In passing along Central Street this morning my attention was directed

by the friend who accompanied me to a group of laborers, with coats off

and sleeves rolled up, heaving at levers, smiting with sledge-hammers,

in full view of the street, on the margin of the canal, just above

Central Street Bridge. I rubbed my eyes, half expecting that I was the

subject of mere optical illusion; but a second look only confirmed the

first. Around me were solemn, go-to-meeting faces,--smileless and

awful; and close at hand were the delving, toiling, mud-begrimed

laborers. Nobody seemed surprised at it; nobody noticed it as a thing

out of the common course of events. And this, too, in a city where the

Sabbath proprieties are sternly insisted upon; where some twenty pulpits

deal out anathemas upon all who "desecrate the Lord's day;" where simple

notices of meetings for moral purposes even can scarcely be read; where

many count it wrong to speak on that day for the slave, who knows no

Sabbath of rest, or for the drunkard, who, imbruted by his appetites,

cannot enjoy it. Verily there are strange contradictions in our

conventional morality. Eyes which, looking across the Atlantic on the

gay Sabbath dances of French peasants are turned upward with horror, are

somehow blind to matters close at home. What would be sin past

repentance in an individual becomes quite proper in a corporation.

True, the Sabbath is holy; but the canals must be repaired. Everybody

ought to go to meeting; but the dividends must not be diminished.

Church indulgences are not, after all, confined to Rome.

To a close observer of human nature there is nothing surprising in the

fact that a class of persons, who wink at this sacrifice of Sabhath

sanctities to the demon of gain, look at the same time with stern

disapprobation upon everything partaking of the character of amusement,

however innocent and healthful, on this day. But for myself, looking

down through the light of a golden evening upon these quietly passing

groups, I cannot find it in my heart to condemn them for seeking on this

their sole day of leisure the needful influences of social enjoyment,

unrestrained exercise, and fresh air. I cannot think any essential

service to religion or humanity would result from the conversion of

their day of rest into a Jewish Sabbath, and their consequent

confinement, like so many pining prisoners, in close and crowded

boarding-houses. Is not cheerfulness a duty, a better expression of our

gratitude for God's blessings than mere words? And even under the old

law of rituals, what answer had the Pharisees to the question, "Is it

not lawful to do good on the Sabbath day?"

I am naturally of a sober temperament, and am, besides, a member of that

sect which Dr. More has called, mistakenly indeed, "the most melancholy

of all;" but I confess a special dislike of disfigured faces,

ostentatious displays of piety, pride aping humility. Asceticism,

moroseness, self-torture, ingratitude in view of down-showering

blessings, and painful restraint of the better feelings of our nature

may befit a Hindoo fakir, or a Mandan medicine man with buffalo skulls

strung to his lacerated muscles; but they look to me sadly out of place

in a believer of the glad evangel of the New Testament. The life of the

divine Teacher affords no countenance to this sullen and gloomy

saintliness, shutting up the heart against the sweet influences of human

sympathy and the blessed ministrations of Nature. To the horror and

clothes-rending astonishment of blind Pharisees He uttered the

significant truth, that "the Sabhath was made for man, and not man for

the Sabhath." From the close air of crowded cities, from thronged

temples and synagogues,--where priest and Levite kept up a show of

worship, drumming upon hollow ceremonials the more loudly for their

emptiness of life, as the husk rustles the more when the grain is gone,

--He led His disciples out into the country stillness, under clear

Eastern heavens, on the breezy tops of mountains, in the shade of fruit-

trees, by the side of fountains, and through yellow harvest-fields,

enforcing the lessons of His divine morality by comparisons and parables

suggested by the objects around Him or the cheerful incidents of social

humanity,--the vineyard, the field-lily, the sparrow in the air, the

sower in the seed-field, the feast and the marriage. Thus gently, thus

sweetly kind and cheerful, fell from His lips the gospel of humanity;

love the fulfilling of every law; our love for one another measuring and

manifesting our love of Him. The baptism wherewith He was baptized was

that of divine fulness in the wants of our humanity; the deep waters of

our sorrows went over Him; ineffable purity sounding for our sakes the

dark abysm of sin; yet how like a river of light runs that serene and

beautiful life through the narratives of the evangelists! He broke

bread with the poor despised publican; He sat down with the fishermen by

the Sea of Galilee; He spoke compassionate words to sin-sick Magdalen;

He sanctified by His presence the social enjoyments of home and

friendship in the family of Bethany; He laid His hand of blessing on the

sunny brows of children; He had regard even to the merely animal wants

of the multitude in the wilderness; He frowned upon none of life's

simple and natural pleasures. The burden of His Gospel was love; and in

life and word He taught evermore the divided and scattered children of

one great family that only as they drew near each other could they

approach Him who was their common centre; and that while no ostentation

of prayer nor rigid observance of ceremonies could elevate man to

heaven, the simple exercise of love, in thought and action, could bring

heaven down to man. To weary and restless spirits He taught the great

truth, that happiness consists in making others happy. No cloister for

idle genuflections and bead counting, no hair-cloth for the loins nor

scourge for the limbs, but works of love and usefulness under the

cheerful sunshine, making the waste places of humanity glad and causing

the heart's desert to blossom. Why, then, should we go searching after

the cast-off sackcloth of the Pharisee? Are we Jews, or Christians?

Must even our gratitude for "glad tidings of great joy" be desponding?

Must the hymn of our thanksgiving for countless mercies and the

unspeakable gift of His life have evermore an undertone of funeral

wailing? What! shall we go murmuring and lamenting, looking coldly on

one another, seeing no beauty, nor light, nor gladness in this good

world, wherein we have the glorious privilege of laboring in God's

harvest-field, with angels for our task companions, blessing and being

blessed?

To him who, neglecting the revelations of immediate duty, looks

regretfully behind and fearfully before him, life may well seem a solemn

mystery, for, whichever way he turns, a wall of darkness rises before

him; but down upon the present, as through a skylight between the

shadows, falls a clear, still radiance, like beams from an eye of

blessing; and, within the circle of that divine illumination, beauty and

goodness, truth and love, purity and cheerfulness blend like primal

colors into the clear harmony of light. The author of Proverbial

Philosophy has a passage not unworthy of note in this connection, when

he speaks of the train which attends the just in heaven:--

"Also in the lengthening troop see I some clad in robes of triumph,

Whose fair and sunny faces I have known and loved on earth.

Welcome, ye glorified Loves, Graces, Sciences, and Muses,

That, like Sisters of Charity, tended in this world's hospital;

Welcome, for verily I knew ye could not but be children of the light;

Welcome, chiefly welcome, for I find I have friends in heaven,

And some I have scarcely looked for; as thou, light-hearted Mirth;

Thou, also, star-robed Urania; and thou with the curious glass,

That rejoicest in tracking beauty where the eye was too dull to note it.

And art thou, too, among the blessed, mild, much-injured Poetry?

That quickenest with light and beauty the leaden face of matter,

That not unheard, though silent, fillest earth's gardens with music,

And not unseen, though a spirit, dost look down upon us from the stars."

THE LIGHTING UP.

"He spak to the spynnsters to spynnen it oute."

PIERS PLOUGHMAN.

THIS evening, the 20th of the ninth month, is the time fixed upon for

lighting the mills for night-labor; and I have just returned from

witnessing for the first time the effect of the new illumination.

Passing over the bridge, nearly to the Dracut shore, I had a fine view

of the long line of mills, the city beyond, and the broad sweep of the

river from the falls. The light of a tranquil and gorgeous sunset was

slowly fading from river and sky, and the shadows of the trees on the

Dracut slopes were blending in dusky indistinctness with the great

shadow of night. Suddenly gleams of light broke from the black masses

of masonry on the Lowell bank, at first feeble and scattered, flitting

from window to window, appearing and disappearing, like will-o'-wisps in

a forest or fireflies in a summer's night. Anon tier after tier of

windows became radiant, until the whole vast wall, stretching far up the

river, from basement to roof, became checkered with light reflected with

the starbeams from the still water beneath. With a little effort of

fancy, one could readily transform the huge mills, thus illuminated,

into palaces lighted up for festival occasions, and the figures of the

workers, passing to and fro before the windows, into forms of beauty and

fashion, moving in graceful dances.

Alas! this music of the shuttle and the daylong dance to it are not

altogether of the kind which Milton speaks of when he invokes the "soft

Lydian airs" of voluptuous leisure. From this time henceforward for

half a weary year, from the bell-call of morning twilight to half-past

seven in the evening, with brief intermissions for two hasty meals, the

operatives will be confined to their tasks. The proverbial facility of

the Yankees in despatching their dinners in the least possible time

seems to have been taken advantage of and reduced to a system on the

Lowell corporations. Strange as it may seem to the uninitiated, the

working-men and women here contrive to repair to their lodgings, make

the necessary preliminary ablutions, devour their beef and pudding, and

hurry back to their looms and jacks in the brief space of half an hour.

In this way the working-day in Lowell is eked out to an average

throughout the year of twelve and a half hours. This is a serious evil,

demanding the earnest consideration of the humane and philanthropic.

Both classes--the employer and the employed--would in the end be greatly

benefited by the general adoption of the "ten-hour system," although the

one might suffer a slight diminution in daily wages and the other in

yearly profits. Yet it is difficult to see how this most desirable

change is to be effected. The stronger and healthier portion of the

operatives might themselves object to it as strenuously as the distant

stockholder who looks only to his semi-annual dividends. Health is too

often a matter of secondary consideration. Gain is the great,

all-absorbing object. Very few, comparatively, regard Lowell as their

"continuing city." They look longingly back to green valleys of

Vermont, to quiet farm-houses on the head-waters of the Connecticut and

Merrimac, and to old familiar homes along the breezy seaboard of New

England, whence they have been urged by the knowledge that here they can

earn a larger amount of money in a given time than in any other place or

employment. They come here for gain, not for pleasure; for high wages,

not for the comforts that cluster about home. Here are poor widows

toiling to educate their children; daughters hoarding their wages to

redeem mortgaged paternal homesteads or to defray the expenses of sick

and infirm parents; young betrothed girls, about to add their savings to

those of their country lovers. Others there are, of maturer age, lonely

and poor, impelled hither by a proud unwillingness to test to its extent

the charity of friends and relatives, and a strong yearning for the

"glorious privilege of being independent." All honor to them! Whatever

may have closed against them the gates of matrimony, whether their own

obduracy or the faithlessness or indifference of others, instead of

shutting themselves up in a nunnery or taxing the good nature of their

friends by perpetual demands for sympathy and support, like weak vines,

putting out their feelers in every direction for something to twine

upon, is it not better and wiser for them to go quietly at work, to show

that woman has a self-sustaining power; that she is something in and of

herself; that she, too, has a part to bear in life, and, in common with

the self-elected "lords of creation," has a direct relation to absolute

being? To such the factory presents the opportunity of taking the first

and essential step of securing, within a reasonable space of time, a

comfortable competency.

There are undoubtedly many evils connected with the working of these

mills; yet they are partly compensated by the fact that here, more than

in any other mechanical employment, the labor of woman is placed

essentially upon an equality with that of man. Here, at least, one of

the many social disabilities under which woman as a distinct individual,

unconnected with the other sex, has labored in all time is removed; the

work of her hands is adequately rewarded; and she goes to her daily task

with the consciousness that she is not "spending her strength for

naught."

'The Lowell Offering', which has been for the last four years published

monthly in this city, consisting entirely of articles written by females

employed in the mills, has attracted much attention and obtained a wide

circulation. This may be in part owing to the novel circumstances of

its publication; but it is something more and better than a mere

novelty. In its volumes may be found sprightly delineations of home

scenes and characters, highly wrought imaginative pieces, tales of

genuine pathos and humor, and pleasing fairy stories and fables.

'The Offering' originated in a reading society of the mill girls, which,

under the name of the 'Improvement Circle' was convened once in a month.

At its meetings, pieces written by its members and dropped secretly into

a sort of "lion's mouth," provided for the purpose of insuring the

authors from detection, were read for the amusement and criticism of

the company. This circle is still in existence; and I owe to my

introduction to it some of the most pleasant hours I have passed in

Lowell.

The manner in which the 'Offering' has been generally noticed in this

country has not, to my thinking, been altogether in accordance with good

taste or self-respect. It is hardly excusable for men, who, whatever

may be their present position, have, in common with all of us, brothers,

sisters, or other relations busy in workshop and dairy, and who have

scarcely washed from their own professional hands the soil of labor, to

make very marked demonstrations of astonishment at the appearance of a

magazine whose papers are written by factory girls. As if the

compatibility of mental cultivation with bodily labor and the equality

and brotherhood of the human family were still open questions, depending

for their decision very much on the production of positive proof that

essays may be written and carpets woven by the same set of fingers!

The truth is, our democracy lacks calmness and solidity, the repose and

self-reliance which come of long habitude and settled conviction. We

have not yet learned to wear its simple truths with the graceful ease

and quiet air of unsolicitous assurance with which the titled European

does his social fictions. As a people, we do not feel and live out our

great Declaration. We lack faith in man,--confidence in simple

humanity, apart from its environments.

"The age shows, to my thinking, more infidels to Adam,

Than directly, by profession, simple infidels to God."

Elizabeth B. Browning.

TAKING COMFORT.

For the last few days the fine weather has lured me away from books and

papers and the close air of dwellings into the open fields, and under

the soft, warm sunshine, and the softer light of a full moon. The

loveliest season of the whole year--that transient but delightful

interval between the storms of the "wild equinox, with all their wet,"

and the dark, short, dismal days which precede the rigor of winter--is

now with us. The sun rises through a soft and hazy atmosphere; the

light mist-clouds melt gradually away before him; and his noontide light

rests warm and clear on still woods, tranquil waters, and grasses green

with the late autumnal rains. The rough-wooded slopes of Dracut,

overlooking the falls of the river; Fort Hill, across the Concord, where

the red man made his last stand, and where may still be seen the trench

which he dug around his rude fortress; the beautiful woodlands on the

Lowell and Tewksbury shores of the Concord; the cemetery; the Patucket

Falls,--all within the reach of a moderate walk,--offer at this season

their latest and loveliest attractions.

One fine morning, not long ago, I strolled down the Merrimac, on the

Tewksbury shore. I know of no walk in the vicinity of Lowell so

inviting as that along the margin of the river for nearly a mile from

the village of Belvidere. The path winds, green and flower-skirted,

among beeches and oaks, through whose boughs you catch glimpses of

waters sparkling and dashing below. Rocks, huge and picturesque,

jut out into the stream, affording beautiful views of the river and

the distant city.

Half fatigued with my walk, I threw myself down upon the rocky slope

of the bank, where the panorama of earth, sky, and water lay clear and

distinct about me. Far above, silent and dim as a picture, was the

city, with its huge mill-masonry, confused chimney-tops, and church-

spires; nearer rose the height of Belvidere, with its deserted burial-

place and neglected gravestones sharply defined on its bleak, bare

summit against the sky; before me the river went dashing down its rugged

channel, sending up its everlasting murmur; above me the birch-tree hung

its tassels; and the last wild flowers of autumn profusely fringed the

rocky rim of the water. Right opposite, the Dracut woods stretched

upwards from the shore, beautiful with the hues of frost, glowing with

tints richer and deeper than those which Claude or Poussin mingled, as

if the rainbows of a summer shower had fallen among them. At a little

distance to the right a group of cattle stood mid-leg deep in the river;

and a troop of children, bright-eyed and mirthful, were casting pebbles

at them from a projecting shelf of rock. Over all a warm but softened

sunshine melted down from a slumberous autumnal sky.

My revery was disagreeably broken. A low, grunting sound, half bestial,

half human, attracted my attention. I was not alone. Close beside me,

half hidden by a tuft of bushes, lay a human being, stretched out at

full length, with his face literally rooted into the gravel. A little

boy, five or six years of age, clean and healthful, with his fair brown

locks and blue eyes, stood on the bank above, gazing down upon him with

an expression of childhood's simple and unaffected pity.

"What ails you?" asked the boy at length. "What makes you lie there?"

The prostrate groveller struggled half-way up, exhibiting the bloated

and filthy countenance of a drunkard. He made two or three efforts to

get upon his feet, lost his balance, and tumbled forward upon his face.

"What are you doing there?" inquired the boy.

"I'm taking comfort," he muttered, with his mouth in the dirt.

Taking his comfort! There he lay,--squalid and loathsome under the

bright heaven,--an imbruted man. The holy harmonies of Nature, the

sounds of gushing waters, the rustle of the leaves above him, the wild

flowers, the frost-bloom of the woods,--what were they to him?

Insensible, deaf, and blind, in the stupor of a living death, he lay

there, literally realizing that most bitterly significant Eastern

malediction, "May you eat dirt!"

In contrasting the exceeding beauty and harmony of inanimate Nature with

the human degradation and deformity before me, I felt, as I confess I

had never done before, the truth of a remark of a rare thinker, that

"Nature is loved as the city of God, although, or rather because, it has

no citizen. The beauty of Nature must ever be universal and mocking

until the landscape has human figures as good as itself. Man is fallen;

Nature is erect."--(Emerson.) As I turned once more to the calm blue

sky, the hazy autumnal hills, and the slumberous water, dream-tinted by

the foliage of its shores, it seemed as if a shadow of shame and sorrow

fell over the pleasant picture; and even the west wind which stirred the

tree-tops above me had a mournful murmur, as if Nature felt the

desecration of her sanctities and the discord of sin and folly which

marred her sweet harmonies.

God bless the temperance movement! And He will bless it; for it is His

work. It is one of the great miracles of our times. Not Father Mathew

in Ireland, nor Hawkins and his little band in Baltimore, but He whose

care is over all the works of His hand, and who in His divine love and

compassion "turneth the hearts of men as the rivers of waters are

turned," hath done it. To Him be all the glory.

CHARMS AND FAIRY FAITH

"Up the airy mountain,

Down the rushy glen,

We dare n't go a-hunting

For fear of little men.

Wee folk, good folk,

Trooping all together;

Green jacket, red cap,

Gray cock's feather."

ALLINGHAM.

IT was from a profound knowledge of human nature that Lord Bacon, in

discoursing upon truth, remarked that a mixture of a lie doth ever add

pleasure. "Doth any man doubt," he asks, "that if there were taken out

of men's minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, and

imaginations, but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor,

shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to

themselves?" This admitted tendency of our nature, this love of the

pleasing intoxication of unveracity, exaggeration, and imagination, may

perhaps account for the high relish which children and nations yet in

the childhood of civilization find in fabulous legends and tales of

wonder. The Arab at the present day listens with eager interest to the

same tales of genii and afrits, sorcerers and enchanted princesses,

which delighted his ancestors in the times of Haroun al Raschid. The

gentle, church-going Icelander of our time beguiles the long night of

his winter with the very sagas and runes which thrilled with not

unpleasing horror the hearts of the old Norse sea-robbers. What child,

although Anglo-Saxon born, escapes a temporary sojourn in fairy-land?

Who of us does not remember the intense satisfaction of throwing aside

primer and spelling-book for stolen ethnographical studies of dwarfs,

and giants? Even in our own country and time old superstitions and

credulities still cling to life with feline tenacity. Here and there,

oftenest in our fixed, valley-sheltered, inland villages,--slumberous

Rip Van Winkles, unprogressive and seldom visited,--may be found the

same old beliefs in omens, warnings, witchcraft, and supernatural charms

which our ancestors brought with them two centuries ago from Europe.

The practice of charms, or what is popularly called "trying projects,"

is still, to some extent, continued in New England. The inimitable

description which Burns gives of similar practices in his Halloween may

not in all respects apply to these domestic conjurations; but the

following needs only the substitution of apple-seeds for nuts:--

"The auld gude wife's wheel-hoordet nits

Are round an' round divided;

An' mony lads and lassies' fates

Are there that night decided.

Some kindle couthie side by side

An' burn thegither trimly;

Some start awa wi' saucy pride

And jump out owre the chimlie."

One of the most common of these "projects" is as follows: A young woman

goes down into the cellar, or into a dark room, with a mirror in her

hand, and looking in it, sees the face of her future husband peering at

her through the darkness,--the mirror being, for the time, as potent as

the famous Cambuscan glass of which Chaucer discourses. A neighbor of

mine, in speaking of this conjuration, adduces a case in point. One of

her schoolmates made the experiment and saw the face of a strange man in

the glass; and many years afterwards she saw the very man pass her

father's door. He proved to be an English emigrant just landed, and in

due time became her husband. Burns alludes to something like the spell

above described:--

"Wee Jenny to her grannie says,

'will ye go wi' me, grannie,

To eat an apple at the glass

I got from Uncle Johnnie?'

She fuff't her pipe wi' sic a lunt,

In wrath she was so vaporin',

She noticed na an' azle brunt

Her bran new worset apron.

"Ye little skelpan-limmer's face,

How dare ye try sic sportin',

An' seek the foul thief ony place

For him to try your fortune?

Nae doubt but ye may get a sight;

Great cause ye hae to fear it;

For mony a one has gotten a fright,

An' lived and died delecrit."

It is not to be denied, and for truth's sake not to be regretted, that

this amusing juvenile glammary has seen its best days in New England.

The schoolmaster has been abroad to some purpose. Not without results

have our lyceum lecturers and travels of Peter Parley brought everything

in heaven above and in the earth below to the level of childhood's

capacities. In our cities and large towns children nowadays pass

through the opening acts of life's marvellous drama with as little

manifestation of wonder and surprise as the Indian does through the

streets of a civilized city which he has entered for the first time.

Yet Nature, sooner or later, vindicates her mysteries; voices from the

unseen penetrate the din of civilization. The child philosopher and

materialist often becomes the visionary of riper years, running into

illuminism, magnetism, and transcendentalism, with its inspired priests

and priestesses, its revelations and oracular responses.

But in many a green valley of rural New England there are children yet;

boys and girls are still to be found not quite overtaken by the march of

mind. There, too, are huskings, and apple-bees, and quilting parties,

and huge old-fashioned fireplaces piled with crackling walnut, flinging

its rosy light over happy countenances of youth and scarcely less happy

age. If it be true that, according to Cornelius Agrippa, "a wood fire

doth drive away dark spirits," it is, nevertheless, also true that

around it the simple superstitions of our ancestors still love to

linger; and there the half-sportful, half-serious charms of which I have

spoken are oftenest resorted to. It would be altogether out of place to

think of them by our black, unsightly stoves, or in the dull and dark

monotony of our furnace-heated rooms. Within the circle of the light of

the open fire safely might the young conjurers question destiny; for

none but kindly and gentle messengers from wonderland could venture

among them. And who of us, looking back to those long autumnal evenings

of childhood when the glow of the kitchen-fire rested on the beloved

faces of home, does not feel that there is truth and beauty in what the

quaint old author just quoted affirms? "As the spirits of darkness grow

stronger in the dark, so good spirits, which are angels of light, are

multiplied and strengthened, not only by the divine light of the sun and

stars, but also by the light of our common wood-fires." Even Lord

Bacon, in condemning the superstitious beliefs of his day, admits that

they might serve for winter talk around the fireside.

Fairy faith is, we may safely say, now dead everywhere,--buried,

indeed,--for the mad painter Blake saw the funeral of the last of the

little people, and an irreverent English bishop has sung their requiem.

It never had much hold upon the Yankee mind, our superstitions being

mostly of a sterner and less poetical kind. The Irish Presbyterians who

settled in New Hampshire about the year 1720 brought indeed with them,

among other strange matters, potatoes and fairies; but while the former

took root and flourished among us, the latter died out, after lingering

a few years in a very melancholy and disconsolate way, looking

regretfully back to their green turf dances, moonlight revels, and

cheerful nestling around the shealing fires of Ireland. The last that

has been heard of them was some forty or fifty years ago in a tavern

house in S-------, New Hampshire. The landlord was a spiteful little

man, whose sour, pinched look was a standing libel upon the state of his

larder. He made his house so uncomfortable by his moroseness that

travellers even at nightfall pushed by his door and drove to the next

town. Teamsters and drovers, who in those days were apt to be very

thirsty, learned, even before temperance societies were thought of, to

practice total abstinence on that road, and cracked their whips and

goaded on their teams in full view of a most tempting array of bottles

and glasses, from behind which the surly little landlord glared out upon

them with a look which seemed expressive of all sorts of evil wishes,

broken legs, overturned carriages, spavined horses, sprained oxen,

unsavory poultry, damaged butter, and bad markets. And if, as a matter

of necessity, to "keep the cold out of his stomach," occasionally a

wayfarer stopped his team and ventured to call for "somethin' warmin',"

the testy publican stirred up the beverage in such a spiteful way, that,

on receiving it foaming from his hand, the poor customer was half afraid

to open his mouth, lest the red-hot flip iron should be plunged down his

gullet.

As a matter of course, poverty came upon the house and its tenants like

an armed man. Loose clapboards rattled in the wind; rags fluttered from

the broken windows; within doors were tattered children and scanty fare.

The landlord's wife was a stout, buxom woman, of Irish lineage, and,

what with scolding her husband and liberally patronizing his bar in his

absence, managed to keep, as she said, her "own heart whole," although

the same could scarcely be said of her children's trousers and her own

frock of homespun. She confidently predicted that "a betther day was

coming," being, in fact, the only thing hopeful about the premises. And

it did come, sure enough. Not only all the regular travellers on the

road made a point of stopping at the tavern, but guests from all the

adjacent towns filled its long-deserted rooms,--the secret of which was,

that it had somehow got abroad that a company of fairies had taken up

their abode in the hostelry and daily held conversation with each other

in the capacious parlor. I have heard those who at the time visited the

tavern say that it was literally thronged for several weeks. Small,

squeaking voices spoke in a sort of Yankee-Irish dialect, in the haunted

room, to the astonishment and admiration of hundreds. The inn, of

course, was blessed by this fairy visitation; the clapboards ceased

their racket, clear panes took the place of rags in the sashes, and the

little till under the bar grew daily heavy with coin. The magical

influence extended even farther; for it was observable that the landlord

wore a good-natured face, and that the landlady's visits to the gin-

bottle were less and less frequent. But the thing could not, in the

nature of the case, continue long. It was too late in the day and on

the wrong side of the water. As the novelty wore off, people began to

doubt and reason about it. Had the place been traversed by a ghost or

disturbed by a witch they could have acquiesced in it very quietly; but

this outlandish belief in fairies was altogether an overtask for Yankee

credulity. As might have been expected, the little strangers, unable to

breathe in an atmosphere of doubt and suspicion, soon took their leave,

shaking off the dust of their elfin feet as a testimony against an

unbelieving generation. It was, indeed, said that certain rude fellows

from the Bay State pulled away a board from the ceiling and disclosed to

view the fairies in the shape of the landlady's three slatternly

daughters. But the reader who has any degree of that charity which

thinks no evil will rather credit the statement of the fairies

themselves, as reported by the mistress of the house, "that they were

tired of the new country, and had no pace of their lives among the

Yankees, and were going back to Ould Ireland."

It is a curious fact that the Indians had some notion of a race of

beings corresponding in many respects to the English fairies.

Schoolcraft describes them as small creatures in human shape, inhabiting

rocks, crags, and romantic dells, and delighting especially in points of

land jutting into lakes and rivers and which were covered with

pinetrees. They were called Puckweedjinees,--little vanishers.

In a poetical point of view it is to be regretted that our ancestors did

not think it worth their while to hand down to us more of the simple and

beautiful traditions and beliefs of the "heathen round about" them.

Some hints of them we glean from the writings of the missionary Mayhew

and the curious little book of Roger Williams. Especially would one

like to know more of that domestic demon, Wetuomanit, who presided over

household affairs, assisted the young squaw in her first essay at

wigwam-keeping, gave timely note of danger, and kept evil spirits at a

distance,--a kind of new-world brownie, gentle and useful.

Very suggestive, too, is the story of Pumoolah,--a mighty spirit, whose

home is on the great Katahdin Mountain, sitting there with his earthly

bride (a beautiful daughter of the Penobscots transformed into an

immortal by her love), in serenest sunshine, above the storm which

crouches and growls at his feet. None but the perfectly pure and good

can reach his abode. Many have from time to time attempted it in vain;

some, after almost reaching the summit, have been driven back by

thunderbolts or sleety whirlwinds.

Not far from my place of residence are the ruins of a mill, in a narrow

ravine fringed with trees. Some forty years ago the mill was supposed

to be haunted; and horse-shoes, in consequence, were nailed over its

doors. One worthy man, whose business lay beyond the mill, was afraid

to pass it alone; and his wife, who was less fearful of supernatural

annoyance, used to accompany him. The little old white-coated miller,

who there ground corn and wheat for his neighbors, whenever he made a

particularly early visit to his mill, used to hear it in full

operation,--the water-wheel dashing bravely, and the old rickety

building clattering to the jar of the stones. Yet the moment his hand

touched the latch or his foot the threshold all was hushed save the

melancholy drip of water from the dam or the low gurgle of the small

stream eddying amidst willow roots and mossy stones in the ravine below.

This haunted mill has always reminded me of that most beautiful of

Scottish ballads, the Song of the Elfin Miller, in which fairies are

represented as grinding the poor man's grist without toil:--

"Full merrily rings the mill-stone round;

Full merrily rings the wheel;

Full merrily gushes out the grist;

Come, taste my fragrant meal.

The miller he's a warldly man,

And maun hae double fee;

So draw the sluice in the churl's dam

And let the stream gae free!"

Brainerd, who truly deserves the name of an American poet, has left

behind him a ballad on the Indian legend of the black fox which haunted

Salmon River, a tributary of the Connecticut. Its wild and picturesque

beauty causes us to regret that more of the still lingering traditions

of the red men have not been made the themes of his verse:--

THE BLACK FOX.

"How cold, how beautiful, how bright

The cloudless heaven above us shines!

But 't is a howling winter's night;

'T would freeze the very forest pines.

"The winds are up while mortals sleep;

The stars look forth while eyes are shut;

The bolted snow lies drifted deep

Around our poor and lonely hut.

"With silent step and listening ear,

With bow and arrow, dog and gun,

We'll mark his track,--his prowl we hear:

Now is our time! Come on! come on!

"O'er many a fence, through many a wood,

Following the dog's bewildered scent,

In anxious haste and earnest mood,

The white man and the Indian went.

"The gun is cocked; the bow is bent;

The dog stands with uplifted paw;

And ball and arrow both are sent,

Aimed at the prowler's very jaw.

"The ball to kill that fox is run

Not in a mould by mortals made;

The arrow which that fox should shun

Was never shaped from earthly reed.

"The Indian Druids of the wood

Know where the fatal arrows grow;

They spring not by the summer flood;

They pierce not through the winter's snow.

"Why cowers the dog, whose snuffing nose

Was never once deceived till now?

And why amidst the chilling snows

Does either hunter wipe his brow?

"For once they see his fearful den;

'T is a dark cloud that slowly moves

By night around the homes of men,

By day along the stream it loves.

"Again the dog is on the track,

The hunters chase o'er dale and hill;

They may not, though they would, look back;

They must go forward, forward still.

"Onward they go, and never turn,

Amidst a night which knows no day;

For nevermore shall morning sun

Light them upon their endless way.

"The hut is desolate; and there

The famished dog alone returns;

On the cold steps he makes his lair;

By the shut door he lays his bones.

"Now the tired sportsman leans his gun

Against the ruins on its site,

And ponders on the hunting done

By the lost wanderers of the night.

"And there the little country girls

Will stop to whisper, listen, and look,

And tell, while dressing their sunny curls,

Of the Black Fox of Salmon Brook."

The same writer has happily versified a pleasant superstition of the

valley of the Connecticut. It is supposed that shad are led from the

Gulf of Mexico to the Connecticut by a kind of Yankee bogle in the shape

of a bird.

THE SHAD SPIRIT.

"Now drop the bolt, and securely nail

The horse-shoe over the door;

'T is a wise precaution; and, if it should fail,

It never failed before.

"Know ye the shepherd that gathers his flock

Where the gales of the equinox blow

From each unknown reef and sunken rock

In the Gulf of Mexico,--

"While the monsoons growl, and the trade-winds bark,

And the watch-dogs of the surge

Pursue through the wild waves the ravenous shark

That prowls around their charge?

"To fair Connecticut's northernmost source,

O'er sand-bars, rapids, and falls,

The Shad Spirit holds his onward course

With the flocks which his whistle calls.

"Oh, how shall he know where he went before?

Will he wander around forever?

The last year's shad heads shall shine on the shore,

To light him up the river.

"And well can he tell the very time

To undertake his task

When the pork-barrel's low he sits on the chine

And drums on the empty cask.

"The wind is light, and the wave is white

With the fleece of the flock that's near;

Like the breath of the breeze he comes over the seas

And faithfully leads them here.

"And now he 's passed the bolted door

Where the rusted horse-shoe clings;

So carry the nets to the nearest shore,

And take what the Shad Spirit brings."

The comparatively innocent nature and simple poetic beauty of this class

of superstitions have doubtless often induced the moralist to hesitate

in exposing their absurdity, and, like Burns in view of his national

thistle, to:

"Turn the weeding hook aside

And spare the symbol dear."

But the age has fairly outgrown them, and they are falling away by a

natural process of exfoliation. The wonderland of childhood must

henceforth be sought within the domains of truth. The strange facts of

natural history, and the sweet mysteries of flowers and forests, and

hills and waters, will profitably take the place of the fairy lore of

the past, and poetry and romance still hold their accustomed seats in

the circle of home, without bringing with them the evil spirits of

credulity and untruth. Truth should be the first lesson of the child

and the last aspiration of manhood; for it has been well said that the

inquiry of truth, which is the lovemaking of it, the knowledge of truth,

which is the presence of it, and the belief of truth, which is the

enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of human nature.

MAGICIANS AND WITCH FOLK.

FASCINATION, saith Henry Cornelius Agrippa, in the fiftieth chapter of

his first book on Occult Philosophy, "is a binding which comes of the

spirit of the witch through the eyes of him that is bewitched, entering

to his heart; for the eye being opened and intent upon any one, with a

strong imagination doth dart its beams, which are the vehiculum of the

spirit, into the eyes of him that is opposite to her; which tender

spirit strikes his eyes, stirs up and wounds his heart, and infects his

spirit. Whence Apuleius saith, 'Thy eyes, sliding down through my eyes

into my inmost heart, stirreth up a most vehement burning.' And when

eyes are reciprocally intent upon each other, and when rays are joined

to rays, and lights to lights, then the spirit of the one is joined to

that of the other; so are strong ligations made and vehement loves

inflamed." Taking this definition of witchcraft, we sadly fear it is

still practised to a very great extent among us. The best we can say of

it is, that the business seems latterly to have fallen into younger

hands; its victims do not appear to regard themselves as especial

objects of compassion; and neither church nor state seems inclined to

interfere with it.

As might be expected in a shrewd community like ours, attempts are not

unfrequently made to speculate in the supernatural,--to "make gain of

sooth-saying." In the autumn of last year a "wise woman" dreamed, or

somnambulized, that a large sum of money, in gold and silver coin, lay

buried in the centre of the great swamp in Poplin, New Hampshire;

whereupon an immediate search was made for the precious metal. Under

the bleak sky of November, in biting frost and sleet rain, some twenty

or more grown men, graduates of our common schools, and liable, every

mother's son of them, to be made deacons, squires, and general court

members, and such other drill officers as may be requisite in the march

of mind, might be seen delving in grim earnest, breaking the frozen

earth, uprooting swamp-maples and hemlocks, and waking, with sledge and

crowbar, unwonted echoes in a solitude which had heretofore only

answered to the woodman's axe or the scream of the wild fowl. The snows

of December put an end to their labors; but the yawning excavation still

remains, a silent but somewhat expressive commentary upon the age of

progress.

Still later, in one of our Atlantic cities, an attempt was made,

partially at least, successful, to form a company for the purpose of

digging for money in one of the desolate sand-keys of the West Indies.

It appears that some mesmerized "subject," in the course of one of those

somnambulic voyages of discovery in which the traveller, like Satan in

chaos,--

"O'er bog, o'er steep, through straight, rough, dense, or rare,

With head, hands, wings, or feet, pursues his way,

And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies,"--

while peering curiously into the earth's mysteries, chanced to have his

eyes gladdened by the sight of a huge chest packed with Spanish coins,

the spoil, doubtless, of some rich-freighted argosy, or Carthagena

galleon, in the rare days of Queen Elizabeth's Christian buccaneers.

During the last quarter of a century, a colored woman in one of the

villages on the southern border of New Hampshire has been consulted by

hundreds of anxious inquirers into the future. Long experience in her

profession has given her something of that ready estimate of character,

that quick and keen appreciation of the capacity, habits, and wishes of

her visitors, which so remarkably distinguished the late famous Madame

Le Normand, of Paris; and if that old squalid sorceress, in her cramped

Parisian attic, redolent of garlic and bestrewn with the greasy

implements of sorry housewifery, was, as has been affirmed, consulted by

such personages as the fair Josephine Beauharnois, and the "man of

destiny," Napoleon himself, is it strange that the desire to lift the

veil of the great mystery before us should overcome in some degree our

peculiar and most republican prejudice against color, and reconcile us

to the disagreeable necessity of looking at futurity through a black

medium?

Some forty years ago, on the banks of the pleasant little creek

separating Berwick, in Maine, from Somersworth, in New Hampshire, within

sight of my mother's home, dwelt a plain, sedate member of the society

of Friends, named Bantum. He passed throughout a circle of several

miles as a conjurer and skilful adept in the art of magic. To him

resorted farmers who had lost their cattle, matrons whose household

gear, silver spoons, and table-linen had been stolen, or young maidens

whose lovers were absent; and the quiet, meek-spirited old man received

them all kindly, put on his huge iron-rimmed spectacles, opened his

"conjuring book," which my mother describes as a large clasped volume in

strange language and black-letter type, and after due reflection and

consideration gave the required answers without money and without price.

The curious old volume is still in the possession of the conjurer's

family. Apparently inconsistent as was this practice of the black art

with the simplicity and truthfulness of his religious profession, I have

not been able to learn that he was ever subjected to censure on account

of it. It may be that our modern conjurer defended himself on grounds

similar to those assumed by the celebrated knight of Nettesheim, in the

preface to his first Book of Magic: "Some," says he, "may crie oute that

I teach forbidden arts, sow the seed of heresies, offend pious ears, and

scandalize excellent wits; that I am a sorcerer, superstitious and

devilish, who indeed am a magician. To whom I answer, that a magician

doth not among learned men signifie a sorcerer or one that is

superstitious or devilish, but a wise man, a priest, a prophet, and that

the sibyls prophesied most clearly of Christ; that magicians, as wise

men, by the wonderful secrets of the world, knew Christ to be born, and

came to worship him, first of all; and that the name of magicke is

received by philosophers, commended by divines, and not unacceptable to

the Gospel."

The study of astrology and occult philosophy, to which many of the

finest minds of the Middle Ages devoted themselves without molestation

from the Church, was never practised with impunity after the

Reformation. The Puritans and Presbyterians, taking the Bible for their

rule, "suffered not a witch to live;" and, not content with burning the

books of those who "used curious arts" after the manner of the

Ephesians, they sacrificed the students themselves on the same pile.

Hence we hear little of learned and scientific wizards in New England.

One remarkable character of this kind seems, however, to have escaped

the vigilance of our modern Doctors of the Mosaic Law. Dr. Robert Child

came to this country about the year 1644, and took up his residence in

the Massachusetts colony. He was a man of wealth, and owned plantations

at Nashaway, now Lancaster, and at Saco, in Maine. He was skilful in

mineralogy and metallurgy, and seems to have spent a good deal of money

in searching for mines. He is well known as the author of the first

decided movement for liberty of conscience in Massachusetts, his name

standing at the head of the famous petition of 1646 for a modification

of the laws in respect to religious worship, and complaining in strong

terms of the disfranchisement of persons not members of the Church. A

tremendous excitement was produced by this remonstrance; clergy and

magistrates joined in denouncing it; Dr. Child and his associates were

arrested, tried for contempt of government, and heavily fined. The

Court, in passing sentence, assured the Doctor that his crime was only

equalled by that of Korah and his troop, who rebelled against Moses and

Aaron. He resolved to appeal to the Parliament of England, and made

arrangements for his departure, but was arrested, and ordered to be kept

a prisoner in his own house until the vessel in which he was to sail had

left Boston. He was afterwards imprisoned for a considerable length of

time, and on his release found means to return to England. The Doctor's

trunks were searched by the Puritan authorities while he was in prison;

but it does not appear that they detected the occult studies to which

lie was addicted, to which lucky circumstance it is doubtless owing that

the first champion of religious liberty in the New World was not hung

for a wizard.

Dr. Child was a graduate of the renowned University of Padua, and had

travelled extensively in the Old World. Probably, like Michael Scott,

he had:

"Learned the art of glammarye

In Padua, beyond the sea;"

for I find in the dedication of an English translation of a Continental

work on astrology and magic, printed in 1651 "at the sign of the Three

Bibles," that his "sublime hermeticall and theomagicall lore" is

compared to that of Hermes and Agrippa. He is complimented as a master

of the mysteries of Rome and Germany, and as one who had pursued his

investigations among the philosophers of the Old World and the Indians

of the New, "leaving no stone unturned, the turning whereof might

conduce to the discovery of what is occult."

There was still another member of the Friends' society in Vermont, of

the name of Austin, who, in answer, as he supposed, to prayer and a

long-cherished desire to benefit his afflicted fellow-creatures,

received, as he believed, a special gift of healing. For several years

applicants from nearly all parts of New England visited him with the

story of their sufferings and praying for a relief, which, it is

averred, was in many instances really obtained. Letters from the sick

who were unable to visit him, describing their diseases, were sent him;

and many are yet living who believe that they were restored miraculously

at the precise period of time when Austin was engaged in reading their

letters. One of my uncles was commissioned to convey to him a large

number of letters from sick persons in his neighborhood. He found the

old man sitting in his plain parlor in the simplest garb of his sect,--

grave, thoughtful, venerable,--a drab-coated Prince Hohenlohe. He

received the letters in silence, read them slowly, casting them one

after another upon a large pile of similar epistles in a corner of the

apartment.

Half a century ago nearly every neighborhood in New England was favored

with one or more reputed dealers in magic. Twenty years later there

were two poor old sisters who used to frighten school urchins and

"children of a larger growth" as they rode down from New Hampshire on

their gaunt skeleton horses, strung over with baskets for the

Newburyport market. They were aware of the popular notion concerning

them, and not unfrequently took advantage of it to levy a sort of black

mail upon their credulous neighbors. An attendant at the funeral of one

of these sisters, who when living was about as unsubstantial as Ossian's

ghost, through which the stars were visible, told me that her coffin was

so heavy that four stout men could barely lift it.

One, of my earliest recollections is that of an old woman, residing

about two miles from the place of my nativity, who for many years had

borne the unenviable reputation of a witch. She certainly had the look

of one,--a combination of form, voice, and features which would have

made the fortune of an English witch finder in the days of Matthew Paris

or the Sir John Podgers of Dickens, and insured her speedy conviction in

King James's High Court of Justiciary. She was accused of divers ill-

doings,--such as preventing the cream in her neighbor's churn from

becoming butter, and snuffing out candles at huskings and quilting-

parties.

"She roamed the country far and near,

Bewitched the children of the peasants,

Dried up the cows, and lamed the deer,

And sucked the eggs, and killed the pheasants."

The poor old woman was at length so sadly annoyed by her unfortunate

reputation that she took the trouble to go before a justice of the

peace, and made solemn oath that she was a Christian woman, and no

witch.

Not many years since a sad-visaged, middle-aged man might be seen in the

streets of one of our seaboard towns at times suddenly arrested in the

midst of a brisk walk and fixed motionless for some minutes in the busy

thoroughfare. No effort could induce him to stir until, in his opinion,

the spell was removed and his invisible tormentor suffered him to

proceed. He explained his singular detention as the act of a whole

family of witches whom he had unfortunately offended during a visit down

East. It was rumored that the offence consisted in breaking off a

matrimonial engagement with the youngest member of the family,--a

sorceress, perhaps, in more than one sense of the word, like that

"winsome wench and walie" in Tam O'Shanter's witch-dance at Kirk

Alloway. His only hope was that he should outlive his persecutors; and

it is said that at the very hour in which the event took place he

exultingly assured his friends that the spell was forever broken, and

that the last of the family of his tormentors was no more.

When a boy, I occasionally met, at the house of a relative in an

adjoining town, a stout, red-nosed old farmer of the neighborhood.

A fine tableau he made of a winter's evening, in the red light of a

birch-log fire, as he sat for hours watching its progress, with sleepy,

half-shut eyes, changing his position only to reach the cider-mug on the

shelf near him. Although he seldom opened his lips save to assent to

some remark of his host or to answer a direct question, yet at times,

when the cider-mug got the better of his taciturnity, he would amuse us

with interesting details of his early experiences in "the Ohio country."

There was, however, one chapter in these experiences which he usually

held in reserve, and with which "the stranger intermeddled not." He was

not willing to run the risk of hearing that which to him was a frightful

reality turned into ridicule by scoffers and unbelievers. The substance

of it, as I received it from one of his neighbors, forms as clever a

tale of witchcraft as modern times have produced.

It seems that when quite a young man he left the homestead, and,

strolling westward, worked his way from place to place until he found

himself in one of the old French settlements on the Ohio River. Here he

procured employment on the farm of a widow; and being a smart, active

fellow, and proving highly serviceable in his department, he rapidly

gained favor in the eyes of his employer. Ere long, contrary to the

advice of the neighbors, and in spite of somewhat discouraging hints

touching certain matrimonial infelicities experienced by the late

husband, he resolutely stepped into the dead man's shoes: the mistress

became the wife, and the servant was legally promoted to the head of the

household.--

For a time matters went on cosily and comfortably enough. He was now

lord of the soil; and, as he laid in his crops of corn and potatoes,

salted down his pork, and piled up his wood for winter's use, he

naturally enough congratulated himself upon his good fortune and laughed

at the sinister forebodings of his neighbors. But with the long winter

months came a change over his "love's young dream." An evil and

mysterious influence seemed to be at work in his affairs. Whatever he

did after consulting his wife or at her suggestion resulted favorably

enough; but all his own schemes and projects were unaccountably marred

and defeated. If he bought a horse, it was sure to prove spavined or

wind-broken. His cows either refused to give down their milk, or,

giving it, perversely kicked it over. A fine sow which he had bargained

for repaid his partiality by devouring, like Saturn, her own children.

By degrees a dark thought forced its way into his mind. Comparing his

repeated mischances with the ante-nuptial warnings of his neighbors, he

at last came to the melancholy conclusion that his wife was a witch.

The victim in Motherwell's ballad of the Demon Lady, or the poor fellow

in the Arabian tale who discovered that he had married a ghoul in the

guise of a young and blooming princess, was scarcely in a more sorrowful

predicament. He grew nervous and fretful. Old dismal nursery stories

and all the witch lore of boyhood came back to his memory; and he crept

to his bed like a criminal to the gallows, half afraid to fall asleep

lest his mysterious companion should take a fancy to transform him into

a horse, get him shod at the smithy, and ride him to a witch-meeting.

And, as if to make the matter worse, his wife's affection seemed to

increase just in proportion as his troubles thickened upon him. She

aggravated him with all manner of caresses and endearments. This was

the drop too much. The poor husband recoiled from her as from a waking

nightmare. His thoughts turned to New England; he longed to see once

more the old homestead, with its tall well-sweep and butternut-trees by

the roadside; and he sighed amidst the rich bottom-lands of his new home

for his father's rocky pasture, with its crop of stinted mulleins. So

one cold November day, finding himself out of sight and hearing of his

wife, he summoned courage to attempt an escape, and, resolutely turning

his back on the West, plunged into the wilderness towards the sunrise.

After a long and hard journey he reached his birthplace, and was kindly

welcomed by his old friends. Keeping a close mouth with respect to his

unlucky adventure in Ohio, he soon after married one of his schoolmates,

and, by dint of persevering industry and economy, in a few years found

himself in possession of a comfortable home.

But his evil star still lingered above the horizon. One summer evening,

on returning from the hayfield, who should meet him but his witch wife

from Ohio! She came riding up the street on her old white horse, with a

pillion behind the saddle. Accosting him in a kindly tone, yet not

without something of gentle reproach for his unhandsome desertion of

her, she informed him that she had come all the way from Ohio to take

him back again.

It was in vain that he pleaded his later engagements; it was in vain

that his new wife raised her shrillest remonstrances, not unmingled with

expressions of vehement indignation at the revelation of her husband's

real position; the witch wife was inexorable; go he must, and that

speedily. Fully impressed with a belief in her supernatural power of

compelling obedience, and perhaps dreading more than witchcraft itself

the effects of the unlucky disclosure on the temper of his New England

helpmate, he made a virtue of the necessity of the case, bade farewell

to the latter amidst a perfect hurricane of reproaches, and mounted the

white horse, with his old wife on the pillion behind him.

Of that ride Burger might have written a counterpart to his ballad:--

"Tramp, tramp, along the shore they ride,

Splash, splash, along the sea."

Two or three years had passed away, bringing no tidings of the

unfortunate husband, when he once more made his appearance in his native

village. He was not disposed to be very communicative; but for one

thing, at least, he seemed willing to express his gratitude. His Ohio

wife, having no spell against intermittent fever, had paid the debt of

nature, and had left him free; in view of which, his surviving wife,

after manifesting a due degree of resentment, consented to take him back

to her bed and board; and I could never learn that she had cause to

regret her clemency.

THE BEAUTIFUL

"A beautiful form is better than a beautiful face;

a beautiful behavior is better than a beautiful form;

it gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures;

it is the finest of the fine arts."

EMERSON'S Essays, Second Series, iv., p. 162.

A FEW days since I was walking with a friend, who, unfortunately for

himself, seldom meets with anything in the world of realities worthy of

comparison with the ideal of his fancy, which, like the bird in the

Arabian tale, glides perpetually before him, always near yet never

overtaken. He was half humorously, half seriously, complaining of the

lack of beauty in the faces and forms that passed us on the crowded

sidewalk. Some defect was noticeable in all: one was too heavy, another

too angular; here a nose was at fault, there a mouth put a set of

otherwise fine features out of countenance; the fair complexions had red

hair, and glossy black locks were wasted upon dingy ones. In one way or

another all fell below his impossible standard.

The beauty which my friend seemed in search of was that of proportion

and coloring; mechanical exactness; a due combination of soft curves and

obtuse angles, of warm carnation and marble purity. Such a man, for

aught I can see, might love a graven image, like the girl of Florence

who pined into a shadow for the Apollo Belvidere, looking coldly on her

with stony eyes from his niche in the Vatican. One thing is certain,--

he will never find his faultless piece of artistical perfection by

searching for it amidst flesh-and-blood realities. Nature does not,

as far as I can perceive, work with square and compass, or lay on her

colors by the rules of royal artists or the dunces of the academies.

She eschews regular outlines. She does not shape her forms by a common

model. Not one of Eve's numerous progeny in all respects resembles her

who first culled the flowers of Eden. To the infinite variety and

picturesque inequality of Nature we owe the great charm of her uncloying

beauty. Look at her primitive woods; scattered trees, with moist sward

and bright mosses at their roots; great clumps of green shadow, where

limb intwists with limb and the rustle of one leaf stirs a hundred

others,--stretching up steep hillsides, flooding with green beauty the

valleys, or arching over with leaves the sharp ravines, every tree and

shrub unlike its neighbor in size and proportion,--the old and storm-

broken leaning on the young and vigorous,--intricate and confused,

without order or method. Who would exchange this for artificial French

gardens, where every tree stands stiff and regular, clipped and trimmed

into unvarying conformity, like so many grenadiers under review? Who

wants eternal sunshine or shadow? Who would fix forever the loveliest

cloudwork of an autumn sunset, or hang over him an everlasting

moonlight? If the stream had no quiet eddying place, could we so admire

its cascade over the rocks? Were there no clouds, could we so hail the

sky shining through them in its still, calm purity? Who shall venture

to ask our kind Mother Nature to remove from our sight any one of her

forms or colors? Who shall decide which is beautiful, or otherwise, in

itself considered?

There are too many, like my fastidious friend, who go through the world

"from Dan to Beersheba, finding all barren,"--who have always some fault

or other to find with Nature and Providence, seeming to consider

themselves especially ill used because the one does not always coincide

with their taste, nor the other with their narrow notions of personal

convenience. In one of his early poems, Coleridge has well expressed a

truth, which is not the less important because it is not generally

admitted. The idea is briefly this: that the mind gives to all things

their coloring, their gloom, or gladness; that the pleasure we derive

from external nature is primarily from ourselves:--

"from the mind itself must issue forth

A light, a glory, a fair luminous mist,

Enveloping the earth."

The real difficulty of these lifelong hunters after the beautiful exists

in their own spirits. They set up certain models of perfection in their

imaginations, and then go about the world in the vain expectation of

finding them actually wrought out according to pattern; very

unreasonably calculating that Nature will suspend her everlasting laws

for the purpose of creating faultless prodigies for their especial

gratification.

The authors of Gayeties and Gravities give it as their opinion that no

object of sight is regarded by us as a simple disconnected form, but

that--an instantaneous reflection as to its history, purpose, or

associations converts it into a concrete one,--a process, they shrewdly

remark, which no thinking being can prevent, and which can only be

avoided by the unmeaning and stolid stare of "a goose on the common or a

cow on the green." The senses and the faculties of the understanding

are so blended with and dependent upon each other that not one of them

can exercise its office alone and without the modification of some

extrinsic interference or suggestion. Grateful or unpleasant

associations cluster around all which sense takes cognizance of; the

beauty which we discern in an external object is often but the

reflection of our own minds.

What is beauty, after all? Ask the lover who kneels in homage to one

who has no attractions for others. The cold onlooker wonders that he

can call that unclassic combination of features and that awkward form

beautiful. Yet so it is. He sees, like Desdemona, her "visage in her

mind," or her affections. A light from within shines through the

external uncomeliness,--softens, irradiates, and glorifies it. That

which to others seems commonplace and unworthy of note is to him, in the

words of Spenser,--

"A sweet, attractive kind of grace;

A full assurance given by looks;

Continual comfort in a face;

The lineaments of Gospel books."

"Handsome is that handsome does,--hold up your heads, girls!" was the

language of Primrose in the play when addressing her daughters. The

worthy matron was right. Would that all my female readers who are

sorrowing foolishly because they are not in all respects like Dubufe's

Eve, or that statue of the Venus "which enchants the world," could be

persuaded to listen to her. What is good looking, as Horace Smith

remarks, but looking good? Be good, be womanly, be gentle,--generous in

your sympathies, heedful of the well-being of all around you; and, my

word for it, you will not lack kind words of admiration. Loving and

pleasant associations will gather about you. Never mind the ugly

reflection which your glass may give you. That mirror has no heart.

But quite another picture is yours on the retina of human sympathy.

There the beauty of holiness, of purity, of that inward grace which

passeth show, rests over it, softening and mellowing its features just

as the full calm moonlight melts those of a rough landscape into

harmonious loveliness. "Hold up your heads, girls!" I repeat after

Primrose. Why should you not? Every mother's daughter of you can be

beautiful. You can envelop yourselves in an atmosphere of moral and

intellectual beauty, through which your otherwise plain faces will look

forth like those of angels. Beautiful to Ledyard, stiffening in the

cold of a northern winter, seemed the diminutive, smokestained women of

Lapland, who wrapped him in their furs and ministered to his necessities

with kindness and gentle words of compassion. Lovely to the homesick

heart of Park seemed the dark maids of Sego, as they sung their low and

simple song of welcome beside his bed, and sought to comfort the white

stranger, who had "no mother to bring him milk and no wife to grind him

corn." Oh, talk as we may of beauty as a thing to be chiselled from

marble or wrought out on canvas, speculate as we may upon its colors and

outlines, what is it but an intellectual abstraction, after all? The

heart feels a beauty of another kind; looking through the outward

environment, it discovers a deeper and more real loveliness.

This was well understood by the old painters. In their pictures of

Mary, the virgin mother, the beauty which melts and subdues the gazer is

that of the soul and the affections, uniting the awe and mystery of that

mother's miraculous allotment with the irrepressible love, the

unutterable tenderness, of young maternity,--Heaven's crowning miracle

with Nature's holiest and sweetest instinct. And their pale Magdalens,

holy with the look of sins forgiven,--how the divine beauty of their

penitence sinks into the heart! Do we not feel that the only real

deformity is sin, and that goodness evermore hallows and sanctifies its

dwelling-place? When the soul is at rest, when the passions and desires

are all attuned to the divine harmony,--

"Spirits moving musically

To a lute's well-ordered law,"

The Haunted Palace, by Edgar A. Poe.

do we not read the placid significance thereof in the human countenance?

"I have seen," said Charles Lamb, "faces upon which the dove of peace

sat brooding." In that simple and beautiful record of a holy life, the

Journal of John Woolman, there is a passage of which I have been more

than once reminded in my intercourse with my fellow-beings: "Some

glances of real beauty may be seen in their faces who dwell in true

meekness. There is a harmony in the sound of that voice to which divine

love gives utterance."

Quite the ugliest face I ever saw was that of a woman whom the world

calls beautiful. Through its "silver veil" the evil and ungentle

passions looked out hideous and hateful. On the other hand, there are

faces which the multitude at the first glance pronounce homely,

unattractive, and such as "Nature fashions by the gross," which I always

recognize with a warm heart-thrill; not for the world would I have one

feature changed; they please me as they are; they are hallowed by kind

memories; they are beautiful through their associations; nor are they

any the less welcome that with my admiration of them "the stranger

intermeddleth not."

THE WORLD'S END.

"Our Father Time is weak and gray,

Awaiting for the better day;

See how idiot-like he stands,

Fumbling his old palsied hands!"

SHELLEY's Masque of Anarchy.

"STAGE ready, gentlemen! Stage for campground, Derry! Second Advent

camp-meeting!"

Accustomed as I begin to feel to the ordinary sights and sounds of this

busy city, I was, I confess, somewhat startled by this business-like

annunciation from the driver of a stage, who stood beside his horses

swinging his whip with some degree of impatience: "Seventy-five cents to

the Second Advent camp-ground!"

The stage was soon filled; the driver cracked his whip and went rattling

down the street.

The Second Advent,--the coming of our Lord in person upon this earth,

with signs, and wonders, and terrible judgments,--the heavens robing

together as a scroll, the elements melting with fervent heat! The

mighty consummation of all things at hand, with its destruction and its

triumphs, sad wailings of the lost and rejoicing songs of the glorified!

From this overswarming hive of industry,--from these crowded treadmills

of gain,--here were men and women going out in solemn earnestness to

prepare for the dread moment which they verily suppose is only a few

months distant,--to lift up their warning voices in the midst of

scoffers and doubters, and to cry aloud to blind priests and careless

churches, "Behold, the Bridegroom cometh!"

It was one of the most lovely mornings of this loveliest season of the

year; a warm, soft atmosphere; clear sunshine falling on the city spires

and roofs; the hills of Dracut quiet and green in the distance, with

their white farm-houses and scattered trees; around me the continual

tread of footsteps hurrying to the toils of the day; merchants spreading

out their wares for the eyes of purchasers; sounds of hammers, the sharp

clink of trowels, the murmur of the great manufactories subdued by

distance. How was it possible, in the midst of so much life, in that

sunrise light, and in view of all abounding beauty, that the idea of the

death of Nature--the baptism of the world in fire--could take such a

practical shape as this? Yet here were sober, intelligent men, gentle

and pious women, who, verily believing the end to be close at hand, had

left their counting-rooms, and workshops, and household cares to publish

the great tidings, and to startle, if possible, a careless and

unbelieving generation into preparation for the day of the Lord and for

that blessed millennium,--the restored paradise,--when, renovated and

renewed by its fire-purgation, the earth shall become as of old the

garden of the Lord, and the saints alone shall inherit it.

Very serious and impressive is the fact that this idea of a radical

change in our planet is not only predicted in the Scriptures, but that

the Earth herself, in her primitive rocks and varying formations, on

which are lithographed the history of successive convulsions, darkly

prophesies of others to come. The old poet prophets, all the world

over, have sung of a renovated world. A vision of it haunted the

contemplations of Plato. It is seen in the half-inspired speculations

of the old Indian mystics. The Cumaean sibyl saw it in her trances.

The apostles and martyrs of our faith looked for it anxiously and

hopefully. Gray anchorites in the deserts, worn pilgrims to the holy

places of Jewish and Christian tradition, prayed for its coming. It

inspired the gorgeous visions of the early fathers. In every age since

the Christian era, from the caves, and forests, and secluded "upper

chambers" of the times of the first missionaries of the cross, from the

Gothic temples of the Middle Ages, from the bleak mountain gorges of the

Alps, where the hunted heretics put up their expostulation, "How long,

O Lord, how long?" down to the present time, and from this Derry

campground, have been uttered the prophecy and the prayer for its

fulfilment.

How this great idea manifests itself in the lives of the enthusiasts of

the days of Cromwell! Think of Sir Henry Vane, cool, sagacious

statesman as he was, waiting with eagerness for the foreshadowings of

the millennium, and listening, even in the very council hall, for the

blast of the last trumpet! Think of the Fifth Monarchy Men, weary with

waiting for the long-desired consummation, rushing out with drawn swords

and loaded matchlocks into the streets of London to establish at once

the rule of King Jesus! Think of the wild enthusiasts at Munster,

verily imagining that the millennial reign had commenced in their mad

city! Still later, think of Granville Sharpe, diligently laboring in

his vocation of philanthropy, laying plans for the slow but beneficent

amelioration of the condition of his country and the world, and at the

same time maintaining, with the zeal of Father Miller himself, that the

earth was just on the point of combustion, and that the millennium would

render all his benevolent schemes of no sort of consequence!

And, after all, is the idea itself a vain one? Shall to-morrow be as

to-day? Shall the antagonism of good and evil continue as heretofore

forever? Is there no hope that this world-wide prophecy of the human

soul, uttered in all climes, in all times, shall yet be fulfilled? Who

shall say it may not be true? Nay, is not its truth proved by its

universality? The hope of all earnest souls must be realized. That

which, through a distorted and doubtful medium, shone even upon the

martyr enthusiasts of the French revolution,--soft gleams of heaven's

light rising over the hell of man's passions and crimes,--the glorious

ideal of Shelley, who, atheist as he was through early prejudice and

defective education, saw the horizon of the world's future kindling with

the light of a better day,--that hope and that faith which constitute,

as it were, the world's life, and without which it would be dark and

dead, cannot be in vain.

I do not, I confess, sympathize with my Second Advent friends in their

lamentable depreciation of Mother Earth even in her present state. I

find it extremely difficult to comprehend how it is that this goodly,

green, sunlit home of ours is resting under a curse. It really does not

seem to me to be altogether like the roll which the angel bore in the

prophet's vision, "written within and without with mourning,

lamentation, and woe." September sunsets, changing forests, moonrise

and cloud, sun and rain,--I for one am contented with them. They fill

my heart with a sense of beauty. I see in them the perfect work of

infinite love as well as wisdom. It may be that our Advent friends,

however, coincide with the opinions of an old writer on the prophecies,

who considered the hills and valleys of the earth's surface and its

changes of seasons as so many visible manifestations of God's curse, and

that in the millennium, as in the days of Adam's innocence, all these

picturesque inequalities would be levelled nicely away, and the flat

surface laid handsomely down to grass.

As might be expected, the effect of this belief in the speedy

destruction of the world and the personal coming of the Messiah, acting

upon a class of uncultivated, and, in some cases, gross minds, is not

always in keeping with the enlightened Christian's ideal of the better

day. One is shocked in reading some of the "hymns" of these believers.

Sensual images,--semi-Mahometan descriptions of the condition of the

"saints,"--exultations over the destruction of the "sinners,"--mingle

with the beautiful and soothing promises of the prophets. There are

indeed occasionally to be found among the believers men of refined and

exalted spiritualism, who in their lives and conversation remind one of

Tennyson's Christian knight-errant in his yearning towards the hope set

before him:

"to me is given

Such hope I may not fear;

I long to breathe the airs of heaven,

Which sometimes meet me here.

"I muse on joys that cannot cease,

Pure spaces filled with living beams,

White lilies of eternal peace,

Whose odors haunt my dreams."

One of the most ludicrous examples of the sensual phase of Millerism,

the incongruous blending of the sublime with the ridiculous, was

mentioned to me not long since. A fashionable young woman in the

western part of this State became an enthusiastic believer in the

doctrine. On the day which had been designated as the closing one of

time she packed all her fine dresses and toilet valuables in a large

trunk, with long straps attached to it, and, seating herself upon it,

buckled the straps over her shoulders, patiently awaiting the crisis,--

shrewdly calculating that, as she must herself go upwards, her goods and

chattels would of necessity follow.

Three or four years ago, on my way eastward, I spent an hour or two at a

camp-ground of the Second Advent in East Kingston. The spot was well

chosen. A tall growth of pine and hemlock threw its melancholy shadow

over the multitude, who were arranged upon rough seats of boards and

logs. Several hundred--perhaps a thousand people--were present, and

more were rapidly coming. Drawn about in a circle, forming a background

of snowy whiteness to the dark masses of men and foliage, were the white

tents, and back of them the provision-stalls and cook-shops. When I

reached the ground, a hymn, the words of which I could not distinguish,

was pealing through the dim aisles of the forest. I could readily

perceive that it had its effect upon the multitude before me, kindling

to higher intensity their already excited enthusiasm. The preachers

were placed in a rude pulpit of rough boards, carpeted only by the dead

forest-leaves and flowers, and tasselled, not with silk and velvet, but

with the green boughs of the sombre hemlocks around it. One of them

followed the music in an earnest exhortation on the duty of preparing

for the great event. Occasionally he was really eloquent, and his

description of the last day had the ghastly distinctness of Anelli's

painting of the End of the World.

Suspended from the front of the rude pulpit were two broad sheets of

canvas, upon one of which was the figure of a man, the head of gold, the

breast and arms of silver, the belly of brass, the legs of iron, and

feet of clay,--the dream of Nebuchadnezzar. On the other were depicted

the wonders of the Apocalyptic vision,--the beasts, the dragons, the

scarlet woman seen by the seer of Patmos, Oriental types, figures, and

mystic symbols, translated into staring Yankee realities, and exhibited

like the beasts of a travelling menagerie. One horrible image, with its

hideous heads and scaly caudal extremity, reminded me of the tremendous

line of Milton, who, in speaking of the same evil dragon, describes him

as

"Swinging the scaly horrors of his folded tail."

To an imaginative mind the scene was full of novel interest. The white

circle of tents; the dim wood arches; the upturned, earnest faces; the

loud voices of the speakers, burdened with the awful symbolic language

of the Bible; the smoke from the fires, rising like incense,--carried me

back to those days of primitive worship which tradition faintly whispers

of, when on hill-tops and in the shade of old woods Religion had her

first altars, with every man for her priest and the whole universe for

her temple.

Wisely and truthfully has Dr. Channing spoken of this doctrine of the

Second Advent in his memorable discourse in Berkshire a little before

his death:--

"There are some among us at the present moment who are waiting for the

speedy coming of Christ. They expect, before another year closes, to

see Him in the clouds, to hear His voice, to stand before His judgment-

seat. These illusions spring from misinterpretation of Scripture

language. Christ, in the New Testament, is said to come whenever His

religion breaks out in new glory or gains new triumphs. He came in the

Holy Spirit in the day of Pentecost. He came in the destruction of

Jerusalem, which, by subverting the old ritual law and breaking the

power of the worst enemies of His religion, insured to it new victories.

He came in the reformation of the Church. He came on this day four

years ago, when, through His religion, eight hundred thousand men were

raised from the lowest degradation to the rights, and dignity, and

fellowship of men. Christ's outward appearance is of little moment

compared with the brighter manifestation of His spirit. The Christian,

whose inward eyes and ears are touched by God, discerns the coming of

Christ, hears the sound of His chariot-wheels and the voice of His

trumpet, when no other perceives them. He discerns the Saviour's advent

in the dawning of higher truth on the world, in new aspirations of the

Church after perfection, in the prostration of prejudice and error, in

brighter expressions of Christian love, in more enlightened and intense

consecration of the Christian to the cause of humanity, freedom, and

religion. Christ comes in the conversion, the regeneration, the

emancipation, of the world."

THE HEROINE OF LONG POINT. (1869.)

LOOKING at the Government Chart of Lake Erie, one sees the outlines of a

long, narrow island, stretching along the shore of Canada West, opposite

the point where Loudon District pushes its low, wooded wedge into the

lake. This is Long Point Island, known and dreaded by the navigators of

the inland sea which batters its yielding shores, and tosses into

fantastic shapes its sandheaps. The eastern end is some twenty miles

from the Canada shore, while on the west it is only separated from the

mainland by a narrow strait known as "The Cut." It is a sandy, desolate

region, broken by small ponds, with dreary tracts of fenland, its ridges

covered with a low growth of pine, oak, beech, and birch, in the midst

of which, in its season, the dogwood puts out its white blossoms. Wild

grapes trail over the sand-dunes and festoon the dwarf trees. Here and

there are almost impenetrable swamps, thick-set with white cedars,

intertwisted and contorted by the lake winds, and broken by the weight

of snow and ice in winter. Swans and wild geese paddle in the shallow,

reedy bayous; raccoons and even deer traverse the sparsely wooded

ridges. The shores of its creeks and fens are tenanted by minks and

muskrats. The tall tower of a light-house rises at the eastern

extremity of the island, the keeper of which is now its solitary

inhabitant.

Fourteen years ago, another individual shared the proprietorship of Long

Point. This was John Becker, who dwelt on the south side of the island,

near its westerly termination, in a miserable board shanty nestled

between naked sand-hills. He managed to make a poor living by trapping

and spearing muskrats, the skins of which he sold to such boatmen and

small-craft skippers as chanced to land on his forlorn territory. His

wife, a large, mild-eyed, patient young woman of some twenty-six years,

kept her hut and children as tidy as circumstances admitted, assisted

her husband in preparing the skins, and sometimes accompanied him on his

trapping excursions.

On that lonely coast, seldom visited in summer, and wholly cut off from

human communication in winter, they might have lived and died with as

little recognition from the world as the minks and wildfowl with whom

they were tenants in common, but for a circumstance which called into

exercise unsuspected qualities of generous courage and heroic self-

sacrifice.

The dark, stormy close of November, 1854, found many vessels on Lake

Erie, but the fortunes of one alone have special interest for us. About

that time the schooner Conductor, owned by John McLeod, of the

Provincial Parliament, a resident of Amherstburg, at the mouth of the

Detroit River, entered the lake from that river, bound for Port

Dalhousie, at the mouth of the Welland Canal.

She was heavily loaded with grain. Her crew consisted of Captain

Hackett, a Highlander by birth, and a skilful and experienced navigator,

and six sailors. At nightfall, shortly after leaving the head of the

lake, one of those terrific storms, with which the late autumnal

navigators of that "Sea of the Woods" are all too familiar, overtook

them. The weather was intensely cold for the season; the air was filled

with snow and sleet; the chilled water made ice rapidly, encumbering the

schooner, and loading down her decks and rigging. As the gale

increased, the tops of the waves were shorn off by the fierce blasts,

clouding the whole atmosphere with frozen spray, or what the sailors

call "spoondrift," rendering it impossible to see any object a few rods

distant. Driving helplessly before the wind, yet in the direction of

her place of destination, the schooner sped through the darkness. At

last, near midnight, running closer than her crew supposed to the

Canadian shore, she struck on the outer bar off Long Point Island, beat

heavily across it, and sunk in the deeper water between it and the inner

bar. The hull was entirely submerged, the waves rolling in heavily, and

dashing over the rigging, to which the crew betook themselves. Lashed

there, numb with cold, drenched by the pitiless waves, and scourged by

the showers of sleet driven before the wind, they waited for morning.

The slow, dreadful hours wore away, and at length the dubious and

doubtful gray of a morning of tempest succeeded to the utter darkness of

night.

Abigail Becker chanced at that time to be in her hut with none but her

young children. Her husband was absent on the Canada shore, and she was

left the sole adult occupant of the island, save the light-keeper, at

its lower end, some fifteen miles off. Looking out at daylight on the

beach in front of her door, she saw the shattered boat of the Conductor,

east up by the waves. Her experience of storm and disaster on that

dangerous coast needed nothing more to convince her that somewhere in

her neighborhood human life had been, or still was, in peril. She

followed the southwesterly trend of the island for a little distance,

and, peering through the gloom of the stormy morning, discerned the

spars of the sunken schooner, with what seemed to be human forms

clinging to the rigging. The heart of the strong woman sunk within her,

as she gazed upon those helpless fellow-creatures, so near, yet so

unapproachable. She had no boat, and none could have lived on that wild

water. After a moment's reflection she went back to her dwelling, put

the smaller children in charge of the eldest, took with her an iron

kettle, tin teapot, and matches, and returned to the beach, at the

nearest point to the vessel; and, gathering up the logs and drift-wood

always abundant, on the coast, kindled a great fire, and, constantly

walking back and forth between it and the water, strove to intimate to

the sufferers that they were at least not beyond human sympathy. As the

wrecked sailors looked shoreward, and saw, through the thick haze of

snow and sleet, the red light of the fire and the tall figure of the

woman passing to and fro before it, a faint hope took the place of the

utter despair which had prompted them to let go their hold and drop into

the seething waters, that opened and closed about them like the jaws of

death. But the day wore on, bringing no abatement of the storm that

tore through the frail spars, and clutched at and tossed them as it

passed, and drenched them with ice-cold spray,--a pitiless, unrelenting

horror of sight, sound, and touch! At last the deepening gloom told

them that night was approaching, and night under such circumstances was

death.

All day long Abigail Becker had fed her fire, and sought to induce the

sailors by signals--for even her strong voice could not reach them--to

throw themselves into the surf, and trust to Providence and her for

succor. In anticipation of this, she had her kettle boiling over the

drift-wood, and her tea ready made for restoring warmth and life to the

half-frozen survivors. But either they did not understand her, or the

chance of rescue seemed too small to induce them to abandon the

temporary safety of the wreck. They clung to it with the desperate

instinct of life brought face to face with death. Just at nightfall

there was a slight break in the west; a red light glared across the

thick air, as if for one instant the eye of the storm looked out upon

the ruin it had wrought, and closed again under lids of cloud. Taking

advantage of this, the solitary watcher ashore made one more effort.

She waded out into the water, every drop of which, as it struck the

beach, became a particle of ice, and stretching out and drawing in her

arms, invited, by her gestures, the sailors to throw themselves into the

waves, and strive to reach her. Captain Hackett understood her. He

called to his mate in the rigging of the other mast: "It is our last

chance. I will try! If I live, follow me; if I drown, stay where you

are!" With a great effort he got off his stiffly frozen overcoat,

paused for one moment in silent commendation of his soul to God, and,

throwing himself into the waves, struck out for the shore. Abigail

Becker, breast-deep in the surf, awaited him. He was almost within her

reach, when the undertow swept him back. By a mighty exertion she

caught hold of him, bore him in her strong arms out of the water, and,

laying him down by her fire, warmed his chilled blood with copious

draughts of hot tea. The mate, who had watched the rescue, now

followed, and the captain, partially restored, insisted upon aiding him.

As the former neared the shore, the recoiling water baffled him.

Captain Hackett caught hold of him, but the undertow swept them both

away, locked in each other's arms. The brave woman plunged after them,

and, with the strength of a giantess, bore them, clinging to each other,

to the shore, and up to her fire. The five sailors followed in

succession, and were all rescued in the same way.

A few days after, Captain Hackett and his crew were taken off Long Point

by a passing vessel; and Abigail Becker resumed her simple daily duties

without dreaming that she had done anything extraordinary enough to win

for her the world's notice. In her struggle every day for food and

warmth for her children, she had no leisure for the indulgence of self-

congratulation. Like the woman of Scripture, she had only "done what

she could," in the terrible exigency that had broken the dreary monotony

of her life.

It so chanced, however, that a gentleman from Buffalo, E. P. Dorr, who

had, in his early days, commanded a vessel on the lake, found himself,

shortly after, at a small port on the Canada shore, not far from Long

Point Island. Here he met an old shipmate, Captain Davis, whose vessel

had gone ashore at a more favorable point, and who related to him the

circumstances of the wreck of the Conductor. Struck by the account,

Captain Dorr procured a sleigh and drove across the frozen bay to the

shanty of Abigail Becker. He found her with her six children, all

thinly clad and barefooted in the bitter cold. She stood there six feet

or more of substantial womanhood,--not in her stockings, for she had

none,--a veritable daughter of Anak, broad-bosomed, large-limbed, with

great, patient blue eyes, whose very smile had a certain pathos, as if

one saw in it her hard and weary life-experience. She might have passed

for any amiable giantess, or one of those much--developed maids of honor

who tossed Gulliver from hand to hand in the court of Brobdingnag. The

thing that most surprised her visitor was the childlike simplicity of

the woman, her utter unconsciousness of deserving anything for an action

that seemed to her merely a matter of course. When he expressed his

admiration with all the warmth of a generous nature, she only opened her

wide blue eyes still wider with astonishment.

"Well, I don't know," she said, slowly, as if pondering the matter for

the first time,--"I don't know as I did more 'n I'd ought to, nor more'n

I'd do again."

Before Captain Dorr left, he took the measure of her own and her

children's feet, and on his return to Buffalo sent her a box containing

shoes, stockings, and such other comfortable articles of clothing as

they most needed. He published a brief account of his visit to the

heroine of Long Point, which attracted the attention of some members of

the Provincial Parliament, and through their exertions a grant of one

hundred acres of land, on the Canada shore, near Port Rowan, was made to

her. Soon after she was invited to Buffalo, where she naturally excited

much interest. A generous contribution of one thousand dollars, to

stock her farm, was made by the merchants, ship-owners and masters of

the city, and she returned to her family a grateful and, in her own

view, a rich woman.

When the story of her adventure reached New York, the Life-Saving

Benevolent Association sent her a gold medal with an appropriate

inscription, and a request that she would send back a receipt in her own

name. As she did not know how to write, Captain Dorr hit upon the

expedient of having her photograph taken with the medal in her hand, and

sent that in lieu of her autograph.

In a recent letter dictated at Walsingham, where Abigail Becker now

lives,--a widow, cultivating with her own hands her little farm in the

wilderness,--she speaks gratefully of the past and hopefully of the

future. She mentions a message received from Captain Hackett, who she

feared had almost forgotten her, that he was about to make her a visit,

adding with a touch of shrewdness: "After his second shipwreck last

summer, I think likely that I must have recurred very fresh to him."

The strong lake winds now blow unchecked over the sand-hills where once

stood the board shanty of Abigail Becker. But the summer tourist of the

great lakes, who remembers her story, will not fail to give her a place

in his imagination with Perry's battle-line and the Indian heroines of

Cooper and Longfellow. Through her the desolate island of Long Point is

richly dowered with the interest which a brave and generous action gives

to its locality.