I not generous?--but he

refused it.

"'When I see her,' he asked, 'am I at liberty to say what I choose?'

"On that I could have said, 'No.' Redmond and I have not seen each

other since the period of my first visit to you. He has been nursing

his wife in the mean time, taking journeys with her, and trying all

sorts of cures; and now he seems tied to his aunt and mother-in-law. He

was merely passing through the city with her, and this morning they

have gone again.--Well," after a pause, "there is no need of words

between us. I have in my possession a part of you. Beautiful women are

like flowers which open their leaves wide enough for their perfume to

attract wandering bees; the perfume is wasted, though the honey may be

hid."

"Alas, what a lesson this man is giving me!" I thought.

"Farewell, then," he said. He bit his lips, and his clenched hands

trembled; but he mastered his emotion. "You must think of me."

"And see you, too," I answered. "Everything comes round again, if we

live long enough. Dramatic unities are never preserved in life; if they

were, how poetical would all these things be! But Time whirls us round,

showing us our many-sided feelings as carelessly as a child rattles the

bits of glass in his kaleidoscope."

"So be it!" he replied. "Adieu!"

That afternoon I staid at home, and put John's room in order, and

cleaned the dust from his Indian idols, and was extremely busy till he

came in. Then I kissed his whiskers, and told him all my sins, and

cried once or twice during my confession. He petted me a good deal, and

made me eat twice as much dinner as I wanted; he said it was good for

me, and I obeyed him, for I felt uncommonly meek that day.

Soon after, Redmond sent me a long letter. He said he had been, from a

boy, under an obligation to his aunt, the mother of his wife. It was a

common story, and he would not trouble me with it. He was married soon

after Harry Lothrop's first visit to me, at the time they had received

the news of Laura's death. How much he had thought of Laura afterward,

while he was watching the fading away of his pale blossom! His aunt had

been ill since the death of her daughter, restless, and discontented

with every change. He hoped she was now settled among some old friends

with whom she might find consolation. In conclusion, he wrote,--"My

aunt noticed our hasty exit from the opera-house that night, when I was

brute enough to nearly kill you. I told her that I loved you. She now

feels, after a struggle, that she must let me go. 'Old women have no

rights,' she said to me yesterday. Margaret, may I come, and never leave

you again?"

My answer may be guessed, for one day he arrived. It was the dusk of a

cheery winter day, the time when home wears so bright a look to those

who seek it. It was an hour before dinner, and I was waiting for John

to come in. The amber evening sky gleamed before the windows, and the

fire made a red core of light in the room. John's sandal-wood boxes

gave out strange odors in the heat, and the pattern of the Persian rug

was just visible. A servant came to the door with a card. I held it to

the grate, and the fire lit up his name.

"Show him up-stairs," I said.

I stood in the doorway, and heard his step on every stair. When he

came, I took him by the hand, and drew him into the room. He was

speechless.

"Oh, Redmond, I love you! How long you were away!"

He kneeled by me, and put my arms round his neck, and we kissed each

other with the first, best kiss of passion.

John came in, and I reached out my hand to him and said, "This is my

husband."

"That's comfortable," he answered. "Won't you stay to dinner?"

"Oh, yes," replied Redmond; "this is my hotel."

"I see," said John.

But after dinner they had a long talk together. John sent me to my

room, and I was glad to go. I walked up and down, crying, I must say,

most of the time, asking forgiveness of myself for my faults, and

remembering Laura and Maurice,--and then thinking Redmond was mine,

with a contraction of the heart which threatened to stifle me.

John took us up to Leonora's that evening; he said he wanted to see if

Puss would be tantalized with the sight of such a beautiful romantic

couple just from fairy-land, who were now prepared "to live in peace."

We were married the next day in a church in a by-street. John was the

only witness, and flourished a large silk handkerchief, so that it had

the effect of a triumphal banner. Redmond put the ring on the wrong

finger,--a mistake which the minister kindly rectified. All I had new

for the occasion was a pair of gloves.

One morning after my marriage, when Redmond and John were smoking

together, I was turning over some boxes, for I was packing to go home

on a visit to our mother. I called Redmond to leave his pipe and come

to me.

"You have not seen any of my property. Look, here it is:--

"One bitten handkerchief.

"A fan never used.

"A gold pen-holder.

"A draggled shawl."

"Margaret," he said, taking my chin in his hand and bringing his eyes

close to mine, "I am wild with happiness."

"Your pipe has gone out," we heard John say.

* * * * *

THE PLAYMATE.

The pines were dark on Ramoth hill,

Their song was soft and low;

The blossoms in the sweet May wind

Were falling like the snow.

The blossoms drifted at our feet,

The orchard birds sang clear;

The sweetest and the saddest day

It seemed of all the year.

For, more to me than birds or flowers,

My playmate left her home,

And took with her the laughing spring,

The music and the bloom.

She kissed the lips of kith and kin,

She laid her hand in mine:

What more could ask the bashful boy

Who fed her father's kine?

She left us in the bloom of May:

The constant years told o'er

Their seasons with as sweet May morns.

But she came back no more.

I walk, with noiseless feet, the round

Of uneventful years;

Still o'er and o'er I sow the spring

And reap the autumn ears.

She lives where all the golden year

Her summer roses blow;

The dusky children of the sun

Before her come and go.

There haply with her jewelled hands

She smooths her silken gown,--

No more the homespun lap wherein

I shook the walnuts down.

The wild grapes wait us by the brook,

The brown nuts on the hill,

And still the May-day flowers make sweet

The woods of Follymill.

The lilies blossom in the pond,

The bird builds in the tree,

The dark pines sing on Ramoth hill

The slow song of the sea.

I wonder if she thinks of them,

And how the old time seems,--

If ever the pines of Ramoth wood

Are sounding in her dreams.

I see her face, I hear her voice:

Does she remember mine?

And what to her is now the boy

Who fed her father's kine?

What cares she that the orioles build

For other eyes than ours,--

That other hands with nuts are filled,

And other laps with flowers?

O playmate in the golden time!

Our mossy seat is green,

Its fringing violets blossom yet,

The old trees o'er it lean.

The winds so sweet with birch and fern

A sweeter memory blow;

And there in spring the veeries sing

The song of long ago.

And still the pines of Ramoth wood

Are moaning like the sea,--

The moaning of the sea of change

Between myself and thee!

THE MAROONS OF SURINAM.

When that eccentric individual, Captain John Gabriel Stedman, resigned

his commission in the English navy, took the oath of abjuration, and

was appointed ensign in the Scots brigade employed for two centuries by

Holland, he little knew that "their High Mightinesses the States of the

United Provinces" would send him out, within a year, to the forests of

Guiana, to subdue rebel negroes. He never imagined that the year 1773

would behold him beneath the rainy season in a tropical country, wading

through marshes and splashing through lakes, exploring with his feet

for submerged paths, commanding impracticable troops and commanded by

an insufferable colonel, feeding on gree-gree worms and fed upon by

mosquitoes, howled at by jaguars, hissed at by serpents, and shot at by

those exceedingly unattainable gentlemen, "still longed for, never seen,"

the Maroons of Surinam.

Yet, as our young ensign sailed up the Surinam river, the world of

tropic beauty came upon him with enchantment. Dark, moist verdure was

close around him, rippling waters below; the tall trees of the jungle

and the low mangroves beneath were all hung with long vines and lianas,

a maze of cordage, like a fleet at anchor; odd monkeys travelled

ceaselessly up and down these airy paths, in armies, bearing their

young, like knapsacks, on their backs; macaws and humming-birds, winged

jewels, flew from tree to tree. As they neared Paramaribo, the river

became a smooth canal among luxuriant plantations, the air was perfumed

music, redolent of orange-blossoms and echoing with the songs of birds

and the sweet plash of oars; gay barges came forth to meet them; "while

groups of naked boys and girls were promiscuously playing and

flouncing, like so many tritons and mermaids, in the water." And when

the troops disembarked,--five hundred fine young men, the oldest not

thirty, all arrayed in new uniforms and bearing orange-flowers in their

caps, a bridal wreath for beautiful Guiana,--it is no wonder that the

Creole ladies were in ecstasy, and the boyish recruits little foresaw

the day, when, reduced to a few dozens, barefooted and ragged as

filibusters, their last survivors would gladly reëmbark from a country

beside which even Holland looked dry and even Scotland comfortable.

For over all that earthly paradise there brooded not alone its terrible

malaria, its days of fever and its nights of deadly chill, but the

worse shadows of oppression and of sin, which neither day nor night

could banish. The first object which met Stedman's eye, as he stepped

on shore, was the figure of a young girl stripped to receive two

hundred lashes, and chained to a hundred-pound-weight. And the few

first days gave a glimpse into a state of society worthy of this

exhibition,--men without mercy, women without modesty, the black man a

slave to the white man's passions, and the white man a slave to his

own. The present West Indian society in its worst forms is probably a

mere dilution of the utter profligacy of those days. Greek or Roman

decline produced nothing more debilitating or destructive than the

ordinary life of a Surinam planter, and his one virtue of hospitality

only led to more unbridled excesses and completed the work of vice. No

wonder that Stedman himself, who, with all his peculiarities, was

essentially simple and manly, soon became disgusted, and made haste to

get into the woods and cultivate the society of the Maroons.

The rebels against whom this expedition was sent were not the original

Maroons of Surinam, but a later generation. The originals had long

since established their independence, and their leaders were

flourishing their honorary silver-mounted canes in the streets of

Paramaribo. Fugitive negroes had begun to establish themselves in the

woods from the time when the colony was finally ceded by the English to

the Dutch, in 1674. The first open outbreak occurred in 1726, when the

plantations on the Seramica river revolted; it was found impossible to

subdue them, and the government very imprudently resolved to make an

example of eleven captives, and thus terrify the rest of the rebels.

They were tortured to death, eight of the eleven being women; this

drove the others to madness, and plantation after plantation was

visited with fire and sword. After a long conflict, their chief, Adoe,

was induced to make a treaty, in 1749. The rebels promised to keep the

peace, and in turn were promised freedom, money, tools, clothes, and,

finally, arms and ammunition.

But no permanent peace was ever made upon a barrel of gunpowder as a

basis, and of course an explosion followed this one. The colonists

naturally evaded the last item of the bargain, and the rebels,

receiving the gifts and remarking the omission of the part of Hamlet,

asked contemptuously if the Europeans expected negroes to subsist on

combs and looking-glasses? New hostilities at once began; a new body of

slaves on the Ouca river revolted; the colonial government was changed

in consequence, and fresh troops shipped from Holland; and after four

different embassies had been sent into the woods, the rebels began to

listen to reason. The black generals, Captain Araby and Captain Boston,

agreed upon a truce for a year, during which the colonial government

might decide for peace or war, the Maroons declaring themselves

indifferent. Finally the government chose peace, delivered ammunition,

and made a treaty, in 1761; the white and black plenipotentiaries

exchanged English oaths and then negro oaths, each tasting a drop of

the other's blood during the latter ceremony, amid a volley of

remarkable incantations from the black _gadoman_ or priest. After some

final skirmishes, in which the rebels almost always triumphed, the

treaty was at length accepted by all the various villages of Maroons.

Had they known that at this very time five thousand slaves in Berbice

were just rising against their masters and were looking to them for

assistance, the result might have been different; but this fact had not

reached them, nor had the rumors of insurrection in Brazil, among negro

and Indian slaves. They consented, therefore, to the peace. "They write

from Surinam," says the "Annual Register" for January 23, 1761, "that

the Dutch governor, finding himself unable to subdue the rebel negroes

of that country by force, hath wisely followed the example of Governor

Trelawney at Jamaica, and concluded an amicable treaty with them; in

consequence of which, all the negroes of the woods are acknowledged to

be free, and all that is past is buried in oblivion." So ended a war of

thirty-six years, and in Stedman's day the original three thousand Ouca

and Seramica Maroons had multiplied (almost incredibly) to fifteen

thousand.

But for the slaves not sharing in this revolt it was not so

easy to "bury the whole past in oblivion." The Maroons had told

some very plain truths to the white ambassadors, and had frankly

advised them, if they wished for peace, to mend their own

manners and treat their slaves humanely. But the planters learned

nothing by experience,--and indeed, the terrible narrations of Stedman

were confirmed by those of Alexander, so lately as 1831. Of course,

therefore, in a colony comprising eighty thousand blacks to four

thousand whites, other revolts were stimulated by the success of this

one. They reached their highest point in 1772, when an insurrection on

the Cottica river, led by a negro named Baron, almost gave the

finishing blow to the colony; the only adequate protection being found

in a body of slaves liberated expressly for that purpose,--a dangerous

and humiliating precedent. "We have been obliged to set three or four

hundred of our stoutest negroes free to defend us," says an honest

letter from Surinam in the "Annual Register" for September 5, 1772.

Fortunately for the safety of the planters, Baron presumed too much

upon his numbers, and injudiciously built a camp too near the

sea-coast, in a marshy fastness, from which he was finally ejected by

twelve hundred Dutch troops, though the chief work was done, Stedman

thinks, by the "black rangers" or liberated slaves. Checked by this

defeat, he again drew back into the forests, resuming his guerrilla

warfare against the plantations. Nothing could dislodge him;

bloodhounds were proposed, but the moisture of the country made them

useless; and thus matters stood when Stedman came sailing, amid

orange-blossoms and music, up the winding Surinam.

Our young officer went into the woods in the condition of Falstaff,

"heinously unprovided." Coming from the unbounded luxury of the

plantations, he found himself entering "the most horrid and

impenetrable forests, where no kind of refreshment was to be had,"--he

being provisioned only with salt pork and peas. After a wail of sorrow

for this inhuman neglect, he bursts into a gush of gratitude for the

private generosity which relieved his wants at the last moment by the

following list of supplies:--"24 bottles best claret, 12 ditto Madeira,

12 ditto porter, 12 ditto cider, 12 ditto rum, 2 large loaves white

sugar, 2 gallons brandy, 6 bottles muscadel, 2 gallons lemon-juice, 2

gallons ground coffee, 2 large Westphalia hams, 2 salted bullocks'

tongues, 1 bottle Durham mustard, 6 dozen spermaceti candles." The hams

and tongues seem, indeed, rather a poor halfpennyworth to this

intolerable deal of sack; but this instance of Surinam privation in

those days may open some glimpse at the colonial standards of comfort.

"From this specimen," moralizes our hero, "the reader will easily

perceive, that, if some of the inhabitants of Surinam show themselves

the disgrace of the creation by their cruelties and brutality, others,

by their social feelings, approve themselves an ornament to the human

species. With this instance of virtue and generosity I therefore

conclude this chapter."

But the troops soon had to undergo worse troubles than those of the

_commisariat_. The rainy season had just set in. "As for the negroes,"

said Mr. Klynhaus, the last planter with whom they parted, "you may

depend on never seeing a soul of them, unless they attack you off

guard; but the climate, the climate, will murder you all." Bringing

with them constitutions already impaired by the fevers and dissipation

of Paramaribo, the poor boys began to perish long before they began to

fight. Wading in water all day, hanging their hammocks over water at

night, it seemed a moist existence, even compared with the climate of

England and the soil of Holland. It was "Invent a shovel and be a

magistrate," even more than Andrew Marvell found it in the United

Provinces. In fact, Raynal evidently thinks that nothing but Dutch

experience in hydraulics could ever have cultivated Surinam.

The two gun-boats which held one division of the expedition were merely

old sugar-barges, roofed over with boards, and looking like coffins.

They were pleasantly named the "Charon" and the "Cerberus," but Stedman

thought that the "Sudden Death" and the "Wilful Murder" would have been

titles more appropriate. The chief duty of the troops consisted in

lying at anchor at the intersections of wooded streams, waiting for

rebels who never came. It was dismal work, and the raw recruits were

full of the same imaginary terrors which have haunted other heroes less

severely tested: the monkeys never rattled the cocoa-nuts against the

trees, but they all heard the axes of Maroon wood-choppers; and when a

sentinel declared, one night, that he had seen a negro go down the

river in a canoe, with his pipe lighted, the whole force was called to

arms--against a firefly. In fact, the insect race brought by far the

most substantial dangers. The rebels eluded the military, but the

chigres, locusts, scorpions, and bush-spiders were ever ready to come

half-way to meet them; likewise serpents and alligators proffered them

the freedom of the forests and exhibited a hospitality almost

excessive. Snakes twenty feet long hung their seductive length from the

trees; jaguars volunteered their society through almost impenetrable

marshes; vampire bats perched by night with lulling endearments upon

their toes. When Stedman describes himself as killing thirty-eight

mosquitoes at one stroke, we must perhaps pardon something to the

spirit of martyrdom. But when we add to these the other woes of his

catalogue,--prickly-heat, ring-worm, putrid-fever, "the growling of

Colonel Fougeaud, dry, sandy savannas, unfordable marshes, burning hot

days, cold and damp nights, heavy rains, and short allowance,"--we can

hardly wonder that three captains died in a month, and that in two

months his detachment of forty-two was reduced to a miserable seven.

Yet, through all this, Stedman himself kept his health. His theory of

the matter almost recalls the time-honored prescription of "A light

heart and a thin pair of breeches," for he attributes his good

condition to his keeping up his spirits and kicking off his shoes.

Daily bathing in the river had also something to do with it,--and,

indeed, hydropathy (this may not be generally known) was first learned

of the West India Maroons, who did their "packing" in wet clay,--and it

was carried by Dr. Wright to England. But his extraordinary personal

qualities must have contributed most to his preservation. Never did a

"meagre, starved, black, burnt, and ragged tatterdemalion," as he calls

himself, carry about him such a fund of sentiment, philosophy, poetry,

and art. He had a great faculty for sketching, as the engravings in his

volumes, with all their odd peculiarities, show; his deepest woes he

coined always into couplets, and fortified himself against hopeless

despair with Ovid and Valerius Flaccus, Pope's "Homer" and Thomson's

"Seasons." Above all reigned his passion for natural history, a ready

balm for every ill. Here he was never wanting to the occasion, and, to

do justice to Dutch Guiana, the occasion never was wanting to him. Were

his men sickening, the peccaries were always healthy without, and the

cockroaches within the camp; just escaping from a she-jaguar, he

satisfies himself, ere he flees, that the print of her claws on the

sand is precisely the size of a pewter dinner-plate; bitten by a

scorpion, he makes sure of his scientific description in case he should

expire of the bite; is the water undrinkable, there is at least some

rational interest in the number of legs possessed by the centipedes

which preoccupy it. This is the highest triumph of man over his

accidents, when he thus turns his pains to gains, and becomes an

entomologist in the tropics.

Meanwhile the rebels kept their own course in the forests, and

occasionally descended upon plantations beside the very river on whose

upper waters the useless troops were sickening and dying. Stedman

himself made several campaigns, with long intervals of illness, before

he came any nearer to the enemy than to burn a deserted village or

destroy a rice-field. Sometimes they left the Charon and the Cerberus

moored by grape-vines to the pine-trees, and made expeditions into the

woods single file. Our ensign, true to himself, gives the minutest

schedule of the order of march, and the oddest little diagram of

manikins with cocked hats, and blacker manikins bearing burdens. First,

negroes with bill-hooks to clear the way; then the van-guard; then the

main body, interspersed with negroes bearing boxes of ball-cartridges;

then the rear-guard, with many more negroes, bearing camp-equipage,

provisions, and new rum, surnamed "kill-devil," and appropriately

followed by a sort of palanquin for the disabled. Thus arrayed, they

marched valorously forth into the woods, to some given point; then they

turned, marched back to the boats, then rowed back to camp, and

straightaway went into the hospital. Immediately upon this, the coast

being clear. Baron and his rebels marched out again and proceeded to

business.

In the course of years, these Maroons had acquired their own peculiar

tactics. They built stockaded fortresses on marshy islands, accessible

by fords which they alone could traverse. These they defended further

by sharp wooden pins, or crows'-feet, concealed beneath the surface of

the miry ground,--and, latterly, by the more substantial protection of

cannon, which they dragged into the woods, and learned to use. Their

bush-fighting was unique. Having always more men than weapons, they

arranged their warriors in threes,--one to use the musket, another to

take his place, if wounded or slain, and a third to drag away the body.

They had Indian stealthiness and swiftness, with more than Indian

discipline; discharged their fire with some approach to regularity, in

three successive lines, the signals being given by the captain's horn.

They were full of ingenuity: marked their movements for each other by

scattered leaves and blazed trees; ran zigzag, to dodge bullets; gave

wooden guns to their unarmed men, to frighten the plantation negroes on

their guerrilla expeditions; and borrowed the red caps of the black

rangers whom they slew, to bewilder the aim of the others. One of

them, finding himself close to the muzzle of a ranger's gun, threw up

his hand hastily. "What!" he exclaimed, "will you fire on one of your

own party?" "God forbid!" cried the ranger, dropping his piece, and was

instantly shot through the body by the Maroon, who the next instant had

disappeared in the woods.

These rebels were no saints: their worship was obi-worship; the women

had not far outgrown the plantation standard of chastity, and the men

drank "kill-devil" like their betters. Stedman was struck with the

difference between the meaning of the word "good" in rebellious circles

and in reputable. "It must, however, be observed that what we Europeans

call a good character was by the Africans looked upon as detestable,

especially by those born in the woods, whose only crime consisted in

avenging the wrongs done to their forefathers." But if martial virtues

be virtues, such were theirs. Not a rebel ever turned traitor or

informer, ever flinched in battle or under torture, ever violated a

treaty or even a private promise. But it was their power of endurance

which was especially astounding; Stedman is never weary of paying

tribute to this, or of illustrating it in sickening detail; indeed, the

records of the world show nothing to surpass it; "the lifted axe, the

agonizing wheel" proved powerless to subdue it; with every limb lopped,

every bone broken, the victims yet defied their tormentors, laughed,

sang, and died triumphant.

Of course, they repaid these atrocities in kind. If they had not, it

would have demonstrated the absurd paradox, that slavery educates

higher virtues than freedom. It bewilders all the relations of human

responsibility, if we expect the insurrectionary slave to commit no

outrages; if slavery have not depraved him, it has done him little

harm. If it be the normal tendency of bondage to produce saints like

Uncle Tom, let us all offer ourselves at auction immediately. It is

Cassy and Dred who are the normal protest of human nature against

systems which degrade it. Accordingly, these poor, ignorant Maroons,

who had seen their brothers and sisters flogged, burned, mutilated,

hanged on iron hooks, broken on the wheel, and had been all the while

solemnly assured that this was paternal government, could only repay

the paternalism in the same fashion, when they had the power. Stedman

saw a negro chained to a red-hot distillery-furnace; he saw disobedient

slaves, in repeated instances, punished by the amputation of a leg, and

sent to boat-service for the rest of their lives; and of course the

rebels borrowed these suggestions. They could bear to watch their

captives expire under the lash, for they had previously watched their

parents. If the government rangers received twenty-five florins for

every rebel right-hand which they brought in, of course they risked

their own right-hands in the pursuit. The difference was, that the one

brutality was that of a mighty state, and the other was only the

retaliation of the victims. And after all, Stedman never ventures to

assert that the imitation equalled the original, or that the Maroons

had inflicted nearly so much as they had suffered.

The leaders of the rebels, especially, were men who had each his own

story of wrongs to tell. Baron, the most formidable, had been the slave

of a Swedish gentleman, who had taught him to read and write, taken him

to Europe, promised to manumit him on his return,--and then, breaking

his word, sold him to a Jew. Baron refused to work for his new master,

was publicly flogged under the gallows, fled to the woods next day, and

became the terror of the colony. Joli Coeur, his first captain, was

avenging the cruel wrongs of his mother. Bonny, another leader, was

born in the woods, his mother having taken refuge there just

previously, to escape from his father, who was also his master. Cojo,

another, had defended his master against the insurgents until he was

obliged by ill usage to take refuge among them; and he still bore upon

his wrist, when Stedman saw him, a silver band, with the inscription,--

"True to the Europeans." In dealing with wrongs like these, Mr. Carlyle

would have found the despised negroes quite as ready as himself to take

the total-abstinence pledge against rose-water.

In his first two months' campaign, Stedman never saw the trace of a

Maroon; in the second, he once came upon their trail; in the third, one

captive was brought in, two surrendered themselves voluntarily, and a

large party was found to have crossed a river within a mile of the

camp, ferrying themselves on palm-trunks, according to their fashion.

Deep swamps and scorching sands,--toiling through briers all day, and

sleeping at night in hammocks suspended over stagnant water, with

weapons supported on sticks crossed beneath,--all this was endured for

two years and a half, before Stedman personally came in sight of the

enemy.

On August 20th, 1775, the troops found themselves at last in the midst

of the rebel settlements. These villages and forts bore a variety of

expressive names, such as "Hide me, O thou surrounding verdure," "I

shall be taken," "The woods lament for me," "Disturb me, if you dare,"

"Take a tasting, if you like it," "Come, try me, if you be men," "God

knows me and none else," "I shall moulder before I shall be taken."

Some were only plantation-grounds with a few huts, and were easily laid

waste; but all were protected more or less by their mere situations.

Quagmires surrounded them, covered by a thin crust of verdure,

sometimes broken through by one man's weight, when the victim sank

hopelessly into the black and bottomless depths below. In other

directions there was a solid bottom, but inconveniently covered by

three or four feet of water, through which the troops waded

breast-deep, holding their muskets high in the air, unable to reload

them when once discharged, and liable to be picked off by rebel scouts,

who ingeniously posted themselves in the tops of palm-trees.

Through this delectable region Colonel Fougeaud and his followers

slowly advanced, drawing near the fatal shore where Captain Meyland's

detachment had just been defeated, and where their mangled remains

still polluted the beach. Passing this point of danger without attack,

they suddenly met a small party of rebels, each bearing on his back a

beautifully-woven hamper of snow-white rice: these loads they threw

down, and disappeared. Next appeared an armed body from the same

direction, who fired upon them once and swiftly retreated; and in a few

moments the soldiers came upon a large field of standing rice, beyond

which lay, like an amphitheatre, the rebel village. But between the

village and the field had been piled successive defences of logs and

branches, behind which simple redoubts the Maroons lay concealed. A

fight ensued, lasting forty minutes, during which nearly every soldier

and ranger was wounded, but, to their great amazement, not one was

killed. This was an enigma to them until after the skirmish, when the

surgeon found that most of them had been struck, not by bullets, but by

various substitutes, such as pebbles, coat-buttons, and bits of silver

coin, which had penetrated only skin-deep. "We also observed that

several of the poor rebel negroes, who had been shot, had only the

shards of Spa-water cans, instead of flints, which could seldom do

execution; and it was certainly owing to these circumstances that we

came off so well."

The rebels at length retreated, first setting fire to their village; a

hundred or more lightly built houses, some of them two stories high,

were soon in flames; and as this conflagration occupied the only neck

of land between two impassable morasses, the troops were unable to

follow, and the Maroons had left nothing but rice-fields to be

pillaged. That night the military force was encamped in the woods;

their ammunition was almost gone; so they were ordered to lie flat on

the ground, even in case of attack; they could not so much as build a

fire. Before midnight an attack was made on them, partly with bullets

and partly with words; the Maroons were all around them in the forest,

but their object was a puzzle: they spent most of the night in bandying

compliments with the black rangers, whom they alternately denounced,

ridiculed, and challenged to single combat. At last Fougeaud and

Stedman joined in the conversation, and endeavored to make this

midnight volley of talk the occasion for a treaty. This was received

with inextinguishable laughter, which echoed through the woods like a

concert of screech-owls, ending in a _charivari_ of horns and

hallooing. The Colonel, persisting, offered them "life, liberty,

victuals, drink, and all they wanted"; in return, they ridiculed him

unmercifully: he was a half-starved Frenchman, who had run away from

his own country, and would soon run away from theirs; they profoundly

pitied him and his soldiers; they would scorn to spend powder on such

scarecrows; they would rather feed and clothe them, as being poor white

slaves, hired to be shot at and starved for four-pence a day. But as

for the planters, overseers, and rangers, they should die, every one of

them, and Bonny should be governor of the colony. "After this, they

tinkled their bill-hooks, fired a volley, and gave three cheers; which

being answered by the rangers, the clamor ended, and the rebels

dispersed with the rising sun."

Very aimless nonsense it certainly appeared. But the next day put a new

aspect on it; for it was found, that, under cover of all this noise,

the Maroons had been busily occupied all night, men, women, and

children, in preparing and filling great hampers of the finest rice,

yams, and cassava, from the adjacent provision-grounds, to be used for

subsistence during their escape, leaving only chaff and refuse for the

hungry soldiers. "This was certainly such a masterly trait of

generalship in a savage people, whom we affected to despise, as would

have done honor to any European commander."

From this time the Maroons fulfilled their threats. Shooting down

without mercy every black ranger who came within their reach,--one of

these rangers being, in Stedman's estimate, worth six white

soldiers,--they left Colonel Fougeaud and his regulars to die of

starvation and fatigue. The enraged Colonel, "finding himself thus

foiled by a naked negro, swore he would pursue Bonny to the world's

end." But he never got any nearer than to Bonny's kitchen-gardens. He

put the troops on half-allowance, sent back for provisions and

ammunition,--and within ten days changed his mind, and retreated to the

settlements in despair. Soon after, this very body of rebels, under

Bonny's leadership, plundered two plantations in the vicinity, and

nearly captured a powder-magazine, which was, however, successfully

defended by some armed slaves.

For a year longer these expeditions continued. The troops never gained

a victory, and they lost twenty men for every rebel killed; but they

gradually checked the plunder of plantations, destroyed villages and

planting-grounds, and drove the rebels, for the time at least, into the

deeper recesses of the woods or into the adjacent province of Cayenne.

They had the slight satisfaction of burning Bonny's own house, a

two-story wooden hut, built in the fashion of our frontier

guard-houses. They often took single prisoners,--some child, born and

bred in the woods, and frightened equally by the first sight of a white

man and of a cow,--or some warrior, who, on being threatened with

torture, stretched forth both hands in disdain, and said, with Indian

eloquence,--"These hands have made tigers tremble." As for Stedman, he

still went bare-footed, still quarrelled with his colonel, still

sketched the scenery and described the reptiles, still reared gree-gree

worms for his private kitchen, still quoted good poetry and wrote

execrable, still pitied all the sufferers around him, black, white, and

red, until finally he and his comrades were ordered back to Holland in

1776.

Among all that wasted regiment of weary and broken-down men, there was

probably no one but Stedman who looked backward with longing as they

sailed down the lovely Surinam. True, he bore all his precious

collections with him,--parrots and butterflies, drawings on the backs

of old letters, and journals kept on bones and cartridges. But he had

left behind him a dearer treasure; for there runs through all his

eccentric narrative a single thread of pure romance, in his love for

his beautiful quadroon wife and his only son.

Within a month after his arrival in the colony, our susceptible ensign

first saw Joanna, a slave-girl of fifteen, at the house of an intimate

friend. Her extreme beauty and modesty first fascinated him, and then

her piteous narrative,--for she was the daughter of a planter, who had

just gone mad and died in despair from the discovery that he could not

legally emancipate his own children from slavery. Soon after, Stedman

was dangerously ill, was neglected and alone; fruits and cordials were

anonymously sent to him, which proved at last to have come from Joanna,

and she came herself, ere long, and nursed him, grateful for the

visible sympathy he had shown to her. This completed the conquest; the

passionate young Englishman, once recovered, loaded her with presents,

which she refused,--talked of purchasing her and educating her in

Europe, which she also declined, as burdening him too greatly,--and

finally, amid the ridicule of all good society in Paramaribo,

surmounted all legal obstacles and was united to the beautiful girl in

honorable marriage. He provided a cottage for her, where he spent his

furloughs, in perfect happiness, for four years.

The simple idyl of their loves was unbroken by any stain or

disappointment, and yet always shadowed with the deepest anxiety for

the future. Though treated with the utmost indulgence, she was legally

a slave, and so was the boy of whom she became the mother. Cojo, her

uncle, was a captain among the rebels against whom her husband fought.

And up to the time when Stedman was ordered back to Holland, he was

unable to purchase her freedom, nor could he, until the very last

moment, procure the emancipation of his boy. His perfect delight at

this last triumph, when obtained, elicited some satire from his white

friends. "While the well-thinking few highly applauded my sensibility,

many not only blamed, but publicly derided me for my paternal

affection, which was called a weakness, a whim." "Nearly forty

beautiful boys and girls were left to perpetual slavery by their

parents of my acquaintance, and many of them without being so much as

once inquired after at all."

But Stedman was a true-hearted fellow, if his sentiment did sometimes

run to rodomontade; he left his Joanna only in the hope that a year or

two in Europe would repair his ruined fortunes, and he could return to

treat himself to the purchase of his own wedded wife. He describes,

with unaffected pathos, their parting scene,--though, indeed, there

were several successive partings,--and closes the description in a

manner worthy of that remarkable combination of enthusiasms which

characterized him. "My melancholy having surpassed all description, I

at last determined to weather one or two painful years in her absence;

and in the afternoon went to dissipate my mind at a Mr. Roux' cabinet

of Indian curiosities; where as my eye chanced to fall on a

rattlesnake, I will, before I leave the colony, describe this dangerous

reptile."

It was impossible to write the history of the Maroons of Surinam except

through the biography of our Ensign, (at last promoted Captain,)

because nearly all we know of them is through his quaint and

picturesque narrative, with its profuse illustrations by his own hand.

It is not fair, therefore, to end without chronicling his safe arrival

in Holland, on June 3d, 1777. It is a remarkable fact, that, after his

life in the woods, even the Dutch looked slovenly to his eyes. "The

inhabitants, who crowded about us, appeared but a disgusting assemblage

of ill-formed and ill-dressed rabble,--so much had my prejudices been

changed by living among Indians and blacks: their eyes seemed to

resemble those of a pig; their complexions were like the color of foul

linen; they seemed to have no teeth, and to be covered over with rags

and dirt. This prejudice, however, was not against these people only,

but against all Europeans in general, when compared to the sparkling

eyes, ivory teeth, shining skin, and remarkable cleanliness of those I

had left behind me." Yet, in spite of these superior attractions, he

never recrossed the Atlantic; for his Joanna died soon after, and his

promising son, being sent to the father, was educated in England,

became a midshipman in the navy, and was lost at sea. With his elegy,

in which the last depths of bathos are sadly sounded by a mourning

parent,--who is induced to print them only by "the effect they had on

the sympathetic and ingenious Mrs. Cowley,"--the "Narrative of a Five

Years' Expedition" closes.

The war, which had cost the government forty thousand pounds a year,

was ended, and left both parties essentially as when it began. The

Maroons gradually returned to their old abodes, and, being unmolested

themselves, left others unmolested thenceforward. Originally three

thousand,--in Stedman's time, fifteen thousand,--they were estimated at

seventy thousand by Captain Alexander, who saw Guiana in 1831,--and a

recent American scientific expedition, having visited them in their

homes, reported them as still enjoying their wild freedom, and

multiplying, while the Indians on the same soil decay. The beautiful

forests of Surinam still make the morning gorgeous with their beauty,

and the night deadly with their chill; the stately palm still rears, a

hundred feet in air, its straight gray shaft and its head of verdure;

the mora builds its solid, buttressed trunk, a pedestal for the eagle;

the pine of the tropics holds out its myriad hands with water-cups for

the rain and dews, where all the birds and the monkeys may drink their

fill; the trees are garlanded with epiphytes and convolvuli, and

anchored to the earth by a thousand vines. High among their branches,

the red and yellow mockingbirds still build their hanging nests,

uncouth storks and tree-porcupines cling above, and the spotted deer

and the tapir drink from the sluggish stream below. The night is still

made noisy with a thousand cries of bird and beast; and the stillness

of the sultry noon is broken by the slow tolling of the _campañero_, or

bell-bird, far in the deep, dark woods, like the chime of some lost

convent. And as Nature is unchanged there, so apparently is man; the

Maroons still retain their savage freedom, still shoot their wild game

and trap their fish, still raise their rice and cassava, yams and

plantains,--still make cups from the gourd-tree and hammocks from the

silk-grass plant, wine from the palm-tree's sap, brooms from its

leaves, fishing-lines from its fibres, and salt from its ashes. Their

life does not yield, indeed, the very highest results of spiritual

culture; its mental and moral results may not come up to the level of

civilization, but they rise far above the level of slavery. In the

changes of time, the Maroons may yet elevate themselves into the one,

but they will never relapse into the other.

CIRCUMSTANCE.

She had remained, during all that day, with a sick neighbor,--those

eastern wilds of Maine in that epoch frequently making neighbors and

miles synonymous,--and so busy had she been with care and sympathy that

she did not at first observe the approaching night. But finally the

level rays, reddening the snow, threw their gleam upon the wall, and,

hastily donning cloak and hood, she bade her friends farewell and

sallied forth on her return. Home lay some three miles distant, across

a copse, a meadow, and a piece of woods,--the woods being a fringe on

the skirts of the great forests that stretch far away into the North.

That home was one of a dozen log-houses lying a few furlongs apart from

each other, with their half-cleared demesnes separating them at the

rear from a wilderness untrodden save by stealthy native or deadly

panther tribes.

She was in a nowise exalted frame of spirit,--on the contrary, rather

depressed by the pain she had witnessed and the fatigue she had

endured; but in certain temperaments such a condition throws open the

mental pores, so to speak, and renders one receptive of every

influence. Through the little copse she walked slowly, with her cloak

folded about her, lingering to imbibe the sense of shelter, the sunset

filtered in purple through the mist of woven spray and twig, the

companionship of growth not sufficiently dense to band against her the

sweet home-feeling of a young and tender wintry wood. It was therefore

just on the edge of the evening that she emerged from the place and

began to cross the meadow-land. At one hand lay the forest to which her

path wound; at the other the evening star hung over a tide of failing

orange that slowly slipped down the earth's broad side to sadden other

hemispheres with sweet regret. Walking rapidly now, and with her eyes

wide-open, she distinctly saw in the air before her what was not there

a moment ago, a winding-sheet,--cold, white, and ghastly, waved by the

likeness of four wan hands,--that rose with a long inflation and fell

in rigid folds, while a voice, shaping itself from the hollowness

above, spectral and melancholy, sighed,--"The Lord have mercy on the

people! The Lord have mercy on the people!" Three times the sheet with

its corpse-covering outline waved beneath the pale hands, and the

voice, awful in its solemn and mysterious depth, sighed, "The Lord have

mercy on the people!" Then all was gone, the place was clear again, the

gray sky was obstructed by no deathly blot; she looked about her, shook

her shoulders decidedly, and, pulling on her hood, went forward once

more.

She might have been a little frightened by such an apparition, if she

had led a life of less reality than frontier settlers are apt to lead;

but dealing with hard fact does not engender a flimsy habit of mind,

and this woman was too sincere and earnest in her character, and too

happy in her situation, to be thrown by antagonism merely upon

superstitious fancies and chimeras of the second-sight. She did not

even believe herself subject to an hallucination, but smiled simply, a

little vexed that her thought could have framed such a glamour from the

day's occurrences, and not sorry to lift the bough of the warder of the

woods and enter and disappear in their sombre path. If she had been

imaginative, she would have hesitated at her first step into a region

whose dangers were not visionary; but I suppose that the thought of a

little child at home would conquer that propensity in the most

habituated. So, biting a bit of spicy birch, she went along. Now and

then she came to a gap where the trees had been partially felled, and

here she found that the lingering twilight was explained by that

peculiar and perhaps electric film which sometimes sheathes the sky in

diffused light for very many hours before a brilliant aurora. Suddenly,

a swift shadow, like the fabulous flying-dragon, writhed through the

air before her, and she felt herself instantly seized and borne aloft.

It was that wild beast--the most savage and serpentine and subtle and

fearless of our latitudes--known by hunters as the Indian Devil, and he

held her in his clutches on the broad floor of a swinging fir-bough.

His long sharp claws were caught in her clothing, he worried them

sagaciously a little, then, finding that ineffectual to free them, he

commenced licking her bare white arm with his rasping tongue and

pouring over her the wide streams of his hot, fetid breath. So quick

had this flashing action been that the woman had had no time for alarm;

moreover, she was not of the screaming kind; but now, as she felt him

endeavoring to disentangle his claws, and the horrid sense of her fate

smote her, and she saw instinctively the fierce plunge of those

weapons, the long strips of living flesh torn from her bones, the

agony, the quivering disgust, itself a worse agony,--while by her side,

and holding her in his great lithe embrace, the monster crouched, his

white tusks whetting and gnashing, his eyes glaring through all the

darkness like balls of red fire,--a shriek, that rang in every forest

hollow, that startled every winter-housed thing, that stirred and woke

the least needle of the tasselled pines, tore through her lips. A

moment afterward, the beast left the arm, once white, now crimson, and

looked up alertly.

She did not think at this instant to call upon God. She called upon her

husband. It seemed to her that she had but one friend in the world;

that was he; and again the cry, loud, clear, prolonged, echoed through

the woods. It was not the shriek that disturbed the creature at his

relish; he was not born in the woods to be scared of an owl, you know;

what then? It mast have been the echo, most musical, most resonant,

repeated and yet repeated, dying with long sighs of sweet sound,

vibrated from rock to river and back again from depth to depth of cave

and cliff. Her thought flew after it; she knew, that, even if her

husband heard it, he yet could not reach her in time; she saw that

while the beast listened he would not gnaw,--and this she _felt_

directly, when the rough, sharp, and multiplied stings of his tongue

retouched her arm. Again her lips opened by instinct, but the sound

that issued thence came by reason. She had heard that music charmed

wild beasts,--just this point between life and death intensified every

faculty,--and when she opened her lips the third time, it was not for

shrieking, but for singing.

A little thread of melody stole out, a rill of tremulous motion; it was

the cradle-song with which she rocked her baby;--how could she sing

that? And then she remembered the baby sleeping rosily on the long

settee before the fire,--the father cleaning his gun, with one foot on

the green wooden rundle,--the merry light from the chimney dancing out

and through the room, on the rafters of the ceiling with their tassels

of onions and herbs, on the log walls painted with lichens and

festooned with apples, on the king's-arm slung across the shelf with

the old pirate's-cutlass, on the snow-pile of the bed, and on the great

brass clock,--dancing, too, and lingering on the baby, with his fringed

gentian eyes, his chubby fists clenched on the pillow, and his fine

breezy hair fanning with the motion of his father's foot. All this

struck her in one, and made a sob of her breath, and she ceased.

Immediately the long red tongue was thrust forth again. Before it

touched, a song sprang to her lips, a wild sea-song, such as some

sailor might be singing far out on trackless blue water that night, the

shrouds whistling with frost and the sheets glued in ice,--a song with

the wind in its burden and the spray in its chorus. The monster raised

his head and flared the fiery eyeballs upon her, then fretted the

imprisoned claws a moment and was quiet; only the breath like the vapor

from some hell-pit still swathed her. Her voice, at first faint and

fearful, gradually lost its quaver, grew under her control and subject

to her modulation; it rose on long swells, it fell in subtile cadences,

now and then its tones pealed out like bells from distant belfries on

fresh sonorous mornings. She sung the song through, and, wondering lest

his name of Indian Devil were not his true name, and if he would not

detect her, she repeated it. Once or twice now, indeed, the beast

stirred uneasily, turned, and made the bough sway at his movement. As

she ended, he snapped his jaws together, and tore away the fettered

member, curling it under him with a snarl,--when she burst into the

gayest reel that ever answered a fiddle-bow. How many a time she had

heard her husband play it on the homely fiddle made by himself from

birch and cherry-wood! how many a time she had seen it danced on the

floor of their one room, to the patter of wooden clogs and the rustle

of homespun petticoat! how many a time she had danced it herself!--and

did she not remember once, as they joined clasps for right-hands-round,

how it had lent its gay, bright measure to her life? And here she was

singing it alone, in the forest, at midnight, to a wild beast! As she

sent her voice trilling up and down its quick oscillations between joy

and pain, the creature who grasped her uncurled his paw and scratched

the bark from the bough; she must vary the spell; and her voice spun

leaping along the projecting points of tune of a hornpipe. Still

singing, she felt herself twisted about with a low growl and a lifting

of the red lip from the glittering teeth; she broke the hornpipe's

thread, and commenced unravelling a lighter, livelier thing, an Irish

jig. Up and down and round about her voice flew, the beast threw back

his head so that the diabolical face fronted hers, and the torrent of

his breath prepared her for his feast as the anaconda slimes his prey.

Franticly she darted from tune to tune; his restless movements followed

her. She tired herself with dancing and vivid national airs, growing

feverish and singing spasmodically as she felt her horrid tomb yawning

wider. Touching in this manner all the slogan and keen clan cries, the

beast moved again, but only to lay the disengaged paw across her with

heavy satisfaction. She did not dare to pause; through the clear cold

air, the frosty starlight, she sang. If there were yet any tremor in

the tone, it was not fear,--she had learned the secret of sound at

last; nor could it be chill,--far too high a fervor throbbed her

pulses; it was nothing but the thought of the log-house and of what

might be passing within it. She fancied the baby stirring in his sleep

and moving his pretty lips,--her husband rising and opening the door,

looking out after her, and wondering at her absence. She fancied the

light pouring through the chink and then shut in again with all the

safety and comfort and joy, her husband taking down the fiddle and

playing lightly with his head inclined, playing while she sang, while

she sang for her life to an Indian Devil. Then she knew he was fumbling

for and finding some shining fragment and scoring it down the yellowing

hair, and unconsciously her voice forsook the wild war-tunes and

drifted into the half-gay, half-melancholy Rosin the Bow.

Suddenly she woke pierced with a pang, and the daggered tooth

penetrating her flesh;--dreaming of safety, she had ceased singing and

lost it. The beast had regained the use of all his limbs, and now,

standing and raising his back, bristling and foaming, with sounds that

would have been like hisses but for their deep and fearful sonority, he

withdrew step by step toward the trunk of the tree, still with his

flaming balls upon her. She was all at once free, on one end of the

bough, twenty feet from the ground. She did not measure the distance,

but rose to drop herself down, careless of any death, so that it were

not this. Instantly, as if he scanned her thoughts, the creature

bounded forward with a yell and caught her again in his dreadful hold.

It might be that he was not greatly famished; for, as she suddenly

flung up her voice again, he settled himself composedly on the bough,

still clasping her with invincible pressure to his rough, ravenous

breast, and listening in a fascination to the sad, strange U-la-lu that

now moaned forth in loud, hollow tones above him. He half closed his

eyes, and sleepily reopened and shut them again.

What rending pains were close at hand! Death! and what a death! worse

than any other that is to be named! Water, be it cold or warm, that

which buoys up blue ice-fields, or which bathes tropical coasts with

currents of balmy bliss, is yet a gentle conqueror, kisses as it kills,

and draws you down gently through darkening fathoms to its heart. Death

at the sword is the festival of trumpet and bugle and banner, with

glory ringing out around you and distant hearts thrilling through

yours. No gnawing disease can bring such hideous end as this; for that

is a fiend bred of your own flesh, and this--is it a fiend, this living

lump of appetites? What dread comes with the thought of perishing in

flames! but fire, let it leap and hiss never so hotly, is something too

remote, too alien, to inspire us with such loathly horror as a wild

beast; if it have a life, that life is too utterly beyond our

comprehension. Fire is not half ourselves; as it devours, arouses

neither hatred nor disgust; is not to be known by the strength of our

lower natures let loose; does not drip our blood into our faces from

foaming chaps, nor mouth nor snarl above us with vitality. Let us be

ended by fire, and we are ashes, for the winds to bear, the leaves to

cover; let us be ended by wild beasts, and the base, cursed thing howls

with us forever through the forest. All this she felt as she charmed

him, and what force it lent to her song God knows. If her voice should

fail! If the damp and cold should give her any fatal hoarseness! If all

the silent powers of the forest did not conspire to help her! The dark,

hollow night rose indifferently over her; the wide, cold air breathed

rudely past her, lifted her wet hair and blew it down again; the great

boughs swung with a ponderous strength, now and then clashed their iron

lengths together and shook off a sparkle of icy spears or some

long-lain weight of snow from their heavy shadows. The green depths

were utterly cold and silent and stern. These beautiful haunts that all

the summer were hers and rejoiced to share with her their bounty, these

heavens that had yielded their largess, these stems that had thrust

their blossoms into her hands, all these friends of three moons ago

forgot her now and knew her no longer.

Feeling her desolation, wild, melancholy, forsaken songs rose thereon

from that frightful aerie,--weeping, wailing tunes, that sob among the

people from age to age, and overflow with otherwise unexpressed

sadness,--all rude, mournful ballads,--old tearful strains, that

Shakspeare heard the vagrants sing, and that rise and fall like the

wind and tide,--sailor-songs, to be heard only in lone mid-watches

beneath the moon and stars,--ghastly rhyming romances, such as that

famous one of the "Lady Margaret," when

"She slipped on her gown of green

A piece below the knee,--

And 'twas all a long, cold winter's night

A dead corse followed she."

Still the beast lay with closed eyes, yet never relaxing his grasp.

Once a half-whine of enjoyment escaped him,--he fawned his fearful head

upon her; once he scored her cheek with his tongue: savage caresses

that hurt like wounds. How weary she was! and yet how terribly awake!

How fuller and fuller of dismay grew the knowledge that she was only

prolonging her anguish and playing with death! How appalling the

thought that with her voice ceased her existence! Yet she could not

sing forever; her throat was dry and hard; her very breath was a pain;

her mouth was hotter than any desert-worn pilgrim's;--if she could but

drop upon her burning tongue one atom of the ice that glittered about

her!--but both of her arms were pinioned in the giant's vice. She

remembered the winding-sheet, and for the first time in her life

shivered with spiritual fear. Was it hers? She asked herself, as she

sang, what sins she had committed, what life she had led, to find her

punishment so soon and in these pangs,--and then she sought eagerly for

some reason why her husband was not up and abroad to find her. He

failed her,--her one sole hope in life; and without being aware of it,

her voice forsook the songs of suffering and sorrow for old Covenanting

hymns,--hymns with which her mother had lulled her, which the

class-leader pitched in the chimney-corners,--grand and sweet Methodist

hymns, brimming with melody and with all fantastic involutions of tune

to suit that ecstatic worship,--hymns full of the beauty of holiness,

steadfast, relying, sanctified by the salvation they had lent to those

in worse extremity than hers,--for they had found themselves in the

grasp of hell, while she was but in the jaws of death. Out of this

strange music, peculiar to one character of faith, and than which there

is none more beautiful in its degree nor owning a more potent sway of

sound, her voice soared into the glorified chants of churches. What to

her was death by cold or famine or wild beasts? "Though He slay me, yet

will I trust in Him," she sang. High and clear through the frore fair

night, the level moonbeams splintering in the wood, the scarce glints

of stars in the shadowy roof of branches, these sacred anthems

rose,--rose as a hope from despair, as some snowy spray of flower-bells

from blackest mould. Was she not in God's hands? Did not the world

swing at His will? If this were in His great plan of providence, was it

not best, and should she not accept it?

"He is the Lord our God; His judgments are in all the earth."

Oh, sublime faith of our fathers, where utter self-sacrifice alone was

true love, the fragrance of whose unrequired subjection was pleasant as

that of golden censers swung in purple-vapored chancels!

Never ceasing in the rhythm of her thoughts, articulated in music as

they thronged, the memory of her first communion flashed over her.

Again she was in that distant place on that sweet spring morning. Again

the congregation rustled out, and the few remained, and she trembled to

find herself among them.

How well she remembered the devout, quiet faces; too accustomed to the

sacred feast to glow with their inner joy! how well the snowy linen at

the altar, the silver vessels slowly and silently shifting! and as the

cup approached and passed, how the sense of delicious perfume stole in

and heightened the transport of her prayer, and she had seemed, looking

up through the windows where the sky soared blue in constant freshness,

to feel all heaven's balms dripping from the portals, and to scent the

lilies of eternal peace! Perhaps another would not have felt so much

ecstasy as satisfaction on that occasion; but it is a true, if a later

disciple, who has said, "The Lord bestoweth his blessings there, where

he findeth the vessels empty."--"And does it need the walls of a church

to renew my communion?" she asked. "Does not every moment stand a

temple four-square to God? And in that morning, with its buoyant

sunlight, was I any dearer to the Heart of the World than now?" "My

beloved is mine, and I am his," she sang over and over again, with all

varied inflection and profuse tune. How gently all the winter-wrapt

things bent toward her then! into what relation with her had they

grown! how this common dependence was the spell of their intimacy! how

at one with Nature had she become! how all the night and the silence

and the forest seemed to hold its breath, and to send its soul up to

God in her singing! It was no longer despondency, that singing. It was

neither prayer nor petition. She had left imploring, "How long wilt

thou forget me, O Lord?" "Lighten mine eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of

death!" "For in death there is no remembrance of thee";--with countless

other such fragments of supplication. She cried rather, "Yea, though I

walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil:

for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me";--and

lingered, and repeated, and sang again, "I shall be satisfied, when I

awake, with thy likeness."

Then she thought of the Great Deliverance, when he drew her up out of

many waters, and the flashing old psalm pealed forth triumphantly:--

"The Lord descended from above,

and bow'd the heavens hie;

And underneath his feet he cast

the darknesse of the skie.

On cherubs and on cherubins

full royally he road:

And on the wings of all the winds

came flying all abroad."

She forgot how recently, and with what a strange pity for her own

shapeless form that was to be, she had quaintly sung,--

"Oh, lovely appearance of death!

What sight upon earth is so fair?

Not all the gay pageants that breathe

Can with a dead body compare!"

She remembered instead,--"In thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy

right hand there are pleasures forevermore"; and, "God will redeem my

soul from the power of the grave: for he shall receive me"; "He will

swallow up death in victory." Not once now did she say, "Lord, how long

wilt thou look on? rescue my soul from their destructions, my darling

from the lions"--for she knew that "the young lions roar after their

prey and seek their meat from God." "O Lord, thou preservest man and

beast!" she said.

She had no comfort or consolation in this season, such as sustained the

Christian martyrs in the amphitheatre. She was not dying for her faith;

there were no palms in heaven for her to wave; but how many a time had

she declared,--"I had rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God,

than to dwell in the tents of wickedness!" And as the broad rays here

and there broke through the dense covert of shade and lay in rivers of

lustre on crystal sheathing and frozen fretting of trunk and limb and

on the great spaces of refraction, they builded up visibly that house,

the shining city on the hill, and singing, "Beautiful for situation,

the joy of the whole earth, is Mount Zion, on the sides of the North,

the city of the Great King," her vision climbed to that higher picture

where the angel shows the dazzling thing, the holy Jerusalem descending

out of heaven from God, with its splendid battlements and gates of

pearls, and its foundations, the eleventh a jacinth, the twelfth an

amethyst,--with its great white throne, and the rainbow round about it,

in sight like unto an emerald:--"And there shall be no night

there,--for the Lord God giveth them light," she sang.

What whisper of dawn now rustled through the wilderness? How the night

was passing! And still the beast crouched upon the bough, changing only

the posture of his head, that again he might command her with those

charmed eyes;--half their fire was gone; she could almost have released

herself from his custody; yet, had she stirred, no one knows what

malevolent instinct might have dominated anew. But of that she did not

dream; long ago stripped of any expectation, she was experiencing in

her divine rapture how mystically true it is that "he that dwelleth in

the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the

Almighty."

Slow clarion cries now wound from the distance as the cocks caught the

intelligence of day and reechoed it faintly from farm to farm,--sleepy

sentinels of night, sounding the foe's invasion, and translating that

dim intuition to ringing notes of warning. Still she chanted on. A

remote crash of brushwood told of some other beast on his depredations,

or some night-belated traveller groping his way through the narrow

path. Still she chanted on. The far, faint echoes of the chanticleers

died into distance,--the crashing of the branches grew nearer. No wild

beast that, but a man's step,--a man's form in the moonlight, stalwart

and strong,--on one arm slept a little child, in the other hand he held

his gun. Still she chanted on.

Perhaps, when her husband last looked forth, he was half ashamed to

find what a fear he felt for her. He knew she would never leave the

child so long but for some direst need,--and yet he may have laughed at

himself, as he lifted and wrapped it with awkward care, and, loading

his gun and strapping on his horn, opened the door again and closed it

behind him, going out and plunging into the darkness and dangers of the

forest. He was more singularly alarmed than he would have been willing

to acknowledge; as he had sat with his bow hovering over the strings,

he had half believed to hear her voice mingling gayly with the

instrument, till he paused and listened if she were not about to lift

the latch and enter. As he drew nearer the heart of the forest, that

intimation of melody seemed to grow more actual, to take body and

breath, to come and go on long swells and ebbs of the night-breeze, to

increase with tune and words, till a strange, shrill singing grew ever

clearer, and, as he stepped into an open space of moonbeams, far up in

the branches, rocked by the wind, and singing, "How beautiful upon the

mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that

publisheth peace," he saw his wife,--his wife,--but, great God in

heaven! how? Some mad exclamation escaped him, but without diverting

her. The child knew the singing voice, though never heard before in

that unearthly key, and turned toward it through the veiling dreams.

With a celerity almost instantaneous, it lay, in the twinkling of an

eye, on the ground at the father's feet, while his gun was raised to

his shoulder and levelled at the monster covering his wife with shaggy

form and flaming gaze,--his wife so ghastly white, so rigid, so stained

with blood, her eyes so fixedly bent above, and her lips, that had

indurated into the chiselled pallor of marble, parted only with that

flood of solemn song.

I do not know if it were the mother-instinct that for a moment lowered

her eyes,--those eyes, so lately riveted on heaven, now suddenly seeing

all life-long bliss possible. A thrill of joy pierced and shivered

through her like a weapon, her voice trembled in its course, her glance

lost its steady strength, fever-flushes chased each other over her

face, yet she never once ceased chanting. She was quite aware, that, if

her husband shot now, the ball must pierce her body before reaching any

vital part of the beast,--and yet better that death, by his hand, than

the other. But this her husband also knew, and he remained motionless,

just covering the creature with the sight. He dared not fire, lest some

wound not mortal should break the spell exercised by her voice, and the

beast, enraged with pain, should rend her in atoms; moreover, the light

was too uncertain for his aim. So he waited. Now and then he examined

his gun to see if the damp were injuring its charge, now and then he

wiped the great drops from his forehead. Again the cocks crowed with

the passing hour,--the last time they were heard on that night.

Cheerful home sound then, how full of safety and all comfort and rest

it seemed! what sweet morning incidents of sparkling fire and sunshine,

of gay household bustle, shining dresser, and cooing baby, of steaming

cattle in the yard, and brimming milk-pails at the door! what pleasant

voices! what laughter! what security! and here----

Now, as she sang on in the slow, endless, infinite moments, the fervent

vision of God's peace was gone. Just as the grave had lost its sting,

she was snatched back again into the arms of earthly hope. In vain she

tried to sing, "There remaineth a rest for the people of God,"--her

eyes trembled on her husband's, and she could think only of him, and of

the child, and of happiness that yet might be, but with what a dreadful

gulf of doubt between! She shuddered now in the suspense; all calm

forsook her; she was tortured with dissolving heats or frozen with icy

blasts; her face contracted, growing small and pinched; her voice was

hoarse and sharp,--every tone cut like a knife,--the notes became heavy

to lift,--withheld by some hostile pressure,--impossible. One gasp, a

convulsive effort, and there was silence,--she had lost her voice.

The beast made a sluggish movement,--stretched and fawned like one

awaking,--then, as if he would have yet more of the enchantment,

stirred her slightly with his muzzle. As he did so, a sidelong hint of

the man standing below with the raised gun smote him; he sprung round

furiously, and, seizing his prey, was about to leap into some unknown

airy den of the topmost branches now waving to the slow dawn. The late

moon had rounded through the sky so that her gleam at last fell full

upon the bough with fairy frosting; the wintry morning light did not

yet penetrate the gloom. The woman, suspended in mid-air an instant,

cast only one agonized glance beneath,--but across and through it, ere

the lids could fall, shot a withering sheet of flame,--a rifle-crack,

half heard, was lost in the terrible yell of desperation that bounded

after it and filled her ears with savage echoes, and in the wide arc of

some eternal descent she was falling;--but the beast fell under her. I

think that the moment following must have been too sacred for us, and

perhaps the three have no special interest again till they issue from

the shadows of the wilderness upon the white hills that skirt their

home. The father carries the child hushed again into slumber; the

mother follows with no such feeble step as might be anticipated,--and

as they slowly climb the steep under the clear gray sky and the paling

morning star, she stops to gather a spray of the red-rose berries or a

feathery tuft of dead grasses for the chimney-piece of the log-house,

or a handful of brown ones for the child's play,--and of these quiet,

happy folk you would scarcely dream how lately they had stolen from

under the banner and encampment of the great King Death. The husband

proceeds a step or two in advance; the wife lingers over a singular

foot-print in the snow, stoops and examines it, then looks up with a

hurried word. Her husband stands alone on the hill, his arms folded

across the babe, his gun fallen,--stands defined against the pallid sky

like a bronze. What is there in their home, lying below and yellowing

in the light, to fix him with such a stare? She springs to his side.

There is no home there. The log-house, the barns, the neighboring

farms, the fences, are all blotted out and mingled in one smoking ruin.

Desolation and death were indeed there, and beneficence and life in the

forest. Tomahawk and scalping-knife, descending during that night, had

left behind them only this work of their accomplished hatred and one

subtle foot-print in the snow.

For the rest,--the world was all before them, where to choose.

* * * * *

URANIA.

Hast thou forgotten whose thou art?

To what high service consecrate?

I gave thee not a noble heart

To wed with such ignoble fate.

I found thee where the laurels grow

Around the lonely Delphian shrine;

There, where the sacred fountains flow,

I found thee, and I made thee mine.

I gave thy soul to agony,

And strange unsatisfied desire,

That thou mightst dearer be to me,

And worthier of thy burning lyre.

O child, thy fate had made thee God,

To thee such powers divine were given;

The paths of fire thou mightst have trod

Had led thee to the stars of heaven.

And those who in the early dawn

Of beauty sat and sang of day,

Deep in their twilight shades withdrawn,

Had heard thy coming far away,--

With haunting music sweet and strange,

And airs ambrosial blown before,

Vague breathings of the floral change

That glorifies the hills of yore:

Had felt the joy those only find

Who in their secret souls have known

The mystery of the poet mind

That through all beauty feels its own:

Had felt the God within them rise

To meet thy radiant soul divine;

Had searched with their prophetic eyes

The midnight luminous of thine.

So fondly did Urania deem!

So proudly did she prophesy!

Oh, ruin of a noble dream

She thought too glorious to die!

Nor knew thy passionate songs of yore

Were as a promise unfulfilled,--

A stately portal set before

The palace thou shall never build!

For is it come to this, at last?

And thou forever must remain

A godlike statue, formed and cast

In marble attitude of pain,--

Proud lips that in their scorn are mute,

And haunting eyes of anguished love,

One hand that grasps a silent lute,

And one convulsèd hand above

That will not strike? Ah, scorn and shame!

Shame for the apostate unforgiven,

Beholding an unconquered fame

In undiscovered fields of heaven!

For Beauty not by one alone

In her completeness is revealed:

The smiles and tears her face hath shown

To thee from others are concealed.

Men see not in the midnight sky

All miracles she worketh there:

It is the blindness of the eye

That paints its darkness on the air.

Two friends who wander by the shore

Look not upon the selfsame seas,

Hearing two voices in the roar,

Because of different memories.

For him whose love the sea hath drowned,

It moans the music of his wrong;

For him whose life with love is crowned,

It breaks upon the beach in song.

So dreaming not another's dream,

But still interpreting thine own,

By woodland wild and quiet stream

Thou wanderest in the world alone.

Then what thou slayest none can save:

Silent and dark oblivion rolls

Over the glory in the grave

Of fierce and suicidal souls.

From that dark wave no pleading ghost

With pointing hand shall ever rise,

To say,--The world hath treasure lost,

And here the buried treasure lies!

Beware, and yet beware! my fear

Unfolds a vision in the gloom

Of Beauty borne upon her bier,

And Darkness crouching in the tomb.

Beware, and yet beware! her end

Is thine; or else, her shadowy hearse

Beside, thy spirit shall descend

The vast sepulchral universe,

And, with the passion that remains

In desolated hearts, implore

The spectre sitting bound in chains

To yield what he shall not restore:--

The mystery whose soul divine

Breathed love, and only love, on thee;

Which better far had not been thine,

Than, having been, to cease to be.

MARY SOMERVILLE.

There have been in every age a few women of genius who have become the

successful rivals of man in the paths which they have severally chosen.

Three instances are of our time. Mrs. Browning is called a poet even by

poets; the artists admit that Rosa Bonheur is a painter; and the

mathematicians accord to Mary Somerville a high rank among themselves.

"In pure mathematics," said Humboldt, "Mrs. Somerville is strong." Of

no other woman of the age could the remark have been made; and this

would probably be true, were the walks of science as marked by the

feminine footprint as are those of literature. To read mathematical

works is an easy task; the formula can be learned and their meaning

apprehended: to read the most profound of them, with such appreciation

that one stands side by side with the great minds who originated them,

requires a higher order of intellect; and far-reaching indeed is that

which, pondering in the study on a few phenomena known by observation,

develops the theory of worlds, traces back for ages their history, and

sketches the outline of their future destiny.

Caroline Herschel, the sister of Sir William, was doubtless gifted with

much of the Herschel talent, and, under other circumstances, her mind

might have turned to original research; but she belonged rather to the

last century, and Hanover was not a region favorable to intellectual

efforts in her sex. She lived the life of a simple-hearted,

truth-loving woman; most worthy of the name she bore, she made notes

for her brother, she swept the heavens and found comets for him, she

computed and tabulated his observations; it seems never to have

occurred to her to be other than the patient, helping sister of a truly

great man.

Mrs. Somerville's life has been more individual. She is the daughter of

Admiral Fairfax, and was born in Fifeshire, Scotland, December 26,

1780, in the house of her uncle, the father of her present husband.

The home training and the school education of the daughters of Great

Britain are very unlike those of their American sisters. The manners

and customs of the Old World change so slowly, that one can scarcely

assent to a remark made by Sir John Herschel:--"The Englishman sticks

to his old ways, but is not cemented to them." The Englishwoman submits

to authority from her infancy; belonging to the middle class, she does

not expect the higher education of the nobility; a woman, she is not

supposed to desire to enter into the studies of her brothers. A

governess, generally the daughter of a curate, who prefers this

position to that of "companion" to a fine lady, is provided for her in

her early years. If the choice be fortunate and the parents watchful,

the young girl is thoroughly taught in a few branches of what are

commonly considered feminine studies. She learns to read and to speak

French; tutors are employed for music and drawing: every young lady

above the rank of the tradesman's daughter plays well upon the piano;

every one has her portfolio of drawings, in which sketches from Nature

can always be found, and frequently the family portraits. The history

of the country is considered a study suitable for girls; the Englishman

expects that his daughter shall know something of the past, of which he

is so justly proud.

But the more solid book-learning given to the girls of New England,

even in the public schools, is known only to the daughters of the

higher classes, and among them an instance like that of Lady Jane Grey

could scarcely now be found. As the girls and boys are never taught in

the same schools, no taste is aroused by the example of manly studies.

An English girl is astonished to hear that an American girl passes a

public examination, like her brothers, and with them competes for

prizes; she doubts the truthfulness of some of the representations of

life found in American novels; and so little is the freedom of manners

understood, that the American traveller is frequently asked,--"Can it

really be as Mrs. Stowe represents in America? Does a young lady really

give a party herself?"

The difference that one would expect is found between the women of

England or Scotland and the women of New England. The young

Englishwoman is tasteful and elegant, mindful of all the proprieties

and graces of social life; she speaks slowly and cautiously, and gives

her opinions with great modesty. These are not at present the

characteristics of the American girl.

Mary Fairfax passed through the usual routine. At fourteen she had read

the books to be found in her father's house, including the few works

on Navigation which were necessary to him in his profession. She had

thus obtained an idea of the world of science, and it was dull to

return to worsted-work for amusement. The needle, which has been the

fetter of so many women, became, however, in her hand, magnetic, and

pointed her to her destiny. She was in the habit of taking her work

into her brother's study, and listening to his recitations; the

revelations of Geometry were thus opened to her; she listened and

worked for a time, until the desire to know more of this region of form

and law, of harmony and of relations, became too strong to be resisted;

the worsted was thrown aside, and she ventured to ask the tutor to

instruct her. The honest man told her that he was no mathematician: he

could lend her Euclid, but he could do no more.

The first great step was now taken; Euclid was quickly read; other

books were borrowed from other friends; Bonnycastle's and Euler's

Algebra were obtained, and she exulted in the use of those mystic

symbols, _x, y_, and _z_. Her parents looked on with indifference; so

that the music were not neglected and the governess reported well of

her studies, they felt there was no harm in her amusing herself as she

chose. When the days of the governess were over, the young lady "came

out" in Edinburgh, and mingled much with the best society. This most

picturesque city had long been the resort of the most gifted minds; men

of literature and men of science made the charm of its winter life.

Never was it more the gathering-place of intellect than in the early

part of this century; but there was no room for a woman of genius, and

the young girl's friends advised her to conceal her pursuits. Move as

quietly, however, and as unobtrusively as she might in the brilliant

circle, her genius was not without recognition. There was a word of

encouragement from Professor Playfair. "Persevere in your study," said

he; "it will be a source of happiness to you when all else fails; for

it is the study of truth." She had a champion, too, in the dreaded

critic, Jeffrey. "I am told," said a friend, writing to him, "that the

ladies of Edinburgh are literary, and that one of them sets up as a

blue-stocking and an astronomer." "The lady of whom you speak," replied

Jeffrey, "may wear blue stockings, but her petticoats are so long that

I have never seen them."

Mrs. Somerville has been twice married. Her first husband, a gentleman

of the name of Greig, regarded her pursuits as her parents had, simply

with indifference. Dr. Somerville, her present husband, has taken the

utmost pains to secure her time for her studies, and has himself

relieved her from many household cares.

The simplicity of character which belonged to her in early life was not

lost when her reputation became established. The Royal Society, whose

doors do not open at every knock, admitted her to membership, and, by

their order, her bust was sculptured by Chantrey, and now adorns the

hall of the Society in Somerset House. During the sittings for this

purpose, a lady, a friend of the sculptor, him to introduce her to Mrs.

Somerville. Chantrey consented, and made a dinner-party for the

purpose. The two ladies were placed side by side at table, and the

benevolent artist rejoiced to perceive, from the flow of talk, that

they were mutually pleased. The next day, to his astonishment, his

friend called on him in a state of great indignation, believing herself

the victim of a practical joke. "How could you do so?" said she. "You

knew that I did not want to know _that_ Mrs. Somerville; I wanted to

know the astronomer: that lady talked of the theatre, the opera, and

common things."

The anecdote so often told of Laplace's compliment is literally true.

Mrs. Somerville dined with this great geometer in Paris. "I write

books," said Laplace, "that no one can read. Only two women have ever

read the 'Mécanique Céleste'; both are Scotch women: Mrs. Greig and

yourself."

Upon the "Mécanique Céleste" Mrs. Somerville's greatest work is

founded. "I simply translated Laplace's work," said she, "from algebra

into common language." That is, she did what very few men and no other

woman could do. It is of this work of Laplace that Bonaparte said, "I

will give to it my first _six months_ of leisure." The student who

reads it by the aid of Dr. Bowditch's notes has little idea of the

difficulties to be met in the original work. Even Dr. Bowditch himself

said, "I never come across one of Laplace's 'Thus it plainly appears,'

without feeling sure that I have got hours of hard study before me, to

fill up the chasm and show _how_ it plainly appears."

This "translation into common language" was undertaken at the request

of Lord Brougham, who desired a mathematical work suited to the

"Library of Useful Knowledge." The manuscript was submitted to Sir John

Herschel, who expressed himself "delighted with it,--that it was a book

for posterity, but quite above the class for which Lord Brougham's

course was intended." It was published at once, and became the

text-book for the students of Cambridge.

"The Connection of the Physical Sciences" and the "Physical Geography"

are the later works of Mrs. Somerville. These volumes have probably

been more read in our country than in Europe; for it is a common remark

of the scientific writers of Great Britain, that their "readers are

found in the United States." They contain vast collections of facts in

all branches of Physical Science, connected together by the delicate

web of Mrs. Somerville's own thought, showing an amount and variety of

learning to be compared only to that of Humboldt.

Provided with an "open sesame" to her heart, in the shape of a letter

from her old friend, Lady Herschel, we sought the acquaintance of Mrs.

Somerville in the spring of 1858. She was at that time residing in

Florence, and, sending the letter and a card to her by the servant, we

awaited the reply in the large Florentine parlor, in the fireplace of

which a wood-fire blazed, suggestive of English comfort,--a suggestion

which in Italy rarely becomes a reality.

There was the usual delay; then a footstep came slowly through the

outer room, and a very old man, exceedingly tall, with a red silk

handkerchief around his head, entered, and introduced himself as Doctor

Somerville. He is proud of his wife; a pardonable weakness in any man,

especially so in the husband of Mary Somerville. He began at once to

talk of her. "Mrs. Somerville," he said, "was much interested in the

Americans, for she claimed a connection with the family of Washington.

Washington's half-brother, Lawrence, married Anne Fairfax, who was of

the Scotch family of that name. When Mrs. Somerville's father, as

Lieutenant Fairfax, was ordered to America, General Washington wrote to

him as a family relative, and invited him to his house. Lieutenant

Fairfax applied to his commanding officer for leave to accept the

invitation, and it was refused; they never met. Much to the regret of

the Somervilles, the letter of Washington has been lost. The Fairfaxes

of Virginia are of the same family, and occasionally some member of the

American branch visits his Scotch cousins."

While Doctor Somerville was talking of these things, Mrs. Somerville

came tripping into the room, speaking with the vivacity of a young

person. She was seventy-seven years old, but appeared twenty years

younger. Her face is pleasing, the forehead low and broad, the eyes

blue,--the features so regular, that, as sculptured by Chantrey, in the

bust at Somerset House, they convey the idea of a very handsome woman.

Neither this bust nor the picture of her, however, gives a correct

impression, except in the outline of the head and shoulders. She spoke

with a strong Scotch accent, and was slightly affected by deafness.

At this time, Mrs. Somerville was re-writing her "Physical Geography."

She said that she worked as well as when she was younger, but was more

quickly fatigued; yet, in order to gain time, she had given up her

afternoon nap, without apparent injury to her health. Her working hours

were in the morning, and she never refused a visitor after noon. For

her first work she said she computed a good deal; and here she stepped

quickly into an adjoining room, and brought out a mass of manuscript

computations made for that work, the mere sight of which would give a

headache to most women. The conversation was rather of the familiar and

chatty order, and marked by great simplicity. She touched upon the

recent discoveries in chemical science,--upon California, its gold and

its consequences, some good from which she thought would be found in

the improvement of seamanship,--on the nebulae, more and more of which

she thought would be resolved, while yet there might exist irresolvable

nebulous matter, such as composed the tails of comets, or the

satellites of the planets, which she thought had other uses than as

their subordinates. Of Doctor Whewell's attempt to prove that our

planet is the only one inhabited she spoke with disapprobation; she

said she believed that the other planets might be inhabited by beings

of a higher order than ourselves.

On subsequent visits, Mrs. Somerville had much to say of the Americans.

She regretted that she so rarely received scientific articles from

America; the papers of Lieutenant Maury alone reached her. She spoke of

the late Doctor Bowditch with great interest, and said she had had some

correspondence with one of his sons; of Professor Peirce as a great

mathematician; and she was much interested in the successful

photography of the stars by Mr. Whipple. To a traveller, thousands of

miles from home, the mere mention of familiar names is cheering.

Mrs. Somerville resides in Florence on account of the health of her

husband. A little garden, well-stocked with rose-bushes, which she

shows with great pride to her visitors, furnishes her with a means of

healthy recreation after her severe studies. Her children are a son by

Mr. Greig and two daughters by Doctor Somerville. In early life, Mrs.

Somerville was a fine musician: the daughters have inherited this

talent; and having lived long in Florence, they speak Italian with a

perfect accent. "I speak Italian," said Mrs. Somerville; "but no one

could ever take me for other than a Scotchwoman."

No one can make the acquaintance of this remarkable woman without

increased admiration for her. The ascent of the steep and rugged path

of science has not unfitted her for the drawing-room circle; the hours

of devotion to close study have not been incompatible with the duties

of the wife and the mother; the mind that has turned to rigid

demonstration has not thereby lost its faith in the truths which

figures will not prove. "I have no doubt," said she, in speaking of the

heavenly bodies, "that in another state of existence we shall know more

about these things."

ROBA DI ROMA.

MAY IN ROME.

May has come again,--"the delicate-footed May," her feet hidden in

flowers as she wanders over the Campagna, and the cool breeze of the

Campagna blowing back her loosened hair. She calls to us from the open

fields to leave the wells of damp churches and shadowy streets, and to

come abroad and meet her where the mountains look down from roseate

heights of vanishing snow upon plains of waving grain. The hedges have

put on their best draperies of leaves and flowers, and, girdled in at

their waist by double osier bands, stagger luxuriantly along the road

like a drunken Bacchanal procession, crowned with festive ivy, and

holding aloft their snowy clusters of elder-blossoms like _thyrsi_.

Among their green robes may be seen thousands of beautiful

wild-flowers,--the sweet-scented laurustinus, all sorts of running

vetches and wild sweet-pea, the delicate vases of dewy morning-glories,

clusters of eglantine or sweetbrier roses, fragrant acacia-blossoms

covered with bees and buzzing flies, the gold of glowing gorses, and

scores of purple and yellow flowers, of which I know not the names. On

the gray walls, vines, grass, and the humble class of flowers which go

by the ignoble name of weeds straggle and cluster; and over them, held

down by the green cord of the stalk, balance the bursted balloons of

hundreds of flaming scarlet poppies that seem to have fed on fire. The

undulating swell of the Campagna is here ablaze with them for acres,

and there deepening with growing grain, or snowed over with myriads of

daisies. Music and song, too, are not wanting; hundreds of birds are in

the hedges. The lark, "from his moist cabinet rising," rains down his

trills of incessant song from invisible heights of blue sky; and

whenever one passes the wayside groves, a nightingale is sure to bubble

into song. The oranges, too, are in blossom, perfuming the air;

locust-trees are tasselled with odorous flowers; and over the walls of

the Campagna villa bursts a cascade of vines covered with foamy Banksia

roses.

The Carnival of the kitchen-gardens is now commencing. Peas are already

an old story, strawberries are abundant, and cherries are beginning to

make their appearance, in these first days of May; old women sell them

at every corner, tied together in tempting bunches, as in "the

cherry-orchard" which Miss Edgeworth has made fairy-land in our

childish memories. Asparagus also has long since come; and artichokes

make their daily appearance on the table, sliced up and fried, or

boiled whole, or coming up roasted and gleaming with butter, with more

outside capes and coats than an ideal English coachman of the olden

times. _Finocchi_, too, are here, tasting like anisette, and good to

mix in the salads. And great beans lie about in piles, the _contadini_

twisting them out of their thick pods with their thumbs, to eat them

raw. Nay, even the _signoria_ of the noble families do the same, as

they walk through the gardens, and think them such a luxury that they

eat them raw for breakfast. But over and above all other vegetables are

the lettuces, which are one of the great staples of food for the Roman

people, and so crisp, fresh, delicate, and high-flavored, that be who

eats them once will hold Nebuchadnezzar no longer a subject for

compassion, but rather of envy. Drowned in fresh olive-oil and strong

with vinegar, they are a feast for the gods; and even in their natural

state, without condiments, they are by no means to be despised. At the

corners of the streets they lie piled in green heaps, and are sold at a

_baiocco_ for five heads. At noontide, the _contadini_ and laborers

feed upon them without even the condiment of salt, crunching their

white teeth through the crisp, wet leaves, and alternating a bite at a

great wedge of bread; and toward nightfall, one may see carts laden

high up with closely packed masses of them, coming in from the Campagna

for the market. In a word, the _festa_ of the vegetables, at which they

do not eat, but are eaten, and the Carnival of the kitchen-garden have

come.

But--a thousand, thousand pardons, O mighty Cavolo!--how have I dared

omit thy august name? On my knees, O potentest of vegetables, I crave

forgiveness! I will burn at thy shrine ten waxen candles, in penance,

if thou wilt pardon the sin and shame of my forgetfulness! The smoke of

thy altar-fires, the steam of thy incense, and the odors of thy

sanctity rise from every hypaethral shrine in Rome. Out-doors and

in-doors, wherever the foot wanders, on palatial stairs or in the hut

of poverty, in the convent pottage and the _Lepre_ soup, in the wooden

platter of the beggar and the silver tureen of the prince, thou fillest

our nostrils, thou satisfiest our stomach. Thou hast no false pride;

great as thou art, thou condescendest to be exchanged for a _baiocco_.

Dear enchantress! to thee, and to thy glorious cousin Broccoli, that

tender-hearted, efflorescent nymph, the Egeria of the _osteria con

cucina_, the peerless maid that goes with the steak and accepts

martyrdom without moan, to drive away the demon of Hunger from her

devoted followers,--all honor! Far away, whenever I inhale thy odor, I

shall think of "Roman Joys"; a whiff from thine altar in a foreign land

will bear me back to the Eternal City, "the City of the Soul," the City

of the Cabbage, the home of the Dioscuri, _Cavolo_ and _Broccoli!_ Yes,

as Paris is recalled by the odor of chocolate, and London by the damp

steam of malt, so shall Rome come back when my nostrils are filled with

thy penetrative fragrance!

Saunter out at any of the city-gates, or lean over the wall at San

Giovanni, (and where will you find a more charming spot?) or look down

from the windows of the Villa Negroni, and your eye will surely fall on

one of the Roman kitchen-gardens, patterned out in even rows and

squares of green. Nothing can be prettier or more tasteful in their

arrangement than these variegated carpets of vegetables. A great

cistern of running water crowns the height of the ground, which is used

for the purposes of irrigation, and towards nightfall the vent is

opened, and you may see the gardeners imbanking the channelled rows to

let the inundation flow through hundreds of little lanes of

intersection and canals between the beds, and then banking them up at

the entrance when a sufficient quantity of water has entered. In this

way they fertilize and refresh the soil, which else would parch under

the continuous sun. And this, indeed, is all the fertilization they

need,--so strong is the soil all over the Campagna. The accretions and

decay of thousands of years have covered it with a loam whose richness

and depth are astonishing. Dig where you will, for ten feet down, and

you do not pass through its wonderfully fertile loam into gravel, and

the slightest labor is repaid a hundred-fold.

As one looks from the Villa Negroni windows, he cannot fail to be

impressed by the strange changes through which this wonderful city has

passed. The very spot on which Nero, the insane emperor-artist, fiddled

while Rome was burning has now become a vast kitchen-garden, belonging

to Prince Massimo, (himself a descendant, as he claims, of Fabius

Cunctator,) where men no longer, but only lettuces, asparagus, and

artichokes, are ruthlessly cut down. The inundations are not for mock

sea-fights among slaves, but for the peaceful purposes of irrigation.

And though the fiddle of Nero is only traditional, the trumpets of the

French, murdering many an unhappy strain near by, are a most melancholy

fact. In the bottom of the valley, a noble old villa, covered with

frescoes, has been turned into a manufactory of bricks, and the very

Villa Negroni itself is now doomed to be the site of a railway station.

Yet here the princely family of Negroni lived, and the very lady at

whose house Lucrezia Borgia took her famous revenge may once have

sauntered under the walls, which still glow with ripening oranges, to

feed the gold-fish in the fountain, or walked with stately friends

through the long alleys of clipped cypresses, and pic-nicked _alia

Giorgione_ on lawns which are now but kitchen-gardens, dedicated to San

Cavolo. It pleases me, also, descending in memories to a later time, to

look up at the summer-house built above the gateway, and recall the

days when Shelley and Keats came there to visit their friend Severn,

the artist, (for that was his studio,) and look over the same alleys

and gardens, and speak words one would have been so glad to hear,--and,

coming still later down, to recall the hearty words and brave heart of

America's best sculptor and my dear friend, Crawford.

But to return to the kitchen-gardens. Pretty as they are to the eye,

they are not considered to be wholesome; and no Roman will live in a

house near one of them, especially if it lie on the southern and

western side, so that the Sirocco and the prevalent summer winds blow

over it. The daily irrigation, in itself, would be sufficient to

frighten all Italians away; for they have a deadly fear of all effluvia

arising from decomposing vegetable substances, and suppose, with a good

deal of truth, that, wherever there is water on the earth, there is

decomposition. But this is not the only reason; for the same prejudice

exists in regard to all kinds of gardens, whether irrigated or

not,--and even to groves of trees and clusters of bushes, or vegetation

of any kind, around a house. This is the real reason why, even in their

country villas, their trees are almost always planted at a distance

from the house, so as to expose it to the sun and to give it a free

ventilation; these they do not care for; damp is their determined foe,

and therefore they will not purchase the luxury of shade from trees at

the risk of the damp it is supposed to engender. On the north, however,

gardens are not thought to be so prejudicial as on the south and

west,--as the cold, dry winds come from the former direction. The

malaria, as we call it, though the term is unknown to Romans, is never

so dangerous as after a slight rain, just sufficient to wet the surface

of the earth without deeply penetrating it; for decomposition is then

stimulated, and the miasma arising from the Campagna is blown abroad.

So long as the earth is dry, there is no danger of fever, except at

morning and nightfall, and then simply because of the heavy dews which

the porous and baked earth then inhales and expires. After the autumn

has given a thorough, drenching rain, Rome is healthy and free from

fever.

Rome has with strangers the reputation of being unhealthy; but this

opinion I cannot think well founded,--to the extent, at least, of the

common belief. The diseases of children there are ordinarily very

light, while in America and England they are terrible. Scarlet and

typhus fevers, those fearful scourges in the North, are known at Rome

only under most mitigated forms. Cholera has shown no virulence there;

and for diseases of the throat and lungs the air alone is almost

curative. The great curse of the place is the intermittent fever, in

which any other illness is apt to end. But this, except in its peculiar

phase of _Perniciosa_, though a very annoying, is by no means a

dangerous disease, and has the additional advantage of a specific

remedy. The Romans themselves of the better class seldom suffer from

it, and I cannot but think that with a little prudence it may be easily

avoided. Those who are most attacked by it are the laborers and

_contadini_ on the Campagna; and how can it be otherwise with them?

They sleep often on the bare ground, or on a little straw under a

_capanna_ just large enough to admit them on all-fours. Their labor is

exhausting, and performed in the sun, and while in a violent

perspiration they are often exposed to sudden draughts and checks.

Their food is poor, their habits careless, and it would require an iron

constitution to resist what they endure. But, despite the life they

lead and their various exposures, they are for the most part a very

strong and sturdy class. This intermittent fever is undoubtedly a far

from pleasant thing; but Americans who are terrified at it in Rome give

it no thought in Philadelphia, where it is more prevalent,--and while

they call Rome unhealthy, live with undisturbed confidence in cities

where scarlet and typhus fevers annually rage.

It is a curious fact, that the French soldiers, who in 1848 made the

siege of Rome, suffered no inconvenience or injury to their health from

sleeping on the Campagna, and that, despite the prophecies to the

contrary, very few cases of fever appeared, though the siege lasted

during all the summer months. The reason of this is doubtless to be

found in the fact that they were better clothed, better fed, and in

every way more careful of themselves, than the _contadini_. Foreigners,

too, who visit Rome, are very seldom attacked by intermittent fever;

and it may truly be said, that, when they are, it is, for the most

part, their own fault. There is generally the grossest inconsistency

between their theories and their practice. Believing as they do that

the least exposure will induce fever, they expose themselves with

singular recklessness to the very causes of fever. After hurrying

through the streets and getting into a violent perspiration, they

plunge at once into some damp pit-like church or chill gallery, where

the temperature is at least ten degrees lower than the outer air. The

bald-headed, rosy John Bull, steaming with heat, doffs at once the hat

which he wore in the street, and, of course, is astounded, if the

result prove just what it would be anywhere else,--and if he take cold

and get a fever, charges it to the climate, and not to his own

stupidity and recklessness. Beside this, foreigners will always insist

on carrying their home-habits with them wherever they go, and it is

exceedingly difficult to persuade any one that he does not understand

the climate better than the Italians themselves, whom he puts down as a

poor set of timid ignoramuses. However, the longer one lives in Rome,

the more he learns to value the Italian rules of health. There is

probably no people so careful in these matters as the Italians, and

especially the Romans. They understand their own climate, and they have

a special dislike of death. In France and England suicides are very

common; in Italy they are almost unknown. The American recklessness of

life completely astounds the Italian. He enjoys life, studies every

method to preserve it, and considers any one who risks it unnecessarily

as simply a fool.

What, then, are their rules of life? In the first place, in all their

habits they are very regular. They eat at stated times, and cannot be

persuaded to partake of anything in the intervals. If it be not their

hour for eating, they will refuse the choicest viands, and will sit at

your table fasting, despite every temptation you can offer them. They

are also very abstemious in their diet, and gluttony is the very rarest

of vices. I do not believe there is another nation in Europe that eats

so sparingly. In the morning they take a cup of coffee, generally

without milk, sopping in it some light _brioche_. Later in the day they

take a slight lunch of soup and macaroni, with a glass of wine. This

lasts them until dinner, which begins with a watery soup; after which

the _lesso_ or boiled meat comes on and is eaten with one vegetable,

which is less a dish than a garnish to the meat; then comes a dish of

some vegetable eaten with bread; then, perhaps, a chop, or another dish

of meat, garnished with a vegetable; some light _dolce_ or fruit, and a

cup of black coffee,--the latter for digestion's sake,--finish the

repast. The quantity is very small, however, compared to what is eaten

in England, France, America, or, though last, not least, Germany. Late

in the evening they have a supper. When dinner is taken in the middle

of the day, lunch is omitted. This is the rule of the better classes.

The workmen and middle classes, after their cup of coffee and bit of

bread or _brioche_ in the morning, take nothing until night, except

another cup of coffee and bread,--and their dinner finishes their meals

after their work is done. From my own observation, I should say that an

Italian does not certainly eat more than half as much as a German, or

two-thirds as much as an American. The climate will not allow of

gormandizing, and much less food is required to sustain the vital

powers than in America, where the atmosphere is so stimulating to the

brain and the digestion, or in England, where the depressing effects of

the climate must be counteracted by stimulants. Go to any _table

d'hôte_ in the season, and you will at once know all the English who

are new comers by their bottle of ale or claret or sherry or brandy;

for the Englishman assimilates with difficulty, and unwillingly puts

off his home-habits. The fresh American will always be recognized by

the morning-dinner, which he calls a breakfast.

If you wish to keep your health in Italy, follow the example of the

Italians. Eat a third less than you are accustomed to at home. Do not

drink habitually of brandy, porter, ale, or even Marsala, but confine

yourselves to the lighter wines of the country or of France. Do not

walk much in the sun; "only Englishmen and dogs" do that, as the

proverb goes; and especially take heed not to expose yourself, when

warm, to any sudden changes of temperature. If you have heated yourself

with walking in the sun, be careful not to go at once, and especially

towards nightfall, into the lower and shaded streets, which have begun

to gather the damps, and which are kept cool by the high, thick walls

of the houses. Remember that the difference of temperature is very

great between the narrow, shaded streets and the high, sunny Pincio. If

you have the misfortune to be of the male sex, and especially if you

suffer under the sorrow of the first great Caesar in being bald, buy

yourself a little skullcap, (it is as good as his laurels for the

purpose,) and put it on your head whenever you enter the churches and

cold galleries. Almost every fever here is the result of suddenly

checked transpiration of the skin; and if you will take the precaution

to cool yourself before entering churches and galleries, and not to

expose yourself while warm to sudden changes of temperature, you may

live twenty years in Rome without a fever. Do not stand in draughts of

cold air, and shut your windows when you go to bed. There is nothing an

Italian fears like a current of air, and with reason. He will never sit

between two doors or two windows. If he has walked to see you and is in

the least warm, pray him to keep his hat on until he is cool, if you

would be courteous to him. You will find that he will always use the

same _gentilezza_ to you. The reason why you should shut your windows

at night is very simple. The night-air is invariably damp and cold,

contrasting greatly with the warmth of the day, and it is then that the

miasma from the Campagna drifts into the city. And oh, my American

friends! repress your national love for hot rooms and great fires, and

do not make an oven of your _salon_. Bake yourselves, kiln-dry

yourselves, if you choose, in your furnaced houses at home, but, if you

value your health, "reform that altogether" in Italy. Increase your

clothing and suppress your fires, and you will find yourselves better

in head and in pocket. With your great fires you will always be cold

and always have colds; for the houses are not tight, and you only

create great draughts thereby. You will not persuade an Italian to sit

near them;--"_Scusa, Signore_" he will say, "_mi fa male; se non gli

dispiace, mi metto in questo cantone_,"--and with your permission he

takes the farthest corner away from the fire. Seven winters in Rome

have convinced me of the correctness of their rule. Of course, you do

not believe me or them; but it would be better for you, if you

did,--and for me, too, when I come to visit you.

But I must beg pardon for all this advice; and as my business is not to

write a medical thesis here, let me return to pleasanter things.

Scarcely does the sun drop behind St. Peter's on the first day of May,

before bonfires begin to blaze from all the country towns on the

mountain-sides, showing like great beacons. This is a custom founded in

great antiquity, and common to the North and South. The first of May is

the Festival of the Holy Apostles in Italy; but in Germany, and still

farther north, in Sweden and Norway, it is _Walpurgisnacht_,--when

goblins, witches, hags, and devils hold high holiday, mounting on their

brooms for the Brocken. And it was on this night that Mephistopheles

carried Faust on his wondrous ride, and showed him the spectre of

Margaret with the red line round her throat. Miss Bremer, in her "Life

in Dalecarlia," gives the following account of the origin of this

custom:--"It is so old," she says, "that there is no perfect certainty

either of its origin or signification. It is, however, believed that it

derives its origin from a heathen sacrificatory festival; and there is

ground for the acceptation that children were sacrificed alive at this

very feast,--and this, in fact, in order to expel or reconcile the evil

spirits, of whom the people believed, that, partly flying, partly

riding, they commenced their passages over fields and woods at the

beginning of spring, and which are to this day called enchanters,

witches, nymphs, and so forth. It is also believed that about this time

the spirits of the earth came forth from out of the bosom of the earth

and the heart of the mountains in order to seek intercourse with the

children of men. Fires were frequently kindled upon the sepulchral

hills, and at these, sacrifices were offered, chiefly to the good

powers, namely, to those who provide for a fruitful year. At present I

should scarcely think there is an individual who believes in such

superstitious stuff. But they still, as in days of yore, kindle fires

upon the mountains on this night, and still look upon it as a bad omen,

if any common or ugly-formed creature, whether beast or man, makes its

appearance at the fire."

In the Neapolitan towns great fires are built on this festival, around

which the people dance, jumping through the flames, and flinging

themselves about in every wild and fantastic attitude. It is probably a

relic of some old sacrificatory festival to Maia, who has given her

name to this month,--the custom still remaining after its significance

is gone.

The month of May is the culmination of the spring and the season of

seasons at Rome. No wonder that foreigners who have come when winter

sets in and take wing before April shows her sky sometimes growl at the

weather, and ask if this is the beautiful Italian clime. They have

simply selected the rainy season for their visit; and one cannot expect

to have sun the whole year through, without intermission. Where will

they find more sun in the same season? where will they find milder and

softer air? Days even in the middle of winter, and sometimes weeks,

descend as it were from heaven to fill the soul with delight; and a

lovely day in Rome is lovelier than under any other sky on earth. But

just when foreigners go away in crowds, the weather is settling into

the perfection of spring, and then it is that Rome is most charming.

The rains are over, the sun is a daily blessing, all Nature is bursting

into leaf and flower, and one may spend days on the Campagna without

fear of colds and fever. Stay in Rome during May, if you wish to feel

its beauty.

The best rule for a traveller who desires to enjoy the charms of every

clime would be to go to the North in the winter and to the South in the

spring and summer. Cold is the speciality of the North, and all its

sports and gayeties take thence their tone. The houses are built to

shut out the demon of Frost, and protect one from his assaults of ice

and snow. Let him howl about your windows and scrawl his wonderful

landscapes on your panes and pile his fantastic wreaths outside, while

you draw round the blazing hearth and enjoy the artificial heat and

warm in the social converse that he provokes. Your punch is all the

better for his threats; by contrast you enjoy the more. Or brave him

outside in a flying sledge, careering with jangling bells over white

wastes of snow, while the stars, as you go, fly through the naked trees

that are glittering with ice-jewels, and your blood tingles with

excitement, and your breath is blown like a white incense to the skies.

That is the real North. How tame he will look to you, when you go back

in August and find a few hard apples, a few tough plums, and some sour

little things which are apologies for grapes! He looks sneaky enough

then, with his make-believe summer, and all his furs off. No, then is

the time for the South. All is simmering outside, and the locust saws

and shrills till he seems to heat the air. You stay in the house at

noon, and know what a virtue there is in thick walls which keep out the

fierce heats, in gaping windows and doors that will not shut because

you need the ventilation. You will not now complain of the stone and

brick floors that you cursed all winter long, and on which you now

sprinkle water to keep the air cool in your rooms. The blunders and

stupidities of winter are all over. The breezy _loggia_ is no longer a

joke. You are glad enough to sit there and drink your wine and look

over the landscape. Manuccia brings in a great basket of grapes that

are grapes, which the wasp envies you as you eat, and comes to share.

And here are luscious figs bursting with seedy sweetness, and apricots

rusted in the sun, and velvety peaches that break into juice in your

mouth, and great black-seeded _cocomeri_. Nature empties her cornucopia

of fruits and flowers and vegetables all over your table. Luxuriously

you enjoy them and fan yourself and take your _siesta_, with full

appreciation of your _dolce far niente_. When the sun begins to slope

westward, if you are in the country, you wander through the green lanes

festooned with vines and pluck the grapes as you go; or, if you are in

the city, you saunter the evening long through the streets, where all

the world are strolling, and take your _granito_ of ice or sherbet, and

talk over the things of the day and the time, and pass as you go home

groups of singers and serenaders with guitars, flutes, and

violins,--serenade, perhaps, sometimes, yourself; and all the time the

great planets and stars palpitate in the near heavens, and the soft air

full of fragrance blows against your cheek. And you can really say,

This is Italy! For it is not what you do, so much as what you feel,

that makes Italy.

But pray remember, when you go there, that in the South every

arrangement is made for the nine hot months, and not for the three cold

and rainy ones you choose to spend there, and perhaps your views may be

somewhat modified in respect of this "miserable people," who, you say,

"have no idea of comfort,"--meaning, of course, English comfort.

Perhaps, I say; for it is in the nature of travellers to come to sudden

conclusions upon slight premises, to maintain with obstinacy

preconceived notions, and to quarrel with all national traits except

their own. And being English, unless you have a friend in India who has

made you aware that cane-bottom chairs are India-English, you will be

pretty sure to believe that there is no comfort without carpets and

coal; or being an American, you will be apt to undervalue a gallery of

pictures with only a three-ply carpet on the floor, and to "calculate,"

that, if they could see your house in Washington Street, they would

feel rather ashamed. However, there is a great deal of human nature in

mankind, wherever you go,--except in Paris, perhaps, where Nature is

rather inhuman and artificial. And when I instance the Englishman and

American as making false judgments, let me not be misunderstood as

supposing them the only nations in that category. No, no! did not my

Parisian acquaintance the other day assure me very gravely, after

lamenting the absurdity of the Italians' not speaking French instead of

their own language,--"But, Sir, what is this Italian? nothing but bad

French!"--and did not another of that same polished nation, in

describing his travels to Naples, say, in answer to the question,

whether he had seen the grand old temples of Paestum,--"Ah, yes, I have

seen Paestum; 'tis a detestable country!--like the Campagna of Rome"? I

am perfectly aware that there are differences of opinion.

Let me, then, beg you to remain in Rome during the mouth of May, if

you can possibly make your arrangements to do so.

May is the month of the Madonna, and on every _festa_-day you will see

at the corners of the streets a little improvised shrine, or it may be

only a festooned print of the Madonna hung against the walls of some

house or against the back of a chair, and tended by two or three

children, who hold out to you a plate, as you pass, and beg for

charity, sometimes, I confess, in the most pertinacious way,--the money

thus raised to be expended in oil for the lamps before the Madonna

shrines in the streets. The monasteries of nuns are also busy with

processions and celebrations in honor of "the Mother of God," which are

carried on pleasantly within their precincts and seen only of female

friends. Sometimes you will meet a procession of ladies outside the

gates following a cross on foot, while their carriages come after in a

long file. These are societies which are making the pilgrimage of the

Seven Basilicas outside the Walls. They set out early in the morning,

stopping in each basilica for a half-hour to say their prayers, and

return to Rome at Ave Maria.

Life, too, is altogether changed now. All the windows are wide open,

and there is at least one head and shoulders leaning out at every

house. And the poorer families are all out on their door-steps, working

and chatting together, while their children run about them in the

streets, sprawling, playing, and fighting. Many a beautiful theme for

the artist is now to be found in these careless and characteristic

groups; and curly-headed Saint Johns may be seen in every street, half

naked, with great black eyes and rounded arms and legs. It is this

which makes Rome so admirable a residence for an artist. All things are

easy and careless in the out-of-doors life of the common people,--all

poses unsought, all groupings accidental, all action unaffected and

unconscious. One meets Nature at every turn,--not braced up in prim

forms, not conscious in manners, not made up into the fashionable or

the proper, but impulsive, free, and simple. With the whole street

looking on, they are as unconscious and natural as if they were where

no eye could see them,--ay, and more natural, too, than it is possible

for some people to be, even in the privacy of their solitary rooms.

They sing at the top of their lungs as they sit on their door-steps at

their work, and often shout from house to house across the street a

long conversation, and sometimes even read letters from upper windows

to their friends below in the street. The men and women who cry their

fruits, vegetables, and wares up and down the city, laden with baskets

or panniers, and often accompanied by a donkey, stop to chat with group

after group, or get into animated debates about prices, or exercise

their wits and lungs at once in repartee in a very amusing way.

Everybody is in dishabille in the morning, but towards twilight the

girls put on their better dresses, and comb their glossy raven hair,

heaping it up in great solid braids, and, hanging two long golden

ear-rings in their ears and _collane_ round their full necks, come

forth conquering and to conquer, and saunter bare-headed up and down

the streets, or lounge about the doorways or piazzas in groups, ready

to give back to any jeerer as good as he sends. You see them marching

along sometimes in a broad platoon of five or six, all their brows as

straight as if they had been ruled, and their great dark eyes flashing

out under them, ready in a moment for a laugh or a frown. What stalwart

creatures they are! What shoulders, bosoms, and backs they have! what a

chance for the lungs under those stout _busti_! and what finished and

elegant heads! They are certainly cast in a large mould, with nothing

belittled or meagre about them, either in feature or figure.

Early in the morning you will see streaming through the streets or

gathered together in picturesque groups, some standing, some couching

on the pavement, herds of long-haired goats, brown and white and black,

which have been driven, or rather which have followed their shepherd,

into the city to be milked. The majestical, long-bearded, patriarchal

rams shake their bells and parade solemnly round,--while the silken

females clatter their little hoofs as they run from the hand of the

milker when he has filled his can. The shepherd is kept pretty busy,

too, milking at everybody's door; and before the fashionable world is

up at nine, the milk is gone and the goats are off.

You may know that it is May by the orange and lemon stands, which are

erected in almost every piazza. These are little booths covered with

canvas, and fantastically adorned with lemons and oranges intermixed,

which, piled into pyramids and disposed about everywhere, have a very

gay effect. They are generally placed near a fountain, the water of

which is conducted through a _canna_ into the centre of the booth, and

there, finding its own level again, makes a little spilling fountain

from which the _bibite_ are diluted. Here for a _baiocco_ one buys

lemonade or orangeade and all sorts of curious little drinks or

_bibite_, with a feeble taste of anisette or some other herb to take

off the mawkishness of the water,--or for a half-_baiocco_ one may have

the lemonade without sugar, and in this way it is usually drunk. On all

_festa_-days, little portable tables are carried round the streets,

hung to the neck of the _limonaro_, and set down at convenient spots,

or whenever a customer presents himself, and the cries of "_Acqua

fresca,--limonaro, limonaro,--chi vuol bere?_" are heard on all sides;

and I can assure you, that, after standing on tiptoe for an hour in the

heat and straining your neck and head to get sight of some Church

procession, you are glad enough to go to the extravagance of even a

lemonade with sugar; and smacking your lips, you bless the institution

of the _limonaro_ as one which must have been early instituted by the

Good Samaritan. Listen to his own description of himself in one of the

popular _canzonetti_ sung about the streets by wandering musicians to

the accompaniment of a violin and guitar:--

"Ma per altro son uomo ingegnoso,

Non possiedo, ma sono padrone;

Vendo l' acqua con spirto e limone

Finche dura d' estate il calor.

"Ho an capello di paglia,--ma bello!

Un zinale di sopra fino;

Chi mi osserva nel mio tavolino,

Gli vien sete, se sete non ha.

"Spaccio spirti, siroppi, acquavite

Fo 'ranciate di nuova invenzione;

Voi vedete quante persone

Chiedon acqua,--e rispondo,--Son quà!"

The _limonaro_ is the exponent, the algebraic power, of the Church

processions which abound this month; and he is as faithful to them as

Boswell to Johnson;--wherever they appear, he is there to console and

refresh. Nor is his office a sinecure now; and let us hope that he has

his small profits, as well as the Church,--though they spell theirs

differently.

The great procession of the year takes place this month on Corpus

Domini, and is well worth seeing, as being the very finest and most

characteristic of all the Church festivals. It was instituted in honor

of the famous miracle at Bolsena, when the wafer dripped blood, and is,

therefore, in commemoration of one of the cardinal doctrines of the

Roman Church, Transubstantiation, and one of its most theological

miracles. The Papal procession takes place in the morning, in the

piazza of Saint Peter's; and if you would be sure of it, you must be on

the spot as soon as eight o'clock at the latest. The whole circle of

the piazza itself is covered with an awning, festooned gayly with

garlands of box, under which the procession passes; and the ground is

covered with yellow sand, over which box and bay are strewn. The

celebration commences with morning mass in the basilica, and that over,

the procession issues from one door, and, making the whole circuit of

the piazza, returns into the church. First come the _Seminaristi_, or

scholars and attendants of the various hospitals and charity-schools,

such as San Michele and Santo Spirito,--all in white. Then follow the

brown-cowled, long-bearded Franciscans, the white Carmelites, and the

black Benedictines, bearing lighted candles and chanting hoarsely as

they go. You may see pass before you now all the members of these

different conventual orders that there are in Rome, and have an

admirable opportunity to study their physiognomies in mass. If you are

a convert to Romanism, you will perhaps find in their bald beads and

shaven crowns and bearded faces a noble expression of reverence and

humility; but, suffering as I do under the misfortune of being a

heretic, I could but remark on their heads an enormous development of

the two organs of reverence and firmness, and a singular deficiency in

the upper forehead, while there was an almost universal enlargement of

the lower jaw and of the base of the brain. Being, unfortunately, a

friend of Phrenology, as well as a heretic, I drew no very auspicious

augury from these developments; and looking into their faces, the

physiognomical traits were narrow-mindedness, bigotry, or cunning. The

Benedictine heads showed more intellect and will; the Franciscans more

dulness and good-nature.

But while I am criticizing them, they are passing by, and a picturesque

set of fellows they are. Much as I dislike the conventual creed, I

should be sorry to see the costume disappear. Directly on the heels of

their poverty come the three splendid triple crowns of the Pope,

glittering with gorgeous jewels, and borne in triumph on silken

embroidered cushions, and preceded by the court jeweller. After them

follow the chapters, canons, and choirs of the seven basilicas,

chanting in lofty altos and solid basses and clear ringing tenors from

their old Church books, each basilica bearing a typical tent of colored

stripes and a wooden campanile and a bell which is constantly rung.

Next come the canons of the churches and the _monsignori_, in splendid

dresses and rich capes of beautiful lace falling below their waists;

the bishops clad in cloth of silver with mitres on their heads; the

cardinals brilliant in gold embroidery and gleaming in the sun; and at

last the Pope himself, borne on a platform splendid with silver and

gold, with a rich canopy over his head. Beneath this he kneels, or

rather, seems to kneel; for, though his splendid draperies and train

are skilfully arranged so as to present this semblance, being drawn

behind him over two blocks which are so placed as to represent his

heels, yet in fact he is seated on a sunken bench or chair, as any

careful eye can plainly see. However, kneeling or sitting, just as you

will, there he is, before an altar, holding up the _ostia_, which is

the _corpus Domini_, "the body of God," and surrounded by officers of

the Swiss guards in glittering armor, chamberlains in their beautiful

black and Spanish dresses with ruffs and swords, attendants in scarlet

and purple costumes, and the _guardia nobile_ in their red dress

uniforms. Nothing could be more striking than this group. It is the

very type of the Church,--pompous, rich, splendid, imposing. After them

follow the dragoons mounted,--first a company on black horses, then

another on bays, and then a third on grays; foot-soldiers with flashing

bayonets bring up the rear, and the procession is over. As the last

soldiers enter the church, there is a stir among the gilt equipages of

the cardinals which line one side of the piazza,--the horses toss their

scarlet plumes, the liveried servants sway as the carriages lumber on,

and you may spend a half-hour hunting out your own humble vehicle, if

you have one, or throng homeward on foot with the crowd through the

Borgo and over the bridge of Sant' Angelo.

This grand procession strikes the note of all the others, and in the

afternoon each parish brings out its banners, arrays itself in its

choicest dresses, and with pomp and music bears the _ostia_ through the

streets, the crowd kneeling before it, and the priests chanting. During

the next _ottava_ or eight days, all the processions take place in

honor of this festival; and when the week has passed, everything ends

with the Papal procession in Saint Peter's piazza, when, without music,

and with uncovered heads, the Pope, cardinals, _monsignori_, canons,

and the rest of the priests and officials, make the round of the

piazza, bearing great Church banners.

One of the most striking of their celebrations took place this year at

the church of San Rocco in the Ripetta, when the church was made

splendid with lighted candles and gold bands, and a preacher held forth

to a crowded audience in the afternoon. At Ave Maria there was a great

procession, with banners, music, and torches, and all the evening the

people sauntered to and fro in crowds before the church, where a

platform was erected and draped with old tapestries, from which a band

played constantly. Do not believe, my dear Presbyterian friend, that

these spectacles fail deeply to affect the common mind. So long as

human nature remains the same, this splendor and pomp of processions,

these lighted torches and ornamented churches, this triumphant music

and glad holiday of religion will attract more than your plain

conventicles, your ugly meeting-houses, and your compromise with the

bass-viol. For my own part, I do not believe that music and painting

and all the other arts really belong to the Devil, or that God gave him

joy and beauty to deceive with, and kept only the ugly, sour, and sad

for himself. We are always better when we are happy; and we are about

as sure of being good when we are happy, as of being happy when we are

good. Cheerfulness and happiness are, in my humble opinion, duties and

habits to be cultivated; but, if you don't think so, I certainly would

not deny you the privilege of being wretched: don't let us quarrel

about it.

Rather let us turn to the Artists' Festival, which takes place in this

month, and is one of the great attractions of the season. Formerly,

this festival took place at Cerbara, an ancient Etruscan town on the

Campagna, of which only certain subterranean caves remain. But during

the revolutionary days which followed the disasters of 1848, it was

suspended for two or three years by the interdict of the Papal

government, and when it was again instituted, the place of meeting was

changed to Fidenae, the site of another Etruscan town, with similar

subterranean excavations, which were made the head-quarters of the

festival. But the new railway to Bologna having been laid out directly

over this ground, the artists have been again driven away, and this

year the _festa_ was held, for the first time, in the grove of Egeria,

one of the most beautiful spots on the whole Campagna,--and here it is

to be hoped it will have an abiding rest.

This festival was instituted by the German artists, and, though the

artists of all nations now join in it, the Germans still remain its

special patrons and directors. Early in the morning, the artists

rendezvous at an appointed _osteria_ outside the walls, dressed in

every sort of grotesque and ludicrous costume which can be imagined.

All the old dresses which can be rummaged out of the studios or

theatres, or pieced together from masking wardrobes, are now in

requisition. Indians and Chinese, ancient warriors and mediaeval

heroes, militia-men and Punches, generals in top-boots and pigtails,

doctors in gigantic wigs and small-clothes, Falstaffs and justices

"with fair round belly with good capon lined," magnificent foolscaps,

wooden swords with terrible inscriptions, gigantic chapeaus with plumes

made of vegetables, in a word, every imaginable absurdity is to be

seen. Arrived at the place of rendezvous, they all breakfast, and then

the line of march is arranged. A great wooden cart, adorned with quaint

devices, garlanded with laurel and bay, bears the president and

committee. This is drawn by great white oxen, who are decorated with

wreaths and flowers and gay trappings, and from it floats the noble

banner of Cerbara or Fidenae. After this follows a strange and motley

train,--some mounted on donkeys, some on horses, and some afoot,--and

the line of march is taken up for the grove of Egeria. What mad jests

and wild fun now take place it is impossible to describe; suffice it to

say, that all are right glad of a little rest when they reach their

destination.

Now begin to stream out from the city hundreds of carriages,--for all

the world will be abroad to-day to see,--and soon the green slopes are

swarming with gay crowds. Some bring with them a hamper of provisions

and wine, and, spreading them on the grass, lunch and dine when and

where they will; but those who would dine with the artists must have

the order of the _mezzo baiocco_ hanging to their buttonhole, which is

distributed previously in Rome to all the artists who purchase tickets.

Some few there are who also bear upon their breasts the nobler medal of

_troppo merito_, gained on previous days, and those are looked upon

with due reverence.

But before dinner or lunch there is a high ceremony to take place,--the

great feature of the day. It is the mock-heroic play. This year it was

the meeting of Numa with the nymph Egeria at the grotto; and thither

went the festive procession; and the priest, befilletted and draped in

white, burned upon the altar as a sacrifice a great toy sheep, whose

offence "smelt to heaven"; and then from the niches suddenly appeared

Numa, a gallant youth in spectacles, and Egeria, a Spanish artist with

white dress and fillet, who made vows over the smoking sheep, and then

were escorted back to the sacred grove with festal music by a joyous,

turbulent crowd.

Last year, however, at Fidenae, it was better. We had a travesty of the

taking of Troy, which was eminently ludicrous, and which deserves a

better description than I can give. Troy was a space inclosed within

paper barriers, about breast-high, painted "to present a wall," and

within these were the Trojans, clad in red, and all wearing gigantic

paper helmets. There was old Priam, in spectacles, with his crown and

robes,--Laocoön, in white, with a white wool beard and wig,--Ulysses,

in a long, yellow beard and mantle,--and Aeneas, with a bald head, in a

blue, long-tailed coat, and tall dickey, looking like the traditional

Englishman in the circus who comes to hire the horse. The Grecians were

encamped at a short distance. All had round, basket-work shields,--some

with their names painted on them in great letters, and some with an odd

device, such as a cat or pig. There were Ulysses, Agamemnon, Ajax,

Nestor, Patroclus, Diomedes, Achilles, "all honorable men." The drama

commenced with the issuing of Paris and Helen from the walls of

Troy,--he in a tall, black French hat, girdled with a gilt crown, and

she in a white dress, with a great wig hanging round her face in a

profusion of carrotty curls. Queer figures enough they were, as they

stepped along together, caricaturing love in a pantomime, he making

terrible demonstrations of his ardent passion, and she finally falling

on his neck in rapture. This over, they seated themselves near by two

large pasteboard rocks, he sitting on his shield and taking out his

flute to play to her, while she brought forth her knitting and ogled

him as he played. While they were thus engaged, came creeping up with

the stage stride of a double step, and dragging one foot behind him,

Menelaus, whom Thersites had, meantime, been taunting, by pointing at

him two great ox-horns. He walked all round the lovers, pantomiming

rage and jealousy in the accredited ballet style, and then, suddenly

approaching, crushed poor Paris's great black hat down over his eyes.

Both, very much frightened, then took to their heels and rushed into

the city, while Menelaus, after shaking Paris's shield, in defiance, at

the walls, retired to the Grecian camp. Then came the preparations for

battle. The Trojans leaned over their paper battlements, with their

fingers to their noses, twiddling them in scorn, while the Greeks shook

their fists back at them. The battle now commenced on the

"ringing-plains of Troy," and was eminently absurd. Paris, in hat and

pantaloons, (_à la mode de Paris_,) soon showed the white feather, and

incontinently fled. Everybody hit nowhere, fiercely striking the ground

or the shields, and always carefully avoiding, as on the stage, to hit

in the right place. At last, however, Patroclus was killed, whereupon

the battle was suspended, and a grand _tableau_ of surprise and horror

took place, from which at last they recovered, and the Greeks prepared

to carry him off on their shoulders. Then terrible to behold was the

grief of Achilles. Homer himself would have wept to see him. He flung

himself on the body, and shrieked, and tore his hair, and violently

shook the corpse, which, under such demonstrations, now and then kicked

up. Finally, he rises and challenges Hector to single combat, and out

comes the valiant Trojan, and a duel ensues with wooden axes. Such

blows and counter blows were never seen, only they never hit, but often

whirled the warrior who dealt them completely round; they tumbled over

their own blows, panted with feigned rage, lost their robes and great

pasteboard helmets, and were even more absurd than Richmond and Richard

ever were on the country boards at a fifth-rate theatre. But Hector is

at last slain and borne away, and a ludicrous lay figure is laid out to

represent him, with bunged-up eyes and a general flabbiness of body and

want of features, charming to behold. On their necks the Trojans bear

him to their walls, and with a sudden jerk pitch him over them head

first, and he tumbles, in a heap, into the city. Then Ulysses harangues

the Greeks. He has brought out a _quarteruola_ barrel of wine, which,

with most expressive pantomime, he shows to be the wooden horse that

must be carried into Troy. His proposition is joyfully accepted, and,

accompanied by all, he rolls the cask up to the walls, and, flourishing

a tin cup in one hand, invites the Trojans to partake. At first there

is confusion in the city, and fingers are twiddled over the walls, but

after a time all go out and drink, and become ludicrously drunk, and

stagger about, embracing each other in the most maudlin style. Even

Helen herself comes out, gets tipsy with the rest, and dances about

like the most disreputable of Maenades. A great scena, however, takes

place as they are about to drink. Laocoön, got up in white wool,

appears, and violently endeavors to dissuade them, but in vain. In the

midst of his harangue, a long string of blown up sausage-skins is

dragged in for the serpent, and suddenly cast about his neck. His sons

and he then form a group, the sausage-snake is twined about them,--only

the old story is reversed, and he bites the serpent instead of the

serpent biting him,--and all die in agony, travestying the ancient

group.

All, being now drunk, go in, and Ulysses with them. A quantity of straw

is kindled, the smoke rises, the Greeks approach and dash in the paper

walls with clubs, and all is confusion. Then Aeneas, in his blue

long-tailed circus-coat, broad white hat, and tall shirt-collar,

carries off old Anchises on his shoulders with a cigar in his mouth,

and bears him to a painted section of a vessel, which is rocked to and

fro by hand, as if violently agitated by the waves. Aeneas and Anchises

enter the boat, or rather stand behind it so as to conceal their legs,

and off it sets, rocked to and fro constantly,--Aeolus and Tramontana

following behind, with bellows to blow up a wind, and Fair Weather,

with his name written on big back, accompanying them. The violent

motion, however, soon makes Aeneas sick, and as he leans over the side

in a helpless and melancholy manner, and almost gives up the ghost, as

well as more material things, the crowd burst into laughter. However,

at last they reach two painted rocks, and found Latium, and a general

rejoicing takes place.--The donkey who was to have ended all by

dragging the body of Hector round the walls came too late, and this

part of the programme did not take place.

So much of the entertainment over, preparations are made for dinner. In

the grove of Egeria the plates are spread in circles, while all the

company sing part-songs and dance. At last all is ready, the signal is

given, and the feast takes place after the most rustic manner. Great

barrels of wine covered with green branches stand at one side, from

which flagons are filled and passed round, and the good appetites soon

make direful gaps in the beef and mighty plates of lettuce. After this,

and a little sauntering about for digestion's sake, come the afternoon

sports. And there are donkey races, and tilting at a ring, and

foot-races, and running in sacks. Nothing can be more picturesque than

the scene, with its motley masqueraders, its crowds of spectators

seated along the slopes, its little tents here and there, its races in

the valley, and, above all, the glorious mountains looking down from

the distance. Not till the golden light slopes over the Campagna,

gilding the skeletons of aqueducts, and drawing a delicate veil of

beauty over the mountains, can we tear ourselves away, and rattle back

in our carriage to Rome.

The wealthy Roman families, who have villas in the immediate vicinity

of Rome, now leave the city to spend a month in them and breathe the

fresh air of spring. Many and many a tradesman who is well to do in the

world has a little _vigna_ outside the gates, where he raises

vegetables and grapes and other fruits; and every _festa_-day you will

be sure to find him and his family out in his little _villetta_,

wandering about the grounds or sitting beneath his arbors, smoking and

chatting with his children around him. His friends who have no villas

of their own here visit him, and often there is a considerable company

thus collected, who, if one may judge from their cheerful countenances

and much laughter, enjoy themselves mightily. Knock at any of these

villa-gates, and, if you happen to have the acquaintance of the owner,

or are evidently a stranger of respectability, you will be received

with much hospitality, invited to partake of the fruit and wine, and

overwhelmed with thanks for your _gentilezza_ when you take your leave;

for the Italians are a most good-natured and social people, and nothing

pleases them better than a stranger who breaks the common round of

topics by accounts of his own land. Everything new is to them

wonderful, just as it is to a child. They are credulous of everything

you tell them about America, which is to them in some measure what it

was to the English in the days of Raleigh, Drake, and Hawkins, and say

"_Per Bacco!_" to every new statement. And they are so magnificently

ignorant, that you have _carte blanche_ for your stories. Never did I

know any one staggered by anything I chose to say, but once. I was

walking with my respectable old _padrone_, Nisi, about his little

garden one day, when an ambition to know something about America

inflamed his breast.

"Are there any mountains?" he asked.

I told him "Yes," and, with a chuckle of delight, he cried,--

"_Per Bacco!_ And have you any cities?"

"Yes, a few little ones,"--for I thought I would sing small, contrary

to the general "'Ercles vein" of my countrymen. He was evidently

pleased that they were small, and, swelling with natural pride, said,--

"Large as Rome, of course, they could not be"; then, after a moment, he

added, interrogatively, "And rivers, too,--have you any rivers?"

"A few," I answered.

"But not as large as our Tiber," he replied,--feeling assured, that, if

the cities were smaller than Rome, as a necessary consequence, the

rivers that flowed by them must be in the same category.

The bait now offered was too tempting. I measured my respectable and

somewhat obese friend carefully with my eye, for a moment, and then

hurled this terrible fact at him:--

"We have some rivers three thousand miles long."

The effect was awful. He stood and stared at me, as if petrified, for a

moment. Then the blood rushed into his face, and, turning on his heel,

he took off his hat, said suddenly, "_Buona sera_," and carried my fact

and his opinions together up into his private room. I am afraid that

Don Pietro decided, on consideration, that I had been taking

unwarrantable liberties with him, and exceeding all proper bounds, in

my attempt to impose on his good-nature. From that time forward he

asked me no more questions about America.

And here, by the way, I am reminded of an incident, which, though not

exactly pertinent, may find here a parenthetical place, merely as

illustrating some points of Italian character. One fact and two names

relating to America they know universally,--Columbus and his discovery

of America, and Washington.

"_Sì, Signore_," said a respectable person some time since, as he was

driving me to see a carriage which he wished to sell me, and therefore

desired to be particularly polite to me and my nation,--"a great man,

your Vashintoni! but I was sorry to hear, the other day, that his

father had died in London."

"His father dead, and in London?" I stammered, completely confounded at

this extraordinary news, and fearing lest I had been too stupid in

misunderstanding him.

"Yes," he said, "it is too true that his father Vellintoni is dead. I

read it in the _Diario di Roma_."

But better than this was the ingenious argument of a _Frate_, whom I

met on board a steamer in going from Leghorn to Genoa, and who, having

pumped out the fact that I was an American, immediately began to

"improve" it in a discourse on Columbus. So he informed me that

Columbus was an Italian, and that he had discovered America, and was a

remarkable man; to all of which I readily assented, as being true, if

not new. But now a severe abstract question began to tax my friend's

powers. He said, "But how could he ever have imagined that the

continent of America was there? That's the question. It is

extraordinary indeed!" And so he sat cogitating, and saying, at

intervals, "_Curioso! Straordinario!_" At last "a light broke in upon

his brain." Some little bird whispered the secret. His face lightened,

and, looking at me, he said, "Perhaps he may have read that it was

there in some old book, and so went to see if it were or no." Vainly I

endeavored to show him that this view would deprive Columbus of his

greatest distinction. He answered invariably, "But without having read

it, how could he ever have known it?"--thus putting the earth upon the

tortoise and leaving the tortoise to account for his own support.

Imagine that I have told you these stories sitting under the vine and

fig-tree of some _villetta_, while Angiolina has gone to call the

_padrone_, who will only be too glad to see you. But, _ecco!_ at last

our _padrone_ comes. No, it is not the _padrone_, it is the

_vignarualo_, who takes care of his grapes and garden, and who

recognizes us as friends of the _padrone_, and tells us that we are

ourselves _padroni_ of the whole place, and offers us all sorts of

fruits.

One old custom, which existed in Rome some fifteen years ago, has now

passed away with other good old things. It was the celebration of the

_Fravolata_ or Strawberry-Feast, when men in gala-dress at the height

of the strawberry-season went in procession through the streets,

carrying on their heads enormous wooden platters heaped with this

delicious fruit, accompanied by girls in costume, who, beating their

_tamburelli_, danced along at their sides and sung the praises of the

strawberry. After threading the streets of the city, they passed

singing out of the gates, and at different places on the Campagna spent

the day in festive sports and had an out-door dinner and dance.

One of these festivals still exists, however, in the picturesque town

of Genzano, which lies above the old crater now filled with the still

waters of Lake Nemi, and is called the _Infiorata di Genzano_, "The

Flower-Festival of Genzano." It takes place on the eighth day of the

Corpus Domini, and receives its name from the popular custom of

spreading flowers upon the pavements of the streets so as to represent

heraldic devices, figures, arabesques, and all sorts of ornamental

designs. The people are all dressed in their effective costumes,--the

girls in _busti_ and silken skirts, with all their corals and jewels

on, and the men with white stockings on their legs, their velvet

jackets dropping over one shoulder, and flowers and rosettes in their

conical hats. The town is then very gay, the bells clang, the incense

steams from the censer in the church, where the organ peals and mass is

said, and a brilliant procession marches over the strewn flower-mosaic,

with music and crucifixes and Church-banners. Hundreds of strangers,

too, are there to look on; and on the Cesarini Piazza and under the

shadow of the long avenues of ilexes that lead to the tower are

hundreds of handsome girls, with their snowy _tovaglie_ peaked over

their heads. The rub and thrum of _tamburelli_ and the clicking of

castanets are heard, too, as twilight comes on, and the _salterello_ is

danced by many a group. This is the national Roman dance, and is named

from the little jumping step which characterizes it. Any number of

couples dance it, though the dance is perfect with two. Some of the

movements are very graceful and piquant, and particularly that where

one of the dancers kneels and whirls her arms on high, clicking her

castanets, while the other circles her round and round, striking his

hands together, and approaching nearer and nearer, till he is ready to

give her a kiss, which she refuses: of course it is the old story of

every national dance,--love and repulse, love and repulse, until the

maiden yields. As one couple panting and rosy retires, another fresh

one takes its place, while the bystanders play on the accordion the

whirling, circling, never-ending tune of the Tarantella, which would

"put a spirit of youth in everything."

If you are tired of the festival, roam up a few paces out of the crowd,

and you stand upon the brink of Lake Nemi. Over opposite, and crowning

the height where the little town of Nemi perches, frowns the old feudal

castle of the Colonna, with its tall, round tower, where many a

princely family has dwelt and many an unprincely act has been done.

There, in turn, have dwelt the Colonna, Borgia, Piccolomini, Cenci,

Frangipani, and Braschi, and there the descendants of the last-named

family still pass a few weeks in the summer.[1] Below you, silent and

silvery, lies the lake itself,--and rising around it, like a green

bowl, tower its richly wooded banks, covered with gigantic oaks,

ilexes, and chestnuts. This was the ancient grove dedicated to Diana,

which extended to L'Ariccia; and here are still to be seen the vestiges

of an ancient villa built by Julius Caesar. Here, too, if you trust

some of the antiquaries, once stood the temple of Diana Nemorensis,[2]

where human sacrifices were offered, and whose chief-priest, called

_Rex Nemorensis_, obtained his office by slaying his predecessor, and

reigned over these groves by force of his personal arm. Times have,

indeed, changed since the priesthood was thus won and baptized by

blood; and as you stand there, and look, on the one side, at the site

of this ancient temple, which some of the gigantic chestnut-trees may

almost have seen in their youth, and, on the other side, at the

campanile of the Catholic church at Genzano, with its flower-strewn

pavements, you may have as sharp a contrast between the past and the

present as can easily be found.

[Footnote 1: On the Genzano side stands the castellated villa of the

Cesarini Sforza, looking peacefully across the lake at the rival tower,

which in the old baronial days it used to challenge,--and in its

garden-pond you may see stately white swans oaring their way with rosy

feet along.]

[Footnote 2: The better opinion of late seems to be that it was on the

slopes of the Val d'Ariccia. But "who shall decide, when doctors

disagree?"]

THRENODIA.

ADDRESSED TO ALFRED TENNYSON, P.L., IN RESPONSE TO VERSES OF HIS "ON A

LATE EVENT IN ENGLAND."

I heard you In your English home,--

I read you by my little brook,

Thousands of miles from British foam,

Hid in my dear New England nook:

But heard you with a sullen look;

But read you with a gloomy brow;

And thus unto my Muse I spoke:--

Who is there to write history now?

Hallam is dead! and Prescott gone!

And Irving sleeps at Sunnyside!

And now that Lord has wandered on,

Whose laurels must with theirs abide:

I greatly mourned the man who died

First on this dismal roll of death,--

And him, of all observers eyed,

My townsman here, who spent his breath

In telling of the things of Spain,

And doing friendly things to friends,

Prescott, well known beyond the main

And past the Pillars, to earth's ends:

Both had my tears: but England sends

Another word across the seas,

Might rouse the dying from his bed:

Oh, bear it gently, ocean-breeze!

That bitter word,--Thy friend is dead!

Macaulay dead, who made to live

Past kingdoms, with his vivid brain!

Who could such warmth to shadows give,

By the mere magic of his pen,

That Charles and England rose again!

Well sleeps he 'mid the Abbey's dust:

And, Laureate! thy funereal verse

Shall have such echo as it must

From hearts just wrung at Irving's hearse.

These are two names to mark the year

As one of memorable woe,

Two men to the two nations dear

Laid in one fatal winter low!

About the streets the mourners go;

But I within my chamber rest,

Or walk the room with measured tread,

Murmuring, with head upon my breast,

My God! and is Macaulay dead?

GENERAL MIRANDA'S EXPEDITION.

In November, 1805, a good-looking foreigner, gentlemanlike in dress

and in manner, and apparently fifty years of age, arrived in New York

from England, and took lodgings at Mrs. Avery's, State Street. He

called himself George Martin; but this incognito was intended only for

the vulgar. Some of the principal citizens of New York, who recollected

his first visit to this country twenty years before, knew him as Don

Francisco de Miranda of Caracas, one of the most distinguished

adventurers of that revolutionary era,--a favorite of the Empress of

Russia, a friend of Mr. Pitt, and second in command under Dumouriez in

the Belgian campaign of 1793. To these gentlemen he avowed that for

many years he had meditated the independence of the Spanish-American

Colonies, and meant to make an attempt to carry out his plans. On

Evacuation Day, a New York festival, which is now nearly worn out, they

invited him to a Corporation dinner, as a foreign officer of rank, and

toasted him, wishing him the same success in South America that we had

had here. He then went to Washington, under the name of Molini. There,

as everywhere, he was received by the best society as General Miranda.

The President and the Secretary of State, Mr. Madison, granted him

several private interviews. In January he returned to New York,--and on

the 2d of February departed thence mysteriously in the Leander, a ship

belonging to Mr. Samuel G. Ogden, merchant.

While the Leander lay at anchor off Staten Island, a gentleman notified

the Naval Officer of the Port, that large quantities of arms and

ammunition had been taken on board of her in boats, at night. He was

informed in return, that the Leander was cleared for Jacquemel, and

that no law existed to prevent her from sailing. No other attempt was

made to detain her; but a few weeks later, rumors affecting the

character of the ship broke out in a more decided form. It was

generally believed at the Tontine Coffee-House that the Leander had

been fitted out by Miranda to attack the Spanish possessions in the

West India Islands or on the Main. And yet the New York journals took

no notice of her until the 21st of February, nineteen days after she

sailed. In the mean time the Marquis Yrujo, backed by the French

Ambassador, had made a formal complaint to Government, and had caused

the insertion in the "Philadelphia Gazette" of a series of

interrogatories to Mr. Madison, which indirectly accused the

Administration of encouraging Miranda's preparations, or at least of

conniving at the expedition. This perverse Marquis, who gave Mr.

Jefferson a taste of the annoyance which Genet, Adet, and Fauchet had

inflicted upon the previous administrations, was clamorous and

persisting. The authorities in Washington thought it proper to order

the arrest of Mr. Ogden, and of Colonel William Smith, son-in-law of

John Adams and Surveyor of the Port of New York, under the Act of 1794.

The prisoners were taken before Judge Tallmadge of the United States

District Court. They were refused counsel, and were forced by threats

of imprisonment to submit to a searching examination. They were then

held to bail, both as principals and witnesses, in the sum of twenty

thousand dollars. Soon after, the President removed Colonel Smith from

his office.

Such a waste of editorial raw-material appears very singular to

newspaper-readers of the present day, accustomed as they are to see in

print everything that has happened or that might have happened; but we

must recollect that our grandfathers found the excitement necessary to

civilized man in party politics, national and local. This game they

played with a fierce eagerness which is now limited to a small class of

inferior men.

To the violence and personal spitefulness of their newspaper articles

we have fortunately nothing comparable, even in the speeches of

Honorable Members on Helper and John Brown. The "_Tu quoque_" and the

"_Vos damnamini_" were their favorite logical processes, and "Fool" and

"Liar" the simple and conclusive arguments with which they established

a principle. Not that these ancients suffered at all from a lack of

stirring news. Bonaparte's wonderful campaigns, (Austerlitz had just

been heard of in New York,) the outrages on our sailors by English

cruisers, our merchantmen plundered by French and Spanish privateers,

the irritating behavior of the Dons in Louisiana, kept them abundantly

supplied with this staff of mental life. But they did not care much for

news in the abstract as news, unless they could work it up into

political ammunition and discharge it at each other's heads. We must

not forget, too, that newspaper-editing, the "California of the

spiritually vagabond," as Carlyle calls it, was a recent discovery, and

that the rich mine was but surface-worked. "Our own Reporter" was, like

Milton's original lion, only half unearthed; and deep hidden from

mortal eyes as yet lay the sensation-items-man, who has made the

last-dying-speech-and-confession style of literature the principal

element of our daily press.

At last the Federal editors gave tongue. It was high time; the town was

in an uproar. They perceived that Miranda might become a useful ally

against Mr. T. Jefferson. His expedition came opportunely, as the

Mammoth Cheese and Black Sally were beginning to grow stale. Mr. Lang

opened the cry in the "New York Gazette" by asserting the complicity of

Government, on the authority of a "gentleman of the first

respectability,"--meaning Mr. Rufus King.--Cheetham, of the "Citizen,"

barked back at Lang, a would-be "Solomon," "a foul and abominable

slanderer." Mr. King, he could prove, had been examined, and had

nothing to reveal.--Tom Paine wrote to the "Citizen" to mention that he

had known Miranda in New York in 1783 and in Paris in 1793. Mr.

Littlepage of Virginia, Chamberlain to the King of Poland, had then

informed him that the Empress Catharine had given Miranda four thousand

pounds "as a retaining fee," and that Mr. Pitt had also paid him twelve

hundred pounds for his services in the Nootka Sound business.--All the

Federal papers charged the Government with connivance. You knew the

destination of the Leander; you did not prevent her from sailing; you

nourished the offence until it attained maturity, and then, after

permitting the principals to go upon this expedition, you seize upon

the accessories who remain at home. And in how shameful and illegal a

way! You examine them before a single judge, with no counsel to advise

them. You force them to criminate themselves, and to sign their

confessions, by the threat of imprisonment; and you punish Colonel

Smith before you have tried him, by depriving him of his office. Why,

such a proceeding is worse than any "Inquisitorial Tribunal" or

"Star-Chamber Court."--Nonsense! answered the Democrats. Ogden's and

Smith's testimony does not implicate the Government in the least. It

only proves that Smith has been the dupe of Miranda. The President knew

nothing about the matter. If the object of the Leander's outfit was so

generally spoken of, why did it escape the notice of the Marquis Yrujo?

Why did he not demand her seizure before she sailed? This charge

against the Government is a mere Federal trick. Your friends, the

British, are at the bottom of the expedition, and they have artfully

employed Rufus King, a Federal chief, to throw the blame upon the

Executive of the United States. By ascribing to those who administer

the government the atrocities committed by Transatlantic rulers, you

aim a deadly blow at the character of our system; and your conduct,

base in any view we can take of it, is particularly reprehensible in

the delicate state of our relations with Spain.

Mr. Cadwallader Golden, of counsel for the defendants, made a motion

before Judge Tallmadge for an order to prevent the District Attorney

from using the preliminary evidence taken at the private examinations.

"It was a proceeding," he said, "arbitrary and subversive of the first

principles of law and liberty,"--"which would have disgraced the reign

of Charles and stained the character of Jeffries." The District

Attorney was heard in opposition, and was successful.

On the 7th of April, the Grand Jury found a bill against Smith, Ogden,

Miranda, and Thomas Lewis, captain of the Leander, for "setting on foot

and beginning with force and arms a certain military enterprise or

expedition, to be carried on from the United States against the

dominions of a foreign prince: to wit, the dominions of the King of

Spain; the said King of Spain then and there being at peace with the

United States." The Grand Jury, as an evidence of their impartiality,

or of the public feeling, also handed the Judge a presentment of

himself, which he put into his pocket, censuring his conduct in the

private examinations, because "unusual, oppressive, and contrary to

law."

The trial was set down for the 14th of July. Messrs. Ogden and Smith

did not wait so long for a hearing. They laid their case at once before

the public, in two memorials addressed to Congress, complaining

bitterly of the prosecution, not to say persecution, instituted against

them by the authorities in Washington, and of the cruel and oppressive

measures taken by Judge Tallmadge to carry out the mandates of his

superiors. If they had done wrong, they urged, it was innocently. A war

with Spain was imminent. The critical position of the Louisiana

Boundary question, the President's Message of the 6th of December, and

the documents accompanying it, left no doubts on that point. Were they

not right, then, in supposing, that, under these circumstances, the

President would encourage an expedition against the colonies of a

hostile power? As evidence of Mr. Jefferson's knowledge of Miranda's

schemes, they stated that the General had brought with him from England

a letter to "a gentleman of the first consequence in New York," (Mr.

King,) which contained a sketch of his project: this letter was

forwarded to the Secretary of State and laid before the President by

him. Miranda then went to Washington, saw the President and the

Secretary, and wrote to the memorialists that he had fully unfolded his

plans to both. In the course of a long conversation with Mr. Madison,

he asked for pecuniary assistance and for open encouragement, on the

ground that individuals might not be willing to join in the enterprise,

if Government did not approve it,--particularly as a bill was then

before Congress to prohibit the exportation of arms. He also requested

leave of absence for Colonel Smith, who wished to accompany him. Mr.

Madison answered, that the sentiments of the President could not be

doubted, but that the Government of the United States could afford no

assistance of any kind. Private individuals were at liberty to act as

they pleased, provided they did not violate the laws; and New York

merchants would always advance money, if they saw their advantage in

it. As to the bill Miranda had spoken of, it was unlikely that it would

pass,--and, in fact, it did not. It was impossible, Mr. Madison added,

to grant leave of absence to Colonel Smith, although he thought him

better fitted for military employment than for the custom-house. He

closed the interview by recommending the greatest discretion.

Miranda, continued the memorialists, remained fourteen days in

Washington after this conversation, and returned to New York confident

of the silent approval of Government. Eleven days before the Leander

sailed, he sent a letter to Mr. Madison, inclosing another to Mr.

Jefferson, both of which he read to Ogden and to Smith. He assured Mr.

Madison that he had conformed in every way to the intentions of

Government, and requested him to keep the secret. To Mr. Jefferson he

wrote in a strain more fashionable ten years before than then, but well

adapted to the sentimentality, both scientific and political, of the

"Philosophic President." Here it is:--

"I have the honor to send you, inclosed, the 'Natural and Civil History

of Chili,' of which we conversed at Washington,--and in which you will,

perhaps, find more than in those which have been before published on

the same subject, concerning this beautiful country.

"If ever the happy prediction, which you have pronounced on the future

destiny of our dear Columbia, is to be accomplished in our day, may

Providence grant that it may be under your auspices, and by the

generous efforts of her own children! We shall then, in some sort,

behold the revival of that age, the return of which the Roman bard

invoked in favor of the human race:--

"'The last great age foretold by sacred rhymes

Renews its finished course; Saturnian times

Roll round again; and mighty years, begun

From this first orb, in radiant circles run.'"

On Miranda's reports, these letters, and the fact that the Leander had

not been seized, they rested their case, and prayed for the

interference of Congress in their behalf.

Congress unanimously granted the petitioners leave to withdraw. Such

evidence as this, not only hearsay, but heard from the party most

interested in misrepresenting the Administration, was not entitled to

much consideration. It had, moreover, the additional disadvantage of

proving nothing against the President and Secretary, even if every word

of it were admitted as true.

Public attention was diverted from the Leander, Captain Lewis, to the

Leander, Captain Whitby. This English frigate was cruising off Sandy

Hook, bringing to inward and outward bound vessels, searching them for

articles contraband of war, and helping herself to able-bodied seamen

who looked like British subjects. All of which was meekly submitted to

in 1806. Mr. Jefferson could not overcome his doubts as to the

constitutionality of a fleet, and the Opposition had the twofold

pleasure of chuckling over the insults offered by John Bull to a

government with French proclivities, and of reproaching the party in

power with its supineness and want of spirit.

But the accident of the 25th of April brought the American people to a

proper sense of their situation, for the moment. On that day, His

British Majesty's ship Leander fired a round-shot into the sloop

Richard, bound to New York, and killed the man at the helm, John

Pierce. The body was brought to the city and borne through the

principal streets, in the midst of universal excitement, anger, and

cries for vengeance. Black streamers were displayed from the houses;

shops were closed; the newspapers appeared in mourning. A public

funeral was attended by the whole population. Captain Whitby was

indicted for murder, and took care to keep out of the reach of United

States law-officers. This homicide happened just in time for the May

election in New York. Both parties attempted to make use of it. The

Federalists proclaimed that the blood of Pierce was on the head of

Jefferson and his followers. These retorted, that the English pirates

were the friends and comrades of the Federalists. Cheetham had seen the

first lieutenant of the Leander, disguised, in company with eight or

ten of them, some days after the murder!!! And the Democratic

Republicans, as was and is still usual, had a majority at the polls.

From time to time short paragraphs appeared in the papers, advertising

Miranda's success. "His flag was flying on every fort from Cumana to

Laguayra." "The whole of this fine country may be considered as lost to

Spain." Then came tidings of sadder complexion. He had been beaten off

with the loss of forty men, taken prisoners. The Spaniards had

threatened to hang them as pirates, but they would not dare to do it.

The British had furnished Miranda with forty Spanish prisoners, as

hostages, "to avenge the threatened insult to the feelings of every

friend to the rights of self-government in every part of the world." At

last, news arrived from the Gulf which left Miranda's failure in his

first attempt to land no longer doubtful. This, of course, made the

position of Ogden and Smith more dangerous, and their case more difficult

to manage.

When the trial of Colonel Smith came on, public interest revived, and

became stronger than before. The court-room was crowded by intelligent

spectators during the whole course of the proceedings, The case was

peculiar, and had almost a dramatic interest. Here was a Government

prosecution against a man well known in the community, for an offence

new to our courts; and the heads of that Government, Jefferson and

Madison, were indirectly on trial at the same time:--"For, if Smith and

Ogden are acquitted," said the Federal papers, "then must the whole

guilt rest on the Administration." Apart from the political interest of

the trial, the eminence of the counsel employed would have commanded an

audience anywhere. Never, since New York has had courts of justice,

have so many distinguished lawyers adorned and dignified her bar as in

the first twenty years of this century. In this case, nearly all of the

leaders were retained: Nathan Sandford, District Attorney, and

Pierrepoint Edwards, for the prosecution; for the defence, Cadwallader

Colden, Josiah Ogden Hoffman, Thomas Addis Emmet, Richard Harrison, and

Washington Morton.[*]

[Footnote *: Judge Patterson, of the United States Court, occupied the

bench with Judge Tallmadge, until ill-health obliged him to withdraw.

He died soon after.]

Mr. Colden handed the Clerk a list of his witnesses, and requested him

to call their names. Among them were those of Madison, Dearborn,

Gallatin, Granger, and Robert Smith, all members of the Government. He

then read the affidavit of service of subpoenas upon them on the 25th

of May, and, inasmuch as these gentlemen had not obeyed the subpoena,

and as Colonel Smith could not safely proceed to trial without their

testimony, he moved that an attachment issue against them.

The District Attorney opposed the motion, on the ground that the

testimony of these witnesses could not possibly be of any use to the

defendant. None of them were present in New York when the Leander was

fitted out. And even if it could be shown by these witnesses that the

Administration had approved of this illegal expedition, it would not

help the defendant. This is a country governed by laws, and not by

arbitrary edicts. If Colonel Smith had violated these laws, he had

rendered himself liable to punishment. He could not escape by making

the President a _particeps criminis_. An amusing letter was read from

Madison, Dearborn, and Smith, which stated, "that the President, taking

into view the state of our public affairs, has specially signified to

us that our official duties cannot consistently therewith be at this

juncture dispensed with." They suggested that a commission should issue

for the purpose of taking their respective testimonies.

Colden insisted that this was an attempt of the Executive to interfere

with the Judiciary, which ought not to be tolerated. Counsel in

criminal cases had always the right to stand face to face with

witnesses. It was outrageous that the President should first approve of

the conduct of Colonel Smith, then order a prosecution against him and

forbid his witnesses to attend the trial.

The Court refused to grant an attachment. And later in the trial, when

the defence offered Rufus King to prove the President's knowledge and

approbation of the enterprise, the Court decided against the admission

of the evidence.

The history of the expedition in New York, as shown by the testimony,

was briefly this:--Colonel Smith introduced Miranda to Ogden; and Ogden

agreed to furnish his armed ship Leander, and to load her with the

necessary provisions, stores, arms, and ammunition. He estimated his

expenditure at seventy thousand dollars. Miranda had brought with him

from London a bill of exchange on New York for eight hundred pounds,

which had been paid, and had drawn bills on England and on Trinidad for

seven thousand pounds, which had not been paid. This was all that Ogden

had received. But if the enterprise were successful, he was to be paid

two hundred per cent, advance on the ship and cargo. Smith had engaged

fifteen or twenty officers, without informing them of the object of the

expedition, but expressly stipulating in writing that they would not be

employed against England or France, and giving them a general verbal

assurance that they would speedily make their fortunes. In this he was

sincere, for he took his son from college and sent him with Miranda.

Smith had employed John Fink, a Bowery butcher, to engage men who could

serve on horseback. Fink enlisted twenty-three at fifteen dollars a

month, and fifteen more as a bounty. They were not to be taken out of

the territory of the United States. Some of them were told that the

President was raising a mounted guard; others, that they were to guard

the mail from Washington to New Orleans. One of Fink's papers was shown

on the trial, indorsed, "Muster-Roll for the President's Guard." Smith

had furnished the bounty-money, but it did not appear that he had

authorized these misrepresentations of Fink, who developed a talent in

this business which forty years later would have made his fortune as an

emigrant-runner. Abundant proofs of the purchase of military clothing,

arms, powder, shot, and cannon were produced.

The Counsel for Colonel Smith, unable to get the connivance of the

Administration before the Jury in the shape of evidence, coolly assumed

it as established, and urged it in defence of their client. They used

his memorial to Congress as their brief, enlarged upon the arbitrary

conduct of the Judge in the examinations and upon the tyrannical

interference of the President with their witnesses. As Mr. Emmet

cleverly and classically remarked, quoting from Tacitus's description

of the funeral of Junia, "Perhaps their very absence rendered them more

decided witnesses in our favor." They also maintained that the Act of

1794, under which the prisoner was indicted, did not prohibit an

enterprise of this character. Even if it did, no proof existed that

this expedition was organized in New York. On the contrary, it was

known that Miranda had gone hence to Jacquemel, and had made his

preparations there, in a port out of our jurisdiction.

This point made, they boldly went a step farther, and declared that the

United States were actually at war with Spain. The affair of the

Kempers, and of Flanagan in Louisiana, the obstruction of the Mobile

Kiver, the depredations upon our commerce by Spanish privateers, were

sufficient proof of a state of war. We had a right to meet force by

force. The President must have been of this opinion, else he could not

have violated his trust by authorizing this expedition.

The case for the defence, considered in a logical point of view, was

desperate; but no case is desperate before a Jury; and when Mr. Colden,

Mr. Hoffman, and Mr. Emmet had each in his own peculiar mode of

eloquence appealed to the Jury to protect their client, already

punished by removal from his place, without a trial or even a hearing,

for an offence committed with, the sanction of his superior

officers,--when they compared this State prosecution to the attempts

made by despotic European governments to crush innocent men by the

machinery of law, and asserted that it was instituted solely to gratify

the malice of the King of Spain, a bitter enemy to the United

States,--and when they enlarged upon the grandeur of an undertaking to

give liberty to the down-trodden victims of Colonial tyranny, comparing

Miranda and his friends to our own Revolutionary heroes, there could be

but little doubt of the verdict. But there was an uneasy feeling after

the District Attorney had closed. He demolished with ease the arguments

of the other side, for not one of them had sufficient strength to stand

alone. Smith's perpetual excuse, that he had been led astray by the

belief of connivance in Washington, was preposterous. If he had been

anxious to know the sentiments of Government on the subject, he might

at any time within six days have ascertained whether Miranda told him

truth or not. He spoke of the cruelty and reckless folly of all such

attempts upon a neighboring people; asked the Jury how they would like

to see an armed force landed upon our shores to take part with one or

the other of the great political parties; and closed with a few strong

words, as true at this day as then:--"If you acquit the defendant, you

say to the world that the United States have renounced the law of

nations,--that they permit their citizens not only to violate their own

laws with impunity, but to invade the people of other countries with

hostile force in a time of peace, as avarice, ambition, or the thought

of plunder may dictate. Such a decision would justify the acts of the

pirate on the ocean, and would sink our national character to the

barbarism of savage tribes."

The Jury were out two hours, and brought in a verdict of not guilty,

which gave great satisfaction to Federal editors. A few days afterward,

Mr. Ogden was acquitted.[1]

[Footnote 1: Mr. Jefferson, after the expiration of his second term,

wrote to Don Valentino de Fornonda as follows:--

"Your predecessor [Yrujo] wished it to be believed that we were in

unjustifiable coöperation in Miranda's expedition.

"I solemnly and on my personal truth and honor declare to you that this

was entirely without foundation, and that there was neither coöperation

nor connivance on our part. He informed us he was about to attempt the

liberation of his native country from bondage, and intimated a hope of

our aid, or connivance at least. He was at once informed, that, though

we had great cause of complaint against Spain, and even of war, yet,

whenever we should think proper to act as her enemy, it should be

openly and aboveboard, and that our hostility should never be exercised

by such petty means. We had no suspicion that he expected to engage men

here, but merely to purchase military stores. Against this there was no

law, nor, consequently, any authority for us to interpose. On the other

hand, we deemed it improper to betray his voluntary communication to

the agents of Spain. Although his measures were many days in

preparation at New York, we never had the least intimation or suspicion

of his engaging men in his enterprise until he was gone; and I presume

that the secrecy of his proceedings kept them equally unknown to the

Marquis Yrujo and to the Spanish Consul at New York, since neither of

them gave us any information of the enlistment of men until it was too

late for any measures taken at Washington to prevent their departure."]

This is a brief account of the first filibuster-trial in the United

States. Other heroes of this profession, compared with whom Smith and

Ogden were spotless, have since come before our courts only to be

turned loose upon the world again. No other result is to be

anticipated. It is an established principle with our fellow-citizens,

that no man is happy, or ought to be, who lives under any other system

of government than our own. Let a lawyer pronounce the magic formula,

"Liberty to the oppressed," or "Free institutions to the victims of

despotism," and, _presto!_--rascality is metamorphosed into merit.

After all, it makes such a difference, when it is only our neighbor's

ox that is gored!

Here closed the first act of the expedition. Colonel Smith lost his

office, and Mr. Ogden stopped payment. The passengers by the Leander

fared worse. There were two hundred men on board: one hundred and

twenty belonged to the ship; the others had been engaged by Smith and

his agent Fink as officers, dragoons, printers, and armorers. With the

exception of two or three, none of them had seen their commander or

knew their destination. The officers, all gentlemen "of crooked

fortunes," supposed that they were sailing to enlarge the area of

freedom somewhere in America; but what particular region of the Spanish

dominions was to be subjected to this wholesome treatment they neither

knew nor cared, provided they could improve their own financial

condition. Both officers and privates were for the most part

serviceable, steady men, worthy of a more efficient leader.

On the 12th of February, they were overhauled and searched by H.B.M.

ship Cleopatra. Nineteen men with American protections were carried off

in the frigate's boat, and twelve native Americans taken out of prizes

sent back to replace them. The Leander's papers were examined and

pronounced unsatisfactory. Miranda was obliged to go on board the

Cleopatra, where he had a long private conversation with the captain.

He returned with full liberty to proceed, and with a written pass to

prevent detention or search by British cruisers. This adventure was

made to give an air of respectability to the enterprise; and Miranda

hinted to his suite that the English captain had promised to join him

with his frigate. A day or two later, the Leander took other airs upon

herself. Meeting a small Spanish schooner, laden with logwood, off the

Haytian coast, Lewis fired into her, and ordered the captain on board

with his papers, for the mere pleasure of exercising power. The

Spaniard, as soon as he got back to his own craft, made the best of his

way home and gave the first alarm.

On the 18th of February, they cast anchor at Jacquemel. Lewis went

immediately to Port au-Prince, to engage the Emperor, a ship commanded

by his brother, to join the expedition. Miranda remained behind to

organize his followers. He at last announced to them that he intended

to land near Caracas; the whole country would rise at his name; his

brave Americans would form the nucleus and the heart of a great army;

there was no Spanish force in the province to resist him. In a general

order, "Parole, America; Countersign, Liberty," he assigned to his

officers their rank in the Columbian army, distributing them into the

Engineers, Artillery, Dragoons, Riflemen, and Foot. Another general

order, "Parole, Warren; Countersign, Bunker's Hill," fixed the uniforms

of the different corps,--to be distinguished by blue, yellow, or green

facings. All hands were set to work upon the crowded deck. Printers

struck off proclamations and blank commissions in the name of "Don

Francisco de Miranda, Commander-in-Chief of the Columbian Army";

carpenters made pike-handles; armorers repaired the arms bought in New

York; (they had cost little, and were worth less;) the regimental

tailor and his disciples stitched the gay facings upon the new

uniforms; files of awkward fellows were put through the manual exercise

by an old drill-sergeant; and the young gentlemen officers read

diligently in treatises on war, or listened to the discourses of their

general upon the noble art. In the midst of this stir of preparation,

Lewis returned unsuccessful, without the ship Emperor; but Miranda

seemed in no hurry to depart. He continued his lectures and his

drilling until the 28th of March. At last he hoisted the new Columbian

flag,--a tricolor, blue, yellow, and red,--fired a grand salute, and

stood gallantly out of the harbor, where he had wasted six precious

weeks.

Captain Lewis had chartered at Port-au-Prince the Bee, a small, unarmed

schooner, and had bought the Bacchus, a vessel of the same class, last

from Laguayra, whose captain and men disappeared mysteriously after

their arrival at Jacquemel. Some of the Leander's hands volunteered for

the schooners, to get out of the crowded ship; others were forced on

board, to make up a crew. The little fleet steered for Bonair, but,

through the ignorance of their pilot, or of their captain, found

themselves, after a ten-days' cruise, seventy miles to leeward, off the

Gulf of Venezuela. The Leander was a dull sailer; and, with the wind

and current against her, it took them four days to beat up to the

Island of Aruba, and seven more to reach Bonair. On the evening of the

27th of April, they were lying to off Puerto Cabello, preparing to

land, and sure of success, when they made out two Spanish

_guardacostas_ close in shore, beating up to windward. Miranda thought

them unworthy of attention, and gave the order to stand in. But the

pilot mistook the landmarks, owing to the darkness, and missed the

point agreed upon for landing. The Bacchus was sent in to reconnoitre

and did not return, although signals of recall were repeated throughout

the night. About midnight signals were noticed passing between the fort

at Puerto Cabello and the _guardacostas_; Captain Lewis beat to

quarters, and kept his men at their guns until morning. At daybreak the

Bacchus was seen close in shore, carrying a press of sail and closely

pursued by the Spanish vessels. The Leander bore down with a flowing

sheet upon the enemy, fired a few ineffective shot, and then, for some

reason best known to her captain, or to Miranda, hauled on to the wind,

and sailed away, leaving the schooners to take care of themselves. The

_guardacostas_ soon took possession of both, and carried their prizes,

with sixty prisoners, into Puerto Cabello,[1] before the eyes of their

astonished and indignant comrades, who could not understand such a want

of courage or conduct on the part of their chief.

[Footnote 1: The unfortunate men taken in the schooners were tried at

Puerto Cabello for piracy. Ten officers were hanged, their heads cut

off and stuck upon poles, and six of them sent to Caracas, two to

Laguayra, and two set up at Puerto Cabello. The other prisoners were

sentenced to the chain-gang. The execution took place on the 21st of

July, the day before Smith was acquitted in New York.]

After this disaster, the Leander sailed for Bonair for water. Miranda

still assumed a confident tone, and called a council of war to

deliberate whether they should attempt a landing at Coro. The council

decided, that, in view of the loss they had sustained, it would be

advisable to make for Trinidad in search of reinforcements. With wind

and tide against them, and a slow ship, the voyage was long. They were

reduced to their last barrel of bread, when they fell in with the

English sloop-of-war Lily, Captain Campbell, who was looking for

Miranda, and who sent supplies of all kinds on board. On the 6th of

June, they ran into Bridgetown, Barbadoes. Admiral Cochrane, who

commanded on that station, gave Miranda every assistance in his power,

and offered to put some of his smaller vessels under his orders, upon

condition that all goods imported into the new state of Columbia in

British bottoms should be assessed ten per cent, lower than the

products of any other nation, except the United States. Miranda signed

a formal agreement to this effect, and sailed for Trinidad, accompanied

by H.B.M. ships Lily and Express, and the Trimmer, a transport

schooner. Captain Lewis, whose repeated quarrels with Miranda had

affected the discipline of the force, resigned at Barbadoes. He was

succeeded by Captain Johnson, a daring fellow, who risked and lost life

and property in this expedition.

The Governor of Trinidad, like all the English of the Gulf, was well

disposed to aid in an attack on the Spanish Provinces. Eighty

volunteers of all nations, most of them worthless fellows and

candidates for a commission, joined the fleet at this place. Miranda

was once more in high spirits. His army amounted to four hundred men,

and he had secured the cooperation of the English. Success seemed

certain. He issued a new proclamation to his followers, headed "To

Victory and Wealth," and set sail, accompanied by seven small British

war-vessels and three transports.

On the 2d of August, the fleet anchored within nine miles of La Vela de

Coro. The next day two hundred and ninety men were landed in the boats

of the squadron. They were all "Mirandanians," the English furnishing

only the means of transportation and the necessary supplies. As the

boats approached the shore, they were fired upon from the bushes which

lined the beach. The Columbians jumped into the water and charged; the

Spaniards retreated to a fort near the shore. This was carried, sword

in hand,--the Spaniards leaping from the walls and flying in all

directions. Miranda then formed his party, and marched to the town, a

quarter of a mile distant, which was evacuated by the Spaniards with

such precipitation that they left their cannon loaded. The inhabitants

had fled, as well as the military, carrying off all their movable

property. The Columbian colors were hoisted, flags of truce sent in all

directions, the printed proclamations distributed about the neighboring

country; but in vain; nobody appeared.

The same evening the Liberators marched twelve miles in a northwesterly

direction to Coro. They arrived an hour before dawn, and found the town

silent and deserted. Dividing themselves into two parties, they entered

cautiously on opposite sides, for fear of an ambuscade,--but,

unfortunately, when the detachments met in the Grand Plaza, they

mistook each other, in the dusk of the morning, for the enemy, and

fired. Miranda's most efficient officer fell, shot through both thighs.

One man was killed, and seven others badly wounded. Not a soul was

found in the place, except those who were too old or too ill to move,

and the occupants of the prison. The jailer presented himself,

surrendered his keys, and informed the General that the Governor had

forced the citizens to leave their homes. Miranda remained in the

deserted town for five days, endeavoring, by the most alluring

proclamations, to bring the inhabitants back. But it was useless. Not a

man presented himself. He then lost heart, and, instead of advancing

into the country, ordered a retreat to La Vela, and reembarked on the

19th.

Those he left behind in the Leander had been still more unfortunate.

Captain Johnson had gone in the boats to a river three or four miles to

the eastward, for water, and, while filling his casks, was set upon by

a party of Spanish soldiers. He was killed, fighting bravely, with

fifteen of his men. The remainder escaped with difficulty.

The discomfited invaders sailed for the Island of Aruba, where their

English allies, pretty well satisfied that nothing could be done with

this expedition, left them. Miranda landed his men and took formal

possession of the island. He sent an ambassador to the Governor of the

neighboring island of Curaçoa, requesting him to surrender. This

request was declined. He was equally unsuccessful in a mission to

Jamaica, begging for assistance from Admiral Dacres. Dacres refused, on

the ground that he had no orders from his Government.

Miranda remained at Aruba, drilling, issuing proclamations, and holding

courts martial, until the want of provisions brought the enterprise to

an end. An English ship-of-war, which touched at the island, offered

him a safe means of escape. On the 29th of October, after a passage of

twenty-five days, the Liberators arrived at Trinidad, and disbanded in

disgrace. The blue and yellow uniforms they had worn with pride, as

"Columbians," on their last visit, were hastily laid aside to escape

the scoff of the rabble, who jeered them as adventurers and

merry-andrews. Miranda kept out of sight until he could get the

opportunity of a passage to England. All his followers who could find

means to quit the island made their way home as best they could. To

conclude the business, the Leander was sold by order of the courts, and

the few poor fellows who had remained by her received a small share of

the proceeds. Nobody else was paid the smallest fraction of the sums

the General had so liberally promised.

That a commander, safely landed with three hundred fighting men, in

possession of Coro, whose peninsular situation might have afforded him

an inexpugnable position, master of the sea, and backed by an English

fleet, should have retreated, without effecting anything, from a

country ripe for rebellion since the conspiracy of 1797, can be

explained only in one way: he must have been ignorant of the real

feelings of the people, and totally unfit to lead such an expedition.

Miranda had what we may call a pretty talent for war. He had studied

the principles of the art, and had seen some service. Excited by the

splendid career of Washington, he, like a certain distinguished

Frenchman, determined to imitate him and become the liberator of his

country. When the Giant at a show bends the iron bar, it seems so easy

that every strong man in the crowd thinks he can do as much, until he

tries. It needs a Giant of the first class to handle a people in

revolution. Miranda was not made of that kind of stuff. He was weak and

inefficient, fond of mystery and pomp, easily affected by flattery,

loving dearly to hear himself talk, and unable to control his temper.

His incessant quarrels with Captain Lewis were one cause of the loss of

the schooners off Puerto Cabello. A want of quickness and energy was

felt in all his operations. Delays are proverbially dangerous, but in a

_coup de main_ fatal. The time wasted by him at Jacquemel and at Aruba

was employed by the Spaniards in making preparations for defence. They

had few troops, and did not dare to trust the natives with arms, but

they succeeded in persuading them that Miranda and his men were pagans

and pirates, whose triumph would be ten times more insufferable than

the rule of the mother country.

If Miranda was incompetent to carry out a liberating expedition, he had

wonderful success in talking it up. For twenty years he had carried

this project about with him in America and in Europe. It was elaborated

to perfection in every part, and there were answers prepared to every

objection. The new government was to be modelled upon the English

Constitution,--an hereditary chief, to be called Inca,--a senate,

nominated by the chief, composed of nobles, but not hereditary,--and a

chamber elected by suffrage, limited by a property qualification. He

had collected all the statistics of population and of trade, to show

what commercial advantages the world might expect from a free South

American government. And, "rising upon a wind of prophecy," he already

saw in the future a ship-canal across the Isthmus of Panama, and the

Nicaragua route opened. He had laid these plans before Catharine of

Russia, who gave him money to help them on. Mr. Pitt listened, promised

him assistance in return for commercial privileges, and kept him in pay

for years. The French Revolutionists were eager to furnish him with an

army and a fleet. Rufus King, American Ambassador at London, sent word

of the scheme to Hamilton and Knox, who both approved of it. Miranda

seems to have made the same impression upon everybody. His extensive

travels and acquaintance with distinguished men, his knowledge of

facts, dates, and figures, his retentive and ready memory, his

wonderful cleverness in persuading his hearers, are spoken of in the

same terms by all. Dr. Rush wrote to a friend, that Miranda had dined

with him, and had talked about European politics as if he had been "in

the inside of all the kings and princes." He might have been a second

Count de St. Germain, if he had lived in the reign of Louis XIV.,

instead of in an era when men had abandoned the philosopher's stone,

and were seeking in politics for a new _magnum opus_, Constitutions, as

the certain means of perfecting the human species.

Everybody was mistaken in him. Although he talked "like an angel," in

action he was worthless. If he had never undertaken to carry out his

plans, he might have left an excellent reputation, and have remained in

South American memory as the possible Father of his Country: _Capax

imperii, nisi imperasset_. A short sketch of his career may be

interesting, before we dismiss him again to the oblivion from which we

have evoked him for this month.

Miranda entered the Spanish army in America at the age of seventeen,

and was advanced to be Colonel, a grade seldom or never before reached

by a Creole. He left the service before the close of the Revolutionary

War, travelled in the United States, and was admitted to the society of

Washington and of the leading men of the day. Here, his attainments,

quickness, and insatiable curiosity attracted attention. He knew the

topography and strategy of every battle fought during the war better

than our officers who had been on the field, and soon made himself

familiar with parties, and even with family connections in this

country. His constant topic was the independence of South America.

After the peace of 1783, Miranda went to England: Colonel Smith was

then Secretary of John Adams, the American Minister, and the

acquaintance between them began in London, which ended so disastrously

twenty years later in New York. Leaving England, he travelled over

Europe. At Cherson, he attracted the notice of Prince Potemkin, who

presented him to the Empress at Kiew. In 1790, when the dispute about

Nootka Sound[*] threatened to produce a war between Great Britain and

Spain, he reappeared in London, and proposed to Mr. Pitt his scheme for

revolutionizing the American Colonies. Pitt at once engaged his

services, but Spain yielded, and the project could not be carried out.

Miranda crossed to France, accepted a command in the Republican army,

and served, with credit, in the Netherlands, under Dumouriez, until the

Battle of Neerwinden. In November, 1792, the French rulers conceived

the idea of revolutionizing Spain, both in Europe and in America.

Brissot suggested Miranda as the fittest person for this purpose. He

was to take twelve thousand troops of the line from St. Domingo,

enlist, in addition, ten or fifteen thousand "_braves mulâtres_," and

make a descent, with this force, upon the Main. "_Le nom de Miranda_,"

wrote Brissot to Dumouriez, "_lui vaudra une armée; et ses talens, son

courage, son génie, tout nous répond du succès_." Monge, Gensonné,

Clavière, Pétion, were pleased with the plan, but Miranda started

difficulties. The French system was too democratic for his taste, and

the pressure of affairs in Europe soon turned the attention of Brissot

and his friends in another direction.

[Footnote *: In May, 1789, the Spanish sloop-of-war Princesa seized

four English vessels engaged in a trade with the natives of Vancouver's

Island, and took them into a Mexican port as prizes, on the ground that

they had violated the Spanish Colonial laws. The English government

denied the claim of Spain to those distant regions, and insisted upon

ample satisfaction. The King of Spain was obliged to submit to avoid

war, but the question of territory was left open.]

After the disastrous affair of Neerwinden, Miranda was accused of

misconduct, arrested, and sent to Paris for trial, but was acquitted by

the _Tribunal Révolutionnaire_, and conducted home in triumph. He was

again imprisoned for _incivisme_, during the Reign of Terror, and did

not recover his liberty until the general jail-delivery which followed

the death of Robespierre. He was seized for the third time in 1797, by

the Directory, as an adherent of the Pichegru faction, and banished

from France.

In January, 1798, Mr. Pitt again sent for Miranda, and a new plan was

arranged for the emancipation of South America. On this occasion, the

coöperation of the United States was confidently relied upon. Both Pitt

and our own rulers foresaw that Spain must inevitably fall a prey to

France, and that the whole of her American possessions would probably

share her fate. Our relations with France were in so critical a

condition, that we were making preparations for defence; and it was, of

course, of the highest importance to our safety, that the Floridas and

Louisiana should not fall into the hands of a powerful enemy. It was

proposed, consequently, to form a commercial and defensive alliance

between England, the United States, and South America. We were to get

the Floridas and Louisiana to the Mississippi, and in return to furnish

a land-force of ten thousand men. Great Britain would provide the

fleet, in consideration of certain important advantages in trade.

Miranda kept his friends in the United States fully advised of the

progress of affairs. Hamilton and Knox were in favor of the project,

provided war were declared. Our provisional army might then have played

a brilliant part. But there was no war. President Adams refused to

listen to Miranda's communications, and patched up our difficulties

with France. Nothing was done by the English.

In 1801 Lord Sidmouth revived Miranda's hopes, but the Peace of Amiens

put a stop to the preparations. In 1804 Mr. Pitt was again at the head

of affairs, and renewed his intercourse with Miranda. Orders were given

to prepare ships and to enrol men, when the hopes of the third

coalition again suspended the execution of the project.

It was after this last blow from Fortune that Miranda came to New York

and fitted out the expedition we have undertaken to describe. His

disastrous failure seemed neither to destroy his hopes, nor to shake

the confidence of his English friends in his pretensions. When he

returned to England from Trinidad, he found ministers prepared to

embark with energy in the South American scheme. This time a fleet and

an army were really assembled at Cork, and Sir Arthur Wellesley was to

command them,--when the Spanish Revolution broke out, altered at once

the face of affairs in Europe, and turned Sir Arthur and his army

toward Portugal, to begin that brilliant series of campaigns which

drove the French out of the Peninsula.

Few men fix their minds pertinaciously upon an object, and adhere to

the pursuit through life, without at least a partial attainment of it.

Miranda, the victim of so many bitter disappointments, at last found

himself for a few months in the position he had so often dreamed of.

When the news of the fall of Seville, and of the dispersion of the

Junta who governed in the name of Ferdinand VII., reached South

America, open rebellion broke out at Caracas. King Joseph Bonaparte had

sent over a proclamation, imploring his trusty and well-beloved South

Americans to come to his paternal arms,--or, if they would not do that,

at least to set up a government for themselves, and not take part with

Ferdinand and England. His emissaries were hunted down and hanged,

wherever caught. Revolutionary Juntas were established all over the

country. On the 19th of April, 1810, the American Confederation of

Venezuela, in Congress assembled, undertook to rule in the name of

Ferdinand VII., but in reality as an independent government. Miranda

was called to the command of the native army. On the 5th of July, 1811,

the Congress published their Declaration of Independence, and a

Constitution, both of them remarkable state-papers. In point of

liberality of sentiment and elegance of style they will bear comparison

with our own celebrated documents of '76 and '87. Indeed, in all these

Spanish political plays, the plot has been good, the text admirable,

but the actors so poor as to spoil the piece. So it fell out in

Venezuela. At first the Patriots were successful; Miranda defeated the

Royalists and took Valencia. The principal towns fell into the hands of

the insurgents. Then, came the terrible earthquake of 1812, which not

only shattered the resources of the Patriots, but was skilfully used by

the Church as a proof that Providence had taken sides against the

rebels. Monteverde, the Spanish general, recaptured Valencia. Congress

placed the dictatorship with unlimited power in Miranda's hands, but he

was not the man for desperate situations. On the 6th of July, the

Royalists took Puerto Cabello; Caracas fell on the 28th; and Miranda,

betrayed by his own party into the hands of the Spaniards, was sent a

prisoner to Cadiz in October. Simon Bolivar and others, men of

different mettle, regained all that had been lost, and cut loose the

Colonies from Spain. From California to Cape Horn the inestimable

system of self-government was established. According to the theory, the

South Americans should have been prosperous and happy; but,

unfortunately, the result has been murder, robbery, and general ruin.

The burden of taking care of one's self, which the North American had

the strength to bear, has crushed the poor half-caste Spaniard. There

are persons who assert that a political regimen which agrees so well

with us must therefore be good for all others. It may be instructive to

such believers in system to compare Humboldt's narrative of the

cultivation shown by the great Colonial Universities of Mexico, Quito,

and Lima, of the pleasing Creole society that entertained him, and the

peaceful quiet and security he noticed throughout country, with the

relations of modern travellers or newspaper-correspondents who visit

those semi-barbarous regions.

Don Francisco de Miranda did not live to hear of the freedom of his

"Columbia." Before the close of the year 1812 he died in prison, at

Cadiz. Thus perished the most gentlemanlike of filibusters, since the

days when Jason sailed in the Argo to extend the blessing of Greek

institutions over Colchis and to appropriate the Golden Fleece.

* * * * *

THE PROFESSOR'S STORY.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE MORNING AFTER.

Colonel Sprowle's family arose late the next morning. The fatigues and

excitements of the evening and the preparation for it were followed by

a natural collapse, of which somnolence was a leading symptom. The sun

shone into the window at a pretty well opened angle when the Colonel

first found himself sufficiently awake to address his yet slumbering

spouse.

"Sally!" said the Colonel, in a voice that was a little husky,--for he

had finished off the evening with an extra glass or two of "Madary,"

and had a somewhat rusty and headachy sense of renewed existence, on

greeting the rather advanced dawn,--"Sally!"

"Take care o' them custard-cups! There they go!"

Poor Mrs. Sprowle was fighting the party over in her dream; and as the

visionary custard-cups crashed down through one lobe of her brain into

another, she gave a start as if an inch of lightning from a quart

Leyden jar had jumped into one of her knuckles with its sudden and

lively _poonk_!

"Sally!" said the Colonel,--"wake up, wake up! What 'r' y' dreamin'

abaout?"

Mrs. Sprowle raised herself, by a sort of spasm, _sur son séant_, as

they say in France,--up on end, as we have it in New England. She

looked first to the left, then to the right, then straight before her,

apparently without seeing anything, and at last slowly settled down,

with her two eyes, blank of any particular meaning, directed upon the

Colonel.

"What time is't?" she said.

"Ten o'clock. What 'y' been dreamin' abaout? Y' giv a jump like a

hoppergrass. Wake up, wake up! Th' party's over, and y' been asleep all

the mornin'. The party's over, I tell ye! Wake up!"

"Over!" said Mrs. Sprowle, who began to define her position at

last,--"over! I should think 'twas time 'twas over! It's lasted a

hundud year. I've been workin' for that party longer 'n Methuselah's

lifetime, sence I been asleep. The pies wouldn' bake, and the blo'monge

wouldn' set, and the ice-cream wouldn' freeze, and all the folks kep'

comin' 'n' comin' 'n' comin',--everybody I ever knew in all my

life,--some of 'em's been dead this twenty year 'n' more,--'n' nothin'

for 'em to eat nor drink. The fire wouldn' burn to cook anything, all

we could do. We blowed with the belluses, 'n' we stuffed in paper 'n'

pitch-pine kindlin's, but nothin' could make that fire burn; 'n' all

the time the folks kep' comin', as if they'd never stop,--'n' nothin'

for 'em but empty dishes, 'n' all the borrowed chaney slippin' round on

the waiters 'n' chippin' 'n' crackin'. I wouldn' go through what I been

through t'-night for all th' money in th' Bank,--I do believe it's

harder t' have a party than t'"----

Mrs. Sprowle stated the case strongly.

The Colonel said he didn't know how that might be. She was a better

judge than he was. It was bother enough, anyhow, and he was glad that

it was over. After this, the worthy pair commenced preparations for

rejoining the waking world, and in due time proceeded down-stairs.

Everybody was late that morning, and nothing had got put to rights. The

house looked as if a small army had been quartered in it over night.

The tables were of course in huge disorder, after the protracted

assault they had undergone. There had been a great battle evidently,

and it had gone against the provisions. Some points had been stormed,

and all their defences annihilated, but here and there were centres of

resistance which had held out against all attacks,--large rounds of

beef, and solid loaves of cake, against which the inexperienced had

wasted their energies in the enthusiasm of youth or uninformed

maturity, while the longer-headed guests were making discoveries of

"shell-oysters" and "patridges" and similar delicacies.

The breakfast was naturally of a somewhat fragmentary character. A

chicken that had lost his legs in the service of the preceding campaign

was once more put on duty. A great ham stuck with cloves, as Saint

Sebastian was with arrows, was again offered for martyrdom. It would

have been a pleasant sight for a medical man of a speculative turn to

have seen the prospect before the Colonel's family of the next week's

breakfasts, dinners, and suppers. The trail that one of these great

rural parties leaves after it is one of its most formidable

considerations. Every door-handle in the house is suggestive of

sweetmeats for the next week, at least. The most unnatural articles of

diet displace the frugal but nutritious food of unconvulsed periods of

existence. If there is a walking infant about the house, it will

certainly have a more or less fatal fit from overmuch of some

indigestible delicacy. Before the week is out, everybody will be tired

to death of sugary forms of nourishment and long to see the last of the

remnants of the festival.

The family had not yet arrived at this condition. On the contrary, the

first inspection of the tables suggested the prospect of days of

unstinted luxury; and the younger portion of the household, especially,

were in a state of great excitement as the account of stock was taken

with reference to future internal investments, Some curious facts came

to light during these researches.

"Where's all the oranges gone to?" said Mrs. Sprowle. "I expected

there'd be ever so many of 'em left. I didn't see many of the folks

eatin' oranges. Where's the skins of 'em? There ought to be six dozen

orange-skins round on the plates, and there a'n't one dozen. And all

the small cakes, too, and all the sugar things that was stuck on the

big cakes.--Has anybody counted the spoons? Some of 'em got swallered,

perhaps. I hope they was plated ones, if they did!"

The failure of the morning's orange-crop and the deficit in other

expected residual delicacies were not very difficult to account for. In

many of the two-story Rockland families, and in those favored

households of the neighboring villages whose members had been invited

to the great party, there was a very general excitement among the

younger people on the morning after the great event. "Did y' bring home

somethin' from the party? What is it? What is it? Is it frût-cake? Is

it nuts and oranges and apples? Give me some! Give _me_ some!" Such a

concert of treble voices uttering accents like these had not been heard

since the great Temperance Festival with the celebrated "colation" in

the open air under the trees of the Parnassian Grove,--as the place was

christened by the young ladies of the Institute. The cry of the

children was not in vain. From the pockets of demure fathers, from the

bags of sharp-eyed spinsters, from the folded handkerchiefs of

light-fingered sisters, from the tall hats of sly-winking brothers,

there was a resurrection of the missing oranges and cakes and

sugar-things in many a rejoicing family-circle, enough to astonish the

most hardened "caterer" that ever contracted to feed a thousand people

under canvas.

The tender recollection of those dear little ones whom extreme youth or

other pressing considerations detain from scenes of festivity--a trait

of affection by no means uncommon among our thoughtful people

--dignifies those social meetings where it is manifested, and

sheds a ray of sunshine on our common nature. It is "an oasis in the

desert,"--to use the striking expression of the last year's

"Valedictorian" of the Apollinean Institute. In the midst of so much

that is purely selfish, it is delightful to meet such disinterested

care for others. When a large family of children are expecting a

parent's return from an entertainment, it will often require great

exertions on his part to provide himself so as to meet their reasonable

expectations. A few rules are worth remembering by all who attend

anniversary dinners in Faneuil Hall or elsewhere. Thus: Lobsters' claws

are always acceptable to children of all ages. Oranges and apples are

to be taken _one at a time_, until the coat-pockets begin to become

inconveniently heavy. Cakes are injured by sitting upon them; it is,

therefore, well to carry a stout tin box of a size to hold as many

pieces as there are children in the domestic circle. A very pleasant

amusement, at the close of one of these banquets, is grabbing for the

flowers with which the table is embellished. These will please the

ladies at home very greatly, and, if the children are at the same time

abundantly supplied with fruits, nuts, cakes, and any little ornamental

articles of confectionery which are of a nature to be unostentatiously

removed, the kind-hearted parent will make a whole household happy,

without any additional expense beyond the outlay for his ticket.

There were fragmentary delicacies enough left, of one kind and another,

at any rate, to make all the Colonel's family uncomfortable for the

next week. It bid fair to take as long to get rid of the remains of the

great party as it had taken to make ready for it.

In the mean time Mr. Bernard had been dreaming, as young men dream, of

gliding shapes with bright eyes and burning cheeks, strangely blended

with red planets and hissing meteors, and, shining over all, the white,

unwandering star of the North, girt with its tethered constellations.

After breakfast he walked into the parlor, where he found Miss Darley.

She was alone, and, holding a school-book in her hand, was at work with

one of the morning's lessons. She hardly noticed him as he entered,

being very busy with her book,--and he paused a moment before speaking,

and looked at her with a kind of reverence. It would not have been

strictly true to call her beautiful. For years,--since her earliest

womanhood,--those slender hands had taken the bread which repaid the

toil of heart and brain from the coarse palms that offered it in the

world's rude market. It was not for herself alone that she had bartered

away the life of her youth, that she had breathed the hot air of

school-rooms, that she had forced her intelligence to posture before

her will, as the exigencies of her place required,--waking to mental

labor,--sleeping to dream of problems,--rolling up the stone of

education for an endless twelvemonth's term, to find it at the bottom

of the hill again when another year called her to its renewed

duties,--schooling her temper in unending inward and outward conflicts,

until neither dulness nor obstinacy nor ingratitude nor insolence could

reach her serene self-possession. Not for herself alone. Poorly as her

prodigal labors were repaid in proportion to the waste of life they

cost, her value was too well established to leave her without what,

under other circumstances, would have been a more than sufficient

compensation. But there were others who looked to her in their need,

and so the modest fountain which might have been filled to its brim was

continually drained through silent-flowing, hidden sluices.

Out of such a life, inherited from a race which had lived in conditions

not unlike her own, _beauty_, in the common sense of the term, could

hardly find leisure to develop and shape itself. For it must be

remembered, that symmetry and elegance of features and figure, like

perfectly formed crystals in the mineral world, are reached only by

insuring a certain necessary repose to individuals and to generations.

Human beauty is an agricultural product in the country, growing up in

men and women as in corn and cattle, where the soil is good. It is a

luxury almost monopolized by the rich in cities, bred under glass like

their forced pine-apples and peaches. Both in city and country, the

evolution of the physical harmonics which make music to our eyes

requires a combination of favorable circumstances, of which

alternations of unburdened tranquillity with intervals of varied

excitement of mind and body are among the most important. Where

sufficient excitement is wanting, as often happens in the country, the

features, however rich in red and white, get heavy, and the movements

sluggish; where excitement is furnished in excess, as is frequently

the case in cities, the contours and colors are impoverished, and the

nerves begin to make their existence known to the consciousness, as the

face very soon informs us.

Helen Darley could not, in the nature of things, have possessed the

kind of beauty which pleases the common taste. Her eye was calm,

sad-looking, her features very still, except when her pleasant smile

changed them for a moment, all her outlines were delicate, her voice

was very gentle, but somewhat subdued by years of thoughtful labor, and

on her smooth forehead one little hinted line whispered already that

Care was beginning to mark the trace which Time sooner or later would

make a furrow. She could not be a beauty; if she had been, it would

have been much harder for many persons to be interested in her. For,

although in the abstract we all love beauty, and although, if we were

sent naked souls into some ultramundane warehouse of soul-less bodies

and told to select one to our liking, we should each choose a handsome

one, and never think of the consequences,--it is quite certain that

beauty carries an atmosphere of repulsion as well as of attraction with

it, alike in both sexes. We may be well assured that there are many

persons who no more think of specializing their love of the other sex

upon one endowed with signal beauty, than they think of wanting great

diamonds or thousand-dollar horses. No man or woman can appropriate

beauty without paying for it,--in endowments, in fortune, in position,

in self-surrender, or other valuable stock; and there are a great many

who are too poor, too ordinary, too humble, too busy, too proud, to pay

any of these prices for it. So the unbeautiful get many more lovers

than the beauties; only, as there are more of them, their lovers are

spread thinner and do not make so much show.

The young master stood looking at Helen Darley with a kind of tender

admiration. She was such a picture of the martyr by the slow social

combustive process, that it almost seemed to him he could see a pale

lambent aureole round her head.

"I did not see you at the great party last evening," he said,

presently.

She looked up and answered, "No. I have not much taste for such large

companies. Besides, I do not feel as if my time belonged to me after it

has been paid for. There is always something to do, some lesson or

exercise,--and it so happened, I was very busy last night with the new

problems in geometry. I hope you had a good time."

"Very. Two or three of our girls were there. Rosa Milburn. What a

beauty she is! I wonder what she feeds on! Wine and musk and chloroform

and coals of fire, I believe; I didn't think there was such color and

flavor in a woman outside the tropics."

Miss Darley smiled rather faintly; the imagery was not just to her

taste: _femineity_ often finds it very hard to accept the fact of

_muliebrity_.

"Was"----?

She stopped short; but her question had asked itself.

"Elsie there? She was, for an hour or so. She looked frightfully

handsome. I meant to have spoken to her, but she slipped away before I

knew it."

"I thought she meant to go to the party," said Miss Darley. "Did she

look at you?"

"She did. Why?"

"And you did not speak to her?"

"No. I should have spoken to her, but she was gone when I looked for

her. A strange creature! Isn't there an odd sort of fascination about

her? You have not explained all the mystery about the girl. What does

she come to this school for? She seems to do pretty much as she likes

about studying."

Miss Darley answered in very low tones. "It was a fancy of hers to

come, and they let her have her way. I don't know what there is about

her, except that she seems to take my life out of me when she looks at

me. I don't like to ask other people about our girls. She says very

little to anybody, and studies, or makes believe study, almost what she

likes. I don't know what she is," (Miss Darley laid her hand,

trembling, on the young master's sleeve,) "but I can tell when she is

in the room without seeing or hearing her. Oh, Mr. Langdon, I am weak

and nervous, and no doubt foolish,--but--if there were women now, as

in the days of our Saviour, possessed of devils, I should think there

was something not human looking out of Elsie Venner's eyes!"

The poor girl's breast rose and fell tumultuously as she spoke, and her

voice labored, as if some obstruction were rising in her throat.

A scene might possibly have come of it, but the door opened. Mr. Silas

Peckham. Miss Darley got away as soon as she well could.

"Why did not Miss Darley go to the party last evening?" said Mr.

Bernard.

"Well, the fact is," answered Mr. Silas Peckham, "Miss Darley, she's

pootty much took up with the school. She's an industris young

woman,--yis, she _is_ industris,--but perhaps she a'n't quite so spry a

worker as some. Maybe, considerin' she's paid for her time, she isn't

fur out o' the way in occoopyin' herself evenin's,--that is, if so be

she a'n't smart enough to finish up all her work in the daytime.

Edoocation is the great business of the Institoot. Amoosements are

objec's of a secondary natur', accordin' to my v'oo." [The unspellable

pronunciation of this word is the touchstone of New England

Brahminism.]

Mr. Bernard drew a deep breath, his thin nostrils dilating, as if the

air did not rush in fast enough to cool his blood, while Silas Peckham

was speaking. The Head of the Apollinean Institute delivered himself of

these judicious sentiments in that peculiar acid, penetrating tone,

wadded with a nasal twang, which not rarely becomes hereditary after

three or four generations raised upon east winds, salt fish, and large,

white-bellied, pickled cucumbers. He spoke deliberately, as if weighing

his words well, so that, during his few remarks, Mr. Bernard had time

for a mental accompaniment with variations, accented by certain bodily

changes, which escaped Mr. Peckham's observation. First there was a

feeling of disgust and shame at hearing Helen Darley spoken of like a

dumb working animal. That sent the blood up into his cheeks. Then the

slur upon her probable want of force--_her_ incapacity, who made the

character of the school and left this man to pocket its profits--sent a

thrill of the old Wentworth fire through him, so that his muscles

hardened, his hands closed, and he took the measure of Mr. Silas

Peckham, to see if his head would strike the wall in case he went over

backwards all of a sudden. This would not do, of course, and so the

thrill passed off and the muscles softened again. Then came that state

of tenderness in the heart, overlying wrath in the stomach, in which

the eyes grow moist like a woman's, and there is also a great

boiling-up of objectionable terms out of the deep-water vocabulary, so

that Prudence and Propriety and all the other pious Ps have to jump

upon the lid of speech to keep them from boiling _over_ into fierce

articulation. All this was internal, chiefly, and of course not

recognized by Mr. Silas Peckham. The idea, that any full-grown,

sensible man should have any other notion than that of getting the most

work for the least money out of his assistants, had never suggested

itself to him.

Mr. Bernard had gone through this paroxysm, and cooled down, in the

period while Mr. Peckham was uttering these words in his thin, shallow

whine, twanging up into the frontal sinuses. What was the use of losing

his temper and throwing away his place, and so, among the consequences

which would necessarily follow, leaving the poor lady-teacher without a

friend to stand by her ready to lay his hand on the grand-inquisitor

before the windlass of his rack had taken one turn too many?

"No doubt, Mr. Peckham," he said, in a grave, calm voice, "there is a

great deal of work to be done in the school; but perhaps we can

distribute the duties a little more evenly after a time. I shall look

over the girls' themes myself, after this week. Perhaps there will be

some other parts of her labor that I can take on myself. We can arrange

a new programme of studies and recitations."

"We can do that," said Mr. Silas Peckham. "But I don't propose

mater'lly alterin' Miss Darley's dooties. I don't think she works to

hurt herself. Some of the Trustees have proposed interdoosin' new

branches of study, and I expect you will be pootty much occoopied with

the dooties that belong to your place. On the Sabbath you will be able

to attend divine service three times, which is expected of our

teachers. I shall continoo myself to give Sabbath Scriptur'-readin's to

the young ladies. That is a solemn dooty I can't make up my mind to

commit to other people. My teachers enjoy the Lord's day as a day of

rest. In it they do no manner of work,--except in cases of necessity or

mercy, such as fillin' out diplomas, or when we git crowded jest at the

end of a term, or when there is an extry number of poopils, or other

Providential call to dispense with the ordinance."

Mr. Bernard had a fine glow in his cheeks by this time,--doubtless

kindled by the thought of the kind consideration Mr. Peckham showed for

his subordinates in allowing them the between-meeting-time on Sundays

except for some special reason. But the morning was wearing away; so he

went to the school-room, taking leave very properly of his respected

principal, who soon took his hat and departed.

Mr. Peckham visited certain "stores" or shops, where he made inquiries

after various articles in the provision-line, and effected a purchase

or two. Two or three barrels of potatoes, which had sprouted in a

promising way, he secured at a bargain. A side of feminine beef was

also obtained at a low figure. He was entirely satisfied with a couple

of barrels of flour, which, being invoiced "slightly damaged", were to

be had at a reasonable price.

After this, Silas Peckham felt in good spirits. He had done a pretty

stroke of business. It came into his head whether he might not follow

it up with a still more brilliant speculation. So he turned his steps

in the direction of Colonel Sprowle's.

It was now eleven o'clock, and the battlefield of last evening was as

we left it. Mr. Peckham's visit was unexpected, perhaps not very well

timed, but the Colonel received him civilly.

"Beautifully lighted,--these rooms last night!" said Mr. Peckham.

"Winter-strained?"

The Colonel nodded.

"How much do you pay for your winter-strained?"

The Colonel told him the price.

"Very hahnsome supper,--very hahnsome! Nothin' ever seen like it in

Rockland. Must have been a great heap of things left over."

The compliment was not ungrateful, and the Colonel acknowledged it by

smiling and saying, "I should think the' was a trifle! Come and look."

When Silas Peckham saw how many delicacies had survived the evening's

conflict, his commercial spirit rose at once to the point of a

proposal.

"Colonel Sprowle," said he, "there's meat and cakes and pies and

pickles enough on that table to spread a hahnsome colation. If you'd

like to trade reasonable, I think perhaps I should be willin' to take

'em off your hands. There's been a talk about our havin' a celebration

in the Parnassian Grove, and I think I could work in what your folks

don't want and make myself whole by chargin' a small sum for tickets.

Broken meats, of course, a'n't of the same valoo as fresh provisions;

so I think you might be willin' to trade reasonable."

Mr. Peckham paused and rested on his proposal. It would not, perhaps,

have been very extraordinary, if Colonel Sprowle had entertained the

proposition. There is no telling beforehand how such things will strike

people. It didn't happen to strike the Colonel favorably. He had a

little red-blooded manhood in him.

"Sell you them things to make a colation out of?" the Colonel replied.

"Walk up to that table, Mr. Peckham, and help yourself! Fill your

pockets, Mr. Peckham! Fetch a basket, and our hired folks shall fill it

full for ye! Send a cart, if y' like, 'n' carry off them leavin's to

make a celebration for your pupils with! Only let me tell ye this:--as

sure's my name's Hezekiah Spraowle, you'll be known through the taown

'n' through the caounty, from that day forrard, as the Principal of the

Broken-Victuals Institoot!"

Even provincial human-nature sometimes has a touch of sublimity about

it. Mr. Silas Peckham had gone a little deeper than he meant, and come

upon the "hard pan," as the well-diggers call it, of the Colonel's

character, before he thought of it. A militia-colonel standing on his

sentiments is not to be despised. That was shown pretty well in New

England two or three generations ago. There were a good many plain

officers that talked about their "rigiment" and their "caounty" who

knew very well how to say "Make ready!" "Take aim!" "Fire!"--in the

face of a line of grenadiers with bullets in their guns and bayonets on

them. And though a rustic uniform is not always unexceptionable in its

cut and trimmings, yet there was many an ill-made coat in those old

times that was good enough to be shown to the enemy's front rank, too

often to be left on the field with a round hole in its left lapel that

matched another going right through the brave heart of the plain

country captain or major or colonel who was buried in it under the

crimson turf.

Mr. Silas Peckham said little or nothing. His sensibilities were not

acute, but he perceived that he had made a miscalculation. He hoped

that there was no offence,--thought it might have been mutooally

agreeable, conclooded he would give up the idee of a colation, and

backed himself out as if unwilling to expose the less guarded aspect of

his person to the risk of accelerating impulses.

The Colonel shut the door,--cast his eye on the toe of his right boot,

as if it had had a strong temptation,--looked at his watch, then round

the room, and, going to a cupboard, swallowed a glass of deep-red

brandy and water to compose his feelings.