CHAPTER XIX.

Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Josephine Paolucci and the

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LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE

OF

_POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE._

NOVEMBER, 1873.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1873, by J. B.

LIPPINCOTT & Co., in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at

Washington.

Transcriber's Note: Minor typos have been corrected.

THE NEW HYPERION.

FROM PARIS TO MARLY BY WAY OF THE RHINE.

V.--IN PURSUIT OF A PASSPORT.

[Illustration: THE SIGN OF THE "STORK".]

"The Strasburgers have a legend--"

We were rolling along very comfortably in the engineer's coach. From

pavement to bridge, and from bridge to pavement, we effected the long

step which bestrides the Rhine.

"I knew you would prick your ears up at the word. Well, I have found a

legend among the people here about the original acquisition of Strasburg

by the French. You know Louis XIV. bagged the city quite unwarrantably

in 1681, in a time of peace."

I was much delighted with this beginning, and told my friend that to

cross the storied Rhine and simultaneously listen to a legend made me

feel as if I were Frithiof the Viking entertained on his voyage by a

Skald.

"The Alsatians will have it," said my canal-digger, "that the Grand

Monarch was a bit of a magician. The depth of what I may call his

High-Church sentiment, which at last proved so edifying to the

Maintenon, has never convinced them that he wasn't a trifle in league

with the devil. At the foot of his praying-chair was always chained a

little casket of ebony, bound with iron. In this he imprisoned a little

yellow man, a demon of the most concentrated structure, hardly a foot

long. This goblin ran through the air, on an errand or with a letter,

about as fast as a stroke of lightning, and admirably filled the place

of the modern telegraph. For each meal he took three seeds of hemp,

which he loved to receive from the king's hand. By and by the little

yellow man became more of a gourmand. He demanded seed-pearls, and the

king was obliged to rob the queen's jewel-boxes. Then the yellow dwarf's

appetite changed, and he required stars, orders and garters: one by one

the obedient monarch gave him the decorations of count, marquis, duke.

The demon's name was Chamillo.

[Illustration: A GRAND MONARCH AND A LITTLE YELLOW IMP.]

"One day the small devil-duke of a Chamillo hovered over the imperial

free city of Strasburg. Entering by key-holes and doors ajar, he stole

into the presence of the principal magistrates, and shortly after the

impregnable capital of Alsace opened its gates at a show of French

investment.

"For this important service Louis XIV. fancied that Chamillo would

require the letters patent constituting him a prince. Not at all.

Chamillo was tired of secular honors: he had seen the bishop of

Strasburg officiating in scarlet, and he insisted on being made

cardinal. The king could not make cardinals, and he doubted whether he

could induce the pope to receive a devil among the upper clergy. He

refused absolutely. Chamillo left him in dudgeon and went over to

Prussia. Apparently he has remained there. At any rate, the French

king's fortunes commenced at that epoch to decline, and the Peace of

Ryswick almost deprived him of Strasburg, which the little yellow man

wanted to get back for Germany."

We had quitted Strasburg by the gate of Austerlitz. While listening to

my friend I kept an eye open, and examined the present state of the

fortress, the incidents of the road to Kehl, and that fairy Ile des

Épis, a perfect little Eden in the Rhine, where the tall trees and

nodding flowers bury the tomb of Dessaix, with its inscription, "À

Dessaix, l'Armée du Rhin, 1800." This bright morning-ride enchanted me,

seasoned as it was with a goblin-story.

[Illustration: ILE DES ÉPIS.]

"Behind this tale, now, there must be a fact," I said. "There is some

bit of history concealed there. The common people never invent: they

distort."

"It is possible," he answered. "I tell you the story as it was told me

by one of my theodolite-bearers. You may find out the rest: it is in

your line."

Kehl has been bombarded or razed a dozen times by French armies crossing

the Rhine. The last occasion when the French ruined it, however, was

not in vain-glory, but in impotent malice. They fired it on August 19,

1870, during the horrors of the Strasburg bombardment. It is a town

formed of a single street--But I will enter no further into topographic

details.

[Illustration: BEGGARS AT BÂLE.]

I entered this town or street in haste, leaving my engineering

acquaintance talking to a Prussian general. The idea had seized me of

writing a line to Hohenfels at Marly, actually dated from the grand

duchy of Baden. Undoubtedly I should reach Marly before my letter, but

the postal mark would be a good proof of the actuality of my wanderings.

Clinging, then, to my childishness, as we do to most of our follies,

with a fidelity which it would be well to imitate in our grave affairs,

and feeling pressed for time, I looked eagerly around for a

resting-place where I could procure ink and paper, and entered at the

sign of the "Stork." I found a smoky crowd, peasants and military,

sucking German pipes and drinking from a variety of glasses, pots,

syphons and jugs. I had taken up my pen when an individual by my side,

at the next table, said to his opposite neighbor, "The French will

hardly take Strasburg again by surprise, as they did two centuries ago."

[Illustration: HOW THINGS FELL OUT.]

"It was not the French who took Strasburg," replied the _vis-à-vis_,

evidently a native: "it was _the little urchin in yellow_."

The expression, joined to what I had just heard in the carriage, was

sufficient to attract my attention. My neighbor, a Belgian by his

accent, opened his eyes. The man opposite, perceiving that he had more

than one auditor, narrated at length, in substance and detail, not the

fairy legend of the Alsatians, but accurately and to my amusement, the

historical anecdote which I had imagined to be wrapped up in that tale.

So then, while he spoke, I wrote--no longer to Hohenfels, but to my own

consciousness and memory--these little notes on Chamillo, or rather

Chamilly, and obtained a trifling contribution to the back-stairs

history of the Grand Nation.

"The marquis of Chamilly, afterward marshal of France, was often

promised a good place for a young nephew he had by the powerful

Minister de Louvois. Each time, however, that the youth presented

himself the experienced minister said, 'Bide your time, young man: I see

nothing yet on the horizon worthy of you.' The boy sulked in the

tortures of hope deferred. One day in September, 1681, Louvois said,

'Young man, post yourself at Bâle on the 18th day of this month, from

noon to four o'clock: stand on the bridge; take a note of all you see,

without the least omission; come back and report to me; and as you

acquit yourself so your future shall be.' The young chevalier found

himself on the bridge at Bâle at high noon. He expected to meet some

deputation from the Swiss cantons, with the great landamman at the head.

What he really saw were carts, villagers, flocks of sheep, children who

chased each other, mendicants who, with Swiss independence, demanded

alms rather than begged it. He gave to each, imagining in each a

mysterious agent. An old woman crossing the bridge on a bucking donkey,

who threw her, he picked up obsequiously, not knowing but this fall

might be a manoeuvre of state, and the precipitate take the form of

the landamman in disguise: he had even the idea of running after the

donkey, but the animal was already galloping with great relish outside

the assigned limits to his diplomacy. When tired of the sun, the dust

and the triviality of the panorama, Chamilly prepared to go. It was

nearing the hour fixed for his departure, and the absence of all

significant events vexed him. As if to put a crown on his discomfiture,

toward the close of the last hour an odd little urchin, grotesquely

dressed in a yellow coat, came to beat old blankets over the parapet,

and flirted the dirt and fluff into the young man's eyes. Already

angered, he was about to hang the young imp for a minute or two over the

bridge, when four o'clock sounded, his duty came to his mind, and he

departed.

[Illustration: THE LITTLE IMP IN YELLOW]

[Illustration: "THE TRAIN IS STARTING"]

"In the middle of the third night, tired and humiliated, he reappeared

before the minister and recounted his failure. When he came to the

little page in yellow, Louvois fell on his neck and kissed him. Chamilly

was dragged incontinently before the king. Louis XIV., who was snoring

with his royal nose in the air, was waked for the purpose, and heard

with attention the story of the beggars, the donkey and the little

monkey in yellow livery. At the apparition of the Yellow Jacket, Louis

XIV. leaped over the _ruelle_ and danced a saraband in his night-gown.

Chamilly might perhaps have considered himself sufficiently rewarded in

being the only man who ever saw the superb king dancing with bare legs

in a wig hastily put on crosswise. But to this recompense others were

added. The monarch named him chevalier of his orders, count and

counselor of state, to the grand stupefaction of the young man, who

understood nothing about it.

"The little yellow urchin, shaking his blankets, announced to the king's

envoy, on the part of the perjured Strasburg magistrates, that the city

was betrayed."

I had now that rare complementing pair, a legend and its historical

foundation. I had been obliged to cross the Rhine to obtain my prize,

but I did not regret the journey. How far I was from fancying the

ill-natured turn that the little yellow man was playing me!

While my neighbor of the Stork was talking, and I was taking down his

words with my utmost rapidity, Time took advantage of me, and put double

the accustomed length into each of his steps. On recrossing into

Strasburg I had before me barely the moments necessary to regain the

railway station.

The gate at the first-class passenger-exit was about closing, fifteen

minutes in advance of the start, according to the European custom. I

pushed in rather roughly.

[Illustration: "JUSTICE AND VENGEANCE PURSUING CRIME"]

The railway-officer or porter was at the gate, barring my passage until

I could exhibit a ticket. I had not taken time to purchase one: the

train was fuming and threatening the belated passengers with a series of

false starts. Surprised into rudeness, and quite forgetting that my

appearance warranted no airs of autocracy, I made some contemptuous

remark.

"Der Herr is much too hasty. Der Herr is doubtless provided with the

necessary papers which will enable him to pass the French frontier."

It was not the porter who spoke now: it was some kind of official relic

or shadow or mouchard left from the old custom-house, and suffered to

hang on the railway-station as an ornament. His costume, half uniform

and half fatigue-dress, compromised nobody, and was surmounted by a

skull cap. His pantaloons were short, his figure was paunchy,

authoritative and German. His German, however, was spoken with a French

accent. As I mused in stupefaction upon the hint he had uttered, he

pointed with his hand. "The train is starting," he observed.

The reader probably knows Prudhon's great picture in the Louvre,

originally painted for the Palace of Justice, and entitled "Divine

Justice and Vengeance in Pursuit of Crime"? This picture, which I had

not thought of, I suppose, for an age, suddenly seemed to be realized

before me, but the heavenly detectives were changed into mortal

gendarmes. The porter and the nondescript threw back the gate,

preventing my passage. The terrors of Prudhon's avenging spirits were

all expressed, to my thinking, in the looks which these two official

people exchanged in my favor, and then bent on me. We stood in a

triangle.

"One moment: I propose a plan," I cried in desperation. "I do not know a

soul in Strasburg, and the friend who brought me here is gone, I cannot

tell whither. But I have an acquaintance in the British consulate at

Carlsruhe--Berkley, you know," I explained with an insane familiarity,

"my old friend Berkley's nephew. Admit me to the train, and we will

telegraph to him. His reply will come in ten minutes, and will show you

my responsible character. I have come fifteen minutes in advance of the

starting-hour."

"The wire to Carlsruhe," said the porter, "is under repairs."

"The train to Paris," said the second man, "is off."

Some fate was pursuing me. Rudely rejected at the wicket, and treated as

a man without a nationality, I felt as if I had but one friend now

available on earth--the friend who had come into my head while

conversing with the railway guard. Old Mr. Berkley, Mr. Sylvester.

Berkley and I had once breakfasted together at Brighton, the first

sitting in a tub, the second eating nothing but raw macerated beef, and

I for my part devouring toast and Icelandic poetry. The nephew had since

gone into diplomacy to strengthen his bile. I had not seen him for

years.

I approached the schedule of distances hanging on the wall. My movements

were those of a man prostrated and resigned. I ran my forefinger over

the departures from Kohl to Carlsruhe.

In three hours I was in the latter city.

It was not in beggar's guise that Paul Flemming would fain be seen in

the capital of the grand duchy--the most formal capital, the most

symmetrical capital, the most monumental capital, as it is the youngest

capital, in Europe. Nor was it as a vagabond that he would wish to

appear in that capital, before a friend who happened to be a

diplomatist. I recollected the engaging aspect in which I had offered

myself to the reflections of the Rhine when last beside that romantic

stream--a comely youth, with Stultz's best waistcoats on his bosom and

with ineffable sorrows in his heart. Frau Himmelauen used to say, at

Heidelberg, that my gloves were a shade too light for a strictly

virtuous man. The Frau has gone to her account, and Stultz, the great

Stultz, is defunct too, after achieving for himself a baronetcy as the

prize of his peerless scissors, and founding a hospital here in

Carlsruhe. Not to insult the shade of Stultz, I determined to renew my

youth, at least in the matter of plumage. A shop of ready-made clothing

afforded me lavender gloves, silk pocket handkerchief, satin cravat,

detachable collar and a cambric shirt: the American dickey, in which

some of my early sartorial triumphs were effected, is not to be had in

Rhineland. My ornaments purchased, the trouble was--to change my shirt.

The great hotel, the Erbprinz, was no place for a man without a passport

and without baggage: not for the world would I have faced a hotel-clerk

with his accusing register. Yet the street was not to be thought of:

only cats are allowed by etiquette to freshen their linen on the

doorstep.

[Illustration: SUSPICIOUS BAGGAGE]

A resource occurred to me. In ransacking the city for my ornaments I

had observed the castle-park, with its clumps of verdure and almost

deserted walks. Hurrah for the leafy dressing-room!

[Illustration: CARLSRUHE: THE GRAND-DUCAL PARK.]

At the gate a sentinel stopped me. Would he demand my passport? No: he

taps with his finger the lid of that faithful botany-box, my sole

valise. Aware that it contained nothing contraband, I opened it

innocently and demonstratively. At the sight of that resonant cavity,

gaping from ear to ear and belching forth gloves, kerchiefs and minor

haberdashery, the dragon laughed: his mirth took the form of a deep,

guttural, honest German guffaw. He still, however, rapped sonorously on

my box, shaking his head from side to side like a china mandarin. In his

view my box was luggage, and luggage is not permitted in any European

park. Relieved to find that my detention was not more serious, my first

thought was to comply with the conditions of entrance. I begged to leave

my package in the sentry-box, to be reclaimed at departure. The amiable

Cerberus, smiling and nodding, closed his eyes significantly: at this

moment I recollected that my only motive for entering the park lay in

that feature of my paraphernalia, and caught it up again, with a gesture

of parental violence, in the very act of depositing it. The sentry,

watching with increasing delight my evolutions and counter evolutions,

evidently thought me a nimble lunatic, Heaven-sent for the recreation of

his long watch. He no longer opposed any of my demonstrations, and

finally, with a hearty chuckle, saw me slink past him into the groves,

wardrobe in hand. Most accommodating of sentinels, why were you not in

charge of a Paris barrier during the siege?

[Illustration: THE GENTLE CERBERUS.]

Once within the park, I found that my sight had deceived me: the day was

hot, and the public, driven from the sunny walks, were concentrated in

the shade. Not a bough but sheltered its group of Arcadians. I wended

from tree to tree, describing singular zigzags on the sward. The

guardians began to eye me with lively interest. Finally, Fortune having

guided me to a beautiful thicket, a closet curtained with evergreens, I

prepared to use it for my toilet, and relinquished a sleeve of my coat.

At that moment one of my watchmen suddenly showed himself.

Looking at him with extreme seriousness, I slowly re-entered my sleeve,

and walked away with unnecessary dignity, giving the guardian my

patronage in the shape of a nod, which he did not return.

[Illustration: THE EYE OF ARGUS.]

Forbidden the green-room, what if I tried the bathroom? Hastily making

for the Square of the Obelisk, I took a carriage, engaging it by the

hour, and directing it to the nearest bathing-establishment. The driver

immediately ran off with me outside the city.

Carlsruhe is an aristocratic construction, whose princely mansions are

supposed to be supplied with their own thermal conveniences. The

locality suggested for my bath proved to be a vast suburban garden,

buried in flowers, with amorous young couples promenading the alleys,

and tables crowned with cylinders of beer, each wadded with its handful

of foam. At the extremity, on a square building, five lofty letters

spelled out the word _Baden_.

A waiter showed me a handsome bath, decorated with a tub like some Roman

mausoleum. I instructed him as to the temperature of my desired plunge.

He nodded quietly, and left me. Twenty minutes passed. I thought of my

friend Sylvester Berkley, of the document I hoped to obtain by his aid,

and, most fondly, of the hour when I could return from Carlsruhe. I

thought of the little group who at Marly were expecting and reproaching

me. Charles now, for the twentieth time, would be brushing my morning

suit and smoking-cap; Josephine, in the act of whipping a mayonnaise,

would draw anxiously to the window. The baron, my galling and

dispensable old Hohenfels, would have arrived and scolded. My

home-circle was like a ring without its jewel, while I, an undenominated

waif in search of a _visé_, was fluttering through the duchy of Baden.

Thirty minutes passed, and the bath-house retained the silence of a

ruined monastery, while outside, among the perfumes and shadows of

twilight, there began to arise strains of admirable harmony. I looked

out of the window. Some lanterns placed among the trees were already

beginning to assert their light among the shadows of evening. A chorus

of fresh and accurate voices was pouring forth from the garden, the pure

young tenors and altos weaving their melodies like network over the

sustained, vibrating, vigorous bass voices. It was the antiphony of the

youthful promenaders to the drinkers, the diastole of the heart above

the stomach, the _elisire d'amore_ in rivalry with beer. Amid this scene

I recognized my waiter, illuminated fitfully like some extraordinary

firefly as he sprang into sight beneath the successive lanterns, and

pouring out beer to right and left. To my indignant appeal he turned,

lifting his head, and stood in that attitude, finishing a musical phrase

which he was contributing to the chorus. Then he told me that my bath

was being made ready. The Teutonic placidity of this youth confounded

me. Quite disarmed, I closed the shutter, changed my linen in the dark,

and drew on my gloves over a pair of hands that decidedly needed the

disguise. The lateness of the hour alarmed me, and I fled down the stair

in three jumps. At the bottom I met my musical waiter, still tranquilly

singing, and armed with a linen wrapper and a hairbrush.

[Illustration: BIER UND BADEN.]

"What do I owe?" I asked.

"Is der Herr not going to take his bath?" asked this most leisurely of

valets.

"No."

"Very well: it will be half a florin, including towels."

I gave him the half-florin, and was getting into my cab, when he came

rambling up.

"And the palm-greaser," he cried, "the trinkgeld?"

In ten minutes I was at the offices of the national representative, but

it was now dark, and the porter, without waiting for my question, told

me that the offices were closed and everybody gone to the opera.

"The theatre!" I shouted to my charioteer.

[Illustration: AN EXHAUSTED TRAVELER.]

The ticket-seller was asleep in his box, and was much astonished at my

application for an orchestra-seat. The last act of some obscure German

opera was being shouted in full chorus. At Carlsruhe the theatre opens

at five o'clock, and closes virtuously at half-past eight. There was no

sign of my friend, no indication of a box for members of the diplomatic

body. I was very hungry, and would willingly have re-entered the

boulevards in search of a supper; but the express-train going toward

Paris would start at ten-fifteen, and I could afford to think of nothing

but my passport. I drove to the national office again, my new costume

quite shipwrecked and foundered in perspiration.

I was more explicit with the porter this time. I asked if Mr. Sylvester

Berkley had returned from the opera. I was answered by that functionary

that Mr. Pairkley was living at present in the city of Heidelberg, where

he was trying a diet of whey for the benefit of his liver.

[Illustration: THE SUNNY GROVE.]

I became flaccid with despair. I was without a refuge on the habitable

globe; my slender provision of funds would be exhausted in paying for

the carriage; I was unable even to seek the friend who for the moment

represented to me both country and fortune. The driver, witness of my

dejection and recipient of my history in part, proposed to me a

temporary refuge in a private hotel on the avenue of Ettlingen, where I

would find chambers by the day, and a family table. The landlady, he

believed, was a Belgian and a widow.

We drew up before a small house of neat appearance. I was shown a

chamber, where, no longer dreaming of supper, I fell across a cushion

like an overthrown statue. I felt as if a good month must have passed

since I possessed a home.

I had in pocket about thirty sous. The philosopher was right enough when

he said, "Traveling lengthens one's life;" only he should have added,

"It shortens one's purse."

On awakening next morning the linnets and finches communicated through

the window a pleasanter sentiment. Nature was gay and inspiring on this

lovely May-day. By a perversity quite natural with me, my letter to

Berkley, which it was my first care to write and post, contained but a

slight reflection of my woes. My need of a passport only appeared in a

postscriptum, wherein I begged him to arrange that little affair for me

in some way by correspondence. The bulk of my communication was a eulogy

of May, of youth, of flowers, of birds, all of which were saluting me as

I scribbled from the beautiful little grove outside my casement.

Treating the diplomate as an intimate friend--a caprice of the moment on

my part--I begged him to go back with me to Marly, promising him the

joys described in old Thomas Randolph's invitation to the country:

We'll seek a shade,

And hear what music's made--

How Philomel

Her tale doth tell,

And how the other birds do fill the choir:

The thrush and blackbird lend their throats,

Warbling melodious notes.

We will all sport _enjoy_, which others but _desire_.

[Illustration: THE MILK OF HUMAN KINDNESS.]

I engaged to furnish him his regimen of whey, and did not omit to quote

from the same poem, apropos of that mild Anacreontic drink, the lines

which happen to introduce his name:

And drink by stealth

A cup or two to noble _Barkley's_ health.

"The cup," I continued, "shall be at once your toast and your medicine,

and the whey shall be fresh. If you want to make a Tartar of yourself,

and feed on koemiss, I will have the milk fermented." To the baron of

Hohenfels I wrote with equal gayety, begging him to plant the stakes of

his tent in my garden until my own nomadic career should be finished. A

third letter, as my reader may imagine, was directed to the Rue Scribe,

and addressed to the American banker, the beloved of all money-needing

compatriots--Mr. John Munroe.

My letters committed to a domestic, I felt absolutely relieved from

care. I breathed freely, and recovered all my self-possession. Sing

loud, little birds! it is a comrade who listens to you.

With two days, perhaps three, of enforced leisure before me, I undertook

in a singular spirit of deliberation the criticism of my surroundings. I

began with my bed-chamber. It contained both a stove and a fireplace.

The fireplace was like all other fireplaces, but not so the stove. Stark

and straight, rising from floor to ceiling, it was fixed immovably in

the wall, a pilaster of porcelain. No stove-door interrupted its

enameled shaft: only a register of fretwork for the emission of heat,

and quite dissociated from the cares of fire-building, relieved the

ennui of this sybaritic length of polish. It was kindled--and that is

the special merit of this famous invention--from without, in the

corridor which borders the line of rooms. If you put the idea to profit,

O overtoasted friends of Flemming, I shall not regret my forced

inspection of Carlsruhe. I would distinguish less honorably that small

oblique looking-glass inserted in the bevel of the window-jamb, and

common to all the dwellings of Carlsruhe--a handy article, an

entertaining distraction, a discreet but immoral spy, which places at

your mercy all the mysteries of the public street. This contrivance,

which enables you to see the world without being seen, certainly gives

you a tempting advantage over the untimely caller or the impertinent

creditor; but it encourages, in my opinion, a habit of vision better

adapted to a sultan's seraglio than to the discreet eyes of Western

folk.

[Illustration: THE TALE OF BRICKS.]

This reflection, by which I satisfied my perhaps exalted moral sense,

was no sooner made than I found myself peeping to right and to left in

my double mirror, not without a lively sense of curiosity. At first I

saw--what Flemming, indeed, was wont to see when he consulted the

Fountain of Oblivion--only streets and moss-grown walls and trembling

spires, like those of the great City of the Past, and children playing

in the gardens like reverberations from one's lost youth. Soon a nearer

image approached. From a troop of blond girls, who dragged after them

little chariots resembling baby-wagons, one damsel drew apart, allowing

the others to pass on. She neared my window. Who is the maiden with the

anachronic baby-cart? She is the milkmaid of the country. Here in

Germany Perrette does not poise her milk upon her head or weigh it in a

balance, in order to afford by its overthrow a fable to La Fontaine. She

can dream at her ease as she draws it behind her. My fair-haired

neighbor paused. A tall lad thereupon emerged from the neighboring

trees, and, replacing Perrette at her wagon, he fitted himself

dexterously into her maiden dream and into the shafts of her equipage.

As the avenue was deserted for the instant, his arm enlaced her figure,

with the obvious and commendable purpose of sustaining her in her walk,

and with his lips close to her smiling, rosy ones he contributed a

gentle note to the hymeneal chorus that was twittered from the trees.

[Illustration: THE FLY-BRUSH.]

Who could remain long shut up from such an out-of-doors? Directly I was

in the open air, scenting the fresh breath from the parks. I inspected

the streets, the factories, the people, the houses. A prolonged and

deliberate examination of Carlsruhe enables me to assert that it is the

most easy-going, slow-paced, loitering, temporizing, procrastinating

capital outside of Dreamland.

A young workingman was assisting some bricklayers in an extension

adjacent to the foundry of Christofle and Company. I saw him going, with

a slow and lounging pace, toward the brick-pile, stopping by the way to

quench his thirst at a hydrant, whose stream was so slender that a good

many applications of the cup of Diogenes were necessary to allay the

heat concentred in the fellow's thick throat. Arrived finally at the

heap of bricks, the goal of his promenade, he took up precisely six, and

proceeded with a lordly, lounging step to bear them back to the masons.

Then, folding his arms, he watched the imbedding of those bricks in

their plaster with a sovereign calm like that of Vitellius eating figs

at the combats of the gladiators. When he consented to take up again his

serene march, it was the turn of the bricklayers to fold their arms. At

each errand he consulted the hydrant, and the builders watched all his

movements with sympathy and approval.

I photograph the moving figures in the street with the same simple

fidelity which I have employed to represent the trouble-saving

conveniences of my chamber. Take another hero, equally worthy of Capua.

The placid personage who assisted me to a bath in my room was as happy a

dullard as my waiter in the _Baden_, and both of them caressed their job

as Narcissus caressed the fountain.

[Illustration: THE KNIGHT OF THE BATH]

A large cart drew up before the door, containing twelve kegs, thoroughly

bunged. Any stranger would take the load for one of beer, but a tub

among the kegs acted as interpreter. The young man from the baths in the

first place saw to his horse. He walked around it: the drive having

heated the animal, he covered it with a cloth, and guaranteed its head

against the flies with several plumes of foliage, beneath which Dobbin,

blinded but content, showed only the paralytic flapping of his

pendulous, negro-like lips. These indispensable cares despatched, the

young man from the baths brought up the tub after a short gossip with

the kitchen-maid, who was going out to market. He asked her if there

were a stable attached where he could put up the horse during the taking

of the bath: being answered in the negative, he then, with an almost

painful inconsequence of argument, chucked the girl under the chin. He

next inquired if she had any soap-fat. At length he consented to lumber

up the steps with one of his little kegs: the tenacity of the bung was

so exemplary that a long time was consumed in getting the advantage

over it, and the water on its part was but tardy in leaping toward the

tub in a series of strangulations. This formula, interrupted by minute

attentions to the horse, had to be repeated twelve times, and the bath,

which commenced as a warm bath, received its guest as a cold one. Such

was the result when to the languor of the individual was added the

national complication of apparatus.

[Illustration: GANYMEDE.]

The deliberate spectator--or, if you will, the imprisoned spectator like

myself, with his artificial leisure--asks himself how long a time was

consumed by this little country of Baden, by this people so lumpish in

its labor, so restricted in its movements, so friendly to its own ease,

in building its elegant metropolis of mansions and palaces? There is

something piquant in learning that the city is the hastiest construction

on the continent. It only dates from the year 1715.

[Illustration: ARRESTED MOTION.]

Carlsruhe reminds the American traveler of Washington. In place of the

tortuous plan and picturesque inconvenience of the antique capitals, it

offers a predetermined and courteous radiation of broad streets from the

grand-ducal palace, much like the fan of avenues that spreads away from

the Capitol building. Formal as it is, and recent as it is, Carlsruhe

affords as pretty a legend as any fairy-founded city of dimmest

ancestry.

The margrave Charles of Baden, hunter and warrior, returned from victory

to bathe his soul in the sylvan delights of the chase. One day, as he

coursed the stag in the Haardt Forest, he lay down with a sudden sense

of fatigue, and fell asleep: an oak tree shadowed him with its broad

canopies. Dreaming, he saw the green boughs separate, and in the zenith

of the heavens descried a crown blazing with incredible jewels, and

inscribed with letters that he felt rather than spelled: "This is the

reward of the noble." All around the crown, hanging in air like

sculptured cloudwork, spread a splendid city with towers: a noble

castle, with open portal and stairway inviting his princely feet, stood

at the centre, and the spires of sacred churches still sought, as they

seek on earth, to pierce the unattainable heaven. When he awoke his

courtiers were around him, for they had searched and found their lord

while he slept. He related his dream, and declared his ducal will to

build on that very spot a city just as he had seen it, with a splendid

palace for central point, and streets like the spokes of light that

spread from the sinking sun. So he said, and gave his whole soul to

building this graceful capital and developing it with the arts of peace;

for heretofore he had thought only of war, and had meant to patch up a

seat of government in the little town of Durlach.

[Illustration: THE PIPERS.]

The Haardtwald still spreads around Carlsruhe ("Charles's Rest") to the

eastward, but the bracken and underbrush have given way to beaten roads,

which prolong with perfect regularity the fan of streets. An avenue of

the finest Lombardy poplars in Germany, the trees being from ninety to a

hundred and twenty feet high, extends for two miles to Durlach. Around

the city spread rich plum and cherry orchards, yielding the "lucent

sirops" from which is distilled the famous Kirschwasser.

The reputation for drunkenness, in my opinion, has been very erroneously

fastened upon the German population. During my sojourn in Carlsruhe I

have paid many a visit to the beer-shops, from the petty taverns

frequented by the poor to the lofty saloons where Ganymedes in white

skirts shuffled with huge tankards through a perfect forest of orange

trees in tubs; for, worse luck to my morals, I have not seen a single

frightful example, not one individual balancing dispersedly over his

legs. In the grand duchy of Baden the debauch is punished by a law of

somewhat harsh logic, which commits to prison both drunkards and those

who have furnished the wherewithal to excess. The common people form a

nation of drinkers, not drunkards. The beer-tables are usually placed in

the open air, with shelter for the patrons in case of bad weather. The

out-door air is almost indispensable to correct the evils which might

proceed from such an artillery of pipes all fired in concert.

[Illustration: INCENSE AT THE ALTAR.]

For Germany, if not a land of intoxication, is certainly one of

fumigation. The face of a German is composed invariably of the

following features: two eyes, a nose, a mouth, and a pipe. Whichever of

these features is movable, the pipe at least is a fixture. Fortified by

this vital organ, he lives, loves and moves.

EDWARD STRAHAN.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

AUTUMN VOICES.

Seemeth the chorus that greets the ear

A dirge for the dying hours,

That wake no more for the passing year,

Spring's voices of birds and flowers?

Or is it a psalm of love upborne

From this grateful earth of ours?

Unfold us the burden of your song,

Grasshoppers, chirping so

Tender and sweet the whole day long!

Is it of joy or woe,

The music that breathes from each blade of grass

In undertone deep and low?

Vainly I list for a jarring tone,

All is so blest to me--

From the cricket that answers, beneath the stone,

The brown toad hid in the tree,

To the tiniest insect of them all

That helps with the harmony.

Never a pause in the serenade!

Like the glory of ripened corn,

It filleth the air through sunshine and shade;

And from twilight till peep of morn

Is a rhythmical pulse in the dreamful night,

That of satisfied life seems born.

As the gold of the summer about us floats,

Soft melody crowneth the haze

Of the yellow ether with choral notes

Through these tuneful autumn days.

Speak, sphinx of the hearthstone, cricket dear!

Is the song of sorrow or praise?

Of this I am sure, that you bring to me

Thoughts the sweetest of any I know:

Of this I am sure, that you sing to me,

In minor tones tenderly low,

Of things the dearest that life has brought,

And dearest that hopes bestow.

MARY B. DODGE.

SKETCHES OF EASTERN TRAVEL.

II. BATAVIA.

"Batavia, ho! and just ahead at that!" exclaimed the captain of our

gallant East Indiaman as the entire party of passengers sprang to the

quarter-deck on the first cry of "Land ahead!" It was scarcely five

o'clock in the morning--not dawn between the tropics--but our impatience

could brook no delay, and despite impromptu toilettes and yet unswabbed

decks, with sluices of sea-water threatening us at every turn, we

hastened forward to catch the earliest possible glimpse of the quaint

old city of which we had heard such varied accounts. "You'll think a

good part of it was built in Holland three centuries ago," said our

captain, "then boxed up, sent across the waters, and dropped down,

pell-mell, in the midst of the jungle." We all laughed incredulously at

the time, but remembered his words afterward.

Batavia, one of the strongholds of Dutch power in the East, occupies the

north-western extremity of the island of Java. It is composed of two

distinct settlements, known, respectively, as the "Old City" and the

"New City." The former, built directly on the seaboard, consists mainly

of warehouses; stores and government offices, with a pretty extensive

mingling of native dwellings and bazaars. The business-houses occupied

by Europeans are all built in the old Dutch style of centuries ago, and

their venerable appearance is largely augmented by the mould and

discoloration of the sea-air; while the _tout ensemble_ presents an

ancient and dilapidated aspect strangely at variance with the luxuriant

verdure of the tropical scenery and the brilliant tints of the

picturesque Oriental costumes everywhere visible. The New City is a

terrestrial Paradise, with broad avenues shaded by majestic trees,

spacious parks, and palace-dwellings of indescribable elegance--a quaint

commingling of city and country, of Oriental luxuriousness with the

Hollander's characteristic love of solidity. In truth, the New City is

not a city at all, but a continuous succession of beautiful villas

embowered in orange groves, and surrounded by palms and banians, upon

which climb and clamber flowering vines and creepers innumerable, while

birds are singing, bees humming and butterflies fluttering their gauzy

wings, utterly regardless of the proprieties of city life.

At eight o'clock we found ourselves in the custom-house, surrounded by

Dutch revenue-officers, whose insignia of office seemed to consist of

the huge bunches of keys with which they were armed. Their stylish

uniforms and fair pale faces were singularly in contrast with the

chocolate-colored skins, naked busts, scarlet girdles and green or

yellow turbans of the crowds of native porters who stood ready to take

charge of the baggage as fast as it was examined. Having seen our

effects disposed of, we set out for our quarters in the New City,

attended by the Bengalese comprador who was to serve as guide and

purveyor-general during our stay in the island. We were driven in the

neatest of pony palanquins, drawn by horses scarcely larger than

Newfoundland dogs, over smooth, well-shaded roads, amid luxuriant fields

and meadows, and for a good portion of the route by the banks of a

beautiful canal, all aglow with busy life. Here and there were sampans

and _budgerows_, some loaded with merchandise, and others with

passengers, their light sails spread and pennons gayly flaunting in the

breeze, while men, women and children, bathing and swimming in the

smooth waters, sported like fish in their native element, and never

dreamed of the possibility of danger.

[Illustration: A STREET IN BATAVIA (THE NEW CITY).]

Among the majestic trees that formed natural archways above our heads,

shutting out completely the sun's fervid rays, we noted especially the

banians and cotton trees, the latter frequently besprinkling our heads

and shoulders with what seemed at first glance a shower of _bonâ fide_

snow, but on examination proved only the light, fleecy down of

sea-island cotton. Conspicuous among the trees we encountered on that

pleasant morning drive was the _Palmier du voyageur_, more generally

known as the _talipat_ or priestly palm, which was described in a recent

number of this magazine.

[Illustration: A canal in Batavia]

One characteristic feature of Javanese residences is their superb baths.

The pools are usually of marble or granite, of such huge dimensions that

one may float and flounder like fish in a pond, while the superintendent

of the bath keeps in constant play a brace of jets that send their

sparkling spray over the bather's head and shoulders with most

refreshing results. The water is clear as crystal, and sufficiently cool

for the relaxed state of the system in a tropical clime. Everybody

bathes three times a day, and one would far sooner dispense with a meal

than do without either of these stated baths.

[Illustration: THE TALAPAT PALM.]

The usual routine of European life in India is to rise at "gun-fire"

(five o'clock), go out for an airing in boat or palanquin for two full

hours, bathe and dress at eight, take breakfast at nine, lunch at one,

and siesta from two to four, when everybody retires, and, whether one

wishes to sleep or not, he is secure of interruption, and has the full

benefit of being _en déshabillé_ for the two most oppressive hours of

the day. At four the second bath is taken; at five all go out in full

dress in open carriages, and after a rapid drive over some of the public

thoroughfares, the horses are walked slowly up and down the esplanade,

where all the fashionable world assemble at this hour to see and be

seen, and exchange passing courtesies or comments. At half-past six "the

course" is deserted, and brilliantly-lighted dining-rooms are thronged

with guests eager to test the quality of the rich and varied delicacies

of which an Oriental dinner consists.

[Illustration: A "GAMMELANG," OR JAVANESE CONCERT.]

This is the principal meal of the day, and, occupying often two or three

hours, it is made not merely an epicurean feast, but also an

intellectual and social banquet. Strong coffee, served in the tiniest of

porcelain cups, follows the guests on their return to the

drawing-rooms, and music, conversation, reading and company fill up the

hours till midnight, when the third bath is taken immediately before

retiring. This routine is seldom varied, except by the arrival of

strangers, bent, like our party at Batavia, on sight-seeing. _We_ soon

wearied of the very voluptuousness of this stereo-typed course of

indulgence, and welcomed in preference the fatigues and annoyances of

exploring the thousand objects of interest that were beckoning us onward

to jungle, mountain or sea-coast. Our friends, who were old residents,

shook their heads knowingly, and prophesied sunstroke or jungle fever;

but we went sight-seeing continually, filled our specimen baskets, and

escaped both fever and sunstroke. The climate of Batavia is, however,

extremely insalubrious for Europeans: a deadly miasma everywhere

overshadows its luxuriant groves and lurks among the petals of its

brightest flowers, rendering absolutely necessary regular habits of

life. Before the occupation of the New City, when merchants and officers

all resided on the seaboard, in the immediate vicinity of their

business-places, the mortality was fearful, till utter depopulation

seemed to threaten the colony. The inland location of the New City is

more salubrious, and the extensive grounds that surround each dwelling

give abundant freedom for ventilation, while the few hours passed by

business or professional gentlemen at their offices--and those the best

hours of the day, from breakfast to luncheon--are not deemed specially

detrimental to health, even for foreigners. The Malays, Chinese and East

Indians generally reside anywhere with impunity.

[Illustration: LIEUTENANT OF THE SULTAN'S GUARD.]

As our ship would be several weeks in port, discharging and taking in

cargo, we availed ourselves of so fortunate an opportunity to explore

some of the native settlements in the interior of the island. A Dutch

officer, long resident in Java, kindly offered his escort, and obtained

for us such passes and other facilities as were needed. Our first

stopping place was at Bandong, the capital of one of the finest

provinces of Java. It is under the nominal control of a native prince,

who bears the title of "regent," holding his office under the government

of Holland, from which he receives, an annuity of about forty thousand

dollars. Among the natives he maintains the state of a grand Oriental

monarch, and his subjects prostrate themselves in profoundest reverence

before him; but both he and his domain are really controlled by half a

dozen resident Hollanders, at the head of whom is the prefect. The

palace of the regent is a massive structure, completely surrounded by

beautiful gardens; and just beneath the windows where we sat I noticed a

picturesque little lake, about which were sporting joyously at the

evening hour a group of the young maidens of the palace. They were

graceful and lovely in the careless abandon of their glee, but they no

sooner perceived the white faces of the foreigners looking down at them

than they fled like frightened doves, hiding themselves in a grove of

bananas, in any single leaf of which one of these dainty demoiselles

might have clothed herself entire.

We found the regent surrounded by crowds of native attendants, among

whose prostrate forms we wended our way to his presence. He was seated

on a raised dais at the upper end of the audience-hall, and received us

with the courteous dignity of a well-bred gentleman. His dress was that

ordinarily worn by Malayan rajahs--brocade silk _saráng_ fastened by a

rich girdle, a loose upper garment of fine muslin, and a massive turban

of blue silk wrought in figures of gold. Costly but clumsy Arabic

sandals, and a diamond-hilted _kris_ or dagger of fabulous value,

completed a costume that looked both graceful and comfortable for a warm

climate. He greeted the ladies of our party with marked _empressement_,

thanked them for their visit, and conducted them in person to the

entrance of the seraglio to make the acquaintance of his wives and

daughters.

[Illustration: SOLDIER OF THE SULTAN'S GUARD.]

The next evening we were all invited to be present at the _gammeláng_,

or orchestral and dramatic entertainment, in the harem of this prince.

The invitation was gladly accepted, and so novel an exhibition I have

seldom witnessed. Many of the musicians were masked, and wore

queer-looking, conical caps that looked like exaggerated extinguishers,

and a sort of light armor in which their unaccustomed limbs were

evidently ill at ease. Occupying a conspicuous position in the very

front, I noticed a Siamese _raknát_-player, robed in the native

dress--or rather _un_dress--of his country, and his hair cut _à la_

Bangkok. He was singularly expert in the use of his instrument; and I

learned afterward that, though taken to Java as a slave, his great

musical talents had won for him not only liberty, but the highest favor

of the regent of Bandong. He was the only rahnát-player in the

gammeláng, but there were some two hundred timbrels, half a dozen drums,

ten or twelve tom-toms, twenty violins, sixteen pairs of cymbals, and

any imaginable number of horns, flutes and flageolets. I leave the

reader to imagine the amount of noise produced by such a combination: my

ears did not cease tingling for a week. But everybody praised the music,

and evidently enjoyed the fun. The dancing was like all Oriental

dancing, very voluptuous and enthusiastic, adapted especially to display

the exquisite charms of the performers and move the passions of the

audience. The play that followed possessed no merit, except in the

bewildering beauty of the girlish actresses, and their superb adornments

of natural flowers artistically arranged in coronets and wreaths, with

costly pearls and diamonds. The play itself was simply a farce--a series

of ridiculous passages between some lovesick swains and their rather

tantalizing lady-loves, who eventually escaped, amid a shower of roses

and bon-bons, from their pursuers, and disappeared behind a huge palm

tree, which the next instant had vanished into air, roots, branches and

all.

After a somewhat adventurous ascent of Mount Tan-kon-bau-pra-hou, a

hurried visit to the volcanoes of Merbabou and Derapi (the former nine

thousand feet high, the latter eight thousand five hundred), and a

glimpse at the sacred woods of Wah-Wons, we turned our faces toward

Sourakarta and Djokjokarta, the two grand principalities of Java still

remaining under native rule. Each is governed by an independent sultan,

whom the Dutch have never been able to subjugate; and they are allowed,

only by sufferance, to keep a diplomatic agent or "resident" at the

courts of these monarchs. We had been forewarned, ere setting out on our

tour, of the state maintained by these proud Oriental princes, and the

utter impossibility of obtaining an audience without fulfilling to the

very letter all the requirements of courtly usage. So we had sent

forward some costly presents to each of the sultans, with letters

written in Arabic and French, praying for the honor of an interview. Our

messenger to the court of Sourakarta soon returned, accompanied by a

native officer and five soldiers in full uniform, with a courteous

letter of welcome from the sultan to his capital. He did not say to his

_court_, and we were left in doubt as to whether we should see him,

after all. But the day of our entrée was a most propitious one, as on

that very morning this renowned monarch had been made the happy father

of his twenty-eighth child. To this fortunate event we doubtless owed

our reception at the court of this very exclusive potentate, who, we

were told, almost invariably declined the proffered civilities of

foreigners. Bonfires, illuminations and processions seemed the order of

the day, business was suspended, bells were ringing, gongs sounding, and

everybody was taking holiday, in commemoration of an event that seemed

to have lost none of its novelty even after nearly a score and a half of

repetitions.

The palace is built in pagoda form, with abundant architectural

adornments, and is surrounded by a semicircle of smaller buildings of

much the same appearance, though somewhat less imposing. The grandest

view is at night, when the whole immense pile, from base to turret, is

one blaze of light that but for the abundant tropical growth might be

seen for miles away. The sultan is a well-informed and courtly

gentleman, with a polish of mind and manners we were quite unprepared to

find hidden away in the heart of Java. He is said to be the most

distinguished of all the Malayan princes of this isle. He conversed with

readiness on the general aspect of political affairs in Europe and

America, inquired for the latest intelligence, and before we left

invited us to be present at a grand military review on the following

day. The garb of the troops, both officers and men, consists of long

silken sarángs confined by embroidered girdles, gold or silver _bangles_

in lieu of boots, and costly turbans adorned with precious stones--a

garb that looked; better suited to the harem than the battle-field but

their manoeuvres certainly did credit to their royal instructor in

military tactics. The distinguishing weapon of Malayan soldiers, both in

Java and elsewhere, is the kris, worn at the back and passed into the

girdle. This is always carried both by officers and men, and very

frequently civilians: the long sword is worn only by officers.

After the review we were presented to the sultan's eldest son, a tall

slender young man, somewhat over twenty, with fierce, gleaming black

eyes, and a profusion of black hair falling below his shoulders. His

countenance indicated both intelligence and firmness, and his appearance

might have been _distingué_ but for his strangely effeminate dress of

damask silk made like a girl's, his anklets and bracelets, gold chains

and jeweled girdle, and a mitre-shaped _coiffure_ of black and gold

studded with enormous diamonds, any one of which would make the fortune

of a Pall-Mall pawnbroker. A score of attendants about his own age were

standing at the back of the young heir, while four diminutive dwarfs

and four jesters in comic garb crouched at his feet, and innumerable

other subordinates--such as the fan-holder, the handkerchief-holder, the

tea- and bouquet-holders, etc. etc.--made up the retinue of this

youthful dignitary. At a subsequent interview the _sonsouhounan_

presented me to his mother and several other ladies of the royal harem.

The sultan was first married at the age of twelve, and had at the time

of our visit forty-eight wives.

[Illustration: THE ELDEST SON OF THE SULTAN OF SOURAKARTA.]

There is very much to interest the tourist in this Javanese city, so

unlike the Anglo-Oriental settlements one meets elsewhere in the East,

nor does he soon weary of its noble sultan and splendid Oriental court;

but time forbade our tarrying longer than the third day, after which we

pressed onward to the neighboring principality of Djokjokarta. This is

the name most conspicuous in Javanese history, since there, from 1825 to

1830, floated victoriously the colors of the revolt, and victory was

purchased at last only by the blood of fifteen thousand soldiers, of

whom eight thousand were Europeans, and Djokjokarta remained as it was

before, an independent sovereignty. The sultan, who belongs to an

ancient family, is fine-looking, with a somewhat martial air, and a

native dignity evidently the heritage of high birth. On our first

interview he wore above the ordinary silk saráng a tight-fitting jacket

of French broadcloth (blue), richly embroidered and trimmed with gold

lace.

[Illustration: THE SULTAN OF DJOKJOKARTA.]

He displayed also a collection of crosses, stars, and other decorations

conferred by various European powers, the French predominating. He had

evidently a partiality for _la belle France_, and exhibited with no

little pride an album containing photographs of Louis Philippe and Louis

Napoleon. He conversed well in several languages, readily using either

Arabic or French in lieu of his vernacular, and was evidently up to time

in regard to the current political topics of the day. He introduced the

ladies of our party to his young and beautiful sultana, and invited them

to accompany her to the inner apartments of the harem. We found the

private apartments of the seraglio, like so many others I visited all

over the East, superbly magnificent in the display of gold and jewels,

in costly carpets and exquisite hangings, in the most lavish exhibition

of pictures, mirrors, statuettes and bijouterie generally. There were

glowing tints and warm, rich colors, but all was sensuous: wealth and

splendor were everywhere visible, but neither modesty nor true womanly

refinement.

The sultan afterward entertained us by the exhibition of a curious

collection of monkeys and apes. Some were of huge proportions, full four

feet in height, and looking as fierce as if just captured from their

native jungles, while the tiny marmosets were scarcely eight inches

long. The orang-outangs and long-armed apes had been trained to go

through a variety of military exercises; and when one of us expressed

surprise at their seeming intelligence, the sultan said gravely, "They

are as really _men_ as you and I, and have the power of speech if _they

chose to exercise it_. They do not talk, because they are unwilling to

work and be made slaves of." This strange theory is generally believed

by the Malays, in whose language _orang-outang_ is simply "_man_ of the

woods."

FANNIE R. FEUDGE.

LONDON BALLS

BY A LONDONER.

How London balls came to be what, in this latter half of the nineteenth

century, they are--by what process of development or natural or

artificial selection they acquired their present characteristics, and

where and when their congregation of frequenters picked up their current

ritual--are matters which I, for one, am content to leave to the

Dryasdusts of social history. The existing phase of the subject affords

phenomena enough and to spare to gossip about, without delving into the

rubbish-heaps of the past.

Well, of course there are different sorts of London balls, and

indifferent sorts, too, for that matter. It would be a hopeless and

endless task to try to classify their various species accurately; and

this paper isn't meant for scientific readers, who are hereby solemnly

warned off frivolous ground; so let us just mark out the field into

three broad divisions--the Public, the Semi-Public and the Private

Ball--and take a look at each successively.

About the public ball I do not intend to say much. Take the whole year

round, it perhaps gets together the biggest crowds, merely from the fact

of its affecting the biggest dancing-areas; but as anybody who wants to

realize it has at most only to spend the handful of dollars requisite

for a journey to London and a ticket of admission, it hasn't anything

but the charm of mere geographical inaccessibility to recommend it. But

if you must make acquaintance with the London variety of the public

ball, you will hardly find a better place for studying it than St.

James's Hall, that big, many-mouthed structure between Regent street and

Piccadilly, which with impartial alacrity, provided the hire is paid,

opens its doors to every sort of gathering--its platform occupied one

night by Joachim and Hallé, the next by Jolly Nash or the Christy

Minstrels; on Wednesday, maybe, by a knot of Total Abstinence

enthusiasts, denouncing publicans as sinners; and on Thursday by the

band to which Licensed Victualers and their friends are dancing at their

annual public ball. You really want to go in? Very well. Gentlemen's

tickets, one guinea; ladies', twenty-five per cent. less--a supposed

inducement to the sordid, money-grubbing male relative or friend who has

the purse to bring them. Are the prices expressed to be inclusive of

wine? If they are, you will be poisoned with some frothy compound of

white _ordinaire_ and chemicals--a truly "excellent substitute" for

champagne--with which ingenious Cette supplies refreshment contractors

(and, alas! others) in inexhaustible abundance. If not, you will have to

disburse a sixpence every time a partner accepts your offer of a glass

of claret-cup between the dances, and half a sovereign for your bottle

of indifferent "fizz" at supper-time. This latter is about the very

worst of conceivable arrangements: it is an improper and aggravating tax

upon the man, who, as likely as not, has not bethought him of bringing

the requisite pocketful of change; while the ladies--at any rate, all

the best of them--naturally hate the idea of letting stranger partners

pay for them, and often decline refreshments all the evening in

consequence.

But now for the company. Mark the splendor of the gentlemen--the

glossiness of their hair, the velvet collars of their dress-coats, the

snowy amplitude of their wristbands, the shininess of their

patent-leather boots or steel-buckled shoes. They don't don this kind of

gear every evening, like your _blasé_ Belgravian; so it is surely meet

and right that the get-up should be more elaborate and brilliant than

his when the festive occasions do come round. The aspect of the ladies,

gallantry and an imperfect acquaintance with the language of millinery

forbid one to criticise. Enough to say that they harmonize perfectly

with the gentlemen. The music is generally pretty good on these public

occasions, but apt to be over-brazen. It is often a military band. And

to organize the dancers--not always an easy task in a crowded hall--and

see that the business of introductions goes on duly, a small staff of

energetic professional gentlemen, styled M.C.'s (which in London, you

know, stands for Master of the Ceremonies), flit ever hither and thither

amongst the throng, now catching a wildly errant waltzing couple in

politely resolute arms and sending them back into the regular ring, now

getting up sets for Lancers and quadrilles, and at all points doing

their best to keep the ball a-rolling. Useful members of society, these

M.C.'s--a congenial profession for retired Harlequins and--what is

pretty much the same thing--dancing-masters. And it is their influence,

maybe, in some measure that is accountable for the extraordinary variety

of dances that is apt to be found in the programme of the public ball.

Mazurka, Schottische, Varsoviana, La Tempête and other curiosities of

the art Terpsichorean flourish and abound there, to the distraction of

folk who are not fresh from a dancing academy. Away go our friends,

though, with happy audacity, whether they're certain of the step or not.

If in doubt, make a waltz of it, is the golden rule; and you can't be

wrong in twisting your partner half a dozen times _in loco_ whenever you

seem to have a few bars to spare in a quadrille.

But we have lingered full long enough at the public ball, though indeed

it is quite the correct thing, you know, to go early and stay late at

such, and get one's money's worth for one's money. Jump into a swift

imaginary hansom, and pass on without more delay to what I have ventured

to call, in default of a better name, the semi-public ball. The term

will perhaps serve as well as any other to cover all those balls which,

though nominally private, are given so much as a matter of course, and

on such a large scale, that they tend to exhibit some characteristics of

the public ball, and also those which are got up by subscription amongst

the members of some semi-public body, such as a volunteer corps. The

lady mayoress's annual balls at the Mansion House, and those of the

Devil's Own (the Inns of Court Rifle Volunteers) in the Temple or

Lincoln's Inn, may stand as typical samples of the species semi-public.

Note those words "Full Dress" in the corner of your card of invitation

to the Mansion House ball. They mean that if you are the possessor of

anything in the nature of a uniform--military, naval, diplomatic,

consular, or what not--you are expected to appear in it. But, in any

case, do not omit to put your card in your pocket, for it will be

demanded at the door--a not unreasonable precaution against the influx

of uninvited guests in such a crowd. And start Cityward betimes, not

later than 10 or a quarter-past 10 P. M., if your home lies in

Belgravian or Mayfair parts, for it's a terribly long journey to that

spot where the Mansion House stands staring at the Bank, and City dances

always begin early. Come, now, isn't it something worth living for to

have one's coat and hat taken by one of this knot of magnificent

crimson-velvet-coated, gold-beplastered, silken-calved beings who are

ranged along the sides of the vestibule? For my part, I protest that,

familiar though their aspect is to me, I cannot see a lord mayor's

flunkeys in their state liveries--their hues varying chameleon-wise from

year to year--without feelings of almost reverential wonderment. What a

study for the great clothes-philosopher of _Sartor Resartus!_ But it

will never do to stand moralizing in the gangway here. Besides, a superb

majordomo has caught up our names and announced them electrifyingly; so

hurry we forward to where, between two pillars, the lord mayor,

distinguished by his chain of office, and the lady mayoress, stand to

receive their guests with bow and hand-shaking, and on, past them, into

the scene of action, the Egyptian Hall. A fine big room for a dance, now

that all those chairs and tables are cleared away that groan so

frequently under aldermanic bodies and things edible and potable (for

this hall is, as everybody knows, the home and centre of civic

hospitality). The platform, see, is occupied by the band of the

Grenadier Guards, so the music is sure to be, from a dancer's point of

view, pretty good. Though, in truth, at present one might wonder where

the dancers are to find space for their gyrations. The whole area of the

floor is covered by a gay crowd, all chattering away in a very Babel of

tongues. Some royal highness or other is expected to-night, it seems,

and it isn't etiquette to begin dancing before he or she arrives. But a

few minutes may well be spent in a quick survey of the assembled guests.

All peoples, nations and languages appear to be represented in the

crowd. Nawabs and other Indian dignitaries of unpronounceable names and

indefinite rank, in gorgeous, many-colored raiment (presumably their

national idea of evening full dress), culminating in jeweled caps and

terminating in the opposite direction, somewhat incongruously, in

London-made dress-boots; envoys from Burmah or the khanates, appareled

in a kind of bedgowns; diplomates from all the embassies and ministries,

in uniforms of all sorts and colors, the amount of stars, orders and

suchlike decorations on each illustrious chest being usually in the

inverse ratio of the real importance of the country to which the wearer

belongs; gallant generals in scarlet and gallant admirals in blue; and

gallant militia officers and deputy lieutenants just as scarlet and

blue, ay, and golden too, as anybody; and all these encircled and

enwrapped by billowy masses of tulle and gauze and silk and satin in

which the ladies have come forth conquering and to conquer.

Meanwhile H.R.H. has arrived, and first-quadrille sets forming in every

direction speedily drive the non-dancers into the background. Those who

mean dancing have turned the preliminary twenty minutes' waiting to

useful account by getting their ball-programmes duly penciled with

engagements. In doing this one little difficulty peculiar to such places

as the Mansion House has to be met. The hall is so vast and the

multitude so bewildering that, unless you know exactly where to look, it

is as hopeless to expect to find any given partner at the right moment

as to seek a needle in a haystack. The only safe expedient is to agree

upon a pillar. A row of substantial pillars runs down either side of the

hall, the base of each fringed with seats, apt head-quarters for

chaperons, who, sitting there at ease, survey the fray and note their

charges' movements in it. So, as soon as an introduction is over, and

the engagement noted on the cards, "Where will you be?" asks the old

hand. "Oh, mamma's by the second pillar from the dais;" and thereupon he

and she go their ways, confident of meeting when their dance's turn is

reached.

Have you ever gone a-skating on the Serpentine after a fall of snow?

Here and there a more or less circular space has been swept clear, and

on each space a batch of skaters whirl and attitudinize, the uncleared

interspaces of snow-covered, impracticable ice given up to miscellaneous

loafers. Even so it is with the wide area of the Egyptian Hall when the

ball is in full swing. The waltzers clear four or five ever-shifting

rings for themselves, in each of which a dozen to twenty couples go

round and round, colliding, jostling and (righteously enough)

eliminating the vagrant do-nothings who in aimless perambulation are for

ever trenching upon the dancers' ground. For which reprehensible

proceeding, mind, there is positively no excuse at the Mansion House,

where the range of drawing-rooms and vestibule is ample enough to

accommodate without difficulty the largest numbers that ever come

together there. There is always the Long Parlor, too, to resort to,

where, at about the longest buffet to be found in Christendom, an army

of waiters are assiduous all the evening through in dispensing tea,

coffee, ices, cakes, claret- and champagne-cups, fruit, and suchlike

light refections to all comers. Pretty well thronged the parlor is, too,

in the intervals between the dances, until between midnight and 1 A. M.,

when it begins to be comparatively deserted. The reason? Follow that

couple hurrying to a far corner of the vestibule, and you will soon see

the reason. Up a flight of stairs we follow to the first floor, to find

ourselves at the end of a long _queue_ of couples, all patiently waiting

with faces turned toward a doorway barred by two authoritative footmen.

Inside that doorway is--Supper, a word of substantial import to the

genuine London citizen; and it is with a keen practical appreciation of

its meaning that these good folk are gathered here, content to wait

their turn till those guardians of the doorway, letting down the barrier

of their arms, shall permit them to pass into the supper-room. Truly an

instructive and elevating sight! Still, people who dance, and still more

devoted matrons who chaperon, need and deserve to be fed, and when one

comes to deal with six or seven hundred feeders, it is perhaps necessary

to be somewhat methodical and systematic about it; so possibly the

_queue_ is inevitable, and not greatly to be sneered at.

The scene inside the supper-room may be dismissed with a very few words.

Narrowish tables, with a background of waiters, line all four sides,

leaving the centre space for the guests. No seats: every couple occupy

the first open standing room they can find at a table, and sup on

whatever viands happen to be opposite them. Maybe there is a certain

stony sameness about the food, a harping _ad infinitum_ on some eight or

ten hackneyed culinary ideas which one always finds where, as here, food

and drink for a great many relays of people are provided by contract;

but so long as chicken and jelly and fairly wholesome wine, with plenty

of that best of antidotal safeguards, seltzer, are obtainable, folk are

not apt to be hypercritical on such occasions.

Another staircase leads down again to the vestibule and hall, where the

crowd is by this time perceptibly thinning. Chaperons are sailing off

to the cloak-room, each followed by her brood; and the hoarse voices of

the servants and policemen outside--"Call Mrs. Thingummy's carriage,"

"Mrs. Whatshername's carriage stops the way"--penetrate almost to the

dancers' ears. Let us get our coats and hats and be off. There is an

almost amusing coolness in that open display of a saucer for the receipt

of tips on the counter at which the coats are applied for. It

prosaically recalls one to the fact that these magnificent flunkeys are

after all but human, and not above a regard for shillings. Next Tuesday,

mind, you must not fail to drop in for a few minutes at the lady

mayoress's afternoon "at home," in acknowledgment of your (I trust)

pleasant evening at the dance; and be sure you write your name and

address in the callers' book on the table near the entrance door, if you

wish to be remembered when the cards of invitation for the next dance

are going out.

Turn we now to a quite different phase of the ball semi-public. The Inns

of Court Rifle Volunteers--familiarly styled (as I have said) The

Devil's Own--are giving a dance in the fine newly-rebuilt hall of the

Inner Temple; which, by the way, stands on the very site where in past

days the Knights Templars used to laugh and quaff. It is a strictly

professional corps, this of the Inns of Court. Not only every officer,

but every man of the rank and file, is either actually a barrister, or

at any rate a student-member of one of the four old Inns, on his way, by

means of eating thirty-six dinners in term-time and passing an

examination, to achieve his "call" to the Bar. Still, overladen though

they be with briefs and business--as of course everybody knows all

London barristers are--the Devil's Own manage somehow to find time to

attain a passable proficiency in drill and rifle practice, and not a few

of them in waltzing too. So the corps determine to get up a dance.

Prompted by their festive and hospitable feelings? Oh, of course; that

is to say, partly, and partly, at least the moving spirits in the

affair, with a shrewdish eye to business. For, behold! it is rumored

one summer's day through the Inns that a ball is projected; ay, and such

a ball! so well managed, so brilliant, so in every way desirable as has

never been known before. Every barrister, every student must be there.

BUT--and this is an all-important "but"--it is at the same time to be

understood that tickets will be issued to _members of the corps only_,

and that members of the Inns of Court who are _not_ also members of the

corps will be specially and particularly inadmissible. Observe the moral

pressure thus brought to bear. Brown, Jones and Robinson have hitherto

withstood all the persuasive recruiting efforts of their friends in the

corps, but this dance turns the scale. They have sisters of their own

who beg and demand and insist upon their procuring tickets, and they

know sisters of their friends who are sure to be there, and whom they

feel ready to give any price to meet; so the long and short of it is

that they go off to the orderly-room and qualify themselves for tickets

by taking the oath and becoming enrolled members of the corps. Whereat

those moving spirits in the affair wink their shrewd eyes gleefully.

They will dance all the more heartily, remembering the good stroke of

business they have done in the interest of the corps and its recruiting.

The ball committee and their workmen have been hard at the work of

preparation till the last minute, and now it is half-past 10 P. M., and

carriages are beginning to roll up to the hall with their freights of

fair and--other ones. The staircase and corridor are lined with stately

tropical plants and banks of many-colored flowers. First to the

tea-room, as the stream seems to be flowing in that direction. This

suite of cozy paneled rooms are the sacred and most private haunts of

the Benchers, the self-electing governing body of the Inn. How

astonished, not to say shocked, those berobed and bewigged legal

luminaries, in their frames upon the walls, must be to look down upon

this gay laughing, talking, tea-and-ice-consuming mob of invaders! I

fear no one heeds their possible feelings much to-night, though: there

are far more important matters--searching in the crowd for friends,

engaging partners for dances, introducing and being introduced--to

occupy all one's time and thoughts.

From the dais-end of the hall, where on other days the Benchers' table

stands, you may well take a preliminary survey of the scene of action.

What a flood of light those sun-burners in the roof pour down! The

blazoned escutcheons of past and present judges, members of the Inn,

with which the walls are lined, show off all their colors, and the

stained-glass windows do their best to look illuminated. In the gallery

opposite a band of no less than nine-and-twenty picked men of Coote and

Tinney's sit ready to play all the latest dance-music as long as any one

will stay to dance to it; while all over the smoothly-polished floor the

dancers are somehow evolving a kind of order out of chaos, and sorting

themselves into pairs and sets for the opening quadrille. The male half

of the gathering is, of course, almost exclusively legal, but there are

no distinctions of legal rank to-night. Learned vice-chancellors,

queen's counsel, juniors and students fraternize and compete for chats

and dances with the ladies quite promiscuously. The hosts of the

evening, the members of the corps, are distinguished by a small knot of

ribbons, the corps colors, in their button-holes; but, for comfort's

sake, uniforms have been tabooed in favor of the ordinary civilian's

black and white. There is present, however, a military element, after

all. Something like eight hundred guests are assembled here, and no

little method is needed to enable such a crowd to move about from room

to room without confusion and blocking-up of doorways and passages. So a

couple of tall Guardsmen have been providently posted in every doorway,

who, you will find, allow you readily enough to pass them in one

direction, but, once passed, politely prohibit your returning on your

steps, and point you forward on a course which, circling through a suite

of rooms and passages, will bring you round again by another entrance

into the ball-room. By this simple expedient free circulation to and

from the tea-rooms and the supper-tent--a temporary erection stretching

nearly to the Temple church outside--is effectually kept up all the

evening, and much loss of time and temper saved. Note how, in the hall,

too, the crowd of dancers are kept, in their own interest, within

bounds. Half a score of the little drummers of the Grenadiers are on

duty there, in all the finery of scarlet, braid and overwhelming

bearskins. These, as soon as the band strikes up a waltz or galop, raise

slender barriers of silken cords at intervals across the hall, cutting

up the whole big area into three or four moderate-sized ones, in each of

which a distinct ring may spin round and round, without fear of

collisions with unexpected errant couples from other quarters of the

hall. Truly the ball committee deserve the credit of having been

ingeniously provident of many things; though, to be sure, it is just

part of their legal stock in trade to be so. But the author of that

arrangement in the passage-nooks--have you noticed it in your

between-dances saunterings?--smooth-hewn pyramids of crystal ice,

embowered in ferns and palms, and lit up from behind by some device

which makes them glow a lovely rose-color all over--that man deserves a

prize, I protest, for an inspiration that hardly could be expected from

the frowsy atmosphere of lawyers' chambers. It will be morning, pale and

gray, before the last volunteers see the last ladies to their carriage,

and betake themselves bedward with ears ringing with half a dozen waltz

tunes, and pleasantly oblivious for the nonce of briefs and work-a-day

botherations.

Kind, patient reader--I feel the adjectives are justly due to any one

who has accompanied my roving pen thus far--did you ever watch a

street-child eating, say, a jam-tart? The dry corners of pastry are

first all nibbled off; gradually the outworks where the jam lies thin

are trenched upon all round; while the toothsome centre is fondly kept

intact for the final morsel. Even so have I been reserving my _bonne

bouche_, the private ball; which in its happiest developments is, to my

thinking, as far superior to the semi-public ball as this latter to the

public. In its happiest developments, mind; for private balls in London

are as infinitely diverse in character as they are infinitely

multitudinous in number; and some sorts are (to speak politely)

comparatively undesirable. So, in deference to the exigencies of time

and space, let us confine our attention to the private dance as it

appears in what is called (or calls itself) "society."

And first, as to the people who give these private balls, or dances, or

dancing-parties (for these two synonyms are very commonly preferred to

the more pretentious word "ball"). They may be roughly classified under

five heads:

1st (and foremost). Mothers of marriageable daughters.

2d. People who for some reason or other--official or social position,

wealth, vanity, or what not--are expected, or think they are expected,

to give balls.

3d. Good-natured, amusement-loving married folk, with money and without

grown children.

4th. Benevolent grandfathers, dowagers and aunts.

5th. The most unlikely people.

And how, where and when are these various dance-givers' gifts bestowed?

The "how" is the easiest thing possible if the lady about to give the

dance is of established position in society. Her set of friends and

acquaintances is numerous, even to embarrassment. All the people whose

dinners or drums or dances she goes to must of course be asked: a dance

for a dance is a rule as obligatory as that of "cutlet for cutlet" (as a

matter-of-fact old lady of the world phrased it) is in dinner-giving

circles. At least as many young ladies as she can do with are sure to be

supplied by this means; while as for men, there are all the host of

bachelors to resort to who at the beginning of the season have left

their visiting-cards at her door, thereby intimating, "I am in town, and

ready to be asked to any entertainment you may happen to get up, and

here is my address." But if our intending hostess is a new-comer in

London, and has not yet picked up a sufficiency of town-acquaintances,

or if those whom she has are not altogether the style of folk she wishes

to invite, a different course of procedure has to be adopted. It may be

taken as an axiom that there are always plenty of people in society who

are ready to go anywhere (within recognized limits) to a ball, provided

that some lady of acknowledged experience in such matters will stand

sponsor for its probable goodness. So our hostess betakes herself to the

half dozen or dozen of her lady friends who are possessed of the most

extended and desirable sets of acquaintances, and, diplomatically

interesting them in her design, leaves with each of them, for

distribution at discretion, a little pack of cards of invitation. And

next day young Jones, coming home to his bachelor lodgings in St.

James's, find on his table the conventional oblong card:

_Mr. Jones_

Mrs. Smythe

At home,

_Tuesday, May 6th, 1873

150 Queen's Gate. Dancing._

R.S.V.P.

Knowing that he has not the pleasure of Mrs. Smythe's acquaintance, he

turns to the back of the card, and reading there (just the sort of thing

he had expected to find) the endorsement, "With Lady Fitzbattleaxe's

compliments," he at once grasps the situation, and sends off a note to

150 Queen's Gate, to the effect that he has much pleasure in accepting

Mrs. Smythe's kind invitation. He feels quite safe. Lady Fitzbattleaxe

and her set, all of whom he knows, will be there; and she wouldn't have

sent the card unless she had reason to know that the thing was going to

be well done. Unattached bachelors who dance have, in fact, little

difficulty in getting their fill of dancing in the season if they lay

themselves out for doing so. A young lady can't, as a rule, be asked

without at the same time sending a card to her mother or other chaperon,

whom the hostess may, from considerations of space or otherwise, not

want to have; whereas your dancing-man takes up very little room, brings

no one but himself, shifts for himself, and is indeed more or less

positively useful toward promoting the avowed object of the gathering.

Aware of this, it is a not uncommon practice with dance-going bachelors

to interrogate a partner whom they feel a wish to meet again as to the

_locales_ of her coming dance-engagements, and thereupon, through the

medium of some friend of that potent and wonderful class, the

Know-everybodys, to manage somehow to procure for themselves cards of

invitation to the houses and parties indicated, whosoever and wherever

they may be.

But now, supposing Lady This or Mrs. That to have made up her mind to

give a ball, where will she give it? At home, no doubt, in the great

majority of cases; but if her rooms happen to be small, or she wishes to

avoid the nuisance of having her own house turned upside down (as it

must be for a couple of days at the least if a ball is to be held in

it), she may prefer--I am assuming expense to be no object--to hire some

public rooms, like Willis's, or an empty house for the occasion; of

which alternatives it is ten to one that the latter will be adopted.

True it is that the ball-room at Willis's (in old days so well known as

Almack's), though far too narrow for its length, offers a floor of

superlative smoothness, and that its position, in the very heart of the

St. James's quarter, leaves nothing to be desired; but the place is so

generally associated with festivities of the public and semi-public

classes that anybody giving a private dance there may feel sure that the

guests will not regard it as quite the same sort of thing as a dance in

a private house. The empty-house plan is not open to this objection.

Owing its origin, doubtless, to the prodigious amount of house-building

that has been going on of late in fashionable London, it has become

quite a recognized institution of these last few seasons; and it

certainly saves the ball-giver a world of trouble. There stand plenty of

newly-built first-class mansions in Belgravia that have not yet found

tenants, thoroughly finished off, externally and internally, so far as

floors and doors and windows and staircases go, but of course entirely

unfurnished. One of these is selected and hired (at a cost that would

make some people gasp) for the determined evening. An upholsterer is

turned in to put up temporary mirrors, chandeliers and curtains, and lay

down temporary carpets; a florist, following, covers bare mantelpieces

with captivating layers of cut-roses, ferns and mosses, and empties a

whole conservatoryful of plants and flowers into halls and passages;

essential Gunter, always equal to any accumulation of occasions, sends

in the conventional foods and drinks, and a competent staff of waiters

to dispense them; from equally essential and omnipresent Coote and

Tinney's comes a detachment of competent musicians; and hey, presto! the

empty house bursts into light and life and music, and, exulting in its

Cinderella finery, welcomes the guests with all the air of an

establishment that has been accustomed to this kind of thing for years.

It is not always an easy matter to time one's arrival at a private ball

quite satisfactorily. The old hands have of course certain general rules

to go by: for instance, if the invitation-card has borne the words

"Small and early" in one corner, that dancing may be expected to begin

by eleven o'clock or thereabouts; but in the absence of any such guide

it is almost impossible to predict with accuracy the time when arrivals

will set in; and so one oftentimes falls into the Scylla of

over-lateness in anxiety to steer clear of the Charybdis of

over-earliness, or _vice versâ_. I call to mind a ball at the close of

last season to which I went expressly to meet certain friends, and

thought to have hit off the happy mean by entering the ball-room just

twenty minutes before midnight; but, lo! the musicians had not yet

taken possession of their corner, and sofas and chairs were but sparsely

occupied by some couple of dozen specimens of that portion of the fair

sex who in outward seeming not attractive, for dancing purposes, to the

frivolous male, yet for some inscrutable reason always put in the

earliest appearances in ball-rooms.

It is all very well to cry out against dances that don't begin till near

midnight as absurd and reprehensible; but, after all, their lateness is

easily accounted for. In May and June from six to half-past seven in the

evening are the pleasantest of hours for driving in the Park or

strolling to see others drive there. Nobody willingly goes home till

those pleasant hours are over; so no wonder that dinners tend to begin

at a quarter- or even half-past eight; that they consequently are not

over much before eleven; and that people who have, after that, to look

in and gossip for ten minutes at somebody or other's drum, do not find

themselves at the ultimate evening engagement, the ball, much before the

stroke of twelve. The balls of the London season will not become much

earlier, methinks, until some thorough revolution takes place in the

likings and habits of the folk who give and go to them.

Suppose, then, the arrival accurately timed, or, at any rate, any fault

on the side of over-earliness corrected by a judicious waste of minutes

in the cloak- and tea-rooms down stairs. At the top of the inevitable

staircase, or just inside her drawing-room, our hostess stands ready

with smile and hand-shake for each and every guest announced by the

sonorous butler. Many of the younger men (who have received cards by one

or other of the side-winds above spoken of) she has very likely never

seen or heard of till this moment; but no matter--they and she are

equally equal to the occasion. Perhaps the lady who has sent the

stranger a card "with her compliments" hears him announced, and stepping

forward introduces him to the hostess. If not, the hardly formidable

ordeal of a polite bow and a hand-shake passes him on into the

ball-room, where, once arrived, he looks about for friends, and

proceeds to engage dances, and (let us hope) enjoy them without the

slightest sense of strangeness in the strange house, provided only that

he has chanced upon a fair sprinkling of his own set there. Who the

master of the house may be he probably, if an average careless Gallio,

knows little and cares less. Indeed, _Paterfamilias_ is usually content

to sink his own personality and be a nonentity for the nonce on the

night of his wife's dancing-party.

The suite of drawing-rooms, usually two rooms occupying the whole of the

first floor, have been gutted of furniture and stripped of carpets to

form the ball-room. The floor is hardly ever of polished wood in modern

London houses, but the boards are smooth, and a very tolerable surface

for dancing purposes is produceable by the simple process of washing

them over with milk. Some people, not caring to go to the trouble of

having carpets taken up, content themselves with a holland cloth tightly

stretched over the carpeting, which is indeed preferable to that

abomination, a beeswaxed floor, but is, at best, but heavy traveling for

the dancers, and apt, too, to tear during the evening into dangerous

foot-ensnaring holes.

Are you a connoisseur in costumes? The men's dress is, of course, the

same, in general appearance, all the Western world over, and the only

varieties in a London ball-room are the better or worse styles of

tailoring and an occasional white waistcoat. Fortunately, the fair sex,

with all the colors of the rainbow and all the inspirations of the

fashion-books and dressmakers at command, can and do give a

kaleidoscopic plentitude of variety to the scene. _Débutantes_ just

"come out" in society are conventionally confined to simple white, but

their more experienced sisters may indulge in any combinations of tulle

and other gauzy substance, white or colored, with ribbons, flowers, and

all the materials and devices known to millinery, at discretion; to all

which the rich and stately velvets and silks of the chaperoning matrons

form an effective background.

And now for the introductions. There is no getting on at all in a

private dance, nor indeed in any London society, without introductions.

Society rigidly requires of every man that he submit to the process as a

preliminary to addressing even a remark anent the weather to a

lady--much more before asking of her such a favor as a dance. But a man

who goes much to dances soon grows somewhat wary in this matter. He

learns to shun the overtures of the seemingly benevolent people--above

all, the master of the house--who proffer willingness to introduce him

to partners; for has not experience taught him that such folk are always

actuated by the desire (laudable enough, perhaps) of procuring partners

for some lady friend whose personal attractions are not, by themselves,

calculated to bring them? No, he prefers, the selfish wretch! to seek

and choose for himself--first, to look about and determine to which of

all the strange faces in the room he would wish to be introduced, and

then to set about finding out means of getting introduced to them.

It is a misfortune that the present habits of society, placing the fair

sex in the position of waiting to be asked by would-be male partners, as

well for dances as for life-partnerships, do not at the same time, in

the former as they do in the latter case, countenance their meeting

undesired proposals with a direct negative. It is fully admitted in

principle, and is said to be experienced in practice, that a lady may

reply to the question, "Will you marry me?" with a conclusive "No." But

the same answer, given to the stock ball-room interrogatory, "May I have

the (honor/pleasure) of a dance?" would be conventionally reprobated as

discourteous, and is practically impossible. The natural consequence is,

that the fair answerer is driven to all manner of distressing--sometimes

almost amusingly distressing--shifts and equivocations, merely to escape

the necessity of dancing with men whom she doesn't wish to dance with,

but who insist on asking her to do so. Sometimes she salves her

conscience by the device of arranging beforehand with a brother or

other near relative that she shall be understood to be engaged to him

for every and any dance that may be asked for by a person undesired. At

other times she will have mislaid her programme, or "think mamma will

want to be gone" before the proposed dance is reached. To young ladies

thus embarrassed a practice which has recently gained some hold at

private balls, of supplying no dance-programmes at all, has afforded a

novel and most happy relief. For when one man has asked for (and perhaps

fondly noted on his ample cuff) "the third dance from now," another "the

second galop," and a third "the fourth round," she is so genuinely

bewildered as to how many and what dances she is and is not engaged for

that it becomes alike easy to checkmate proposals by the reply

"engaged," and at any time in the course of the evening to give an

immediate dance to any favored partner, in sheer hopelessness of

remembering to whom, if at all, it has already been promised, and on the

chance that the unknown will not appear to claim it.

But suppose, on the other hand, there are programmes. If one could get a

sight of any dozen, taken at random, after all, I warrant there would be

some curious if not edifying reading there. Names are (unintentionally

enough) so slurred in the hurry of introduction--"Miss Mumble-mumble,

allow me to introduce Mr. Jumble-jumble"--that, more often than not,

neither party catches the other's name; and so She, even if she gives up

her programme to be marked with the engagement, probably gets it back

just scrawled with some initials; while He is driven to the expedient of

entering on his programme some brief memorandum of dress or

ornament--"blue and roses," "pearls," or the like--which may or may not

serve to recall to him each fair personality in turn. Sisters, though,

are apt to upset this descriptive arrangement by their provoking habit

of going about in identical costumes. Some luckless wight has taken a

satisfactory note of the dress and general appearance of a Miss

Unknown, and then, horror! half an hour afterward he discovers that

there are _two_ wearers of such dress in the room, each the very ditto

of the other. There is only one way out of it: when the destined dance

arrives he must go boldly up to one of them with the usual "My dance, I

believe?" For there's, at any rate, an even chance of his being right;

while, at worst, if she answers, "I think not," his doubt is at once

solved in favor of the other sister.

In the dances themselves there is not much variety. Society knows of

four only--two "squares," quadrille and Lancers, and two "round," waltz

and galop. Of these, waltzes are the most, and quadrilles the least,

popular, it being of course understood that "round" dances occupy

considerably more than half of every programme. Still, "squares" are not

likely ever actually to disappear. There is a certain undeniable utility

about them. They give breathing-times between waltz and galop; a share

in the amusement of the evening to people who are too old or too

ponderous, or otherwise unsuited for the whirling "rounds;" and scope

for that pleasant institution, "sitting out," which, as everybody knows,

consists in ostensibly engaging a partner for a "square," and then,

instead of dancing it, deliberately spending the time in a quiet

sit-down chat. "Dancing it," I see I have written, but truly it is only

by courtesy that the word can be applied to a private-ball quadrille, in

which nobody dreams of doing steps or attending to time, and the

conventional ideal is reached by a sort of unconcerned-looking saunter,

distantly suggestive of the formulated movements of the figures. But if

you can't dance too ill for the "squares," on the other hand you can't

dance too well for the "rounds," especially waltzes. All thorough-going

dancers will now have nothing but the _valse à trois temps_, which

requires both partners to be exactly in time both with one another and

the music, and a partner who can only dance the old _deux temps_, or

whose _trois temps_ step is faulty, is not very likely, if a man, to be

favored with many "rounds," or if a lady to be asked for them.

As for the talk of ball-rooms, its silliness and inanity are almost

proverbial. And yet what else can one expect? In the "squares" one's

attention is so constantly called off to some process of bowing, or

setting, or crossing over, or turning round, that it is next to

impossible to get half a dozen consecutive sentences of conversation at

a time. Indeed, I have often meditated making a fortune by publishing,

for the use of men whose small talk is limited, a pocket _Dancers

Conversation Book_, to consist wholly of three-word beginnings of

sentences, such as "Don't you think--," "Have you seen--," "Do you

know--," and so on. The reader would be instructed, every time he found

himself at rest beside his partner, to start one of these fragments,

with a pleasant smile and an interrogative air, in well-founded

confidence that by the time the third word was out of his mouth some

exigency of the figure would require him to turn off to some independent

movement on his own part, which ended, his partner might safely be

assumed to have forgotten all about his last remark, and to be ready to

listen to another equally illusory. But even supposing a couple have

comparatively time to talk--as, for instance, during the short interval

between two dances--how, if (as must continually happen) they were utter

strangers to one another till ten minutes ago--how, I say, can they be

expected to get beyond the veriest outworks and superficialities of

conversation? The man (with whom it lies to take the lead) may possibly

have a host of interests, and be able to talk sensibly or speciously on

a variety of subjects, but at the start he is quite in the dark as to

his partner's tastes and pursuits, and so almost perforce breaks ground

with first one, and if that fails another, of the ordinary small-talk

questions, on the chance of lighting upon some topic that the lady knows

or cares about. There is always a hope of turning up trumps. "Have you

been to the opera lately?" may discover an ardent musician, and pave

the way for a long "sit-out" gossip on things musical. "Have you been in

town long?" may lead to any amount of pleasantly rambling talk about

places and people in the counties, or recollections of continental

travel, perhaps the most fascinating of all kinds of "shop." Of course,

if the partners are old friends, or even tolerably familiar

acquaintances, the surface-fishing process is happily unnecessary, and

they can plunge at once into deep waters. Still, even if they get upon

so-called tender subjects, it's long odds they won't have time enough to

get out of their depth. That danger is reserved for the quieter and more

prolonged intercourse of picnic-parties and country-house life. Cupid's

arrows seldom penetrate deep at a ball.

A careful observer of ball-room talk will not fail to notice what may be

called the exclusive slang of society. He will find people "in society"

habitually using a few pet words which they love, not because they are a

bit better than the synonyms used by other people, but just because

other people don't use them, whereby they serve as a sort of passwords

or Masonic signs among the initiated. Just now plainness is all the

fashion. Ladies who are not in society talk of "dresses" and

"gentlemen," and grammatically contract "are not" into "aren't;" so the

ladies of the Upper Ten say "gowns" and "men" and "ain't" for

distinction's sake. And the same idea comes out at many points. The

public-ball cavaliers rejoice in lavender- or lemon-colored kids, and

display exuberant activity in the "squares;" so the dancing-man of

society punctiliously gloves his hands in white, and strolls through a

quadrille with an air of languid indifference. One romp, and one only,

does the private ball countenance in the merry-go-round of the third

figure of a "sixteen" (double) set of Lancers.

After every dance, in the early stage of the ball, there is a general

set of the dancers in the direction of the tea-room. Till some time

between midnight and one o'clock the door of the supper room is kept

strictly closed, and light refreshments--tea, iced coffee, cream- and

water-ices, various "cups" and lemonades and strawberryades, and cakes

and biscuits and such-like--have undisputed possession of the field.

Anything to get away for five minutes from the heated atmosphere of the

dancing-room; so it is generally advisable to propose "tea" to your

partner as an excuse for a visit to the back room down stairs (probably

Paterfamilias's study or the children's school-room on other days); and,

once there, you will ask instructions as to whether "tea" shall this

time take the form of "cup," or something-ade, or ice. Most likely it

will be the latter, and between "cream" and "water" [ices] her voice is

almost sure, despite the certainty of consequential thirst, to be for

"cream." But hardly has the _preux chevalier_ successfully struggled at

the buffet for the creamy spoonful when harp and horn are heard

preluding to the next dance up stairs, and everybody must hurry back

from passage, stairs or tea-room to find or await his or her next

partner.

When the ball is at its fullest is the time for the really first-rate

dancer to turn his talent to the best advantage. Nearly all London

ball-givers have such an immense circle of acquaintances that, for some

shorter or longer period of the evening, their parties are pretty sure

to be overcrowded. Soon after midnight, it may be, all the world and his

wife will just have arrived together, and the abomination of suffocation

sets in. The staircase is congested and impassable: the dancing area in

the ball-room is encroached upon till a space about as big as a

dining-table is all the dancers have to dance in. At which crisis it

wants no little skill and practice in a man to steer his partner deftly

and without collisions through the intricate _mêlée_. It can be done,

though, to a degree hardly credible till practically tested, the really

greatest difficulties being, in point of fact, rather to start and stop

than to avoid bumpings when once fairly underweight; but ladies suffer

sufficiently from dizzy or clumsy partners to make them often, in a

crowd, prefer to give their "rounds" to a man whose steering is good,

rather than to one whose feet are less dexterous than his tongue.

At some unperceived moment toward one o'clock couples descending to the

ice-room find the dining-room door wide open, the signal that the supper

period has commenced. First, one or two make up their minds that the

discovery is opportune, and enter shyly in the face of an expectant line

of waiters drawn up behind the buffet. Note the arrangement of the room

while there is yet space to grasp its details, for ten minutes hence, be

sure, the place will be so thronged, with such an all-pervading

hurry-scurry going on, that there will be no chance of noting anything.

Facing you as you enter, down the length of one side of the room, runs a

long buffet-table, the nearer side spread with the apparatus of eating

and drinking, the centre laden with every variety of comestibles,

interspersed at intervals with tall _épergnes_ and other silver

ornaments sacred to all that's aesthetically captivating in fruit and

flower; while in the rear, calm, collected and decorous, stand a row of

middle-aged ministering persons from Gunter's. There are no chairs at

the buffet. If you sup there, you must sup standing--no great hardship,

as the table is of course of a height just convenient for the

purpose--and you can either accept the services of the ministering

person opposite you, or help yourself from the multitude of dishes

within reach. All very well, this, for those who are in a hurry, just

snatching a morsel between two dances, and for all who see no

practicable opportunity of doing better for their partners and

themselves. For, an intervening gangway being of course left clear for

folk to pass up and down to and along the buffet, the rest of the

floor-space is occupied by three or more (according to the size of the

room) small round tables, low, chair-surrounded, each laden with a due

complement of plates, glasses, victuals, and so on, and each capable of

accommodating three or four couples at a time. To one of these, if you

are wise, and have the luck to espy any vacant chairs, you will

surely--I am of course addressing my male readers--lead your partner. I

assume that, with an experienced eye to this very thing, you have

purposely contrived to engage one with whom you specially enjoy, or

think it likely that you will enjoy, a good gossip, for a quadrille that

occurs just at this period of the evening, and that you have suggested

"sitting out" the dance in the supper-room; so that you have now

descended the stairs happy in the consciousness of ten minutes or more

of leisure before the next "round" will again demand your indefatigable

_trois temps_ in the ball-room.

Well, two chairs secured, and partner comfortably seated on one of them,

the next thing for the man to do, before settling down into

conversation, is to forage at the buffet for supplies; for the stock

originally placed on the little table is pretty sure to have been

eviscerated in the course of the first half hour's attack. He doesn't

ask his partner to say what she will have, knowing full well that

ladies, young and old, even if so interrogated, are sure to give that

invariable pair of successive answers, "chicken" and "jelly," not

because they really prefer those to any other viands--as a matter of

fact, their own inclinations, so far as they are earthly enough to have

any, are generally very much otherwise--but from a modest wish to give

the least possible trouble; chicken and jelly being stock dishes that

are quite certain to be at hand in every supper-room. No, he is far more

likely to please by asking to have the matter left in his hands, and

thereupon going off to the buffet, to return with a small but varied

collection of three or four samples, each on a separate plate, of the

most novel and attractive of the culinary triumphs there displayed, for

her to choose from. Which duty done, and some champagne and

seltzer-water deftly mixed, he will with a light heart take possession

of his reserved chair, and fall to upon one or other of the unchosen

samples and the most thoroughly zestful chat of the evening.

Behooves it to say a word or two of the materials of the typical

ball-supper? There is a family likeness about those turned out by

Gunter that the experience of one season is enough to make one

recognize. And, on the whole, the Gunterian supper is as good, in its

way, as; need be. Nothing hot, of course, except oyster soup (specially

adapted for deserving chaperons), and, maybe, some delicately browned

cutlets; but cold meats of every shade of substantiality, from boars'

heads and chickens and raised pies to the most delicate of sandwiches,

tempting translucent aspics, in which larks, lobsters, prawns, fillets

of sole, and such-like lie "imbedded and injellied," and ethereal

plovers' eggs. Of sweets the multitude and variety is almost infinite;

and indeed the possible combinations of things creamy and jammy and

gelatinous are tolerably well known all over the world. Among them fresh

strawberries combined with plain iced cream may be mentioned as holding

a high place in general favor. As to the drinkables, sherry and claret

are always at hand, but the almost universal beverage is a mixture of,

say, two thirds of champagne to one of seltzer-water. The idea of this

mixture is, no doubt, partly to get rid of that excess of fixed air

which is apt to make undiluted champagne a rather uncomfortable material

for a draught; but the custom is mainly the result of sad experience of

the unwisdom of doing otherwise, owing (it must be admitted) to the

badness of the so-called champagne only too commonly dispensed at ball

suppers. How the man who wouldn't dream of giving his guests a glass of

inferior wine at his dinner-table comes to think nothing of poisoning

them with the cheap rubbish that audaciously flouts in advertising

columns as "supper-champagne," has puzzled sager brains than mine.

Surely, bad wine is not less injurious taken in repeated draughts in the

small hours of the morning than it would be sipped in small doses at

dinner-time; yet it's only here and there a logically-minded individual

produces his dinner-champagne at his wife's dancing-parties; and

everywhere else old and young with equal caution demand a prudent

admixture of the seltzer that will, if anything can, avert a

next-morning headache. The chaperon, warrantably hungry, taking her time

over her supper in a comfortable corner, is often not to be tempted by

any sparkling liquid; but the dancers want the nervous exhilaration that

champagne, however inferior, at least temporarily supplies, and are

rarely careful enough to shun the danger altogether.

"Are you going on anywhere?" is a query that not unfrequently meets

one's ears about halfway through the evening. "Going on" is an

essentially town practice. In the country, houses lie too far scattered

for it, and there is seldom such a press of gayeties on foot together as

to make it likely that two or more engagements will have been made for

one night. But in London, owing to the limited number of evenings

comprised in a season, as compared with the host of people who want to

give their parties in the course of it, it constantly happens that folk

who go out much find themselves invited to a dinner, a drum and a couple

of dances, all on one and the same evening. Ay, and they manage to

achieve them all, too, thanks to determination and broughams. To the

dinner at eight P. M.; away at a quarter to eleven to put in an

appearance and for ten minutes swell the hurried and promiscuous chatter

at the drum; thence off again to one of the balls--to stay if it is

good, or if it isn't to go on after a dance or two to the other. The

custom is so thoroughly recognized that no hostess would ever dream of

being offended with any of her guests for "going on" elsewhere whenever

they think fit. Not that she is ever likely to know whether this or that

individual does or does not do so; for it's not at all necessary before

one goes off to say any formal good-night to the hostess, and in fact

men very seldom do so. When they have had dancing enough, or,

remembering some disagreeable necessity of being up and alert for work

next morning, feel it's about time to be going bedward, they quietly

slink down stairs to the cloak-room, get hats and wraps, and are off in

a fast hansom without a word to anybody. It's all very well for the

young lady, who has from day to day no calls upon her time but those of

her own pleasures and engagements, to stay late at any particularly

pleasant dance. She may collapse to her heart's content next morning,

and still be ready again by nightfall for another round of excitements;

but with her partners things are very different, unless, indeed, they

are officers in the Household Brigade. The young barrister or banker, or

what not, who is frivolous enough to like combining some nights of

dancing in the season with hard days of work, soon finds that the only

way of gratifying both tastes is to partake sparingly, in point of

hours, of the former one; so he comforts himself with the reflection

that there are as good balls in the season as ever came out of it, and

resolutely says good-night to the most festive scenes by 2 A. M. at

latest. By that time, indeed, the best of a private ball is very

commonly over. No doubt there are delicious and long-to-be-remembered

opportunities now and then seizable by staying later. Strauss'

world-known "Blue Danube" waltz with an appreciative partner, and the

rare luxury of ample dancing-space in an emptying room, is one such. But

when the minute-hand of the hall-clock is approaching the third of the

small hours, the endurance of the most indulgent and enduring of matrons

is apt to get exhausted, and she carries off her brood, determined, like

everybody else, not to be the last to go. In the tea-room she will get a

strengthening draught of some clear soup or other in a tea-cup, and

meanwhile John Thomas will have called the carriage to the door.

Next morning the _Morning Post_ will serve up to its (mostly lady)

readers a full list of the names of those who were at last night's

balls, under the head of "Fashionable Entertainments." The _Post_ is the

one daily paper that systematically goes in for this kind of news,

publishing every day during the season a long list of coming fixtures,

as well as catalogues of the guests attending them. And I fear it must

be owned that there are people not a few who take delight in having

their parties and appearances chronicled in this small-beer manner, and

that there are several grains of truth contained in the good-humoredly

sarcastic lines in which that clever rhymer "C.S.C," parodying the

_Proverbial Philosophy_ of Mr. Tupper, gives worldly advice to young

ladies entering society. Says "C.S.C.":

Choose judiciously thy friends, for to discard them is undesirable;

Yet it is better to drop thy friends, O my daughter, than to drop

thy H's.

Dost thou know a wise woman? yea, wiser than the children of light?

Hath she a position? and a title? _and are her parties in the

Morning Post_?

If thou dost, cleave unto her, and give up unto her thy body and mind;

Think with her ideas, and distribute thy smiles at her bidding:

So shalt thou become like unto her, and thy manners shall be "formed:"

And thy name shall be a sesame at which the doors of the great shall

fly open:

Thou, shalt know every peer, his arms, and the date of his creation,

His pedigree and their intermarriages, and cousins to the sixth remove;

Thou shalt kiss the hand of royalty, and lo! in next morning's papers,

Side by side with rumors of wars and stories of shipwrecks and sieges,

Shall appear thy name, and the minutiæ of thy headdress and petticoat,

For an enraptured public to muse upon over their matutinal muffin.

Society expects every guest after a dance to go through the form of

paying a call upon the giver. If you are an old friend of the house, or

for any reason want to go in, it will be wise to defer your visit for

two or three days, until the interior of the house has recovered its

normal condition; for of course on the very day that follows a dance the

rooms are in such a universal state of up-side-downness (if the word may

be coined) that callers can't expect to be admitted. For which reason,

if you don't want to go in, you can't do better than select this very

day for leaving a card at the door; which last ceremony duly concluded,

all possible respect and duty may be taken to have been shown and done

to the private ball: at all events, the present writer--rejoice,

long-suffering reader, if you still exist--has no further word or

suggestion to offer, on this occasion, on the subject.

W. D. R.

THE LIVELIES.

IN TWO PARTS.--I.

"What under the canopy is all that hammering at the door?" said Mrs.

Lively, glancing up from her crocheting.

Master Napoleon Lively, the person appealed to, was sucking a lemon

through a stick of candy. He took this from his mouth, said, "Dunno,"

and then returned it to the anxious aperture.

"And don't care," said Mrs. Lively with spirit. "Any other child in the

city would go to the door and find out what it means; but you! much you

care to save your mother's feet!" Gathering her ball of worsted with the

crocheting in her left hand, she swept out of the room and through the

hall to the front door. She pulled this open. There stood a man with

hammer in hand.

"No harm to ye's, marm," he said. "I's jist afther puttin' a bill on

ye's door; for shure it's to be sowld, that the house is."

"Sold!" cried Mrs. Lively. "When?"

"Faith! whiniver it may please a body to buy it," was the definite

reply.

Mrs. Lively read the bill: "'Six thousand dollars!' Why the whole

property isn't worth six thousand, much less the lease for twelve years.

Won't the owner take less?"

"It's more than likely he would, 'specially from the likes of ye's.

Shure! folks most ginerly wants all they kin git, and ef they can't git

it they'll be afther takin' less. The gintleman says as it must be sold

immadiate, for the owner is bruck to smitherations."

Here was prospective trouble. Mrs. Lively went down the doorsteps and

along the paved walk to her husband's office, in the front basement. The

doctor laid down his pen, expecting a patient, but, seeing that it was

only his wife, resumed it.

"There's a bill put up on our door: the house is for sale--six thousand

dollars. I'll warrant it could be got for five: I think it's worth six,

though. We may have to move out at a day's notice, and we've just had

this office newly papered, and the kitchen repainted, and, dear me! just

got those Brussels carpets down in the parlors. It's too provoking! I

know those carpets'll have to be cut and slashed into ribbons to make

them fit other rooms. I was afraid of that when I got them. Until you

own a house we oughtn't to get anything nice. But, oh dear! if I waited

till we owned a home, I should go down to my grave on a two-ply. But

where in the name of reason are we going? There isn't another vacant

house in this neighborhood that I'd live in. And just think of the

damage to your practice in moving your office! What are we going to do?

Why in the world don't you say something? Can't you suggest something?

One would think you hadn't any interest in the matter. But it's always

the way. I've had to do all the planning for this family ever since I

came into it, and I came into it before it was a family. Oh, you needn't

smile: I know you're thinking that I haven't given you a chance to say

anything; but I wouldn't talk if you'd talk, and I wouldn't bother

myself about our arrangements if you would. It's too provoking about

this house. It just suits me: there isn't a thing about it I should wish

to have altered."

"Closets, little kitchen, back stairs," said Napoleon, who had entered

the office unobserved, and who had often heard his mother denounce the

house as most inconvenient in these three particulars.

"What have you come for?" the mother demanded sharply. "Go back to the

sitting-room, and learn your geography lesson for to-morrow."

"Have learnt it," replied the imperturbable Napoleon.

"Then go and get your arithmetic."

"Have got it."

"Well, then, get your history."

"Have."

"And your grammar and spelling and German--you've learned them all, have

you?"

"Yes."

"Then go and take your walk."

"Have."

"For pity's sake, what is it you haven't done?"

"Nothing."

"Every duty of life discharged, is it?" and Mrs. Lively smiled in spite

of herself.

"'Cept eating."

"Except eating! Of course: I never knew a time in your life when you'd

finished up your eating.--What are you going to do about that bill?"

Mrs. Lively continued, turning to her husband.

"I can't do anything about it except to leave it there," replied the

gentleman, smiling quietly.

"It's exasperating," cried the lady. "I don't see how I can ever give up

this house."

"We might buy it," said Dr. Lively. "I've been thinking about it for

some time."

"How can we? Where's the money?"

"I have some in bank."

"You have, and you didn't let me know it, you mean, stingy thing!" said

Mrs. Lively between a pout and a smile. "How much have you in bank?"

"Four or five thousand."

"Why, where did you get it?"

"Saved it."

"Why, you've always talked as poor as poverty, especially if I wanted a

bonnet or anything--said you were barely making a living."

"No man is making a living till he can afford to own a home," said the

doctor, laying aside his pen. "I'll go and see the agent, and learn what

we can get the house for."

"Well, beat him down: don't give him six thousand for it, and don't

decide on anything till you've consulted me. After all, there are a good

many things about this house that don't suit me. Maybe, we can get a lot

and build a house to suit us better for the same money."

"Hardly," said Dr. Lively.

"Well, really, I don't know about buying this house," said the lady in

an undecided way. "I should like to be nearer church, and Nappy ought to

be nearer his school."

"But my practice is all in this neighborhood, and it's a most excellent

neighborhood--permanent: the people own their houses. To go into a new

neighborhood would be like going into a new city. I should have to build

up a practice with new people."

Dr. Lively saw the agent, and agreed to pay five thousand dollars in

cash for the house, and five hundred in one year, at six per cent. "Now,

my dear," he said to his wife, "we've got to save that five hundred

dollars this year."

"Don't I know that? I suppose, now, I shall have to hear that

ding-donged at me for the next twelve months. You'll fling it at me

every time I ask for change. I dare say before the year is out I shall

repent in sackcloth and ashes that we ever bought the house. Save it! Of

course I've got to save it. It never enters your head that it's possible

for you to save anything."

"Who saved the five thousand?" asked the doctor quietly.

"For pity's sake, how could I save it if you never gave it to me? I

didn't even know you'd made it. I'm sure my dress has been shabby enough

to suit the stingiest mortal in existence. There isn't a woman in our

church that dresses plainer than I do."

"As you are going out," said the doctor, changing the subject, "you can

call at the savings bank and get the money: the agent will be here in

the morning with the papers."

Mrs. Lively came home in due time and displayed ten five-hundred-dollar

bills. "They offered to give me a cheque," she said, "but these bills

look so much richer."

"But a cheque is safer in case of accident," the doctor suggested.

"What in the world's going to happen to-night? You are such a croaker,

always anticipating trouble!"

"Oh no; I don't anticipate a fire or a robbery before morning," the

doctor said.

That night, when Mrs. Lively went to bed, she took the doctor's purse

from his pocket and put it under her pillow. All night long she was

dreaming about those bills. The next morning, when she woke, her first

act was to look for the purse. There it was, just where she had placed

it. She returned it to her husband's pocket, and then dressed without

waking him, for he had been called up that night to see a patient.

Very promptly at eight o'clock the agent for the house presented himself

in Dr. Lively's office. Who ever knew an agent behind time when a sale

was to be consummated?

Dr. Lively looked over the papers carefully, and, being satisfied,

opened his purse to make the cash payment. If the agent's eyes had not

been eagerly watching the purse for the forthcoming bills, but instead

had been fixed on Dr. Lively's face, they would have seen in it first a

look utterly blank, then one of intense alarm.

"Excuse me a moment," he said as he closed his purse. He left the office

and hurried to Mrs. Lively's sitting-room.

"Well, is the deed done?" the lady asked with the complacent air of a

land-holder.

"What did you do with the money?" the doctor asked anxiously. "I thought

you put it in my purse."

"I did," replied Mrs. Lively, her eyes dilating with alarm.

"It isn't here," the doctor asserted. "You must be mistaken."

"I am not mistaken," said the lady, panting with alarm. "I did put it in

your purse. You've dropped it out somewhere."

"That is impossible: I haven't opened my purse since those bills were

brought into the house until just now in my office. You must have put

the bills somewhere else. Look in your purse."

"I tell you I put the money in your purse," replied Mrs. Lively with

asperity, at the same time opening her purse with an impatient movement.

"It isn't here: I knew it wasn't. I tell you again I put it in your

purse, and you've dropped it out somewhere."

"But I haven't opened the purse till a moment since in my office," the

doctor reiterated.

"Then you've dropped the bills in the office."

"No, I have not. I was holding the purse over the table when I opened

it, and I perceived at once that it was empty, even to my small change."

"Well, that shows that the money has been dropped out of the purse some

time when you opened it. If I put the bills somewhere else, what's

become of the change? You've lost it all out together, you see."

"Then it must be in the house somewhere," said the doctor, evidently

staggered, "for I haven't been out since those bills were brought home."

"Yes, you have," urged Mrs. Lively from her vantage-ground. "You were

called up last night to see that child on Morgan street."

"But I didn't lose it there. For when I wanted to make change for a

five-dollar bill, I found that I hadn't my purse; and that reminds me, I

found it in my pocket this morning, though it wasn't there last night."

"I can explain that," said Mrs. Lively after a moment's hesitation. "I

put the purse under my pillow last night, and returned it to your pocket

this morning."

"Then of course you lost the money out," said the doctor promptly.

"Of course! I might have known you would lay it on me if there was a

shadow of a chance. I had nothing in the world to do with the losing of

that money."

"You ought to have got a cheque."

"Why in Heaven's name didn't you tell me to?"

All this while the two had been looking the room over, rummaging through

drawers, looking on whatnots, brackets, shelves, etc.

"Well, I can't keep the agent waiting any longer," said the doctor.

"I'll tell I him I'll bring the money round to him;" and he left the

room.

"What are you standing there for?" said Mrs. Lively, whirling sharply

on Napoleon. "Go, and look for that money."

"Where?"

"How do I know where? Look anywhere and everywhere. There's no telling

where your father lost it. Napoleon Lively," she exclaimed, a sudden

idea seeming to strike her, "what did you do with that money?"

"Nothing," answered the youth with cool indifference.

"Where did you hide it?"

"Didn't hide it."

His perfect nonchalance was irresistibly convincing.

"Have you found it?" said the doctor, re-entering the room.

"Found it!" Mrs. Lively snapped out the words, and then her lips shut

close together as if with the vehemence of the snapping.

"Perhaps the house was entered last night," suggested the doctor.

"I locked every door and window, and they were all locked this morning

when I got up," replied Mrs. Lively. "Perhaps you left the front door

open when you went out in the night. I'll warrant you did: it would be

just like you."

"I did _not_ leave the door open," replied the doctor. "I found it

locked when I got back, and opened it with my night-key. Besides, I was

not out of the house more than forty minutes, and you told me when I got

back that you hadn't been asleep."

"I told you I had scarcely been asleep," said Mrs. Lively.

All that day the Lively household was in extreme commotion. Every

bedstead was stripped naked, and each article of bedding was separately

shaken in the middle of the room; the contents of every drawer were

turned out; every piece of furniture was moved; every floor was

carefully swept. The house, in short, was turned inside out.

Advertisements were put in the papers; handsome rewards were offered;

the police were notified of the loss. The detectives were of opinion

that the house had been entered, but there was not the slightest clew to

the burglars.

It was Friday, the sixth of October, when the loss was discovered. On

the seventh the house was again looked over, inch by inch.

"You _must_ have put that money somewhere else than in my purse," said

Dr. Lively to his wife. "Have you looked in the pockets of all your

dresses?"

"Don't say to me again that I didn't put that money in your purse," said

Mrs. Lively vehemently: "I won't bear it. You might as well tell me that

I don't see you this minute. There never was anything in this world that

makes me so tearing mad as to be contradicted about something that I

perfectly well know. I'd go into any court and swear that I put that

money in your purse; and I don't want to hear any more of your

insinuations. Do you think I've stolen the money? You've lost it out of

the purse--that's all there is about it. This house has no more been

entered than I've been burglaring."

"Then where's the money?"

"How in the name of sense do you think I know? I'd go and get it if I

knew. Dear! dear! dear! dear! The savings of ten years gone in a night,

after all my pinching! I've done my own work--"

"When you couldn't get a girl," said Napoleon.

"I've worn old-fashioned clothes; I've twisted and screwed in every

possible way to save that money--"

"Pa saved it," was Napoleon's emendation.

"Well," retorted the lady, "he'd better not have saved it: he'd better

have let his family have it. What's the use of saving money for

burglars?"

"You think now that the burglars have it?" said the doctor dryly.

"Oh, for pity's sake, hush! I don't think anything about it. I believe

I'm going insane. How in the universe we're ever going to live is more

than I can conceive."

"My dear, we are better off than we were ten years ago, for I yet have

my practice, and we are as well off as you thought we were two days ago;

and you were happy then."

"Happy!" There was a volume of bitter scorn in the word as Mrs. Lively

uttered it.

"Oh, my dear!" said the husband in a tone of piteous remonstrance.

The next evening, which was Sunday, Dr. Lively and wife went to church,

and; heard a sermon by the Rev. Charles Hilmer from the words, "Help one

another."

"What's the use of preaching such stuff?" said Mrs. Lively with

petulance when they were out of church. "Nobody heeds it. Who's going to

help us in our loss?"

"Our lesson from that sermon is, that we are to help others," said the

doctor.

"We help others! I'd like to know what we've got to help others with!

Five thousand dollars out of pocket!"

"There's a fire somewhere," said the doctor as an engine whirled by them

while they stood waiting for a car.

The lady and gentleman proceeded to their home on the South Side, and

went to bed, though the fire-bells were still ringing. About midnight

they were roused by a violent ringing of the door-bell. Dr. Lively

started up with a patient on his mind. "There's a fire somewhere," he

exclaimed immediately, perceiving the glare in the room. Mrs. Lively was

out of bed in an instant.

"Where? where's the fire?" she cried. "Is the house afire? I believe in

my soul it is."

"No," said Dr. Lively, who had gone to the window; "but there's a

tremendous fire to the south-west. The flames seem to be leaping from

roof to roof. That was a policeman who rang us up. He seems to be waking

all this neighborhood."

They dressed hurriedly, called up Napoleon, and went out at the front

door, and on with the stream toward the fire. The street was crowded

with people, the air thick with noises, and everywhere it was as light

as day. They passed on under the lurid heavens, and reached a hotel

which stood open. Two streams of people were on the stairs--one hurrying

down, the other going up for a view of the fire. Our party followed the

stream up the stairs and on to the roof. It was crowded with spectators,

all greatly excited. Making their way to the front of the roof, our

couple stood spellbound by a vision which once seen could never be

forgotten. It was like a look into hell. The whole fire seemed below

them, a surging, tempest-lashed ocean of flame, with mile-long billows,

mile-high breakers and mile-deep shadows. All about the flaming ocean,

except to the leeward, was a sea of faces, white and upturned, and rapt

as with some unearthly vision. Stretching out for miles were housetops

swarming with crowds, gazing appalled at the spectacle in which the fate

of every man, woman and child of them was vitally involved. At times the

gale, with a strong, steady sweep, would level the billows of fire, and

bear the current northward with the majestic flow of a great river. Then

the flames would heave and part as with earthquake throes, dash skyward

in jets and spouts innumerable, and pile up to the north-east mountains

of fire that seemed to touch the heavens. Clouds of smoke obscured at

times the view of the streets below, without making inaudible the roll

of wheels, the beat of hoofs, the tramp of human feet, the cry of human

voices, the scream of the engines, the thunder of falling buildings, the

maniacal shriek of the gale, the Niagara-like roar of the fire; and ever

and anon, striking through all the tumult, the deep, solemn voice of the

great court-house bell, and the one word it seemed to say to the

trembling city--"Doomed! doomed! doomed."

"We must go home," said Mrs. Lively in a lost, bewildered way.

"Yes," assented the doctor: "there is no safety this side the river. All

the engines in creation couldn't stop that fire. Why in God's name don't

they pull down houses or explode them? Come!"

But the lady continued to gaze in a fascinated way at the unearthly

spectacle. It was all so wild, so awful, that the brain reeled. The

doomed houses in the path of the fire seemed to her to be animate

things--dumb, helpless, feeling creatures, that trembled and shrank as

the flames reached out cruel fingers for them. She shook off the

bewildered, dazed feeling, but it came again as the tempest of flame and

smoke went racing to the north. Street and house and steeple and the

vast crowds seemed sailing away on some swift crescent river to a great,

vague, yawning blackness beyond.

They hurried down into the street. Momently the crowds, the tumult, the

terror were growing. Every house stood open, the interior as clear as at

noonday. Men, women and children were moving about in eager haste,

tearing up carpets, lifting furniture and loading trucks. Ruffians were

pushing in at the open doors, snatching valuables and insulting the

owners. There was a hasty seizing of goods, and a wild dash into the

street from imperiled houses, a shouting for trucks and carriages,

piteous inquiries for absent friends, distressed cries for absent

protectors, screams of little children, swift, wild faces pushing

eagerly in this direction and that; oaths and prayers and shoutings;

women bowed beneath mattresses and heavy furniture; wheels interlocking

in an inextricable mass; horses rearing and plunging in the midst of

women separated from their husbands and little children from their

mothers; men bearing away their sick and infirm and their clinging

little ones; the shower of falling brands, and the roar of the oncoming

flood of destruction.

In the next block but one to our doctor's home a brand had lodged in the

turret of a little wooden Catholic church, and, pinned there by the

fierce gale, was being blown and puffed at as with a blowpipe. There was

no time to lose. While he stopped on the street to secure a truckman,

Mrs. Lively hurried in to get together the most valuable of their

belongings. For a time she proceeded with considerable system, tying in

sheets and locking in trunks the best of the bedding and other

necessaries. Then she got together some family relics, looked longingly

at some paintings, took down a quaintly-carved Black-Forest clock from

its shelf, and then set it back, feeling that something else would be

more needed. But as the roar of the tempest came nearer she was seized

with panic, and no longer knew what she did. When Dr. Lively came in to

announce the dray at the door he found his wife making for a trunk with

a tin baking-pan in one hand and a cloth duster in the other.

"For Heaven's sake, Priscilla, don't pack up such trash!" he cried.

"Have you got up the parlor carpets?"

"Oh dear! no: I never thought of them. Nappy might get them up if he

would. Napoleon! Where under the sun is that boy? Napoleon!" she called.

"Here," answered Napoleon through a mouthful of cake. He entered with a

basket in his hand.

"Why in the world don't you go to work and help?"

"Am helping."

"What are you doing?"

"Packing."

"Packing what, I'd like to know?"

"Victuals."

"Of course! I might have known without asking. What in the world shall

we want with victuals, in the street without roof or bed?"

But the father told him to hold on to his basket.

"You may be sure he'll do that," said the mother. "What in the world are

all those boxes you've got there?" she asked as she dragged a sheet full

of articles to the front door.

"Some things from my office," the doctor replied hurriedly.

"I just know they're those plants and fossils and casts and miserable

things that have been in my way everlastingly. I was in hopes they'd get

burnt up."

Without heeding his wife, Dr. Lively disappeared into the house for

something else.

"Take those boxes off," she said to the drayman.

"Blast my eyes if I'm going to be lifting boxes off and on here all

night for any darned twenty-five dollars that ever was paid. Hurry your

things on here, or, by Godfrey! I'll dump 'em and be off. Blast me if

I'll wait here a second beyond five minutes."

Just then the doctor reappeared, and began to turn over the contents of

a sheet before tying it. "Oh, my dear," he cried in a tone of mingled

remonstrance and despair, "we can't spare room for these worthless

traps;" and he pitched out a pair of vases, two pin-cushions, a dustpan,

a sieve, a kitchen apron, a statuette of Psyche, a pair of plaster

medallions, _Our Mutual Friend_ in paper cover, a pink tarletan dress, a

dirty tablecloth, an ice pitcher, a flat-iron, a mosquito-bar, a

hoop-skirt, a backgammon-board and a bottle of hair restorative.

"They're worth a thousand times more than those old rocks and things

you've loaded up the dray with," Mrs. Lively maintained.

At last the truck moved off, followed by Dr. Lively, shouting to his

wife to come on and not lose sight of him. Mrs. Lively seized a

carpet-bag in which she had packed her silver and jewelry, and rushed

into the street, screaming to Napoleon to follow and not lose sight of

her. Napoleon hung his basket of provisions on his arm and stuck his hat

on his head. Then he went to the pantry and poked up cookies through a

lift between his hat and forehead, until there was no vacant space

remaining in the top of his hat. Then he crammed a cake in his mouth,

filled his pockets and both hands, and left the rest to their doom.

The wind, which for a time had blown steadily to the north-east, was now

seemingly bewildered. At times there would be a dead calm, as though the

fierce gale had tired itself out; then it would sweep roaring down a

street with the force of a hurricane, and go shrieking through an alley

as though sucked through a tube; again, it seemed to strike from every

quarter of the compass, while anon a vast whirlwind was formed, swirling

and circling till one half expected to see the glowing masses of masonry

lifted and whirled like autumn leaves.

On went our party as fast as the press would permit. One bundle after

another, as it took fire from falling brands, was pitched off the truck

and left to burn out on the pavement; and to these bundle-pitchings Mrs.

Lively kept up a running accompaniment of groans and ejaculations. When

they had reached the corner of Washington and La Salle, the truckman

signified his intention of throwing off his load.

"They'll be safe here," he said. Dr. Lively, too, thought this, for he

did not believe that the flames could pass the double row of fireproof

buildings on La Salle street and others in the neighborhood. But as he

was bound for a friend's house across the river, on the North Side, he

would of course have preferred to take his goods with him, even if there

had been no danger from pillagers. But no arguments or persuasions, even

when offered in the shape of the gentleman's last five-dollar bill,

could induce the drayman to cross the river. He dumped on the sidewalk

all that remained of the Livelies' earthly possessions, and disappeared

in the press.

Again and again, but all in vain, Dr. Lively offered his forlorn hope,

his one greenback, to procure the transportation of his goods across the

river. But that five-dollar bill was so scorned and snubbed by the

ascendent truckmen that the doctor found himself smiling at his conceit

that the poor, despised thing, when returned to his purse, went

sneakingly into the farthest and deepest corner.

As he could not leave his goods, it was decided that Mrs. Lively and

Napoleon should cross the river without him. He sat down on Mrs.

Lively's big Saratoga trunk to await developments. He did not have to

wait long. The double row of fireproofs, which was to have held the fire

at bay, was attacked and went down; then the Chamber of Commerce melted

away; shortly after the court-house was assailed. Dr. Lively gave up his

trunks and bundles as lost, and as too insignificant, in that wild

havoc, to be worth a sigh. He did feel a desire, however, for a clean

shirt in which to face the heavens. Then, too, he wanted to bring

something through the fire--to preserve something which would serve as

a memento of his ante-igneous life. The best thing in the way of a relic

which he could secure was a case of sea-weeds mounted on cards. He made

a hasty bundle of these and a few articles of underwear, tucked it under

his arm, and then looked about him, considering which way he should go.

The wind had again risen to a hurricane. All around him was a storm of

fire-brands, as though the flakes in a snow-storm had been turned to

flame. Great sheets of blazing felt-roofing were driving overhead.

Everywhere timbers and masonry were falling: walls a half square in

length came down with the thunder's crash, and in such quick succession

that the noise ceased to be noticed. Thousands of frantic people were

pushing wildly in every direction. The crowds seemed bewildered, lost,

frenzied. And what wonder? The world seemed to be burning up, the

heavens to be melting: a star looked like a speck of blood, so that the

whole canopy of heaven when visible seemed blood-spattered.

As the doctor was gazing at the terrible spectacle the cry ran from

mouth to mouth that all the bridges across the west branch of the river

were burned. There were thousands of spectators from the West Division

who had come over to witness the melting away of the South Side

business-palaces. If the bridges were burned, there remained but one

avenue by which they could reach their homes. There were cries of "The

tunnel! the tunnel!" a panic and a grand rush, in which everybody was

borne westward toward Washington street tunnel. Dr. Lively found himself

forced into the tunnel. It was crowded with two streams of

wildly-excited people moving in opposite directions. One was rushing to

the rescue of property on the South Side or to see the fire--the other,

to get away from it. Most of these latter were carrying articles of

furniture and bales of goods, or they were wheeling loaded barrows.

Everybody was crowding and pushing. Our doctor had made his way through

about one-third of the tunnel when suddenly every light went out. The

great gasometer of the South Side gas-works had exploded. He was under

the river, in the bowels of the earth, in the midst of that wild crowd

of humanity, and in utter darkness. "There will be a panic," he thought:

"all the weak will be overrun and trampled to death. God help them and

help us all!" Then there came to him a flash of inspiration: "Keep to

the right!" he shouted, "to the right!" "Keep to the right!" repeated an

abetting voice. "To the right!" "Keep to the right!" "Right! right!" The

blessed words ran along from one end of the dark way to the other. Then

a hush seemed to fall on the lips as though the hearts were at prayer,

and the two streams moved along like processions through the dark valley

of the shadow of death.

Facing about, Dr. Lively squeezed his way through a dense throng on

North Water street bridge till he gained the North Division. Here he sat

down on the steps of a warehouse to take breath, and looked back on the

scene he had left. The fire had reached the river, which reflected the

lurid horror above, and seemed a stream of molten metal, or a current of

glowing lava poured from some wide rent in the earth. Struggling human

creatures in the blazing, hissing, sputtering waters realized Dante's

imaginings of tortured, writhing souls on the red floor of hell.

Tired and faint, Dr. Lively pressed on to the north. He was not long in

learning that the fire was already raging in the doomed North Division,

and that the waterworks were disabled. Reaching the house of his friend,

where his family had taken refuge, he found them all informed of the

peril to the North Side, and getting ready to move. His friend decided

to take refuge on the prairies. "There we can keep up the race," he

said.

"I'm going where I can get water," said Dr. Lively: "it's the only thing

under heaven that this fire-fiend won't eat. There isn't a suburb but

may be burned. I'm going toward the lake." So he took possession of his

wife and boy and started for Lincoln Park. There were lights in all the

houses, and eager, swift-moving figures were seen through the doors and

windows: everywhere people were getting their things into the streets.

Shortly after, the flames, it was; noticed, were beginning to pale. A

weird kind of light began to creep over burning house, blazing street

and ruined wall. The day was dawning. With a kind of bewildered feeling

our friends watched the coming on of the strange, ghostly morning, and

saw the pale, sickly, shamefaced sun come up out of the lake. It was ten

o'clock before they reached the old cemetery south of Lincoln Park.

Hundreds had already arrived here with their belongings, representing

every article that pertains to modern civilization. Parties were

momently coming in with more loads. Here our friends halted. Mrs. Lively

dropped down in a fugitive rocking chair, thinking what a comfort it

would be to go off into a faint. But without a pillow or salts or

camphor it was a luxury in which she did not dare to indulge, though she

had a physician at hand. Right in front of her she noticed a besmutched,

red-eyed woman who had something familiar in her appearance. "Why, it's

myself!" she said to her husband, pointing to a large plate mirror;

leaning against an old headstone.

"Yes," said the doctor smiling, "we all look like sweeps."

Napoleon seated himself on a grave and opened his lunch-basket.

"Did anybody ever?" cried the mother. "This boy's brought his basket

through. There's nothing in all the world except something to eat that

he would have devoted himself to in this way."

"Nothing could have proved more opportune," said the father.

Then they ate their breakfast, sharing it with a little girl who was

crying for her father, and with a lady who was carrying a handsome dress

bonnet by the ribbons, and who in turn shared her portion with her

poodle dog. They offered a slice of cake to a sad old gentleman sitting

on an inverted pail with his hands clasped above a gold headed cane, and

his chin resting on them. He shook his head without speaking, and went

on gazing in a dreary, abstracted way into the air, as though oblivious

of everything around him. "'Though I make my bed in hell, behold, Thou

art there,'" he said in slow measured soliloquy. His lip began to quiver

and the tears to stream down his furrowed face. Dr. Lively heard, and

wiped his eyes on the back of his hand: he had nothing else to receive

the quick tears. Just then a hearse with nodding black plumes came by

loaded with boxes and bundles, on which were perched a woman and five

children, the three youngest crowing and laughing in unconscious glee at

their strange circumstances. This was followed by two buggies hitched

together, both packed with women and children drawn by a single horse,

astride of which was a lame man.

"What is it, madam?" said Dr. Lively to a woman who was wringing her

hands and crying piteously.

"Why, you see," she said between her sobs, "me and Johnny made our

livin' a-sellin' pop-corn; and last night we had a bushel popped ready

for the Monday's trade; and now it's all gone: we've lost

everything--all that beautiful corn: there wasn't a single scorched

grain."

"But think what others have lost--their beautiful homes and all their

business--"

She suddenly ceased crying, and, turning upon him, said sharply, "We

lost all we had: did they lose any more'n they had?"

A young man came pressing through the crowd, desperately clutching a

picture in a handsome gilt frame. Through the smoke and smutch which

stained the canvas was seen a gray-haired, saintly woman's head.

"The picture of his mother," thought the doctor with a swelling about

his heart.

"I saved dese," said a jolly-faced German, extending his two hands; "and

dey is all I had when I come from de Faderland to Chicago. And saved you

nothin'?"

The man appealed to had about him three children and a pale delicate

woman.

"I saved these," he said with a gesture that was an embrace. "All the

baby-faces we left hanging on the walls in the home where all were

born."

Then the bearded lip quivered and the lids were dropped over the

brimming eyes. The mother looked up with clear, unfaltering features,

and with a light grateful, almost joyous, in her fine eyes, and said

softly, "But all the real faces we've brought along."

Then one of the little girls took up the story: "Oh, mother, Tommy's

picture will be burned, and we can never get another. Tommy's dead, you

know," she explained.

The mother's eyes grew misty, and so did the German's and the doctor's,

and many others. There they were in that old deserted cemetery, a

company of strangers, not one of whom had ever seen the other's face

before, exchanging their confidences and mingling their tears.

All day long the fugitives poured into this strange encampment, and by

night they numbered thirty thousand. There was shouting, swearing,

laughing, weeping, waiting. There was pallid stupefaction, sullen

silence, faces of black despair--every kind of face except the happy

variety. The air was thick with frightful stories of arson; of men

hanged to lamp-posts; of incendiaries hurled headlong into the fires

they had kindled; of riot, mobs and lawlessness. There was scarcely a

suburb that was not reported to be burning up, and prairie-fires were

said to be raging. The fate of Sodom was believed to have overtaken

Chicago and her dependent suburbs.

"There's no safety here," said Mrs. Lively nervously as the flames

approached the cemetery. "Do let's get out of this horrid place. What in

the world do you want to stay here for?"

"My dear," replied the doctor with a twinkle, "I don't want to stay

here. We are not certainly safe, but I don't know of any place where our

chances would be better."

"Let's go down to the beach, get on a propeller and go out into the

lake."

"But, my dear, 'the Sands' and the lake shore are already thronged. It

is said that people were lying in the lake, and others standing up to

their necks in water--women with children in their arms. The propellers

have doubtless taken off fugitives to their entire capacity."

In the mean time the fire came on. Everywhere over the dead leaves and

dry grass and piles of household goods, and against the headboards and

wooden crosses, the brands were falling; and the people were running and

dodging, and fighting the incipient fires.

"Oh, we shall be burned to death here: I knew all the time we should,"

cried Mrs. Lively, dodging to the right to escape a torch, and then

running backward over a grave, beyond the reach of a second. Dr. Lively

stamped out the fires. "What under the sun are we going to do?"

persisted the lady.

"Dodge the brands--that's your work--and look out that Napoleon doesn't

get on fire in one of his dreams."

"Look there!" said Napoleon.

"Look where?" cried Mrs. Lively, whirling around.

"There."

"Where is _there_?"

"Dead-house."

"The dead-house! Good Heavens! it's afire!"

"This fire-demon," said the doctor, "isn't going to let any of us off.

It strikes at the living through their dead."

The dead-house, fortunately empty, was consumed, the headboards and

crosses were burned, the trees were scorched and blackened, the graves

were seared: all the life which the years had drawn from the entombed

ashes was laid again in ashes.

After a horrible suspense these graveyard campers saw the fiery tide

recede from their quarters and sweep on to the north. Then came on the

weird, elfinish night, that mockery of day, when, except in the

direction of the lake, great mountains of fire loomed up on every side

against the horizon, so that one felt environed, besieged, engirdled by

horrors.

"Try to get some sleep," said Dr. Lively to his wife when the torrent

had swept by to the north.

"Sleep!" said Mrs. Lively. "How can anybody sleep with these terrible

fires all around? It seems to me as if I were in some part of the

infernal regions. I shall always know after this how hell looks."

"I don't think the fire will trouble us any more to-night, but I'll

watch: there will be plenty of watchers, indeed, to give the alarm. Lie

down and try to get some rest."

"Where in the world is anybody to lie? On a grave? What in the world are

you eating?" continued Mrs. Lively, turning on Napoleon.

"_Shoemake_" answered the boy. "Want some?"

Mrs. Lively took some of the crimson, acrid berries and put them in her

mouth.

"You're hungry," said the father compassionately.

"Awful," answered the lad.

"Where are you going?" asked the mother as he started off.

"To bed," he replied, and he stretched himself out on a piece of carpet

where half a dozen children were sleeping.

"Now do, Priscilla, lie down and try to sleep," the husband insisted.

"How under the stars do you suppose I could sleep with hunger and thirst

gnawing at the pit of my stomach? Do let me alone: I want to try to

think out something--to plan for the future. What under the sun is to

become of us?"

"My dear," said the doctor, "don't worry about the future. I'll take

care of it some way, if the fire will ever let us out of our present

prison. We have our lives, our hands and our heads, and we must thank

God."

"Heads! I feel as if I'd lost mine. I think sometimes that I'm insane."

"Oh no: you ain't of the kind that go insane."

"I suppose you mean by that I've got no feelings, no sensibility."

"No, I don't mean that;" and Dr. Lively became silent, as though it was

useless to prolong the conversation.

They were sitting together on the ground, she leaning against a

headstone.

"Let me sit there against that stone, and you put your head on my lap,"

the doctor proposed.

"What in the world is the use of it?" she said. "Do you think I'm deaf

that I could sleep with all this moaning around me? Just hear it! One

would think all these graves had just been made, and that all these

people were chief mourners for the dead."

"The strangest bivouac ever seen under heaven!" said the doctor, looking

around. "In a life liable to such vicissitudes," he continued softly,

"it is important that we possess our spirits."

"Oh, for pity's sake, don't preach! What's the use?" said the wife.

"What's the use, indeed?" said the husband in a saddened tone. "If one

heed not the voice of the past twenty-four hours--" He left the sentence

unfinished.

"Oh, I know. Everybody, the world over, will be preaching about Chicago.

She was so wicked. Sodom and Gomorrah and Babylon! That'll be the talk.

I suppose we shall be told ten thousand times that riches have

wings--just as though we hadn't seen the wings and couldn't swear to the

color of them. But, dear me! I've been thinking that your story of

losses by the fire is not worth telling. I wish to goodness we'd bought

the house. If you hadn't lost the money, we might have now a

respectable-sized story to tell of our losses. I shall be ashamed to

tell that we lost just some clothes and household traps, when some

people have lost millions. How much better it would sound to say that

our house and everything in it was burned! People wouldn't know but it

was a fifty-thousand-dollar house. But a few chairs and bedquilts!--it's

too small to talk about."

"We've lost enough to satisfy me," said the doctor. "All my practice

that I've been ten years in building up! I'm exactly where I was when I

began in Chicago. We own but five dollars in the world--haven't even a

change of clothes."

"I've a mind to say that we had just bought the house, and it was

burned," said Mrs. Lively. "I'm sure it was just the same. But then you

never would stand by me in the story: you'd be sure to let the cat out."

"But what good would come of such a story?" asked the doctor.

"Why, people would be so much sorrier for us. Nobody could feel sorry

for that old pop-corn woman you were talking to, even if she did lose

all she had; and just so it will be with us. It's just like you to be

always missing a good thing. If you'd only bought the house before you

lost the money!"

"You're determined to saddle the loss of that money on me," the doctor

said smiling.

"Well, who lost it if you didn't?"

"I'm sure I can't say."

"Of course you can't. You might as well say that black isn't black as

that you didn't lose that money."

"I'll acknowledge, once for all, that I lost the money if you'll let the

subject drop," said he wearily. "It's wasting time and breath to talk

about it. There," he continued soothingly, "try to forget, and go to

sleep."

"It's wasting time and breath telling me to go to sleep," replied the

wife.

"Hurrah! here's a cigar!" said the doctor, producing one from his

pocket. "Now, if I only had a match to light it!"

"For patience' sake, you needn't be at a loss for a light for a cigar

when all this universe is afire. Go and light it at that headboard over

there, and then sit down and take your comfort while I'm starving. Why

in the world doesn't it rain? I don't see why the Lord should have such

a spite against Chicago: we ain't any worse than other people."

And thus the woman continued to run on all night. Up to two o'clock she

complained because it didn't rain, and after that she shivered and

moaned because it did.

With the morning, water-carts and bakers' wagons began to arrive on the

ground. These were quickly emptied among the hungry, thirsty people. Dr.

Lively spent his five dollars to within fifty cents for the relief of

the sufferers about him. Mrs. Lively obstinately refused to take

anything.

"I won't eat bread at twenty-five cents a loaf, and I won't drink water

at ten cents a quart. I'll die first!" she declared.

"I want you to take me to the West Division," Dr. Lively said to one of

the bakers. He had already tried a dozen times to make terms with

teamsters to this end. "I have a wife and child."

"I'll do it for five dollars apiece," replied the man.

"I haven't any money. Will you take a set of silver forks in pawn?"

"He sha'n't have my forks," said Mrs. Lively violently.--"How dare you

speculate on our calamities?" she demanded of the baker. "You sha'n't

have my forks: I'll stay here and starve first. I mean to stand this

siege of extortion to the last gasp."

"But, my dear," remonstrated the doctor, "there are people here who are

already near their last gasp. There are the sick and infirm and little

children. There are women now on this desolate ground in the pangs of

childbirth, and infants not an hour old. These must have help. I must

get over to the West Division. There are some hearts over there, I am

sure."

"I'll take you, sir," said the baker, "and I don't want none of your

silver. I'm beat, sir: I never thought of women hit that way. I can't

fight with sich, and with babies born in a graveyard. I'm whipped, sir.

I ain't never had much of a chance to make a extry dollar: I thought

this fire had give me a chance. My shop was left, full of flour. I was

bakin' all night; but darn me if I kin put the screw onto babies, and

women in childbed. You shall have my horse and cart and all my bakery

for 'em. Come, load up."[A]

[Footnote A: It need scarcely be said that the incidents here related

are literal facts, which came under the writer's observation in the

midst of the scenes described.]

On their way through the burnt district, on the ill-fated Chicago

Avenue, they passed a ruined wall where people were preparing to dig out

two men. One was crying piteously in mixed German and English for help.

The other, except his head and shoulders, was completely buried beneath

the ruins. As the people began to remove the rubbish he said in a tone

expressive at once of pluck and agony, "Leave me, and go and get out

that bawling Dutchman: he ain't dead, and I am."

As it proved, he was broken all to pieces, both legs and both arms being

fractured, one of the arms in two places.

Of course Dr. Lively found the hearts he went to seek, not only among

the favored few whom God had spared the bitter cup, but all over the

world. We all know the beautiful story--how all the cities and villages

and hamlets of the land were on the housetops, watching the burning of

Chicago, marking her needs, and speeding the relief as fast as steam and

lightning could bring it. We know of that message of love, the sweetest,

the most wonderful the world ever heard since Christ died for us.

Through the pallid stupefaction, the sullen silence, the awful gloom,

the black despair that were settling over Chicago's heart, it pierced,

and from all the world it came: "We have heard thy cry, O our sister!

Our hearts are aching for thee; our tears are flowing for thee; our

hands are working for thee." Oh, how it electrified us in Chicago! If

any refused, if any gave grudgingly, we saw it not, we knew it not. We

saw only the eager outstretched hand of love.

And we know now the sequel of the wonderful story--how Chicago has

proved herself worthy of the great love wherewith the world hath loved

her, and of the great faith wherewith the world hath believed in her.

She has come up out of her bereavement strong through suffering, wearing

yet her badge of mourning, her face subdued, but uplifted, wise and

strong of purpose; her eye sad, but earnest and true; her figure less

imperious, but majestic and regal; her spirit less arrogant, but just as

brave, just as heroic, and more human.

SARAH WINTER KELLOGG.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

A STRAYED SINGER.

Most of us know what a pathos is mixed with the sweet surprise of

meeting a beautiful thing in strange and inferior surroundings, in

circumstances that suggest an utter incongruity between the subject and

the situation, and imply an awful weight of loneliness and an

intolerable lack of sympathy. The Alpine harebell on the edge of the

glacier, the caged lion gazing vacantly into a wearisome monotony of

idleness, the shivering little Italian fiddling about our winter

streets, make the same appeal, in various measure, to this consciousness

of incongruity that in another phase would stimulate our laughter

instead of our tears.

As with space, so with time. It is the appreciation of the discord

between the subject and its surroundings that awakens our sympathy for

men "born out of their time," as we express it with an arrogance of

wiser judgment. In every period of history, affronting the great

averages of intellectual development, appear certain minds classified at

once as being either before or behind their age. To the first class

belong the great reformers, discoverers, inventors--men whose immense

genius, concentrated upon one idea, carries them beyond their fellows,

as a straight-going steamer distances a pleasure-yacht. These men we do

not think of pitying, unless they come too near us, and then we call

them fools or fanatics.

But there are lost children of the second class whose fate we all

deplore--children of an earlier age or a summer clime, drifting about

in this laborious world like helpless babes in the wood; bright-eyed,

luxurious young Greeks, rebelling against pain and intolerant of toil,

struggling in vain to hold their own among keen, restless Yankees;

dreamy mystics, strayed from the shadows of some cloister, their vague

eyes dazzled by the sun; artists of early Italy, worshiping the mediæval

Madonna; poets, belonging of right to the court of Elizabeth, or

companions of the wandering and disastrous fortunes of "the fairest and

crudest of princesses."

It is of an Elizabethan poet strayed into our Victorian age that I

propose to write. Few people except professed students of literature

know more of Thomas Lovell Beddoes than his name. More than a year ago

an article on him appeared in the _Fortnightly_, half biographical, half

occupied with a sketch of his principal tragedy--an article doing more

justice to the dramatic than to the lyric quality of his genius. But it

is by his songs that his name is kept in the minds of men

to-day--exquisite snatches of melody, full of the peculiar charm of that

Elizabethan age to which they properly belong.

In 1851 an edition of his poems in two volumes, with a memoir and

letters, was published by Pickering. The edition was small and soon

exhausted, but the literary world of England was unanimous in its

praise; and Landor, Browning, Proctor, and many others came out with

generous tributes to the genius of that poet whose circle of listeners

has always been so small. "Nearly two centuries have elapsed," wrote

Walter Savage Landor, with his hearty enthusiasm, "since a work of the

same wealth of genius as _Death's Jest-Book_ has been given to the

world." And Browning wrote to Mr. Kelsall, the author of the memoir:

"You might pick out scenes, passages, lyrics, fine as fine can be: the

power of the man is immense and irresistible."

The two volumes contain, besides the Life and letters, two dramas, _The

Brides' Tragedy_ and _Death's Jest-Book_, two unfinished plays,

_Torrismond_ and _The Second Brother_, and many dramatic and poetic

fragments and songs. The Life is an uneventful history, but the letters,

though singularly free from egotism, bring up before us a most

interesting character--a curious mixture of genius and want of faith in

that genius, of energy and self-distrust, of intense devotion to

practical studies and the most impractical and dreamy fancy, an

affectionate nature lonely and misunderstood, a spirit of the most

sturdy and uncompromising independence, a mind of keen and scientific

insight--a character made up, in short, of all the warring elements of

philosopher, physician, politician and poet.

Thomas Lovell Beddoes was born in Clifton in 1803, and died at Bâle in

Switzerland in 1849. His mother was a sister of Maria Edgeworth, and his

father a distinguished physician and an intimate friend of Sir Humphry

Davy. In the father's character we may trace the principal traits of the

son: a strong scientific bent, a fondness for poetic dreams, an

invincible independence, were predominant in both. The character of

Lovell Beddoes' poetry was the natural outgrowth of his early studies.

His schoolfellows at the Charterhouse speak of him at the age of

fourteen as already thoroughly versed in the best English literature and

a close student of the dramatists, from the Elizabethan to those of his

own day. He was always ready to invent and carry out any acts of

insubordination, which he informed with so much wit and spirit that the

very authorities were often subdued by their own irresistible laughter.

It was one phase of his dramatic genius, that seemed to be constantly

impelling him to get up some striking situation wherein he might pose as

a youthful Ajax defying the lightnings. At Oxford his restless

independence was continually prompting him to affront his tutors. He was

always in opposition to the spirit of the occasion, whatever it might

be.

This spirit of rebellion inspired him with an intense interest in German

literature and German politics, as representing the ultra-liberal

tendencies of the day. Shelley, too, the rejected of Oxford, whose name

was scarcely to be mentioned to the British Philistine of the moment,

was one of Beddoes' idols, and he joined with two other gentlemen in the

expense of printing the first edition of the poet's posthumous works in

1824, afterward withdrawn by Mrs. Shelley. Byron was the popular poet

then, and universal Young England was turning down its shirt-collars in

a mockery of woe. But this boy of twenty, with his sturdy independence,

would judge for himself, and wrote to a friend: "I saw ---- (the

greatest fool within the walls of my acquaintance) the other night at

Oxford, repeating the whole of the _Deformed_ in raptures. God forgive

him!"

In 1821, while yet a freshman, he published a little volume of poems

called _The Improvisatore_, of which he was soon ashamed. Long before he

left Oxford he used to hunt the unfortunate volume through the libraries

of his acquaintance, and cutting out all the pages leave the binding

intact, a hollow mockery, upon their shelves. The next year, however, he

published _The Brides' Tragedy_, a drama of very great originality and

power, and a most extraordinary production for a boy of nineteen. The

_Edinburgh Review_ and the _London Magazine_. then at the height of

their power, came out with critical and highly laudatory notices by

Proctor (Barry Cornwall) and George Darley, and the former was ever

after one of Beddoes' warmest personal friends. In July, 1825, he went

to Göttingen, where his brilliant achievements as a student of medicine

won him numerous honors. The rest of his life was spent in Germany and

Switzerland, with occasional brief visits to England, but his heart was

with the German radicals, and he found the united attractions of

science, liberalism and Swiss scenery far more powerful than love of his

native land. He threw himself with enthusiasm into the discussion of the

scientific and political questions of the day, soon became a master of

the language, wrote a great deal for the German newspapers, both in

prose and verse, and used jestingly to call himself "a popular German

poet."

About this time he began his finest tragedy, _Death's Jest-Book_, still

undergoing correction and revision at the time of his death in his

forty-sixth year. He was never weary of making alterations: never

satisfied with the result of his labors, he tore up scene after scene,

or struck out remorselessly the finest passage in a drama if he thought

it inharmonious with the context. He had a theory that no man should

devote himself entirely to poetry unless possessed of most extraordinary

powers of imagination, or unfitted, by mental or bodily weakness, for

severer scientific pursuits. The studies of the physician and the

dramatist were to his mind allied by Nature, and he looked upon tragedy

as the fitting and inevitable result of combined physiological and

psychological researches. And he afterward declared himself determined

"never to listen to any metaphysician who is not both anatomist and

physiologist of the first rank." This was in 1825, when German and

French scientists were just beginning to explore the hidden mysteries of

matter, and to trace its intimate and subtle connections with the mind,

and when protoplasm was still an unknown quantity toward whose discovery

science was slowly feeling its way.

As he penetrated deeper and deeper into the arcana of anatomy and

physiology his judgment of his own poetry grew more and more severe. The

more he knew of Truth, the nearer absolute perfection must that Beauty

be which would compete with her for his heart. Busy with a pursuit in

which his progress was marked by absolute tests that even his modesty

could not disown, he shrank from trying to reach vague eminences in

poetry that he judged himself unable to attain. There is something in

his style that recalls Heine when he writes, "Me you may safely regard

as one banished from a service to which he was not adapted, but who has

still a lingering affection for the land of dreams--as yet, at least,

not far enough in the journey of science to have lost sight of the old

two-topped hill." And again: "I am essentially unpoetical in character,

habits and ways of thinking; and nothing but the desperate hanker for

distinction so common to the young gentlemen at the university ever set

me upon rhyming. If I had possessed the conviction that I could by any

means become an important or great dramatic writer, I would have never

swerved from the path to reputation; but seeing that others who had

devoted their lives to literature, such as Coleridge and Wordsworth--men

beyond a question of far higher originality and incomparably superior

poetical feeling and genius--had done so little, you must give me leave

to persevere in my preference of Apollo's pill-box to his lyre, and

should congratulate me on having chosen Göttingen instead of Grub street

for my abode.... It is good to be tolerable or intolerable in any other

line, but Apollo defend us from brewing all our lives at a

quintessential pot of the smallest ale Parnassian!"

There are so many racy bits of anecdote and opinion scattered through

this correspondence, so many things worth keeping for their own sakes or

as throwing new light upon the character of their writer, that it is

hard to choose a single specimen, but with one more extract we must

strive to be content. Beddoes' friend and editor had been trying to get

from him some personal details about his daily life, pursuits and

fancies, which, with his usual horror of the egotistical, he flatly

declined to give. "I will not venture on a psychological

self-portraiture," he writes, "fearing--and I believe with sufficient

reason--to be betrayed into affectation, dissimulation or some other

alluring shape of lying. I believe that all autobiographical sketches

are the result of mere vanity--not excepting those of St. Augustine and

Rousseau--falsehood in the mask and mantle of truth. Half ashamed and

half conscious of his own mendacious self-flattery, the historian of his

own deeds or geographer of his own mind breaks out now and then

indignantly, and revenges himself on his own weakness by telling some

very disagreeable truth of some other person; and then, re-established

in his own good opinion, marches on cheerfully in the smooth path toward

the temple of his own immortality. Yet even here, you see, I am

indirectly lauding my own worship for not being persuaded to laud my own

worship. How sleek, smooth-tongued, paradisaical a deluder art thou,

sweet Self-conceit! Let great men give their own thoughts on their own

thoughts: from such we can learn much; but let the small deer hold jaw,

and remember what the philosopher says, 'Fleas are not lobsters: d----n

their souls!'"

Caring nothing even for professional honors, Beddoes refused various

professorships in Germany, and traveled about to Zurich, to Bâle, and to

the other German centres of learning as his desires prompted him. Always

the same independent and rebellious spirit that he had shown himself as

a boy, he sympathized warmly with the democratic movements then

agitating Switzerland and the Rhine provinces, and devoted both his

purse and his pen to aid the anti-oligarchic and anti-clerical party. In

1848 he had intended to go back to England, but in the spring of that

year a slight wound received while dissecting infused a poison into his

system that undermined his health. In May, while seeking restoration in

the purer air of Bâle, his horse fell with him, and his left leg was so

badly broken that amputation became necessary. Until the autumn he

seemed to be doing well, but then the poison imbibed at Frankfort

declared itself once more, and a slow fever set in which terminated in

death on the 26th of January, 1849.

Beddoes' great fault as a dramatist he was quite aware of himself, and

had pointed out to the friend who was continually urging him to write:

"The power of drawing character and humor--two things absolutely

indispensable for a good dramatist--are the first two articles in my

deficiencies; and even the imaginative poetry I think you will find in

all my verse always harping on the same two or three principles; for

which plain and satisfactory reasons I have no business to expect any

great distinction as a writer." He could draw types of character, but

not individuals: the power of making the creations of the mind seem as

real as "our dear intimates and chamber-fellows" was denied him. But he

was not wholly destitute of humor, though he was possessed of but one

kind--that grim, sardonic quality which we find so often among the

Elizabethans--that mocking irony most like the grin upon a skull. His

fools are his best characters, so far as strength and originality go.

Here is a snatch from the wise conversation of two of these worthies in

_Death's Jest-Book_:

"_Isbrand._ Good-morrow, Brother Vanity! How? soul of a pickle-herring,

body of a spagirical tosspot, doublet of motley, and mantle of pilgrim,

how art thou transmuted! Wilt thou desert our brotherhood, fool

sublimate? Shall the motley chapter no longer boast thee? Wilt thou

forswear the order of the bell, and break thy vows to Momus? Have mercy

on Wisdom and relent.

"_Mandrake._ Respect the grave and sober, I pray thee. To-morrow I know

thee not. In truth, I mark that our noble faculty is in its last leaf.

The dry rot of prudence hath eaten the ship of fools to dust: she is no

more seaworthy. The world will see its ears in a glass no longer. So we

are laid aside and shall soon be forgotten; for why should the feast of

asses come but once a year, when all the days are foaled of one mother?

O world! world! The gods and fairies left thee, for thou wert too wise;

and now, thou Socratic star, thy demon, the great Pan, Folly, is parting

from thee. The oracles still talked in their sleep, shall our

grandchildren say, till Master Merriman's kingdom was broken up: now is

every man his own fool, and the world's sign is taken down.

"_Isbrand._ Farewell, thou great-eared mind! I mark, by thy talk, that

thou commencest philosopher, and then thou art only a fellow-servant out

of livery."

Isbrand is the brother of the slain knight Wolfram: his foolery is but

the disguise of his revenge, and thus he rails over the body of his

brother: "Dead and gone! a scurvy burden to this ballad of life. There

lies he, Siegfried--my brother, mark you--and I weep not, nor gnash the

teeth, nor curse: and why not, Siegfried? Do you see this? So should

every honest man be--cold, dead, and leaden-coffined. This was one who

would be constant in friendship, and the pole wanders; one who would be

immortal, and the light that shines upon his pale forehead now, through

yonder gewgaw window, undulated from its star hundreds of years ago.

That is constancy, that is life. O moral Nature!"

It is unnecessary to try to describe the plot of this strange drama, if

plot it may be called. The poem rather resembles the old bridge at

Lucerne with the gloomy figures of the Dance of Death painted along its

wormeaten sides, while over its old timbers rolls the current of busy

life, and the laughter of children echoes from its roof. With the

exception of Isbrand, the characters of the play are pale and shadowy

enough, but the poetry that they speak is wonderful. The gloom and

tender beauty of the verse are inextricably united, as in the plays of

Webster, whose "intellectual twin" Beddoes might have been. Here is a

lovely sketch of "a melancholy lady:"

_Duke._ Thorwald, I fear hers is a broken heart.

When first I met her in the Egyptian prison,

She was the rosy morning of a woman:

Beauty was rising, but the starry grace

Of a calm childhood might be seen in her.

But since the death of Wolfram, who fell there,

Heaven and one single soul only know how,

I have not dared to look upon her sorrow.

_Thorwald._ Methinks she's too unearthly beautiful.

Old as I am, I cannot look at her,

And hear her voice, that touches the heart's core,

Without a dread that she will fade o' th' instant.

There's too much heaven in her; oft it rises,

And, pouring out about the lovely earth,

Almost dissolves it. She is tender too;

And melancholy is the sweet pale smile

With which she gently does reproach her fortune

But the greatest beauty of this singular poem, with its wild medley of

jesters and spirits, knights and fiends, Deaths and tender women, "like

flowers on a grave," is the wonderful perfection of its songs. There are

no less than thirteen in this play, some of them the wild mockery

remind us of their faults. A turgid inflation in the tragic passages, a

tendency to bombast, even more apparent in the man of forty-six than in

the boy of nineteen, mar the calm strength of many of his scenes. The

cloying sweetness that overloaded the verses of his juvenile work he

left behind him as he grew older, but the Marlowe-like extravagance that

noted in the soliloquies of _Hesperus_ still comes to the surface

occasionally in the pages of _Death's Jest-Book_. It is the extravagance

of strength, however, not of weakness.

It is not often that we see a poet giving up the glorious race from

sheer distrust of his power to win, but such was the case of Beddoes. A

want of faith in his own genius was for ever paralyzing his hand. To

succeed, as he himself knew but too well, and as he wrote to his editor,

"a man must have an exclusive passion for his art, and all the obstinacy

and self-denial which is combined with such a temperament--an

unconquerable and always enduring will, always working forward to the

only goal he knows." This singleness of purpose Beddoes never possessed.

Inheriting from his father the qualities of both poet and physician, the

faculties of the scientific man, trained and cultivated through a long

life by Dr. Thomas Beddoes (with whom poetry was but an occasional

pastime), seem to have overbalanced and diverted the poetic genius of

his son. The hereditary instinct overcame the individual bent. And in

spite of Lovell Beddoes' opinion that "the studies of the dramatist and

physician are closely, almost inseparably, allied," is it not true that

the analytical faculty so essential to the latter is rarely found in

connection with great creative ability? Sainte-Beuve never forgave

Balzac for saying that critics were unsuccessful authors, but he should

have consoled himself with the of the jesters, but many of them very

beautiful; and there are three more in _The Brides' Tragedy_. Since the

days of Elizabeth we have had nothing to compare with them. They have

that delicate poise of beauty, like the lighting of a butterfly on a

bending flower, that adds to our delight the keen sense of its

transitoriness. Here is one--"a voice from the waters:"

The swallow leaves her nest,

The soul my weary breast;

But therefore let the rain

On my grave

Fall pure; for why complain?

Since both will come again

O'er the wave.

The wind dead leaves and snow

Doth hurry to and fro;

And once a day shall break

O'er the wave,

When a storm of ghosts shall shake

The dead, until they wake

In the grave.

This is the least Elizabethan of them all, perhaps, in sentiment, but it

has an exquisite sombre tenderness and music of its own. Then follows

one of the finest of all Beddoes' songs, a dirge, beginning--

If thou wilt ease thine heart

Of love and all its smart,

Then sleep, dear, sleep;

which it is useless to quote entire, because it may be found in Dana's

_Household Poetry_, and in the best collection of songs we have, R. H.

Stoddard's _Melodies and Madrigals_, wherein are enshrined three of

Beddoes' dirges, all from this one drama of _Death's Jest-Book_.

The second volume of Beddoes' poems also contains _The Brides' Tragedy_,

written when he was but nineteen. More simple and coherent in plot and

construction than the other drama, it has more sweetness and less

strength. It is full of the innocence of love, and rich with that

prodigality of beauty with which youthful genius loves to make itself

splendid. It begins with a scene in a garden, and "while that wingèd

song, the restless nightingale, turns her sad heart to music," two

lovers talk of flowers and love and dreams--dreams of the Queen of

Smiles, and her attendant mob of Loves, busy with their various tasks:

Here stood one alone,

Blowing a pyre of blazing lovers' hearts

With bellows full of absence-caused sighs:

Near him his work-mate mended broken vows

With dangerous gold, or strung soft rhymes together

Upon a lady's tress.... And one there was alone,

Who with wet downcast eyelids threw aside

The remnants of a broken heart, and looked

Into my face and bid me 'ware of love,

Of fickleness, and woe, and mad despair.

There are beautiful scenes and passages all through the play, the

passion and the terror smacking somewhat of youth, perhaps, that loves

to pile up agonies, but the poetry still so fine that one continually

forgets to say, This is the work of a boy of nineteen. There is no need

to say it, in fact: it is a work of genius, and demands no extenuation.

There is a scene between Olivia and her attendants, as they prepare her

for her bridal, that has a sustained and tender sweetness and calm about

it hard to be matched in all our modern drama. For the same Olivia is

sung this lovely

SONG, BY TWO VOICES.

_First Voice._ Who is the baby that doth lie

Beneath the silken canopy

Of thy blue eye?

_Second Voice._ It is young Sorrow laid asleep

In the crystal deep.

_Both._ Let us sing his lullaby,

Heigho! a sob and a sigh.

_First Voice._ What sound is that, so soft, so clear,

Harmonious as a bubbled tear

Bursting, we hear?

_Second Voice._ It is young Sorrow, slumber breaking,

Suddenly waking.

_Both._ Let us sing his lullaby,

Heigho! a sob and a sigh.

They are not all dirges, these beautiful scraps of melody. Sometimes we

come upon one as blithe as sunshine, like this serenade from the fine

fragment called _The Second Brother_:

Strike, you myrtle-crownèd boys,

Ivied maidens, strike together:

Magic lutes are these whose noise

Our fingers gather,

Threaded thrice with golden strings

From Cupid's bow:

And the sounds of its sweet voice

Not air, but little busy things,

Pinioned with the lightest feather

Of his wings,

Rising up at every blow

Round the chords, like flies from roses

Zephyr-touched; so these light minions

Hover round, then shut their pinions,

And drop into the air, that closes

Where music's sweetest sweet reposes.

There is a song worthy of Ariel, whose delicate involutions well repay

study, and whose perfect melody carries along the unfolding of the

thought as easily and lightly as a swift stream sweeps along scattered

rose-leaves. And here is another of the same dainty complexion, but

simpler:

How many times do I love thee, dear?

Tell me how many thoughts there be

In the atmosphere

Of a new-fall'n year,

Whose white and sable hours appear

The latest flake of Eternity:

So many times do I love thee, dear.

How many times do I love again?

Tell me how many beads there are

In a silver chain

Of evening rain,

Unraveled from the tumbling main,

And threading the eye of a yellow star:

So many times do I love again.

Nor is it only the songs of Beddoes that ought to keep his memory alive

among us, if his dramas are too long to enchain our fickle attention. We

turn over the small collection of fragments that his stern judgment has

spared from the material of his two finished plays, to come across

thoughts like these, that would have made the best part of some less

severe critic's pages:

I know not whether

I see your meaning: if I do, it lies

Upon the wordy wavelets of your voice

Dim as the evening shadow in a brook,

When the least moon has silver on't no larger

Than the pure white of Hebe's pinkish nail.

And many voices marshaled in one hymn

Wound through the night, whose still, translucent moments

Lay on each side their breath; and the hymn passed

Its long harmonious populace of words

Between the silvery silences.

Luckless man

Avoids the miserable bodkin's point,

And flinching from the insect's little sting,

In pitiful security keeps watch,

While 'twixt him and that hypocrite the sun.

To which he prays, comes windless Pestilence,

Transparent as a glass of poisoned water

Through which the drinker sees his murderer smiling:

She stirs no dust, and makes no grass to nod,

Yet every footstep is a thousand graves,

And every breath of hers as full of ghosts

As a sunbeam with motes.

There is an old saying that the workman may be known by his chips:

surely from these chips we may gather a high opinion of that artificer

who left such fragments to testify for him. For imaginative power of a

very high order, for the true tragic spirit, for exquisitely melodious

versification, for that faculty of song which is the flower of the lyric

genius, Beddoes was pre-eminently distinguished. Nor for these alone.

His style is based upon the rich vocabulary of the old dramatists, and

is terse, pregnant and quaint, without any trace of affectation. There

was a sturdy genuineness about the man that forbade him to assume, and

his phraseology was the natural outgrowth of his mind and his early

education. He has not gone to work, like so many of our modern

pre-Raphaelite painters, to imitate crudeness of form in the vain hope

of acquiring thereby earnestness and innocence of spirit; but he has

studied the best tragic models in a reverent spirit, and allowed his

muse to work out her own salvation. That grim ironical humor which

infuses such bitter strength into the speeches of Isbrand was always

scoffing at his own verses, and nipping the blossoms of his genius in

the bud. "I believe I might have met with some success as a retailer of

small coal," he writes to Mr. Kelsall, "or a writer of long-bottomed

tracts, but doubt of my aptitude for any higher literary or commercial

occupation."

His greatest weakness as a writer of tragedy has already been mentioned

as one of which he was himself but too well aware--his inability to

create characters that should have any more individual existence than as

the mouthpieces of various sentiments. While holding that the proper aim

of the dramatic writer should be to write for the stage, his dramas are

nevertheless fitted only for the closet. "If it were possible," said

George Darley (in the _London Magazine_, December, 1823), "speaking of a

work of this kind (_The Brides' Tragedy_), to make a distinction between

the _vis tragica_ and the _vis dramatica_, I should say that he

possessed much of the former, but little of the latter." As the beauties

of his style--and they are many--recall to us the Shakespearian writers

and the matchless riches of their verse, so do its faults--which are

few--reflection that the author was unsuccessful because the critic was

great. All critics, however, do not aspire to create, but all poets

sooner or later attempt to criticise. Baudelaire, "the illustrious poet,

the faultless critic," as Swinburne calls him, went still further. He

said: "Tous les grands poëtes deviennent naturellement, fatalement,

critiques. Je plains les poëtes que guide le seul instinct; je les crois

incomplets. Il serait prodigieux qu'un critique devînt poëte, et il est

impossible qu'un poëte ne contienne pas un critique." Yet a man cannot

serve two masters, and Art is a jealous mistress who will not brook a

rival. Even Beddoes found that his ideal of the physiologist-poet was

fast slipping through his fingers, and confessed at last that were he

"soberly and mathematically convinced" of his own inspiration, he would

give himself up to the cultivation of literature. But he died at the

early age of forty-six, from the effects of a wound received in the

cause of Science. A singular retribution befell him, a truly poetic

justice: all his scientific writings have disappeared--were either

stolen before his executors had time to examine his papers, or had been

destroyed by his own ruthless hand--and all that was left to keep his

memory alive were the two tragedies and the few scattered fragments of

verse of which he had made so little account during his lifetime. Their

circle of readers has necessarily been small, but choice. There are few

left, besides Browning and Proctor and John Forster, of his original

admirers, and his name seems to be another on the long list of those who

have failed, as the world counts failure. But the poets know better, and

among their undying brotherhood space will always be kept for this

strayed singer.

KATE HILLARD.

HARVEST.

Gray orchards starred with fruitage gold and red,

Field beyond field of yellow-tasseled corn,

Rippling responsive to each breath of morn.

Along the Southern wall the dark vines shed

Their splendid clusters, blue-black and pale green,

With liquid sunshine through their thin films seen.

In yonder mead the haymakers at work

With lusty sounds the clear tense air fulfill,

Rearing the shapely hayrick's mimic hill,

The dried grass tossing with light-wielded fork.

Daylong the reapers glean the bladed gold;

High to the topmost orchard branches climb

The apple-gatherers, and from each limb

Shake the ripe globes of sweetness, downward rolled

Upon the leaf-strewn ground; and all day long

From the near vineyard comes the merry song

Of those who prune the stocks and tread the press.

The spirit melts beneath the mastering sense

Of supreme beauty and beneficence,

Power divine and awful gentleness.

No space for sadness in the heart to-day,

Seeing the generous, faithful earth fulfill

The springtide promise of vine, field and hill

When bush and hedge were rosy-flushed with May.

Yet at the threshold of fruition fain

We pause to catch the savor once again

Of sweet expectancy. The perfect year

In fourfold beauty rounds itself at length,

With golden fullness of developed strength,

Into the sure, complete, unswerving sphere.

This the result of frozen winter-rains,

Of hard, white snows, of dull, loud-dripping thaw,

Of showers and shine of spring, of March blasts raw,

Of glaring August heats,--these dainty grains,

This fruitage delicate. O sluggard soul!

What harvest reapest thou as seasons roll?

Mayhap to thee the slow results of time

Bring also profit, though thy fruit, hung high,

Escape the glance of careless passers-by,

A seeming fragile husk of empty rhyme.

Yet there are those who know what fed the root,

What long, dull tedium as of wintry hours,

What rapture as of spring-light after showers,

Went to the ripening of this strange, frail fruit.

Defeat and hope, disaster, joy and pain,

Grief, pleasure and despair--the same old train

That follows every soul. No grafted seed,

No alien harvest this, but a true part

Of the whole being--soul and pulse and heart--

That from the living bough is lightly freed.

EMMA LAZARUS.

ORCO.

FROM THE FRENCH OF GEORGE SAND.

We were as usual assembled in the arbor. The evening was stormy, the air

heavy and the sky charged with black clouds furrowed with frequent

lightnings. We were keeping a melancholy silence, as if the gloom of the

atmosphere had reached our hearts, disposing us involuntarily to tears.

Beppa, particularly, seemed given up to sorrowful thoughts. In vain had

the abbé, alarmed at the disposition of the company, tried several times

and in every way to reanimate the gayety, usually so sparkling, of our

friend. Neither questions, teasing nor entreaties succeeded in drawing

her from her reverie: her eyes fixed on the sky, her fingers wandering

carelessly over the trembling strings of her guitar, she seemed not to

notice what was going on around her, and to be thinking of nothing but

the plaintive sounds she caused her instrument to utter, and the

capricious course of the clouds.

The good Panorio, disheartened by the ill success of his attempts, took

the resolution of addressing himself to me. "Come, dear Zorze," said he,

"try in thy turn the power of thy affection upon this capricious beauty.

There exists between you two a sort of magnetic sympathy stronger than

all my reasoning, and the sound of thy voice succeeds in drawing her

from her deepest distraction."

"This magnetic sympathy of which thou speakest to me," I answered,

"comes, dear abbé, from the identity of our feelings. We have suffered

in the same way and thought the same things, and we know each other well

enough, she and I, to know what sort of ideas external circumstances

recall to each. I wager that I can guess, not the subject, but at least

the nature, of her reverie." And turning toward Beppa, "_Carissima_," I

said gently, "of which of our sisters art thou thinking?"

"Of the most beautiful," she answered without turning round, "of the

proudest, the most unfortunate."

"When did she die?" I continued, already interested in her who lived in

the memory of my noble friend, and desiring to associate myself by my

regrets with a destiny which could not be strange to me.

"She died at the close of last winter, on the night of the ball at the

palace Servilio. She had resisted many sorrows, she had come forth

victorious from many dangers, had suffered, without succumbing, terrible

agonies, and died suddenly without leaving any trace, as if carried off

by a thunderbolt. Every one here knew her more or less, but no one so

well as I, because none loved her so much, and she only let herself be

known according as she was loved. Others do not believe in her death,

although she has not appeared since the night of which I tell thee: they

say it has often happened that she has disappeared thus for a long time,

and returned again afterward. But _I_ know that she will never come

back any more, and that her part upon the earth is finished. If I wished

to doubt it I could not: she took care to let me know the fatal truth

through him who was the cause of her death. And what a misfortune was

that! O God! the greatest misfortune of our unhappy age! Such a

beautiful life was hers! so beautiful and so full of contrasts! so

illustrious, so mysterious, so sad, so magnificent, so enthusiastic, so

austere, so voluptuous, so complete in its resemblance to all human

things! No: no life and no death were like hers. She had found means of

suppressing all the pitiful realities of her existence, leaving only its

poetry. Faithful to the old customs of the national aristocracy, she

only showed herself after the close of the day, masked, but never

followed by any one. There is not an inhabitant of the city who has not

met her wandering in the squares or in the streets--not one who has not

noticed her gondola moored in some canal, but no one ever saw it enter

or go out. Although this gondola was watched by no one, it was never

known to have been the object of an attempt at theft. It was painted and

equipped like all other gondolas, yet every one knew it. Even the

children said, on seeing it, 'There is the gondola of the Mask.' As to

the way in which it moved, and the place from which it brought its

mistress at night, and to which it carried her back in the morning, no

one could even suspect it. The revenue-cruisers had, indeed, often seen

a black shadow upon the lagoons, and, taking it for a contraband boat,

had given chase to it as far as the open sea, but when morning came they

never saw upon the waves anything resembling the object of their

pursuit; and finally they fell into the way of not minding it, and of

saying when they saw it, 'There is the gondola of the Mask again.'

"At night the Mask traversed the whole city, seeking no one knew what.

She was seen by turns in the broadest squares and in the most crooked

streets, on bridges and under the arches of tall palaces, in the most

frequented places and the most deserted. She went sometimes slowly,

sometimes fast, without appearing to notice the crowd or the solitude,

but never stopping. She seemed to contemplate with passionate curiosity

the houses, the monuments, the canals, and even the sky above the city,

and to breathe with delight the air which circulated through it. When

she met a friendly person, she signed to him to follow her, and soon

disappeared with him. More than once she has led me thus from the midst

of the crowd, and has conversed with me of the things we loved. I

followed her with confidence, for I knew we were friends; but many of

those to whom she signaled did not dare respond to her invitation.

Strange stories circulated about her, and froze the courage of the most

intrepid. It was said that several young men, thinking they discovered a

woman beneath this mask and this black dress, became enamored of her, as

much for the singularity and mystery of her life as for her beautiful

form and noble appearance--that having had the imprudence to follow her,

they had never reappeared. The police, having even noticed that these

young men were all Austrians, had brought all their manoeuvres into

use to discover them, and get possession of her who was accused as the

cause of their disappearance. But the _sbirri_ were not more fortunate

than the revenue-officers, and were never able to learn anything about

the young foreigners or to lay hands upon _her_. A strange incident had

discouraged the most ardent spies of the Venetian Inquisition. Finding

that it was impossible to seize the Mask by night in Venice, two of the

most zealous of the police resolved to wait for her in her own gondola,

so as to capture her when she should enter it to row away. One evening,

when they saw it moored to the Quay dei Schiavi, they got into it and

concealed themselves. They remained there all night without hearing or

seeing any one, but an hour before day they thought they perceived that

some one was untying the boat. They rose silently and prepared to fall

upon their prey, but at the same instant a terrible push capsized the

gondola and the unlucky agents of Austrian rule. One of them was

drowned, and the other only owed his life to aid brought him by the

smugglers. The next day there was no trace of the boat, and the police

were forced to believe it submerged, but in the evening it was seen

moored in the same place and in the same condition as the night before.

Then a superstitious terror took possession of the police, and not one

of them was willing to make the same attempt a second time. After that

day they no longer sought to disturb the Mask, who continued her

excursions as in the past.

"In the beginning of last autumn there came to the garrison here an

Austrian officer named Count Franz Lichtenstein. He was an enthusiastic,

passionate young man, who had within him the germ of all great

sentiments and an instinct for noble thoughts. In spite of his bad

education as a great lord, he had been able to preserve his mind from

all prejudices, and to keep in his heart a reverence for liberty. His

position forced him to dissimulate in public his ideas and tastes, but

as soon as his duties were performed he hastened to throw off his

uniform, which seemed to him a badge of all the vices of the government

he served, and hurried to meet the friends whom his goodness and

intelligence had procured for him in the city. We loved particularly to

hear him speak of Venice. He had seen it as an artist, had deplored its

servitude, and had come to love it as much as a Venetian. He never

wearied of traversing it night and day, and of admiring it. He wished,

he said, to know it better than those whose good fortune it was to have

been born there. In his nocturnal rambles he encountered the Mask. At

first he paid no great attention to her, but having soon noticed that

she appeared to study the city with the same curiosity as himself, he

was struck with this strange coincidence, and spoke of it to several

persons. They related to him the stories which were afloat concerning

the veiled woman, and advised him to beware of her. But, as he was brave

even to rashness, these warnings, instead of frightening him, excited

his curiosity, and inspired him with a mad desire to make the

acquaintance of the mysterious personage who so terrified the vulgar.

Wishing to keep toward the Mask the same incognito which she preserved

toward him, he dressed himself as a citizen and continued his nocturnal

excursions. He was not long in meeting what he sought. He saw under a

beautiful moonlight the masked woman standing before the charming church

of Santi Giovanni e Paolo. She seemed to contemplate with adoration the

delicate ornaments which decorated its portal. The count silently and

slowly approached her. She did not appear to notice him, and did not

stir. The count, who had stopped a moment to see if he were discovered,

moved on again and came close to her. He heard her utter a profound

sigh, and as he knew Venetian very badly, but Italian very well, he

addressed her in pure Tuscan. 'Salutation,' said he--'salutation and

happiness to those who love Venice.'

"'Who are you?' replied the Mask, with a voice full and sonorous as a

man's, but sweet as a nightingale's.

"'I am a lover of beauty.'

"'Are you one of those whose brutal love does violence to free beauty,

or of those who kneel before captive beauty and weep for its sorrows?'

"'When the king of the night sees the rose flourish joyously beneath the

breath of the breeze, he flaps his wings and sings: when he sees her

wither beneath the hurrying blast of the storm, he hides his head under

his wing and shudders. Thus does my love.'

"'Follow me, then, for thou art one of the faithful.' And grasping the

young man's hand, she drew him toward the church. When he felt the cold

hand of the unknown press his, and saw her move with him toward the

sombre depth of the portal, involuntarily he recalled the fearful

stories he had heard, and, seized with a sudden terror, he stopped. The

Mask turned, and fixing a scornful look on the pale face of her

companion, said to him, 'You are afraid? Adieu.' Then loosing his arm

she hastened away.

"The count was ashamed of his weakness, and rushing after her, in his

turn seized her hand, saying, 'No, I am not afraid. Come!' Without

answering, she continued her walk. But instead of going toward the

church, as at first, she turned into one of the little streets which

lead into the square. The moon was hidden, and the most complete

obscurity reigned over the city. Franz hardly saw where he placed his

foot, and could distinguish nothing in the deep shadows which enfolded

him on all sides. He followed at random his guide, who seemed, on the

contrary, to know her way perfectly well. From time to time a few beams

gliding across the clouds came to show Franz the edge of a canal, a

bridge, an arch or some unknown part of a labyrinth of deep and tortuous

streets: then everything relapsed into darkness. Franz soon discovered

that he was lost in Venice, and that he was at the mercy of his guide,

but he resolved to brave everything. He showed no uneasiness, and let

himself be led along without making an observation.

"At the end of a full hour the masked woman stopped. 'It is well,' she

said to the count: 'you have courage. If you had shown the least sign of

fear during our walk, I would never have spoken to you again. But you

were calm: I am satisfied with you. To-morrow, then, on the square of

Santi Giovanni e Paolo, at eleven o'clock. Do not seek to follow me: it

would be useless. Turn down this street to the right and you will see

the piazza of St. Mark's. Au revoir!' She quickly pressed the count's

hand, and before he had time to answer disappeared behind the angle of

the street.

"The count remained for some time motionless, still perfectly astounded

at what had passed, and undecided what to do. But having reflected on

his slight chance of finding the mysterious lady again, and the risk he

ran of losing himself by pursuing her, he resolved to return home. He

followed, therefore, the street to the right, found himself in a few

moments in the piazza of St. Mark's, and thence easily regained his

hotel.

"The next day he was faithful to the rendezvous. He arrived in the

square as the church-clock was striking eleven. He saw the masked woman

standing waiting for him on the steps of the entrance.

"'It is well,' said she. 'You are punctual: let us enter.' So speaking,

she turned immediately toward the church.

"Franz, who saw that the door was shut, and knew that it was never

opened at night, thought the woman was mad. But what was his surprise at

seeing the door yield to her first effort! He mechanically followed his

guide, who quickly reclosed the door after he had entered. They then

found themselves in darkness, but Franz, remembering that a second door

without a lock still separated them from the nave, felt no uneasiness,

and prepared to push it before him in order to enter. But she stopped

him by a pressure of the arm. 'Have you ever come into this church?' she

asked him abruptly.

"'Twenty times,' he answered. 'I know it as well as the architect who

built it.'

"'Say you think you know it, for you do not really know it yet. Enter!'

"Franz pushed the second door, and they penetrated into the interior of

the church. It was magnificently lighted on all sides, but completely

empty.

"'What ceremony is to be performed here?' asked Franz, stupefied.

"'None: the church expected me to-night: that is all. Follow me.'

"The count vainly tried to understand the meaning of the words the Mask

addressed to him, but, subjugated by a mysterious power, he followed her

obediently. She led him into the middle of the church, made him notice,

understand and admire its general architecture; then, passing to the

examination of each part, she explained to him in detail, by turns, the

nave, the colonnades, the chapels, the altars, the statues, the

pictures, all the ornaments; showed him the meaning of everything,

disclosed to him the idea hidden beneath each form, made him feel all

the beauties of the works which composed the whole, and caused him to

penetrate, so to speak, into the very entrails of the church. Franz

listened with religious attention to all the words of the eloquent mouth

which was pleased to instruct him, and from minute to minute recognized

how little he had comprehended this ensemble of works which had seemed

to him so easy to understand. When she finished the rays of morning,

penetrating through the window-panes, caused the light of the tapers to

pale. Although she had spoken for several hours, and had not sat down

for an instant during the whole night, neither her voice nor her body

betrayed any fatigue. Only her head drooped upon her bosom, which was

throbbing violently, and seemed to listen to the sighs exhaling from it.

Suddenly she lifted up her head, and raising her arms toward heaven,

cried, 'O servitude! servitude!' At these words tears, rolling from

beneath her mask, fell among the folds of her black dress.

"'Why do you weep?' asked Franz, approaching her.

"'To-morrow,' she answered, 'at midnight, before the Arsenal;' and went

out by the side door at the left, which closed again heavily. At the

same moment the Angelus sounded.

"Franz, astonished by the unexpected noise of the bell, turned and saw

that all the tapers were extinguished. He remained for some time

motionless from surprise, then left the church by the great door which

the sacristan had just opened, and returned slowly home, endeavoring to

guess who this woman, so bold, so artistic, so powerful, with such charm

in her speech, such majesty in her appearance, could be.

"The next night at midnight the count was before the Arsenal. He found

the Mask, who was waiting for him as on the previous night, and who,

without saying anything, began to walk rapidly before him. Arrived

before one of the side doors on the right, she stopped, inserted in the

keyhole a golden key, which Franz saw glitter in the moonbeams, opened

the door without making any noise, and entered first, signing to Franz

to follow her. The latter hesitated an instant. To penetrate into the

Arsenal at night by the aid of a false key was to expose one's self to a

trial by a court-martial, if one were discovered; and it was almost

impossible to avoid discovery in a place guarded by sentinels. But

seeing the Mask on the point of closing the door upon him, he suddenly

decided to pursue the adventure to the close, and entered. The masked

woman first led him across several courts, then through corridors and

galleries, all the doors of which she opened with her golden key, and

ended by bringing him into vast halls filled with arms of all kinds and

times, which had served, in the wars of the republic, either its

defenders or its enemies. These halls were lighted by ships' lanterns

placed at equal distances between the trophies. She showed the count the

most curious and celebrated arms, telling him the names of those to whom

they had belonged and of the battles in which they had been used, and

relating to him in detail the exploits of which they had been the

instruments. Thus she revived before the eyes of Franz the whole history

of Venice. After having visited the four halls consecrated to this

exhibition, she led him into a last one, larger than all the others, and

lighted like them, but containing wood for shipbuilding, the débris of

vessels of different forms and sizes, and fragments of the last

Bucentaur. She told her companion the properties of these woods, the use

of the ships, the time at which they had been built and the expeditions

in which they had taken part: then pointing to the balcony of the

Bucentaur, 'There,' said she, in a sad voice, 'are the remains of a past

royalty. That was the last ship which bore a doge of Venice to wed the

sea. Now Venice is a slave, and slaves never marry. O servitude!

servitude!'

"As upon the previous evening, she went away after having pronounced

these words, but this time taking the count with her, as he could not,

without danger, remain in the Arsenal. Arrived in the square, they

agreed on a new rendezvous for the morrow and parted.

"The next night and many succeeding nights she took Franz to the

principal monuments of the city, introducing him everywhere with

incomprehensible facility, explaining to him with admirable lucidity

everything presented to their view, displaying to him marvelous

treasures of intelligence and sensibility. He did not know which to

admire most, the mind that had investigated so deeply or the heart that

displayed itself in such beautiful bursts of feeling. What had at first

been with him only a fancy, soon changed to a real and profound

sentiment. Curiosity had caused him to form a connection with the Mask,

and astonishment had led him to continue it. But at length the habit

which he had formed of seeing her every night became to him a veritable

necessity. Although the words of the unknown were always grave and often

sad, Franz found in them an indefinable charm which attached him to her

more and more, and he could not have fallen asleep at the break of day

if he had not at night heard her sighs and seen her tears. He had such a

sincere and profound respect for the grandeur and sufferings of which he

suspected her that he had not dared beg her to take off her mask or to

tell him her name. As she had not asked his, he would have blushed to

show himself more curious and less discreet than she; and he was

resolved to hope everything from her good-will and nothing from his own

importunity. She seemed to appreciate the delicacy of his conduct, and

to be pleased with it, for at each succeeding interview she showed him

more confidence and sympathy. Although not a single word of love had

been uttered between them, Franz had reason to believe that she knew his

passion and felt disposed to share it. His hopes almost sufficed for his

happiness, and when he felt a deeper desire to know her whom he already

named internally his mistress, his imagination, impressed and as if

assured by the marvels which surrounded him, painted her so perfect and

so beautiful that he almost feared the moment in which she should be

unveiled to him.

"One night, as they were wandering together under the arcades of St.

Mark's, the masked woman made Franz stop before a picture which

represented a girl kneeling before the patron saint of the basilica and

the city. 'What do you think of this woman?' said she to him, after

having given him time to examine it well.

"'It is,' he answered, 'the most wonderful beauty that one could, not

see, but imagine. The artist's inspired soul has been able to give us

its image, but the model can only exist in heaven.'

"The masked woman warmly pressed the hand of Franz. 'I,' she replied,

'know a face more beautiful than that of the glorious Saint Mark, and I

could love no other than that which is the living image of it.'

"On hearing these words Franz paled and trembled as if seized with

vertigo. He had just perceived that the face of the saint offered the

most exact resemblance to his own. He fell on his knees before the

unknown, and seizing her hand bathed it with his tears, without being

able to utter a word.

"'I know now that thou belongest to me,' she said in a voice full of

emotion, 'and that thou art worthy to know me and possess me. To-morrow,

at the ball of the palace Servilio.' Then she left him as before, but

without pronouncing the sacramental words, so to speak, which had

terminated the conversation of each previous night.

"Intoxicated with joy, Franz wandered through the whole city, without

being able to stop anywhere. He admired the sky, smiled upon the

lagoons, saluted the houses and spoke to the wind. All who met him took

him for a madman, and singled him out by their glances. He perceived it,

but only laughed at the madness of those who found amusement in his.

When his friends asked him what he had been doing for a month in which

he had not been visible, he answered, 'I am going to be happy,' and

passed on.

"Evening having arrived, he bought a magnificent scarf and new

epaulettes, returned home to dress, took the greatest pains with his

toilette, and then went, adorned with his uniform, to the palace

Servilio. The ball was magnificent: every one except the officers of the

garrison had come disguised, according to the injunction in the cards of

invitation; and this multitude of varied and elegant costumes, mingling

and moving to the sound of a numerous orchestra, presented the most

brilliant and animated appearance. Franz traversed all the halls,

approached all the groups and cast his eyes upon all the women. Several

were remarkably beautiful, but none seemed to him worthy to arrest his

regard. 'She is not here,' he said to himself. 'I was sure of it: it is

not yet her hour.' He placed himself behind a column near the principal

entrance and waited, his eyes fixed on the door. Many times it opened,

many women entered, without causing the heart of Franz to throb, but at

the moment when the clock struck eleven he started and cried out, loud

enough to be heard by his neighbors, 'There she is!'

"All eyes turned toward him, as if to ask the meaning of his

exclamation. But at the same moment the doors opened abruptly, and a

woman who entered attracted all attention toward herself. Franz

recognized her immediately. It was the young girl of the picture,

dressed like a dogess of the fifteenth century, and rendered still more

beautiful by the magnificence of her costume. She advanced with a slow

and majestic step, looking about her with assurance, and saluting

nobody, as if she had been the queen of the ball. No one except Franz

knew her, but every one, conquered by her marvelous beauty and her lofty

air, stood respectfully aside, and almost bowed down before her passage.

Franz, at once dazzled and enchanted, followed her at a sufficient

distance. At the moment she arrived in the last hall a handsome young

man wearing the costume of Tasso was singing, accompanying himself on

the guitar, a romance in honor of Venice. She walked straight toward

him, and looking; fixedly at him asked him who he was that dared to wear

such a costume and to sing of Venice. The young man, overwhelmed by her

look, turned pale, bent his head and handed her his guitar. She took it,

and drawing her fingers, white as alabaster, across the strings, she

intoned in her turn, with a harmonious and powerful voice, a strange and

irregular song: 'Dance, laugh, sing, gay children of Venice! For you the

winter has no frosts, the night no shadows, life no cares. You are the

happy ones of the world, and Venice is the queen of nations. Who says

No? Take care: eyes see, ears hear, tongues speak. Fear the Council of

Ten if you are not good citizens. Good citizens dance, laugh and sing,

but do not speak. Dance, laugh, sing, gay children of Venice!--Venice,

only city not created by the hand, but by the mind, of man! thou who

seemst made to serve as the passing dwelling of the souls of the just,

placed as a step for them from earth to heaven; walls which fairies

inhabited, and which a magic breath still animates; aërial colonnades

which tremble in the mist; light spires which one confounds with the

floating masts of ships; arcades which seem to contain a thousand voices

to answer each passing voice; ye myriads of angels and saints, who seem

to bound upon the cupolas and move your bronze and marble wings when the

breeze blows upon your damp brows; city which liest not, like others, on

a dark and filthy soil, but which floatest, like a troop of swans, upon

the waves,--rejoice, rejoice, rejoice! A new destiny is opening for you

as beautiful as the first! The black eagle floats over the lion of St.

Mark's, and Teutonic feet waltz in the palaces of the doges. Be silent,

harmony of the night! Die, insensate noises of the ball! Be no more

heard, holy song of the fishermen! Cease to murmur, voice of the

Adriatic! Pale lamp of the Madonna! hide thyself for ever, silver queen

of the night! There are no more Venetians in Venice. Do we dream? are we

at a fête? Yes, yes: let us dance, let us laugh, let us sing! It is the

hour when Faliero's shade descends slowly the staircase of the Giants,

and seats himself, immovable, upon the lowest step. Let us dance, let

us laugh, let us sing, for presently the voice of the clock will say,

Midnight! and the chorus of the dead will come to cry in our ears,

Servitude! servitude!'

"With these words she let fall the guitar, which gave forth a funereal

sound on striking against the marble floor. Every one listened for the

twelve strokes in a horrible silence. Then the master of the palace

advanced toward the unknown with an air half terrified, half angry.

'Madame,' said he in a troubled voice, 'who has done me the honor to

bring you to my house?'

"'I,' cried Franz, advancing, 'and if any one finds it ill, let him

speak.'

"The unknown, who had appeared to pay no attention to the host's

question, quickly raised her head on hearing the count's voice. 'I

live,' she cried with enthusiasm, 'I shall live!' and she turned toward

him with a radiant face. But as she looked at him her cheeks paled and

her brow darkened with a sombre cloud. 'Why have you taken this

disguise?' she said in a severe tone, pointing to his uniform.

"'It is not a disguise,' he answered: 'it is--' He could say no more: a

terrible look from the unknown had as if petrified him. She regarded him

some seconds in silence, then let fall from her eyes two large tears.

Franz would have rushed toward her, but she did not give him time.

"'Follow me,' she said in a hollow voice: then rapidly breaking through

the astonished crowd, she left the hall, followed by Franz.

"Arrived at the foot of the palace steps, she leaped into her gondola,

and told Franz to enter after her and be seated. When he had done so he

looked about him, and seeing no gondolier, 'Who will row us?' he asked.

"'I,' she answered, seizing the oar with a vigorous hand.

"'Rather let me.'

"'No: Austrian hands do not know the oar of Venice;' and giving a

powerful impulse to the gondola, she sent it like an arrow into the

canal. In a few moments they were far from the palace. Franz, who

expected from the unknown an explanation of her anger, was astonished

and unhappy at seeing her keep silence. 'Where are we going?' he said

after a moment's reflection.

"'Where destiny wills us to go,' she replied in a terrible voice, and as

if these words had reanimated her anger she began to row still more

vigorously. The gondola, obeying the impulse of her powerful hand,

seemed to fly over the water. Franz saw the foam dash with dazzling

rapidity along the sides of the boat, and the ships on their course flee

behind them like clouds borne away by the whirlwind. Soon the darkness

grew deeper, the wind rose, and the young man heard nothing but the

seething of the waves and the hissing of the air through his hair, and

saw nothing before him but the tall white figure of his companion in the

midst of the shadows. Standing at the stern, her hands on the oar, her

hair scattered over her shoulders, and her long, white garments

abandoned in disorder to the wind, she less resembled a woman than the

spirit of shipwrecks playing upon the stormy sea.

"'Where are we?' cried Franz in an agitated voice.

"'The captain is afraid?' answered the unknown with a disdainful laugh.

"Franz did not reply. He felt that she was right, and that fear was

gaining him. Not being able to master it, he wished at least to disguise

it, and resolved to remain silent. But at the end of a few moments,

seized with a sort of vertigo, he rose and walked toward the unknown.

"'Sit down!' she cried to him. 'Sit down!' she repeated in a furious

voice; and seeing that he continued to advance, she stamped with so much

violence that the boat trembled as if it would capsize. Franz was thrown

down by the shock, and fell fainting on the bottom of the boat. When he

came to himself he saw the unknown lying weeping at his feet. Touched by

her bitter sorrow, and forgetting all that had just passed, he seized

her in his arms, raised her up and made her sit by him; but she did not

cease to weep.

"'Oh, my love,' cried Franz, pressing her against his heart, 'why these

tears?'

"'The Lion! the Lion!' she answered, raising toward heaven her arm white

as marble.

"Franz raised his eyes to the part of the sky toward which she pointed,

and saw indeed the constellation of the Lion shining solitary amid the

clouds: 'What matters it? The planets have no power over our destinies,

and if they had we would find favorable constellations to struggle

against fatal stars.'

"'Venus is set, alas! and the Lion rises; and yonder, look yonder! Who

can struggle against what comes yonder?' She uttered these words in a

sort of delirium, lowering her arms toward the horizon.

"Franz turned his eyes in the direction she designated, and saw a black

point traced upon the waves in the midst of an aureole of fire. 'What is

that?' he asked with profound astonishment.

"'It is destiny,' she answered, 'who comes to seek its victim. Which of

us? thou wilt ask. Whichever I will. Thou hast heard of the Austrian

nobles who came with me in my gondola, and were never seen again?'

"'Yes, but that story is false.'

"'It is true. I must devour or be devoured. Every man of thy nation who

loves me, and whom I do not love, dies. As long as I do not love one, I

shall live and I shall cause to die; and if I love one, I shall die: it

is my fate.'

"'Oh, my God, who art thou, then?'

"'How it advances! In a minute it will be upon us! Dost thou hear? dost

thou hear?' The black point had approached with inconceivable rapidity,

and had taken the form of an immense boat. A red light came from its

sides and surrounded it with flame: tall phantoms stood motionless on

the deck, and innumerable oars rose and fell in measure, striking the

water with a dreadful noise, while hollow voices chanted the _Dies Iræ_,

accompanying themselves with the noise of chains.

"'O Life! O Life!' continued the unknown in a tone of despair. 'Oh,

Franz, here is the ship: dost thou recognize it?'

"'No: I tremble before this terrible apparition, but I do not know it.'

"'It is the Bucentaur: it is that which engulfed thy countrymen. They

were here in this same place, at this same hour, seated by my side in

this gondola. The ship approached as it is approaching now: a voice

cried to me, "Who goes there?" I answered, "Austrian." The voice cried

to me, "Dost thou hate or love?" I answered, "I hate;" and the voice

said to me, "Live!" Then the ship passed over the gondola, engulfed thy

compatriots, and bore me in triumph on the waves.'

"'And to-day?'

"'Alas! the voice is going to speak.'

"In fact, a lugubrious and solemn voice, imposing silence on the

funereal equipage of the Bucentaur, cried, 'Who goes there?'

"'Austrian,' replied the trembling voice of the unknown.

"A chorus of malediction burst from the Bucentaur, which approached with

ever-increasing rapidity. Then a new silence fell, and the voice

continued, 'Dost thou hate or love?'

"The unknown hesitated a moment, then in a voice thrilling like thunder

she cried out, 'I love.'

"Then the voice said, 'Thou hast accomplished thy destiny--thou lovest

Austria. Die, Venice!'

"A great cry, a heartrending, desperate cry, clove the air, and Franz

sank in the waves. On coming to the surface he saw nothing--neither the

gondola, the Bucentaur nor his beloved. Only on the horizon shone some

little lights: they were the famous lanterns of the fishermen of Murano.

He swam in the direction of the little isle, and arrived there at the

end of an hour. Poor Venice!"

Beppa had finished speaking: tears fell from her eyes. We watched them

flow in silence without seeking to console her. But suddenly she dried

them, and said to us with her capricious vivacity, "Well, what is the

matter with you that you are so sad? Is that the effect fairy-stories

produce upon you? Have you never heard of Orco, the Venetian Trilby?

Have you never met her at evening in the churches or on the Lido? She is

a good devil, who only does harm to oppressors and traitors. One may say

that she is the real genius of Venice. But the viceroy, having heard

indirectly and confusedly of Count Lichtenstein's perilous adventure,

begged the patriarch to pronounce a great exorcism over the lagoons, and

since then Orco has never reappeared."

L. W. J.

IN THE ISLE OF WIGHT.

The Solent Sea, the channel dividing the Isle of Wight from the

mainland, varies in breadth from one to six miles. The island must at

one time have formed a portion of the mainland, and so late as when the

Greeks traded with Cornwall for tin the Solent is said to have been

passable at low water by men and carts.

The circumference of the island is about sixty miles, the surface

undulating, with a range of fine downs running through from east to

west, having here and there points of considerable elevation. It is said

to have been well wooded formerly, but no forests remain, and the

hedge-rows, coppices and scattered trees are all it can now offer in the

way of foliage. The scenery of the north side of the island is quiet,

pleasing, here and there picturesque, but the southern side is full of

the beauty of bold cliffs, chasms, irregular coast- and hill-lines,

tumbled rocks, bare, wind-swept hills, and sheltered coves where flowers

bloom and ivy climbs from the very verge of the sea. On this side lies

the famous region known as the Undercliff--a series of terraces rising

ambitiously from the sea up the steep sides of St. Boniface's Down--the

tract being about seven miles long, and from a quarter to half a mile

broad.

On the one hand, the bold promontories, the shell-like bays of the

sea-line; on the other, the lofty, rounded down, with here and there its

buttress of gray rock coming out in naked grandeur; between the two a

lovely irregularity of soft slope, sinuous or dimple-like valleys, dark

ravines, velvet-smooth laps of terrace, with now and again a sudden

springing brook, and everywhere the thickets of holly and cedar

clambered rampantly over by masses of ivy and traveler's joy--_our_

Virgin's bower clematis--and such sunshine as falls not elsewhere in

England over all.

Miss Sewell, the author of _Amy Herbert, Ivors_ and _Ursula_, who

resides at Bonchurch with her sisters, where they have a school, says of

the Undercliff: "There is a verse spoken of a very different country

which often comes to my mind when I think of it: 'It is a land which the

Lord thy God careth for. The eyes of the Lord thy God are always upon

it, from the beginning of the year, even unto the end of the year.'

Sometimes it has even seemed to me that heaven itself can scarcely be

more beautiful."

It was Sir James Clark who discovered the Undercliff to the public. Up

to the time of the publication of his work _On the Influence of Climate

in the Prevention and Cure of Disease_, only a few fishermen's huts

marked the spot that is now populous Ventnor. But the sheltered, sunny

spot, the soft air, the plants flourishing even in winter, the charming

surroundings, at once caught the fancy of invalids: they came in

numbers, both for a summer visit and a winter residence, and of course

suitable accommodation had to be provided for them. The "plague of

building" lighted on Ventnor: almost every possible and impossible spot

has been used for lodging--houses, hotels, shops, villas, churches,

situated with utter disregard to the natural lines of the place. The

building still goes on. There are everywhere ugly scars in the

chalk-banks that Nature has not had time to heal: in short, Ventnor is

spoiled for those who remember it in its early days, and for

aristocratic dwellers roundabout, but it is a case of the greatest good

to the greatest number; and when the quick-springing green shall have

kindly softened and folded in the crowded, incongruous buildings, and

blended into rounded masses above them, Ventnor will be forgiven its

railway that has made this region accessible to the many-headed, in

consideration of the comforts and amenities of life brought to the doors

of circumjacent dwellers, instead of being, as once, lacking, or brought

laboriously from London at serious individual expense.

To say that Ventnor is dull, to American notions, is only to say that it

is an English sea-side resort. People live mostly in lodgings, which is

the most unsocial way possible of living: there are no reading-rooms, no

cafés, no hops, no places of meeting and introduction. There is the

rapprochement of proximity on the Esplanade and the bathing beach, where

one gets a little of his fellow-creatures in a sort of spiritual

endosmose and exosmose. But nothing more, and I am afraid our average

youthful American specimen of Solomon's lilies would, at the end of two

days, cause all her crisp, snowy and varicolored petals to be refolded

within their calyx "ark," and indignantly withdraw herself for evermore

from the "Fair Island." "Her own loss?" Doubtless, but it is the race's

as well that any single creature should be deaf, blind, without heart to

feel, intellect and culture to appreciate, or with any exquisite sense

of apprehension wanting.

But there are Americans _and_ Americans; and some of our countrymen and

countrywomen who have been busiest at home, who have journeyed far and

wide, seem to find it the most natural thing possible to linger for

months in Capuan Ventnor--anywhere in the soft-aired, Sleepy-Hollow

Undercliff; and to pluck themselves away from the sweet peace, the calm

delights of sauntering and lying on the cliffs, watching "the wrinkled

sea" that "beneath _them_ crawls," breathing the air that has no

suggestion of ocean in it save its freshness, so entirely is all odor of

brine and sea-weed overborne by the fragrance of flowers, notably that

of the mignonette, sweet-pea and nasturtium, making little excursions on

foot or coach-top along the coast, or to the charming inland famous

spots,--a thing very grievous to be borne patiently.

Just above Ventnor, where the down is steepest, and almost at its top,

is a wishing well; but if one would have his wish fulfilled, made while

drinking its waters, he must climb to the spring without casting one

backward glance. A sure foot and a head not easily dizzied are

imperative necessities, and then one may climb, as I did, with

carefulest directions, scramble to the very brow and find no drop of

water on the way, get a superb view of the Undercliff and the Channel

for miles and miles, gather handfuls of the lovely heather that clothes

the down's top, then, plunging downward again, almost set foot unawares

in the milky little basin no bigger than a kneading-bowl, that on the

upward way would have been a very Kohinoor, and is now only glanced at

with spiteful aversion. The ancients were right: there _is_ a malignity

of matter.

At Ventnor died John Sterling, made known to the world through the

biographies of Carlyle and Archdeacon Hare. He was buried in the

churchyard of the old church at Bonchurch, a tiny Norman building, of

date 1270, which has been for years deserted. Graves fill all the

enclosure, ancient elms shade it, a noisy brook half winds about it,

then dashes down the sudden slope to the restless sea, whose mighty

murmur underlies the streamlet's plashes and gurgles and the ceaseless

tender bird-notes, and makes for this little burial ground, that is

only hidden, not widely removed from men, a wondrous sense of space and

solemn solitude.

Bonchurch is perhaps a mile from Ventnor, and is the boskiest bit of

loveliness in all the lovely island. By every approach you enter it

under the interlacing arches of noble old trees; ivy and ferns mask all

with tender and dark glossy green; the thatched cottages are masses of

honeysuckle and jessamine, their tiny windows and gardens gay with old

English flowers; you may stand beneath fuchsia trees so reddened with

the profusion of blossoms that at a little distance they are like

nothing so much as tall clumps of barberry bushes laden with the ripe

berries; you may visit, by introduction or permission, gardens of the

lovely villas nestled in dells here, perched on bold crags there, or

backing against the abrupt gray cliff, which has here no turfy

covering--gardens such as one could well dream away life in, with no

wish to range beyond their bounds, had one in this work-filled world no

conscience about long dalliance in an earthly paradise. In one of these

gardens I wandered long one afternoon that was not sunny, and that was

yet not sombre, the air of balmiest breath, all the earth and sky

softened with the changing, tender tones one finds not out of England.

The house was grandly placed against the cliff, and the garden, which

was rather a succession of gardens, was all up and down on the scattered

terraces provided by long-ago landslips. There were modern gardens with

banks of color and mosaic parterres; old-fashioned gardens, clipt and

quaint; a fernery brought bodily from Fairy-land; clematis, ivy,

woodbine and jessamine clambering and flowering against the wall of

crag, and fuchsias that seemed to have no foothold swinging long,

jewel-hung branches from far overhead. In one place, from a broad low

arch at the crag's base, a clear spring rushed forth. One could see some

yards within the arch, discern rare ferns, a shimmer of ghostly lilies,

and one vigorous tuft of maiden-hair that dropped a veil of tremulous

green lace almost to the water's edge. Still, vines and vines, and in

this little garden of the grot what a magnificent growth of canes,

cannas and pampas-grass; with walks now dropping into densest shade, now

climbing out upon a bare spur of rock or lap of smooth lawn; the musical

rain of a fountain in the green depths below; the hamlet and neighboring

villas so lost to sight that the very birds might well doubt where to

pierce the leafy canopy to find home, wife and callow nestlings; beyond,

and round all, the half ring of quiet-colored, placid sea--the emerald

sea, rough with white caps; the blue sea, sparkling in sunshine; the

moonlit sea, silver-gleaming, but melancholy, and terrible as eternity.

At Bonchurch lived the parents of the poet Swinburne, but they left some

years since, because, it is affirmed, there was no church hereabouts

sufficiently ritualistic to content their consciences. One cannot help

thinking, with a little unmalicious amusement, what a cuckoo child the

poet must have been to this pair. Here, too, lived a good old man and

prolix poet, a friend of Tennyson. It is asserted, on authority, that

the laureate, in his visits to the family, sometimes found himself so

intolerably bored by his fellow-craftsman that he was fain to betake

himself to a bathing-machine, dallying therein and over his bath for two

or three hours to purchase the necessary respite.

Beyond Bonchurch are three lions--"the Landslip" and the Luccombe and

Shanklin Chines. Many and many a rocky hillside pasture in New England

is far finer than the Landslip, and the Chines (fissures or ravines--"He

that in his day did chine the long-ribb'd Apennine," sings Dryden) are

by no means impressive to American eyes. But the mixture of miniature

wildernesses, tumbled rocks, stream, waterfall, airy little swells and

falls of ground, elegant villas, charming walks where all is beautiful,

finished, dainty, with incessant views of the really grand features of

the scene--the sea and the down--forms an enchanting combination. The

authoress who under the _nom-de-plume_ "Holme Lee" has done so much for

the readers of circulating libraries, resides at Shanklin, and here in

1819 came Keats and tarried while writing _Lamia_.

From Ventnor south-west through the Undercliff to St. Catherine's Hill,

the western bulwark of the Elysium of suave airs, the scenery is perhaps

even finer to Western hemisphere taste than that of the more noted

northern region. It is, if not wilder, more solitary, unimproved by art,

less pervaded with tourists and tourists' needs: one feels less

suffocated, crowded, and very, very covetous of one or another of the

lovely, lonely homes scattered here and there.

On this side of Ventnor is situated the National Consumptive Hospital

projected by Dr. Arthur Hill Hassall. It is on the cottage plan. There

are to be sixteen cottages, each to contain about six patients. Several

of the buildings are already completed and in use. The hospital is

partly self-supporting, partly dependent upon voluntary aid, and in all

the places of resort one sees the little alms-box with its eloquent

appeal, "For I was sick, and ye visited me not."

High up upon the hill above Ventnor is the seaside refuge of the London

city missionaries. The block of buildings was erected as a series of

model cottages for laborers. Whether these found their intended homes

too fine, too phalansterian, or what not, I cannot tell, but the group

of houses was made over to the tired workers in the London slums, and

the laborers perch upon all sorts of inaccessible places upon the down,

scratching great unsightly places in the chalk, erecting therein the

tiniest houses of red brick; and though the one or two windows may be

filled with flowers, the ugly gashes do not heal quickly high on the

wind-swept hill.

The longest, and certainly the most interesting, excursions to be made

from Ventnor are those to Carisbrooke and to Freshwater. The first leads

you into the very heart of the island, through lanes that must be the

boweriest in all England. Often the road-bed drops for a long way into a

deep cutting. Ivies cover all the sides, ferns, vetches, campions and

arums spring thickly amid them, and the tall, straggling hedges of

dog-roses, brambles and hawthorn that top the banks are luxuriantly

overrun with honeysuckle, filling the whole air with its spicy

fragrance. On either side are blossoming fields of clover and beans, the

larks are mounting and singing in ecstasy overhead, the road climbs a

steep ascent, and we have miles and miles of finished landscape in view.

There are timber-tied farm-houses here and there, or tiny hamlets whose

straw thatches are simply glorious with their patches of velvet moss and

the brilliant golden blossoms of a succulent whose name I do not

know--houses and hamlets one would like to seize in one's arms and drop

them down in America, in the midst of New England's hideous

factory-villages, ornamentless, shadeless, unrestful, glaring with

white-painted deal.

For the _interior_ of the old English cottages there is not one word of

defence to be uttered: the ugliest pine box of a house to be found

anywhere in all the unlovely New England towns is more comfortable, more

sanitary. The English cottage has a rheumatic floor of beaten earth or

tile; its rooms are few and small, and very dark; the water-supply is

scanty and most inconvenient; its chimney smokes; mice and rats find

secure refuge in the thatch; the masses of clinging vines make it damp

and earwiggy; but what a lovely bit it is in the landscape!--the neutral

tints, the patches of color, the picturesque outlines, the pitch and

curved border of its roof, the yellow ricks in the background, the

little garden gorgeous with marigolds, wallflowers, stocks, pinks,

balsams, or white and pure with stately ranks of the beautiful Virgin

lily. For the interior, away with it! but can we get no hint from all

the external beauty?

Of Carisbrooke too much might be said for the scope and limits of this

paper: brief mention must suffice. It is the old capital of the island.

The remains of a Roman villa were discovered about a dozen years since;

the old church dates from the time of William the Conqueror; and the

grand old castle, connected with almost every era of English history,

had for its nucleus a Saxon stronghold, which succeeded a Roman

fortress, as that in turn succeeded a Celtic camp. The ruin covers a

large space of ground on a hill overlooking the old town. There is no

majesty of beetling crags, no girdle of turbulent sea, but the dignity

of its size, its age, its story, is all-satisfying. It is a good, a

fitting spot for an American to make a pilgrimage to. A noble, eloquent,

peaceful sadness pervades it, and generations shrink to dots. And Nature

herself has had pity on these stones for the mirth, the heroism, the

misery they have encompassed: she has propped up the tottering ramparts

with forests of tall trees in the courts, balustraded the dizzy heights

with a sturdy, bushy growth of ivy, and firmly bound together all the

crumbling decay with a centuries-old cording of vine-stems.

A mile from Carisbrooke village lies Newport, the modern capital of the

island--modern in its relation to Carisbrooke, but possessing some

traces that it was formerly of Roman occupation also. It is pleasantly

situated in a gentle valley, the temperature mild and damp like that of

Devonshire, but is chiefly interesting to visitors for the attractions

of the lovely region round about--stately Carisbrooke; Osborne, the

royal manor of Her Majesty, and not far from thence the birthplace of

Dr. Arnold; Godshill, a hamlet so beautiful one would like to wave over

it an enchanter's wand that should fix for ever just the charm one sees

in it to-day. The name of the village is accounted for by a tradition

that is not uncommon. The builders of the church proposed to erect it at

the foot of the hill, but each morning found the previous day's work

undone and the materials carried to the top. After some days'

perseverance they gave up the contest, and set up their beacon of the

faith on the spot indicated by their invisible combatants.

Not far from Newport, by a way filled with delight, one reaches

Shorwell, a little village beautifully placed, and with a curious old

church full of interest. Upon one of the walls is an old fresco

illustrating the life and adventures of St. Christopher, and there is a

quaint memorial brass erected by Barnabas Leigh in honor of his two

deceased wives, and with a flattering allusion to wife No. 3, then

living! One wife is followed by a troop of children--the other is

forlornly alone. There is also a memorial to Sir John Leigh and his

grandson Barnabas, who died seven days after the grand-sire:

Inmate in grave he took his grandchild heire,

Whose soul did haste to make to him repaire;

And so to heaven along, as little page,

With him did poast to wait upon his age;

and to Lady Elizabeth Leigh--"Sixteene a maide, and fiftie yeares a

wife."

In the opposite direction from Newport lies Arreton, where Legh Richmond

found the heroine of a narrative we have all read--_The Dairyman's

Daughter_. Her memorial is in the churchyard, which is unusually full of

interesting inscriptions. Here is an early English one from a brass,

dated 1430, within the church:

Here is yburied vnder this graue

Harry Hawles his soul God saue

Longe tyme steward of ye yle of Wyght

Have mercy on hym God ful of myght.

Legh Richmond was curate of two near-by villages, Brading and Yaverland,

during the first years of the present century. Both villages are very

old and full of interesting antiquities--churches, Jacobean manor- and

farm-houses, parish stocks, a bull-ring where our enlightened

forefathers amused themselves savagely as well as sadly.

The excursion to Freshwater, twenty-two miles from Ventnor, is

sufficiently charming when made on top of a coach in the veiled yet warm

friendliness of an English summer day; but the way of ways to make it,

as indeed to see the whole island, is as a pedestrian. Freshwater is at

the extreme western point of the island. In going thither from Ventnor

one traverses all the western portion of the Undercliff, where every

glimpse is a joy; then emerges into a wilder, solitary region, with a

bold coast-line sharply indented with chines whose scenery varies from

beautiful to savage and drear; finds always the little hamlets--this

with its church, that with its inn, become a classic resort, another

with its story of an old hermitage or tradition of gold-laden galleon

foundered on its cruel rocks, the gold coins still now and then to be

found in certain sands. Here a landslip has exposed the remains of a

Romano-British pottery; there is a down with Pictish tumuli, and at long

intervals one of the old farm-houses which it is impossible not to

grudge to its possessor. The landscape has none of the exuberant

luxuriance and variety of the Undercliff. Bare, lofty downs, shadeless

fields, no coppices, great swampy pastures--an open, breezy country all

swells and falls, with occasionally fine clumps and avenues of English

elms, feathered to their roots. And so, at last, Freshwater, where downs

are noblest, and the air, blown straight across the Atlantic, seems not

less bracing and exhilarating than that of New England.

The old village of Freshwater is picturesque, but the new lodging-house

portion, only lately sprung up because it has become a fashion with

doctors to prescribe Freshwater as a holiday and sanitary place, is

hideous in its newness of fiery red brick and freshly uptorn earth.

But it was not for Freshwater, old or new; not for its church, which has

some very fine bits, and an epitaph celebrating "the most virtuous Mrs.

Anne Toppe, in her widowhood, by a memorable providence, preserved out

of the flames of the Irish rebellion;" not for the really superb

character of the coast-cliffs, just here mined into caverns only

accessible from the sea, with huge detached masses of chalk, one

hollowed into a grand arch, through which the waters rush with

magnificent music; not for "the Needles," the extreme western points of

the middle range of downs, isolated masses of rock that are very fine

seen from seaward, entering "the Race" between the Isle of Wight and

Dorset; not for Alum Bay, whose gay sands we have all seen fantastically

arranged in landscapes under glass, and whose cliffs have their

vertical strata in brilliant stripes of deep, purplish-red, blue,

yellow, gray that is almost white, and jet black, and contrast

delightfully with the snowy sides of "the Needles;"--not for any or all

the sublimity of sea and shore, did I make the pilgrimage to this

out-of-the-way island corner. I went, as most lovers of our English

tongue in its strength and poetry will go, because here for years was

Tennyson's home--the home wherein most of his poems have been

written--Farringford,

Where, far from noise of smoke and town,

I watch the twilight falling brown

All round a careless-ordered garden,

Close to the ridge of a noble down.

You'll have no scandal while you dine,

But honest talk and wholesome wine,

And only hear the magpie gossip

Garrulous, under a roof of pine.

For groves of pine on either hand.

To break the blasts of winter, stand,

And farther on, the hoary Channel

Tumbles a breaker on chalk and sand.

The house is by no means beautiful, but it is in the midst of such a

network of peacefulest leafy lanes, the near-by surroundings are so

grand, the "groves of pine" and the "careless-ordered garden" look so

utterly fitted to be haunted by a poet's step and musings, the whole

place must be so associated, so saturated with his reveries and fancies,

so peopled with his creations, that it seems impossible any other spot

_could_ be home to him; and one feels a great pang of sadness that the

only true master of Farringford should have felt himself driven to leave

it, and to set up his household gods where he would be comparatively

unknown and unhunted.

An un-famous person finds it however, a little difficult to sympathize

with Tennyson's overpowering horror of the troublesomely affectionate

curiosity of which he is the object. Even such extreme cases of

hero-worship as that of the American who climbed the tree at Farringford

to survey its master at his leisure, and that of the bevy of ladies at a

London exhibition who, occupying a lounge before one of the special

pictures of the season, and beholding Tennyson approach for a look,

overwhelmed him with discomfiture by impressively ceding to him the

entire sofa,--even these, and others of their kind, have a humorous side

that might serve to qualify their impertinence and ill-breeding.

Neither Browning nor George Eliot is unknown by sight to the reading

world of London: neither was Thackeray nor Dickens. Did either of these

ever make outcry at the friendly if vulgar glances? Yet it is true that

no one of them, save Dickens, has been so widely read, and it is

probable that Browning, who looks like nothing so much as a hale, hearty

business-man, oftenest escapes detection, while Tennyson's late

photograph reproduces him so faithfully that he declares he can go

nowhere without being known. Of the mischievous fidelity of the picture

I am myself a witness, for having driven up one day to the Victoria

station of the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway, by which

Tennyson's new home is reached, and being busied with extricating from

my purse the cabman's fare, my companion suddenly caught my arm, crying

out, "Oh, S----, there's Tennyson!" The purse dropped in my lap: he was

so near the cab I could have touched him, and of course he had heard the

exclamation and knew why two ladies had so utterly forgotten their

manners; but if he had also known that one of us had a certain

shabby-through-use edition of all his earlier poems, which during a

space of a dozen years had never been separated from her, traveling in a

crowded trunk for even the shortest absences from home--that for months

of that time she had been used to read therefrom to a precocious child

who came every night in her night-gown to nestle in the reader's lap and

listen to the music without which she declined to undertake the business

of sleep,--I think the look bestowed upon the absorbed twain might well

have been more amiable than the one which really fell upon them and

blighted their innocent delight. It was all the photograph's fault, and,

enthusiastic American sisters, be content with beholding the

representation, for the original looks neither more patient, more

gracious, nor more hopeful. So sensitive is he to looks which have in

them any recognition, any stress, that a visitor at Farringford relates

that, wandering about the cliffs and shores with his host, the latter

would every now and then nervously cry out, "Come! let's walk on--I hear

tourists!" and his companion, delaying a little, would be able to answer

reassuringly, "Oh no: see! there's nothing in sight but a flock of

sheep."

Perhaps I ought to confess that finding in one of the Farringford lanes

a lovely little green gate opening into one of the "groves of pine," I

_did_ just try the latch. The door opened, and it looked all so still

and shaded, whispery and ferny, so exactly as if Tennyson might any

minute come pacing down between the tall trees, as if the "Talking Oak"

was sure to stand just round a sun-lighted corner of the wood, that,

incited thereto by a countrywoman of the poet's, who, herself a member

of the guild, should know how poets' possessions may worthily be

approached, I let my sacrilegious feet carry me a little way within that

violated enclosure. But it was only a very tiny raid we made. We stood

quietly for two or three minutes, just _feeling_ the place, then

scurried hastily away like two timorous hares; and as I have since lost

a much prized little fern-leaf plucked within the enclosure, I think Mr.

Tennyson should agree that this intrusive American has been quite

severely enough punished, and that much ought to be forgiven one who has

loved so much.

There really is one spot in England where "skies are blue and bright"

uniformly, and, in the Undercliff, where no harsh winds come. And the

whole island--with its smiling loveliness, its miniature sublimity, all

its varying scenery, all its old landmarks, its rich story, its soft yet

sparkling air, its dainty English culture, the sea that one never loses

for long--is a honeymoon paradise. It can have been intended for nothing

else. But it should be a pedestrian honeymoon. _They_ should come to

Ryde, leave all impedimenta to be sent forward to Ventnor by rail, and

Madame in a serviceable walking-dress that need not be hideous, a

sun-hat, with a strap holding her waterproof cloak, Monsieur with wraps,

a bag containing the indispensable toilet necessaries, an umbrella and

guide-book, should set gayly forth on their enchanted way. What a month

in the romantic byways, over hill, down dale, in the old churches,

churchyards, ivied ruins, through the ideal villages, resting amidst the

heather on a down's summit, on the sands of a little scallop of a bay,

stopping for food and sleep at the comfortable quaint inns or the

sometimes "swell" hotels that are nowhere many miles asunder--seeing it,

having it all together--the idyllic spot in the idyllic time!

And to American invalids it seems to me the Undercliff is far less known

as a winter resort than it deserves to be. It is perfectly sheltered,

yet has none of the dampness of Torquay and most of the other

south-of-England health-resorts. And to invalids who speak no language

save their own it must be infinitely pleasanter to abide where they hear

their own tongue, where home comforts and home ways are joined to the

other advantages they have come to seek. There is all the accessible

beauty of walk and drive, ever-changing aspects of sea, shore, sky and

crag, of which it would be difficult to tire, and a delicious languor in

the mental atmosphere inexpressibly soothing to worn brain and nerves.

S. F. HOPKINS.

SOLACE.

Thou art the last rose of the year,

By gusty breezes rudely fanned:

The dying Summer holds thee fast

In the hot hollow of her hand.

Thy face pales, as if looking back

Into the splendor of thy past

Had thrilled thee strangely, knowing that

This one long look must be the last.

Thine essence, that was heavenly sweet,

Has flown upon the tricksy air:

Fate's hand is on thee; drop thy leaves,

And go among the things that were.

Be must and mould, be trampled dust,

Be nothing that is fair to see:

One day, at least, of glorious life

Was thine of all eternity.

Be this a comfort: Crown and lyre,

And regal purple last not long:

Kings fall like leaves, but thy perfume

Strays through the years like royal song.

JAMES MAURICE THOMPSON.

A PRINCESS OF THULE.

BY WILLIAM BLACK, AUTHOR OF "THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF A PHAETON."

CHAPTER XIX.

A NEW DAY BREAKS.

Was this, then, the end of the fair and beautiful romance that had

sprung up and blossomed so hopefully in the remote and bleak island,

amid the silence of the hills and moors and the wild twilights of the

North, and set round about, as it were, by the cold sea-winds and the

sound of the Atlantic waves? Who could have fancied, looking at those

two young folks as they wandered about the shores of the island, as they

sailed on the still moonlight nights through the channels of Loch Roag,

or as they sang together of an evening in the little parlor of the house

at Borvabost, that all the delight and wonder of life then apparently

opening out before them was so soon and so suddenly to collapse, leaving

them in outer darkness and despair? All their difficulties had been got

over. From one side and from another they had received generous help,

friendly advice, self-sacrifice to start them on a path that seemed to

be strewn with sweet-smelling flowers. And here was the end--a wretched

girl, blinded and bewildered, flying from her husband's house and

seeking refuge in the great world of London, careless whither she went.

Whose was the fault? Which of them had been mistaken up there in the

North, laying the way open for a bitter disappointment? Or had either of

them failed to carry out that unwritten contract entered into in the

halcyon period of courtship, by which two young people promise to be and

remain to each other all that they then appeared?

Lavender, at least, had no right to complain. If the real Sheila turned

out to be something different from the Sheila of his fancy, he had been

abundantly warned that such would be the case. He had even accepted it

as probable, and said that as the Sheila whom he might come to know must

doubtless be better than the Sheila whom he had imagined, there was

little danger in store for either. He would love the true Sheila even

better than the creature of his brain. Had he done so? He found beside

him this proud and sensitive Highland girl, full of generous impulses

that craved for the practical work of helping other people, longing,

with the desire of a caged bird, for the free winds and light of heaven,

the sight of hills and the sound of seas, and he could not understand

why she should not conform to the usages of city life. He was

disappointed that she did not do so. The imaginative Sheila, who was to

appear as a wonderful sea-princess in London drawing-rooms, had

disappeared now; and the real Sheila, who did not care to go with him

into that society which he loved or affected to love, he had not learned

to know.

And had she been mistaken in her estimate of Frank Lavender's character?

At the very moment of her leaving her husband's house, if she had been

asked the question, she would have turned and proudly answered, "No!"

She had been disappointed--so grievously disappointed that her heart

seemed to be breaking over it--but the manner in which Frank Lavender

had fallen away from all the promise he had given was due not to

himself, but to the influence of the society around him. Of that she was

quite assured. He had shown himself careless, indifferent, inconsiderate

to the verge of cruelty; but he was not, she had convinced herself,

consciously cruel, nor yet selfish, nor radically bad-hearted in any

way. In her opinion, at least, he was courageously sincere, to the verge

of shocking people who mistook his frankness for impudence. He was

recklessly generous: he would have given the coat off his back to a

beggar at the instigation of a sudden impulse, provided he could have

got into a cab before any of his friends saw him. He had rare abilities,

and at times wildly ambitious dreams, not of his own glorification, but

of what he would do to celebrate the beauty and the graces of the

princess whom he fancied he had married. It may seem hard of belief that

this man, judging him by his actions at this time, could have had

anything of thorough self-forgetfulness and manliness in his nature. But

when things were at their very worst, when he appeared to the world as a

self-indulgent idler, careless of a noble woman's unbounded love; when

his indifference, or worse, had actually driven from his house a

young wife who had especial claims on his forbearance and

consideration,--there were two people who still believed in Frank

Lavender. They were Sheila Mackenzie and Edward Ingram; and a man's wife

and his oldest friend generally know something about his real nature,

its besetting temptations, its weakness, its strength and its

possibilities.

Of course, Ingram was speedily made aware of all that had happened.

Lavender went home at the appointed hour to luncheon, accompanied by his

three acquaintances. He had met them accidentally in the forenoon, and

as Mrs. Lorraine was most particular in her inquiries about Sheila, he

thought he could not do better than ask her there and then, with her

mother and Lord Arthur, to have luncheon at two. What followed on his

carrying the announcement to Sheila we know. He left the house, taking

it for granted that there would be no trouble when he returned. Perhaps

he reproached himself for having spoken so sharply, but Sheila was

really very thoughtless in such matters. At two o'clock everything would

be right. Sheila must see how it would be impossible to introduce a

young Highland serving-maid to two fastidious ladies and the son of a

great Conservative peer.

Lavender met his three friends once more, and walked up to the house

with them, letting them in, indeed, with his own latch-key. Passing the

dining-room, he saw that the table was laid there. This was well.

Sheila had been reasonable.

They went up stairs to the drawing-room. Sheila was not there. Lavender

rang the bell, and bade the servant tell her mistress she was wanted.

"Mrs. Lavender has gone out, sir," said the servant.

"Oh, indeed!" he said, taking the matter quite coolly. "When?"

"A quarter of an hour ago, sir. She went out with the--the young lady

who came this morning."

"Very well. Let me know when luncheon is ready."

Lavender turned to his guests, feeling a little awkward, but appearing

to treat the matter in a light and humorous way. He imagined that

Sheila, resenting what he had said, had resolved to take Mairi away and

find her lodgings elsewhere. Perhaps that might be done in time to let

Sheila come back to receive his guests.

Sheila did not appear, however, and luncheon was announced.

"I suppose we may as well go down," said Lavender with a shrug of his

shoulders. "It is impossible to say when she may come back. She is such

a good-hearted creature that she would never think of herself or her own

affairs in looking after this girl from Lewis."

They went down stairs and took their places at the table.

"For my part," said Mrs. Lorraine, "I think it is very unkind not to

wait for poor Mrs. Lavender. She may come in dreadfully tired and

hungry."

"But that would not vex her so much as the notion that you had waited on

her account," said Sheila's husband with a smile; and Mrs. Lorraine was

pleased to hear him sometimes speak in a kindly way of the Highland girl

whom he had married.

Lavender's guests were going somewhere after luncheon, and he had half

promised to go with them, Mrs. Lorraine stipulating that Sheila should

be induced to come also. But when luncheon was over and Sheila had not

appeared, he changed his intention. He would remain at home. He saw his

three friends depart, and went into the study and lit a cigar.

How odd the place seemed! Sheila had left no instructions about the

removal of those barbaric decorations she had placed in the chamber; and

here, around him, seemed to be the walls of the old fashioned little

room at Borvabost, with its big shells, its peacocks' feathers, its

skins and stuffed fish, and masses of crimson bell-heather. Was there

not, too, an odor of peat-smoke in the air?--and then his eye caught

sight of the plate that still stood on the window-sill, with the ashes

of the burned peat on it.

"The odd child she is!" he thought with a smile, "to go playing at

grotto-making, and trying to fancy she was up in Lewis again! I suppose

she would like to let her hair down again, and take off her shoes and

stockings, and go wading along the sand in search of shellfish."

And then, somehow, his fancies went back to the old time when he had

first seen and admired her wild ways, her fearless occupations by sea

and shore, and the delight of active work that shone on her bright face

and in her beautiful eyes. How lithe and handsome her figure used to be

in that blue dress, when she stood in the middle of the boat, her head

bent back, her arms upstretched and pulling at some rope or other, and

all the fine color of exertion in the bloom of her cheeks! Then the

pride with which she saw her little vessel cutting through the

water!--how she tightened her lips with a joyous determination as the

sheets were hauled close, and the gunwale of the small boat heeled over

so that it almost touched the hissing and gurgling foam!--how she

laughed at Duncan's anxiety as she rounded some rocky point, and sent

the boat spinning into the clear and smooth waters of the bay! Perhaps,

after all, it was too bad to keep the poor child so long shut up in a

city. She was evidently longing for a breath of sea-air, and for some

brief dash of that brisk, fearless life on the sea-coast that she used

to love. It was a happy life, after all; and he had himself enjoyed it

when his hands and face got browned by the sun, when he grew to wonder

how any human being could wear black garments and drink foreign wines

and smoke cigars at eighteenpence apiece, so long as frieze coats,

whisky and a brier-root pipe were procurable. How one slept up in that

remote island, after all the laughing and drinking and singing of the

evening were over! How sharp was the monition of hunger when the keen

sea-air blew about your face on issuing out in the morning! and how

fresh and cool and sweet was that early breeze, with the scent of

Sheila's flowers in it! Then the long, bright day at the river-side,

with the black pools rippling in the wind, and in the silence the rapid

whistle of the silken line through the air, with now and again the

"blob" of a big salmon rising to a fly farther down the pool! Where was

there any rest like the rest of the mid-day luncheon, when Duncan had

put the big fish, wrapped in rushes, under the shadow of the nearest

rock, when you sat down on the warm heather and lit your pipe, and began

to inquire where you had been bitten on hands and neck by the ferocious

"clegs" while you were too busy in playing a fifteen-pounder to care?

Then, perhaps, as you were sitting there in the warm sunlight, with all

the fresh scents of the moorland around, you would hear a light footstep

on the soft moss; and, turning round, here was Sheila herself, with a

bright look in her pretty eyes, and a half blush on her cheek, and a

friendly inquiry as to the way the fish had been behaving. Then the

beautiful, strange, cool evenings on the shores of Loch Roag, with the

wild, clear light still shining in the northern heavens, and the sound

of the waves getting to be lonely and distant; or, still later, out in

Sheila's boat, with the great yellow moon rising up over Suainabhal and

Mealasabhal into a lambent vault of violet sky; a pathway of quivering

gold lying across the loch; a mild radiance glittering here and there on

the spars of the small vessel, and out there the great Atlantic lying

still and distant as in a dream. As he sat in this little room and

thought of all these things, he grew to think he had not acted quite

fairly to Sheila. She was so fond of that beautiful island-life, and she

had not even visited the Lewis since her marriage. She should go now. He

would abandon the trip to the Tyrol, and as soon as arrangements could

be made they would together start for the North, and some day find

themselves going up the steep shore to Sheila's home, with the old King

of Borva standing in the porch of the house, and endeavoring to conceal

his nervousness by swearing at Duncan's method of carrying the luggage.

Had not Sheila's stratagem succeeded? That pretty trick of hers in

decorating the room so as to resemble the house at Borvabost had done

all that she could have desired. But where was she?

Lavender rose hastily and looked at his watch. Then he rang the bell,

and a servant appeared. "Did not Mrs. Lavender say when she would

return?" he asked.

"No, sir."

"You don't know where she went?"

"No, sir. The young lady's luggage was put into the cab, and they drove

away without leaving any message."

He scarcely dared confess to himself what fears began to assail him. He

went up stairs to Sheila's room, and there everything appeared to be in

its usual place, even to the smallest articles on the dressing-table.

They were all there, except one. That was a locket, too large and clumsy

to be worn, which some one had given her years before she left Lewis,

and in which her father's portrait had been somewhat rudely set. Just

after their marriage Lavender had taken out this portrait, touched it up

a bit into something of a better likeness, and put it back; and then she

had persuaded him to have a photograph of himself colored and placed on

the opposite side. This locket, open and showing both portraits, she had

fixed on to a small stand, and in ordinary circumstances it always stood

on one side of her dressing-table. The stand was there, the locket was

gone.

He went down stairs again. The afternoon was drawing on. A servant came

to ask him at what hour he wished to dine: he bade her wait till her

mistress came home and consult her. Then he went out.

It was a beautiful, quiet afternoon, with a warm light from the west

shining over the now yellowing trees of the squares and gardens. He

walked down toward Netting Hill Gate Station, endeavoring to convince

himself that he was not perturbed, and yet looking somewhat anxiously at

the cabs that passed. People were now coming out from their business in

the city by train and omnibus and hansom; and they seemed to be hurrying

home in very good spirits, as if they were sure of the welcome awaiting

them there. Now and again you would see a meeting--some demure young

person, who had been furtively watching the railway-station, suddenly

showing a brightness in her face as she went forward to shake hands with

some new arrival, and then tripping briskly away with him, her hand on

his arm. There were men carrying home fish in small bags, or baskets of

fruit--presents to their wives, doubtless, from town. Occasionally an

open carriage would go by, containing one grave and elderly gentleman

and a group of small girls--probably his daughters, who had gone into

the city to accompany their papa homeward. Why did these scenes and

incidents, cheerful in themselves, seem to him to be somehow saddening

as he walked vaguely on? He knew, at least, that there was little use in

returning home. There was no one in that silent house in the square. The

rooms would be dark in the twilight. Probably dinner would be laid, with

no one to sit down at the table. He wished Sheila had left word where

she was going.

Then he bethought him of the way in which they had parted, and of the

sense of fear that had struck him the moment he left the house, that

after all he had been too harsh with the child. Now, at least, he was

ready to apologize to her. If only he could see Sheila coming along in

one of those hansoms--if he could see, at any distance, the figure he

knew so well walking toward him on the pavement--would he not instantly

confess to her, that he had been wrong, even grievously wrong, and beg

her to forgive him? She should have it all her own way about going up to

Lewis. He would cast aside this society-life he had been living, and to

please her would go in for any sort of work or amusement of which she

approved. He was so anxious, indeed, to put these virtuous resolutions

into force that he suddenly turned and walked rapidly back to the house,

with the wild hope that Sheila might have already come back.

The windows were dark, the curtains were yet drawn, and by this time the

evening had come on and the lamps in the square had been lit. He let

himself into the house by his latch-key. He walked into all the rooms

and up into Sheila's room: everything remained as he had left it. The

white cloth glimmered in the dusk of the dining-room, and the light of

the lamp outside in the street touched here and there the angles of the

crystal and showed the pale colors of the glasses. The clock on the

mantelpiece ticked in the silence. If Sheila had been lying dead in that

small room up stairs, the house could not have appeared more silent and

solemn.

He could not bear this horrible solitude. He called one of the servants

and left a message for Sheila, if she came in in the interval, that he

would be back at ten o'clock: then he went out, got into a hansom and

drove down to his club in St. James's street.

Most of the men were dining: the other rooms were almost deserted. He

did not care to dine just then. He went into the library: it was

occupied by an old gentleman who was fast asleep in an easy-chair. He

went into the billiard-rooms, in the vague hope that some exciting game

might be going on: there was not a soul in the place, the gases were

down, and an odor of stale smoke pervaded the dismal chambers. Should he

go to the theatre? His sitting there would be a mockery while this vague

and terrible fear was present to his heart. Or go down to see Ingram,

as had been his wont in previous hours of trouble? He dared not go near

Ingram without some more definite news about Sheila. In the end he went

out into the open air, as if he were in danger of being stifled, and,

walking indeterminately on, found himself once more at his own house.

The place was still quite dark: he knew before entering that Sheila had

not returned, and he did not seem to be surprised. It was now long after

their ordinary dinner-hour. When he went into the house he bade the

servants light the gas and bring up dinner: he would himself sit down at

this solitary table, if only for the purpose of finding occupation and

passing this terrible time of suspense.

It never occurred to him, as it might have occurred to him at one time,

that Sheila had made some blunder somewhere and been unavoidably

detained. He did not think of any possible repetition of her adventures

in Richmond Park. He was too conscious of the probable reason of

Sheila's remaining away from her own home; and yet from minute to minute

he fought with that consciousness, and sought to prove to himself that,

after all, she would soon be heard driving up to the door. He ate his

dinner in silence, and then drew a chair up to the fire and lit a cigar.

For the first time in his life he was driven to go over the events that

had occurred since his marriage, and to ask himself how it had all come

about that Sheila and he were not as they once had been. He recalled the

early days of their friendship at Borva; the beautiful period of their

courtship; the appearance of the young wife in London, and the close

relegation of Sheila to the domestic affairs of the house, while he had

chosen for himself other companions, other interests, other aims. There

was no attempt at self-justification in those communings, but an effort,

sincere enough in its way, to understand how all this had happened. He

sat and dreamed there before the warmth of the fire, with the slow and

monotonous ticking of the clock unconsciously acting on his brain. In

time the silence, the warmth, the monotonous sound produced their

natural effects, and he fell fast asleep.

He awoke with a start. The small silver-toned bell on the mantelpiece

had struck the hour of twelve. He looked around, and knew that the evil

had come upon him, for Sheila had not returned, and all his most

dreadful fears of that evening were confirmed. Sheila had gone away and

left him. Whither had she gone?

Now there was no more indecision in his actions. He got his hat, plunged

into the cold night air, and, finding a hansom, bade the man drive as

hard as he could go down to Sloane street. There was a light in Ingram's

windows, which were on the ground floor: he tapped with his stick on one

of the panes--an old signal that had been in constant use when he and

Ingram were close companions and friends. Ingram came to the door and

opened it: the light of a lamp glared in on his face. "Hillo, Lavender!"

he said in a tone of surprise.

The other could not speak, but he went into the house, and Ingram,

shutting the door and following him, found that the man's face was

deadly pale.

"Sheila--" he said, and stopped.

"Well, what about her?" said Ingram, keeping quite calm, but with wild

fancies about some terrible accident almost stopping the pulsation of

his heart.

"Sheila has gone away."

Ingram did not seem to understand.

"Sheila has gone away, Ingram," said Lavender in an excited way. "You

don't know anything about it? You don't know where she has gone? What am

I to do, Ingram? how am I to find her? Good God! don't you understand

what I tell you? And now it is past midnight, and my poor girl may be

wandering about the streets!"

He was walking up and down the room, paying almost no attention, in his

excitement, to the small, sallow-faced man who stood quite quiet, a

trifle afraid, perhaps, but with his heart full of a blaze of anger.

"She has gone away from your house?" he said slowly. "What made her do

that?"

"I did," said Lavender in a hurried way. "I have acted like a brute to

her--that is true enough. You needn't say anything to me, Ingram: I feel

myself far more guilty than anything you could say. You may heap

reproaches on me afterward, but tell me. Ingram, what am I to do? You

know what a proud spirit she has: who can tell what she might do? She

wouldn't go home--she would be too proud: she may have gone and drowned

herself."

"If you don't control yourself and tell me what has happened, how am I

to help you?" said Ingram stiffly, and yet disposed somehow--perhaps for

the sake of Sheila, perhaps because he saw that the young man's

self-embarrassment and distress were genuine enough--not to be too rough

with him.

"Well, you know, Mairi--" said Lavender, still walking up and down the

room in an excited way. "Sheila had got the girl up here without telling

me, some friends of mine were coming home to luncheon, we had some

disagreement about Mairi being present, and then Sheila said something

about not remaining in the house if Mairi did not: something of that

sort. I don't know what it was, but I know it was all my fault, and if

she has been driven from the house, I did it: that is true enough. And

where do you think she has gone, Ingram? If I could only see her for

three minutes I would explain everything: I would tell her how sorry I

am for everything that has happened, and she would see, when she went

back, how everything would be right again. I had no idea she would go

away. It was mere peevishness that made me object to Mairi meeting those

people; and I had no idea that Sheila would take it so much to heart.

Now tell me what you think should be done, Ingram. All I want is to see

her just for three minutes to tell her it was all a mistake, and that

she will never have to fear anything like that again."

Ingram heard him out, and said with some precision, "Do you mean to say

that you fancy all this trouble is to be got over that way? Do you know

so little of Sheila, after the time you have been married to her, as to

imagine that she has taken this step out of some momentary caprice, and

that a few words of apology and promise will cause her to rescind it?

You must be crazed, Lavender, or else you are actually as ignorant of

the nature of that girl as you were up in the Highlands."

The young man seemed to calm down his excitement and impatience, but it

was because of a new fear that had struck him, and that was visible in

his face. "Do you think she will never come back, Ingram?" he said,

looking aghast.

"I don't know: she may not. At all events, you may be quite sure that,

once having resolved to leave your house, she is not to be pacified and

cajoled by a few phrases and a promise of repentance on your part. That

is quite sure. And what is quite as sure is this, that if you knew just

now where she was, the most foolish thing you could do would be to go

and see her."

"But I must go and see her--I must find her out, Ingram," he said

passionately. "I don't care what becomes of me. If she won't go back

home, so much the worse for me; but I _must_ find her out, and know that

she is safe. Think of it, Ingram! Perhaps she is walking about the

streets somewhere at this moment; and you know her proud spirit. If she

were to go near the river--"

"She won't go near the river," said Ingram quietly, "and she won't be

walking about the streets. She is either in the Scotch mail-train, going

up to Glasgow, or else she has got some lodgings somewhere, along with

Mairi. Has she any money?"

"No," said Lavender. And then he thought for a minute. "There was some

money her father gave her in case she might want it at a pinch: she may

have that--I hope she has that. I was to have given her money to-morrow

morning. But hadn't I better go to the police-stations, and see, just

by way of precaution, that she has not been heard of? I may as well do

that as nothing. I could not go home to that empty house--I could not

sleep."

"Sheila is a sensible girl: she is safe enough," said Ingram. "And if

you don't care about going home, you may as well remain here. I can give

you a room up stairs when you want it. In the mean time, if you will

pull a chair to the table and calm yourself, and take it for granted

that you will soon be assured of Sheila's safety, I will tell you what I

think you should do. Here is a cigar to keep you occupied: there are

whisky and cold water back there if you like. You will do no good by

punishing yourself in small matters, for your trouble is likely to be

serious enough, I can tell you, before you get Sheila back, if ever you

get her back. Take the chair with the cushion."

It was so like the old days when these two used to be companions! Many

and many a time had the younger man come down to these lodgings, with

all his troubles and wild impulses and pangs of contrition ready to be

revealed; and then Ingram, concealing the liking he had for the lad's

generous waywardness, his brilliant and facile cleverness and his dashes

of honest self-depreciation, would gravely lecture him and put him right

and send him off comforted. Frank Lavender had changed much since then.

The handsome boy had grown into a man of the world; there was less

self-revelation in his manner, and he was less sensitive to the opinions

and criticisms of his old friend; but Ingram, who was not prone to

idealism of any sort, had never ceased to believe that this change was

but superficial, and that, in different circumstances and with different

aims, Lavender might still fulfill the best promise of his youth.

"You have been a good friend to me, Ingram," he said with a hot blush,

"and I have treated you as badly as I have treated--By Jove! what a

chance I had at one time!"

He was looking back on all the fair pictures his imagination had drawn

while yet Sheila and he were wandering about that island in the

northern seas.

"You had," said Ingram decisively. "At one time I thought you the most

fortunate man in the world. There was nothing left for you to desire, so

far as I could see. You were young and strong, with plenty of good

spirits and sufficient ability to earn yourself an honorable living, and

you had won the love of the most beautiful and best-hearted woman I have

known. You never seemed to me to know what that meant. Men marry

women--there is no difficulty about that--and you can generally get an

amiable sort of person to become your wife and have a sort of affection

for you, and so on. But how many have bestowed on them the pure and

exalted passion of a young and innocent girl, who is ready to worship

with all the fervor of a warmly imaginative and emotional nature the man

she has chosen to love? And suppose he is young too, and capable of

understanding all the tender sentiments of a high-spirited, sensitive

and loyal woman, and suppose that he fancies himself as much in love

with her as she with him? These conditions are not often fulfilled, I

can tell you. It is a happy fluke when they are. Many a day ago I told

you that you should consider yourself more fortunate than if you had

been made an emperor; and indeed it seemed to me that you had everything

in the shape of worldly happiness easily within your reach. How you came

to kick away the ball from your feet--Well, God only knows. The thing is

inconceivable to me. You are sitting here as you used to sit two or

three years ago, and in the interval you have had every chance in life;

and now if you are not the most wretched man in London, you ought at

least to be the most ashamed and repentant."

Lavender's head was buried in his hands: he did not speak.

"And it is not only your own happiness you have destroyed. When you saw

that girl first she was as lighthearted and contented with her lot as

any human being could be. From one week's end to the other not the

slightest care disturbed her mind. And then, when she entrusted her

whole life to you--when she staked her faith in human nature on you, and

gave you all the treasures of hope and reverence and love that lay in

her pure and innocent soul--my God! what have you done with these? It is

not that you have shamed and insulted her as a wife, and driven her out

of her home--there are other homes than yours where she would be welcome

a thousand times over--but you have destroyed her belief in everything

she had taught herself to trust, you have outraged the tenderest

sentiments of her heart, you have killed her faith as well as ruined her

life. I talk plainly: I cannot do otherwise. If I help you now, don't

imagine I condone what you have done: I would cut my right hand off

first. For Sheila's sake I will try to help you."

He stopped just then, however, and checked the indignation that had got

the better of his ordinarily restrained manner and curt speech. The man

before him was crying bitterly, his face hidden in his hands.

"Look here, Lavender," he said presently: "I don't want to be hard on

you. I tell you plainly what I think of your conduct, so that no

delusions may exist between us. And I will say this for you, that the

only excuse you have--"

"There is no excuse," said the other, sadly enough. "I have no excuse,

and I know it."

"The only thing, then, you can say in mitigation of what you have done

is that you never seem to have understood the girl whom you married. You

started with giving her a fancy character when first you went to the

Lewis, and once you had got the bit in your teeth there was no stopping

you. If you seek now to get Sheila back to you, the best thing you can

do, I presume, would be to try to see her as she is, to win her regard

that way, to abandon that operatic business, and learn to know her as a

thoroughly good woman, who has her own ways and notions about things,

and who has a very definite character underlying that extreme gentleness

which she fancies to be one of her duties. The child did her dead best

to accommodate herself to your idea of her, and failed. When she would

rather have been living a brisk and active life in the country or by the

seaside, running wild about a hillside, or reading strange stories in

the evening, or nursing some fisherman's child that had got ill, you had

her dragged into a sort of society with which she had no sympathy

whatever. And the odd thing to me is that you yourself seemed to be

making an effort that way. You did not always devote yourself to

fashionable life. Where are all the old ambitions you used to talk about

in the very chair you are now sitting in?"

"Is there any hope of my getting Sheila back?" he said, looking up at

last. There was a vague and bewildered look in his eyes. He seemed

incapable of thinking of anything but that.

"I don't know," said Ingram. "But one thing is certain: you will never

get her back to repeat the experiment that has just ended in this

desperate way."

"I should not ask that," he said hurriedly--"I should not ask that at

all. If I could but see her for a moment, I would ask her to tell me

everything she wanted, everything she demanded as conditions, and I

would obey her. I will promise to do everything that she wishes."

"If you saw her you could give her nothing but promises," said Ingram.

"Now, what if you were to try to do what you know she wishes, and then

go to her?"

"You mean--" said Lavender, glancing up with another startled look on

his face. "You don't mean that I am to remain away from her a long

time--go into banishment as it were--and then some day come back to

Sheila and beg her to forget all that happened long before?"

"I mean something very like that," said Ingram with composure. "I don't

know that it would be successful. I have no means of ascertaining what

Sheila would think of such a project--whether she would think that she

could ever live with you again."

Lavender seemed fairly stunned by the possibility of Sheila's resolving

never to see him again; and began to recall what Ingram had many a time

said about the strength of purpose she could show when occasion needed.

"If her faith in you is wholly destroyed, your case is hopeless. A woman

may cling to her belief in a man through good report and evil report,

but if she once loses it she never recovers it. But there is this hope

for you: I know very well that Sheila had a much more accurate notion of

you than ever you had of her; and I happen to know, also, that at the

very time when you were most deeply distressing her here in London she

held the firm conviction that your conduct toward her--your habits, your

very self--would alter if you could only be persuaded to get out of the

life you have been leading. That was true, at least, up to the time of

your leaving Brighton. She believed in you then. She believed that if

you were to cut society altogether, and go and live a useful and

hardworking life somewhere, you would soon become once more the man she

fell in love with up in Lewis. Perhaps she was mistaken: I don't say

anything about it myself."

The terribly cool way in which Ingram talked--separating, defining,

exhibiting, so that he and his companion should get as near as possible

to what he believed to be the truth of the situation--was oddly in

contrast with the blind and passionate yearning of the other for some

glimpse of hope. His whole nature seemed to go out in a cry to Sheila

that she would come back and give him a chance of atoning for the past.

At length he rose. He looked strangely haggard, and his eyes scarcely

seemed to see the things around him. "I must go home," he said.

Ingram saw that he merely wanted to get outside and walk about in order

to find some relief from this anxiety and unrest, and said, "You ought,

I think, to stop here and go to bed. But if you would rather go home, I

will walk up with you if you like."

When the two men went out the night-air smelt sweet and moist, for rain

had fallen, and the city trees were still dripping with the wet and

rustling in the wind. The weather had changed suddenly, and now, in the

deep blue overhead, they knew the clouds were passing swiftly by. Was it

the coming light of the morning that seemed to give depth and richness

to that dark-blue vault, while the pavements of the streets and the

houses grew vaguely distinct and gray? Suddenly, in turning the corner

into Piccadilly, they saw the moon appear in a rift of those passing

clouds, but it was not the moonlight that shed this pale and wan

grayness down the lonely streets. It is just at this moment, when the

dawn of the new day begins to tell, that a great city seems at its

deadest; and in the profound silence and amid the strange

transformations of the cold and growing light a man is thrown in upon

himself, and holds communion with himself, as though he and his own

thoughts were all that was left in the world. Not a word passed between

the two men, and Lavender, keenly sensitive to all such impressions, and

now and again shivering slightly, either from cold or nervous

excitement, walked blindly along the deserted streets, seeing far other

things than the tall houses and the drooping trees and the growing light

of the sky.

It seemed to him at this moment that he was looking at Sheila's funeral.

There was a great stillness in that small house at Borvabost. There was

a boat--Sheila's own boat--down at the shore there, and there were two

or three figures in black in it. The day was gray and rainy; the sea

washed along the melancholy shores; the far hills were hidden in mist.

And now he saw some people come out of the house into the rain, and the

bronzed and bearded men had oars with them, and on the crossed oars

there was a coffin placed. They went down the hillside. They put the

coffin in the stern of the boat, and in absolute silence, except for the

wailing of the women, they pulled away down the dreary Loch Roag till

they came to the island where the burial-ground is. They carried the

coffin up to that small enclosure, with its rank grass growing green and

the rain falling on the rude stones and memorials. How often had he

leaned on that low stone wall, and read the strange inscriptions in

various tongues over the graves of mariners from distant countries who

had met with their death on this rocky coast! Had not Sheila herself

pointed out to him, with a sad air, how many of these memorials bore the

words "who was drowned;" and that, too, was the burden of the

rudely-spelt legends beginning "Hier rutt in Gott," or "Her under hviler

stovit," and sometimes ending with the pathetic "Wunderschen ist unsre

Hoffnung." The fishermen brought the coffin to the newly-made grave, the

women standing back a bit, old Scarlett MacDonald stroking Mairi's hair

and bidding the girl control her frantic grief, though the old woman

herself could hardly speak for her tears and her lamentations. He could

read the words "Sheila Mackenzie" on the small silver plate: she had

been taken away from all association with him and his name. And who was

this old man with the white hair and the white beard, whose hands were

tightly clenched, and his lips firm, and a look as of death in the

sunken and wild eyes? Mackenzie was gray a year before--

"Ingram," he said suddenly, and his voice startled his companion, "do

you think it is possible to make Sheila happy again?"

"How can I tell?" said Ingram.

"You used to know everything she could wish--everything she was thinking

about. If you find her out now, will you get to know? Will you see what

I can do--not by asking her to come back, not by trying to get back my

own happiness, but anything, it does not matter what it is, I can do for

her? If she would rather not see me again, I will stay away. Will you

ask her, Ingram?"

"We have got to find her first," said his companion.

"A young girl like that," said Lavender, taking no heed of the

objection, "surely she cannot always be unhappy. She is so young and

beautiful, and takes so much interest in many things: surely she may

have a happy life."

"She might have had."

"I don't mean with me," said Lavender, with his haggard face looking

still more haggard in the increasing light. "I mean anything that can be

done--any way of life that will make her comfortable and contented

again--anything that I can do for that. Will you try to find it out,

Ingram?"

"Oh yes, I will," said the other, who had been thinking with much

foreboding of all these possibilities ever since they left Sloane

street, his only gleam of hope being a consciousness that this time at

least there could be no doubt of Frank Lavender's absolute sincerity, of

his remorse, and his almost morbid craving to make reparation if that

were still possible.

They reached the house at last. There was a dim orange-colored light

shining in the passage. Lavender went on and threw open the door of the

small room which Sheila had adorned, asking Ingram to follow him. How

wild and strange this chamber looked, with the wan glare of the dawn

shining in on its barbaric decorations from the sea-coast--on the shells

and skins and feathers that Sheila had placed around! That white light

of the morning was now shining everywhere into the silent and desolate

house. Lavender found Ingram a bedroom, and then he turned away, not

knowing what to do. He looked into Sheila's room: there were dresses,

bits of finery and what not that he knew so well, but there was no light

breathing audible in the silent and empty chamber. He shut the door as

reverently as though he were shutting it on the dead, and went down

stairs and threw himself almost fainting with despair and fatigue on a

sofa, while the world outside awoke to a new day with all its countless

and joyous activities and duties.