Mercy Vint scanned the patient closely, and saw that Paul Carrick was

right. She followed his instructions to the letter, with one exception.

Instead of trusting to the old woman, of whom she had no very good

opinion, she had the great arm-chair brought into the sick-room, and

watched the patient herself by night and day; a gentle hand cooled his

temples; a gentle hand brought concentrated nourishment to his lips; and

a mellow voice coaxed him to be good and swallow it. There are voices it

is not natural to resist; and Griffith learned by degrees to obey this

one, even when he was half unconscious.

At the end of three days this zealous young nurse thought she discerned

a slight improvement, and told her mother so. Then the old lady came and

examined the patient, and shook her head gravely. Her judgment, like her

daughter's, was influenced by her wishes.

The fact is, both landlord and landlady were now calculating upon

Griffith's decease. Harry had told her about the money and jewels, and

the pair had put their heads together, and settled that Griffith was a

gentleman highwayman, and his spoil would never be reclaimed after his

decease, but fall to those good Samaritans, who were now nursing him,

and intended to bury him respectably. The future being thus settled,

this worthy couple became a little impatient; for Griffith, like Charles

the Second, was "an unconscionable time dying."

We order dinner to hasten a lingering guest; and, with equal force of

logic, mine host of the "Packhorse" spoke to White, the village

carpenter, about a full-sized coffin; and his wife set the old crone to

make a linen shroud, unobtrusively, in the bake-house.

On the third afternoon of her nursing, Mercy left her patient, and

called up the crone to tend him. She herself, worn out with fatigue,

threw herself on a bed in her mother's room, hard by, and soon fell

asleep.

She had slept about two hours when she was wakened by a strange noise in

the sick-chamber. A man and a woman quarrelling.

She bounded off the bed, and was in the room directly.

Lo and behold, there were the nurse and the dying man abusing one

another like pickpockets.

The cause of this little misunderstanding was not far to seek. The old

crone had brought up her work: _videlicet_, a winding-sheet all but

finished, and certain strips of glazed muslin about three inches deep.

She soon completed the winding-sheet, and hung it over two chairs in the

patient's sight; she then proceeded to double the slips in six, and nick

them; then she unrolled them, and they were frills, and well adapted to

make the coming corpse absurd, and divest it of any little dignity the

King of Terrors might bestow on it.

She was so intent upon her congenial task that she did not observe the

sick man had awakened, and was viewing her and her work with an

intelligent but sinister eye.

"What is that you are making?" said he, grimly.

The voice was rather clear, and strong, and seemed so loud and strange

in that still chamber, that it startled the woman mightily. She uttered

a little shriek, and then was wroth. "Plague take the man!" said she;

"how you scared me. Keep quiet, do; and mind your own business." [The

business of going off the hooks.]

"I ask you what is that you are making," said Griffith, louder, and

raising himself on his arm.

"Baby's frills," replied the woman, coolly, recovering that contempt for

the understandings of the dying which marks the veritable crone.

"Ye lie," said Griffith. "And there is a shroud. Who is that for?"

"Who should it be for, thou simple body? Keep quiet, do, till the change

comes. 'T won't be long now; art too well to last till sundown."

"So 't is for me, is it?" screamed Griffith. "I'll disappoint ye yet.

Give me my clothes. I'll not lie here to be measured for my grave, ye

old witch."

"Here's manners!" cackled the indignant crone. "Ye foul-mouthed knave!

is this how you thank a decent woman for making a comfortable corpse of

ye, you that has no right to die in your shoes, let a be such dainties

as muslin neck-ruff, and shroud of good Dutch flax."

At this Griffith discharged a volley in which "vulture," "hag,"

"blood-sucker," etc., blended with as many oaths: during which Mercy

came in.

She glided to him, with her dove's eyes full of concern, and laid her

hand gently on his shoulder. "You'll work yourself a mischief," said

she; "leave me to scold her. Why, my good Nelly, how could ye be so

hare-brained? Prithee take all that trumpery away this minute: none here

needeth it, nor shall not this many a year, please God."

"They want me dead," said Griffith to her, piteously, finding he had got

one friend, and sunk back on his pillow exhausted.

"So it seems," said Mercy, cunningly. "But I'd balk them finely. I'd up

and order a beef-steak this minute."

"And shall," said Griffith, with feeble spite. "Leastways, do you order

it, and I'll eat it: ---- d--n her!"

Sick men are like children; and women soon find that out, and manage

them accordingly. In ten minutes Mercy brought a good rump-steak to the

bedside, and said, "Now for 't. Marry come up, with her winding-sheets!"

Thus played upon, and encouraged, the great baby ate more than half the

steak; and soon after perspired gently, and fell asleep.

Paul Carrick found him breathing gently, with a slight tint of red in

his cheek, and told Mercy there was a change for the better. "We have

brought him to a true intermission," said he; "so throw in the bark at

once."

"What, drench his honor's worship!" said Mercy, innocently. "Nay, send

thou the medicine, and I'll find womanly ways to get it down him."

Next day came the doctor, and whispered softly to Mrs. Vint, "How are we

all up stairs?"

"Why couldn't you come afore?" replied Mrs. Vint, crossly. "Here's

Farrier Carrick stepped in, and curing him out of hand,--the meddlesome

body."

"A farrier rob me of my patient!" cried the doctor, in high dudgeon.

"Nay, good sir, 't is no fault of mine. This Paul is a sort of a kind of

a follower of our Mercy's: and she is mistress here, I trow."

"And what hath his farriership prescribed? Friar's balsam, belike."

"Nay, I know not; but you may soon learn, for he is above, physicking

the gentleman (a pretty gentleman!) and suiting to our Mercy--after a

manner."

The doctor declined to make one in so mixed a consultation.

"Give me my fee, dame," said he; "and as for this impertinent farrier,

the patient's blood be on his head; and I'd have him beware the law."

Mrs. Vint went to the stair-foot, and screamed, "Mercy, the good doctor

wants his fee. Who is to pay it, I wonder?"

"I'll bring it him anon," said a gentle voice; and Mercy soon came down

and paid it with a willing air that half disarmed professional fury.

"'T is a good lass, dame," said the doctor, when she was gone; "and, by

the same token, I wish her better mated than to a scrub of a farrier."

* * * * *

Griffith, still weak, but freed of fever, woke one glorious afternoon,

and heard a bird-like voice humming a quaint old ditty, and saw a field

of golden wheat through an open window, and seated at that window the

mellow songstress, Mercy Vint, plying her needle, with lowered lashes

but beaming face, a picture of health and quiet womanly happiness.

Things were going to her mind in that sick-room.

He looked at her, and at the golden corn and summer haze beyond, and the

tide of life seemed to rush back upon him.

"My good lass," said he, "tell me, where am I? for I know not."

Mercy started, and left off singing, then rose and came slowly towards

him, with her work in her hand.

Innocent joy at this new symptom of convalescence flushed her comely

features, but she spoke low.

"Good sir, at the 'Packhorse,'" said she, smiling.

"The 'Packhorse'? and where is that?"

"Hard by Allerton village."

"And where is that? not in Cumberland?"

"Nay, in Lancashire, your worship. Why, whence come you that know not

the 'Packhorse,' nor yet Allerton township? Come you from Cumberland?"

"No matter whence I come. I'm going on board ship,--like my father

before me."

"Alas, sir, you are not fit; you have been very ill, and partly

distraught."

She stopped; for Griffith turned his face to the wall, with a deep

groan. It had all rushed over him in a moment.

Mercy stood still, and worked on, but the water gathered in her eyes at

that eloquent groan.

By and by Griffith turned round again, with a face of anguish, and filmy

eyes, and saw her in the same place, standing, working, and pitying.

"What, are _you_ there still?" said he, roughly.

"Ay, sir; but I'll go, sooner than be troublesome. Can I fetch you

anything?"

"No. Ay, wine; bring me wine to drown it all."

She brought him a pint of wine.

"Pledge me," said he, with a miserable attempt at a smile.

She put the cup to her lips, and sipped a drop or two; but her dove's

eyes were looking up at him over the liquor all the time. Griffith soon

disposed of the rest, and asked for more.

"Nay," said she, "but I dare not: the doctor hath forbidden excess in

drinking."

"The doctor! What doctor?"

"Doctor Paul," said she, demurely. "He hath saved your life, sir, I do

think."

"Plague take him for that!"

"So say not I."

Here, she left him with an excuse. "'T is milking time, sir; and you

shall know that I am our dairymaid. I seldom trouble the inn."

Next day she was on the window-seat, working and beaming. The patient

called to her in peevish accents to put his head higher. She laid down

her work with a smile, and came and raised his head.

"There, now, that is too high," said he; "how awkward you are."

"I lack experience, sir, but not good will. There, now, is that a little

better?"

"Ay, a little. I'm sick of lying here. I want to get up. Dost hear what

I say? I--want--to get up."

"And so you shall. As soon as ever you are fit. To-morrow, perhaps.

To-day you must e'en be patient. Patience is a rare medicine."

* * * * *

Tic, tic, tic! "What a noise they are making down stairs. Go, lass, and

bid them hold their peace."

Mercy shook her head. "Good lack-a-day! we might as well bid the river

give over running; but, to be sure, this comes of keeping a hostelry,

sir. When we had only the farm, we were quiet, and did no ill to no

one."

"Well, sing me, to drown their eternal buzzing: it worries me dead."

"Me sing! alack, sir, I'm no songster."

"That is false. You sing like a throstle. I dote on music; and, when I

was delirious, I heard one singing about my bed; I thought it was an

angel at that time, but 't was only you, my young mistress: and now I

ask you, you say me nay. That is the way with you all. Plague take the

girl, and all her d----d, unreasonable, hypocritical sex. I warrant me

you'd sing, if I wanted to sleep, and dance the Devil to a standstill."

Mercy, instead of flouncing out of the room, stood looking on him with

maternal eyes, and chuckling like a bird. "That is right, sir: tax us

all to your heart's content. O, but I'm a joyful woman to hear you; for

't is a sure sign of mending when the sick take to rating of their

nurses."

"In sooth, I am too cross-grained," said Griffith, relenting.

"Not a whit, sir, for my taste. I've been in care for you: and now you

are a little cross, that maketh me easy."

"Thou art a good soul. Wilt sing me a stave after all?"

"La, you now; how you come back to that. Ay, and with a good heart: for,

to be sure, 't is a sin to gainsay a sick man. But indeed I am the

homeliest singer. Methinks 't is time I went down and bade them cook

your worship's supper."

"Nay, I'll not eat nor sup till I hear thee sing."

"Your will is my law, sir," said Mercy, dryly, and retired to the

window-seat; that was the first obvious preliminary. Then she fiddled

with her apron, and hemmed, and waited in hopes a reprieve might come;

but a peevish, relentless voice demanded the song at intervals.

So then she turned her head carefully away from her hearer, lowered her

eyes, and, looking the picture of guilt and shame all the time, sang an

ancient ditty. The poltroon's voice was rich, mellow, clear, and sweet

as honey; and she sang the notes for the sake of the words, not the

words for the sake of the notes, as all but Nature's singers do.

The air was grave as well as sweet; for Mercy was of an old Puritan

stock, and even her songs were not giddy-paced, but solid, quaint, and

tender: all the more did they reach the soul.

In vain was the blushing cheek averted, and the honeyed lips. The

ravishing tones set the birds chirping outside, yet filled the room

within, and the glasses rang in harmony upon the shelf as the sweet

singer poured out from her heart (so it seemed) the speaking-song:--

"In vain you tell your parting lover

You wish fair winds may waft him over.

Alas! what winds can happy prove

That bear me far from her I love?

Alas! what dangers on the main

Can equal those that I sustain

From stinted love and cold disdain?" etc.

Griffith beat time with his hand awhile, and his face softened and

beautified as the melody curled about his heart. But soon it was too

much for him. He knew the song,--had sung it to Kate Peyton in their

days of courtship. A thousand memories gushed in upon his soul and

overpowered him. He burst out sobbing violently, and wept as if his

heart must break.

"Alas! what have I done?" said Mercy; and the tears ran from her eyes at

the sight. Then, with native delicacy, she hurried from the room.

What Griffith Gaunt went through that night, in silence, was never known

but to himself. But the next morning he was a changed man. He was all

dogged resolution,--put on his clothes unaided, though he could hardly

stand to do it, and borrowed the landlord's staff, and crawled out a

smart distance into the sun. "It was kill or cure," said he. "I am to

live, it seems. Well, then, the past is dead. My life begins again

to-day."

Hen-like, Mercy soon learned this sally of her refractory duckling, and

was uneasy. So, for an excuse to watch him, she brought him out his

money and jewels, and told him she had thought it safest to take charge

of them.

He thanked her cavalierly, and offered her a diamond ring.

She blushed scarlet, and declined it; and even turned a meekly

reproachful glance on him with her dove's eyes.

* * * * *

He had a suit of russet made, and put away his fine coat, and forbade

any one to call him "Your worship." "I am a farmer, like yourselves,"

said he; "and my name is--Thomas Leicester."

* * * * *

A brain fever either kills the unhappy lover, or else benumbs the very

anguish that caused it.

And so it was with Griffith. His love got benumbed, and the sense of his

wrongs vivid. He nursed a bitter hatred of his wife; only, as he could

not punish her without going near her, and no punishment short of death

seemed enough for her, he set to work to obliterate her from his very

memory, if possible. He tried employment: he pottered about the little

farm, advising and helping,--and that so zealously that the landlord

retired altogether from that department, and Griffith, instead of he,

became Mercy's ally, agricultural and bucolical. She was a shepherdess

to the core, and hated the poor "Packhorse."

For all that, it was her fate to add to its attractions: for Griffith

bought a _viol da gambo_, and taught her sweet songs, which he

accompanied with such skill, sometimes, with his voice, that good

company often looked in on the chance of a good song sweetly sung and

played.

The sick, in body or mind, are egotistical. Griffith was no exception:

bent on curing his own deep wound, he never troubled his head about the

wound he might inflict.

He was grateful to his sweet nurse, and told her so. And his gratitude

charmed her all the more that it had been rather long in coming.

He found this dove-like creature a wonderful soother: he applied her

more and more to his sore heart.

As for Mercy, she had been too good and kind to her patient not to take

a tender interest in his convalescence. Our hearts warm more to those we

have been kind to, than to those who have been kind to us: and the

female reader can easily imagine what delicious feelings stole into that

womanly heart when she saw her pale nursling pick up health and strength

under her wing, and become the finest, handsomest man in the parish.

Pity and admiration,--where these meet, love is not far behind.

And then this man, who had been cross and rough while he was weak,

became gentler, kinder, and more deferential to her, the stronger he

got.

Mrs. Vint saw they were both fond of each other's company, and

disapproved it. She told Paul Carrick if he had any thought of Mercy he

had better give over shilly-shallying, for there was another man after

her.

Paul made light of it, at first. "She has known me too long to take up

her head with a new-comer," said he. "To be sure I never asked her to

name the day; but she knows my mind well enough, and I know hers."

"Then you know more than I do," said the mother, ironically.

He thought over this conversation, and very wisely determined not to run

unnecessary risks. He came up one afternoon, and hunted about for Mercy,

till he found her milking a cow in the adjoining paddock.

"Well, lass," said he, "I've good news for thee. My old dad says we may

have his house to live in. So now you and I can yoke next month if ye

will."

"Me turn the honest man out of his house!" said Mercy, mighty

innocently.

"Who asks you? He nobbut bargains for the chimney-corner: and you are

not the girl to begrudge the old man that."

"O no, Paul. But what would father do if I were to leave _his_ house?

Methinks the farm would go to rack and ruin; he is so wrapped up in his

nasty public."

"Why, he has got a helper, by all accounts: and if you talk like that,

you will never wed at all."

"Never is a big word. But I'm too young to marry yet. Jenny, thou jade,

stand still."

The attack and defence proceeded upon these terms for some time; and the

defendant had one base advantage; and used it. Her forehead was wedged

tight against Jenny's ribs, and Paul could not see her face. This, and

the feminine evasiveness of her replies, irritated him at last.

"Take thy head out o' the coow," said he, roughly, "and answer straight.

Is all our wooing to go for naught?"

"Wooing? You never said so much to me in all these years as you have

to-day."

"O, ye knew my mind well enough. There's a many ways of showing the

heart."

"Speaking out is the best, I trow."

"Why, what do I come here for twice a week, this two years past, if not

for thee?"

"Ay, for me, and father's ale."

"And thou canst look at me, and tell me that? Ye false, hard-hearted

hussy. But nay, thou wast never so: 't is this Thomas Leicester hath

bewitched thee, and set thee against thy true lover."

"Mr. Leicester pays no suit to me," said Mercy, blushing. "He is a right

civil-spoken gentleman, and you know you saved his life."

"The more fool I. I wish I had known he was going to rob me of my lass's

heart, I'd have seen him die a hundred times ere I'd have interfered.

But they say if you save a man's life he'll make you rue it. Mercy, my

lass, you are well respected in the parish. Take a thought, now: better

be a farrier's wife than a gentleman's mistress."

Mercy did take her head "out of the cow" at this, and, for once, her

cheek burned with anger; but the unwonted sentiment died before it could

find words, and she said, quietly, "I need not be either, against my

will."

* * * * *

Young Carrick made many such appeals to Mercy Vint; but he could never

bring her to confess to him that he and she had ever been more than

friends, or were now anything less than friends. Still he forced her to

own to herself, that, if she had never seen Thomas Leicester, her quiet

affection and respect for Carrick would probably have carried her to the

altar with him.

His remonstrances, sometimes angry, sometimes tearful, awoke her pity,

which was the grand sentiment of her heart, and disturbed her peace.

Moreover, she studied the two men in her quiet, thoughtful way, and saw

that Carrick loved her with all his honest, though hitherto tepid

heart; but Griffith had depths, and could love with more passion than

ever he had shown for her. "He is not the man to have a fever by reason

of me," said the poor girl to herself. But I am afraid even this

attracted her to Griffith. It nettled a woman's soft ambition; which is,

to be as well loved as ever woman was.

And so things went on, and, as generally happens, the man who was losing

ground went the very way to lose more. He spoke ill of Griffith behind

his back: called him a highwayman, a gentleman, an ungrateful,

undermining traitor. But Griffith never mentioned Carrick; and so, when

he and Mercy were together, her old follower was pleasingly obliterated,

and affectionate good-humor reigned. Thus Griffith, _alias_ Thomas,

became her sunbeam, and Paul her cloud.

But he who had disturbed the peace of others, his own turn came.

One day he found Mercy crying. He sat down beside her, and said, kindly,

"Why, sweetheart, what is amiss?"

"No great matter," said she; and turned her head away, but did not check

her tears, for it was new and pleasant to be consoled by Thomas

Leicester.

"Nay, but tell me, child."

"Well, then, Jessie Carrick has been at me; that is all."

"The vixen! what did she say?"

"Nay, I'm not pleased enow with it to repeat it. She did cast something

in my teeth."

Griffith pressed her to be more explicit: she declined, with so many

blushes, that his curiosity was awakened, and he told Mrs. Vint, with

some heat, that Jess Carrick had been making Mercy cry.

"Like enow," said Mrs. Vint, coolly. "She'll eat her victuals all one

for that, please God."

"Else I'll wring the cock-nosed jade's neck, next time she comes here,"

replied Griffith; "but, Dame, I want to know what she can have to say to

Mercy to make her cry."

Mrs. Vint looked him steadily in the face for some time, and then and

there decided to come to an explanation. "Ten to one 't is about her

brother," said she; "you know this Paul is our Mercy's sweetheart."

At these simple words Griffith winced, and his countenance changed

remarkably. Mrs. Vint observed it, and was all the more resolved to have

it out with him.

"Her sweetheart!" said Griffith. "Why, I have seen them together a dozen

of times, and not a word of courtship."

"O, the young men don't make many speeches in these parts. They show

their hearts by act."

"By act? why, I met them coming home from milking t' other evening.

Mercy was carrying the pail, brimful; and that oaf sauntered by her

side, with his hands in his pockets. Was that the act of a lover?"

"I heard of it, sir," said Mrs. Vint, quietly; "and as how you took the

pail from her, willy nilly, and carried it home. Mercy was vexed about

it. She told me you panted at the door, and she was a deal fitter to

carry the pail than you, that is just off a sick-bed, like. But lawk,

sir, ye can't go by the likes of that. The bachelors here they'd see

their sweethearts carry the roof into next parish on their backs, like a

snail, and never put out a hand; 't is not the custom hereaway. But, as

I was saying, Paul and our Mercy kept company, after a manner: he never

had the wit to flatter her as should he, nor the stomach to bid her name

the day and he'd buy the ring; but he talked to her about his sick

beasts more than he did to any other girl in the parish, and she'd have

ended by going to Church with him; only you came and put a coolness

atween 'em."

"I! How?"

"Well, sir, our Mercy is a kind-hearted lass, though I say it, and you

were sick, and she did nurse you; and that was a beginning. And, to be

sure, you are a fine personable man, and capital company; and you are

always about the girl; and, bethink you, sir, she is flesh and blood

like her neighbors; and they say, once a body has tasted venison-steak,

it spoils their stomach for oat-porridge. Now that is Mercy's case, I'm

thinking; not that she ever said as much to me,--she is too reserved.

But, bless your heart, I'm forced to go about with eyes in my head, and

watch 'em all a bit,--me that keeps an inn."

Griffith groaned. "I'm a villain!" said he.

"Nay, nay," said Mrs. Vint. "Gentlefolks must be amused, cost what it

may; but, hoping no offence, sir, the girl was a good friend to you in

time of sickness; and so was this Paul, for that matter."

"She was," cried Griffith; "God bless her. How can I ever repay her?"

"Well, sir," said Mrs. Vint, "if that comes from your heart, you might

take our Mercy apart, and tell her you like her very well, but not

enough to marry a farmer's daughter,--don't say an innkeeper's daughter,

or you'll be sure to offend her. She is bitter against the 'Packhorse.'

Says you, 'This Paul is an honest lad, turn your heart back to him.'

And, with that, mount your black horse and ride away, and God speed you,

sir; we shall often talk of you at the 'Packhorse,' and naught but

good."

Griffith gave the woman his hand, and his breast labored visibly.

Jealousy was ingrained in the man. Mrs. Vint had pricked his conscience,

but she had wounded his foible. He was not in love with Mercy, but he

esteemed her, and liked her, and saw her value, and, above all, could

not bear another man should have her.

Now this gave the matter a new turn. Mrs. Vint had overcome her dislike

to him long ago: still he was not her favorite. But his giving her his

hand with a gentle pressure, and his manifest agitation, rather won her;

and, as uneducated women are your true weathercocks, she went about

directly. "To be sure," said she, "our Mercy is too good for the likes

of him. She is not like Harry and me. She has been well brought up by

her Aunt Prudence, as was governess in a nobleman's house. She can read

and write, and cast accounts; good at her sampler, and can churn and

make cheeses, and play of the viol, and lead the psalm in church, and

dance a minuet, she can, with any lady in the land. As to her nursing in

time of sickness, that I leave to you, sir."

"She is an angel," cried Griffith, "and my benefactress: no man living

is good enough for her." And he went away, visibly discomposed.

Mrs. Vint repeated this conversation to Mercy, and told her Thomas

Leicester was certainly in love with her. "Shouldst have seen his face,

girl, when I told him Paul and you were sweethearts. 'T was as if I had

run a knife in his heart."

Mercy murmured a few words of doubt; but she kissed her mother

eloquently, and went about, rosy and beaming, all that afternoon.

As for Griffith, his gratitude and his jealousy were now at war, and

caused him a severe mental struggle.

Carrick, too, was spurred by jealousy, and came every day to the house,

and besieged Mercy; and Griffith, who saw them together, and did not

hear Mercy's replies, was excited, irritated, alarmed.

Mrs. Vint saw his agitation, and determined to bring matters to a

climax. She was always giving him a side thrust; and, at last, she told

him plainly that he was not behaving like a man. "If the girl is not

good enough for you, why make a fool of her, and set her against a good

husband?" And when he replied she was good enough for any man in

England, "Then," said she, "why not show your respect for her as Paul

Carrick does? He likes her well enough to go to church with her."

With the horns of this dilemma she so gored Kate Peyton's husband that,

at last, she and Paul Carrick, between them, drove him out of his

conscience.

So he watched his opportunity and got Mercy alone. He took her hand and

told her he loved her, and that she was his only comfort in the world,

and he found he could not live without her.

At this she blushed and trembled a little, and leaned her brow upon his

shoulder, and was a happy creature for a few moments.

So far, fluently enough; but then he began to falter and stammer, and

say that for certain reasons he could not marry at all. But if she could

be content with anything short of that, he would retire with her into a

distant country, and there, where nobody could contradict him, would

call her his wife, and treat her as his wife, and pay his debt of

gratitude to her by a life of devotion.

As he spoke, her brow retired an inch or two from his shoulder; but she

heard him quietly out, and then drew back and confronted him, pale, and,

to all appearance, calm.

"Call things by their right names," said she. "What you offer me this

day, in my father's house, is, to be your mistress. Then--God forgive

you, Thomas Leicester."

With this oblique and feminine reply, and one look of unfathomable

reproach from her soft eyes, she turned her back on him; but,

remembering her manners, courtesied at the door; and so retired; and

unpretending Virtue lent her such true dignity that he was struck dumb,

and made no attempt to detain her.

I think her dignified composure did not last long when she was alone; at

least, the next time he saw her, her eyes were red; his heart smote him,

and he began to make excuses and beg her forgiveness. But she

interrupted him. "Don't speak to me no more, if you please, sir," said

she, civilly, but coldly.

Mercy, though so quiet and inoffensive, had depth and strength of

character. She never told her mother what Thomas Leicester had proposed

to her. Her honest pride kept her silent, for one thing. She would not

have it known she had been insulted. And, besides that, she loved Thomas

Leicester still, and could not expose or hurt him. Once there was an

Israelite without guile, though you and I never saw him; and once there

was a Saxon without bile, and her name was Mercy Vint. In this heart of

gold the affections were stronger than the passions. She was deeply

wounded, and showed it in a patient way to him who had wounded her, but

to none other. Her conduct to him in public and private was truly

singular, and would alone have stamped her a remarkable character. She

declined all communication with him in private, and avoided him steadily

and adroitly; but in public she spoke to him, sang with him when she was

asked, and treated him much the same as before. He could see a subtle

difference, but nobody else could.

This generosity, coupled with all she had done for him before,

penetrated his heart and filled him with admiration and remorse. He

yielded to Mrs. Vint's suggestions, and told her she was right; he would

tear himself away, and never see the dear "Packhorse" again. "But oh!

Dame," said he, "'t is a sorrowful thing to be alone in the world again,

and naught to do. If I had but a farm, and a sweet little inn like this

to go to, perchance my heart would not be quite so heavy as 't is this

day at thoughts of parting from thee and thine."

"Well, sir," said Mrs. Vint, "if that is all, there is the 'Vine' to let

at this moment. 'T is a better place of business than this; and some

meadows go with it, and land to be had in the parish."

"I'll ride and see it," said Griffith, eagerly: then, dejectedly, "but,

alas! I have no heart to keep an inn without somebody to help me, and

say a kind word now and then. Ah! Mercy Vint, thou hast spoiled me for

living alone."

This vacillation exhausted Mrs. Vint's patience. "What are ye sighing

about, ye foolish man?" said she, contemptuously; "you have got it all

your own way. If 't is a wife ye want, ask Mercy, and don't take a nay.

If ye would have a housekeeper, you need not want one long. I'll be

bound there's plenty of young women where you came from as would be glad

to keep the 'Vine' under you. And, if you come to that, our Mercy is a

treasure on the farm, but she is no help in the inn, no more than a wax

figure. She never brought us a shilling, till you came and made her sing

to your bass-viol. Nay, what you want is a smart, handsome girl, with a

quick eye and a ready tongue, and one as can look a man in the face, and

not given to love nor liquor. Don't you know never such a one?"

"Not I. Humph, to be sure there is Caroline Ryder. She is handsome, and

hath a good wit. She is a lady's maid."

"That's your woman, if she'll come. And to be sure she will; for to be

mistress of an inn, that's a lady's maid's Paradise."

"She would have come a few months ago, and gladly. I'll write to her."

"Better talk to her, and persuade her."

"I'll do that, too; but I must write to her first."

"So do then; but whatever you do, don't shilly-shally no longer. If

wrestling was shilly-shallying, methinks you'd bear the bell, you or

else Paul Carrick. Why, all his trouble comes on 't. He might have wed

our Mercy a year agone for the asking. Shilly-shally belongs to us that

be women. 'T is despicable in a man."

Thus driven on all sides, Griffith rode and inspected the "Vine" (it was

only seven miles off); and, after the usual chaffering, came to terms

with the proprietor.

He fixed the day for his departure, and told Mrs. Vint he must ride into

Cumberland first to get some money, and also to see about a housekeeper.

He made no secret of all this; and, indeed, was not without hopes Mercy

would relent, or perhaps be jealous of this housekeeper. But the only

visible effect was to make her look pale and sad. She avoided him in

private as before.

Harry Vint was loud in his regrets, and Carrick openly exultant.

Griffith wrote to Caroline Ryder, and addressed the letter in a feigned

hand, and took it himself to the nearest post-town.

The letter came to hand, and will appear in that sequence of events on

which I am now about to enter.

CHAPTER XXVII.

If Griffith Gaunt suffered anguish, he inflicted agony. Mrs. Gaunt was a

high-spirited, proud, and sensitive woman; and he crushed her with foul

words. Leonard was a delicate, vain, and sensitive man, accustomed to

veneration. Imagine such a man hurled to the ground, and trampled upon.

Griffith should not have fled; he should have stayed and enjoyed his

vengeance on these two persons. It might have cooled him a little had he

stopped and seen the immediate consequences of his savage act.

The priest rose from the ground, pale as ashes, and trembling with fear

and hate.

The lady was leaning, white as a sheet, against a tree, and holding it

with her very nails for a little support.

They looked round at one another,--a piteous glance of anguish and

horror. Then Mrs. Gaunt turned and flung her arm round so that the palm

of her hand, high raised, confronted Leonard. I am thus particular

because it was a gesture grand and terrible as the occasion that called

it forth,--a gesture that _spoke_, and said, "Put the whole earth and

sea between us forever after this."

The next moment she bent her head and rushed away, cowering and wringing

her hands. She made for her house as naturally as a scared animal for

its lair; but, ere she could reach it, she tottered under the shame, the

distress, and the mere terror, and fell fainting, with her fair forehead

on the grass.

Caroline Ryder was crouched in the doorway, and did not see her come

out of the grove, but only heard a rustle; and then saw her proud

mistress totter forward and lie, white, senseless, helpless, at her very

feet.

Ryder uttered a scream, but did not lose her presence of mind. She

instantly kneeled over Mrs. Gaunt, and loosened her stays with quick and

dexterous hand.

It was very like the hawk perched over and clawing the ringdove she has

struck down.

But people with brains are never quite inhuman: a drop of lukewarm pity

entered even Ryder's heart as she assisted her victim. She called no one

to help her; for she saw something very serious had happened, and she

felt sure Mrs. Gaunt would say something imprudent in that dangerous

period when the patient recovers consciousness but has not all her wits

about her. Now Ryder was equally determined to know her mistress's

secrets, and not to share the knowledge with any other person.

It was a long swoon; and, when Mrs. Gaunt came to, the first thing she

saw was Ryder leaning over her, with a face of much curiosity, and some

concern.

In that moment of weakness the poor lady, who had been so roughly

handled, saw a woman close to her, and being a little kind to her; so

what did she do but throw her arms round Ryder's neck and burst out

sobbing as if her heart would break.

Then that unprincipled woman shed a tear or two with her, half

crocodile, half impulse.

Mrs. Gaunt not only cried on her servant's neck; she

justified Ryder's forecast by speaking unguardedly: "I've been

insulted--insulted--insulted!"

But, even while uttering these words, she was recovering her pride: so

the first "insulted" seemed to come from a broken-hearted child, the

second from an indignant lady, the third from a wounded queen.

No more words than this; but she rose, with Ryder's assistance, and

went, leaning on that faithful creature's shoulder, to her own bedroom.

There she sank into a chair and said, in a voice to melt a stone, "My

child! Bring me my little Rose."

Ryder ran and fetched the little girl; and Mrs. Gaunt held out both arms

to her, angelically, and clasped her so passionately and piteously to

her bosom, that Rose cried for fear, and never forgot the scene all her

days; and Mrs. Ryder, who was secretly a mother, felt a genuine twinge

of pity and remorse. Curiosity, however, was the dominant sentiment. She

was impatient to get all these convulsions over, and learn what had

actually passed between Mr. and Mrs. Gaunt.

She waited till her mistress appeared calmer; and then, in soft,

caressing tones, asked her what had happened.

"Never ask me that question again," cried Mrs. Gaunt, wildly. Then, with

inexpressible dignity, "My good girl, you have done all you could for

me; now you must leave me alone with my daughter, and my God, who knows

the truth."

Ryder courtesied and retired, burning with baffled curiosity.

Towards dusk Thomas Leicester came into the kitchen, and brought her

news with a vengeance. He told her and the other maids that the Squire

had gone raving mad, and fled the country. "O lasses," said he, "if you

had seen the poor soul's face, a-riding headlong through the fair, all

one as if it was a ploughed field; 't was white as your smocks; and his

eyes glowering on 't other world. We shall ne'er see that face alive

again."

And this was her doing.

It surprised and overpowered Ryder. She threw her apron over her head,

and went off in hysterics, and betrayed her lawless attachment to every

woman in the kitchen,--she who was so clever at probing others.

* * * * *

This day of violent emotions was followed by a sullen and sorrowful

gloom.

Mrs. Gaunt kept her bedroom, and admitted nobody; till, at last, the

servants consulted together, and sent little Rose to knock at her door,

with a basin of chocolate, while they watched on the stairs.

"It's only me, mamma," said Rose.

"Come in, my precious," said a trembling voice; and so Rose got in with

her chocolate.

The next day she was sent for early; and at noon Mrs. Gaunt and Rose

came down stairs; but their appearance startled the whole household.

The mother was dressed all in black, and so was her daughter, whom she

led by the hand. Mrs. Gaunt's face was pale, and sad, and stern,--a

monument of deep suffering and high-strung resolution.

* * * * *

It soon transpired that Griffith had left his home for good; and friends

called on Mrs. Gaunt to slake their curiosity under the mask of

sympathy.

Not one of them was admitted. No false excuses were made. "My mistress

sees no one for the present," was the reply.

Curiosity, thus baffled, took up the pen; but was met with a short,

unvarying formula: "There is an unhappy misunderstanding between my

husband and me. But I shall neither accuse him behind his back, nor

justify myself."

Thus the proud lady carried herself before the world; but secretly she

writhed. A wife abandoned is a woman insulted, and the wives--that are

not abandoned--cluck.

Ryder was dejected for a time, and, though not honestly penitent,

suffered some remorse at the miserable issue of her intrigues. But her

elastic nature soon shook it off, and she felt a certain satisfaction at

having reduced Mrs. Gaunt to her own level. This disarmed her hostility.

She watched her as keenly as ever, but out of pure curiosity.

One thing puzzled her strangely. Leonard did not visit the house; nor

could she even detect any communication between the parties.

At last, one day, her mistress told her to put on her hat, and go to

Father Leonard.

Ryder's eyes sparkled; and she was soon equipped. Mrs. Gaunt put a

parcel and a letter into her hands. Ryder no sooner got out of her sight

than she proceeded to tamper with the letter. But to her just

indignation she found it so ingeniously folded and sealed that she could

not read a word.

The parcel, however, she easily undid, and it contained forty pounds in

gold and small notes. "Oho! my lady," said Ryder.

She was received by Leonard with a tender emotion he in vain tried to

conceal.

On reading the letter his features contracted sharply, and he seemed to

suffer agony. He would not even open the parcel. "You will take that

back," said he, bitterly.

"What, without a word?"

"Without a word. But I will write, when I am able."

"Don't be long, sir," suggested Ryder. "I am sure my mistress is

wearying for you. Consider, sir, she is all alone now."

"Not so much alone as I am," said the priest, "nor half so unfortunate."

And with this he leaned his head despairingly on his hand, and motioned

to Ryder to leave him.

"Here's a couple of fools," said she to herself, as she went home.

That very evening Thomas Leicester caught her alone, and asked her to

marry him.

She stared at first, and then treated it as a jest. "You come at the

wrong time, young man," said she. "Marriage is put out of countenance.

No, no, I will never marry after what I have seen in this house."

Leicester would not take this for an answer, and pressed her hard.

"Thomas," said this plausible jade, "I like you very well; but I

couldn't leave my mistress in her trouble. Time to talk of marrying when

master comes here alive and well."

"Nay," said Leicester, "my only chance is while he is away. You care

more for his little finger than for my whole body; that they all say."

"Who says?"

"Jane, and all the lasses."

"You simple man, they want you for themselves; that is why they belie

me."

"Nay, nay; I saw how you carried on, when I brought word he was gone.

You let your heart out for once. Don't take me for a fool. I see how 't

is, but I'll face it, for I worship the ground you walk on. Take a

thought, my lass. What good can come of your setting your heart on

_him_? I'm young, I'm healthy, and not ugly enough to set the dogs

a-barking. I've got a good place; I love you dear; I'll cure you of that

fancy, and make you as happy as the day is long. I'll try and make you

as happy as you will make me, my beauty."

He was so earnest, and so much in love, that Mrs. Ryder pitied him, and

wished her husband was in heaven.

"I am very sorry, Tom," said she, softly; "dear me, I did not think you

cared so much for me as this. I must just tell you the truth. I have got

one in my own country, and I've promised him. I don't care to break my

word; and, if I did, he is such a man, I am sure he would kill me for

it. Indeed he has told me as much, more than once or twice."

"Killing is a game that two can play at."

"Ah! but 't is an ugly game; and I'll have no hand in it. And--don't you

be angry with me, Tom--I've known him longest, and--I love him best."

By pertinacity and vanity in lying, she hit the mark at last. Tom

swallowed this figment whole.

"That is but reason," said he. "I take my answer, and I wish ye both

many happy days together, and well spent." With this he retired, and

blubbered a good hour in an outhouse.

Tom avoided the castle, and fell into low spirits. He told his mother

all, and she advised him to change the air. "You have been too long in

one place," said she; "I hate being too long in one place myself."

This fired Tom's gypsy blood, and he said he would travel to-morrow, if

he could but scrape together money enough to fill a pedler's pack.

He applied for a loan in several quarters, but was denied in all.

At last the poor fellow summoned courage to lay his case before Mrs.

Gaunt.

Ryder's influence procured him an interview. She took him into the

drawing-room, and bade him wait there. By and by a pale lady, all in

black, glided into the room.

He pulled his front hair, and began to stammer something or other.

She interrupted him. "Ryder has told me," said she, softly. "I am sorry

for you; and I will do what you require. And, to be sure, we need no

gamekeeper here now."

She then gave him some money, and said she would look him up a few

trifles besides, to put in his pack.

Tom's mother helped him to lay out this money to advantage; and, one

day, he called at Hernshaw, pack and all, to bid farewell.

The servants all laid out something with him for luck; and Mrs. Gaunt

sent for him, and gave him a gold thimble, and a pound of tea, and

several yards of gold lace, slightly tarnished, and a Queen Anne's

guinea.

He thanked her heartily. "Ay, Dame," said he, "you had always an open

hand, married or single. My heart is heavy at leaving you. But I miss

the Squire's kindly face too. Hernshaw is not what it used to be."

Mrs. Gaunt turned her head aside, and the man could see his words had

made her cry. "My good Thomas," said she, at last, "you are going to

travel the country: you might fall in with him."

"I might," said Leicester, incredulously.

"God grant you may; and, if ever you should, think of your poor mistress

and give him--this." She put her finger in her bosom and drew out a

bullet wrapped in silver paper. "You will never lose this," said she. "I

value it more than gold or silver. O, if ever you _should_ see him,

think of me and my daughter, and just put it in his hand without a

word."

As he went out of the room Ryder intercepted him, and said, "Mayhap you

will fall in with our master. If ever you do, tell him he is under a

mistake, and the sooner he comes home the better."

Tom Leicester departed; and, for days and weeks, nothing occurred to

break the sorrowful monotony of the place.

But the mourner had written to her old friend and confessor, Francis;

and, after some delay, involuntary on his part, he came to see her.

They were often closeted together, and spoke so low that Ryder could not

catch a word.

Francis also paid several visits to Leonard; and the final result of

these visits was that the latter left England.

Francis remained at Hernshaw as long as he could; and it was Mrs.

Gaunt's hourly prayer that Griffith might return while Francis was with

her.

He did, at her earnest request, stay much longer than he had intended;

but, at length, he was obliged to fix next Monday to return to his own

place.

It was on Thursday he made this arrangement; but the very next day the

postman brought a letter to the Castle, thus addressed:--

"To Mistress Caroline Ryder,

Living Servant with Griffith Gaunt, Esq.,

at his house, called Hernshaw Castle,

near Wigeonmoor,

in the county of Cumberland.

These with speed."

The address was in a feigned hand. Ryder opened it in the kitchen, and

uttered a scream.

Instantly three female throats opened upon her with questions.

She looked them contemptuously in their faces, put the letter into her

pocket, and, soon after, slipped away to her own room, and locked

herself in while she read it. It ran thus:--

"GOOD MISTRESS RYDER,--I am alive yet, by the blessing; though

somewhat battered; being now risen from a fever, wherein I lost

my wits for a time. And, on coming to myself, I found them

making of my shroud; whereby you shall learn how near I was to

death. And all this I owe to that false, perjured woman that

was my wife, and is your mistress.

"Know that I have donned russet, and doffed gentility; for I

find a heavy heart's best cure is occupation. I have taken a

wayside inn, and think of renting a small farm, which two

things go well together. Now you are, of all those I know, most

fitted to manage the inn, and I the farm. You were always my

good friend; and, if you be so still, then I charge you most

solemnly that you utter no word to any living soul about this

letter; but meet me privately where we can talk fully of these

matters; for I will not set foot in Hernshaw Castle. Moreover,

she told me once 't was hers; and so be it. On Friday I shall

lie at Stapleton, and the next day, by an easy journey, to the

place where I once was so happy.

"So then at seven of the clock on Saturday evening, be the same

wet or dry, prithee come to the gate of the grove unbeknown,

and speak to

"Your faithful friend

and most unhappy master,

"GRIFFITH GAUNT.

"Be secret as the grave. Would I were in it."

This letter set Caroline Ryder in a tumult. Griffith alive and well, and

set against his wife, and coming to her for assistance!

After the first agitation, she read it again, and weighed every

syllable. There was one book she had studied more than most of us,--the

Heart. And she soon read Griffith's in this letter. It was no

love-letter; he really intended business; but, weak in health and

broken in spirit, and alone in the world, he naturally turned to one who

had confessed an affection for him, and would therefore be true to his

interests, and study his happiness.

The proposal was every way satisfactory to Mrs. Ryder. To be mistress of

an inn, and have servants under her instead of being one herself. And

then, if Griffith and she began as allies in business, she felt very

sure she could make herself, first necessary to him, and then dear to

him.

She was so elated she could hardly contain herself; and all her

fellow-servants remarked that Mrs. Ryder had heard good news.

Saturday came, and never did hours seem to creep so slowly.

But at last the sun set, and the stars come out. There was no moon.

Ryder opened the window and looked out; it was an admirable night for an

assignation.

She washed her face again, put on her gray silk gown, and purple

petticoat,--_Mrs. Gaunt_ had given them to her,--and, at the last

moment, went and made up her mistress's fire, and put out everything she

thought could be wanted, and, five minutes after seven o'clock, tied a

scarlet handkerchief over her head, and stepped out at the back door.

What with her coal-black hair, so streaked with red, her black eyes,

flashing in the starlight, and her glowing cheeks, she looked

bewitching.

And, thus armed for conquest, wily, yet impassioned, she stole out, with

noiseless foot and beating heart, to her appointment with her imprudent

master.

BAD SYMPTOMS.

Mons. Alphonse Karr writes as follows in his _Les Femmes_:--"When I wish

to become invisible, I have a certain rusty and napless old hat, which I

put on as Prince Lutin in the fairy tale puts on his chaplet of roses; I

join to this a certain coat very much out at elbows: _eh bien_! I become

invisible! Nobody on the street sees me, nobody recognizes me, nobody

speaks to me."

And yet I do not doubt that the majority of M. Karr's friends and

acquaintances, as is the case with the friends and acquaintances of

nearly every one else, are well-disposed, good-hearted, average persons,

who would be heartily ashamed, if it could be brought home to them, of

having given him the go-by under such circumstances. What, then, was the

difficulty? In what consisted this change in the man's appearance, so

signal that he trusted to it as a disguise? What was there in hat and

coat thus to eclipse the whole personality of the man? There is a

certain mystery in the philosophy of clothes too deep for me to fathom.

The matter has been descanted upon before; the "Havamal, or High Song of

Odin," the Essays of Montaigne, the "Sartor" of Thomas Carlyle, all

dwell with acuteness upon this topic; but they merely give instances,

they do not interpret. I am continually meeting with things in my

intercourse with the world which I cannot reconcile with any theories

society professes to be governed by. How shall I explain them? How, for

example, shall I interpret the following cases, occurring within my own

experience and under my own observation?

I live in the country, and am a farmer. If I lived in the city and

occupied myself with the vending of merchandise, I should, in busy

times at least, now and then help my clerks to sell my own goods,--if I

could,--make up the packages, mark them, and attend to having them

delivered. Solomon Gunnybags himself has done as much, upon occasion,

and society has praised Solomon Gunnybags for such a display of devotion

to his business. But I am a farmer, not a merchant; and, though not able

to handle the plough, I am not above my business. One day during the

past summer, while my peach-orchard was in full bearing, my foreman, who

attends market for me, fell sick. The peaches would not tarry in their

ripening, the pears were soft and blushing as sweet sixteen as they lay

upon their shelves, the cantelopes grew mellow upon their vines, the

tomato-beds called loudly to be relieved, and the very beans were

beginning to rattle in their pods for ripeness. I am not a good

salesman, and I was very sorry my foreman could not help me out; but

something must be done, so I made up a load of fruit and vegetables,

took them to the city to market, and sold them. While I was busily

occupied measuring peaches by the half and quarter peck, stolidly deaf

to the objurgations of my neighbor huckster on my right, to whom some

one had given bad money, and equally impervious to the blandishments of

an Irish customer in front of me, who could not be persuaded I meant to

require the price I had set upon my goods, my friend Mrs. Entresol came

along, trailing her parasol with one gloved hand, with the other

daintily lifting her skirts out of the dust and dirt. Bridget, following

her, toiled under the burden of a basket of good things. Mrs. Entresol

is an old acquaintance of mine, and I esteem her highly. Entresol has

just obtained a partnership in the retail dry-goods house for which he

has been a clerk during so many years; the firm is prosperous, and, if

he continues to be as industrious and prudent as he has been, I do not

doubt but my friend will in the course of time be able to retire from

business with money enough to buy a farm. My pears seemed to please Mrs.

Entresol; she approached my stall, looked at them, took one up. "What is

the price of your--" she began to inquire, when, looking up, she

recognized the vender of the coveted fruit. What in the world came over

the woman? I give you my word that, instead of speaking to me in her

usual way, and telling me how glad she was to see me, she started as if

something had stung her; she stammered, she blushed, and stood there

with the pear in her fingers, staring at me in the blankest way

imaginable. I must confess a little of her confusion imparted itself to

me. For a moment the thought entered my mind that I had, in selling my

own pears and peaches, been guilty of some really criminal action, such

as sheep-stealing, lying, or slandering, and it was not pleasant to be

caught in the act. But only for a moment; then I replied, "Good morning,

Mrs. Entresol"; and, stating the price, proceeded to wait upon another

customer.

My highly business-like tone and manner rather added to my charming

friend's confusion, but she rallied surprisingly, put out her little

gloved hand to me, and exclaimed in the gayest voice: "Ah, you eccentric

man! What will you do next? To think of you selling in the market, _just

like a huckster_! You! I must tell Mrs. Belle Etoile of it. It is really

one of the best jokes I know of! And how well you act your part,

too,--just as if it came naturally to you," etc., etc.

Thus she ran on, laughing, and interfering with my sales, protesting all

the while that I was the greatest original in all her circle of

acquaintance. Of course it would have been idle for me to controvert her

view of the matter, so I quietly left her to the enjoyment of such an

excellent joke, and was rather glad when at last she went away. I could

not help wondering, however, after she was gone, why it was she should

think I joked in retailing the products of my farm, any more than Mr.

Entresol in retailing the goods piled upon his shelves and counters.

And why should one be "original" because he handles a peck-measure,

while another is _comme il faut_ in wielding a yardstick? Why did M.

Karr's thread-bare coat and shocking bad hat fling such a cloud of dust

in the eyes of passing friends, that they could not see him,

"Ne wot who that he ben?"

Now for another case. There is Tom Pinch's wife. Tom is an excellent

person, in every respect, and so is his wife. I don't know any woman

with a light purse and four children who manages better, or is possessed

of more sterling qualities, than Mrs. Tom Pinch. She is industrious,

amiable, intelligent; pious as father AEneas; in fact, the most devoted

creature to preachers and sermons that ever worked for a fair. She would

be very angry with you if you were to charge her with entertaining the

doctrine of "justification by works," but I seriously incline to believe

she imagines that seat of hers in that cushioned pew one of the

mainstays to her hope of heaven. And yet, at this crisis, Mrs. Tom Pinch

can't go to church! There is an insurmountable obstacle which keeps the

poor little thing at home every Sunday, and renders her (comparatively)

miserable the rest of the week. She takes a course of Jay's Sermons, to

be sure, but she takes it disconsolately, and has serious fears of

becoming a backslider. What is it closes the church door to her? Not her

health, for that is excellent. It is not the baby, for her nurse, small

as she is, is quite trustworthy. It is not any trouble about dinner, for

nobody has a better cook than Mrs. Tom Pinch,--a paragon cook, in fact,

who seems to have strayed down into her kitchen from that remote

antiquity when servants were servants. No, none of these things keeps

the pious wife at home. None of these things restrains her from taking

that quiet walk up the aisle and occupying that seat in the corner of

the pew, there to dismiss all thought of worldly care, and fit her good

little soul for the pleasures of real worship, and that prayerful

meditation and sweet communion with holy things that only such good

little women know the blessings of;--none of these things at all. It is

Mrs. Tom Pinch's _bonnet_ that keeps her at home,--her last season's

bonnet! Strike, but hear me, ladies, for the thing is simply so. Tom's

practice is not larger than he can manage; Tom's family need quite all

he can make to keep them; and he has not yet been able this season to

let Mrs. Tom have the money required to provide a new fall bonnet. She

will get it before long, of course, for Tom is a good provider, and he

knows his wife to be economical. Still he cannot see--poor innocent that

he is!--why his dear little woman cannot just as well go to church in

her last fall's bonnet, which, to his purblind vision, is quite as good

as new. What, Tom! don't you know the dear little woman has too much

love for you, too much pride in you, to make a fright of herself, upon

any consideration? Don't you know that, were your wife to venture to

church in that hideous condition of which a last year's bonnet is the

efficient and unmistakable symbol, Mrs. A., Mrs. B., Mrs. C., all the

ladies of the church, in fact, would remark it at once,--would sit in

judgment upon it like a quilt committee at an industrial fair, and would

unanimously decide, either that you were a close-fisted brute to deny

such a sweet little helpmeet the very necessaries of life, or that your

legal practice was falling off so materially you could no longer support

your family? O no, Tom, your wife must not venture out to church in her

last season's bonnet! She is not without a certain sort of courage, to

be sure; she has stood by death-beds without trembling; she has endured

poverty and its privations, illness, the pains and perils of childbirth,

and many another hardship, with a brave cheerfulness such as you can

wonder at, and never dream of imitating; but there is a limit even to

the boldest woman's daring; and, when it comes to the exposure and

ridicule consequent upon defying the world in a last season's bonnet,

that limit is reached.

I have one other case to recount, and, in my opinion, the most

lamentable one of all. Were I to tell you the real name of my friend,

Mrs. Belle Etoile, you would recognize one of the most favored daughters

of America, as the newspapers phrase it. Rich, intelligent, highly

cultivated, at the tip-top of the social ladder, esteemed by a wide

circle of such friends as it is an honor to know, loving and beloved by

her noble husband,--every one knows Mrs. Etoile by reputation at least.

Happy in her pretty, well-behaved children, she is the polished

reflection of all that is best and most refined in American society. She

is, indeed, a noble woman, as pure and unsullied in the instincts of her

heart, as she is bright and glowing in the display of her intellect. Her

wit is brilliant; her _mots_ are things to be remembered; her opinions

upon art and life have at once a wide currency and a substantial value;

and, more than all, her modest charities, of which none knows save

herself, are as deep and as beneficent as those subterranean fountains

which well up in a thousand places to refresh and gladden the earth.

Nevertheless, and in spite of her genuine practical wisdom, her lofty

idealism of thought, her profound contempt for all the weak shams and

petty frivolities of life, Mrs. Belle Etoile is a slave! "They who

submit to drink as another pleases, make themselves his slaves," says

that Great Mogul of sentences, Dr. Johnson; and in this sense Mrs. Belle

Etoile is a slave indeed. The fetters gall her, but she has not courage

to shake them off. Her mistress is her next-door neighbor, Mrs. Colisle,

a coarse, vulgar, half-bred woman, whose husband acquired a sudden

wealth from contracts and petroleum speculations, and who has in

consequence set herself up for a leader of _ton_. A certain downright

persistence and energy of character, acquired, it may be, in bullying

the kitchen-maids at the country tavern where she began life, a certain

lavish expenditure of her husband's profits, the vulgar display and

profusion at her numerous balls, and her free-handed patronage of

_modistes_ and shop-keepers, have secured to Mrs. Colisle a sort of

Drummond-light position among the stars of fashion. She imports

patterns, and they become the mode; her caterer invents dishes, and they

are copied throughout the obeisant world. There are confections _a la_

Colisle; the confectioners utter new editions of them. There is a

Colisle head-dress, a Colisle pomade, a Colisle hat,--the world wears

and uses them. Thus, Mrs. Colisle has set herself up as Mrs. Belle

Etoile's rival; and that unfortunate lady, compelled by those

_noblesse-oblige_ principles which control the chivalry of fashion,

takes up the unequal gage, and enters the lists against her. The result

is, that Mrs. Belle Etoile has become the veriest slave in Christendom.

Whatever the other woman's whims and extravagances, Mrs. Belle Etoile is

their victim. Her taste revolts, but her pride of place compels

obedience. She cannot yield, she will not follow; and so Mrs. Colisle,

with diabolical ingenuity, constrains her to run a course that gives her

no honor and pays her no compensation. She scorns Mrs. Colisle's ways,

she loathes her fashions and her company, and--outbids her for them! It

is a very unequal contest, of course. Defeat only inspires Mrs. Colisle

with a more stubborn persistence. Victory cannot lessen the sad regrets

of Mrs. Belle Etoile's soul for outraged instincts and insulted taste.

It is an ill match,--a strife between greyhound and mastiff, a contest

at heavy draught between a thoroughbred and a Flanders mare. Mrs. Etoile

knows this as well as you and I can possibly know it. She is perfectly

aware of her serfdom. She is poignantly conscious of the degrading

character of her servitude, and that it is not possible to gather grapes

of thorns, nor figs of thistles; and yet she will continue to wage the

unequal strife, to wear the unhandsome fetters, simply because she has

not the courage to extricate herself from the false position into which

the strategic arts of Fashion have inveigled her.

Now I do not intend to moralize. I have no purpose to frighten the

reader prematurely off to the next page by unmasking a formidable

battery of reflections and admonitions. I have merely instanced the

above cases, three or four among a thousand of such as must have

presented themselves to the attention of each one of us; and I adduce

them simply as examples of what I call "bad symptoms" in any diagnosis

of the state of the social frame. They indicate, in fact, a total

absence of _social courage_ in persons otherwise endowed with and

illustrious for all the useful and ornamental virtues, and consequently

they make it plain and palpable that society is in a condition of

dangerous disease. Whether a remedy is practicable or not I will not

venture to decide; but I can confidently assure our reformers, both men

and women, that, if they can accomplish anything toward restoring its

normal and healthy courage to society, they will benefit the human race

much more signally than they could by making Arcadias out of a dozen or

two Borrioboola-Ghas.

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

1. _Croquet._ By CAPTAIN MAYNE REID. Boston: James Redpath.

2. _Handbook of Croquet._ By EDMUND ROUTLEDGE. London: George Routledge

and Sons.

3. _The Game of Croquet; its Appointments and Laws._ By R. FELLOW. New

York: Hurd and Houghton.

4. _Croquet, as played by the Newport Croquet Club._ By one of the

Members. New York: Sheldon & Co.

The original tower of Babel having been for some time discontinued, and

most of our local legislatures having adjourned, the nearest approach to

a confusion of tongues is perhaps now to be found in an ordinary game of

croquet. Out of eight youths and maidens caught for that performance at

a picnic, four have usually learned the rules from four different

manuals, and can agree on nothing; while the rest have never learned any

rules at all, and cannot even distinctly agree to disagree. With

tolerably firm wills and moderately shrill voices, it is possible for

such a party to exhibit a very pretty war of words before even a single

blow is struck. For supposing that there is an hour of daylight for the

game, they can easily spend fifteen minutes in debating whether the

starting-point should be taken a mallet's length from the stake,

according to Reid, or only twelve inches, according to Routledge.

More than twenty manuals of croquet have been published in England, it

is said, and some five or six in America. Of the four authorities named

above, each has some representative value for American players. Mayne

Reid was the pioneer, Routledge is the most compact and seductive,

Fellow the most popular and the poorest, and "Newport" the newest and by

far the best. And among them all it is possible to find authority for

and against almost every possible procedure.

The first point of grave divergence is one that occurs at the very

outset of the game. "Do you play with or without the roquet-croquet?"

has now come to be the first point of mutual solicitude in a mixed

party. It may not seem a momentous affair whether the privilege of

striking one's own ball and the adversary's without holding the former

beneath the foot, should be extended to all players or limited to the

"rover"; but it makes an immense difference in both the duration and the

difficulty of the game. By skilfully using this right, every player may

change the position of every ball, during each tour of play. It is a

formidable privilege, and accordingly Reid and "Newport" both forbid it

to all but the "rover," and Routledge denies it even to him; while

Fellow alone pleads for universal indulgence. It seems a pity to side

with one poor authority against three good ones, but there is no doubt

that the present tendency of the best players is to cultivate the

roquet-croquet more and more; and after employing it, one is as

unwilling to give it up, as a good billiard-player would be to revert

from the cue to the mace. The very fact, however, that this privilege

multiplies so enormously the advantages of skill is perhaps a good

reason for avoiding it in a mixed party of novices and experts, where

the object is rather to equalize abilities. It should also be avoided

where the croquet-ground is small, as is apt to be the case in our

community,--because in such narrow quarters a good player can often hit

every other ball during each tour of play, even without this added

advantage. If we played habitually on large, smooth lawns like those of

England, the reasons for the general use of the roquet-croquet would be

far stronger.

Another inconvenient discrepancy of the books relates to the different

penalties imposed on "flinching," or allowing one's ball to slip from

under one's foot, during the process of croquet. Here Routledge gives no

general rule; Reid and "Newport" decree that, if a ball "flinches," its

tour terminates, but its effects remain; while, according to Fellow, the

ball which has suffered croquet is restored, but the tour

continues,--the penalties being thus reversed. Here the sober judgment

must side with the majority of authorities; for this reason, if for no

other, that the first-named punishment is more readily enforced, and

avoids the confusion and altercation which are often produced by taking

up and replacing a ball.

Again, if a ball be accidentally stopped in its motion by a careless

player or spectator, what shall be done? Fellow permits the striker

either to leave the ball where the interruption left it, or to place it

where he thinks it would have stopped, if unmolested. This again is a

rule far less simple, and liable to produce far more wrangling, than the

principle of the other authorities, which is that the ball should either

be left where it lies, or be carried to the end of the arena.

These points are all among the commonest that can be raised, and it is

very unfortunate that there should be no uniformity of rule, to meet

contingencies so inevitable. When more difficult points come up for

adjudication, the difficulty has thus far been less in the conflict of

authorities than in their absence. Until the new American commentator

appeared, there was no really scientific treatise on croquet to be had

in our bookstores.

The so-called manual of the "Newport Croquet Club" is understood to

proceed from a young gentleman whose mathematical attainments have won

him honor both at Cambridge and at New Haven, and who now beguiles his

banishment as Assistant Professor in the Naval Academy by writing on

croquet in the spirit of Peirce. What President Hill has done for

elementary geometry, "Newport" aims to do for croquet, making it

severely simple, and, perhaps we might add, simply severe. And yet,

admirable to relate, this is the smallest of all the manuals, and the

cheapest, and the only one in which there is not so much as an allusion

to ladies' ankles. All the others have a few pages of rules and a very

immoderate quantity of slang; they are all liable to the charge of being

silly; whereas the only possible charge to be brought against "Newport"

is that he is too sensible. But for those who hold, with ourselves, that

whatever is worth doing is worth doing sensibly, there is really no

other manual. That is, this is the only one which really grapples with a

difficult case, and deals with it as if heaven and earth depended on the

adjudication.

It is possible that this scientific method sometimes makes its author

too bold a lawgiver. The error of most of the books is in attempting too

little and in doing that little ill. They are all written for beginners

only. The error of "Newport" lies in too absolute an adherence to

principles. His "theory of double points" is excellent, but his theory

of "the right of declining" is an innovation all the more daring because

it is so methodically put. The principle has long been familiar, though

never perhaps quite settled, that where two distinct points were made by

any stroke,--as, for instance, a bridge and a roquet,--the one or the

other could be waived. The croquet, too, could always be waived. But to

assert boldly that "a player may decline any point made by himself, and

play precisely as if the point had not been made," is a thought radical

enough to send a shudder along Pennsylvania Avenue. Under this ruling, a

single player in a game of eight might spend a half-hour in running and

rerunning a single bridge, with dog-in-the-mangerish pertinacity,

waiting his opportunity to claim the most mischievous run as the valid

one. It would produce endless misunderstandings and errors of memory.

The only vexed case which it would help to decide is that in which a

ball, in running the very last bridge, strikes another ball, and is yet

forbidden to croquet, because it must continue its play from the

starting-point. But even this would be better settled in almost any

other way; and indeed this whole rule as to a return to the "spot" seems

a rather arbitrary and meaningless thing.

The same adherence to theory takes the author quite beyond our depth, if

not beyond his own, in another place. He says that a ball may hit

another ball twice or more, during the same tour, between two steps on

the round, and move it each time by concussion,--"but only one (not

necessarily the first) contact is a valid roquet." (p. 34.) But how can

a player obtain the right to make a second contact, under such

circumstances, unless indeed the first was part of a _ricochet_, and was

waived as such? And if the case intended was merely that of ricochet, it

should have been more distinctly stated, for the right to waive ricochet

was long since recognized by Reid (p. 40), though Routledge prohibits,

and Fellow limits it.

Thus even the errors of "Newport" are of grave and weighty nature, such

as statesmen and mathematicians may, without loss of dignity, commit. Is

it that it is possible to go too deep into all sciences, even croquet?

But how delightful to have at last a treatise which errs on that side,

when its predecessors, like popular commentators on the Bible, have

carefully avoided all the hard points, and only cleared up the easy

ones!

_Poetry, Lyrical, Narrative, and Satirical, of the Civil War._ Selected

and Edited by RICHARD GRANT WHITE. New York: The American News Company.

We confess that our heart had at times misgiven us concerning the

written and printed poetry of our recent war; but until Mr. White gave

us the present volume, we did not know how strong a case could be made

against it. The effect is perhaps not altogether intended, but it shows

how bad his material was, and how little inspiration of any sort

attended him in his work, when a literary gentleman of habits of

research and of generally supposed critical taste makes a book so

careless and slovenly as this.

We can well afford the space which the editor devotes to Mr. Lowell's

noble poem, but we must admit that we can regard "The Present Crisis" as

part of the poetry of the war only in the large sense in which we should

also accept the Prophecies of Ezekiel and the Lamentations of Jeremiah.

Many pious men beheld the war (after it came) foreshadowed in the poetry

of the awful and exalted prophecies, and we wonder that Mr. White did

not give us a few passages from those books. It is scarcely possible

that he did not know "The Present Crisis" to have been written nearly a

score of years ago; though he seems to have been altogether ignorant of

"The Washers of the Shroud," a poem by the same author actually written

after the war began, and uttering all that dread, suspense, and deep

determination which the threatened Republic felt after the defeats in

the autumn of 1861. As Mr. White advances with his poetical chronology

of the war, he is likewise unconscious of "The Commemoration Ode," which

indeed is so far above all other elegiac poems of the war, as perhaps to

be out of his somewhat earth-bound range. Yet we cannot help blaming him

a little for not looking higher: his book must for some time represent

the feeling of the nation in war time, and we would fain have had his

readers know how deep and exalted this sentiment really was, and how it

could reach, if only once and in only one, an expression which we may

challenge any literature to surpass. Of "The Biglow Papers," in which

there is so much of the national hard-headed shrewdness, humor, and

earnestness, we have but one, and that not the best.

As some compensation, however, Mr. White presents us with two humorous

lyrics of his own, and makes us feel like men who, in the first moments

of our financial disorder, parted with a good dollar, and received

change in car-tickets and envelopes covering an ideal value in

postage-stamps. It seems hard to complain of an editor who puts only two

of his poems in a collection when he was master to put in twenty if he

chose, and when in both cases he does his best to explain and relieve

their intolerable brilliancy by foot-notes; yet, seeing that one of

these productions is in literature what the "Yankee Notions" and the

"Nick-Nax" caricatures of John Bull are in art, and seeing that the

other is not in the least a parody of the Emersonian poetry it is

supposed to burlesque, and is otherwise nothing at all, we cannot help

crying out against them.

The foot-notes to Mr. White's verses _are_ comical, however, we must

acknowledge; and so are all the foot-notes in the book. If the Model of

Deportment had taken to letters with a humorous aim, we could conceive

of his writing them. "If burlesque," says Mr. White of his "Union"

verses, "were all their purpose, they would not be here preserved";

adding, with a noble tenderness for his victim, "Mr. Emerson could well

afford to forgive them, even if they did not come from one of his

warmest admirers,"--in which we agree with Mr. White, whose

consideration for the great transcendentalist is equalled only by his

consideration for the reader's ignorance in regard to most things not

connected with the poetry of the war. "Bully," he tells us, was used as

"an expression of encouragement and approval" by the Elizabethan

dramatists, as well as by our own cherished rowdies; which may be

readily proven from the plays of Shakespeare. But what the author of the

poem in which this word occurs means by "hefty" Mr. White does not know,

and frankly makes a note for the purpose of saying so. Concerning the

expression "hurried up his cakes," he is, however, perfectly _au fait_,

and surprises us with the promptness of his learning. "As long as the

importance of hurrying buckwheat pancakes from the griddle to the

table," says he, with a fine air of annotation, "is impressed upon the

American mind, this vile slang will need no explanation. But the

fame,"--mark this dry light of philosophy, and the delicacy of the humor

through which it plays,--"but the fame of the Rebel march into

Pennsylvania, and of the victory of Gettysburg, will probably outlive

even the taste for these alluring compounds." This is Mr. White's good

humor; his bad humor is displayed in his note to a poem by Fitz James

O'Brien on the "Seventh Regiment," which he says was "written by a young

Irishman, one of its members." The young Irishman's name is probably as

familiar to most readers of the magazines as Mr. White's, and we cannot

help wondering how he knew a writer of singularly brilliant powers and

wide repute only as "a young Irishman."

But there are many things which Mr. White seems not to know, and he has

but a poor memory for names, and in his despair he writes _anonymous_

against the title of every third poem. We might have expected a

gentleman interested in the poetry of the war to attend the lectures of

Dr. Holmes, who has been reading in New York and elsewhere "The Old

Sergeant," as the production of Mr. Forcythe Willson of Kentucky. By

turning to the index of that volume of the Atlantic from which the

verses were taken, Mr. White could have learned that "Spring at the

Capital" was written by Mrs. Akers; and with quite as little trouble

could have informed himself of the authorship of a half-score of other

poems we might name. We have already noted the defectiveness of the

collection, in which we are told "no conspicuous poem elicited by the

war is omitted"; and we note it again in Mr. White's failure to print

Mr. Bryant's pathetic and beautiful poem, "My Autumn Walk," and in his

choosing from Mr. Aldrich not one of the fine sonnets he has written on

the war, but a _jeu d'esprit_ which in no wise represents him. Indeed,

Mr. White's book seems to have been compiled after the editor had

collected a certain number of clippings from the magazines and

newspapers: if by the blessing of Heaven these had the names of their

authors attached, and happened to be the best things the poets had done,

it was a fortunate circumstance; but if the reverse was the fact, Mr.

White seems to have felt no responsibility in the matter. We are

disposed to hold him to stricter account, and to blame him for

temporarily blocking, with a book and a reputation, the way to a work of

real industry, taste, and accuracy on the poetry of the war. It was our

right that a man whose scholarly fame would carry his volume beyond our

own shores should do his best for our heroic Muse, robing her in all

possible splendor; and it is our wrong that he has chosen instead to

present the poor soul in attire so very indifferently selected from her

limited wardrobe.

_The Story of Kennett._ By BAYARD TAYLOR. New York: G. P. Putnam; Hurd

and Houghton.

In this novel Mr. Taylor has so far surpassed his former efforts in

extended fiction, as to approach the excellence attained in his briefer

stories. He has of course some obvious advantages in recounting "The

Story of Kennett" which were denied him in "Hannah Thurston" and "John

Godfrey's Fortunes." He here deals with the persons, scenes, and actions

of a hundred years ago, and thus gains that distance so valuable to the

novelist; and he neither burdens himself with an element utterly and

hopelessly unpicturesque, like modern reformerism, nor assumes the

difficult office of interesting us in the scarcely more attractive

details of literary adventure. But we think, after all, that we owe the

superiority of "The Story of Kennett" less to the felicity of his

subject than to Mr. Taylor's maturing powers as a novelist, of which his

choice of a happy theme is but one of the evidences. He seems to have

told his story because he liked it; and without the least consciousness

(which we fear haunted him in former efforts) that he was doing

something to supply the great want of an American novel. Indeed, but for

the prologue dedicating the work in a somewhat patronizing strain to his

old friends and neighbors of Kennett, the author forgets himself

entirely in the book, and leaves us to remember him, therefore, with all

the greater pleasure.

The hero of the tale is Gilbert Potter, a young farmer of Kennett, on

whose birth there is, in the belief of his neighbors, the stain of

illegitimacy, though his mother, with whom he lives somewhat solitarily

and apart from the others, denies the guilt imputed to her, while some

mystery forbids her to reveal her husband's name. Gilbert is in love

with Martha, the daughter of Dr. Deane, a rich, smooth, proud old

Quaker, who is naturally no friend to the young man's suit, but is

rather bent upon his daughter's marriage with Alfred Barton, a bachelor

of advanced years, and apparent heir of one of the hardest, wealthiest,

and most obstinately long-lived old gentlemen in the neighborhood.

Obediently to the laws of fiction, Martha rejects Alfred Barton, who,

indeed, is but a cool and timid wooer, and a weak, selfish, spiritless

man, of few good impulses, with a dull fear and dislike of his own

father, and a covert tenderness for Gilbert. The last, being openly

accepted by Martha, and forbidden, with much contumely, to see her, by

her father, applies himself with all diligence to paying off the

mortgage on his farm, in order that he may wed the Doctor's daughter, in

spite of his science, his pride, and his riches; but when he has earned

the requisite sum, he is met on his way to Philadelphia and robbed of

the money by Sandy Flash, a highwayman who infested that region, and

who, Mr. Taylor tells us, is an historical personage. He appears first

in the first chapter of "The Story of Kennett," when, having spent the

day in a fox-hunt with Alfred Barton, and the evening at the tavern in

the same company, he beguiles his comrade into a lonely place, reveals

himself, and, with the usual ceremonies, robs Barton of his money and

watch. Thereafter, he is seen again, when he rides through the midst of

the volunteers of Kennett, drinks at the bar of the village tavern, and

retires unharmed by the men assembled to hunt him down and take him.

After all, however, he is a real brigand, and no hero; and Mr. Taylor

manages his character so well as to leave us no pity for the fate of a

man, who, with some noble traits, is in the main fierce and cruel. He is

at last given up to justice by the poor, half-wild creature with whom he

lives, and whom, in a furious moment, he strikes because she implores

him to return Gilbert his money.

As for Gilbert, through all the joy of winning Martha, and the sickening

disappointment of losing his money, the shame and anguish of the mystery

that hangs over his origin oppress him; and, having once experienced the

horror of suspecting that Martha's father might also be his, he suffers

hardly less torture when the highwayman, on the day of his conviction,

sends to ask an interview with him. But Sandy Flash merely wishes to

ease his conscience by revealing the burial-place of Gilbert's money;

and when the young man, urged to the demand by an irresistible anxiety,

implores, "You are not my father?" the good highwayman, in great and

honest amazement, declares that he certainly is not. The mystery

remains, and it is not until the death of the old man Barton that it is

solved. Then it is dissipated, when Gilbert's mother, in presence of

kindred and neighbors, assembled at the funeral, claims Alfred Barton as

her husband; and after this nothing remains but the distribution of

justice, and the explanation that, long ago, before Gilbert's birth, his

parents had been secretly married. Alfred Barton, however, had sworn his

wife not to reveal the marriage before his father's death, at that time

daily expected, and had cruelly held her to her vow after the birth of

their son, and through all the succeeding years of agony and

contumely,--loving her and her boy in his weak, selfish, cowardly way,

but dreading too deeply his father's anger ever to do them justice. The

reader entirely sympathizes with Gilbert's shame in such a father, and

his half-regret that it had not been a brave, bad man like Sandy Flash

instead. Barton's punishment is finely worked out. The fact of the

marriage had been brought to the old man's knowledge before his death,

and he had so changed his will as to leave the money intended for his

son to his son's deeply wronged wife; and, after the public assertion of

their rights at the funeral, Gilbert and his mother coldly withdraw from

the wretched man, and leave him, humiliated before the world he dreaded,

to seek the late reconciliation which is not accomplished in this book.

It is impossible to feel pity for his sufferings; but one cannot repress

the hope that Mary and her son will complete the beauty of their own

characters by forgiving him at last.

It seems to us that this scene of Mary Potter's triumph at the funeral

is the most effective in the whole book. Considering her character and

history, it is natural that she should seek to make her justification as

signal and public as possible. The long and pitiless years of shame

following the error of her youthful love and ambition, during which the

sin of attempting to found her happiness on a deceit was so heavily

punished, have disciplined her to the perfect acting of her part, and

all her past is elevated and dignified by the calm power with which she

rights herself. She is the chief person of the drama, which is so pure

and simple as not to approach melodrama; and the other characters are

merely passive agents; while the reader, to whom the facts are known,

cannot help sharing their sense of mystery and surprise. We confess to a

deeper respect for Mr. Taylor's power than we have felt before, when we

observe with what masterly skill he contrives by a single incident to

give sudden and important development to a character, which, however

insignificant it had previously seemed, we must finally allow to have

been perfectly prepared for such an effect.

The hero of the book, we find a good deal like other heroes,--a little

more natural than most, perhaps, but still portentously noble and

perfect. He does not interest us much; but we greatly admire the

heroine, Martha Deane, whom he loves and marries. In the study of her

character and that of her father, Mr. Taylor is perfectly at home, and

extremely felicitous. There is no one else who treats Quaker life so

well as the author of the beautiful story of "Friend Eli's Daughter";

and in the opposite characters of Doctor Deane and Martha we have the

best portraiture of the contrasts which Quakerism produces in human

nature. In the sweet and unselfish spirit of Martha, the theories of

individual action under special inspiration have created self-reliance,

and calm, fearless humility, sustaining her in her struggle against the

will of her father, and even against the sect to whose teachings she

owes them. Dr. Deane had made a marriage of which the Society

disapproved, but after his wife's death he had professed contrition for

his youthful error, and had been again taken into the quiet brotherhood.

Martha, however, had always refused to unite with the Society, and had

thereby been "a great cross" to her father,--a man by no means broken

under his affliction, but a hard-headed, self-satisfied, smooth, narrow

egotist. Mr. Taylor contrives to present his person as clearly as his

character, and we smell hypocrisy in the sweet scent of marjoram that

hangs about him, see selfishness in his heavy face and craft in the

quiet gloss of his drab broadcloth, and hear obstinacy in his studied

step. He is the most odious character in the book, what is bad in him

being separated by such fine differences from what is very good in

others. We have even more regard for Alfred Barton, who, though a

coward, has heart enough to be truly ashamed at last, while Dr. Deane

retains a mean self-respect after the folly and the wickedness of his

purposes are shown to him.

His daughter, for all her firmness in resisting her father's commands to

marry Barton, and to dismiss Gilbert, is true woman, and submissive to

her lover. The wooing of these, and of the other lovers, Mark Deane and

Sally Fairthorn, is described with pleasant touches of contrast, and a

strict fidelity to place and character. Indeed, nothing can be better

than the faithful spirit in which Mr. Taylor seems to have adhered to

all the facts of the life he portrays. There is such shyness among

American novelists (if we may so classify the writers of our meagre

fiction) in regard to dates, names, and localities, that we are glad to

have a book in which there is great courage in this respect. Honesty of

this kind is vastly more acceptable to us than the aerial romance which

cannot alight in any place known to the gazetteer; though we must

confess that we attach infinitely less importance than the author does

to the fact that Miss Betsy Lavender, Deb. Smith, Sandy Flash, and the

two Fairthorn boys are drawn from the characters of persons who once

actually lived. Indeed, we could dispense very well with the low comedy

of Sally's brothers, and, in spite of Miss Betsy Lavender's foundation

in fact, we could consent to lose her much sooner than any other leading

character of the book: she seems to us made-up and mechanical. On the

contrary, we find Sally Fairthorn, with her rustic beauty and

fresh-heartedness, her impulses and blunders, altogether delightful. She

is a part of the thoroughly _country_ flavor of the book,--the rides

through the woods, the huskings, the raising of the barn,--(how

admirably and poetically all that scene of the barn-raising is

depicted!)--just as Martha somehow belongs to the loveliness and

goodness of nature,--the blossom and the harvest which appear and

reappear in the story.

We must applaud the delicacy and propriety of the descriptive parts of

Mr. Taylor's work: they are rare and brief, and they are inseparable

from the human interest of the narrative with which they are interwoven.

The style of the whole fiction is clear and simple, and, in the more

dramatic scenes,--like that of old Barton's funeral,--rises effortlessly

into very great strength. The plot, too, is well managed; the incidents

naturally succeed each other; and, while some portion of the end may be

foreseen, it must be allowed that the author skilfully conceals the

secret of Gilbert's parentage, while preparing at the right moment to

break it effectively to the reader.

_The South since the War: as shown by Fourteen Weeks of Travel and

Observation in Georgia and the Carolinas._ By SIDNEY ANDREWS. Boston:

Ticknor and Fields.

The simple and clear exhibition of things heard and seen in the South

seems to have been the object of Mr. Andrews's interesting tour, and he

holds the mirror up to Reconstruction with a noble and self-denying

fidelity. It would have been much easier to give us studied theories and

speculations instead of the facts we needed, and we are by no means

inclined to let the crudity of parts of the present book abate from our

admiration of its honesty and straightforwardness.

A great share of the volume is devoted to sketches of scenes and debates

in the Conventions held last autumn in North and South Carolina and

Georgia, for the reconstruction of the State governments; and Mr.

Andrews's readers are made acquainted, as pleasantly as may be, with the

opinions and appearance of the leaders in these bodies. But the value of

this part of his book is necessarily transitory; and we have been much

more interested in the chapters which recount the author's experiences

of travel and sojourn, and describe the popular character and

civilization of the South as affected by the event of the war. It must

be confessed, however, that the picture is not one from which we can

take great courage for the present. The leading men in the region

through which Mr. Andrews passed seem to have an adequate conception of

the fact that the South can only rise again through tranquillity,

education, and justice; and some few of these men have the daring to

declare that regeneration must come through her abandonment of all the

social theories and prejudices that distinguished her as a section

before the war. But in a great degree the beaten bully is a bully still.

There is the old lounging, the old tipsiness, the old swagger, the old

violence. Mr. Andrews has to fly from a mob, as in the merry days of

1859, because he persuades an old negro to go home and not stay and be

stabbed by a gentleman of one of the first families. Drunken life-long

idlers hiccup an eloquent despair over the freedmen's worthlessness;

bitter young ladies and high-toned gentlemen insult Northerners when

opportunity offers; and, while there is a general disposition to accept

the fortune of war, there is a belief, equally general, among our

unconstructed brethren, that better people were never worse off. The

conditions outside of the great towns are not such as to attract

Northern immigration, in which the chief hope of the South lies; and

there is but slight wish on the part of the dominant classes to improve

the industry of the country by doing justice to the liberated slaves.

The military, under the Freedmen's Bureau, does something to enforce

contracts and punish outrage; but it is often lamentably inadequate, and

is sometimes controlled by men who have the baseness to side against the

weak.

Of the three States through which Mr. Andrews travelled, South Carolina

seems to be in the most hopeful mood for regeneration; but it is

probable that the natural advantages of Georgia will attract a larger

share of foreign capital and industry, and place it first in the line of

redemption, though the temper of its people is less intelligent and

frank than that of the South-Carolinians. In North Carolina the

difficulty seems to be with the prevailing ignorance and poverty of the

lower classes, and the lukewarm virtue of people who were also lukewarm

in wickedness, and whose present loyalty is dull and cold, like their

late treason.

_Social Life of the Chinese: with some Account of their Religious,

Governmental, Educational, and Business Customs and Opinions, etc._ By

REV. JUSTUS DOOLITTLE, Fourteen Years Member of the Fuhchan Mission of

the American Board. With over One Hundred and Fifty Illustrations. In

Two Volumes. New York: Harper and Brothers.

Mr. Doolittle speaks of a class of degraded individuals in China, "who

are willing to make amusement for others." The severest critic can

hardly assign him to any such class, for there is no reason to suppose

that he would have made his book amusing, if he could possibly have

helped it. But the Chinese are a race of such amazing and inexhaustible

oddities, that the driest description of them, if it be only truthful,

must be entertaining.

What power of prose can withdraw all interest from a people whose

theology declares that whoever throws printed paper on the ground in

anger "has five demerits, and will lose his intelligence," and that he

who tosses it into water "has twenty demerits, and will have sore eyes"?

A people among whom unmarried women who have forsworn meat are called

"vegetable virgins," and married women similarly pledged are known as

"vegetable dames,"--among whom a present of sugar-cane signifies the

approach of an elder sister, and oysters in an earthen vessel are the

charming signal that a younger brother draws near,--a people among whom

the most exciting confectionery is made of rice and molasses,--how can

the Reverend Justus Doolittle deprive such a people of the most piquant

interest?

And when we come to weightier matters, one finds this to be after all

one of those "dry books" for which Margaret Fuller declared her

preference,--a book where the author supplies only a multiplicity of the

most unvarnished facts, and leaves all the imagination to the reader. To

say that he for one instant makes the individuality of a Chinese

conceivable, or his human existence credible, or that he can represent

the whole nation to the fancy as anything but a race of idiotic dolls,

would be saying far too much. No traveller has ever accomplished so much

as that, save that wonderful Roman Catholic, Huc. But setting all this

apart, there has scarcely appeared in English, until now, so exhaustive

and so honest a picture of the external phenomena of Chinese life.

It is painful to have to single out honesty as a special merit in a

missionary work; but the temptation to filch away the good name of a

Pagan community is very formidable, and few even among lay travellers

have done as faithful justice to the Chinese character as Mr. Doolittle.

He fully recognizes the extended charities of the Chinese and their

filial piety; stoutly declares that tight shoeing is not so injurious as

tight lacing, and that Chinese slavery is not so bad as the late

lamented "institution" in America; shows that the religions of that

land, taken at their worst, have none of the deified sensuality of other

ancient mythologies, and that the greatest practical evils, such as

infanticide, are steadily combated by the Chinese themselves. Even on

the most delicate point, the actual condition of missionary enterprises,

the good man tells the precise truth with the most admirable frankness.

To make a single convert cost seven years' labor at Canton, and nine at

Fuhchan, and it was twenty-eight years ere a church was organized. Out

of four hundred million souls, there are as yet less than three thousand

converts, as the result of the labor of two hundred missionaries, after

sixty years of work. Yet Mr. Doolittle, who has spent more than a third

of his life in China, still finds his courage fresh and his zeal

unabated; and every one must look with respect upon a self-devotion so

generous and so sincere.

_Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates, a Story of Life in Holland._ By M.

E. DODGE. New York: James O'Kane.

Hans Brinker is a charming domestic story of some three hundred and

fifty pages, which is addressed, indeed, to young people, but which may

be read with pleasure and profit by their elders. The scene is laid in

Holland, a land deserving to be better known than it is; and the writer

evinces a knowledge of the country, and an acquaintance with the spirit

and habits of its stout, independent, estimable people, which must have

been gathered not from books alone, but from living sources.

Graphically, too, is the quaint picture sketched, and with a pleasant

touch of humor. We all know the main features of Dutch scenery; but they

are seldom brought to our notice with livelier effect. Speaking of the

guardian dikes, Mrs. Dodge says:--

"They are high and wide, and the tops of some of them are covered with

buildings and trees. They have even fine public roads upon them, from

which horses may look down on wayside cottages. Often the keels of

floating ships are higher than the roofs of the dwellings. The stork

chattering to her young on the house-peak may feel that her nest is

lifted out of danger, but the croaking frog in neighboring bulrushes is

nearer the stars than she. Water-bugs dart backward and forward above

the heads of the chimney-swallows, and willow-trees seem drooping with

shame, because they cannot reach as high as the reeds near by....

Farm-houses, with roofs like great slouched hats over their eyes, stand

on wooden legs with a tucked-up sort of air, as if to say, 'We intend to

keep dry if we can.' Even the horses wear a wide stool on each hoof to

lift them out of the mire.... Men, women, and children go clattering

about in wooden shoes with loose heels; peasant-girls, who cannot get

beaux for love, hire them for money to escort them to the _Kermis_; and

husbands and wives lovingly harness themselves, side by side, on the

bank of the canal, and drag their _pakschuyts_ to market....

"'One thing is clear," cries Master Brightside, 'the inhabitants need

never be thirsty.' But no, Odd-land is true to itself still.

Notwithstanding the sea pushing to get in, and the lakes pushing to get

out, and all the canals and rivers and ditches, there is, in many

districts, no water fit to swallow; our poor Hollanders must go dry, or

drink wine and beer, or send inland to Utrecht and other favored

localities for that precious fluid, older than Adam, yet young as the

morning dew.

The book is fresh and flavorous in tone, and speaks to the fancy of

children. Here is a scene on the canal:--

"It was recess-hour. At the first stroke of the school-house bell, the

canal seemed to give a tremendous shout, and grow suddenly alive with

boys and girls. The sly thing, shining so quietly under the noonday sun,

was a kaleidoscope at heart, and only needed a shake from that great

clapper to startle it into dazzling changes.

"Dozens of gayly clad children were skating in and out among each other,

and all their pent-up merriment of the morning was relieving itself in

song and shout and laughter. There was nothing to check the flow of

frolic. Not a thought of school-books came out with them into the

sunshine. Latin, arithmetic, grammar, all were locked up for an hour in

the dingy school-room. The teacher might be a noun if he wished, and a

proper one at that, but _they_ meant to enjoy themselves. As long as the

skating was as perfect as this, it made no difference whether Holland

was on the North Pole or the Equator; and as for philosophy, how could

they bother themselves about inertia and gravitation and such things,

when it was as much as they could do to keep from getting knocked over

in the commotion?"

There is no formal moral, obtruding itself in set phrase. The lessons

inculcated, elevated in tone, are in the action of the story and the

feelings and aspirations of the actors. A young lady, for example, has

been on a visit to aid and console a poor peasant-girl, whom, having

been in deep affliction, she found unexpectedly relieved. Engrossed by

her warm sympathy with her humble friend, she forgets the lapse of time.

"Helda was reprimanded severely that day for returning late to school

after recess, and for imperfect recitation.

"She had remained near the cottage until she heard Dame Brinker laugh,

and heard Hans say, 'Here I am, father!' and then she had gone back to

her lessons. What wonder that she missed them! How could she get a long

string of Latin verbs by heart, when her heart did not care a fig for

them, but would keep saying to itself, 'O, I am so glad! I am so glad!'"

The book contains two things,--a series of lifelike pictures of an

interesting country and of the odd ways and peculiarities and homely

virtues of its inhabitants; and then, interwoven with these, a simple

tale, now pathetic, now amusing, and carrying with it wholesome

influences on the young heart and mind.