Last Saturday night the life of the President of the French Republic was

taken by an Italian assassin. Last night a mob surrounded our hotel,

shouting, howling, singing the "Marseillaise," and pelting our windows

with sticks and stones; for we have Italian waiters, and the mob demanded

that they be turned out of the house instantly--to be drubbed, and then

driven out of the village. Everybody in the hotel remained up until far

into the night, and experienced the several kinds of terror which one

reads about in books which tell of nigh attacks by Italians and by French

mobs: the growing roar of the oncoming crowd; the arrival, with rain of

stones and a crash of glass; the withdrawal to rearrange plans--followed

by a silence ominous, threatening, and harder to bear than even the

active siege and the noise. The landlord and the two village policemen

stood their ground, and at last the mob was persuaded to go away and

leave our Italians in peace. Today four of the ringleaders have been

sentenced to heavy punishment of a public sort--and are become local

heroes, by consequence.

That is the very mistake which was at first made in the Missourian

village half a century ago. The mistake was repeated and repeated--just

as France is doing in these later months.

In our village we had our Ravochals, our Henrys, our Vaillants; and in a

humble way our Cesario--I hope I have spelled this name wrong. Fifty

years ago we passed through, in all essentials, what France has been

passing through during the past two or three years, in the matter of

periodical frights, horrors, and shudderings.

In several details the parallels are quaintly exact. In that day, for a

man to speak out openly and proclaim himself an enemy of negro slavery

was simply to proclaim himself a madman. For he was blaspheming against

the holiest thing known to a Missourian, and could NOT be in his right

mind. For a man to proclaim himself an anarchist in France, three years

ago, was to proclaim himself a madman--he could not be in his right mind.

Now the original first blasphemer against any institution profoundly

venerated by a community is quite sure to be in earnest; his followers

and imitators may be humbugs and self-seekers, but he himself is

sincere--his heart is in his protest.

Robert Hardy was our first ABOLITIONIST--awful name! He was a journeyman

cooper, and worked in the big cooper-shop belonging to the great

pork-packing establishment which was Marion City's chief pride and sole

source of prosperity. He was a New-Englander, a stranger. And, being a

stranger, he was of course regarded as an inferior person--for that has

been human nature from Adam down--and of course, also, he was made to

feel unwelcome, for this is the ancient law with man and the other

animals. Hardy was thirty years old, and a bachelor; pale, given to

reverie and reading. He was reserved, and seemed to prefer the isolation

which had fallen to his lot. He was treated to many side remarks by his

fellows, but as he did not resent them it was decided that he was a

coward.

All of a sudden he proclaimed himself an abolitionist--straight out and

publicly! He said that negro slavery was a crime, an infamy. For a

moment the town was paralyzed with astonishment; then it broke into a

fury of rage and swarmed toward the cooper-shop to lynch Hardy. But the

Methodist minister made a powerful speech to them and stayed their hands.

He proved to them that Hardy was insane and not responsible for his

words; that no man COULD be sane and utter such words.

So Hardy was saved. Being insane, he was allowed to go on talking. He

was found to be good entertainment. Several nights running he made

abolition speeches in the open air, and all the town flocked to hear and

laugh. He implored them to believe him sane and sincere, and have pity

on the poor slaves, and take measurements for the restoration of their

stolen rights, or in no long time blood would flow--blood, blood, rivers

of blood!

It was great fun. But all of a sudden the aspect of things changed. A

slave came flying from Palmyra, the county-seat, a few miles back, and

was about to escape in a canoe to Illinois and freedom in the dull

twilight of the approaching dawn, when the town constable seized him.

Hardy happened along and tried to rescue the negro; there was a struggle,

and the constable did not come out of it alive. Hardly crossed the river

with the negro, and then came back to give himself up. All this took

time, for the Mississippi is not a French brook, like the Seine, the

Loire, and those other rivulets, but is a real river nearly a mile wide.

The town was on hand in force by now, but the Methodist preacher and the

sheriff had already made arrangements in the interest of order; so Hardy

was surrounded by a strong guard and safely conveyed to the village

calaboose in spite of all the effort of the mob to get hold of him. The

reader will have begun to perceive that this Methodist minister was a

prompt man; a prompt man, with active hands and a good headpiece.

Williams was his name--Damon Williams; Damon Williams in public,

Damnation Williams in private, because he was so powerful on that theme

and so frequent.

The excitement was prodigious. The constable was the first man who had

ever been killed in the town. The event was by long odds the most

imposing in the town's history. It lifted the humble village into sudden

importance; its name was in everybody's mouth for twenty miles around.

And so was the name of Robert Hardy--Robert Hardy, the stranger, the

despised. In a day he was become the person of most consequence in the

region, the only person talked about. As to those other coopers, they

found their position curiously changed--they were important people, or

unimportant, now, in proportion as to how large or how small had been

their intercourse with the new celebrity. The two or three who had

really been on a sort of familiar footing with him found themselves

objects of admiring interest with the public and of envy with their

shopmates.

The village weekly journal had lately gone into new hands. The new man

was an enterprising fellow, and he made the most of the tragedy. He

issued an extra. Then he put up posters promising to devote his whole

paper to matters connected with the great event--there would be a full

and intensely interesting biography of the murderer, and even a portrait

of him. He was as good as his word. He carved the portrait himself, on

the back of a wooden type--and a terror it was to look at. It made a

great commotion, for this was the first time the village paper had ever

contained a picture. The village was very proud. The output of the

paper was ten times as great as it had ever been before, yet every copy

was sold.

When the trial came on, people came from all the farms around, and from

Hannibal, and Quincy, and even from Keokuk; and the court-house could

hold only a fraction of the crowd that applied for admission. The trial

was published in the village paper, with fresh and still more trying

pictures of the accused.

Hardy was convicted, and hanged--a mistake. People came from miles

around to see the hanging; they brought cakes and cider, also the women

and children, and made a picnic of the matter. It was the largest crowd

the village had ever seen. The rope that hanged Hardy was eagerly bought

up, in inch samples, for everybody wanted a memento of the memorable

event.

Martyrdom gilded with notoriety has its fascinations. Within one week

afterward four young lightweights in the village proclaimed themselves

abolitionists! In life Hardy had not been able to make a convert;

everybody laughed at him; but nobody could laugh at his legacy. The four

swaggered around with their slouch-hats pulled down over their faces, and

hinted darkly at awful possibilities. The people were troubled and

afraid, and showed it. And they were stunned, too; they could not

understand it. "Abolitionist" had always been a term of shame and

horror; yet here were four young men who were not only not ashamed to

bear that name, but were grimly proud of it. Respectable young men they

were, too--of good families, and brought up in the church. Ed Smith, the

printer's apprentice, nineteen, had been the head Sunday-school boy, and

had once recited three thousand Bible verses without making a break.

Dick Savage, twenty, the baker's apprentice; Will Joyce, twenty-two,

journeyman blacksmith; and Henry Taylor, twenty-four,

tobacco-stemmer--were the other three. They were all of a sentimental

cast; they were all romance-readers; they all wrote poetry, such as it

was; they were all vain and foolish; but they had never before been

suspected of having anything bad in them.

They withdrew from society, and grew more and more mysterious and

dreadful. They presently achieved the distinction of being denounced by

names from the pulpit--which made an immense stir! This was grandeur,

this was fame. They were envied by all the other young fellows now.

This was natural. Their company grew--grew alarmingly. They took a name.

It was a secret name, and was divulged to no outsider; publicly they were

simply the abolitionists. They had pass-words, grips, and signs; they

had secret meetings; their initiations were conducted with gloomy pomps

and ceremonies, at midnight.

They always spoke of Hardy as "the Martyr," and every little while they

moved through the principal street in procession--at midnight,

black-robed, masked, to the measured tap of the solemn drum--on

pilgrimage to the Martyr's grave, where they went through with some

majestic fooleries and swore vengeance upon his murderers. They gave

previous notice of the pilgrimage by small posters, and warned everybody

to keep indoors and darken all houses along the route, and leave the road

empty. These warnings were obeyed, for there was a skull and crossbones

at the top of the poster.

When this kind of thing had been going on about eight weeks, a quite

natural thing happened. A few men of character and grit woke up out of

the nightmare of fear which had been stupefying their faculties, and

began to discharge scorn and scoffings at themselves and the community

for enduring this child's-play; and at the same time they proposed to end

it straightway. Everybody felt an uplift; life was breathed into their

dead spirits; their courage rose and they began to feel like men again.

This was on a Saturday. All day the new feeling grew and strengthened;

it grew with a rush; it brought inspiration and cheer with it. Midnight

saw a united community, full of zeal and pluck, and with a clearly

defined and welcome piece of work in front of it. The best organizer and

strongest and bitterest talker on that great Saturday was the

Presbyterian clergyman who had denounced the original four from his

pulpit--Rev. Hiram Fletcher--and he promised to use his pulpit in the

public interest again now. On the morrow he had revelations to make, he

said--secrets of the dreadful society.

But the revelations were never made. At half past two in the morning the

dead silence of the village was broken by a crashing explosion, and the

town patrol saw the preacher's house spring in a wreck of whirling

fragments into the sky. The preacher was killed, together with a negro

woman, his only slave and servant.

The town was paralyzed again, and with reason. To struggle against a

visible enemy is a thing worth while, and there is a plenty of men who

stand always ready to undertake it; but to struggle against an invisible

one--an invisible one who sneaks in and does his awful work in the dark

and leaves no trace--that is another matter. That is a thing to make the

bravest tremble and hold back.

The cowed populace were afraid to go to the funeral. The man who was to

have had a packed church to hear him expose and denounce the common enemy

had but a handful to see him buried. The coroner's jury had brought in a

verdict of "death by the visitation of God," for no witness came forward;

if any existed they prudently kept out of the way. Nobody seemed sorry.

Nobody wanted to see the terrible secret society provoked into the

commission of further outrages. Everybody wanted the tragedy hushed up,

ignored, forgotten, if possible.

And so there was a bitter surprise and an unwelcome one when Will Joyce,

the blacksmith's journeyman, came out and proclaimed himself the

assassin! Plainly he was not minded to be robbed of his glory. He made

his proclamation, and stuck to it. Stuck to it, and insisted upon a

trial. Here was an ominous thing; here was a new and peculiarly

formidable terror, for a motive was revealed here which society could not

hope to deal with successfully--VANITY, thirst for notoriety. If men

were going to kill for notoriety's sake, and to win the glory of

newspaper renown, a big trial, and a showy execution, what possible

invention of man could discourage or deter them? The town was in a sort

of panic; it did not know what to do.

However, the grand jury had to take hold of the matter--it had no choice.

It brought in a true bill, and presently the case went to the county

court. The trial was a fine sensation. The prisoner was the principal

witness for the prosecution. He gave a full account of the

assassination; he furnished even the minutest particulars: how he

deposited his keg of powder and laid his train--from the house to

such-and-such a spot; how George Ronalds and Henry Hart came along just

then, smoking, and he borrowed Hart's cigar and fired the train with it,

shouting, "Down with all slave-tyrants!" and how Hart and Ronalds made no

effort to capture him, but ran away, and had never come forward to

testify yet.

But they had to testify now, and they did--and pitiful it was to see how

reluctant they were, and how scared. The crowded house listened to

Joyce's fearful tale with a profound and breathless interest, and in a

deep hush which was not broken till he broke it himself, in concluding,

with a roaring repetition of his "Death to all slave-tyrants!"--which

came so unexpectedly and so startlingly that it made everyone present

catch his breath and gasp.

The trial was put in the paper, with biography and large portrait, with

other slanderous and insane pictures, and the edition sold beyond

imagination.

The execution of Joyce was a fine and picturesque thing. It drew a vast

crowd. Good places in trees and seats on rail fences sold for half a

dollar apiece; lemonade and gingerbread-stands had great prosperity.

Joyce recited a furious and fantastic and denunciatory speech on the

scaffold which had imposing passages of school-boy eloquence in it, and

gave him a reputation on the spot as an orator, and his name, later, in

the society's records, of the "Martyr Orator." He went to his death

breathing slaughter and charging his society to "avenge his murder." If

he knew anything of human nature he knew that to plenty of young fellows

present in that great crowd he was a grand hero--and enviably situated.

He was hanged. It was a mistake. Within a month from his death the

society which he had honored had twenty new members, some of them

earnest, determined men. They did not court distinction in the same way,

but they celebrated his martyrdom. The crime which had been obscure and

despised had become lofty and glorified.

Such things were happening all over the country. Wild-brained martyrdom

was succeeded by uprising and organization. Then, in natural order,

followed riot, insurrection, and the wrack and restitutions of war. It

was bound to come, and it would naturally come in that way. It has been

the manner of reform since the beginning of the world.

SWITZERLAND, THE CRADLE OF LIBERTY

Interlaken, Switzerland, 1891.

It is a good many years since I was in Switzerland last. In that remote

time there was only one ladder railway in the country. That state of

things is all changed. There isn't a mountain in Switzerland now that

hasn't a ladder railroad or two up its back like suspenders; indeed, some

mountains are latticed with them, and two years hence all will be. In

that day the peasant of the high altitudes will have to carry a lantern

when he goes visiting in the night to keep from stumbling over railroads

that have been built since his last round. And also in that day, if

there shall remain a high-altitude peasant whose potato-patch hasn't a

railroad through it, it would make him as conspicuous as William Tell.

However, there are only two best ways to travel through Switzerland. The

first best is afloat. The second best is by open two-horse carriage.

One can come from Lucerne to Interlaken over the Brunig by ladder

railroad in an hour or so now, but you can glide smoothly in a carriage

in ten, and have two hours for luncheon at noon--for luncheon, not for

rest. There is no fatigue connected with the trip. One arrives fresh in

spirit and in person in the evening--no fret in his heart, no grime on

his face, no grit in his hair, not a cinder in his eye. This is the

right condition of mind and body, the right and due preparation for the

solemn event which closed the day--stepping with metaphorically uncovered

head into the presence of the most impressive mountain mass that the

globe can show--the Jungfrau. The stranger's first feeling, when suddenly

confronted by that towering and awful apparition wrapped in its shroud of

snow, is breath-taking astonishment. It is as if heaven's gates had

swung open and exposed the throne.

It is peaceful here and pleasant at Interlaken. Nothing going on--at

least nothing but brilliant life-giving sunshine. There are floods and

floods of that. One may properly speak of it as "going on," for it is

full of the suggestion of activity; the light pours down with energy,

with visible enthusiasm. This is a good atmosphere to be in, morally as

well as physically. After trying the political atmosphere of the

neighboring monarchies, it is healing and refreshing to breathe air that

has known no taint of slavery for six hundred years, and to come among a

people whose political history is great and fine, and worthy to be taught

in all schools and studied by all races and peoples. For the struggle

here throughout the centuries has not been in the interest of any private

family, or any church, but in the interest of the whole body of the

nation, and for shelter and protection of all forms of belief. This fact

is colossal. If one would realize how colossal it is, and of what

dignity and majesty, let him contrast it with the purposes and objects of

the Crusades, the siege of York, the War of the Roses, and other historic

comedies of that sort and size.

Last week I was beating around the Lake of Four Cantons, and I saw Rutli

and Altorf. Rutli is a remote little patch of meadow, but I do not know

how any piece of ground could be holier or better worth crossing oceans

and continents to see, since it was there that the great trinity of

Switzerland joined hands six centuries ago and swore the oath which set

their enslaved and insulted country forever free; and Altorf is also

honorable ground and worshipful, since it was there that William,

surnamed Tell (which interpreted means "The foolish talker"--that is to

say, the too-daring talker), refused to bow to Gessler's hat. Of late

years the prying student of history has been delighting himself beyond

measure over a wonderful find which he has made--to wit, that Tell did

not shoot the apple from his son's head. To hear the students jubilate,

one would suppose that the question of whether Tell shot the apple or

didn't was an important matter; whereas it ranks in importance exactly

with the question of whether Washington chopped down the cherry-tree or

didn't. The deeds of Washington, the patriot, are the essential thing;

the cherry-tree incident is of no consequence. To prove that Tell did

shoot the apple from his son's head would merely prove that he had better

nerve than most men and was skillful with a bow as a million others who

preceded and followed him, but not one whit more so. But Tell was more

and better than a mere marksman, more and better than a mere cool head;

he was a type; he stands for Swiss patriotism; in his person was

represented a whole people; his spirit was their spirit--the spirit which

would bow to none but God, the spirit which said this in words and

confirmed it with deeds. There have always been Tells in

Switzerland--people who would not bow. There was a sufficiency of them

at Rutli; there were plenty of them at Murten; plenty at Grandson; there

are plenty today. And the first of them all--the very first, earliest

banner-bearer of human freedom in this world--was not a man, but a

woman--Stauffacher's wife. There she looms dim and great, through the

haze of the centuries, delivering into her husband's ear that gospel of

revolt which was to bear fruit in the conspiracy of Rutli and the birth

of the first free government the world had ever seen.

From this Victoria Hotel one looks straight across a flat of trifling

width to a lofty mountain barrier, which has a gateway in it shaped like

an inverted pyramid. Beyond this gateway arises the vast bulk of the

Jungfrau, a spotless mass of gleaming snow, into the sky. The gateway,

in the dark-colored barrier, makes a strong frame for the great picture.

The somber frame and the glowing snow-pile are startlingly contrasted.

It is this frame which concentrates and emphasizes the glory of the

Jungfrau and makes it the most engaging and beguiling and fascinating

spectacle that exists on the earth. There are many mountains of snow

that are as lofty as the Jungfrau and as nobly proportioned, but they

lack the fame. They stand at large; they are intruded upon and elbowed

by neighboring domes and summits, and their grandeur is diminished and

fails of effect.

It is a good name, Jungfrau--Virgin. Nothing could be whiter; nothing

could be purer; nothing could be saintlier of aspect. At six yesterday

evening the great intervening barrier seen through a faint bluish haze

seemed made of air and substanceless, so soft and rich it was, so

shimmering where the wandering lights touched it and so dim where the

shadows lay. Apparently it was a dream stuff, a work of the imagination,

nothing real about it. The tint was green, slightly varying shades of

it, but mainly very dark. The sun was down--as far as that barrier was

concerned, but not for the Jungfrau, towering into the heavens beyond the

gateway. She was a roaring conflagration of blinding white.

It is said the Fridolin (the old Fridolin), a new saint, but formerly a

missionary, gave the mountain its gracious name. He was an Irishman, son

of an Irish king--there were thirty thousand kings reigning in County

Cork alone in his time, fifteen hundred years ago. It got so that they

could not make a living, there was so much competition and wages got cut

so. Some of them were out of work months at a time, with wife and little

children to feed, and not a crust in the place. At last a particularly

severe winter fell upon the country, and hundreds of them were reduced to

mendicancy and were to be seen day after day in the bitterest weather,

standing barefoot in the snow, holding out their crowns for alms.

Indeed, they would have been obliged to emigrate or starve but for a

fortunate idea of Prince Fridolin's, who started a labor-union, the first

one in history, and got the great bulk of them to join it. He thus won

the general gratitude, and they wanted to make him emperor--emperor over

them all--emperor of County Cork, but he said, No, walking delegate was

good enough for him. For behold! he was modest beyond his years, and

keen as a whip. To this day in Germany and Switzerland, where St.

Fridolin is revered and honored, the peasantry speak of him

affectionately as the first walking delegate.

The first walk he took was into France and Germany, missionarying--for

missionarying was a better thing in those days than it is in ours. All

you had to do was to cure the savage's sick daughter by a "miracle"--a

miracle like the miracle of Lourdes in our day, for instance--and

immediately that head savage was your convert, and filled to the eyes

with a new convert's enthusiasm. You could sit down and make yourself

easy, now. He would take an ax and convert the rest of the nation

himself. Charlemagne was that kind of a walking delegate.

Yes, there were great missionaries in those days, for the methods were

sure and the rewards great. We have no such missionaries now, and no

such methods.

But to continue the history of the first walking delegate, if you are

interested. I am interested myself because I have seen his relics in

Sackingen, and also the very spot where he worked his great miracle--the

one which won him his sainthood in the papal court a few centuries later.

To have seen these things makes me feel very near to him, almost like a

member of the family, in fact. While wandering about the Continent he

arrived at the spot on the Rhine which is now occupied by Sackingen, and

proposed to settle there, but the people warned him off. He appealed to

the king of the Franks, who made him a present of the whole region,

people and all. He built a great cloister there for women and proceeded

to teach in it and accumulate more land. There were two wealthy brothers

in the neighborhood, Urso and Landulph. Urso died and Fridolin claimed

his estates. Landulph asked for documents and papers. Fridolin had none

to show. He said the bequest had been made to him by word of mouth.

Landulph suggested that he produce a witness and said it in a way which

he thought was very witty, very sarcastic. This shows that he did not

know the walking delegate. Fridolin was not disturbed. He said:

"Appoint your court. I will bring a witness."

The court thus created consisted of fifteen counts and barons. A day was

appointed for the trial of the case. On that day the judges took their

seats in state, and proclamation was made that the court was ready for

business. Five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes passed, and yet no

Fridolin appeared. Landulph rose, and was in the act of claiming judgment

by default when a strange clacking sound was heard coming up the stairs.

In another moment Fridolin entered at the door and came walking in a deep

hush down the middle aisle, with a tall skeleton stalking in his rear.

Amazement and terror sat upon every countenance, for everybody suspected

that the skeleton was Urso's. It stopped before the chief judge and

raised its bony arm aloft and began to speak, while all the assembled

shuddered, for they could see the words leak out between its ribs. It

said:

"Brother, why dost thou disturb my blessed rest and withhold by robbery

the gift which I gave thee for the honor of God?"

It seems a strange thing and most irregular, but the verdict was actually

given against Landulph on the testimony of this wandering rack-heap of

unidentified bones. In our day a skeleton would not be allowed to

testify at all, for a skeleton has no moral responsibility, and its word

could not be believed on oath, and this was probably one of them.

However, the incident is valuable as preserving to us a curious sample of

the quaint laws of evidence of that remote time--a time so remote, so far

back toward the beginning of original idiocy, that the difference between

a bench of judges and a basket of vegetables was as yet so slight that we

may say with all confidence that it didn't really exist.

During several afternoons I have been engaged in an interesting, maybe

useful, piece of work--that is to say, I have been trying to make the

mighty Jungfrau earn her living--earn it in a most humble sphere, but on

a prodigious scale, on a prodigious scale of necessity, for she couldn't

do anything in a small way with her size and style. I have been trying

to make her do service on a stupendous dial and check off the hours as

they glide along her pallid face up there against the sky, and tell the

time of day to the populations lying within fifty miles of her and to the

people in the moon, if they have a good telescope there.

Until late in the afternoon the Jungfrau's aspect is that of a spotless

desert of snow set upon edge against the sky. But by mid-afternoon some

elevations which rise out of the western border of the desert, whose

presence you perhaps had not detected or suspected up to that time, began

to cast black shadows eastward across the gleaming surface. At first

there is only one shadow; later there are two. Toward 4 P.M. the other

day I was gazing and worshiping as usual when I chanced to notice that

shadow No. 1 was beginning to take itself something of the shape of the

human profile. By four the back of the head was good, the military cap

was pretty good, the nose was bold and strong, the upper lip sharp, but

not pretty, and there was a great goatee that shot straight aggressively

forward from the chin.

At four-thirty the nose had changed its shape considerably, and the

altered slant of the sun had revealed and made conspicuous a huge

buttress or barrier of naked rock which was so located as to answer very

well for a shoulder or coat-collar to this swarthy and indiscreet

sweetheart who had stolen out there right before everybody to pillow his

head on the Virgin's white breast and whisper soft sentimentalities to

her in the sensuous music of the crashing ice-domes and the boom and

thunder of the passing avalanche--music very familiar to his ear, for he

had heard it every afternoon at this hour since the day he first came

courting this child of the earth, who lives in the sky, and that day is

far, yes--for he was at this pleasant sport before the Middle Ages

drifted by him in the valley; before the Romans marched past, and before

the antique and recordless barbarians fished and hunted here and wondered

who he might be, and were probably afraid of him; and before primeval man

himself, just emerged from his four-footed estate, stepped out upon this

plain, first sample of his race, a thousand centuries ago, and cast a

glad eye up there, judging he had found a brother human being and

consequently something to kill; and before the big saurians wallowed

here, still some eons earlier. Oh yes, a day so far back that the

eternal son was present to see that first visit; a day so far back that

neither tradition nor history was born yet and a whole weary eternity

must come and go before the restless little creature, of whose face this

stupendous Shadow Face was the prophecy, would arrive in the earth and

begin his shabby career and think of a big thing. Oh, indeed yes; when

you talk about your poor Roman and Egyptian day-before-yesterday

antiquities, you should choose a time when the hoary Shadow Face of the

Jungfrau is not by. It antedates all antiquities known or imaginable;

for it was here the world itself created the theater of future

antiquities. And it is the only witness with a human face that was there

to see the marvel, and remains to us a memorial of it.

By 4:40 P.M. the nose of the shadow is perfect and is beautiful. It is

black and is powerfully marked against the upright canvas of glowing

snow, and covers hundreds of acres of that resplendent surface.

Meantime shadow No. 2 has been creeping out well to the rear of the face

west of it--and at five o'clock has assumed a shape that has rather a

poor and rude semblance of a shoe.

Meantime, also, the great Shadow Face has been gradually changing for

twenty minutes, and now, 5 P.M., it is becoming a quite fair portrait of

Roscoe Conkling. The likeness is there, and is unmistakable. The goatee

is shortened, now, and has an end; formerly it hadn't any, but ran off

eastward and arrived nowhere.

By 6 P.M. the face has dissolved and gone, and the goatee has become what

looks like the shadow of a tower with a pointed roof, and the shoe had

turned into what the printers call a "fist" with a finger pointing.

If I were now imprisoned on a mountain summit a hundred miles northward

of this point, and was denied a timepiece, I could get along well enough

from four till six on clear days, for I could keep trace of the time by

the changing shapes of these mighty shadows of the Virgin's front, the

most stupendous dial I am acquainted with, the oldest clock in the world

by a couple of million years.

I suppose I should not have noticed the forms of the shadows if I hadn't

the habit of hunting for faces in the clouds and in mountain crags--a

sort of amusement which is very entertaining even when you don't find

any, and brilliantly satisfying when you do. I have searched through

several bushels of photographs of the Jungfrau here, but found only one

with the Face in it, and in this case it was not strictly recognizable as

a face, which was evidence that the picture was taken before four o'clock

in the afternoon, and also evidence that all the photographers have

persistently overlooked one of the most fascinating features of the

Jungfrau show. I say fascinating, because if you once detect a human

face produced on a great plan by unconscious nature, you never get tired

of watching it. At first you can't make another person see it at all,

but after he has made it out once he can't see anything else afterward.

The King of Greece is a man who goes around quietly enough when off

duty. One day this summer he was traveling in an ordinary first-class

compartment, just in his other suit, the one which he works the realm in

when he is at home, and so he was not looking like anybody in particular,

but a good deal like everybody in general. By and by a hearty and

healthy German-American got in and opened up a frank and interesting and

sympathetic conversation with him, and asked him a couple of thousand

questions about himself, which the king answered good-naturedly, but in a

more or less indefinite way as to private particulars.

"Where do you live when you are at home?"

"In Greece."

"Greece! Well, now, that is just astonishing! Born there?"

"No."

"Do you speak Greek?"

"Yes."

"Now, ain't that strange! I never expected to live to see that. What is

your trade? I mean how do you get your living? What is your line of

business?"

"Well, I hardly know how to answer. I am only a kind of foreman, on a

salary; and the business--well, is a very general kind of business."

"Yes, I understand--general jobbing--little of everything--anything that

there's money in."

"That's about it, yes."

"Are you traveling for the house now?"

"Well, partly; but not entirely. Of course I do a stroke of business if

it falls in the way--"

"Good! I like that in you! That's me every time. Go on."

"I was only going to say I am off on my vacation now."

"Well that's all right. No harm in that. A man works all the better for

a little let-up now and then. Not that I've been used to having it

myself; for I haven't. I reckon this is my first. I was born in

Germany, and when I was a couple of weeks old shipped to America, and

I've been there ever since, and that's sixty-four years by the watch.

I'm an American in principle and a German at heart, and it's the boss

combination. Well, how do you get along, as a rule--pretty fair?"

"I've a rather large family--"

"There, that's it--big family and trying to raise them on a salary. Now,

what did you go to do that for?"

"Well, I thought--"

"Of course you did. You were young and confident and thought you could

branch out and make things go with a whirl, and here you are, you see!

But never mind about that. I'm not trying to discourage you. Dear me!

I've been just where you are myself! You've got good grit; there's good

stuff in you, I can see that. You got a wrong start, that's the whole

trouble. But you hold your grip, and we'll see what can be done. Your

case ain't half as bad as it might be. You are going to come out all

right--I'm bail for that. Boys and girls?"

"My family? Yes, some of them are boys--"

"And the rest girls. It's just as I expected. But that's all right, and

it's better so, anyway. What are the boys doing--learning a trade?"

"Well, no--I thought--"

"It's a big mistake. It's the biggest mistake you ever made. You see

that in your own case. A man ought always to have a trade to fall back

on. Now, I was harness-maker at first. Did that prevent me from

becoming one of the biggest brewers in America? Oh no. I always had the

harness trick to fall back on in rough weather. Now, if you had learned

how to make harness--However, it's too late now; too late. But it's no

good plan to cry over spilt milk. But as to the boys, you see--what's to

become of them if anything happens to you?"

"It has been my idea to let the eldest one succeed me--"

"Oh, come! Suppose the firm don't want him?"

"I hadn't thought of that, but--"

"Now, look here; you want to get right down to business and stop

dreaming. You are capable of immense things--man. You can make a

perfect success in life. All you want is somebody to steady you and

boost you along on the right road. Do you own anything in the business?"

"No--not exactly; but if I continue to give satisfaction, I suppose I can

keep my--"

"Keep your place--yes. Well, don't you depend on anything of the kind.

They'll bounce you the minute you get a little old and worked out;

they'll do it sure. Can't you manage somehow to get into the firm?

That's the great thing, you know."

"I think it is doubtful; very doubtful."

"Um--that's bad--yes, and unfair, too. Do you suppose that if I should

go there and have a talk with your people--Look here--do you think you

could run a brewery?"

"I have never tried, but I think I could do it after a little familiarity

with the business."

The German was silent for some time. He did a good deal of thinking, and

the king waited curiously to see what the result was going to be.

Finally the German said:

"My mind's made up. You leave that crowd--you'll never amount to

anything there. In these old countries they never give a fellow a show.

Yes, you come over to America--come to my place in Rochester; bring the

family along. You shall have a show in the business and the foremanship,

besides. George--you said your name was George?--I'll make a man of you.

I give you my word. You've never had a chance here, but that's all going

to change. By gracious! I'll give you a lift that'll make your hair

curl!"

AT THE SHRINE OF ST. WAGNER

Bayreuth, Aug. 2d, 1891

It was at Nuremberg that we struck the inundation of music-mad strangers

that was rolling down upon Bayreuth. It had been long since we had seen

such multitudes of excited and struggling people. It took a good

half-hour to pack them and pair them into the train--and it was the

longest train we have yet seen in Europe. Nuremberg had been witnessing

this sort of experience a couple of times a day for about two weeks. It

gives one an impressive sense of the magnitude of this biennial

pilgrimage. For a pilgrimage is what it is. The devotees come from the

very ends of the earth to worship their prophet in his own Kaaba in his

own Mecca.

If you are living in New York or San Francisco or Chicago or anywhere

else in America, and you conclude, by the middle of May, that you would

like to attend the Bayreuth opera two months and a half later, you must

use the cable and get about it immediately or you will get no seats, and

you must cable for lodgings, too. Then if you are lucky you will get

seats in the last row and lodgings in the fringe of the town. If you

stop to write you will get nothing. There were plenty of people in

Nuremberg when we passed through who had come on pilgrimage without first

securing seats and lodgings. They had found neither in Bayreuth; they

had walked Bayreuth streets a while in sorrow, then had gone to Nuremberg

and found neither beds nor standing room, and had walked those quaint

streets all night, waiting for the hotels to open and empty their guests

into trains, and so make room for these, their defeated brethren and

sisters in the faith. They had endured from thirty to forty hours'

railroading on the continent of Europe--with all which that implies of

worry, fatigue, and financial impoverishment--and all they had got and

all they were to get for it was handiness and accuracy in kicking

themselves, acquired by practice in the back streets of the two towns

when other people were in bed; for back they must go over that

unspeakable journey with their pious mission unfulfilled. These

humiliated outcasts had the frowsy and unbrushed and apologetic look of

wet cats, and their eyes were glazed with drowsiness, their bodies were

adroop from crown to sole, and all kind-hearted people refrained from

asking them if they had been to Bayreuth and failed to connect, as

knowing they would lie.

We reached here (Bayreuth) about mid-afternoon of a rainy Saturday. We

were of the wise, and had secured lodgings and opera seats months in

advance.

I am not a musical critic, and did not come here to write essays about

the operas and deliver judgment upon their merits. The little children of

Bayreuth could do that with a finer sympathy and a broader intelligence

than I. I only care to bring four or five pilgrims to the operas,

pilgrims able to appreciate them and enjoy them. What I write about the

performance to put in my odd time would be offered to the public as

merely a cat's view of a king, and not of didactic value.

Next day, which was Sunday, we left for the opera-house--that is to say,

the Wagner temple--a little after the middle of the afternoon. The great

building stands all by itself, grand and lonely, on a high ground outside

the town. We were warned that if we arrived after four o'clock we should

be obliged to pay two dollars and a half extra by way of fine. We saved

that; and it may be remarked here that this is the only opportunity that

Europe offers of saving money. There was a big crowd in the grounds

about the building, and the ladies' dresses took the sun with fine

effect. I do not mean to intimate that the ladies were in full dress,

for that was not so. The dresses were pretty, but neither sex was in

evening dress.

The interior of the building is simple--severely so; but there is no

occasion for color and decoration, since the people sit in the dark. The

auditorium has the shape of a keystone, with the stage at the narrow end.

There is an aisle on each side, but no aisle in the body of the house.

Each row of seats extends in an unbroken curve from one side of the house

to the other. There are seven entrance doors on each side of the theater

and four at the butt, eighteen doors to admit and emit 1,650 persons.

The number of the particular door by which you are to enter the house or

leave it is printed on your ticket, and you can use no door but that one.

Thus, crowding and confusion are impossible. Not so many as a hundred

people use any one door. This is better than having the usual (and

useless) elaborate fireproof arrangements. It is the model theater of

the world. It can be emptied while the second hand of a watch makes its

circuit. It would be entirely safe, even if it were built of lucifer

matches.

If your seat is near the center of a row and you enter late you must work

your way along a rank of about twenty-five ladies and gentlemen to get to

it. Yet this causes no trouble, for everybody stands up until all the

seats are full, and the filling is accomplished in a very few minutes.

Then all sit down, and you have a solid mass of fifteen hundred heads,

making a steep cellar-door slant from the rear of the house down to the

stage.

All the lights were turned low, so low that the congregation sat in a

deep and solemn gloom. The funereal rustling of dresses and the low buzz

of conversation began to die swiftly down, and presently not the ghost of

a sound was left. This profound and increasingly impressive stillness

endured for some time--the best preparation for music, spectacle, or

speech conceivable. I should think our show people would have invented

or imported that simple and impressive device for securing and

solidifying the attention of an audience long ago; instead of which there

continue to this day to open a performance against a deadly competition

in the form of noise, confusion, and a scattered interest.

Finally, out of darkness and distance and mystery soft rich notes rose

upon the stillness, and from his grave the dead magician began to weave

his spells about his disciples and steep their souls in his enchantments.

There was something strangely impressive in the fancy which kept

intruding itself that the composer was conscious in his grave of what was

going on here, and that these divine souls were the clothing of thoughts

which were at this moment passing through his brain, and not recognized

and familiar ones which had issued from it at some former time.

The entire overture, long as it was, was played to a dark house with the

curtain down. It was exquisite; it was delicious. But straightway

thereafter, or course, came the singing, and it does seem to me that

nothing can make a Wagner opera absolutely perfect and satisfactory to

the untutored but to leave out the vocal parts. I wish I could see a

Wagner opera done in pantomime once. Then one would have the lovely

orchestration unvexed to listen to and bathe his spirit in, and the

bewildering beautiful scenery to intoxicate his eyes with, and the dumb

acting couldn't mar these pleasures, because there isn't often anything

in the Wagner opera that one would call by such a violent name as acting;

as a rule all you would see would be a couple of silent people, one of

them standing still, the other catching flies. Of course I do not really

mean that he would be catching flies; I only mean that the usual operatic

gestures which consist in reaching first one hand out into the air and

then the other might suggest the sport I speak of if the operator

attended strictly to business and uttered no sound.

This present opera was "Parsifal." Madame Wagner does not permit its

representation anywhere but in Bayreuth. The first act of the three

occupied two hours, and I enjoyed that in spite of the singing.

I trust that I know as well as anybody that singing is one of the most

entrancing and bewitching and moving and eloquent of all the vehicles

invented by man for the conveying of feeling; but it seems to me that the

chief virtue in song is melody, air, tune, rhythm, or what you please to

call it, and that when this feature is absent what remains is a picture

with the color left out. I was not able to detect in the vocal parts of

"Parsifal" anything that might with confidence be called rhythm or tune

or melody; one person performed at a time--and a long time, too--often

in a noble, and always in a high-toned, voice; but he only pulled out

long notes, then some short ones, then another long one, then a sharp,

quick, peremptory bark or two--and so on and so on; and when he was done

you saw that the information which he had conveyed had not compensated

for the disturbance. Not always, but pretty often. If two of them would

but put in a duet occasionally and blend the voices; but no, they don't

do that. The great master, who knew so well how to make a hundred

instruments rejoice in unison and pour out their souls in mingled and

melodious tides of delicious sound, deals only in barren solos when he

puts in the vocal parts. It may be that he was deep, and only added the

singing to his operas for the sake of the contrast it would make with the

music. Singing! It does seem the wrong name to apply to it. Strictly

described, it is a practicing of difficult and unpleasant intervals,

mainly. An ignorant person gets tired of listening to gymnastic

intervals in the long run, no matter how pleasant they may be. In

"Parsifal" there is a hermit named Gurnemanz who stands on the stage in

one spot and practices by the hour, while first one and then another

character of the cast endures what he can of it and then retires to die.

During the evening there was an intermission of three-quarters of an hour

after the first act and one an hour long after the second. In both

instances the theater was totally emptied. People who had previously

engaged tables in the one sole eating-house were able to put in their

time very satisfactorily; the other thousand went hungry. The opera was

concluded at ten in the evening or a little later. When we reached home

we had been gone more than seven hours. Seven hours at five dollars a

ticket is almost too much for the money.

While browsing about the front yard among the crowd between the acts I

encountered twelve or fifteen friends from different parts of America,

and those of them who were most familiar with Wagner said that "Parsifal"

seldom pleased at first, but that after one had heard it several times it

was almost sure to become a favorite. It seemed impossible, but it was

true, for the statement came from people whose word was not to be

doubted.

And I gathered some further information. On the ground I found part of a

German musical magazine, and in it a letter written by Uhlic thirty-three

years ago, in which he defends the scorned and abused Wagner against

people like me, who found fault with the comprehensive absence of what

our kind regards as singing. Uhlic says Wagner despised "JENE PLAPPERUDE

MUSIC," and therefore "runs, trills, and SCHNORKEL are discarded by him."

I don't know what a SCHNORKEL is, but now that I know it has been left

out of these operas I never have missed so much in my life. And Uhlic

further says that Wagner's song is true: that it is "simply emphasized

intoned speech." That certainly describes it--in "Parsifal" and some of

the operas; and if I understand Uhlic's elaborate German he apologizes

for the beautiful airs in "Tannh:auser." Very well; now that Wagner and

I understand each other, perhaps we shall get along better, and I shall

stop calling Waggner, on the American plan, and thereafter call him

Waggner as per German custom, for I feel entirely friendly now. The

minute we get reconciled to a person, how willing we are to throw aside

little needless puctilios and pronounce his name right!

Of course I came home wondering why people should come from all corners

of America to hear these operas, when we have lately had a season or two

of them in New York with these same singers in the several parts, and

possibly this same orchestra. I resolved to think that out at all

hazards.

TUESDAY.--Yesterday they played the only operatic favorite I have ever

had--an opera which has always driven me mad with ignorant delight

whenever I have heard it--"Tannh:auser." I heard it first when I was a

youth; I heard it last in the last German season in New York. I was busy

yesterday and I did not intend to go, knowing I should have another

"Tannh:auser" opportunity in a few days; but after five o'clock I found

myself free and walked out to the opera-house and arrived about the

beginning of the second act. My opera ticket admitted me to the grounds

in front, past the policeman and the chain, and I thought I would take a

rest on a bench for an hour and two and wait for the third act.

In a moment or so the first bugles blew, and the multitude began to

crumble apart and melt into the theater. I will explain that this

bugle-call is one of the pretty features here. You see, the theater is

empty, and hundreds of the audience are a good way off in the

feeding-house; the first bugle-call is blown about a quarter of an hour

before time for the curtain to rise. This company of buglers, in uniform,

march out with military step and send out over the landscape a few bars

of the theme of the approaching act, piercing the distances with the

gracious notes; then they march to the other entrance and repeat.

Presently they do this over again. Yesterday only about two hundred

people were still left in front of the house when the second call was

blown; in another half-minute they would have been in the house, but then

a thing happened which delayed them--the only solitary thing in this

world which could be relied on with certainty to accomplish it, I

suppose--an imperial princess appeared in the balcony above them. They

stopped dead in their tracks and began to gaze in a stupor of gratitude

and satisfaction. The lady presently saw that she must disappear or the

doors would be closed upon these worshipers, so she returned to her box.

This daughter-in-law of an emperor was pretty; she had a kind face; she

was without airs; she is known to be full of common human sympathies.

There are many kinds of princesses, but this kind is the most harmful of

all, for wherever they go they reconcile people to monarchy and set back

the clock of progress. The valuable princes, the desirable princes, are

the czars and their sort. By their mere dumb presence in the world they

cover with derision every argument that can be invented in favor of

royalty by the most ingenious casuist. In his time the husband of this

princess was valuable. He led a degraded life, he ended it with his own

hand in circumstances and surroundings of a hideous sort, and was buried

like a god.

In the opera-house there is a long loft back of the audience, a kind of

open gallery, in which princes are displayed. It is sacred to them; it is

the holy of holies. As soon as the filling of the house is about

complete the standing multitude turn and fix their eyes upon the princely

layout and gaze mutely and longingly and adoringly and regretfully like

sinners looking into heaven. They become rapt, unconscious, steeped in

worship. There is no spectacle anywhere that is more pathetic than this.

It is worth crossing many oceans to see. It is somehow not the same gaze

that people rivet upon a Victor Hugo, or Niagara, or the bones of the

mastodon, or the guillotine of the Revolution, or the great pyramid, or

distant Vesuvius smoking in the sky, or any man long celebrated to you by

his genius and achievements, or thing long celebrated to you by the

praises of books and pictures--no, that gaze is only the gaze of intense

curiosity, interest, wonder, engaged in drinking delicious deep draughts

that taste good all the way down and appease and satisfy the thirst of a

lifetime. Satisfy it--that is the word. Hugo and the mastodon will

still have a degree of intense interest thereafter when encountered, but

never anything approaching the ecstasy of that first view. The interest

of a prince is different. It may be envy, it may be worship, doubtless

it is a mixture of both--and it does not satisfy its thirst with one

view, or even noticeably diminish it. Perhaps the essence of the thing

is the value which men attach to a valuable something which has come by

luck and not been earned. A dollar picked up in the road is more

satisfaction to you than the ninety-and-nine which you had to work for,

and money won at faro or in stocks snuggles into your heart in the same

way. A prince picks up grandeur, power, and a permanent holiday and

gratis support by a pure accident, the accident of birth, and he stands

always before the grieved eye of poverty and obscurity a monumental

representative of luck. And then--supremest value of all-his is the only

high fortune on the earth which is secure. The commercial millionaire

may become a beggar; the illustrious statesman can make a vital mistake

and be dropped and forgotten; the illustrious general can lose a decisive

battle and with it the consideration of men; but once a prince always a

prince--that is to say, an imitation god, and neither hard fortune nor an

infamous character nor an addled brain nor the speech of an ass can

undeify him. By common consent of all the nations and all the ages the

most valuable thing in this world is the homage of men, whether deserved

or undeserved. It follows without doubt or question, then, that the most

desirable position possible is that of a prince. And I think it also

follows that the so-called usurpations with which history is littered are

the most excusable misdemeanors which men have committed. To usurp a

usurpation--that is all it amounts to, isn't it?

A prince is not to us what he is to a European, of course. We have not

been taught to regard him as a god, and so one good look at him is likely

to so nearly appease our curiosity as to make him an object of no greater

interest the next time. We want a fresh one. But it is not so with the

European. I am quite sure of it. The same old one will answer; he never

stales. Eighteen years ago I was in London and I called at an

Englishman's house on a bleak and foggy and dismal December afternoon to

visit his wife and married daughter by appointment. I waited half an hour

and then they arrived, frozen. They explained that they had been delayed

by an unlooked-for circumstance: while passing in the neighborhood of

Marlborough House they saw a crowd gathering and were told that the

Prince of Wales was about to drive out, so they stopped to get a sight of

him. They had waited half an hour on the sidewalk, freezing with the

crowd, but were disappointed at last--the Prince had changed his mind. I

said, with a good deal of surprise, "Is it possible that you two have

lived in London all your lives and have never seen the Prince of Wales?"

Apparently it was their turn to be surprised, for they exclaimed: "What

an idea! Why, we have seen him hundreds of times."

They had seem him hundreds of times, yet they had waited half an hour in

the gloom and the bitter cold, in the midst of a jam of patients from the

same asylum, on the chance of seeing him again. It was a stupefying

statement, but one is obliged to believe the English, even when they say

a thing like that. I fumbled around for a remark, and got out this one:

"I can't understand it at all. If I had never seen General Grant I doubt

if I would do that even to get a sight of him." With a slight emphasis on

the last word.

Their blank faces showed that they wondered where the parallel came in.

Then they said, blankly: "Of course not. He is only a President."

It is doubtless a fact that a prince is a permanent interest, an interest

not subject to deterioration. The general who was never defeated, the

general who never held a council of war, the only general who ever

commanded a connected battle-front twelve hundred miles long, the smith

who welded together the broken parts of a great republic and

re-established it where it is quite likely to outlast all the monarchies

present and to come, was really a person of no serious consequence to

these people. To them, with their training, my General was only a man,

after all, while their Prince was clearly much more than that--a being of

a wholly unsimilar construction and constitution, and being of no more

blood and kinship with men than are the serene eternal lights of the

firmament with the poor dull tallow candles of commerce that sputter and

die and leave nothing behind but a pinch of ashes and a stink.

I saw the last act of "Tannh:auser." I sat in the gloom and the deep

stillness, waiting--one minute, two minutes, I do not know exactly how

long--then the soft music of the hidden orchestra began to breathe its

rich, long sighs out from under the distant stage, and by and by the

drop-curtain parted in the middle and was drawn softly aside, disclosing

the twilighted wood and a wayside shrine, with a white-robed girl praying

and a man standing near. Presently that noble chorus of men's voices was

heard approaching, and from that moment until the closing of the curtain

it was music, just music--music to make one drunk with pleasure, music to

make one take scrip and staff and beg his way round the globe to hear it.

To such as are intending to come here in the Wagner season next year I

wish to say, bring your dinner-pail with you. If you do, you will never

cease to be thankful. If you do not, you will find it a hard fight to

save yourself from famishing in Bayreuth. Bayreuth is merely a large

village, and has no very large hotels or eating-houses. The principal

inns are the Golden Anchor and the Sun. At either of these places you

can get an excellent meal--no, I mean you can go there and see other

people get it. There is no charge for this. The town is littered with

restaurants, but they are small and bad, and they are overdriven with

custom. You must secure a table hours beforehand, and often when you

arrive you will find somebody occupying it. We have had this experience.

We have had a daily scramble for life; and when I say we, I include

shoals of people. I have the impression that the only people who do not

have to scramble are the veterans--the disciples who have been here

before and know the ropes. I think they arrive about a week before the

first opera, and engage all the tables for the season. My tribe had

tried all kinds of places--some outside of the town, a mile or two--and

have captured only nibblings and odds and ends, never in any instance a

complete and satisfying meal. Digestible? No, the reverse. These odds

and ends are going to serve as souvenirs of Bayreuth, and in that regard

their value is not to be overestimated. Photographs fade, bric-a-brac

gets lost, busts of Wagner get broken, but once you absorb a

Bayreuth-restaurant meal it is your possession and your property until

the time comes to embalm the rest of you. Some of these pilgrims here

become, in effect, cabinets; cabinets of souvenirs of Bayreuth. It is

believed among scientists that you could examine the crop of a dead

Bayreuth pilgrim anywhere in the earth and tell where he came from. But

I like this ballast. I think a "Hermitage" scrap-up at eight in the

evening, when all the famine-breeders have been there and laid in their

mementoes and gone, is the quietest thing you can lay on your keelson

except gravel.

THURSDAY.--They keep two teams of singers in stock for the chief roles,

and one of these is composed of the most renowned artists in the world,

with Materna and Alvary in the lead. I suppose a double team is

necessary; doubtless a single team would die of exhaustion in a week, for

all the plays last from four in the afternoon till ten at night. Nearly

all the labor falls upon the half-dozen head singers, and apparently they

are required to furnish all the noise they can for the money. If they

feel a soft, whispery, mysterious feeling they are required to open out

and let the public know it. Operas are given only on Sundays, Mondays,

Wednesdays, and Thursdays, with three days of ostensible rest per week,

and two teams to do the four operas; but the ostensible rest is devoted

largely to rehearsing. It is said that the off days are devoted to

rehearsing from some time in the morning till ten at night. Are there

two orchestras also? It is quite likely, since there are one hundred and

ten names in the orchestra list.

Yesterday the opera was "Tristan and Isolde." I have seen all sorts of

audiences--at theaters, operas, concerts, lectures, sermons,

funerals--but none which was twin to the Wagner audience of Bayreuth for

fixed and reverential attention. Absolute attention and petrified

retention to the end of an act of the attitude assumed at the beginning

of it. You detect no movement in the solid mass of heads and shoulders.

You seem to sit with the dead in the gloom of a tomb. You know that they

are being stirred to their profoundest depths; that there are times when

they want to rise and wave handkerchiefs and shout their approbation, and

times when tears are running down their faces, and it would be a relief

to free their pent emotions in sobs or screams; yet you hear not one

utterance till the curtain swings together and the closing strains have

slowly faded out and died; then the dead rise with one impulse and shake

the building with their applause. Every seat is full in the first act;

there is not a vacant one in the last. If a man would be conspicuous,

let him come here and retire from the house in the midst of an act. It

would make him celebrated.

This audience reminds me of nothing I have ever seen and of nothing I

have read about except the city in the Arabian tale where all the

inhabitants have been turned to brass and the traveler finds them after

centuries mute, motionless, and still retaining the attitudes which they

last knew in life. Here the Wagner audience dress as they please, and

sit in the dark and worship in silence. At the Metropolitan in New York

they sit in a glare, and wear their showiest harness; they hum airs, they

squeak fans, they titter, and they gabble all the time. In some of the

boxes the conversation and laughter are so loud as to divide the

attention of the house with the stage. In large measure the Metropolitan

is a show-case for rich fashionables who are not trained in Wagnerian

music and have no reverence for it, but who like to promote art and show

their clothes.

Can that be an agreeable atmosphere to persons in whom this music

produces a sort of divine ecstasy and to whom its creator is a very

deity, his stage a temple, the works of his brain and hands consecrated

things, and the partaking of them with eye and ear a sacred solemnity?

Manifestly, no. Then, perhaps the temporary expatriation, the tedious

traversing of seas and continents, the pilgrimage to Bayreuth stands

explained. These devotees would worship in an atmosphere of devotion.

It is only here that they can find it without fleck or blemish or any

worldly pollution. In this remote village there are no sights to see,

there is no newspaper to intrude the worries of the distant world, there

is nothing going on, it is always Sunday. The pilgrim wends to his

temple out of town, sits out his moving service, returns to his bed with

his heart and soul and his body exhausted by long hours of tremendous

emotion, and he is in no fit condition to do anything but to lie torpid

and slowly gather back life and strength for the next service. This

opera of "Tristan and Isolde" last night broke the hearts of all

witnesses who were of the faith, and I know of some who have heard of

many who could not sleep after it, but cried the night away. I feel

strongly out of place here. Sometimes I feel like the sane person in a

community of the mad; sometimes I feel like the one blind man where all

others see; the one groping savage in the college of the learned, and

always, during service, I feel like a heretic in heaven.

But by no means do I ever overlook or minify the fact that this is one of

the most extraordinary experiences of my life. I have never seen

anything like this before. I have never seen anything so great and fine

and real as this devotion.

FRIDAY.--Yesterday's opera was "Parsifal" again. The others went and

they show marked advance in appreciation; but I went hunting for relics

and reminders of the Margravine Wilhelmina, she of the imperishable

"Memoirs." I am properly grateful to her for her (unconscious) satire

upon monarchy and nobility, and therefore nothing which her hand touched

or her eye looked upon is indifferent to me. I am her pilgrim; the rest

of this multitude here are Wagner's.

TUESDAY.--I have seen my last two operas; my season is ended, and we

cross over into Bohemia this afternoon. I was supposing that my musical

regeneration was accomplished and perfected, because I enjoyed both of

these operas, singing and all, and, moreover, one of them was "Parsifal,"

but the experts have disenchanted me. They say:

"Singing! That wasn't singing; that was the wailing, screeching of

third-rate obscurities, palmed off on us in the interest of economy."

Well, I ought to have recognized the sign--the old, sure sign that has

never failed me in matters of art. Whenever I enjoy anything in art it

means that it is mighty poor. The private knowledge of this fact has

saved me from going to pieces with enthusiasm in front of many and many a

chromo. However, my base instinct does bring me profit sometimes; I was

the only man out of thirty-two hundred who got his money back on those

two operas.

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

Is it true that the sun of a man's mentality touches noon at forty and

then begins to wane toward setting? Doctor Osler is charged with saying

so. Maybe he said it, maybe he didn't; I don't know which it is. But if

he said it, I can point him to a case which proves his rule. Proves it

by being an exception to it. To this place I nominate Mr. Howells.

I read his VENETIAN DAYS about forty years ago. I compare it with his

paper on Machiavelli in a late number of HARPER, and I cannot find that

his English has suffered any impairment. For forty years his English has

been to me a continual delight and astonishment. In the sustained

exhibition of certain great qualities--clearness, compression, verbal

exactness, and unforced and seemingly unconscious felicity of

phrasing--he is, in my belief, without his peer in the English-writing

world. SUSTAINED. I entrench myself behind that protecting word. There

are others who exhibit those great qualities as greatly as he does, but

only by intervaled distributions of rich moonlight, with stretches of

veiled and dimmer landscape between; whereas Howells's moon sails

cloudless skies all night and all the nights.

In the matter of verbal exactness Mr. Howells has no superior, I suppose.

He seems to be almost always able to find that elusive and shifty grain

of gold, the RIGHT WORD. Others have to put up with approximations, more

or less frequently; he has better luck. To me, the others are miners

working with the gold-pan--of necessity some of the gold washes over and

escapes; whereas, in my fancy, he is quicksilver raiding down a

riffle--no grain of the metal stands much chance of eluding him. A

powerful agent is the right word: it lights the reader's way and makes it

plain; a close approximation to it will answer, and much traveling is

done in a well-enough fashion by its help, but we do not welcome it and

applaud it and rejoice in it as we do when THE right one blazes out on

us. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book

or a newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and

electrically prompt: it tingles exquisitely around through the walls of

the mouth and tastes as tart and crisp and good as the autumn-butter that

creams the sumac-berry. One has no time to examine the word and vote

upon its rank and standing, the automatic recognition of its supremacy is

so immediate. There is a plenty of acceptable literature which deals

largely in approximations, but it may be likened to a fine landscape seen

through the rain; the right word would dismiss the rain, then you would

see it better. It doesn't rain when Howells is at work.

And where does he get the easy and effortless flow of his speech? and its

cadenced and undulating rhythm? and its architectural felicities of

construction, its graces of expression, its pemmican quality of

compression, and all that? Born to him, no doubt. All in shining good

order in the beginning, all extraordinary; and all just as shining, just

as extraordinary today, after forty years of diligent wear and tear and

use. He passed his fortieth year long and long ago; but I think his

English of today--his perfect English, I wish to say--can throw down the

glove before his English of that antique time and not be afraid.

I will got back to the paper on Machiavelli now, and ask the reader to

examine this passage from it which I append. I do not mean examine it in

a bird's-eye way; I mean search it, study it. And, of course, read it

aloud. I may be wrong, still it is my conviction that one cannot get out

of finely wrought literature all that is in it by reading it mutely:

Mr. Dyer is rather of the opinion, first luminously suggested by

Macaulay, that Machiavelli was in earnest, but must not be judged as a

political moralist of our time and race would be judged. He thinks that

Machiavelli was in earnest, as none but an idealist can be, and he is the

first to imagine him an idealist immersed in realities, who involuntarily

transmutes the events under his eye into something like the visionary

issues of reverie. The Machiavelli whom he depicts does not cease to be

politically a republican and socially a just man because he holds up an

atrocious despot like Caesar Borgia as a mirror for rulers. What

Machiavelli beheld round him in Italy was a civic disorder in which there

was oppression without statecraft, and revolt without patriotism. When a

miscreant like Borgia appeared upon the scene and reduced both tyrants

and rebels to an apparent quiescence, he might very well seem to such a

dreamer the savior of society whom a certain sort of dreamers are always

looking for. Machiavelli was no less honest when he honored the

diabolical force than Carlyle was when at different times he extolled the

strong man who destroys liberty in creating order. But Carlyle has only

just ceased to be mistaken for a reformer, while it is still

Machiavelli's hard fate to be so trammeled in his material that his name

stands for whatever is most malevolent and perfidious in human nature.

You see how easy and flowing it is; how unvexed by ruggednesses,

clumsinesses, broken meters; how simple and--so far as you or I can make

out--unstudied; how clear, how limpid, how understandable, how unconfused

by cross-currents, eddies, undertows; how seemingly unadorned, yet is all

adornment, like the lily-of-the-valley; and how compressed, how compact,

without a complacency-signal hung out anywhere to call attention to it.

There are twenty-three lines in the quoted passage. After reading it

several times aloud, one perceives that a good deal of matter is crowded

into that small space. I think it is a model of compactness. When I

take its materials apart and work them over and put them together in my

way, I find I cannot crowd the result back into the same hole, there not

being room enough. I find it a case of a woman packing a man's trunk: he

can get the things out, but he can't ever get them back again.

The proffered paragraph is a just and fair sample; the rest of the

article is as compact as it is; there are no waste words. The sample is

just in other ways: limpid, fluent, graceful, and rhythmical as it is, it

holds no superiority in these respects over the rest of the essay. Also,

the choice phrasing noticeable in the sample is not lonely; there is a

plenty of its kin distributed through the other paragraphs. This is

claiming much when that kin must face the challenge of a phrase like the

one in the middle sentence: "an idealist immersed in realities who

involuntarily transmutes the events under his eye into something like the

visionary issues of reverie." With a hundred words to do it with, the

literary artisan could catch that airy thought and tie it down and reduce

it to a concrete condition, visible, substantial, understandable and all

right, like a cabbage; but the artist does it with twenty, and the result

is a flower.

The quoted phrase, like a thousand others that have come from the same

source, has the quality of certain scraps of verse which take hold of us

and stay in our memories, we do not understand why, at first: all the

words being the right words, none of them is conspicuous, and so they all

seem inconspicuous, therefore we wonder what it is about them that makes

their message take hold.

The mossy marbles rest On the lips that he has prest In their bloom,

And the names he loved to hear Have been carved for many a year On the

tomb.

It is like a dreamy strain of moving music, with no sharp notes in it.

The words are all "right" words, and all the same size. We do not notice

it at first. We get the effect, it goes straight home to us, but we do

not know why. It is when the right words are conspicuous that they

thunder:

The glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome!

When I got back from Howells old to Howells young I find him arranging

and clustering English words well, but not any better than now. He is

not more felicitous in concreting abstractions now than he was in

translating, then, the visions of the eyes of flesh into words that

reproduced their forms and colors:

In Venetian streets they give the fallen snow no rest. It is at once

shoveled into the canals by hundreds of half-naked FACCHINI; and now in

St. Mark's Place the music of innumerable shovels smote upon my ear; and

I saw the shivering legion of poverty as it engaged the elements in a

struggle for the possession of the Piazza. But the snow continued to

fall, and through the twilight of the descending flakes all this toil and

encountered looked like that weary kind of effort in dreams, when the

most determined industry seems only to renew the task. The lofty crest

of the bell-tower was hidden in the folds of falling snow, and I could no

longer see the golden angel upon its summit. But looked at across the

Piazza, the beautiful outline of St. Mark's Church was perfectly penciled

in the air, and the shifting threads of the snowfall were woven into a

spell of novel enchantment around the structure that always seemed to me

too exquisite in its fantastic loveliness to be anything but the creation

of magic. The tender snow had compassionated the beautiful edifice for

all the wrongs of time, and so hid the stains and ugliness of decay that

it looked as if just from the hand of the builder--or, better said, just

from the brain of the architect. There was marvelous freshness in the

colors of the mosaics in the great arches of the facade, and all that

gracious harmony into which the temple rises, or marble scrolls and leafy

exuberance airily supporting the statues of the saints, was a hundred

times etherealized by the purity and whiteness of the drifting flakes.

The snow lay lightly on the golden gloves that tremble like

peacocks-crests above the vast domes, and plumed them with softest white;

it robed the saints in ermine; and it danced over all its works, as if

exulting in its beauty--beauty which filled me with subtle, selfish

yearning to keep such evanescent loveliness for the little-while-longer

of my whole life, and with despair to think that even the poor lifeless

shadow of it could never be fairly reflected in picture or poem.

Through the wavering snowfall, the Saint Theodore upon one of the granite

pillars of the Piazzetta did not show so grim as his wont is, and the

winged lion on the other might have been a winged lamb, so gentle and

mild he looked by the tender light of the storm. The towers of the

island churches loomed faint and far away in the dimness; the sailors in

the rigging of the ships that lay in the Basin wrought like phantoms

among the shrouds; the gondolas stole in and out of the opaque distance

more noiselessly and dreamily than ever; and a silence, almost palpable,

lay upon the mutest city in the world.

The spirit of Venice is there: of a city where Age and Decay, fagged

with distributing damage and repulsiveness among the other cities of the

planet in accordance with the policy and business of their profession,

come for rest and play between seasons, and treat themselves to the

luxury and relaxation of sinking the shop and inventing and squandering

charms all about, instead of abolishing such as they find, as it their

habit when not on vacation.

In the working season they do business in Boston sometimes, and a

character in THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY takes accurate note of pathetic

effects wrought by them upon the aspects of a street of once dignified

and elegant homes whose occupants have moved away and left them a prey to

neglect and gradual ruin and progressive degradation; a descent which

reaches bottom at last, when the street becomes a roost for humble

professionals of the faith-cure and fortune-telling sort.

What a queer, melancholy house, what a queer, melancholy street! I

don't think I was ever in a street before when quite so many professional

ladies, with English surnames, preferred Madam to Mrs. on their

door-plates. And the poor old place has such a desperately conscious air

of going to the deuce. Every house seems to wince as you go by, and

button itself up to the chin for fear you should find out it had no shirt

on--so to speak. I don't know what's the reason, but these material

tokens of a social decay afflict me terribly; a tipsy woman isn't

dreadfuler than a haggard old house, that's once been a home, in a street

like this.

Mr. Howells's pictures are not mere stiff, hard, accurate photographs;

they are photographs with feeling in them, and sentiment, photographs

taken in a dream, one might say.

As concerns his humor, I will not try to say anything, yet I would try,

if I had the words that might approximately reach up to its high place.

I do not think any one else can play with humorous fancies so gracefully

and delicately and deliciously as he does, nor has so many to play with,

nor can come so near making them look as if they were doing the playing

themselves and he was not aware that they were at it. For they are

unobtrusive, and quiet in their ways, and well conducted. His is a humor

which flows softly all around about and over and through the mesh of the

page, pervasive, refreshing, health-giving, and makes no more show and no

more noise than does the circulation of the blood.

There is another thing which is contentingly noticeable in Mr. Howells's

books. That is his "stage directions"--those artifices which authors

employ to throw a kind of human naturalness around a scene and a

conversation, and help the reader to see the one and get at meanings in

the other which might not be perceived if entrusted unexplained to the

bare words of the talk. Some authors overdo the stage directions, they

elaborate them quite beyond necessity; they spend so much time and take

up so much room in telling us how a person said a thing and how he looked

and acted when he said it that we get tired and vexed and wish he hadn't

said it all. Other authors' directions are brief enough, but it is

seldom that the brevity contains either wit or information. Writers of

this school go in rags, in the matter of state directions; the majority

of them having nothing in stock but a cigar, a laugh, a blush, and a

bursting into tears. In their poverty they work these sorry things to

the bone. They say:

". . . replied Alfred, flipping the ash from his cigar." (This explains

nothing; it only wastes space.)

". . . responded Richard, with a laugh." (There was nothing to laugh

about; there never is. The writer puts it in from habit--automatically;

he is paying no attention to his work; or he would see that there is

nothing to laugh at; often, when a remark is unusually and poignantly

flat and silly, he tries to deceive the reader by enlarging the stage

direction and making Richard break into "frenzies of uncontrollable

laughter." This makes the reader sad.)

". . . murmured Gladys, blushing." (This poor old shop-worn blush is a

tiresome thing. We get so we would rather Gladys would fall out of the

book and break her neck than do it again. She is always doing it, and

usually irrelevantly. Whenever it is her turn to murmur she hangs out

her blush; it is the only thing she's got. In a little while we hate

her, just as we do Richard.)

". . . repeated Evelyn, bursting into tears." (This kind keep a book

damp all the time. They can't say a thing without crying. They cry so

much about nothing that by and by when they have something to cry ABOUT

they have gone dry; they sob, and fetch nothing; we are not moved. We

are only glad.)

They gavel me, these stale and overworked stage directions, these carbon

films that got burnt out long ago and cannot now carry any faintest

thread of light. It would be well if they could be relieved from duty

and flung out in the literary back yard to rot and disappear along with

the discarded and forgotten "steeds" and "halidomes" and similar

stage-properties once so dear to our grandfathers. But I am friendly to

Mr. Howells's stage directions; more friendly to them than to any one

else's, I think. They are done with a competent and discriminating art,

and are faithful to the requirements of a state direction's proper and

lawful office, which is to inform. Sometimes they convey a scene and its

conditions so well that I believe I could see the scene and get the

spirit and meaning of the accompanying dialogue if some one would read

merely the stage directions to me and leave out the talk. For instance,

a scene like this, from THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY:

". . . and she laid her arms with a beseeching gesture on her father's

shoulder."

". . . she answered, following his gesture with a glance."

". . . she said, laughing nervously."

". . . she asked, turning swiftly upon him that strange, searching

glance."

". . . she answered, vaguely."

". . . she reluctantly admitted."

". . . but her voice died wearily away, and she stood looking into his

face with puzzled entreaty."

Mr. Howells does not repeat his forms, and does not need to; he can

invent fresh ones without limit. It is mainly the repetition over and

over again, by the third-rates, of worn and commonplace and juiceless

forms that makes their novels such a weariness and vexation to us, I

think. We do not mind one or two deliveries of their wares, but as we

turn the pages over and keep on meeting them we presently get tired of

them and wish they would do other things for a change.

". . . replied Alfred, flipping the ash from his cigar."

". . . responded Richard, with a laugh."

". . . murmured Gladys, blushing."

". . . repeated Evelyn, bursting into tears."

". . . replied the Earl, flipping the ash from his cigar."

". . . responded the undertaker, with a laugh."

". . . murmured the chambermaid, blushing."

". . . repeated the burglar, bursting into tears."

". . . replied the conductor, flipping the ash from his cigar."

". . . responded Arkwright, with a laugh."

". . . murmured the chief of police, blushing."

". . . repeated the house-cat, bursting into tears."

And so on and so on; till at last it ceases to excite. I always notice

stage directions, because they fret me and keep me trying to get out of

their way, just as the automobiles do. At first; then by and by they

become monotonous and I get run over.

Mr. Howells has done much work, and the spirit of it is as beautiful as

the make of it. I have held him in admiration and affection so many

years that I know by the number of those years that he is old now; but

his heart isn't, nor his pen; and years do not count. Let him have

plenty of them; there is profit in them for us.

ENGLISH AS SHE IS TAUGHT

In the appendix to Croker's Boswell's Johnson one finds this anecdote:

CATO'S SOLILOQUY.--One day Mrs. Gastrel set a little girl to repeat to

him [Dr. Samuel Johnson] Cato's Soliloquy, which she went through very

correctly. The Doctor, after a pause, asked the child:

"What was to bring Cato to an end?"

She said it was a knife.

"No, my dear, it was not so."

"My aunt Polly said it was a knife."

"Why, Aunt Polly's knife MAY DO, but it was a DAGGER, my dear."

He then asked her the meaning of "bane and antidote," which she was

unable to give. Mrs. Gastrel said:

"You cannot expect so young a child to know the meaning of such words."

He then said:

"My dear, how many pence are there in SIXPENCE?"

"I cannot tell, sir," was the half-terrified reply.

On this, addressing himself to Mrs. Gastrel, he said:

"Now, my dear lady, can anything be more ridiculous than to teach a child

Cato's Soliloquy, who does not know how many pence there are in a

sixpence?"

In a lecture before the Royal Geographical Society Professor Ravenstein

quoted the following list of frantic questions, and said that they had

been asked in an examination:

Mention all names of places in the world derived from Julius Caesar or

Augustus Caesar.

Where are the following rivers: Pisuerga, Sakaria, Guadalete, Jalon,

Mulde?

All you know of the following: Machacha, Pilmo, Schebulos, Crivoscia,

Basces, Mancikert, Taxhem, Citeaux, Meloria, Zutphen.

The highest peaks of the Karakorum range.

The number of universities in Prussia.

Why are the tops of mountains continually covered with snow [sic]?

Name the length and breadth of the streams of lava which issued from the

Skaptar Jokul in the eruption of 1783.

That list would oversize nearly anybody's geographical knowledge. Isn't

it reasonably possible that in our schools many of the questions in all

studies are several miles ahead of where the pupil is?--that he is set to

struggle with things that are ludicrously beyond his present reach,

hopelessly beyond his present strength? This remark in passing, and by

way of text; now I come to what I was going to say.

I have just now fallen upon a darling literary curiosity. It is a little

book, a manuscript compilation, and the compiler sent it to me with the

request that I say whether I think it ought to be published or not. I

said, Yes; but as I slowly grow wise I briskly grow cautious; and so, now

that the publication is imminent, it has seemed to me that I should feel

more comfortable if I could divide up this responsibility with the public

by adding them to the court. Therefore I will print some extracts from

the book, in the hope that they may make converts to my judgment that the

volume has merit which entitles it to publication.

As to its character. Every one has sampled "English as She is Spoke" and

"English as She is Wrote"; this little volume furnishes us an instructive

array of examples of "English as She is Taught"--in the public schools

of--well, this country. The collection is made by a teacher in those

schools, and all the examples in it are genuine; none of them have been

tampered with, or doctored in any way. From time to time, during several

years, whenever a pupil has delivered himself of anything peculiarly

quaint or toothsome in the course of his recitations, this teacher and

her associates have privately set that thing down in a memorandum-book;

strictly following the original, as to grammar, construction, spelling,

and all; and the result is this literary curiosity.

The contents of the book consist mainly of answers given by the boys and

girls to questions, said answers being given sometimes verbally,

sometimes in writing. The subjects touched upon are fifteen in number:

I. Etymology; II. Grammar; III. Mathematics; IV. Geography; V.

"Original"; VI. Analysis; VII. History; VIII. "Intellectual"; IX.

Philosophy; X. Physiology; XI. Astronomy; XII. Politics; XIII. Music;

XIV. Oratory; XV. Metaphysics.

You perceive that the poor little young idea has taken a shot at a good

many kinds of game in the course of the book. Now as to results. Here

are some quaint definitions of words. It will be noticed that in all of

these instances the sound of the word, or the look of it on paper, has

misled the child:

ABORIGINES, a system of mountains.

ALIAS, a good man in the Bible.

AMENABLE, anything that is mean.

AMMONIA, the food of the gods.

ASSIDUITY, state of being an acid.

AURIFEROUS, pertaining to an orifice.

CAPILLARY, a little caterpillar.

CORNIFEROUS, rocks in which fossil corn is found.

EMOLUMENT, a headstone to a grave.

EQUESTRIAN, one who asks questions.

EUCHARIST, one who plays euchre.

FRANCHISE, anything belonging to the French.

IDOLATER, a very idle person.

IPECAC, a man who likes a good dinner.

IRRIGATE, to make fun of.

MENDACIOUS, what can be mended.

MERCENARY, one who feels for another.

PARASITE, a kind of umbrella.

PARASITE, the murder of an infant.

PUBLICAN, a man who does his prayers in public.

TENACIOUS, ten acres of land.

Here is one where the phrase "publicans and sinners" has got mixed up in

the child's mind with politics, and the result is a definition which

takes one in a sudden and unexpected way:

REPUBLICAN, a sinner mentioned in the Bible.

Also in Democratic newspapers now and then. Here are two where the

mistake has resulted from sound assisted by remote fact:

PLAGIARIST, a writer of plays.

DEMAGOGUE, a vessel containing beer and other liquids.

I cannot quite make out what it was that misled the pupil in the

following instances; it would not seem to have been the sound of the

word, nor the look of it in print:

ASPHYXIA, a grumbling, fussy temper.

QUARTERNIONS, a bird with a flat beak and no bill, living in New Zealand.

QUARTERNIONS, the name given to a style of art practiced by the

Phoenicians.

QUARTERNIONS, a religious convention held every hundred years.

SIBILANT, the state of being idiotic.

CROSIER, a staff carried by the Deity.

In the following sentences the pupil's ear has been deceiving him again:

The marriage was illegible.

He was totally dismasted with the whole performance.

He enjoys riding on a philosopher.

She was very quick at repertoire.

He prayed for the waters to subsidize.

The leopard is watching his sheep.

They had a strawberry vestibule.

Here is one which--well, now, how often we do slam right into the truth

without ever suspecting it:

The men employed by the Gas Company go around and speculate the meter.

Indeed they do, dear; and when you grow up, many and many's the time you

will notice it in the gas bill. In the following sentences the little

people have some information to convey, every time; but in my case they

fail to connect: the light always went out on the keystone word:

The coercion of some things is remarkable; as bread and molasses.

Her hat is contiguous because she wears it on one side.

He preached to an egregious congregation.

The captain eliminated a bullet through the man's heart.

You should take caution and be precarious.

The supercilious girl acted with vicissitude when the perennial time

came.

The last is a curiously plausible sentence; one seems to know what it

means, and yet he knows all the time that he doesn't. Here is an odd

(but entirely proper) use of a word, and a most sudden descent from a

lofty philosophical altitude to a very practical and homely illustration:

We should endeavor to avoid extremes--like those of wasps and bees.

And here--with "zoological" and "geological" in his mind, but not ready

to his tongue--the small scholar has innocently gone and let out a couple

of secrets which ought never to have been divulged in any circumstances:

There are a good many donkeys in theological gardens.

Some of the best fossils are found in theological gardens.

Under the head of "Grammar" the little scholars furnish the following

information:

Gender is the distinguishing nouns without regard to sex.

A verb is something to eat.

Adverbs should always be used as adjectives and adjectives as adverbs.

Every sentence and name of God must begin with a caterpillar.

"Caterpillar" is well enough, but capital letter would have been

stricter. The following is a brave attempt at a solution, but it failed

to liquify:

When they are going to say some prose or poetry before they say the

poetry or prose they must put a semicolon just after the introduction of

the prose or poetry.

The chapter on "Mathematics" is full of fruit. From it I take a few

samples--mainly in an unripe state:

A straight line is any distance between two places.

Parallel lines are lines that can never meet until they run together.

A circle is a round straight line with a hole in the middle.

Things which are equal to each other are equal to anything else.

To find the number of square feet in a room you multiply the room by the

number of the feet. The product is the result.

Right you are. In the matter of geography this little book is

unspeakably rich. The questions do not appear to have applied the

microscope to the subject, as did those quoted by Professor Ravenstein;

still, they proved plenty difficult enough without that. These pupils

did not hunt with a microscope, they hunted with a shot-gun; this is

shown by the crippled condition of the game they brought in:

America is divided into the Passiffic slope and the Mississippi valey.

North America is separated by Spain.

America consists from north to south about five hundred miles.

The United States is quite a small country compared with some other

countrys, but it about as industrious.

The capital of the United States is Long Island.

The five seaports of the U.S. are Newfunlan and Sanfrancisco.

The principal products of the U.S. is earthquakes and volcanoes.

The Alaginnies are mountains in Philadelphia.

The Rocky Mountains are on the western side of Philadelphia.

Cape Hateras is a vast body of water surrounded by land and flowing into

the Gulf of Mexico.

Mason and Dixon's line is the Equator.

One of the leading industries of the United States is mollasses,

book-covers, numbers, gas, teaching, lumber, manufacturers, paper-making,

publishers, coal.

In Austria the principal occupation is gathering Austrich feathers.

Gibraltar is an island built on a rock.

Russia is very cold and tyrannical.

Sicily is one of the Sandwich Islands.

Hindoostan flows through the Ganges and empties into the Mediterranean

Sea.

Ireland is called the Emigrant Isle because it is so beautiful and green.

The width of the different zones Europe lies in depend upon the

surrounding country.

The imports of a country are the things that are paid for, the exports

are the things that are not.

Climate lasts all the time and weather only a few days.

The two most famous volcanoes of Europe are Sodom and Gomorrah.

The chapter headed "Analysis" shows us that the pupils in our public

schools are not merely loaded up with those showy facts about geography,

mathematics, and so on, and left in that incomplete state; no, there's

machinery for clarifying and expanding their minds. They are required to

take poems and analyze them, dig out their common sense, reduce them to

statistics, and reproduce them in a luminous prose translation which

shall tell you at a glance what the poet was trying to get at. One

sample will do. Here is a stanza from "The Lady of the Lake," followed

by the pupil's impressive explanation of it:

Alone, but with unbated zeal, The horseman plied with scourge and steel;

For jaded now and spent with toil, Embossed with foam and dark with soil,

While every gasp with sobs he drew, The laboring stag strained full in

view.

The man who rode on the horse performed the whip and an instrument made

of steel alone with strong ardor not diminishing, for, being tired from

the time passed with hard labor overworked with anger and ignorant with

weariness, while every breath for labor he drew with cries full or

sorrow, the young deer made imperfect who worked hard filtered in sight.

I see, now, that I never understood that poem before. I have had

glimpses of its meaning, it moments when I was not as ignorant with

weariness as usual, but this is the first time the whole spacious idea of

it ever filtered in sight. If I were a public-school pupil I would put

those other studies aside and stick to analysis; for, after all, it is

the thing to spread your mind.

We come now to historical matters, historical remains, one might say. As

one turns the pages he is impressed with the depth to which one date has

been driven into the American child's head--1492. The date is there,

and it is there to stay. And it is always at hand, always deliverable at

a moment's notice. But the Fact that belongs with it? That is quite

another matter. Only the date itself is familiar and sure: its vast Fact

has failed of lodgment. It would appear that whenever you ask a

public-school pupil when a thing--anything, no matter what--happened,and

he is in doubt, he always rips out his 1492. He applies it to

everything, from the landing of the ark to the introduction of the

horse-car. Well, after all, it is our first date, and so it is right

enough to honor it, and pay the public schools to teach our children to

honor it:

George Washington was born in 1492.

Washington wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1492.

St. Bartholemew was massacred in 1492.

The Brittains were the Saxons who entered England in 1492 under Julius

Caesar.

The earth is 1492 miles in circumference.

To proceed with "History"

Christopher Columbus was called the Father of his Country.

Queen Isabella of Spain sold her watch and chain and other millinery so

that Columbus could discover America.

The Indian wars were very desecrating to the country.

The Indians pursued their warfare by hiding in the bushes and then

scalping them.

Captain John Smith has been styled the father of his country. His life

was saved by his daughter Pochahantas.

The Puritans found an insane asylum in the wilds of America.

The Stamp Act was to make everybody stamp all materials so they should be

null and void.

Washington died in Spain almost broken-hearted. His remains were taken

to the cathedral in Havana.

Gorilla warfare was where men rode on gorillas.

John Brown was a very good insane man who tried to get fugitives slaves

into Virginia. He captured all the inhabitants, but was finally

conquered and condemned to his death. The confederasy was formed by the

fugitive slaves.

Alfred the Great reigned 872 years. He was distinguished for letting

some buckwheat cakes burn, and the lady scolded him.

Henry Eight was famous for being a great widower haveing lost several

wives.

Lady Jane Grey studied Greek and Latin and was beheaded after a few days.

John Bright is noted for an incurable disease.

Lord James Gordon Bennet instigated the Gordon Riots.

The Middle Ages come in between antiquity and posterity.

Luther introduced Christianity into England a good many thousand years

ago. His birthday was November 1883. He was once a Pope. He lived at

the time of the Rebellion of Worms.

Julius Caesar is noted for his famous telegram dispatch I came I saw I

conquered.

Julius Caesar was really a very great man. He was a very great soldier

and wrote a book for beginners in the Latin.

Cleopatra was caused by the death of an asp which she dissolved in a wine

cup.

The only form of government in Greece was a limited monkey.

The Persian war lasted about 500 years.

Greece had only 7 wise men.

Socrates . . . destroyed some statues and had to drink Shamrock.

Here is a fact correctly stated; and yet it is phrased with such

ingenious infelicity that it can be depended upon to convey

misinformation every time it is uncarefully unread:

By the Salic law no woman or descendant of a woman could occupy the

throne.

To show how far a child can travel in history with judicious and

diligent boosting in the public school, we select the following mosaic:

Abraham Lincoln was born in Wales in 1599.

In the chapter headed "Intellectual" I find a great number of most

interesting statements. A sample or two may be found not amiss:

Bracebridge Hall was written by Henry Irving.

Show Bound was written by Peter Cooper.

The House of the Seven Gables was written by Lord Bryant.

Edgar A. Poe was a very curdling writer.

Cotton Mather was a writer who invented the cotten gin and wrote

histories.

Beowulf wrote the Scriptures.

Ben Johnson survived Shakspeare in some respects.

In the Canterbury Tale it gives account of King Alfred on his way to the

shrine of Thomas Bucket.

Chaucer was the father of English pottery.

Chaucer was a bland verse writer of the third century.

Chaucer was succeeded by H. Wads. Longfellow an American Writer. His

writings were chiefly prose and nearly one hundred years elapsed.

Shakspere translated the Scriptures and it was called St. James because

he did it.

In the middle of the chapter I find many pages of information concerning

Shakespeare's plays, Milton's works, and those of Bacon, Addison, Samuel

Johnson, Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Smollett, De Foe, Locke, Pope,

Swift, Goldsmith, Burns, Cowper, Wordsworth, Gibbon, Byron, Coleridge,

Hood, Scott, Macaulay, George Eliot, Dickens, Bulwer, Thackeray,

Browning, Mrs. Browning, Tennyson, and Disraeli--a fact which shows that

into the restricted stomach of the public-school pupil is shoveled every

year the blood, bone, and viscera of a gigantic literature, and the same

is there digested and disposed of in a most successful and characteristic

and gratifying public-school way. I have space for but a trifling few of

the results:

Lord Byron was the son of an heiress and a drunken man.

Wm. Wordsworth wrote the Barefoot Boy and Imitations on Immortality.

Gibbon wrote a history of his travels in Italy. This was original.

George Eliot left a wife and children who mourned greatly for his genius.

George Eliot Miss Mary Evans Mrs. Cross Mrs. Lewis was the greatest

female poet unless George Sands is made an exception of.

Bulwell is considered a good writer.

Sir Walter Scott Charles Bronte Alfred the Great and Johnson were the

first great novelists.

Thomas Babington Makorlay graduated at Harvard and then studied law, he

was raised to the peerage as baron in 1557 and died in 1776.

Here are two or three miscellaneous facts that may be of value, if taken

in moderation:

Homer's writings are Homer's Essays Virgil the Aenid and Paradise lost

some people say that these poems were not written by Homer but by another

man of the same name.

A sort of sadness kind of shone in Bryant's poems.

Holmes is a very profligate and amusing writer.

When the public-school pupil wrestles with the political features of the

Great Republic, they throw him sometimes:

A bill becomes a law when the President vetoes it.

The three departments of the government is the President rules the world,

the governor rules the State, the mayor rules the city.

The first conscientious Congress met in Philadelphia.

The Constitution of the United States was established to ensure domestic

hostility.

Truth crushed to earth will rise again. As follows:

The Constitution of the United States is that part of the book at the

end which nobody reads.

And here she rises once more and untimely. There should be a limit to

public-school instruction; it cannot be wise or well to let the young

find out everything:

Congress is divided into civilized half civilized and savage.

Here are some results of study in music and oratory:

An interval in music is the distance on the keyboard from one piano to

the next.

A rest means you are not to sing it.

Emphasis is putting more distress on one word than another.

The chapter on "Physiology" contains much that ought not to be lost to

science:

Physillogigy is to study about your bones stummick and vertebry.

Occupations which are injurious to health are cabolic acid gas which is

impure blood.

We have an upper and lower skin. The lower skin moves all the time and

the upper skin moves when we do.

The body is mostly composed of water and about one half is avaricious

tissue.

The stomach is a small pear-shaped bone situated in the body.

The gastric juice keeps the bones from creaking.

The Chyle flows up the middle of the backbone and reaches the heart where

it meets the oxygen and is purified.

The salivary glands are used to salivate the body.

In the stomach starch is changed to cane sugar and cane sugar to sugar

cane.

The olfactory nerve enters the cavity of the orbit and is developed into

the special sense of hearing.

The growth of a tooth begins in the back of the mouth and extends to the

stomach.

If we were on a railroad track and a train was coming the train would

deafen our ears so that we couldn't see to get off the track.

If, up to this point, none of my quotations have added flavor to the

Johnsonian anecdote at the head of this article, let us make another

attempt:

The theory that intuitive truths are discovered by the light of nature

originated from St. John's interpretation of a passage in the Gospel of

Plato.

The weight of the earth is found by comparing a mass of known lead with

that of a mass of unknown lead.

To find the weight of the earth take the length of a degree on a meridian

and multiply by 6 1/2 pounds.

The spheres are to each other as the squares of their homologous sides.

A body will go just as far in the first second as the body will go plus

the force of gravity and that's equal to twice what the body will go.

Specific gravity is the weight to be compared weight of an equal volume

of or that is the weight of a body compared with the weight of an equal

volume.

The law of fluid pressure divide the different forms of organized bodies

by the form of attraction and the number increased will be the form.

Inertia is that property of bodies by virtue of which it cannot change

its own condition of rest or motion. In other words it is the negative

quality of passiveness either in recoverable latency or insipient

latescence.

If a laugh is fair here, not the struggling child, nor the unintelligent

teacher--or rather the unintelligent Boards, Committees, and

Trustees--are the proper target for it. All through this little book one

detects the signs of a certain probable fact--that a large part of the

pupil's "instruction" consists in cramming him with obscure and wordy

"rules" which he does not understand and has no time to understand. It

would be as useful to cram him with brickbats; they would at least stay.

In a town in the interior of New York, a few years ago, a gentleman set

forth a mathematical problem and proposed to give a prize to every

public-school pupil who should furnish the correct solution of it.

Twenty-two of the brightest boys in the public schools entered the

contest. The problem was not a very difficult one for pupils of their

mathematical rank and standing, yet they all failed--by a hair--through

one trifling mistake or another. Some searching questions were asked,

when it turned out that these lads were as glib as parrots with the

"rules," but could not reason out a single rule or explain the principle

underlying it. Their memories had been stocked, but not their

understandings. It was a case of brickbat culture, pure and simple.

There are several curious "compositions" in the little book, and we must

make room for one. It is full of naivete, brutal truth, and

unembarrassed directness, and is the funniest (genuine) boy's composition

I think I have ever seen:

ON GIRLS

Girls are very stuck up and dignefied in their maner and be have your.

They think more of dress than anything and like to play with dowls and

rags. They cry if they see a cow in a far distance and are afraid of

guns. They stay at home all the time and go to church on Sunday. They

are al-ways sick. They are always funy and making fun of boy's hands and

they say how dirty. They cant play marbels. I pity them poor things.

They make fun of boys and then turn round and love them. I dont beleave

they ever kiled a cat or anything. They look out every nite and say oh

ant the moon lovely. Thir is one thing I have not told and that is they

al-ways now their lessons bettern boys.

From Mr. Edward Channing's recent article in SCIENCE:

The marked difference between the books now being produced by French,

English, and American travelers, on the one hand, and German explorers,

on the other, is too great to escape attention. That difference is due

entirely to the fact that in school and university the German is taught,

in the first place to see, and in the second place to understand what he

does see.

A SIMPLIFIED ALPHABET

(This article, written during the autumn of 1899, was about the last

writing done by Mark Twain on any impersonal subject.)

I have had a kindly feeling, a friendly feeling, a cousinly feeling

toward Simplified Spelling, from the beginning of the movement three

years ago, but nothing more inflamed than that. It seemed to me to merely

propose to substitute one inadequacy for another; a sort of patching and

plugging poor old dental relics with cement and gold and porcelain paste;

what was really needed was a new set of teeth. That is to say, a new

ALPHABET.

The heart of our trouble is with our foolish alphabet. It doesn't know

how to spell, and can't be taught. In this it is like all other

alphabets except one--the phonographic. This is the only competent

alphabet in the world. It can spell and correctly pronounce any word in

our language.

That admirable alphabet, that brilliant alphabet, that inspired alphabet,

can be learned in an hour or two. In a week the student can learn to

write it with some little facility, and to read it with considerable

ease. I know, for I saw it tried in a public school in Nevada forty-five

years ago, and was so impressed by the incident that it has remained in

my memory ever since.

I wish we could adopt it in place of our present written (and printed)

character. I mean SIMPLY the alphabet; simply the consonants and the

vowels--I don't mean any REDUCTIONS or abbreviations of them, such as the

shorthand writer uses in order to get compression and speed. No, I would

SPELL EVERY WORD OUT.

I will insert the alphabet here as I find it in Burnz's PHONIC SHORTHAND.

[Figure 1] It is arranged on the basis of Isaac Pitman's PHONOGRAPHY.

Isaac Pitman was the originator and father of scientific phonography. It

is used throughout the globe. It was a memorable invention. He made it

public seventy-three years ago. The firm of Isaac Pitman & Sons, New

York, still exists, and they continue the master's work.

What should we gain?

First of all, we could spell DEFINITELY--and correctly--any word you

please, just by the SOUND of it. We can't do that with our present

alphabet. For instance, take a simple, every-day word PHTHISIS. If we

tried to spell it by the sound of it, we should make it TYSIS, and be

laughed at by every educated person.

Secondly, we should gain in REDUCTION OF LABOR in writing.

Simplified Spelling makes valuable reductions in the case of several

hundred words, but the new spelling must be LEARNED. You can't spell

them by the sound; you must get them out of the book.

But even if we knew the simplified form for every word in the language,

the phonographic alphabet would still beat the Simplified Speller "hands

down" in the important matter of economy of labor. I will illustrate:

PRESENT FORM: through, laugh, highland.

SIMPLIFIED FORM: thru, laff, hyland.

PHONOGRAPHIC FORM: [Figure 2]

To write the word "through," the pen has to make twenty-one strokes.

To write the word "thru," then pen has to make twelve strokes--a good

saving.

To write that same word with the phonographic alphabet, the pen has to

make only THREE strokes.

To write the word "laugh," the pen has to make FOURTEEN strokes.

To write "laff," the pen has to make the SAME NUMBER of strokes--no labor

is saved to the penman.

To write the same word with the phonographic alphabet, the pen has to

make only THREE strokes.

To write the word "highland," the pen has to make twenty-two strokes.

To write "hyland," the pen has to make eighteen strokes.

To write that word with the phonographic alphabet, the pen has to make

only FIVE strokes. [Figure 3]

To write the words "phonographic alphabet," the pen has to make

fifty-three strokes.

To write "fonografic alfabet," the pen has to make fifty strokes. To the

penman, the saving in labor is insignificant.

To write that word (with vowels) with the phonographic alphabet, the pen

has to make only SEVENTEEN strokes.

Without the vowels, only THIRTEEN strokes. [Figure 4] The vowels are

hardly necessary, this time.

We make five pen-strokes in writing an m. Thus: [Figure 5] a stroke

down; a stroke up; a second stroke down; a second stroke up; a final

stroke down. Total, five. The phonographic alphabet accomplishes the m

with a single stroke--a curve, like a parenthesis that has come home

drunk and has fallen face down right at the front door where everybody

that goes along will see him and say, Alas!

When our written m is not the end of a word, but is otherwise located, it

has to be connected with the next letter, and that requires another

pen-stroke, making six in all, before you get rid of that m. But never

mind about the connecting strokes--let them go. Without counting them,

the twenty-six letters of our alphabet consumed about eighty pen-strokes

for their construction--about three pen-strokes per letter.

It is THREE TIMES THE NUMBER required by the phonographic alphabet. It

requires but ONE stroke for each letter.

My writing-gait is--well, I don't know what it is, but I will time myself

and see. Result: it is twenty-four words per minute. I don't mean

composing; I mean COPYING. There isn't any definite composing-gait.

Very well, my copying-gait is 1,440 words per hour--say 1,500. If I

could use the phonographic character with facility I could do the 1,500

in twenty minutes. I could do nine hours' copying in three hours; I

could do three years' copying in one year. Also, if I had a typewriting

machine with the phonographic alphabet on it--oh, the miracles I could

do!

I am not pretending to write that character well. I have never had a

lesson, and I am copying the letters from the book. But I can accomplish

my desire, at any rate, which is, to make the reader get a good and clear

idea of the advantage it would be to us if we could discard our present

alphabet and put this better one in its place--using it in books,

newspapers, with the typewriter, and with the pen.

[Figure 6]--MAN DOG HORSE. I think it is graceful and would look comely

in print. And consider--once more, I beg--what a labor-saver it is! Ten

pen-strokes with the one system to convey those three words above, and

thirty-three by the other! [Figure 6] I mean, in SOME ways, not in all.

I suppose I might go so far as to say in most ways, and be within the

facts, but never mind; let it go at SOME. One of the ways in which it

exercises this birthright is--as I think--continuing to use our laughable

alphabet these seventy-three years while there was a rational one at

hand, to be had for the taking.

It has taken five hundred years to simplify some of Chaucer's rotten

spelling--if I may be allowed to use to frank a term as that--and it will

take five hundred years more to get our exasperating new Simplified

Corruptions accepted and running smoothly. And we sha'n't be any better

off then than we are now; for in that day we shall still have the

privilege the Simplifiers are exercising now: ANYBODY can change the

spelling that wants to.

BUT YOU CAN'T CHANGE THE PHONOGRAPHIC SPELLING; THERE ISN'T ANY WAY. It

will always follow the SOUND. If you want to change the spelling, you

have to change the sound first.

Mind, I myself am a Simplified Speller; I belong to that unhappy guild

that is patiently and hopefully trying to reform our drunken old alphabet

by reducing his whiskey. Well, it will improve him. When they get

through and have reformed him all they can by their system he will be

only HALF drunk. Above that condition their system can never lift him.

There is no competent, and lasting, and real reform for him but to take

away his whiskey entirely, and fill up his jug with Pitman's wholesome

and undiseased alphabet.

One great drawback to Simplified Spelling is, that in print a simplified

word looks so like the very nation! and when you bunch a whole squadron

of the Simplified together the spectacle is very nearly unendurable.

The da ma ov koars kum when the publik ma be expektd to get rekonsyled to

the bezair asspekt of the Simplified Kombynashuns, but--if I may be

allowed the expression--is it worth the wasted time? [Figure 7]

To see our letters put together in ways to which we are not accustomed

offends the eye, and also takes the EXPRESSION out of the words.

La on, Makduf, and damd be he hoo furst krys hold, enuf!

It doesn't thrill you as it used to do. The simplifications have sucked

the thrill all out of it.

But a written character with which we are NOT ACQUAINTED does not offend

us--Greek, Hebrew, Russian, Arabic, and the others--they have an

interesting look, and we see beauty in them, too. And this is true of

hieroglyphics, as well. There is something pleasant and engaging about

the mathematical signs when we do not understand them. The mystery

hidden in these things has a fascination for us: we can't come across a

printed page of shorthand without being impressed by it and wishing we

could read it.

Very well, what I am offering for acceptance and adopting is not

shorthand, but longhand, written with the SHORTHAND ALPHABET UNREACHED.

You can write three times as many words in a minute with it as you can

write with our alphabet. And so, in a way, it IS properly a shorthand.

It has a pleasant look, too; a beguiling look, an inviting look. I will

write something in it, in my rude and untaught way: [Figure 8]

Even when _I_ do it it comes out prettier than it does in Simplified

Spelling. Yes, and in the Simplified it costs one hundred and

twenty-three pen-strokes to write it, whereas in the phonographic it

costs only twenty-nine.

[Figure 9] is probably [Figure 10].

Let us hope so, anyway.

AS CONCERNS INTERPRETING THE DEITY

I

This line of hieroglyphics was for fourteen years the despair of all the

scholars who labored over the mysteries of the Rosetta stone: [Figure 1]

After five years of study Champollion translated it thus:

Therefore let the worship of Epiphanes be maintained in all the temples,

this upon pain of death.

That was the twenty-forth translation that had been furnished by

scholars. For a time it stood. But only for a time. Then doubts began

to assail it and undermine it, and the scholars resumed their labors.

Three years of patient work produced eleven new translations; among them,

this, by Gr:unfeldt, was received with considerable favor:

The horse of Epiphanes shall be maintained at the public expense; this

upon pain of death.

But the following rendering, by Gospodin, was received by the learned

world with yet greater favor:

The priest shall explain the wisdom of Epiphanes to all these people,

and these shall listen with reverence, upon pain of death.

Seven years followed, in which twenty-one fresh and widely varying

renderings were scored--none of them quite convincing. But now, at last,

came Rawlinson, the youngest of all the scholars, with a translation

which was immediately and universally recognized as being the correct

version, and his name became famous in a day. So famous, indeed, that

even the children were familiar with it; and such a noise did the

achievement itself make that not even the noise of the monumental

political event of that same year--the flight from Elba--was able to

smother it to silence. Rawlinson's version reads as follows:

Therefore, walk not away from the wisdom of Epiphanes, but turn and

follow it; so shall it conduct thee to the temple's peace, and soften for

thee the sorrows of life and the pains of death.

Here is another difficult text: [Figure 2]

It is demotic--a style of Egyptian writing and a phase of the language

which has perished from the knowledge of all men twenty-five hundred

years before the Christian era.

Our red Indians have left many records, in the form of pictures, upon our

crags and boulders. It has taken our most gifted and painstaking

students two centuries to get at the meanings hidden in these pictures;

yet there are still two little lines of hieroglyphics among the figures

grouped upon the Dighton Rocks which they have not succeeds in

interpreting to their satisfaction. These: [Figure 3]

The suggested solutions are practically innumerable; they would fill a

book.