CHAPTER XXIII.

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS

VOL. VI.--DECEMBER, 1860.--NO. XXXVIII

THE UNITED STATES AND THE BARBARY STATES.

Speak of the relations between the United States and the Barbary

Regencies at the beginning of the century, and most of our countrymen

will understand the War with Tripoli. Ask them about that Yankee crusade

against the Infidel, and you will find their knowledge of it limited to

Preble's attack. On this bright spot in the story the American mind is

fixed, regardless of the dish we were made to eat for five-and-twenty

years. There is also current a vague notion, which sometimes takes the

shape of an assertion, that we were the first nation who refused to pay

tribute to the Moorish pirates, and thus, established a now principle in

the maritime law of the Mediterranean. This, also, is a patriotic

delusion. The money question between the President and the Pacha was

simply one of amount. Our chief was willing to pay anything in reason;

but Tripolitan prices were too high, and could not be submitted to.

The burning of the Philadelphia and the bombardment of Tripoli are much

too fine a subject for rhetorical pyrotechnics to have escaped lecturers

and orators of the Fourth-of-July school. We have all heard, time and

again, how Preble, Decatur, Trippe, and Somers cannonaded, sabred, and

blew up these pirates. We have seen, in perorations glowing with pink

fire, the Genius of America, in full naval uniform, sword in hand,

standing upon a quarter-deck, his foot upon the neck of a turbaned Turk,

while over all waves the flag of Freedom.

The Moorish sketch is probably different. In it, Brother Jonathan must

appear with his liberty-cap in one hand and a bag of dollars in the

other, bowing humbly before a well-whiskered Mussulman, whose shawl is

stuck full of poniards and pistols. The smooth-faced unbeliever begs

that his little ships may be permitted to sail up and down this coast

unmolested, and promises to give these and other dollars, if his

Highness, the Pacha, will only command his men to keep the peace on the

high-seas. This picture is not so generally exhibited here; but it is

quite as correct as the other, and as true to the period.

The year after Preble's recall, another New-England man, William Eaton,

led an army of nine Americans from Egypt to Derne, the easternmost

province of Tripoli,--a march of five hundred miles over the Desert. He

took the capital town by storm, and would have conquered the whole

Regency, if he had been supplied with men and money from our fleet.

"Certainly," says Pascal Paoli Peek, a non-commissioned officer of

marines, one of the nine, "certainly it was one of the most

extraordinary expeditions ever set on foot." Whoever reads the story

will be of the same opinion as this marine with the wonderful name.

Never was the war carried into Africa with a force so small and with

completer success. Yet Eaton has not had the luck of fame. He was nearly

forgotten, in spite of a well-written Life by President Felton, in

Sparks's Collection, until a short time since; when he was placed before

the public in a somewhat melodramatic attitude, by an article in a New

York pictorial monthly. It is not easy to explain this neglect. We know

that our Temple of Fame is a small building as yet, and that it has a

great many inhabitants,--so many, indeed, that worthy heroes may easily

be overlooked by visitors who do not consult the catalogue. But a man

who has added a brilliant page to the _Gesta Dei per Novanglos_ deserves

a conspicuous niche. A brief sketch of his doings in Africa will give a

good view of the position of the United States in Barbary, in the first

years of the Republic.

Sixty years ago, civilized Europe not only tolerated the robbery, the

murder, and the carrying into captivity of her own people, but actually

recognized this triple atrocity as a privilege inherent to certain

persons of Turkish descent and Mahometan religion inhabiting the

northern coast of Africa. England or France might have put them down by

a word long before; but, as the corsairs chiefly ravaged the defenceless

coasts of Sardinia, Sicily, and Naples, the two great powers had no

particular interest in crushing them. And there was always some jealous

calculation of advantage, some pitiful project of turning them to future

account, which prevented decisive action on the part of either nation.

Then the wars which followed the French Revolution kept Europe busy at

home and gave the Barbary sailors the opportunity of following their

calling for a few years longer with impunity. The English, with large

fleets and naval stations in the Mediterranean, had nothing to fear from

them, and were, probably, not much displeased with the contributions

levied upon the commerce of other nations. Barbary piracy was a

protective tax in favor of British bottoms. French merchantmen kept at

home. Spain, Sweden, Denmark, and Holland tried to outbid one another

for the favor of the Dey, Bey, and Pacha, and were robbed and enslaved

whenever it suited the interests of their Highnesses. The Portuguese

kept out of the Mediterranean, and protected their coast by guarding the

Straits of Gibraltar.

Not long before the French Revolution, a new flag in their waters had

attracted the greedy eyes of the Barbarians. When they learned that it

belonged to a nation thousands of miles away, once a colony of England,

but now no longer under her protection, they blessed Allah and the

Prophet for sending these fish to their nets; and many Americans were

made to taste the delights of the Patriarchal Institution in the

dockyards of Algiers. As soon as the Federal Government was fairly

established, Washington recommended to Congress to build a fleet for the

protection of citizens in the Mediterranean. But the young nation needed

at first all its strength to keep itself upright at home; and the

opposition party professed a theory, that it would be safer and cheaper

for the United States to give up ships altogether, and to get other

people to carry for them. Consequently the plan of negotiating was

resorted to. Agents were sent to Algiers to ransom the captives and to

obtain a treaty by presents and the payment of a fixed tribute. Such a

treaty was made in the summer of 1796. In March of the succeeding year,

the Dey showed so much ill-temper at the backwardness of our payments,

that Joel Barlow, the American Commissioner, thought it necessary to

soothe his Highness by the promise of a frigate to be built and equipped

in the United States. Thus, with Christian meekness, we furnished the

Mussulman with a rod for our own backs. These arrangements cost the

United States about a million of dollars, all expenses included.

Having pacified Algiers, Mr. Barlow turned his attention to Tunis.

Instead of visiting the Bey in person, he appointed a European merchant,

named Famin, residing in Tunis, agent to negotiate a treaty for the

United States. Of Famin Mr. Barlow knew nothing, but considered his

French birth and the recommendation of the French Consul for Algiers

sufficient proofs of his qualifications. Besides attending to his own

trade, Monsieur Famin was in the habit of doing a little business for

the Bey, and took care to make the treaty conform to the wishes of his

powerful partner. The United States were to pay for the friendship and

forbearance of Tunis one hundred and seven thousand dollars in money,

jewels, and naval stores. Tunisian cargoes were to be admitted into

American ports on payment of three per cent; the same duty to be levied

at Tunis on American shipments. If the Bey saluted an American

man-of-war, he was to receive a barrel of powder for every gun fired.

And he reserved the right of taking any American ship that might be in

his harbor into his service to carry despatches or a cargo to any port

in the Mediterranean.

When the treaty reached the United States, the Senate refused to ratify

it. President Adams appointed Eaton, formerly a captain in the army,

Consul for Tunis, with directions to present objections to the articles

on the tariff, salutes, and impressment of vessels. Mr. Cathcart, Consul

for Tripoli, was joined with him in the commission. They sailed in the

United States brig Sophia, in December, 1798, and convoyed the ship Hero

laden with naval stores, an armed brig, and two armed schooners. These

vessels they delivered to the Dey of Algiers "for arrearages of

stipulation and present dues." The offerings of his Transatlantic

tributaries were pleasing to the Dey. He admitted the Consuls to an

audience. After their shoes had been taken en off at the door of the

presence-chamber, they were allowed to advance and kiss his hand. This

ceremony over, the Sophia sailed for Tunis.

Here the envoys found a more difficult task before them. The Bey had

heard of the ships and cargoes left at Algiers, and asked at once, Where

were all the good things promised to him by Famin? The Consuls presented

President Adam's letter of polite excuses, addressed to the Prince of

Tunis, "the well-guarded city, the abode of felicity." The Bey read it,

and repeated his question,--"Why has the Prince of America not sent the

hundred and seven thousand dollars?" The Consuls endeavored to explain

the dependence of their Bey on his Grand Council, the Senate, which

august body objected to certain stipulations in Famin's treaty. If his

Highness of Tunis would consent to strike out or modify these articles,

the Senate would ratify the treaty, and the President would send the

money as soon as possible. But the Bey was not to be talked over; he

refused to be led away from the main question,--"Where are the money,

the regalia, the naval stores?" He could take but one view of the case:

he had been trifled with; the Prince of America was not in earnest.

Monsieur Famin, who found himself turned out of office by the

Commissioners, lost no opportunity of insinuating that American promises

were insincere, and any expectations built upon them likely to

prove delusive.

After some weeks spent in stormy negotiations, this modification of the

articles was agreed upon. The duty might be three or three hundred per

cent., if the Consuls wished it, but it should be reciprocal. The Bey

refused to give up the powder: fifteen barrels of powder, he said, might

get him a prize worth a hundred thousand dollars; but salutes were not

to be fired, unless demanded by the Consul on the part of the United

States. The Bey also persisted in his intention of pressing American

vessels into his service; but he waived this claim in the case of

national ships, and promised not to take merchantmen, if he could

possibly do without them.

Convinced that no better terms could be obtained, Cathcart sailed for

Tripoli, to encounter fresh troubles, leaving Eaton alone to bear the

greediness and insolence of Tunis. The Bey and his staff were legitimate

descendants of the two daughters of the horse-leech; their daily cry

was, "Give! give!" The Bey told Eaton to get him a frigate like the one

built for the Algerines.

"You will find I am as much to be feared as they. Your good faith I do

not doubt," he added, with a sneer, "but your presents have been

insignificant."

"But your Highness, only a short time since, received fifty thousand

dollars from the United States."

"Yes, but fifty thousand dollars are nothing, and you have since altered

the treaty; a new present is necessary; this is the custom."

"Certainly," chorused the staff; "and it is also customary to make

presents to the Prime Minister and to the Secretary every time the

articles are changed, and also upon the arrival of a new Consul."

To carry out this doctrine, the Admiral sent for a gold-headed cane, a

gold watch, and twelve pieces of cloth. The Prime Minister wanted a

double-barreled gun and a gold chain. The Aga of the Port said he would

be satisfied with some thing in the jewelry-line, simple, but rich.

Officials of low rank came in person to ask for coffee and sugar. Even

his Highness condescended to levy small contributions. Hearing that

Eaton had a Grecian mirror in his house, he requested that it might be

sent to decorate the cabin of his yacht.

As month after month passed, and no tribute-ship arrived, the Bey's

threats grew louder and more frequent. At last he gave orders to fit out

his cruisers. Eaton sent letters of warning to the Consuls at Leghorn

and Gibraltar, and prepared to strike his flag. At the last moment the

Hero sailed into port, laden with naval stores such as never before had

been seen in Tunis. The Bey was softened. "It is well," he said; "this

looks a Lotte more like truth; but the guns, the powder, and the jewels

are not on board."

A letter from Secretary Pickering instructed Eaton to try to divert the

Bey's mind from the jewels; but if that were impossible, to order them

in England, where they could be bought more cheaply; and to excuse the

delay by saying "that the President felt a confidence, that, on further

reflection upon all circumstances in relation to the United States, the

Bey would relinquish this claim, and therefore did not give orders to

provide the present." As the jewels had been repeatedly promised by the

United States, this weak attempt to avoid giving them was quite

consistent with the shabby national position we had taken In the

Mediterranean. It met with the success it deserved. The Bey was much too

shrewd a fellow, especially in the matter of presents, to be imposed

upon by any such Yankee pretences. The jewels were ordered in London,

and, as compensation for this new delay, the demand for a frigate was

renewed. After nearly two years of anxiety, Eaton could write home that

the prospects of peace were good.

His despatches had not passed the Straits when the Pacha of Tripoli sent

for Consul Cathcart, and swore by "Allah and the head of his son," that,

unless the President would give him two hundred and fifty thousand

dollars for a new treaty, and an annual subsidy of twenty thousand, he

would declare war against the United States.

These two years of petty humiliations had exasperated Eaton's bold and

fiery temper. He found some relief in horse-whipping Monsieur Famin, who

had been unceasing in his quiet annoyances, and in writing to the

Government at home despatches of a most undiplomatic warmth and

earnestness. From the first, he had advised the use of force. "If you

would have a free commerce in those seas, you must defend it. It is

useless to buy a peace. The more you give, the more the Turks will ask

for. Tribute is considered an evidence of your weakness; and contempt

stimulates cupidity. _Qui se fait brebis, le loup le mange_. What are

you afraid of? The naval strength of the Regencies amounts to nothing.

If, instead of sending a sloop with presents to Tunis, you will consign

to me a transport with a thousand trusty marines, well officered, under

convoy of a forty-four-gun frigate, I pledge myself to surprise Porto

Farina and destroy the Bey's arsenal. As to Tripoli, two frigates and

four gun-boats would bring the Pacha to terms. But if you yield to his

new demands, you must make provision to pay Tunis double the amount, and

Algiers in proportion. Then, consider how shameful is your position, if

you submit. 'Tributary to the pitiful sand-bank of Tripoli?' says the

world; and the answer is affirmative, without a blush. Habit reconciles

mankind to everything, even humiliation, and custom veils disgrace. But

what would the world say, if Rhode Island should arm two old

merchantmen, put an Irish renegade into one and a Methodist preacher in

another, and send them to demand a tribute of the Grand Seignior? The

idea is ridiculous; but it is exactly as consistent as that Tripoli

should say to the American nation,--'Give me tribute, or tremble under

the chastisement of my navy!'"

This was sharp language for a Consul to hold to a Secretary of State;

but it was as meekly borne as the other indignities which came

from Barbary.

An occurrence in Algiers completes the picture of "Americans in the

Mediterranean" in the year 1800. In October, the United States ship

Washington, Captain Bainbridge, lay in that port, about to sail for

home. The Dey sent for Consul O'Brien, and laid this alternative before

him: either the Washington should take the Algerine Ambassador to

Constantinople, or he, the Dey, would no longer hold to his friendship

with the United States. O'Brien expostulated warmly, but in vain. He

thought it his duty to submit. The Ambassador, his suite, amounting to

two hundred persons, their luggage and stores, horses, sheep, and horned

cattle, and their presents to the Sultan, of lions, tigers, and

antelopes, were sent on board. The Algerine flag was hoisted at the

main, saluted with seven guns, and the United States ship Washington

weighed anchor for Constantinople.

Eaton's rage boiled over when he heard of this freak of the Dey. He

wrote to O'Brien,--"I frankly own, I would have lost the peace, and been

myself impaled, rather than have yielded this concession. Will nothing

rouse my country?"[1]

When the news reached America, Mr. Jefferson was President. He was not

roused. He regretted the affair; but hoped that time, and a more correct

estimate of interest, would produce justice in the Dey's mind; and he

seemed to believe that the majesty of pure reason, more potent than the

music of Orpheus,

"Dictas ob hoc lenire tigres, rabidosque

leones,"

would soften piratical Turks. Mr. Madison's despatch to O'Brien on the

subject is written in this spirit. "The sending to Constantinople the

national ship-of-war, the George Washington, by force, under the

Algerine flag, and for such a purpose, has deeply affected the

sensibility, not only of the President, but of the people of the United

States. Whatever temporary effects it may have had favorable to our

interest, the indignity is of so serious a nature, _that it is not

impossible that it may be deemed necessary, on a fit occasion, to revive

the question._ Viewing it in this light, the President wishes that

nothing may be said or done by you that may unnecessarily preclude the

competent authority from animadverting on that transaction in any way

that a vindication of the national honor may be thought to prescribe."

Times have changed since then, and our national spirit with them. The

Secretary's Quaker-like protest offers a ludicrous contrast to the

wolf-to-lamb swagger of our modern diplomacy. What faithful Democrat of

1801 would have believed that the day would come of the Kostza affair,

of the African right-of-search quarrel, the Greytown bombardment, and

the seizure of Miramon's steamers?

It is clear that our President and people were in no danger of being led

into acts of undue violence by "deeply affected sensibility" or the

"vindication of the national honor," when a violent blow aimed by the

Pacha of Tripoli at their Mediterranean trade roused them to a show of

self-defence. Early in May he declared war against the United States,

although Consul Cathcart offered him ten thousand dollars to leave the

American flag-staff up for a short time longer. Even then, if Mr.

Jefferson could have consulted no one but himself, not a ship would have

sailed from these shores. But the merchants were too powerful for him;

they insisted upon protection in the Mediterranean. A squadron of three

frigates and a sloop under Commodore Dale was fitted out and despatched

to Gibraltar; and the nations of the earth were duly notified by our

diplomatic agents of our intentions, that they might not be alarmed by

this armada.

In June of this year a fire broke out in the palace at Tunis, and fifty

thousand stand of arms were destroyed. The Bey sent for Eaton; he had

apportioned his loss among his friends, and it fell to the United States

to furnish ten thousand stand without delay.

"It is only the other day," said Eaton, "that you asked for eighty

twenty-four pounders. At this rate, when are our payments to have

an end?"

"Never," was the answer. "The claims we make are such as we receive from

all friendly nations, every two or three years; and you, like other

Christians, will be obliged to conform to it."

Eaton refused to state the claim to his Government. The Bey said, Very

well, he would write himself; and threatened to turn Eaton out of

the Regency.

At this juncture Commodore Dale arrived at Gibraltar. The Bey paid us

the compliment of believing that he had not been sent so far for

nothing, and allowed Eaton a few months' respite.

Now was the time to give the Turks their lesson; but Dale's hands were

tied by his orders. Mr. Jefferson's heart was not in violent methods of

dealing with his fellow-men in Barbary. He thought our objects might be

accomplished by a display of force better and more cheaply than by

active measures. A dislike of naval war and of public expenditure[2]

made his constitutional conscience, always tender, very sensitive on

this question of a cruise against Tripoli. Fearful lest our young

sailors should go too far, he instructed the Commodore not to overstep

the strict line of defence. Hence, when Sterret, in the Enterprise,

captured a Tripolitan schooner, after a brisk engagement, he disarmed

and dismantled her, and left her, with the survivors of her crew on

board, to make the best of their way home again. Laymen must have found

it difficult, even in 1801, to discover the principle of this delicate

distinction between killing and taking prisoners; but it was "according

to orders." Commodore Dale returned home at the end of the year, having

gathered few African laurels; Commodore Morris came out the next season

with a larger fleet, and gathered none at all.

There is no better established rule, in commencing hostilities, public

or private, than this: If you strike at all, strike with all your might.

Half-measures not only irritate, they encourage. When the Bey of Tunis

perceived that Dale did little and Morris less, he thought he had

measured exactly the strength of the United States navy, and had no

reason to feel afraid of it. His wants again became clamorous, and his

tone menacing. The jewels arrived from England in the Constellation, but

did not mollify him.

"Now," said he, "I must have a thirty-six-gun frigate, like the one you

sent to the Dey of Algiers."

Eaton protested that there was no frigate in the treaty, and that we

would fight rather than yield to such extortion.

The Prime Minister blew a cloud from his pipe. "We find it all puff; we

see how you carry on the war with Tripoli."

"But are you not ashamed to make this demand, when you have just

received these valuable jewels?"

"Not at all. We expected the full payment of peace stipulations in a

year. You came out with nothing, and three years have elapsed since you

settled the treaty. We have waited all this time, but you have made us

no consideration for this forbearance. Nor have we as yet received any

evidence of the veritable friendship of the Prince of America,

notwithstanding the repeated intimations we have given him that such an

expression of his sincerity would be agreeable to us. His Excellency, my

master, is a man of great forbearance; but he knows what steps to take

with nations who exhaust his patience with illusive expressions of

friendship."

Eaton answered, angrily, that the Bey might write himself to the

President, if he wanted a frigate. For his part, he would never transmit

so outrageous a demand. "Then," retorted the Bey, "I will send you home,

and the letter with you."

The letter was composed by the dragoman and forwarded to the United

States, but Eaton was allowed to remain.

Disgusted with the shameful position of our affairs in the

Mediterranean, Eaton requested Mr. Madison to recall him, unless more

active operations against the enemy should be resolved upon. "I can no

longer talk of resistance and coercion," he wrote, "without exciting a

grimace of contempt and ridicule ... The operations of our squadron this

season have done less than the last to aid my efforts. Government may as

well send out Quaker meeting-houses to float about this sea as frigates

with ------ in command ... If further concessions are to be made here, I

desire I may not be the medium through whom they shall be presented. Our

presents show the Bey our wealth and our weakness and stimulate his

avarice to new demands."

The display of latent force by the United States fleet, from which our

Government had expected so much, increased the insolence of the Bey of

Tunis to such a point that Eaton was obliged to withdraw from his post,

and a new war seemed inevitable. The Americans had declared Tripoli

blockaded; but, as their ships were seldom on the coast, little

attention was paid to them. It happened, however, that a Tunisian

vessel, bound for Tripoli, was captured when attempting to enter the

harbor, and declared a prize. Shortly after, Commodore Morris anchored

off Tunis and landed to visit the Consul. The Bey, who held the correct

doctrine on the subject of paper blockades, pronounced the seizure

illegal and demanded restitution. During his stay on shore, the

Commodore had several interviews with the Bey's commercial agent in

relation to this prize question. The behavior of that official was so

offensive that the Commodore determined to go on board his ship without

making the usual farewell visit at Court. As he was stepping into his

boat from the mole, he was arrested by the commercial agent for a debt

of twenty-two thousand dollars, borrowed by Eaton to assist Hamet

Caramanli in his expedition against Tripoli. Eaton remonstrated

indignantly. He alone was responsible for the debt; he had given

abundant security, and was willing to pay handsomely for further

forbearance. In vain; the agent would take nothing but the money. Eaton

hurried to the palace to ask the Bey if this arrest was by his order.

The Bey declined to answer or to interfere. There was no help for it;

the Commodore was caught. To obtain permission to embark, he was obliged

to get the money from the French Consul-General, and to promise

restitution of the captured vessel and cargo. As soon as he was at

liberty, the Commodore, accompanied by Eaton, went to the palace to

protest against this breach of national hospitality and insult to the

flag. Eaton's remarks were so distasteful to the Bey that he ordered him

again to quit his court,--this time peremptorily,--adding, that the

United States must send him a Consul "with a disposition more congenial

to Barbary interests."

Eaton arrived in Boston on the 5th of May, 1803. The same season Preble

sailed into the Mediterranean, with the Constitution, "a bunch of pine

boards," as she was then called in derision, poorly fitted out, and

half-manned; and with three other vessels in no better condition. But

here, at last, was a captain whom no cautious or hesitating instructions

could prevent from doing the work set before him to the best of his

ability. Sword in hand, he maintained the principle of "Death before

tribute," so often and so unmeaningly toasted at home; and it was not

his fault, if he did not establish it. At all events, he restored the

credit of our flag in the Mediterranean.

When the news reached home of the burning of the Philadelphia, of the

attack of the fireships, and of the bombardment of Tripoli, the blood of

the nation was up. Arch-democratic scruples as to the expediency,

economy, or constitutionality of public armed ships were thenceforth

utterly disregarded. Since then, it has never been a question whether

the United States should have a navy or not. To Preble fairly belongs

the credit of establishing it upon a permanent footing, and of heading

the roll of daring and skilful officers the memory of whose gallantry

pervades the service and renders it more effective than its ships

and its guns.

The Administration yielded to the popular feeling, and attempted to

claim for themselves the credit of these feats of arms, which they had

neither expected nor desired. A new fleet was fitted out, comprising our

whole navy except five ships. Here again the cloven foot became visible.

Preble, who had proved himself a captain of whom any nation might be

proud, was superseded by Commodore Barron, on a question of seniority

etiquette, which might have been easily settled, had the Government so

wished it.

Eaton had spent a year at home, urging upon the authorities, whenever

the settlement of his accounts took him to Washington, more effective

measures against Tripoli,--and particularly an alliance with Hamet

Caramanli, the Ex-Pacha, who had been driven from his throne by his

brother Jusuf, a much more able man. In spite of his bitter flings at

their do-nothing policy, the Administration sent him out in the fleet,

commissioned as General Agent for the Barbary Regencies, with the

understanding that he was to join Hamet and assist him in an attack upon

Derne. His instructions were vague and verbal; he had not even a letter

to our proposed ally. Eaton was aware of his precarious position; but

the hazardous adventure suited his enterprising spirit, and he

determined to proceed in it. "If successful, for the public,--if

unsuccessful, for myself," he wrote to a friend, quoting from his

classical reminiscences; "but any personal risk," he added, with a

rhetorical flourish, "is better than the humiliation of treating with a

wretched pirate for the ransom of men who are the rightful heirs

of freedom."

He sailed in the John Adams, in June, 1804. The President, Congress,

Essex, and Constellation were in company. On the 5th of September the

fleet anchored at Malta. In a few weeks the plan of the expedition was

settled, and the necessary arrangements made, with the consent and under

the supervision of Barron. Eaton then went on board the United States

brig Argus, Captain Isaac Hull, detached specially on this service by

the Commodore, and sailed for Alexandria, to hunt up Hamet and to

replace him upon a throne.

On the 8th of December, Eaton and his little party, Lieutenant Blake,

Midshipmen Mann and Danielson, of the navy, and Lieutenant O'Bannon of

the marines, arrived in Cairo. Here they learned that Hamet had taken

service with the rebel Mamlouk Beys and was in command of an Arab force

in Upper Egypt. A letter from Preble to Sir Alexander Ball insured the

Americans the hearty good wishes of the English. They were lodged in the

English house, and passed for United States naval officers on a

pleasure-trip. In this character they were presented to the Viceroy by

Dr. Mendrici, his physician, who had known Eaton intimately in Tunis,

and was much interested in this enterprise. The recommendation of the

Doctor obtained a private audience for Eaton. He laid his plans frankly

before his Highness, who listened favorably, assured him of his

approval, and ordered couriers to be sent to Hamet, bearing a letter of

amnesty and permission to depart from Egypt.

The messengers returned with an answer. The Ex-Pacha was unwilling to

trust himself within the grasp of the Viceroy; he preferred a meeting at

a place near Lake Fayoum, (Maeris,) on the borders of the Desert, about

one hundred and ninety miles from the coast. Regardless of the danger of

travelling in this region of robbery and civil war, Eaton set off at

once, accompanied by Blake, Mann, and a small escort. After a ride of

seventy miles, they fell in with a detachment of Turkish cavalry, who

arrested them for English spies. This accident they owed to the zeal of

the French Consul, M. Drouette, who, having heard that they were on good

terms with the English, thought it the duty of a French official to

throw obstacles in their way. Luckily the Turkish commandant proved to

be a reasonable man. He listened to their story and sent off a courier

to bring Hamet to them. The Pacha soon arrived. He expressed an entire

willingness to be reinstated upon his throne by the Americans, and to do

what he could for himself with his followers and friendly Arab tribes in

the province of Derne. In case of success, he offered brilliant

advantages to the United States. A convention was drawn up in this

sense, signed by him as legitimate Pacha of Tripoli, and by Eaton, as

agent for the United States.

The original plan was to proceed to Derne in the Argus; but the Turkish

Governor of Alexandria refused to permit so large a force to embark at

that port; and Hamet himself showed a strong disinclination to venture

within the walls of the enemy. The only course left was to march over

the Desert. Eaton adopted it with his usual vigor. The Pacha and his men

were directed to encamp at the English cut, between Aboukir Bay and Lake

Mareotis. Provisions were bought, men enlisted, camels hired, and a few

Arabs collected together by large promises and small gifts. The party,

complete, consisted of the Americans already mentioned, Farquhar, an

Englishman, Pascal Paoli Peck, whose name we take pleasure in writing

again, with six men of his corps, twenty-five artillery-men of all

nations, principally Levanters, and thirty-eight Greeks. The followers

of the Pacha, hired Arabs, camel-drivers, servants, and vagabonds, made

up their number to about four hundred.

On the 8th of March, 1805, Eaton advanced into the Desert westward,

towards the famous land of Cyrene, like Aryandes the Persian, and Amrou,

general of the Caliph Omar. The little army marched along slowly, "on

sands and shores and desert wildernesses," past ruins of huge

buildings,--relics of three civilizations that had died out,--mostly

mere stones to Eaton, whose mind was too preoccupied by his wild

enterprise to speculate much on what others had done there before him.

Want of water, scarcity of provisions, the lazy dilatoriness of the

Arabs, who had never heard of the American axiom, "Time is money," gave

him enough to think of. But worse than these were the daily outbreaks of

the ill-feeling which always exists between Mussulman and Christian. The

Arabs would not believe that Christians could be true friends to

Mussulmans. They were not satisfied with Eaton's explanations of the

similarity between the doctrines of Islam and of American, but tried

again and again to make him repeat the soul-saving formula, "_Allah

Allah Mohammed ben Allah_", and thus at once prove his sincerity and

escape hell. The Pacha himself, an irresolute, weak man, could not quite

understand why these infidels should have come from beyond the seas to

place him upon a throne. A suspicion lurked in his heart that their real

object was to deliver him to his brother as the price of a peace, and

any occurrence out of the daily routine of the march brought this

unpleasant fancy uppermost in his thoughts. On one point the Mahometan

mind of every class dwelt alway,--"How could Allah permit these dogs,

who followed the religion of the Devil, to possess such admirable

riches?" The Arabs tried hard to obtain a share of them. They yelped

about the Americans for money, food, arms, and powder. Even the brass

buttons of the infidels excited their cupidity.

Eaton's patience, remarkable in a man of his irascible temper, many

promises, and a few threats, kept the Crescent and the Cross moving on

together in comparative peace until the 8th of April. On that day and

outbreak of ill-temper occurred so violent that the two parties nearly

came to blows. Turks were drawn up on one side, headed by

Hamet,--Americans on the other, with the Greeks and Levanters. Swords

were brandished and muskets pointed, and much abuse discharged. Nothing

but the good sense of one of the Pacha's officers and Eaton's cool

determination prevented the expedition from destroying itself on

the spot.

Peace was at last restored, and kept until the 15th, when the army

reached the Gulf of Bomba. In this bay, known to the ancients as the

Gulf of Plataea, it is said that the Greeks landed who founded the

colony of Cyrene. Eaton had written to Captain Hull to meet him here

with the Argus, and, relying upon her stores, had made this the place of

fulfilment of many promises. Unfortunately, no Argus was to be seen. Sea

and shore were as silent and deserted as when Battus the Dorian first

saw the port from his penteconters, six hundred years or more before

Christ. A violent tumult arose. The Arabs reproached the Americans

bitterly for the imposture, and declared their intention of deserting

the cause immediately. Luckily, before these wild allies had departed, a

sail appeared upon the horizon; they were persuaded to wait a short time

longer. It was the Argus. Hull had seen the smoke of their fires and

stood in. He anchored before dark; provisions were sent on shore; and

plenty in the camp restored quiet and discipline.

On the 23d they resumed their march, and on the 25th, at two in the

afternoon, encamped upon a hill overlooking the town of Derne. Deserters

came in with the information that two-thirds of the inhabitants were in

favor of Hamet; but that Hassan Bey, the Governor, with eight hundred

fighting-men, was determined to defend the place; Jusuf had sent fifteen

hundred men to his assistance, who were within three days' march.

Hamet's Arabs seized upon this opportunity to be alarmed. It became

necessary to promise the chiefs two thousand dollars before they would

consent to take courage again.

Eaton reconnoitred the town. He ascertained that a ten-inch howitzer on

the terrace of the Governor's house was all he had to fear in the way of

artillery. There were eight nine-pounders mounted on a bastion looking

seaward, but useless against a land-attack. Breastworks had been thrown

up, and the walls of houses loopholed for musketry.

The next day, Eaton summoned Hassan to surrender the place to his

legitimate sovereign, and offered to secure him his present position in

case of immediate submission.. The flag was sent back with the answer,

"My head or yours!" and the Bey followed up this Oriental message by

offering six thousand dollars for Eaton's head, and double the sum, if

he were brought in alive.

At six o'clock on the morning of the 27th, the Argus, Nautilus, and

Hornet stood in, and, anchoring within a hundred yards of the battery,

silenced it in three-quarters of an hour. At the same time the town was

attacked on one side by Hamet, and on the other by the Americans. A hot

fire of musketry was kept up by the garrison. The Greek artillery-men

shot away the rammer of their only field-piece, after a few discharges,

rendering the gun useless. Finding that a number of his small party were

falling, Eaton ordered a charge, and led it. Dashing through a volley of

bullets, the Christians took the battery in flank, carried it, planted

the American flag, and turned the guns upon the town. Hamet soon cut his

way to the Bey's palace, and drove him to sanctuary to escape being

taken prisoner. After a lively engagement of two hours and a half, the

allies had complete possession of the town. Fourteen of the Christians

had been killed or wounded, three of them American marines. Eaton

himself received a musket-ball in his wrist.

The Ex-Pacha had scarcely established himself in his new conquest before

Jusuf's army appeared upon the hills near the town. Hassan Bey succeeded

in escaping from sanctuary, and took the command. After several

fruitless attempts to buy over the rebel Arabs, the Bey, on the 13th of

May, made a sudden attack upon the quarter of the town held by Hamet's

forces, and drove all before him as far as the Governor's house; but a

few volleys from the nine-pounders sent him and his troops back at full

speed. Hamet's cavalry pursued, and cut down a great many of them. This

severe lesson made the Bey cautious. Henceforward he kept his men in the

hills, and contented himself with occasional skirmishing-parties.

After this affair numerous Arabs of rank came over, and things looked

well for the cause of the legitimate Pacha. Eaton already fancied

himself marching into Tripoli under the American flag, and releasing

with his own hands the crew of the Philadelphia. He wrote to Barron of

his success, and asked for supplies of provisions, money, and men. A few

more dollars, a detachment of marines, and the fight was won. His answer

was a letter from the Commodore, informing him, "that the reigning Pacha

of Tripoli has lately made overtures of peace, which the Consul-General,

Colonel Lear, has determined to meet, viewing the present moment

propitious to such a step." With the letter came another from Lear,

ordering Eaton to evacuate Derne. Eaton sent back an indignant

remonstrance, and continued to hold the town. But on the 11th of June

the Constellation came in, bringing the news of the conclusion of peace,

and of the release of the captives, upon payment of sixty thousand

dollars. Colonel Lear wrote, that, by an article of the treaty, Hamet's

wife and children would be restored to him, on condition of his leaving

the Regency. No other provision was made for him.

When the Ex-Pacha (Ex for the third time) heard that thenceforth he

must depend upon his own resources, he requested that he might be taken

off in the Constellation, as his life would not be safe when his

adherents discovered that his American friends had betrayed him, Eaton

took every precaution to keep the embarkation a secret, and succeeded in

getting all his men safely on board the frigate. He then, the last of

the party, stepped into a small boat, and had just time to save his

distance, when the shore was crowded with the shrieking Arabs. Finding

the Christians out of their reach, they fell upon their tents and

horses, and swept away everything of value.

It was a rapid change of scene. Six hours before, the little American

party held Derne triumphantly against all comers from Jusuf's dominions,

and Hamet had prospects of a kingdom. Now he was a beggar, on his way to

Malta, to subsist there for a time on a small allowance from the United

States. Even his wife and children were not to be restored to him; for,

in a secret stipulation with the Pacha, Lear had waived for four years

the execution of that article of the treaty. The poor fellow had been

taken up as a convenience, and was dropped when no longer wanted. But he

was only an African Turk, and, although not black, was probably dark

enough in complexion to weaken his claims upon the good feeling and the

good faith of the United States.

Eaton arrived at home in November of the same year,[3] disgusted with

the officers, civil and naval, who had cut short his successful

campaign, and had disregarded, as of no importance, the engagements he

had contracted with his Turkish ally. His report to the Secretary of the

Navy expressed in the most direct language his opinion of the treaty and

his contempt for the reasons assigned by Lear and Barron for their

sudden action. The enthusiastic welcome he received from his countrymen

encouraged his dissatisfaction. The American people decreed him a

triumph after their fashion,--public dinners, addresses of

congratulation, the title of Hero of Derne. He had shown just the

qualities mankind admire,--boldness, tenacity, and dashing courage. Few

could be found who did not regret that Preble had not been there to help

him onward to Tripoli and to a peace without payments. And as Eaton was

not the man to carry on a war, even of words, without throwing his whole

soul into the conflict, he proclaimed to all hearers that the Government

was guilty of duplicity and meanness, and that Lear was a compound of

envy, treachery, and ignorance.

But this violence of language recoiled upon himself,--

"And so much injured more his side,

The stronger arguments he applied."

The Administration steadily upheld Lear; and good Democrats, who saw

every measure refracted through the dense medium of party-spirit, of

course defended their leaders, and took fire at Eaton's overbearing

manner and insulting intolerance of their opinions. Thus, although the

general sentiment of the country was strongly in his favor, at

Washington he made many enemies. A resolution was introduced into the

House of Representatives to present him with a medal, or with a sword;

it was violently opposed by John Randolph and others, postponed from

time to time, and never passed. Eaton received neither promotion, nor

pecuniary compensation, nor an empty vote of thanks. He had even great

delay and difficulty in obtaining the settlement of his accounts[4] and

the repayment of the money advanced by him.

Disappointment, debt, and hard drinking soon brought Eaton's life to a

close. He died in obscurity in 1811. Among his papers was found a list

of officers who composed a Court Martial held in Ohio by General St.

Clair in 1793. As time passed, he had noted in the margin of the paper

the fate of each man. All were either "Dead" or "Damned by brandy." His

friends might have completed the melancholy roll by writing under his

name the same epitaph.

However wrong Eaton may have been in manners and in morals, he seems to

have been right in complaining of the treatment he received from the

Administration. The organs of the Government asserted that Eaton had

exceeded his instructions, and had undertaken projects the end of which

could not be foreseen,--that the Administration had never authorized

any specific engagement with Hamet, an inefficient person, and not at

all the man he was supposed to be,--and that the alliance with him was

much too expensive and dangerous to justify its further prosecution.

Unfortunately for this view of the case, the dealings of the United

States with Hamet dated back to the beginning of the war with Tripoli. A

diversion in his favor was no new project, but had been considered for

more than three years. Eaton and Cathcart had recommended it in 1801,

and Government approved of the plan. In 1802, when Jusuf Pacha offered

Hamet the Beyship of Benghazi and Derne, to break up these negotiations,

the United States Consuls promised him Jusuf's throne, if he would

refuse the offer, and threatened, if he accepted it, to treat him as an

enemy, and to send a frigate to prevent him from landing at Derne.

Later, when the Bey of Tunis showed some inclination to surrender Hamet

to his brother, the Consuls furnished him with the means of escape to

Malta. In 1803, he crossed over to Derne in an English brig, hoping to

receive assistance from the American fleet; but Commodore Morris left

him to his own resources; he was unable to hold his ground, and fled to

Egypt. All this was so well known at home, that members of the

Opposition in Congress jokingly accused the Administration of

undertaking to decide constitutional questions for the people

of Tripoli.

Before the news of this flight into Egypt reached the United States,

Eaton had been instructed by the President to take command of an

expedition on the coast of Barbary in connection with Hamet. It had been

determined to furnish a few pieces of field-artillery, a thousand stand

of arms, and forty thousand dollars as a loan to the Pretender. But when

the President heard of Hamet's reverses, he withheld the supplies, and

sent Eaton out as "General Agent for the several Barbary States,"

without special instructions. The Secretary of the Navy wrote at the

same time to Commodore Barron:--"With respect to the Ex-Bashaw of

Tripoli, we have no objection to your availing yourself of his

cooperation with you against Tripoli, if you shall, upon a full view of

the subject, after your arrival upon the station, consider his

cooperation expedient. The subject is committed entirely to your

discretion. In such an event, you will, it is believed, find Mr. Eaton

extremely useful to you."

After Commodore Barron had reached his station, he did consider the

"coöperation" expedient; and ordered Hull in the Argus to Alexandria

with Eaton in search of Hamet, "the legitimate sovereign of the

reigning Bashaw of Tripoli." If Eaton succeeded in finding the Pacha,

Hull was to carry him and his suite to Derne, "or such other place as

may be determined the most proper for coöperating with the naval force

under my command against the common enemy ... You may assure the Bashaw

of the support of my squadron at Benghazi or Derne, and that I will take

the most effectual measures with the forces under my command for

cooperating with him against the usurper his brother, and for

reëstablishing him in the Regency of Tripoli. Arrangements to this

effect with him are confided to the discretion with which Mr. Eaton is

vested by the Government."

It would seem from these extracts that Eaton derived full authority from

Barron to act in this matter, independently of his commission as

"General Agent." We do not perceive that he exceeded a reasonable

discretion in the "arrangements" made with Hamet. After so many

disappointments, the refugee could not be expected to leave a

comfortable situation and to risk his head without some definite

agreement as to the future; and the convention made with him by Eaton

did not go beyond what Hamet had a right to demand, or the instructions

of the Commodore,--even in Article II., which was afterward particularly

objected to by the Government. It ran thus:--

"The Government of the United States shall use their utmost exertions,

so far as comports with their own honor and interest, their subsisting

treaties, and the acknowledged law of nations, to reëstablish the said

Hamet Bashaw in the possession of his sovereignty of Tripoli against the

pretensions of Joseph Bashaw," etc.

We should add, that Hamet, to satisfy himself of the truth of Eaton's

representations, sent one of his followers to Barron, who confirmed the

treaty; and that the Commodore, when he received Eaton's despatch,

announcing his departure from Aboukir, wrote back a warm approval of his

energy, and notified him that the Argus and the Nautilus would be sent

immediately to Bomba with the necessary stores and seven thousand

dollars in money. Barron added,--"You may depend upon the most active

and vigorous support from the squadron, as soon as the season and our

arrangements will permit us to appear in force before the

enemy's walls."

So much for Eaton's authority to pledge the faith of the United States.

As to the question of expense: the whole cost of the expedition, up to

the evacuation of Derne, was thirty-nine thousand dollars. Eaton

asserted, and we see no reason to doubt his accuracy, that thirty

thousand more would have carried the American flag triumphantly into

Tripoli. Lear paid sixty thousand for peace.

Hamet was set on shore at Syracuse with thirty followers. Two hundred

dollars a month were allowed him for the support of himself and of them,

until particular directions should be received from the United States

concerning him. He wrote more than once to the President for relief,

resting his claims upon Eaton's convention and the letter of the

Secretary of State read to him by Consul Cathcart in 1802. In this

letter, the Secretary declared, that, in case of the failure of the

combined attack upon Derne, it would be proper for our Government "to

restore him to the situation from, which he was drawn, or to make some

other convenient arrangement that may be more eligible to him." Hamet

asked that at least the President would restore to him his wife and

family, according to the treaty, and send them all back to Egypt. "I

cannot suppose," he wrote, "that the engagements of an American agent

would be disputed by his Government, ... or that a gentleman has pledged

towards me the honor of his country on purpose to deceive me."

Eaton presented these petitions to the President and to the public, and

insisted so warmly upon the harsh treatment his ally had received from

the United States, that two thousand four hundred dollars were sent to

him in 1806, and again, in 1807, Davis, Consul for Tripoli, was directed

to insist upon the release of the wife and children. They were delivered

up by Jusuf in 1807, and taken to Syracuse in an American sloop-of-war.

Here ended the relations of the United States with Hamet Caramanli.[5]

Throughout this whole African chapter, the darling economy of the

Administration was a penny-wise policy which resulted in the usual

failure. Already in 1802, Mr. Gallatin reported that two millions and a

half, in round numbers, had been paid in tribute and presents. The

expense of fitting out the four squadrons is estimated by Mr. Sabine at

three millions and a half. The tribute extorted after 1802 and the cost

of keeping the ships in the Mediterranean amount at the lowest estimate

to two millions more. Most of this large sum might have been saved by

giving an adequate force and full powers to Commodore Dale, who had

served under Paul Jones, and knew how to manage such matters.

Unluckily for their fame, the Administration was equally parsimonious in

national spirit and pluck, and did their utmost to protect themselves

against the extravagance of such reckless fellows as Preble, Decatur,

and Eaton. In the spring of 1803, while Preble was fitting out his

squadron, Mr. Simpson, Consul at Tangier, was instructed to buy the

good-will of the Emperor of Morocco. He disobeyed his instructions, and

the Emperor withdrew his demands when he saw the American ships. About

the same time, the Secretary of State wrote to Consul Cathcart in

relation to Tripoli:--

"It is thought best that you should not be tied down to a refusal of

presents, whether to be included in the peace, or to be made from time

to time during its continuance,--especially as in the latter case the

title to the presents will be a motive to its continuance,--to admit

that the Bashaw shall receive in the first instance, including the

consular present, the sum of $20,000, and at the rate afterwards of

$8,000 or $10,000 a year ... The presents, whatever the amount or

purpose of them, (except the consular present, which, as usual, may

consist of jewelry, cloth, etc.,) must be made in money and not in

stores, to be biennial rather than annual; _and the arrangement of the

presents is to form no part of the public treaty, if a private promise

and understanding can be substituted._"

After notifying Cathcart of his appointment to Tunis, the Secretary

directs him to evade the thirty-six-gun frigate, and to offer the Bey

ten thousand dollars a year for peace, to be arranged in the same

underhand way.

Tripoli refused the money; it was not enough. The Bey of Tunis rejected

both the offer and the Consul. He wrote to Mr. Jefferson that he

considered some of Cathcart's expressions insulting, and that he

insisted upon the thirty-six-gun frigate. Mr. Jefferson answered on the

27th of January, 1804, after he knew of the insult to Morris and of the

expulsion of Eaton. Beginning with watery generalities about "mutual

friendships and the interests arising out of them," he regretted that

there should be any misconception of his motives on the part of the Bey.

"Such being our regard for you, it is with peculiar concern I learn from

your letter that Mr. Cathcart, whom I had chosen from a confidence in

his integrity, experience, and good dispositions, has so conducted

himself as to incur your displeasure. In doing this, be assured he has

gone against the letter and spirit of his instructions, which were, that

his deportment should be such as to make known my esteem and respect for

your character both personal and public, and to cultivate your

friendship by all the attentions and services he could render.... In

selecting another character to take the place of Mr. Cathcart, I shall

take care to fix on one who, I hope, will better fulfil the duties of

respect and esteem for you, and who, in so doing only, will be the

faithful representative and organ of our earnest desire that the peace

and friendship so happily subsisting between the two countries may be

firm and permanent."

Most people will agree with Eaton, that "the spirit which dictated this

answer betrays more the inspiration of Carter's Mountain[6] than of

Bunker Hill."

Lear, who was appointed Consul-General in 1803, was authorized by his

instructions to pay twenty thousand dollars down and ten thousand a year

for peace, and a sum not to exceed five hundred dollars a man

for ransom.

When Barron's squadron anchored at Malta, Consul O'Brien came on board

to say that he had offered, by authority, eight thousand dollars a year

to Tunis, instead of the frigate, and one hundred and ten thousand to

Tripoli for peace and the ransom of the crew of the Philadelphia, and

that both propositions had been rejected.

Finally, after fitting out this fourth squadron, at an expense of one

million five hundred and seventy thousand dollars, and with Eaton in

possession of Derne, the Administration paid sixty thousand dollars for

peace and ransom, when Preble, ten months previously, could have

obtained both for one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Thus they

spent two millions to save ninety thousand, and left the principle of

tribute precisely where it was before.

What makes this business still more remarkable is, that the

Administration knew from the reports of our consuls and from the

experience of our captains that the force of the pirates was

insignificant, and that they were wretched sailors and poor shots.

Sterret took a Tripolitan cruiser of fourteen guns after an engagement

of thirty minutes; he killed or wounded fifty of her crew, and did not

lose a man, nor suffer any material damage in his hull or rigging. There

was no one killed on the American side when Decatur burned the

Philadelphia. The Constitution was under the fire of the Tripolitan

batteries for two hours without losing a man, and was equally fortunate

when she ran in a second time and lay within musket-shot of the mole,

exposed to the fire of the enemy for three-quarters of an hour. These

Tripolitan batteries mounted one hundred and fifteen guns. Three years

later, Captain Ichabod Sheffield, of the schooner Mary Ann, furnished in

person an example of the superiority of the Yankee over the Turk. Consul

Lear had just given forty-eight thousand dollars to the Dey of Algiers,

in full payment of tribute "up to date." Nevertheless, the Mary Ann, of

and from New York to Leghorn, was seized in the Straits of Gibraltar by

an Algerine corsair. A prize-crew of nine Turks was sent on board; the

captain, two men, and a boy left in her to do the work; she was ordered

to Algiers; and the pirate sailed away. Having no instructions from

Washington, Sheffield and his men determined to strike a blow for

liberty, and fixed upon their plan. Algiers was in sight, when Sheffield

hurled the "grains" overboard, and cried that he had struck a fish. Four

Turks, who were on deck, ran to the side to look over. Instantly the

Americans threw three of them into the sea. The others, hearing the

noise, hurried upon deck. In a hand-to-hand fight which followed two

more were killed with handspikes, and the remaining four were

overpowered and sent adrift in a small boat. Sheffield made his way,

rejoicing, to Naples. When the Dey heard how his subjects had been

handled, he threatened to put Lear in irons and to declare war. It cost

the United States sixteen thousand dollars to appease his wrath.

The cruise of the Americans against Tripoli differed little, except in

the inferiority of their force, from numerous attacks made by European

nations upon the Regencies. Venice, England, France, had repeatedly

chastised the pirates in times past. In 1799, the Portuguese, with one

seventy-four-gun ship, took two Tripolitan cruisers, and forced the

Pacha to pay them eleven thousand dollars. In 1801, not long before our

expedition, the French Admiral Gaunthomme over-hauled two Tunisian

corsairs in chase of some Neapolitan vessels. He threw all their guns

overboard, and bade them beware how they provoked the wrath of the First

Consul by plundering his allies. But all of them left, as we did, the

principle of piracy or payments as they found it. At last this evil was

treated in a manner more creditable to civilization. In 1812, the

Algerines captured an American vessel, and made slaves of the crew.

After the peace with England, in 1815, Decatur, in the Guerrière, sailed

into the Mediterranean, and captured off Cape de Gat, in twenty-five

minutes, an Algerine frigate of forty-six guns and four hundred men. On

board the Guerrière, four were wounded, and no one killed. Two days

later, off Cape Palos, he took a brig of twenty-two guns and one hundred

and eighty men. He then sailed into the harbor of Algiers with his

prizes, and offered peace, which was accepted. The Dey released the

American prisoners, relinquished all claims to tribute in future, and

promised never again to enslave an American. Decatur, on our part,

surrendered his prizes, and agreed to consular presents,--a mitigated

form of tribute, similar in principle, but, at least, with another name.

From Algiers he went to Tunis, and demanded satisfaction of that Regency

for having permitted a British man-of-war to retake in their port two

prizes to Americans in the late war with England. The Bey submitted, and

paid forty-six thousand dollars. He next appeared before Tripoli, where

he compelled the Pacha to pay twenty-six thousand dollars, and to

surrender ten captives, as an indemnity for some breaches of

international law. In fifty-four days he brought all Barbary to

submission. It is true, that, the next spring, the Dey of Algiers

declared this treaty null, and fell back upon the time-honored system of

annual tribute. But it was too late. Before it became necessary for

Decatur to pay him another visit, Lord Exmouth avenged the massacre of

the Neapolitan fishermen at Bona by completely destroying the fleet and

forts of Algiers, in a bombardment of seven hours. Christian prisoners

of every nation were liberated in all the Regencies, and the

slave-system, as applied to white men, finally abolished.

Preble, Eaton, and Decatur are our three distinguished African officers.

As Barron's squadron did not fire a shot into Tripoli, indeed never

showed itself before that port, to Eaton alone belongs the credit of

bringing the Pacha to terms which the American Commissioner was willing

to accept. The attack upon Derne was the feat of arms of the fourth

year, and finished the war.

Ours is not a new reading of the earlier relations of the United States

with the Barbary powers. The story can be found in the Collection of

State Papers, and more easily in the excellent little books of Messrs.

Sabine and Felton. But a "popular version" despises documents. Under

the pressure of melodrama, history will drift into Napoleon's "fable

agreed upon"; and if it be true, as Emerson says, that "no anchor, no

cable, no fence, avail to keep a fact a fact," it is not at all likely

that a paper in a monthly magazine will do it.

* * * * *

SUNSHINE.

I have always worked in the carpet-factories. My father and mother

worked there before me and my sisters, as long as they lived. My sisters

died first;--the one, I think, out of deep sorrow; the other from

too much joy.

My older sister worked hard, knew nothing else but work, never thought

of anything else, nor found any joy in work, scarcely in the earnings

that came from it. Perhaps she pined for want of more air, shut up in

the rooms all day, not caring to find it in walking or in the fields, or

even in books. Household-work awaited her daily after the factory-work,

and a dark, strange religion oppressed and did not sustain her, Sundays.

So we scarcely wondered when she died. It seemed, indeed, as if she had

died long ago,--as if the life had silently passed away from her,

leaving behind a working body that was glad at last to find a rest it

had never known before.

My other sister was far different. Very much younger, not even a shadow

of the death that had gone before weighed heavily upon her. Everybody

loved her, and her warm, flashing spirit that came out in her sunny

smile. She died in a season of joy, in the first flush of summer. She

died, as the June flowers died, after their happy summer-day of life.

At last I was left alone, to plod the same way, every night and

morning,--out with the sunrise from the skirts of the town, over the

bridge across the stream that fell into our great river which has worked

for us so long, to the tall, grim factory-building where my work awaited

me, and home again at night. I lived on in the house we all of us had

lived in. At first it was alone in the wood. But the town crept out to

meet it, and soon but little woodland was left around it. "Gloomy

Robert" they called me, as I walked back and forth upon the same track,

seldom lifting my head to greet friend or stranger. Though I walked over

well-known ground, my thoughts were wandering in strange romances. My

evening-readings furnished the land I lived in,--seldom this Western

home, but the East, from Homer's time to the days of Haroun Alraschid. I

was so faithful at my work that my responsibilities were each year

increased; and though my brain lived in dreams, I had sufficient use of

it for my little needs each day. I never forgot to answer the wants of

the greedy machines while I was within sound of them; but away from them

I forgot all external sight and sound. I can remember in my boyhood once

I was waked from my reveries. I was walking beneath a high stone-wall,

with my eyes and head bent down as usual, when I was roused by a shower

of rose-buds that fell over my shoulders and folded arms. I heard

laughter, and looked up to see a childish face with sunny, golden curls

tumbling over it; and a surprised voice cried out, "Gloomy Robert is

looking up!" The picture of the face hung in my memory long after, with

the sound of the happy voice, as though it came out of another world.

But it remained only a picture, and I never asked myself whether that

sunny face ever made any home happy, nor did I ever listen for that

voice again from behind the high stone-wall.

Many years of my life passed away. There were changes in the factories.

The machines grew more like human beings, and we men could act more like

machines. There were fewer of us needed; but I still held my place, and

my steadiness gave me a position.

One day, in the end of May, I was walking early in the morning towards

the factories, as usual, when suddenly there fell across my path a

glowing beam of sunshine that lighted up the grass before me. I stopped

to see how the green blades danced in its light, how the sunshine fell

down the sloping, bank across the stream below. Whirring insects seemed

to be suddenly born in its beam. The stream flowed more gayly, the

flowers on its brim were richer in color. A voice startled me. It was

only that of one of my fellow-workmen, as he shouted, "Look at Gloomy

Robert!--there's a sunbeam in his way, and he stumbles over it!" It was

really so. I had stumbled over a beam of sunlight. I had never observed

the sunshine before. Now, what life it gave, as it gleamed under the

trees! I kept on my way, but the thought of it followed me all up the

weary stairs into the high room where the great machines were standing

silently. Suddenly, after my work began, through a high narrow window

poured a strip of sunshine. It fell across the colored threads which

were weaving diligently their work. This day the work was of an

unusually artistic nature. We have our own artists in the mills, artists

who must work under severe limitations. Within a certain space their

fancy revels, and then its lines are suddenly cut short. Nature scatters

her flowers as she pleases over the field, does not measure her groups

to see that they stand symmetrically, nor count her several daisies that

they may be sure to repeat themselves in regular order. But our artist

must fit his stems to certain angles so that their lines may be

continuous, constantly repeating themselves, the same group recurring,

yet in a hidden monotony.

My pattern of to-day had always pleased me, for we had woven many yards

of it before,--the machines and I. There were rich green leaves and

flowers, gay flowers that shone in light and hid themselves in shade,

and I had always admired their grace and coloring. To-day they had

seemed to me cold and dusky. All my ideas that I had gained from

conventional carpet-flowers, which, woven almost beneath my hand, had

seemed to rival Nature's, all these ideas had been suddenly swept away.

My eyes had opened upon real flowers waving in real sunshine; and my

head grew heavy at the sound of the clanking machine weaving out yards

of unsunned flowers. If only that sunshine, I thought, would light up

these green leaves, put a glow on these brilliant flowers, instead of

this poor coloring which tries to look like sunshine, we might rival

Nature. But the moment I was so thinking, the rays of sunlight I have

spoken of fell on the gay threads. They seemed, before my eyes, to seize

upon the poor yellow fibres which were trying to imitate their own glow,

and, winding themselves round them, I saw the shuttle gather these rays

of sunlight into the meshes of its work. I was to stand there till noon.

So, long before I left, the gleam of sunshine had left the narrow window

and was hidden from the rest of the long room by the gray stone-walls of

another building which rose up outside. But as long as they lingered

over the machine that I was watching, I saw, as though human fingers

were placing them there, rays of sunlight woven in among the green

leaves and brilliant flowers.

After that gleam had gone, my work grew dark and dreary, and, for the

first time, my walls seemed to me like prison-walls. I longed for the

end of my day's work, and rejoiced that the sun had not yet set when I

was free again. I was free to go out across the meadows, up the hills,

to catch the last rays of sunset. Then coming home, I stooped to pick

the flowers which grew by the wayside in the waning light.

All that June which followed, I passed my leisure hours and leisure days

in the open air, in the woods. I chased the sunshine from the fields in

under the deep trees, where it only flickered through the leaves. I

hunted for flowers, too, beginning with the gay ones which shone with

color. I wondered how it was they could drink in so much of the sun's

glow. Then I fell to studying all the science of color and all the

theories which are woven about it. I plunged into books of chemistry,

to try to find out how it was that certain flowers should choose certain

colors out from the full beam of light. After the long days, I sat late

into the night, studying all that books could tell me. I collected

prisms, and tried, in scattering the rays, to learn the properties of

each several pencil of light. I grew very wise and learned, but never

came nearer the secret I was searching for,--why it was that the Violet,

lying so near the Dandelion, should choose and find such a different

dress to wear. It was not the rarer flowers that I brought home, at

first. My hands were filled with Dandelions and Buttercups. The

Saint-John's-Wort delighted me, and even the gaudy Sunflower. I trained

the vines which had been drooping round our old house,--the gray

time-worn house; the "natural-colored house," the neighbors called it. I

thought of the blind boy who fancied the sound of the trumpet must be

scarlet, as I trained up the brilliant scarlet trumpet-flower which my

sister had planted long ago.

So the summer passed away. My companions and neighbors did not wonder

much, that, after studying so many books, I should begin to study

flowers and botany. And November came. My occupation was not yet taken

away, for Golden-Rod and the Asters gleamed along the dusty roadside,

and still underneath the Maples there lay a sunny glow from the yellow

leaves not yet withered beneath them.

One day I received a summons from our overseer, Mr. Clarkson, to visit

him in the evening. I went, a little disturbed, lest he might have some

complaint to make of the engrossing nature of my present occupations.

This I was almost led to believe, from the way in which he began to

speak to me. His perorations, to be sure, were apt to be far wide of his

subject; and this time, as usual, I could allow him two or three

minutes' talk before it became necessary for me to give him my

attention.

At last it came out. I was wanted to go up to Boston about a marvellous

piece of carpet which had appeared from our mills. It had lain in the

warehouse some time, had at last been taken to Boston, and a large

portion of it had been sold, the pattern being a favorite one. But

suddenly there had been a change. In opening one of the rolls and

spreading it broadly in the show-room of Messrs. Gobelin's warehouse, it

had appeared the most wonderful carpet that ever was known. A real

sunlight gleamed over the leaves and flowers, seeming to flicker and

dance among them as on a broad meadow. It shed a radiance which paled

the light that struggled down between the brick walls through the high

windows. It had been subject of such wonder that Messrs. Gobelin had

been obliged to ask a high price of admission for the many that flocked

to see it. They had eagerly examined the other rolls of carpeting, in

the hope of finding a repetition of the wonder, and were inclined at one

time to believe that this magical effect was owing to a new method of

lighting their apartments. But it was only in this beautiful pattern and

through a certain portion of it that this wonderful appearance was

shown. Some weeks ago they had sent to our agent to ask if he knew the

origin of this wonderful tapestry. He had consulted with the designer of

the pattern, who had first claimed the discovery of the combination of

colors by which such an effect was produced, but he could not account

for its not appearing throughout the whole work. My master had then

examined some of the workmen, and learned, in the midst of his

inquiries, what had been my late occupations and studies.

"If," he continued, "I had been inclined to apply any of my discoveries

to the work which I superintended, he was willing, and his partners were

willing, to forgive any interference of that sort, of mine, in affairs

which were strictly their own, as long as the discoveries seemed of so

astonishing a nature."

I am not able to give all our conversation. I could only say to my

employer, that this was no act of mine, though I felt very sure that

the sunshine which astonished them in Messrs. Gobelin's carpet-store was

the very sunbeam that shone through the window of the factory on the

27th of May, that summer. When he asked me what chemical preparation

could insure a repetition of the same wonderful effect, I could only

say, that, if sunlight were let in upon all the machines, through all

the windows of the establishment, a similar effect might be produced. He

stared at me. Our large and substantial mill was overshadowed by the

high stone-walls of the rival company. It had taken a large amount of

capital to raise our own walls; it would take a still larger to induce

our neighbors to remove theirs. So we parted,--my employer evidently

thinking that I was keeping something behind, waiting to make my profit

on a discovery so interesting to him. He called me back to tell me,

that, after working so long under his employ, he hoped I should never be

induced by higher wages or other proffers to leave for any rival

establishment.

I was not left long in quiet. I received a summons to Boston. Mr.

Stuart, the millionnaire, had bought the wonderful carpet at an immense

price. He had visited our agent himself, had invited the designer to

dinner, and now would not be satisfied until I had made him a visit

in Boston.

I went to his house. I passed up through broad stairways, and over

carpets such as I had never trod nor woven. I should have liked to

linger and satisfy my eyes with looking at the walls decorated with

paintings, and at the statuary, which seemed to beckon to me like moving

figures. But I passed on to the room where Mr. Stuart and his friends

awaited me. Here the first thing that struck me was the glowing carpet

across which I must tread. It was lying in an oval saloon, which had

been built, they told me, for the carpet itself. The light was admitted

only from the ceiling, which was so decorated that no clear sunlight

could penetrate it; but down below the sunbeams lay flickering in the

meadow of leaves, and shed a warm glow over the whole room.

But my eyes directly took in many things besides the flowery ground

beneath me. At one end of the room stood a colossal bust of Juno,

smiling grandly and imperturbably, as if she were looking out from the

great far-away past. I think this would have held my looks and my

attention completely, but that Mr. Stuart must introduce me to his

friends. So I turned my glance away; but it was drawn directly towards a

picture which hung before me,--a face that drove away all recollection

of the colossal goddess. The golden hair was parted over a broad brow;

from the gentle, dreamy eyes there came a soft, penetrating glance, and

a vagueness as of fancy rested over the whole face. I scarcely heard a

word that was spoken to me as I looked upon this new charm, and I could

hardly find answers for the questions that surrounded me.

But I was again roused from my dreamy wonderment by a real form that

floated in and sent away all visions of imagination. "My daughter," said

Mr. Stuart, and I looked up into the same dreamy eyes which had been

winning me in the picture. But these looked far beyond me, over me,

perhaps, or through me,--I could scarcely say which,--and the mouth

below them bent into a welcoming smile. While she greeted the other

guests, I had an opportunity to watch the stately grace of Mr. Stuart's

daughter, who played the part of hostess as one long accustomed to it.

"A queen!" I had exclaimed to myself, as she entered the room, "and my

Juno!"

The gentlemen to whom I had been introduced had been summoned earlier,

as in a learned committee, discussing the properties of the new

discovery. After the entrance of the ladies, I was requested to lead

Miss Stuart to dinner, and sat by her side through the clanging of

dishes and a similar clangor of the table-talk of tongues.

"Speaking of light," said the Professor, turning to me, "why cannot you

bring, by your unknown chemical ways, some real sunlight into our rooms,

in preference to this metallic gas-light?"

I turned to the windows, before which the servant had just drawn the

heavy, curtains still closer, to shut out the gleams of a glowing sunset

which had ventured to penetrate between its folds.

"I see your answer," said Miss Stuart. "You wonder, as I do, why a

little piece of artificial sunlight should astonish us so much more than

the cheap sunlight of every day which the children play in on

the Common."

"I think your method, Mr. Desmond," said the Chemist, "must be some

power you have found of concentrating all the rays of a pencil of light,

disposing in some way of their heating power. I should like to know if

this is a fluid agent or some solid substance."

"I should like to see," interrupted another gentleman, "the anvil where

Mr. Desmond forges his beams. Could not we get up a party, Miss Stuart,

an evening-party, to see a little bit of sunlight struck out,--on a

moonshiny night, too?"

"In my lectures on chemistry," began Mr. Jasper. He was interrupted by

Mr. Stuart.

"You will have to write your lectures over again. Mr. Desmond has

introduced such new ideas upon chemistry that he will give you a chance

for a new course."

"You forget," said the Chemist, "that the laws of science are the same

and immutable. My lectures, having once been written, are written. I

only see that Mr. Desmond has developed theories which I have myself

laid down. As our friend the Artist will tell us, sunlight is sunlight,

wherever you find it, whether you catch it on a carpet or on a

lady's face."

"But I am quite ashamed," said Miss Stuart, "that we ladies so seldom

have the sunlight on our faces. I think we might agree to Mr. Green's

proposal to go out somewhere and see where the sunbeams really are made.

We shut them out with our curtains, and turn night into a

make-believe day."

"But the sun is so trying!" put in Miss Lester. "Just think how much

more becoming candle-light is! There is not one of my dresses which

would stand a broad sunbeam."

"I see," said Mr. Stuart, "that, when Mr. Desmond has perfected his

studies, we shall be able to roof over the whole of Boston with our

woven sunlight by day and gas-light by night, quite independent of fogs

and uncertain east-winds."

So much of the dinner-conversation dwelt upon what was supposed to be

interesting to me, and a part of my profession. It was laggingly done;

for presently the talk fell into an easier flow,--a wonder about Mrs.

This, and speculation concerning Mr. That. Mr. Blank had gone to Europe

with half his family, and some of them knew why he had taken the four

elder children, and others wondered why he had left the rest behind. I

was talked into a sort of spasmodic interest about a certain Maria, who

was at the ball the night before, but could not be at the dinner to-day.

In an effort to show me why she would be especially charming to me, her

personal appearance, the style of her conversation and dress, her manner

of life, all were pulled to pieces, and discussed, dissected, and

classified, in the same way as I would handle one of the Composite.

Miss Stuart spoke but little. She fluttered gayly over the livelier

conversation, but seemed glad to fall back into a sort of wearied

repose, where she appeared to be living in a higher atmosphere than the

rest of us. This air of repose the others seemed to be trying to reach,

when they got no farther than dulness; and some of the gentlemen, I

thought, made too great efforts in their attempts to appear bored.

Especially one of them exerted himself greatly to gape so often in the

face of a lady with whom he was striving to keep up an appearance of

conversation, that the exertion itself must have wearied him.

After the ladies had left, the Chemist seated himself by me, that he

might, as he openly said, get out of me the secret of my sunshine. The

more I disowned the sunshine, the more he felt sure that I possessed

some secret clue to it. I need not say, that, in all my talk with these

gentlemen, I had constantly tried to show that I could claim no

influence in setting the sun's rays among the green carpeted leaves.

I was urged to stay many days in Boston, was treated kindly, and invited

here and there. I grew to feel almost at home at Mr. Stuart's. He was

pleased to wonder at the education which I had given myself, as he

called it. I sat many long mornings in Miss Stuart's drawing-room, and

she had the power of making me talk of many things which had always been

hidden even from myself. It was hardly a sympathy with me which seemed

to unlock my inner thoughts; it was as though she had already looked

through them, and that I must needs bring them out for her use. That

same glance which I have already spoken of, which seemed to pass over

and through me, invited me to say in words what I felt she was beginning

to read with her eyes. We went together, the day before I was to leave

town, to the Gallery of Paintings.

As we watched a fine landscape by Kensett, a stream of sunshine rested a

moment on the canvas, giving motion and color, as it were, to the

pictured sunlight.

Miss Stuart turned to me.

"Why will you not imprison sunlight in that way, Mr. Desmond? That would

be artistic."

"You forget," I said, "if I could put the real sunlight into such a

picture, it would no longer be mine; I should be a borrower, not a

creator of light; I should be no more of an artist than I am now."

"You will always refuse to acknowledge it," she said; "but you can never

persuade me that you have not the power to create a sunbeam. An

imprisoned sunbeam! The idea is absurd."

"It is because the idea is so absurd," I said, "that, if I felt the

power were mine to imprison sunbeams, I should hardly care to repeat the

effort. The sunshine rests upon the grass, freely we say, but in truth

under some law that prevents its penetrating farther. A sunbeam existing

in the absence of the sun is, of course, an absurdity. Yet they are

there, the sunbeams of last spring, in your oval room, as I saw them one

day in May."

"Which convinces me," said Miss Stuart, "that you are an artist. That is

not real sunshine. You have created it. You are born for an artist-life.

Do not go back to your drudgery."

"Daily work," I answered, "must become mechanical work, if we perform it

in a servile way. A lawyer is perhaps inspired, when he is engaged in a

cause on which he thinks his reputation hangs; but, day by day, when he

goes down to the work that brings him his daily bread, he is quite as

likely to call it his drudgery as I my daily toil."

She left her seat and walked with me towards a painting which hung not

far from us. It represented sunset upon the water. "The tender-curving

lines of creamy spray" were gathering up the beach; the light was

glistening across the waves; and shadows and light almost seemed to move

over the canvas.

"There," said Miss Stuart, "is what I call work that is worthy. I know

there was inspiration in every touch of the brush. I know there was

happy life in the life that inspired that painting. It is worth while to

live and to show that one has been living in that way."

"But I think," said I, "that the artist even of that picture laid aside

his brush heavily, when he sighed to himself that he must call it

finished. I believe that in all the days that it lay upon his easel he

went to it many times with weariness, because there was monotony in the

work,--because the work that he had laid out for himself in his fancy

was far above what he could execute with his fingers. The days of

drudgery hung heavily on the days of inspiration; and it was only when

he carried his heart into the most monotonous part of his work that he

found any inspiration in it, that he could feel he had accomplished

anything." We turned suddenly away into a room where we had not been

before. I could not notice the pictures that covered the walls for the

sake of one to which Miss Stuart led the way. After looking upon that,

there could be no thought of finding out any other. It possessed the

whole room. The inspiration which uplifted the eyes fell over the whole

painting. We looked at it silently, and it was not till we had left the

building that Miss Stuart said,--

"We have seen there something which takes away all thought of artist or

style of painting or work. I have never been able to ask myself what is

the color of the eyes of that Madonna, or of her flowing hair, or the

tone of the drapery. I see only an expression that inspires the whole

figure, gives motion to the hands, life to the eyes, thought to the

lips, and soul to the whole being."

"The whole inspiration, the whole work," I said, "is far above us. It is

quite above me. No, I am not an artist; my fingers do not tingle for the

brush. This is an inspiration I cannot reach; it floats above me. It

moves and touches me, but shows me my own powerlessness."

I left Boston. I went back to winter, to my old home, to my every-day's

work. My work was not monotonous; or if one tone did often recur in it,

I built upon it, out of my heart and life, full chords of music. The

vision of Margaret Stuart came before my eyes in the midst of all

mechanical labor, in all the hours of leisure, in all the dreams of

night. My life, indeed, grew more varied than ever; for I found myself

more at ease with those around me, finding more happiness than I had

ever found before in my intercourse with others. I found more of myself

in them, more sympathy in their joy or sorrow, myself more of an equal

with those around me.

The winter months passed quickly away. Mr. Clarkson frequently showed

his disappointment because the mills no longer produced the wonder of

last year. For me, it had almost passed out of my thoughts. It seemed

but a part of the baser fabric of that vision where Margaret Stuart

reigned supreme. I saw no way to help him; but more and more, daily,

rejoiced in the outer sunshine of the world, in the fresh, glowing

spring, in the flowers of May. So I was surprised again, when, near the

close of May, after a week of stormy weather, the sunlight broke through

the window where it had shone the year before. It hung a moment on the

threads of work,--then, seeming to spurn them, fell upon the ground.

We were weaving, alas! a strange "arabesque pattern," as it was called,

with no special form,--so it seemed to my eyes,--bringing in gorgeous

colors, but set in no shape which Nature ever produced, either above the

earth or in metals or crystals hid far beneath. How I reproached myself,

on Mr. Clarkson's account, that I had not interceded, just for this one

day of sunshine, for some pattern that Nature might be willing to

acknowledge! But the hour was past, I knew it certainly, when the next

day the sun was clouded, and for many days we did not see its

face again.

So the time passed away. Another summer came along, and another glowing

autumn, and that winter I did not go to Boston. Mr. Clarkson let me fall

back again into my commonplace existence. I was no longer more than one

of the common workmen. Perhaps, indeed, he looked upon, me with a

feeling of disappointment, as though a suddenly discovered diamond had

turned to charcoal in his hands. Sometimes he consulted me upon chemical

matters, finding I knew what the books held, but evidently feeling a

little disturbed that I never brought out any hidden knowledge.

This second winter seemed more lonely to me. The star that had shone

upon me seemed farther away than ever. I could see it still. It was

hopelessly distant. My Juno! For a little while I could imagine she was

thinking of me, that my little name might be associated in her memory

with what we had talked of, what we had seen together, with some of the

high things which I knew must never leave her thoughts. But this

glimmering memory of me I knew must have faded away as her life went on,

varied as it was with change of faces, sounds of music, and whirl of

excitement. Then, too, I never heard her name mentioned. She was out of

my circle, as far away from my sphere as the heroines of those old

romances that I had read so long ago; but more life-like, more warm,

more sunny was her influence still. It uplifted my work, and crowned my

leisure with joy. I blessed the happy sunshine of that 27th of May,

which in a strange way had been the clue that led to my knowledge

of her.

The longest winter-months melt away at last into spring, and so did

these. May came with her promises and blights of promise. Recalling,

this time, how sunshine would come with the latter end of May through

the dark walls, I begged of Mr. Clarkson that a favorite pattern of mine

might be put upon the looms. Its design was imagined by one of my

companions in my later walks. He was an artist of the mills, and had

been trying to bring within the rigid lines that were required some of

the grace and freedom of Nature. He had scattered here some water-lilies

among broad green leaves. My admiration for Nature, alas! had grown only

after severe cultivation among the strange forms which we carpet-makers

indulge in with a sort of mimicry of Nature. So I cannot be a fair judge

of this, even as a work of art. I see sometimes tapestries in a meadow

studded with buttercups, and I fancy patterns for carpets when I see a

leaf casting its shadow upon a stone. So I may be forgiven for saying

that these water-lilies were dear to me as seeming like Nature, as they

were lying upon their green leaves.

Mr. Clarkson granted my request, and for a few days, this pattern was

woven by the machine. These trial-days I was excited from my usual

calmness. The first day the sunshine did not reach the narrow window.

The second day we had heavy storm and rain. But the third day, not far

from the expected hour, the sunshine burst through the little space. It

fell upon my golden threads; it seemed directly to embrace them

joyously, to encircle them closely. The sunlight seemed to incorporate

itself with the woolly fibre, to conceal itself among the work where the

shuttle chose to hide it. I fancied a sort of laughing joy, a clatter

and dash in the machinery itself, as though there were a happy time,

where was usually only a monotonous whirl. I could scarcely contain

myself till noon.

When I left my room, I found, on inquiry, that Mr. Clarkson was not in

the building, and was to be away all day. I went out into the air for a

free breath, and looked up into the glowing sky, yet was glad to go back

again to my machines, which I fancied would greet me with an unwonted

joy. But, as I passed towards the stairway, I glanced into one of the

lower rooms, where some of the clerks were writing. I fancied Mr.

Clarkson might be there. There were women employed in this room, and

suddenly one who was writing at a desk attracted my attention. I did not

see her face; but the impression that her figure gave me haunted me as I

passed on. Some one passing me saw my disturbed look.

"What have you seen? a ghost?" he asked.

"Who is writing in that room? Can you tell me?" I said.

"You know them all," was his answer, "except the new-comer, Miss Stuart.

Have not you heard the talk of her history,--how the father has failed

and died and all that, and how the daughter is glad enough to get work

under Mr. Clarkson's patronage?"

The bell was ringing that called me, and I could not listen to more. My

brain was whirling uncertainly, and I doubted if I ought to believe my

ears. I went back to my work more dazed and bewildered than ever in my

youthful days. I forgot the wonder of the morning. It was quite

outshone by the wonder of the afternoon. I longed for my hour of

release. I longed for a time for thought,--to learn whether what had

been told me could be true. When the time came, I hastened down-stairs;

but I found the door of the office closed. Its occupants had all gone. I

hastened through the village, turned back again, and on the bridge over

the little stream met Margaret Stuart. She was the same. It made no

difference what were her surroundings, she was the same; there was the

same wonderful glance, the same smile of repose. It made no difference

where or how I met her, she ruled me still. She greeted me with the same

air and manner as in her old home when I saw her first.

She told me afterwards of the changes and misfortunes of the past year,

of her desire for independence, and how she found she was little able to

uphold it herself.

"Some of my friends," she said, "were very anxious I should teach

singing,--I had such a delicious voice, which had been so well

cultivated. I could sing Italian opera-songs and the like. But I found I

could only sing the songs that pleased me, and it was doubtful whether

they would happen to suit the taste or the voice of those I should try

to teach. For, I must confess it, I have never cultivated my voice

except for my own pleasure, and never for the sake of the art. I did try

to teach music a little while, and, oh, it was hopeless! I remembered

some of our old talks about drudgery, and thought it had been a happy

thing for me, if I had ever learned how to drudge over anything. What I

mean is, I have never learned how to go through a monotonous duty, how

to give it an inspiration which would make it possible or endurable. It

would have been easier to summon up all my struggling for the sake of

one great act of duty. I did not know how to scatter it over work day

after day the same. Worse than all, in spite of all my education, I did

not know enough of music to teach it."

She went on, not merely this evening, but afterwards, to tell me of the

different efforts she had made to earn a living for herself with the

help of kind friends.

"At last," she said, "I bethought me of my handwriting, of the 'elegant'

notes which used to receive such praise; and when I met Mr. Clarkson one

day in Boston, I asked him what price he would pay me for it. I will

tell you that he was very kind, very thoughtful for me. He fancied the

work he had to offer would be distasteful to me; but he has made it as

agreeable, as easy to be performed, as can be done. My aunt was willing

to come here with me. She has just enough to live upon herself, and we

are likely to live comfortably together here. So I am trying that sort

of work you praised so much when you were with me; and I shall be glad,

if you can go on and show me what inspiration can bring into it."

So day after day I saw her, and evening after evening we renewed the old

talks. The summer passed on, and the early morning found her daily at

her work, every day pursuing an unaccustomed labor. Her spirit seemed

more happy and joyous than ever. She seemed far more at home than in the

midst of crowded streets and gay, brilliant rooms. Her expression was

more earnest and spiritual than ever,--her life, I thought, gayer

and happier.

So I thought till one evening, when we had walked far away down the

little stream that led out of the town. We stopped to look into its

waters, while she leaned against the trunk of a tree overshadowed it. We

watched the light and shade that nickered below, the shadow of the

clover-leaves, of the long reeds that hung almost across the stream. The

quiet was enhanced by the busy motion below, the bustle of little animal

life, the skimming of the water-insects, the tender rustling of the

leaves, and the gentle murmuring of the stream itself. Then I looked at

her, from the golden hair upon her head down to its shadow in the brook

below. I saw her hands folded over each other, and, suddenly, they

looked to me very thin and white and very weary. I looked at her again,

and her whole posture was one of languor and weariness,--the languor of

the body, not a weariness of the soul. There was a happy smile on the

lips, and a gleam of happiness from under the half-closed eyes. But, oh,

so tired and faint did the slender body look that I almost feared to see

the happier spirit leave it, as though it were incumbered by something

which could not follow it.

"Margaret!" I exclaimed. "You are wearing yourself away. You were never

made for such labor. You cannot learn this sort of toil. You are of the

sunshine, to play above the dusty earth, to gladden the dreary places.

Look at my hands, that are large for work,--at my heavy shoulders,

fitted to bear the yoke. Let me work for us both, and you shall still be

the inspiration of my work, and the sunshine that makes it gold. The

work we talked of is drudgery for you; you cannot bear it."

I think she would not agree to what I said about her work. She "had

began to learn how to find life in every-day work, just as she saw a new

sun rise every day." But she did agree that we would work together,

without asking where our sunshine came from, or our inspiration.

So it was settled. And her work was around and within the old

"natural-colored" house, whose walls by this time were half-embowered in

vines. There was gay sunshine without and within. And the lichen was

yellow that grew on the deeply sloping roof, and we liked to plant

hollyhocks and sunflowers by the side of the quaint old building, while

scarlet honeysuckles and trumpet-flowers and gay convolvuli gladdened

the front porch.

There was but one question that was left to be disputed between us.

Margaret still believed I was an artist, all-undeveloped.

"Those sunbeams"--

"I had nothing to do with them. They married golden threads that seemed

kindred to them."

"It is not true. Sunbeams cannot exist without the sun. Your magnetic

power, perhaps, attracted the true sunbeam, and you recreated others."

She fancies, if I would only devote myself to Art, I might become an

American Murillo, and put a Madonna upon canvas.

But before we carried the new sunshine into the old house, I had been

summoned again by Mr. Clarkson. Another wonderful piece of carpeting had

gone out from the works, discovered by our agent before it had left our

warehouse. It was the Water-Lily pattern,--lilies sitting among green

leaves with sunshine playing in and out and among them. So dazzling it

seemed, that it shed a light all round the darkened walls of the

warehouse. It was priceless, he thought, a perfect unique. Better,

almost, that never such a pattern should appear again. It ought to

remain the only one in the world.

And it did so remain. The rival establishment built a new chimney to

their mill, which shut out completely all sunshine or hope of sunshine

from our narrow windows. This was accomplished before the next May, and

I showed Mr. Clarkson how utterly impossible it was for the most

determined sunbeam ever to mingle itself with our most inviting fabrics.

Mr. Clarkson pondered a long time. We might build our establishment a

story higher; we might attempt to move it. But here were solid changes,

and the hopes were uncertain. Affairs were going on well, and the

reputation of the mills was at its height. And the carpets of sunshine

were never repeated.

* * * * *

THE TWO TONGUES.

Whoever would read a profound political pamphlet under the guise of a

brilliant novel may find it in "Sibyl, or The Two Nations." The gay

overture of "The Eve of the Derby," at a London club, with which the

curtain rises, contrasts with the evening amusements of the _prolétaire_

in the gin-palaces of Manchester in a more than operatic effectiveness,

and yet falls rather below than rises above the sober truth of present

history. And we are often tempted to bind up the novel of the dashing

Parliamenteer with our copy of "Ivanhoe," that we may thus have, side by

side, from the pens of the Right Honorable Benjamin Disraeli and Sir

Walter Scott, the beginning and the end of these eight hundred years of

struggle between Norman rule and Saxon endurance. For let races and

families change as they will, there have ever been in England two

nations; and the old debate of Wamba and Gurth in the forest-glade by

Rotherwood is illustrated by the unconscious satires of last week's

"Punch." In Chartism, Reform-Bills, and Strikes, in the etiquette which

guards the Hesperides of West-End society, in the rigid training which

stops many an adventurer midway in his career, are written the old

characters of the forest-laws of Rufus and the Charter of John. Races

and families change, but the distinction endures, is stamped upon all

things pertaining to both.

We in America, who boast our descent from this matrimony of Norman and

Saxon, claim also that we have blent the features of the two into one

homogeneous people. In this country, where the old has become new, and

the new is continually losing its raw lustre before the glitter of some

fresher splendor, the traces of the contest are all but obliterated.

Only our language has come to us with the brand of the fatherland upon

it. In our mother-tongue prevails the same principle of dualism, the

same conflict of elements, which not all the lethean baptism of the

Atlantic could wash out. The two nations of England survive in the two

tongues of America.

We beg the reluctant reader not to prematurely pooh-pooh as a "miserable

mouse" this conclusion, thinking that we are only serving up again that

old story of Wamba and Gurth with an added _sauce-piquante_ from Dean

Trench. We admit that we allude to that original composition of English

past and present from a Latin and a Teutonic stock. But that is to us

not an ultimate, but a primal fact. It is the premise from which we

propose to trace out the principle now living and working in our present

speech. We commence our history with that strife of the tongues which

had at the outset also their battle of Hastings, their field of Sanilac.

There began the feud which to-day continues to divide our language,

though the descendants of the primitive stocks are inextricably mingled.

For it is as in "Sibyl." That novel showed us the peer's descendants at

the workman's forge, while the manufacturer's grandchildren were wearing

the ermine and the strawberry-leaves. There is the constant passing to

and fro across the one border-line which never changes. Dandy Mick and

Devilsdust save a little money and become "respectable." We can follow

out their history after Mr. Disraeli leaves them. They marry Harriet and

Caroline, and contrive to educate a sharp boy or two, who will rise to

become superintendents in the mills and to speculate in cotton-spinning.

They in turn send into trade, with far greater advantages, their sons.

The new generation, still educating, and, faithful to the original

impulse, putting forth its fresh and aspiring tendrils, gets one boy

into the church, another at the bar, and keeps a third at the great

_Rouge-et-Noir_ table of commerce. Some one of their stakes has a run of

luck. Either it is my Lord Eldon who sits on the wool-sack, or the young

curate bids his Oxford laurels against a head-mastership of a public

school and covers his baldness with a mitre, or Jones Lloyd steps from

his back parlor into the carriage which is to take Lord Overstone to the

House of Peers. From the day when young Osborne, the bold London

'prentice, leaped into the Thames to fish up thence his master's

daughter, and brought back, not only the little lady, but the ducal

coronet of Leeds in prospective, to that when Thomas Newcome the elder

walked up to the same London that he might earn the "bloody hand" for

Sir Brian and Sir Barnes, English life has been full of such gallant

achievements.

So it has been with the words these speak. The phrases of the noble

Canon Chaucer have fallen to the lips of peasants and grooms, while many

a pert Cockney saying has elbowed its sturdy way into her Majesty's High

Court of Parliament. Yet still there are two tongues flowing through our

daily talk and writing, like the Missouri and Mississippi, with distinct

and contrasted currents.

And this appears the more strikingly in this country, where other

distinctions are lost. We have an aristocracy of language, whose

phrases, like the West-End men of "Sibyl," are effeminate, extravagant,

conventional, and prematurely worn-out. These words represent ideas

which are theirs only by courtesy and conservatism, like the law-terms

of the courts, or the "cant" of certain religious books. We have also a

plebeian tongue, whose words are racy, vigorous, and healthy, but which

men look askance at, when met in polite usage, in solemn literature, and

in sermons. Norman and Saxon are their relative positions, as in the old

time when "Ox" was for the serf who drove a-field the living animal, and

"Beef" for the baron who ate him; but their lineage is counter-crossed

by a hundred, nay, a thousand vicissitudes.

With this aristocracy of speech we are all familiar. We do not mean with

the speech of our aristocracy, which is quite another thing, but that

which is held appropriate for "great occasions," for public parade, and

for pen, ink, and types. It is cherished where all aristocracies

flourish best,--in the "rural districts." There is a style and a class

of words and phrases belonging to country newspapers, and to the city

weeklies which have the largest bucolic circulation, which you detect in

the Congressional eloquence of the honorable member for the Fifteenth

District, Mass., and in the Common-School Reports of Boston Corner,--a

style and words that remind us of the country gentry whose titles date

back to the Plantagenets. They look so strangely beside the brisk,

dapper curtnesses in which metropolitan journals transact their daily

squabbles! We never write one of them out without an involuntary

addition of quotation-marks, as a New-Yorker puts to his introduction of

his verdant cousin the supplementary, "From the Jerseys." Their

etymological Herald's Office is kept by schoolmasters, and especially

schoolma'ams, or, in the true heraldic tongue, "Preceptresses of

Educational Seminaries." You may find them in Mr. Hobbs, Jr.'s,

celebrated tale of "The Bun-Baker of Cos-Cob," or in Bowline's thrilling

novelette of "Beauty and Booty, or The Black Buccaneer of the Bermudas."

They glitter in the train of "Napoleon and his Marshals," and look down

upon us from the heights of "The Sacred Mountains."

Occasionally you will find them degraded from their high estate and

fallen among the riff-raff of slang. They become "seedy" words, stripped

of their old meaning, mere _chevaliers d'industrie_, yet with something

of the air noble about them which distinguishes them from the born

"cad." The word "convey" once suffered such eclipse, (we are glad to say

it has come up again,) and consorted, unless Falstaff be mistaken, with

such low blackguards as "nim" and "cog" and "prig" and similar

"flash" terms.

But we do not propose to linger among the "upper-ten" of the

dictionaries. The wont of such is to follow the law of hereditary

aristocracies: the old blood gets thin, there is no sparkle to the

_sangre azul_, the language dies out in poverty. The strong, new,

popular word forces its way up, is heard at the bar, gets quoted in the

pulpit, slips into the outer ring of good society. King Irving or King

Emerson lays his pen across its shoulder and it rises up ennobled, till

finally it is accepted of the "Atlantic Monthly," and its

court-presentation is complete.

We have thus indicated the nature of the great contest in language

between the conventional and the idiomatic. Idioms are just what their

name implies. They are the commonalty of language,--private, proletarian

words, who do the work, "_dum alteri tulerunt honores_." They come to us

from all handiworks and callings, where you will always find them at

their posts. Sharp, energetic, incisive, they do the hard labor of

speech,--that of carrying heavy loads of thought and shaping new ideas.

We think them vulgar at first, and savoring of the shop; but they are

useful and handy, and we cannot do without them. They rivet, they forge,

they coin, they "fire up," "brake up," "switch off," "prospect," "shin"

for us when we are "short," "post up" our books, and finally ourselves,

"strike a lead," "follow a trail," "stand up to the rack," "dicker,"

"swap," and "peddle." They are "whole teams" beside the "one-horse"

vapidities which fail to bear our burdens. The Norman cannot keep down

the Saxon. The Saxon finds his Wat Tyler or Jack Cade. Now "Mose" brings

his Bowery Boys into our parlor, or Cromwell Judd recruits his Ironsides

from the hamlets of the Kennebec.

We declare for the prolétaires. We vote the working-words ticket. We

have to plead the cause of American idioms. Some of them have, as we

said, good blood in them and can trace their lineage and standing to the

English Bible and Book of Common Prayer; others are "new men," born

under hedge-rows and left as foundlings at furnace-doors. And before we

go farther, we have a brief story to tell in illustration of the

two tongues.

A case of assault and battery was tried in a Western court. The

plaintiff's counsel informed the jury in his opening, that he was

"prepared to prove that the defendant, a steamboat-captain, menaced his

client, an English traveller, and put him in bodily fear, commanding him

to vacate the avenue of the steamboat with his baggage, or he would

precipitate him into the river." The evidence showed that the captain

called out,--"Stranger, ef you don't tote your plunder off that

gang-plank, I'll spill you in the drink."

We submit that for terseness and vigor the practitioner at the bar of

the Ohio had the better of the learned counsel who appeared at the bar

of justice, albeit his client was in a Cockney mystification at

the address.

The illustration will serve our turn. It points to a class of phrases

which are indigenous to various localities of the land, in which the

native thought finds appropriate, bold, and picturesque utterance. And

these in time become incorporate into the universal tongue. Of them is

the large family of political phrases. These are coined in moments of

intense excitement, struck out at white heat, or, to follow our leading

metaphor, like the speakers who use them, come upon the stump in their

shirt-sleeves. Every campaign gives us a new horde. Some die out at

once; others felicitously tickle the public ear and ring far and wide.

They "speak for Buncombe," are Barn-Burners, Old Hunkers, Hard Shells,

Soft Shells, Log-Rollers, Pipe-Layers, Woolly Heads, Silver Grays,

Locofocos, Fire-Eaters, Adamantines, Free Soilers, Freedom Shriekers,

Border Ruffians. They spring from a bon-mot or a retort. The log-cabin

and hard-cider watchwords were born of a taunt, like the "Gueux" of the

Netherlands. The once famous phrase, Gerrymandering, some of our readers

may remember. Governor Elbridge Gerry contrived, by a curious

arrangement of districts in Massachusetts, to transfer the balance of

power to his own party. One of his opponents, poring over the map of the

Commonwealth, was struck by the odd look of the geographical lines

which thus were drawn, curving in and out among the towns and counties.

"It looks," said he, "like a Salamander." "Looks like a _Gerry_-mander!"

ejaculated another; and the term stuck long and closely.

Now and then you have the aristocratic and democratic sides of an idea

in use at the same time. Those who style themselves "Gentlemen of the

Press" are known to the rest of mankind as "Dead Heads,"--being, for

paying purposes, literally, _capita mortua_.

So, too, our colleges are provided, over and above the various dead

languages of their classic curriculum, with the two tongues. The one

serves the young gentlemen, especially in their Sophomoric maturity,

with appropriate expressions for their literary exercises and public

flights. The other is for their common talk, tells who "flunked" and was

"deaded," who "fished" with the tutor, who "cut" prayers, and who was

"digging" at home. Each college, from imperial Harvard and lordly Yale

to the freshest Western "Institution," whose three professors fondly

cultivate the same number of aspiring Alumni, has its particular dialect

with its quadrennial changes. The just budded Freshmen of the class of

'64 could hardly without help decipher "The Rebelliad," which in the

Consulship of Plancus Kirkland was the epic of the day. The good old

gentlemen who come up to eat Commencement dinners and to sing with

quavery voices the annual psalm thereafter, are bewildered in the mazes

of the college-speech of their grandsons. Whence come these phrases few

can tell. Like witty Dr. S------'s "quotation," which never was

anything else, they started in life as sayings, springing full-grown,

like Pallas Athene, from the laboring brain of some Olympic Sophister.

Here in the quiet of our study in the country, we wonder if the boys

continue as in our day to "create a shout," instead of "making a call,"

upon their lady acquaintances,--if they still use "ponies,"--if they

"group," and get, as we did, "parietals" and "publics" for the same.

The police courts contribute their quota. Baggage-smashing,

dog-smudging, ring-dropping, watch-stuffing, the patent-safe men, the

confidence men, garroters, shysters, policy-dealers, mock-auction Peter

Funks, bogus-ticket swindlers, are all terms which have more or less

outgrown the bounds of their Alsatia of Thieves' Latin and are known

of men.

Even the pulpit, with its staid decorums, has its idioms, which it

cannot quite keep to itself. We hear in the religious world of

"professors," and "monthly concerts," (which mean praying, and not

psalmody,) of "sensation-preaching," (which takes the place of the

"painful" preaching of old times,) of "platform-speakers," of

"revival-preachers," of "broad pulpits," and "Churches of the Future,"

of the "Eclipse of Faith" and the "Suspense of Faith," of "liberal"

Christians, (with no reference to the contribution-plates,) of

"subjective" and "objective" sermons, "Spurgeonisms," and "businessmen's

meetings." And we can never think without a smile of that gifted genius,

whoever he was, who described a certain public exercise as _"the most

eloquent prayer ever addressed to a Boston audience."_ He surely created

a new and striking idiom.

The boys do, as Young America should, their share. And the sayings of

street urchins endure with singular tenacity. Like their sports, which

follow laws of their own, uninfluenced by meteorological considerations,

tending to the sedentary games of marbles in the cold, chilly spring,

and bursting into base-and foot-ball in the midsummer solstice, strict

tradition hands down from boy to boy the well-worn talk. There are still

"busters," as in our young days, and the ardent youth upon floating

cakes of ice "run bendolas" or "kittly-benders," or simply "benders." In

different latitudes the phrase varies,--one-half of it going to Plymouth

Colony, and the other abiding in Massachusetts Bay. And this tendency to

dismember a word is curiously shown in that savory fish which the

Indian christened "scup-paug." Eastward he swims as "scup," while at the

Manhattan end of the Sound he is fried as "porgie." And apropos of him,

let us note a curious instance of the tenacity of associated ideas. The

street boys of our day and early home were wont to term the _hetairai_

of the public walks "scup." The young Athenians applied to the classic

courtesans the epithet of [Greek: saperdion], the name of a small fish

very abundant in the Black Sea. Here now is a bit of slang which may

fairly be warranted to keep fresh in any climate.

But boy-talk is always lively and pointed; not at all precise, but very

prone to prosopopeia; ever breaking out of the bounds of legitimate

speech to invent new terms of its own. Dr. Busby addresses Brown, Jr.,

as Brown Secundus, and speaks to him of his "young companions." Brown

himself talks of "the chaps," or "the fellows," who in turn know Brown

only as Tom Thumb. The power of nicknaming is a school-boy gift, which

no discouragement of parents and guardians can crush out, and which

displays thoroughly the idiomatic faculty. For a man's name was once

_his_, the distinctive mark by which the world got at his identity.

Long, Short, White, Black, Greathead, Longshanks, etc., told what a

person in the eyes of men the owner presented. The hereditary or

aristocratic process has killed this entirely. Men no longer make their

names; even the poor foundlings, like Oliver Twist, are christened

alphabetically by some Bumble the Beadle. But the nickname restores his

lost rights, and takes the man at once out of the _ignoble vulgus_ to

give him identity. We recognize this gift and are proud of our

nicknames, when we can get them to suit us. Only the sharp judgment of

our peers reverses our own heraldry and sticks a surname like a burr

upon us. The nickname is the idiom of nomenclature. The sponsorial

appellation is generally meaningless, fished piously out of Scripture or

profanely out of plays and novels, or given with an eye to future

legacies, or for some equally insufficient reason apart from the name

itself. So that the gentleman who named his children One, Two, and

Three, was only reducing to its lowest term the prevailing practice. But

the nickname abides. It has its hold in affection. When the "old boys"

come together in Gore Hall at their semi-centennial Commencement, or the

"Puds" or "Pores" get together after long absence, it is not to inquire

what has become of the Rev. Dr. Heavysterne or his Honor Littleton Coke,

but it is, "Who knows where Hockey Jones is?" and "Did Dandy Glover

really die in India?" and "Let us go and call upon Old Sykes" or "Old

Roots" or "Old Conic-Sections,"--thus meaning to designate

Professor----, LL.D., A.A.S., F.R.S., etc. A college president who had

no nickname would prove himself, _ipso facto_, unfit for his post. It is

only dreadfully affected people who talk of "Tully"; the sensible all

cling to the familiar "Chick-Pea" or Cicero, by which the wart-faced

orator was distinguished. For it is not the boys only, but all American

men, who love nicknames, the idioms of nomenclature. The first thing

which is done, after a nominating convention has made its platform and

balloted for its candidates, is to discover or invent a nickname: Old

Hickory, Tippecanoe, The Little Giant, The Little Magician, The Mill-Boy

of the Slashes, Honest John, Harry of the West, Black Dan, Old Buck, Old

Rough and Ready. A "good name" is a tower of strength and many votes.

And not only with candidates for office, the spots on whose "white

garments" are eagerly sought for and labelled, but in the names of

places and classes the principle prevails, the democratic or Saxon

tongue gets the advantage. Thus, we have for our states, cities, and

ships-of-war the title of fondness which drives out the legal title of

ceremony. Are we not "Yankees" to the world, though to the diplomatists

"citizens of the United States of America"? We have a Union made up upon

the map of Maine, New Hampshire, etc., to California; we have another in

the newspapers, composed of the Lumber State, the Granite State, the

Green-Mountain State, the Nutmeg State, the Empire State, the Keystone

State, the Blue Hen, the Old Dominion, of Hoosiers, Crackers, Suckers,

Badgers, Wolverines, the Palmetto State, and Eldorado. We have the

Crescent City, the Quaker City, the Empire City, the Forest City, the

Monumental City, the City of Magnificent Distances. We hear of Old

Ironsides sent to the Mediterranean to relieve the Old Tea-Wagon,

ordered home. Everywhere there obtains the Papal principle of taking a

new title upon succeeding to any primacy. The Norman imposed his laws

upon England; the courts, the parish-registers, the Acts of Parliament

were all his; but to this day there are districts of the Saxon Island

where the postman and census-taker inquire in vain for Adam Smith and

Benjamin Brown, but must perforce seek out Bullhead and Bandyshins. So

indomitable is the Saxon.

We have not done yet with our national idioms. In the seaboard towns

nautical phrases make tarry the talk of the people. "Where be you

a-cruising to?" asks one Nantucket matron of her gossip. "Sniver-dinner,

I'm going to Egypt; Seth B. has brought a letter from Turkey-wowner to

Old Nancy." "Dressed-to-death-and-drawers-empty, don't you see we're

goin' to have a squall? You had better take in your stu'n'-sails." The

good woman was dressed up, intending, "_as soon as ever_ dinner was

over," to go, not to the land of the Pharaohs, but to the negro-quarter

of the town, with a letter which "Seth B." (her son, thus identified by

his middle letter) had brought home from Talcahuana.

For the rural idioms we refer the reader to the late Sylvester Judd's

"Margaret" and "Richard Edney," and to the Jack Downing Letters.

The town is not behind the country. For, whatever is the current fancy,

pugilism, fire-companies, racing, railway-building, or the opera, its

idioms invade the talk. The Almighty Dollar of our worship has more

synonymes than the Roman Pantheon had divinities. We are not

"well-informed," but "posted" or "posted up." We are not "hospitably

entreated" any more, but "put through." We do not "meet with

misadventure," but "see the elephant," which we often do through the

Hibernian process of "fighting the tiger."

Purists deplore this, but it is inevitable; and if one searches beneath

the surface, there is often a curious deposit of meaning, sometimes

auriferous enough to repay our use of cradle and rocker. We "panned

out," the other day, a phrase which gave us great delight, and which

illustrated a fact in New England history worth noting. We were puzzling

over the word "socdollager," which Bartlett, we think, defines as

"Anything very large and striking,"--_Anglicé_, a "whopper,"--"also a

peculiar fish-hook." The word first occurs in print, we believe, in Mr.

Cooper's "Home as Found," applied to a patriarch among the white bass of

Otsego Lake, which could never be captured. We assumed at once that

there was a latent reason for the term, and all at once it flashed upon

us that it was a rough fisherman's random-shot at the word "doxology."

This, in New England congregations, as all know, was wont to be sung, or

"j'ined in," by the whole assembly, and given with particular emphasis,

both because its words were familiar to all without book, and because it

served instead of the chanted creed of their Anglican forefathers. The

last thing, after which nothing could properly follow, the most

important and most conspicuous of all, it represented to our Yankee

Walton the crowning hope of his life,--the big bass, after taking which

he might put hook-and-line on the shelf. By a slight transposition,

natural enough to untrained organs, "doxology" became "socdollager."

We are not making a dictionary of Americanisms, but merely wandering a

little way into our native forests. We refer to the prevalent habit of

idiomatic speech as a fact that makes part of our literature. It cannot

be ignored, nor do we see how it is to be avoided. It is well, of

course, to retain the sterling classic basis of our speech as we

received it from abroad, and to this all that is best and purest in our

literature past and present will tend. But we hold to no Know-Nothing

platform which denies a right of naturalization to the worthy. As Ruskin

says of the river, that it does not make its bed, but finds it, seeking

out, with infinite pains, its appointed channel, so thought will seek

its expression, guided by its inner laws of association and sympathy. If

the mind and heart of a nation become barbarized, no classic culture can

keep its language from corruption. If its ideas are ignoble, it will

turn to the ignoble and vulgar side of every word in its tongue, it will

affix the mean sense it desires to utter where it had of old no place.

It converts the prince's palace into a stable or an inn; it pulls down

the cathedral and the abbey to use the materials for the roads on which

it tramples. It is good to sanctify language by setting some of its

portions apart for holy uses,--at least, by preserving intact the high

religious association which rests upon it. The same silver may be

moulded to the altar-chalice or the Bacchic goblet; but we touch the one

with reverent and clean hands, while the other is tossed aside in the

madness of the revel. Men clamor for a new version of the Sacred

Scriptures, and profess to be shocked at its plain outspokenness,

forgetting that to the pure all things are pure, and that to the

prurient all things are foul. It was a reverent and a worshipping age

that gave us that treasure, and so long as we have the temper of

reverence and worship we shall not ask to change it.

And to return once more to our original illustration. We have the two

nations also in us, the Norman and the Saxon, the dominant and the

aspiring, the patrician and the _prolétaire_. The one rules only by

right of rule, the other rises only by right of rising. The power of

conservatism perishes, when there is no longer anything to keep; the

might of radicalism overflows into excess, when the proper check is

taken away or degraded. So long as the noble is noble and "_noblesse

oblige_," so long as Church and State are true to their guiding and

governing duties, the elevation of the base is the elevation of the

whole. If the standards of what is truly aristocratic in our language

are standards of nobility of thought, they will endure and draw up to

them, on to the episcopal thrones and into the Upper House of letters,

all that is most worthy. Whatever makes the nation's life will make its

speech. War was once the career of the Norman, and he set the seal of

its language upon poetry. Agriculture was the Saxon's calling, and he

made literature a mirror of the life he led. We in this new land are

born to new heritages, and the terms of our new life must be used to

tell our story. The Herald's College gives precedence to the

Patent-Office, and the shepherd's pipe to the steam-whistle. And since

all literature which can live stands only upon the national speech, we

must look for our hopes of coming epics and immortal dramas to the

language of the land, to its idioms, in which its present soul abides

and breathes, and not to its classicalities, which are the empty shells

upon its barren sea-shore.

MIDSUMMER AND MAY.

[Continued.]

II.

When Miss Kent, the maternal great-aunt of Mr. Raleigh, devised her

property, the will might possibly have been set aside as that of a

monomaniac, but for the fact that he cared too little about anything to

go to law for it, and for the still more important fact that the

heirs-at-law were sufficiently numerous to ingulf the whole property and

leave no ripple to attest its submerged existence, had he done so; and

on deserting it, he was better pleased to enrich the playfellow of his

childhood than a host of unknown and unloved individuals. I cannot say

that he did not more than once regret what he had lost: he was not of a

self-denying nature, as we know; on the contrary, luxurious and

accustomed to all those delights of life generally to be procured only

through wealth. But, for all that, there had been intervals, ere his

thirteen years' exile ended, in which, so far from regret, he

experienced a certain joy at remembrance of this rough and rugged point

of time where he had escaped from the chrysalid state to one of action

and freedom and real life. He had been happy in reaching India before

his uncle's death, in applying his own clear understanding to the

intricate entanglements of the affairs before him, in rescuing his

uncle's commercial good name, and in securing thus for himself a

foothold on the ladder of life, although that step had not occurred to

him till thrust there by the pressure of circumstances. For the rest, I

am not sure that Mr. Raleigh did not find his path suiting him well

enough. There was no longer any charm in home; he was forbidden to think

of it. That strange summer, that had flashed into his life like the

gleam of a carnival-torch into quiet rooms, must be forgotten; the forms

that had peopled it, in his determination, should become shadows.

Valiant vows! Yet there must have come moments, in that long lapse of

days and years, when the whole season gathered up its garments and swept

imperiously through his memory: nights, when, under the shadow of the

Himmaleh, the old passion rose at spring-tide and flooded his heart and

drowned out forgetfulness, and a longing asserted itself, that, if

checked as instantly by honor as despair, was none the less insufferable

and full of pain,--warm, wide, Southern nights, when all the stars,

great and golden, leaned out of heaven to meet him, and all ripe

perfumes, wafted by their own principle of motion, floated in the rich

dusk and laden air about him, and the phantom of snow on topmost heights

sought vainly to lend him its calm. Days also must have showered their

fervid sunshine on him, as he journeyed through plains of rice, where

all the broad reaches whitening to harvest filled him with intense and

bitterest loneliness. What region of spice did not recall the noons when

they two had trampled the sweet-fern on wide, high New England pastures,

and breathed its intoxicating fragrance? and what forest of the tropics,

what palms, what blooms, what gorgeous affluence of color and of growth,

equalled the wood on the lake-shores, with its stately hemlocks, its

joyous birches, its pale-blue, shadow-blanched violets? Nor was this

regret, that had at last become a part of the man's identity, entirely a

selfish one. He had no authority whatever for his belief, yet believe he

did, that, firmly and tenderly as he loved, he was loved, and of the two

fates his was not the harder. But a man, a man, too, in the stir of the

world, has not the time for brooding over the untoward events of his

destiny that a woman has; his tender memories are forever jostled by

cent. per cent.; he meets too many faces to keep the one in constant and

unchanging perpetuity sacredly before his thought. And so it happened

that Mr. Raleigh became at last a silent, keen-eyed man, with the shadow

of old and enduring melancholy on his life, but with no certain

sorrow there.

In the course of time his business-connections extended themselves; he

was associated with other men more intent than he upon their aim;

although not wealthy, years might make him so; his name commanded

respect. Something of his old indifference lingered about him; it was

seldom that he was in earnest; he drifted with the tide, and, except to

maintain a clear integrity before God and men and his own soul, exerted

scarcely an effort. It was not an easy thing for him to break up any

manner of life; and when it became necessary for one of the firm to

visit America, and he as the most suitable was selected, he assented to

the proposition with not a heart-beat. America was as flat a wilderness

to him as the Desert of Sahara. On landing in India, he had felt like a

semi-conscious sleeper in his dream, the country seemed one of

phantasms: the Lascars swarming in the port,--the merchants wrapped in

snowy muslins, who moved like white-robed bronzes faintly animate,--the

strange faces, modes, and manners,--the stranger beasts, immense, and

alien to his remembrance; all objects that crossed his vision had seemed

like a series of fantastic shows; he could have imagined them to be the

creations of a heated fancy or the weird deceits of some subtle draught

of magic. But now they had become more his life than the scenes which he

had left; this land with its heats and its languors had slowly and

passively endeared itself to him; these perpetual summers, the balms and

blisses of the South, had unconsciously become a need of his nature. One

day all was ready for his departure; and in the clipper ship Osprey,

with a cargo for Day, Knight, and Company, Mr. Raleigh bade farewell

to India.

The Osprey was a swift sailer and handled with consummate skill, so that

I shall not venture to say in how few days she had weathered the Cape,

and, ploughing up the Atlantic, had passed the Windward Islands, and off

the latter had encountered one of the severest gales in Captain

Tarbell's remembrance, although he was not new to shipwreck. If Mr.

Raleigh had found no time for reflection in the busy current of affairs,

when, ceasing to stand aside, he had mingled in the turmoil and become a

part of the generations of men, he could not fail to find it in this

voyage, not brief at best, and of which every day's progress must assure

him anew toward what land and what people he was hastening. Moreover,

Fate had woven his lot, it seemed, inextricably among those whom he

would shun; for Mr. Laudersdale himself was deeply interested in the

Osprey's freight, and it would be incumbent upon him to extend his

civilities to Mr. Raleigh. But Mr. Raleigh was not one to be cozened by

circumstances more than by men.

The severity of the gale, which they had met some three days since, had

entirely abated; the ship was laid to while the slight damage sustained

was undergoing repair, and rocked heavily under the gray sky on the

long, sullen swell and roll of the grayer waters. Mr. Raleigh had just

come upon deck at dawn, where he found every one in unaccountable

commotion. "Ship to leeward in distress," was all the answer his

inquiries could obtain, while the man on the topmast was making his

observations. Mr. Raleigh could see nothing, but every now and then the

boom of a gun came faintly over the distance. The report having been

made, it was judged expedient to lower a boat and render her such

assistance as was possible. Mr. Raleigh never could tell how it came to

pass that he found himself one of the volunteers in this

dangerous service.

The disabled vessel proved to be a schooner from the West Indies in a

sinking condition. A few moments sufficed to relieve a portion of her

passengers, sad wretches who for two days had stared death in the face,

and they pulled back toward the Osprey. A second and third journey

across the waste, and the remaining men prepared to lower the last woman

into the boat, when a stout, but extremely pale individual, who could no

longer contain his frenzy of fear, clambered down the chains and dropped

in her place. There was no time to be lost, and nothing to do but

submit; the woman was withdrawn to wait her turn with the captain and

crew, and the laden boat again labored back to the ship. Each trip in

the heavy sea and the blinding rain occupied no less than a couple of

hours, and it was past noon when, uncertain just before if she might yet

be there, they again came within sight of the little schooner, slowly

and less slowly settling to her doom. As they approached her at last,

Mr. Raleigh could plainly detect the young woman standing at a little

distance from the anxious group, leaning against the broken mast with

crossed arms, and looking out over the weary stretch with pale, grave

face and quiet eyes. At the motion of the captain, she stepped forward,

bound the ropes about herself, and was swung over the side to await the

motion of the boat, as it slid within reach on the top of the long wave,

or receded down its shining, slippery hollow. At length one swell brought

it nearer, Mr. Raleigh's arms snatched the slight form and drew her

half-fainting into the boat, a cloak was tossed after, and one by one

the remainder followed; they were all safe, and some beggared. The bows

of the schooner already plunged deep down in the gaping gulfs, they

pulled bravely away, and were tossed along from billow to billow.

"You are very uncomfortable, Mademoiselle Le Blanc?" asked the rescued

captain at once of the young woman, as she sat beside him in the

stern-sheets.

"_Moi?_" she replied. "_Mais non, Monsieur._"

Mr. Raleigh wrapped the cloak about her, as she spoke. They were

equidistant from the two vessels, neither of which was to be seen, the

rain fell fast into the hissing brine, their fate still uncertain. There

was something strangely captivating and reassuring in this young girl's

equanimity, and he did not cease speculating thereon till they had again

reached the Osprey, and she had disappeared below.

By degrees the weather lightened; the Osprey was on the wing again, and

a week's continuance of this fair wind would bring them into port. The

next day, toward sunset, as Mr. Raleigh turned about in his regular

pacing of the deck, he saw at the opposite extremity of the ship the

same slight figure dangerously perched upon the taffrail, leaning over,

now watching the closing water, and now eagerly shading her eyes with

her hand to observe the ship which they spoke, as they lay head to the

wind, and for a better view of which she had climbed to this position.

It was not Mr. Raleigh's custom to interfere; if people chose to drown

themselves, he was not the man to gainsay them; but now, as his walk

drew him toward her, it was the most natural thing in the world to pause

and say,--

"_Il serait fâcheux, Mademoiselle, lorsqu' on a failli faire naufrage,

de se noyer_"--and, in want of a word, Mr. Raleigh ignominiously

descended to his vernacular--"with a lee-lurch."

The girl, resting on the palm of one hand, and unsupported otherwise,

bestowed upon him no reply, and did not turn her head. Mr. Raleigh

looked at her a moment, and then continued his walk. Returning, the

thing happened as he had predicted, and, with a little quick cry,

Mademoiselle Le Blanc was hanging by her hands among the ropes. Reaching

her with a spring, "_Viens, petite!_" he said, and with an effort placed

her on her feet again before an alarm could have been given.

"_Ah! mais je crus c'en était fait de moi!_" she exclaimed, drawing in

her breath like a sob. In an instant, however, surveying Mr. Raleigh,

the slight emotion seemed to yield to one of irritation, that she had

been rescued by him; for she murmured quickly, in English, head

haughtily thrown back and eyes downcast,--"Monsieur thinks that I owe

him much for having saved my life!"

"Mademoiselle best knows its worth," said he, rather amused, and turning

away.

The girl was still looking down; now, however, she threw after him a

quick glance.

"_Tenez!_" said she, imperiously, and stepping toward him. "You fancy me

very ungrateful," she continued, lifting her slender hand, and with the

back of it brushing away the floating hair at her temples. "Well, I am

not, and at some time it may be that I prove it. I do not like to owe

debts; but, since I must, I will not try to cancel them with thanks."

Mr. Raleigh bowed, but said nothing. She seemed to think it necessary to

efface any unpleasant impression, and, with a little more animation and

a smile, added,--"The Captain Tarbell told me your name, Mr. Raleigh,

and that you had not been at home for thirteen years. _Ni moi non

plus_,--at least, I suppose it is home where I am going; yet I remember

no other than the island and my"--

And here the girl opened her eyes wide, as if determined that they

should not fill with tears, and looked out over the blue and sparkling

fields around them. There was a piquancy in her accent that made the

hearer wish to hear further, and a certain artlessness in her manner not

met with recently by him. He moved forward, keeping her beside him.

"Then you are not French," he said.

"I? Oh, no,--nor Creole. I was born in America; but I have always lived

with mamma on the plantation; _et maintenant, il y a six mois qu'elle

est morte!_"

Here she looked away again. Mr. Raleigh's glance followed hers, and,

returning, she met it bent kindly and with a certain grave interest upon

her. She appeared to feel reassured, somewhat protected by one so much

her elder.

"I am going now to my father," she said, "and to my other mother."

"A second marriage," thought Mr. Raleigh, "and before the orphan's

crapes are"--Then, fearful lest she should read his thought, he

added,--"And how do you speak such perfect English?"

"Oh, my father came to see us every other year, and I have written home

twice a week since I was a little child. Mamma, too, spoke as much

English as French."

"I have not been in America for a long time," said Mr. Raleigh, after a

few steps. "But I do not doubt that you will find enjoyment there. It

will be new: womanhood will have little like youth for you; but, in

every event, it is well to add to our experience, you know."

"What is it like, Sir? But I know! Rows of houses, very counterparts of

rows of houses, and they of rows of houses yet beyond. Just the

toy-villages in boxes, uniform as graves and ugly as bricks"--

"Brick houses are not such ugly things. I remember one, low and wide,

possessed of countless gables, covered with vines and shaded with

sycamores; it could not have been so picturesque, if built of the marble

of Paros, and gleaming temple-white through masks of verdure."

"It seems to me that I, too, remember such a one," said she, dreamily.

"_Mais non, je m'y perds_. Yet, for all that, I shall not find the New

York avenues lined with them."

"No; the houses there are palaces."

"I suppose, then, I am to live in a palace," she answered, with a light

tinkling laugh. "That is fine; but one may miss the verandas, all the

whiteness and coolness. How one must feel the roof!"

"Roofs should be screens, and not prisons, not shells, you think?" said

Mr. Raleigh.

"At home," she replied, "our houses are, so to say, parasols; in those

cities they must be iron shrouds. _Ainsi soit il!_" she added, and

shrugged her shoulders like a little fatalist.

"You must not take it with such desperation; perhaps you will not be

obliged to wear the shroud."

"Not long, to be sure, at first. We go to freeze in the country, a place

with distant hills of blue ice, my old nurse told me,--old Ursule. Oh,

Sir, she was drowned! I saw the very wave that swept her off!"

"That was your servant?"

"Yes."

"Then, perhaps, I have some good news for you. She was tall and large?"

"_Oui_."

"Her name was Ursule?"

"_Oui! je dis que oui!_"

Mr. Raleigh laughed at her eagerness. "She is below, then," he

said,--"not drowned. There is Reynolds. Mr. Reynolds, will you take this

young lady to her servant, Ursule, the woman you rescued?"

And Mademoiselle Le Blanc disappeared under that gentleman's escort.

The ordinary restraints of social life not obtaining so much on board

ship as elsewhere, Mr. Raleigh saw his acquaintance with the pale young

stranger fast ripening into friendliness. It was an agreeable variation

from the monotonous routine of his voyage, and he felt that it was not

unpleasant to her. Indeed, with that childlike simplicity that was her

first characteristic, she never saw him without seeking him, and every

morning and every evening it became their habit to pace the deck

together. Sunrise and twilight began to be the hours with which he

associated her; and it was strange, that, coming, as she did, out of the

full blaze of tropical suns, she yet seemed a creature that had taken

life from the fresh, cool, dewy hours, and that must fairly dissolve

beneath the sky of noon. She puzzled him, too, and he found singular

contradictions in her: to-night, sweetness itself,--to-morrow, petulant

as a spoiled child. She had all a child's curiosity, too; and he amused

himself by seeing, at one time, with what novelty his adventures struck

her, when, at another, he would have fancied she had always held Taj and

Himmaleh in her garden. Now and then, excited, perhaps, by emulation and

wonder, her natural joyousness broke through the usually sad and quiet

demeanor; and she related to him, with dramatic _abandon_, scenes of her

gay and innocent island-life, so that he fancied there was not an

emotion in her experience hidden from his knowledge, till, all-unaware,

he tripped over one reserve and another, that made her, for the moment,

as mysterious a being as any of those court-ladies of ancient _régimes_,

in whose lives there were strange _lacunae_, and spaces of shadow. And a

peculiarity of their intercourse was, that, let her depart in what freak

or perversity she pleased, she seemed always to have a certainty of

finding him in the same mood in which she had left him,--as some bright

wayward vine of Southern forests puts out a tendril to this or that

enticing point, yet, winding back, will find its first support

unchanged. Shut out, as Mr. Raleigh had been, from any but the most

casual female society, he found a great charm in this familiarity, and,

without thinking how lately it had begun or how soon it must cease, he

yielded himself to its presence. At one hour she seemed to him an

impetuous and capricious thing, for whose better protection the accident

of his companionship was extremely fortunate,--at another hour, a woman

too strangely sweet to part with; and then Mr. Raleigh remembered that

in all his years he had really known but two women, and one of these had

not spent a week in his memory.

Mademoiselle Le Blanc came on deck, one evening, and, wrapping a soft,

thick mantle round her, looked about for a minute, shaded her eyes from

the sunset, meantime, with a slender, transparent hand, bowed to one,

spoke to another, slipped forward and joined Mr. Raleigh, where he

leaned over the ship's side.

"_Voici ma capote!_" said she, before he was aware of her approach.

"_Ciel! qu'il fait frais!_"

"We have changed our skies," said Mr. Raleigh, looking up.

"It is not necessary that you should tell me that!" she replied. "I

shiver all the time. I shall become a little iceberg, for the sake of

floating down to melt off Martinique!"

"Warm yourself now in the sunset; such a blaze was kindled for the

purpose."

"Whenever I see a sunset, I find it to be a splendid fact, _une

jouissance vraie, Monsieur_, to think that men can paint,--that these

shades, which are spontaneous in the heavens, and fleeting, can be

rivalled by us and made permanent,--that man is more potent than light."

"But you are all wrong in your _jouissance_."

She pouted her lip, and hung over the side in an attitude that it seemed

he had seen a hundred times before.

"That sunset, with all its breadth and splendor, is contained in every

pencil of light."

She glanced up and laughed.

"Oh, yes! a part of its possibilities. Which proves?"--

"That color is an attribute of light and an achievement of man."

"Cà et là,

Toute la journée,

Le vent vain va

En sa tournée,"

hummed the girl, with a careless dismissal of the subject.

Mr. Raleigh shut up the note-book in which he had been writing, and

restored it to his pocket. She turned about and broke off her song.

"There is the moon on the other side," she said, "floating up like a

great bubble of light. She and the sun are the scales of a balance, I

think; as one ascends, the other sinks."

"There is a richness in the atmosphere, when sunset melts into moonrise,

that makes one fancy it enveloping the earth like the bloom on a plum."

"And see how it has powdered the sea! The waters look like the wings of

the _papillon bleu_."

"It seems that you love the sea."

"Oh, certainly. I have thought that we islanders were like those Chinese

who live in great _tanka_-boats on the rivers; only our boat rides at

anchor. To climb up on the highest land, and see yourself girt with

fields of azure enamelled in sheets of sunshine and fleets of sails, and

lifted against the horizon, deep, crystalline, and translucent as a

gem,--that makes one feel strong in isolation, and produces keen races.

Don't you think so?"

"I think that isolation causes either vivid characteristics or idiocy,

seldom strong or healthy ones; and I do not value race."

"Because you came from America!"--with an air of disgust,--"where there

is yet no race, and the population is still too fluctuating for the

mould of one."

"I come from India, where, if anywhere, there is race."

"But, pshaw! that was not what we were talking about."

"No, Mademoiselle, we were speaking of an element even more fluctuating

than American population."

"Of course I love the sea; but if the sea loves me, it is the way a cat

loves the mouse."

"It is always putting up a hand to snatch you?"

"I suppose I am sent to Nineveh and persist in shipping for Tarshish. I

never enter a boat without an accident. The Belle Voyageuse met

shipwreck, and I on board. That was anticipated, though, by all the

world; for the night before we set sail,--it was a very murk, hot night,

--we were all called out to see the likeness of a large merchantman

transfigured in flames upon the sky,--spars and ropes and hull one net

and glare of fire."

"A mirage, probably, from some burning ship at sea."

"No, I would rather think it supernatural. Oh, it was frightful! Rather

superb, though, to think of such a spectral craft rising to warn us with

ghostly flames that the old Belle Voyageuse was riddled with rats!"

"Did it burn blue?" asked Mr. Raleigh.

"Oh, if you're going to make fun of me, I'll tell you nothing more!"

As she spoke, Capua, who had considered himself, during the many years

of wandering, both guiding and folding star to his master, came up, with

his eyes rolling fearfully in a lively expansion of countenance, and

muttered a few words in Mr. Raleigh's ear, lifting both hands in comical

consternation the while.

"Excuse me a moment," said Mr. Raleigh, following him, and, meeting

Captain Tarbell at the companion-way, the three descended together.

Mr. Raleigh was absent some fifteen minutes, at the end of that time

rejoining Mademoiselle Le Blanc.

"I did not mean to make fun of you," said he, resuming the conversation

as if there had been no interruption. "I was watching the foam the

Osprey makes in her speed, which certainly burns blue. See the flashing

sparks! now that all the red fades from the west, they glow in the moon

like broken amethysts."

"What did you mean, then?" she asked, pettishly.

"Oh, I wished to see if the idea of a burning ship was so terrifying."

"Terrifying? No; I have no fear; I never was afraid. But it must, in

reality, be dreadful. I cannot think of anything else so appalling."

"Not at all timid?"

"Mamma used to say, those that know nothing fear nothing."

"Eminently your case. Then you cannot imagine a situation in which you

would lose self-possession?"

"Scarcely. Isn't it people of the finest organization, comprehensive,

large-souled, that are capable of the extremes either of courage or

fear? Now I am limited, so that, without rash daring or pale panic, I

can generally preserve equilibrium."

"How do you know all this of yourself?" he asked, with an amused air.

"_Il se présentait des occasions_," she replied, briefly.

"So I presumed," said he. "Ah? They have thrown out the log. See, we

make progress. If this breeze holds!"

"You are impatient, Mr. Raleigh. You have dear friends at home, whom you

wish to see, who wish to see you?"

"No," he replied, with a certain bitterness in his tone. "There is no

one to whom I hasten, no one who waits to receive me."

"No one? But that is terrible! Then why should you wish to hasten? For

me, I would always be willing to loiter along, to postpone home

indefinitely."

"That is very generous, Mademoiselle."

"Mr. Raleigh"--

"Well?"

"I wish--please--you must not say Mademoiselle. Nobody will address me

so, shortly. Give me my name,--call me Marguerite. _Je vous en prie_."

And she looked up with a blush deepening the apple-bloom of her cheek.

"Marguerite? Does it answer for pearl or for daisy with you?"

"Oh, they called me so because I was such a little round white baby. I

couldn't have been very precious, though, or she never would have parted

with me. Yes, I wish we might drift on some lazy current for years. I

hate to shorten the distance. I stand in awe of my father, and I do not

remember my mother."

"Do not remember?"

"She is so perfect, so superb, so different from me! But she ought to

love her own child!"

"Her own child?"

"And then I do not know the customs of this strange land. Shall I be

obliged to keep an establishment?"

"Keep an establishment?"

"It is very rude to repeat my words so! You oughtn't! Yes, keep an

establishment!"

"I beg your pardon, Mademoiselle."

"No, it is I who am rude."

"Not at all,--but mysterious. I am quite in the dark concerning you."

"Concerning me?"

"Ah, Miss Marguerite, it is my turn now."

"Oh! It must be----This is your mystery, _n'est ce pas?_ Mamma was my

grandmamma. My own mother was far too young when mamma gave her in

marriage; and, to make amends, mamma adopted me and left me her name and

her fortune. So that I am very wealthy. And now shall I keep an

establishment?"

"I should think not," said Mr. Raleigh, with a smile.

"Do you know, you constantly reassure me? Home grows less and less a

bugbear when you speak of it. How strange! It seems as if I had known

you a year, instead of a week."

"It would probably take that period of time to make us as well

acquainted under other circumstances."

"I wish you were going to be with us always. Shall you stay in America,

Mr. Raleigh?"

"Only till the fall. But I will leave you at your father's door"----

And then Mr. Raleigh ceased suddenly, as if he had promised an

impossibility.

"How long before we reach New York?" she asked.

"In about nine hours," he replied,--adding, in unconscious undertone,

"if ever."

"What was that you said to yourself?" she asked, in a light and gayly

inquisitive voice, as she looked around and over the ship. "Why, how

many there are on deck! It is such a beautiful night, I suppose. Eh,

Mr. Raleigh?"

"Are you not tired of your position?" he asked. "Sit down beside me

here." And he took a seat.

"No, I would rather stand. Tell me what you said."

"Sit, then, to please me, Marguerite, and I will tell you what I said."

She hesitated a moment, standing before him, the hood of her capote,

with its rich purple, dropping from the fluttering yellow hair that the

moonlight deepened into gold, and the fire-opal clasp rising and falling

with her breath, like an imprisoned flame. He touched her hand, still

warm and soft, with his own, which was icy. She withdrew it, turned her

eyes, whose fair, faint lustre, the pale forget-me-not blue, was

darkened by the antagonistic light to an amethystine shadow,

inquiringly upon him.

"There is some danger," she murmured.

"Yes. When you are not a mark for general observation, you shall hear

it."

"I would rather hear it standing."

"I told you the condition."

"Then I shall go and ask Captain Tarbell."

"And come sobbing back to me for 'reassurance.'"

"No," she said, quickly, "I should go down to Ursule."

"Ursule has a mattress on deck; I assisted her up."

"There is the captain! Now"----

He seized her hand and drew her down beside him. For an instant she

would have resisted, as the sparkling eyes and flushed cheeks

attested,--and then, with the instinctive feminine baseness that compels

every woman, when once she has met her master, she submitted.

"I am sorry, if you are offended," said he. "But the captain cannot

attend to you now, and it is necessary to be guarded in movement; for a

slight thing on such occasions may produce a panic."

"You should not have forced me to sit," said she, in a smothered voice,

without heeding him; "you had no right."

"This right, that I assume the care of you."

"Monsieur, you see that I am quite competent to the care of myself."

"Marguerite, I see that you are determined to quarrel."

She paused a moment, ere replying; then drew a little nearer and turned

her face toward him, though without looking up.

"Forgive me, then!" said she. "But I would rather be naughty and

froward, it lets me stay a child, and so you can take me in keeping, and

I need not think for myself at all. But if I act like a woman grown,

then comes all the responsibility, and I must rely on myself, which is

such trouble now, though I never felt it so before,--I don't know why.

Don't you see?" And she glanced at him with her head on one side, and

laughing archly.

"You were right," he replied, after surveying her a moment; "my

proffered protection is entirely superfluous."

She thought he was about to go, and placed her hand on his, as it lay

along the side. "Don't leave me," she murmured.

"I have no intention of leaving you," he said.

"You are very good. I have never seen one like you. I love you well."

And, bathed in moonlight, she raised her face and her glowing lips

toward him.

Mr. Raleigh gazed in the innocent eyes a moment, to seek the extent of

her meaning, and felt, that, should he take advantage of her childlike

forgetfulness, he would be only reënacting the part he had so much

condemned in one man years before. So he merely bent low over the hand

that lay in his, raised it, and touched his lips to that. In an instant

the color suffused her face, she snatched the hand away, half rose

trembling from her seat, then sank into it again.

"_Soit, Monsieur!_" she exclaimed, abruptly. "But you have not told me

the danger."

"It will not alarm you now?" he replied, laughing.

"I have said that I am not a coward."

"I wonder what you would think of me when I say that without doubt I

am."

"You, Mr. Raleigh?" she cried, astonishment banishing anger.

"Not that I betray myself. But I have felt the true heart-sinking. Once,

surprised in the centre of an insurrection, I expected to find my hair

white as snow, if I escaped."

"Your hair is very black. And you escaped?"

"So it would appear."

"They suffered you to go on account of your terror? You feigned death?

You took flight?"

"Hardly, neither."

"Tell me about it," she said, imperiously.

Though Mr. Raleigh had exchanged the singular reserve of his youth for a

well-bred reticence, he scarcely cared to be his own hero.

"Tell me," said she. "It will shorten the time; and that is what you are

trying to do, you know."

He laughed.

"It was once when I was obliged to make an unpleasant journey into the

interior, and a detachment was placed at my service. We were in a

suspected district quite favorable to their designs, and the commanding

officer was attacked with illness in the night. Being called to his

assistance, I looked abroad and fancied things wore an unusual aspect

among the men, and sent Capua to steal down a covered path and see if

anything were wrong. Never at fault, he discovered a revolt, with intent

to murder my companion and myself, and retreat to the mountains. Of

course there was but one thing to do. I put a pistol in my belt and

walked down and in among them, singled out the ringleader, fixed him

with my eye, and bade him approach. My appearance was so sudden and

unsuspected that they forgot defiance."

"_Bien_, but I thought you were afraid."

"So I was. I could not have spoken a second word. I experienced intense

terror, and that, probably, gave my glance a concentration of which I

was unaware and by myself incapable; but I did not suffer it to waver; I

could not have moved it, indeed; I kept it on the man while he crept

slowly toward me. I shall never forget the horrible sensation. I did not

dare permit myself to doubt his conquest; but if I had failed, as I then

thought, his approach was like the slow coil of a serpent about me, and

it was his glittering eyes that had fixed mine, and not mine his. At my

feet, I commanded him, with a gesture, to disarm. He obeyed, and I

breathed; and one by one they followed his example. Capua, who was

behind me, I sent back with the weapons, and in the morning gave them

their choice of returning to town with their hands tied behind their

backs, or of going on with me and remaining faithful. They chose the

latter, did me good service, and I said nothing about the affair."

"That was well. But were you really frightened?"

"So I said. I cannot think of it yet without a slight shudder."

"Yes, and a rehearsal. Your eyes charge bayonets now. I am not a Sepoy."

"Well, you are still angry with me?"

"How can I be angry with you?"

"How, indeed? So much your senior that you owe me respect, Miss

Marguerite. I am quite old enough to be your father."

"You are, Sir?" she replied, with surprise. "Why, are you fifty-five

years old?"

"Is that Mr. Laudersdale's age?"

"How did you know Mr. Laudersdale Was my father?"

"By an arithmetical process. That is his age?"

"Yes; and yours?"

"Not exactly. I was thirty-seven last August."

"And will be thirty-eight next?"

"That is the logical deduction."

"I shall give you a birthday-gift when you are just twice my age."

"By what courier will you make it reach me?"

"Oh, I forgot. But--Mr. Raleigh?" "What is it?" he replied, turning to

look at her,--for his eyes had been wandering over the deck.

"I thought you would ask me to write to you."

"No, that would not be worth while."

His face was too grave for her to feel indignation.

"Why?" she demanded.

"It would give me great pleasure, without doubt. But in a week you will

have too many other cares and duties to care for such a burden."

"That shows that you do not know me at all. _Vous en avez usé mal avec

moi!_"

Though Mr. Raleigh still looked at her, he did not reply. She rose and

walked away a few steps, coming back.

"You are always in the right, and I consequently in the wrong," she

said. "How often to-night have I asked pardon? I will not put up

with it!"

"We shall part in a few hours," he replied; "when you lose your temper,

I lose my time."

"In a few hours? Then is the danger which you mentioned past?"

"I scarcely think so."

"Now I am not going to be diverted again. What is this dreadful danger?"

"Let me tell you, in the first place, that we shall probably make the

port before our situation becomes apparently worse,--that we do not take

to the boats, because we are twice too many to fill them, owing to the

Belle Voyageuse, and because it might excite mutiny, and for several

other becauses,--that every one is on deck, Capua consoling Ursule, the

captain having told to each, personally, the possibility of escape"----

"_Allez au hut!_"

"That the lights are closed, the hatches battened down, and by dint of

excluding the air we can keep the flames in a smouldering state and sail

into harbor a shell of safety over this core of burning coal."

"Reducing the equation, the ship is on fire?"

"Yes."

She did not speak for a moment or two, and he saw that she was quite

faint. Soon recovering herself,--

"And what do you think of the mirage now?" she asked. "Where is Ursule?

I must go to her," she added suddenly, after a brief silence, starting

to her feet.

"Shall I accompany you?"

"Oh, no."

"She lies on a mattress there, behind that group,"--nodding in the

implied direction; "and it would be well, if you could lie beside her

and get an hour's rest."

"Me? I couldn't sleep. I shall come back to you,--may I?" And she was

gone.

Mr. Raleigh still sat in the position in which she had left him, when, a

half-hour afterward, she returned.

"Where is your cloak?" he asked, rising to receive her.

"I spread it over Ursule, she was so chilly."

"You will not take cold?"

"I? I am on fire myself."

"Ah, I see; you have the Saturnalian spirit in you."

"It is like the Revolution, the French, is it not?--drifting on before

the wind of Fate, this ship full of fire and all red-hot raging

turbulence. Just look up the long sparkling length of these white, full

shrouds, swelling and curving like proud swans, in the gale,--and then

imagine the devouring monster below in his den!"

"_Don't_ imagine it. Be quiet and sit beside me. Half the night is

gone."

"I remember reading of some pirates once, who, driving forward to

destruction on fearful breakers, drank and sang and died madly. I wish

the whole ship's company would burst out in one mighty chorus now, or

that we might rush together with tumultuous impulse and dance,--dance

wildly into death and daylight."

"We have nothing to do with death," said Mr. Raleigh. "Our foe is simply

time. You dance, then?"

"Oh, yes. I dance well,--like those white fluttering butterflies,--as if

I were _au gré du vent_." "That would not be dancing well."

"It would not be dancing well to _be_ at the will of the wind, but it is

perfection to appear so."

"The dance needs the expression of the dancer's will. It is breathing

sculpture. It is mimic life beyond all other arts."

"Then well I love to dance. And I do dance well. Wait,--you shall see."

He detained her.

"Be still, little maid!" he said, and again drew her beside him, though

she still continued standing.

At this moment the captain approached.

"What cheer?" asked Mr. Raleigh.

"No cheer," he answered, gloomily, dinting his finger-nails into his

palm. "The planks forward are already hot to the hand. I tremble at

every creak of cordage, lest the deck crash in and bury us all."

"You have made the Sandy Hook light?"

"Yes; too late to run her ashore."

"You cannot try that at the Highlands?"

"Certain death."

"The wind scarcely"----

"Veered a point I am carrying all sail. But if this tooth of fire gnaws

below, you will soon see the masts go by the board. And then we are

lost, indeed!"

"Courage! she will certainly hold together till you can hail the

pilots."

"I think no one need tremble when he has such an instance of

fearlessness before him," replied the captain, bowing to Marguerite; and

turning away, he hid his suspense and pain again under a calm

countenance.

Standing all this while beside Mr. Raleigh, she had heard the whole of

the conversation, and he felt the hand in his growing colder as it

continued. He wondered if it were still the same excitement that sent

the alternate flush and pallor up her cheek. She sat down, leaning her

head back against the bulwark, as if to look at the stars, and suffering

the light, fine hair to blow about her temples before the steady breeze.

He bent over to look into her eyes, and found them fixed and lustreless.

"Marguerite!" he exclaimed.

She tried to speak, but the teeth seemed to hinder the escape of her

words, and to break them into bits of sound; a shiver shook her from

head to foot.

"I wonder if this is fear," she succeeded in saying. "Oh, if there were

somewhere to go, something to hide me! A great horror is upon me! I am

afraid! _Seigneur Dieu! Mourir par le feu! Périssons alors au plus

vite!_" And she shuddered, audibly.

Mr. Raleigh passed his arm about her and gathered her closer to himself.

He saw at once, that, sensitive as she was to every impression, this

fear was a contagious one, a mere gregarian affinity, and that she

needed the preponderating warmth and strength of a protecting presence,

the influence of a fuller vitality. He did not speak, but his touch must

in some measure have counteracted the dread that oppressed her. She

ceased trembling, but did not move.

The westering moon went to bury herself in banks of cloud; the wind

increasing piped and whistled in strident threatening through the

rigging; the ship vibrated to the concussive voice of the minute-gun. No

murmurs but those of wind and water were heard among the throng; they

drove forward in awful, pallid silence. Suddenly the shriek of one

voice, but from fourscore throats, rent the agonized quiet. A red light

was running along the deck, a tongue of flame lapping round the

forecastle, a spire shooting aloft. Marguerite hid her face in Mr.

Raleigh's arm; a great sob seemed to go up from all the people. The

captain's voice thundered through the tumult, and instantly the mates

sprang forward and the jib went crashing overboard. Mr. Raleigh tore his

eyes away from the fascination of this terror, and fixed them by chance

on two black specks that danced on the watery horizon. He gazed with

intense vision a moment. "The tugs!" he cried. The words thrilled with

hope in every dying heart; they no longer saw themselves the waiting

prey of pain and death, of flames and sea. Some few leaped into the boat

at the stern, lowered and cut it away; others dropped spontaneously into

file, and passed the dripping buckets of sea-water, to keep, if

possible, the flames in check. Mr. Raleigh and Marguerite crossed over

to Ursule.

The sight of her nurse, passive in despair, restored to the girl a

portion of her previous spirit. She knelt beside her, talking low and

rapidly, now and then laughing, and all the time communicating nerve

with her light, firm finger-touches. Except their quick and

unintelligible murmurs, and the plash and hiss of water, nothing else

broke the torturing hush of expectation. There was a half-hour of

breathless watch ere the steam-tugs were alongside. Already the place

was full of fervid torment, and they had climbed upon every point to

leave below the stings of the blistering deck. None waited on the order

of their going, but thronged and sprang precipitately. Ursule was at

once deposited in safety. The captain moved to conduct Marguerite

across, but she drew back and clung to Mr. Raleigh.

"_J'ai honte_," she said; "_je ne bougerai pas plus tót que vous._"

The breath of the fierce flames scorched her cheek as she spoke, the

wind of their roaring progress swept her hair. He lifted her over

without further consultation, and still kept her in his care.

There was a strange atmosphere on board the little vessels, as they

labored about and parted from the doomed Osprey. Many were subdued with

awe and joy at their deliverance; others broke the tense strain of the

last hours in suffocating sobs. Every throb of the panting engines they

answered with waiting heart-beats, as it sent them farther from the

fearful wonder, now blazing in multiplex lines of fire against the gray

horizon. Mr. Raleigh gazed after it as one watches the conflagration of

a home. Marguerite left her quiet weeping to gaze with him. An hour

silently passed, and as the fiery phantom faded into dawn and distance

she sang sweetly the first few lines of an old French hymn. Another

voice took up the measure, stronger and clearer; those who knew nothing

of the words caught the spirit of the tune; and no choral service ever

pealed up temple-vaults with more earnest accord than that in which this

chant of grateful, exultant devotion now rose from rough-throated men

and weary women in the crisp air and yellowing spring-morning.

As the moment of parting approached, Marguerite stood with folded hands

before Mr. Raleigh, looking sadly down the harbor.

"I regret all that," she said,--"these days that seem years."

"An equivocal phrase," he replied, with a smile.

"But you know what I mean. I am going to strangers; I have been with

you. I shall find no one so kind to me as you have been, Monsieur."

"Your strangers can be much kinder to you than I have been."

"Never! I wish they did not exist! What do I care for them? What do they

care for me? They do not know me; I shall shock them. I miss you, I hate

them, already. _Non! Personne ne m'aime, et je n'aime personne!_" she

exclaimed, with low-toned vehemence.

"Rite," began Mr. Raleigh.

"Rite! No one but my mother ever called me that. How did you know it?"

"I have met your mother, and I knew you a great many years ago."

"Mr. Raleigh!" And there was the least possible shade of unconscious

regret in the voice before it added,--"And what was I?"

"You were some little wood-spirit, the imp of a fallen cone, mayhap, or

the embodiment of birch-tree shadows. You were a soiled and naughty

little beauty, not so different from your present self, and who kissed

me on the lips." "And did you refuse to take the kiss?"

He laughed.

"You were a child then," he said. "And I was not"----

"Was not?"----

Here the boat swung round at her moorings, and the shock prevented Mr.

Raleigh's finishing his sentence.

"Ursule is with us, or on the other one?" she asked.

"With us."

"That is fortunate. She is all I have remaining, by which to prove my

identity."

"As if there could be two such maidens in the world!"

Marguerite left him, a moment, to give Captain Tarbell her address, and

returning, they were shortly afterward seated side by side in a coach,

Capua and Ursule following in another. As they stopped at the destined

door, Mr. Raleigh alighted and extended his hand. She lingered a moment

ere taking it,--not to say adieu, nor to offer him cheek or lip again.

"_Que je te remercie!_" she murmured, lifting her eyes to his. "_Que je

te trouve bon!_" and sprang before him up the steps.

He heard her father meet her in the hall; Ursule had already joined

them; he reëntered the coach and rolled rapidly beyond recall.

The burning of the Osprey did not concern Mr. Raleigh's

business-relations. Carrying his papers about him, he had personally

lost thereby nothing of consequence. He refreshed himself, and proceeded

at once to the transactions awaiting him. In a brief time he found that

affairs wore a different aspect from that for which he had been

instructed, and letters from the house had already arrived, by the

overland route, which required mutual reply and delay before he could

take further steps; so that Mr. Raleigh found himself with some months

of idleness upon his hands, in a land with not a friend. There lay a

little scented billet, among the documents on his table, that had at

first escaped his attention; he took it up wonderingly, and broke the

seal. It was from his Cousin Kate, and had been a few days before him.

Mrs. McLean had heard of his expected arrival, it said, and begged him,

if he had any time to spare, to spend it with her in his old home by the

lake, whither every summer they had resorted to meditate on the virtues

of the departed. There was added, in a different hand, whose delicate

and pointed characters seemed singularly familiar,--

"Come o'er the stream, Charlie, dear Charlie,

brave Charlie!

"Come o'er the stream, Charlie, and dine

wi' McLean!"

Mr. Raleigh looked at the matter a few moments; he did not think it best

to remain long in the city; he would be glad to know if sight of the old

scenes could renew a throb. He answered his letters, replenished his

wardrobe, and took, that same day, the last train for the North. At noon

of the second day thereafter he found Mr. McLean's coach, with that

worthy gentleman in person, awaiting him, and he stepped out, when it

paused at the foot of his former garden, with a strange sense of the

world as an old story, a twice-told tale, a maze of error.

Mrs. McLean came running down to meet him,--a face less round and rosy

than once, as the need of pink cap-ribbons testified, but smiling and

bright as youth.

"The same little Kate," said Mr. Raleigh, after the first greeting,

putting his hands on her shoulders and smiling down at her benevolently.

"Not quite the same Roger, though," said she, shaking her head. "I

expected this stain on your skin; but, dear me! your eyes look as if you

had not a friend in the world."

"How can they look so, when you give me such a welcome?"

"Dear old Roger, you _are_ just the same," said she, bestowing a little

caress upon his sleeve. "And if you remember the summer before you went

away, you will not find that pleasant company so very much changed

either." "I do not expect to find them at all."

"Oh, then they will find you; because they are all here,--at least the

principals; some with different names, and some, like myself, with

duplicates,"--as a shier Kate came down toward them, dragging a brother

and sister by the hand, and shaking chestnut curls over rosy blushes.

After making acquaintance with the new cousins, Mr. Raleigh turned again

to Mrs. McLean.

"And who are there here?" he asked.

"There is Mrs. Purcell,--you remember Helen Heath? Poor Mrs. Purcell,

whom you knew, died, and her slippers fitted Helen. She chaperons Mary,

who is single and speechless yet; and Captain, now Colonel, Purcell

makes a very good silent partner. He is hunting in the West, on

furlough; she is here alone. There is Mrs. Heath,--you never have

forgotten her?"

"Not I."

"There is"------

"And how came you all in the country so early in the season,--anybody

with your devotion to company?"

"To be made April fools, John says."

"Why, the willows are not yet so yellow as they will be."

"I know it. But we had the most fatiguing winter; and Mrs. Laudersdale

and I agreed, that, the moment the snow was off the ground up here, we

would fly away and be at rest."

"Mrs. Laudersdale? Can she come here?"

"Goodness! Why not? The last few summers we have always spent together."

"She is with you now, then?"

"Oh, yes. She is the least changed of all. I didn't mean to tell, but

keep her as a surprise. Of course, you will be a surprise to

everybody.--There, run along, children; we'll follow.--Yes, won't it be

delightful, Roger? We can all play at youth again."

"Like skeletons in some Dance of Death!" he exclaimed. "We shall be

hideous in each other's sight."

"McLean, I am a bride," said his wife, not heeding the late misanthropy;

"Helen is a girl; the ghost of the prior Mrs. Purcell shall be

_rediviva_; and Katy there"------

"Wait a bit, Kate," said her cousin.

"Before you have shuffled off mortality for the whole party, sit down

under this hedge,--here is an opportune bench,--and give me accounts

from the day of my departure."

"Dear me, Roger, as if that were possible! The ocean in a tea-cup? Let

me see,--you had a flirtation with Helen that summer, didn't you? Well,

she spent the next winter at the Fort with the Purcells. It was odd to

miss both her and Mrs. Laudersdale from society at once. Mrs.

Laudersdale was ill; I don't know exactly what the trouble was. You know

she had been in such an unusual state of exhilaration all that summer;

and as soon as she left New Hampshire and began the old city-life, she

became oppressed with a speechless melancholy, I believe, so that the

doctors foreboded insanity. She expressed great disinclination to follow

their advice, and her husband finally banished them all. It was a great

care to him; he altered much. McLean surmised that she didn't like to

see him, while she was in this state; for, though he used to surround

her with every luxury, and was always hunting out new appliances, and

raising the heavens for a trifle, he kept himself carefully out of her

sight during the greater part of the winter. I don't know whether she

became insufferably lonely, or whether the melancholy wore off, or she

conquered it, and decided that it was not right to go crazy for nothing,

or what happened. But one cold March evening he set out for his home,

dreary, as usual, he thought; and he found the fire blazing and

reddening the ceiling and curtains, the room all aglow with rich

shadows, and his wife awaiting him, in full toilet, just as superb as

you will see her tonight, just as sweet and cold and impassible and

impenetrable. At least," continued Mrs. McLean, taking breath, "I have

manufactured this little romance out of odds and ends that McLean has

now and then reported from his conversation. I dare say there isn't a

bit of it true, for Mr. Laudersdale isn't a man to publish his affairs;

but _I_ believe it. One thing is certain: Mrs. Laudersdale withdrew from

society one autumn and returned one spring, and has queened it

ever since."

"Is Mr. Laudersdale with you?"

"No. But he will come with their daughter shortly."

"And with what do you all occupy yourselves, pray?"

"Oh, with trifles and tea, as you would suppose us to do. Mrs. Purcell

gossips and lounges, as if she were playing with the world for

spectator. Mrs. Laudersdale lounges, and attacks things with her

finger-ends, as if she were longing to remould them. Mrs. McLean gossips

and scolds, as if it depended on her to keep the world in order."

"Are you going to keep me under the hedge all night?"

"This is pretty well! Hush! Who is that?"

As Mrs. McLean spoke, a figure issued from the tall larches on the left,

and crossed the grass in front of them,--a woman, something less tall

than a gypsy queen might be, the round outlines of her form rich and

regular, with a certain firm luxuriance, still wrapped in a morning-robe

of palm-spread cashmere. In her hand she carried various vines and

lichens that had maintained their orange-tawny stains under the winter's

snow, and the black hair that was folded closely over forehead and

temple was crowned with bent sprays of the scarlet maple-blossom. As

vivid a hue dyed her cheek through warm walking, and with a smile of

unconscious content she passed quickly up the slope and disappeared

within the doorway. She impressed the senses of the beholder like some

ripe and luscious fruit, a growth of sunshine and summer.

"Well," said Mrs. McLean, drawing breath again, "who is it?"

"Really, I cannot tell," replied Mr. Raleigh.

"Nor guess?"

"And that I dare not."

"Must I tell you?"

"Was it Mrs. Laudersdale?"

"And shouldn't you have known her?"

"Scarcely."

"Mercy! Then how did you know me? She is unaltered."

"If that is Mrs. Purcell, at the window, she does not recognize me, you

see; neither did -----. Both she and yourself are nearly the same; one

could not fail to know either of you; but of the Mrs. Laudersdale of

thirteen years ago there remains hardly a vestige."

If Mrs. McLean, at this testimony, indulged in that little inward

satisfaction which the most generous woman may feel, when told that her

color wears better than the color of her dearest friend, it must have

been quickly quenched by the succeeding sentence.

"Yes, she is certainly more beautiful than I ever dreamed of a woman's

being. If she continues, I do not know what perfect thing she will

become. She is too exquisite for common use. I wonder her husband is not

jealous of every mote in the air, of rain and wind, of every day that

passes over her head,--since each must now bear some charm from her in

its flight."

Mr. Raleigh was talking to Mrs. McLean as one frequently reposes

confidence in a person when quite sure that he will not understand a

word you say.

An hour afterward, Mrs. Purcell joined Mrs. McLean.

"So that is Mr. Raleigh, is it?" she said. "He looks as if he had made

the acquaintance of Siva the Destroyer. There's nothing left of him. Is

he taller, or thinner, or graver, or darker, or what? My dear Kate, your

cousin, that promised to be such a hero, has become a mere

man-of-business. Did you ever burn firecrackers? You have probably found

some that just fizzed out, then." And Mrs. Purcell took an attitude.

"Roger is a much finer man than he was, I think,--so far as I could

judge in the short time we have seen each other," replied Mrs. McLean,

with spirit.

"Do you know," continued Mrs. Purcell, "what makes the Laudersdale so

gay? No? She has a letter from her lord, and he brings you that little

Rite next week. I must send for the Colonel to see such patterns of

conjugal felicity as you and she. Ah, there is the tea-bell!"

Mr. Raleigh was standing with one hand on the back of his chair, when

Mrs. Laudersdale entered. The cheek had resumed its usual pallor, and

she was in her customary colors of black and gold. She carried a

curiously cut crystal glass, which she placed on the sideboard, and then

moved toward her chair. Her eye rested casually for a moment on Mr.

Raleigh, as she crossed the threshold, and then returned with a species

of calm curiosity.

"Mrs. Laudersdale has forgotten me?" he asked, with a bow. His voice,

not susceptible of change in its tone of Southern sweetness,

identified him.

"Not at all," she replied, moving toward him, and offering him her hand

quietly. "I am happy at meeting Mr. Raleigh again." And she took

her seat.

There was something in her grasp that relieved him. It was neither

studiedly cold, nor absurdly brief, nor traitorously tremulous. It was

simply and forgetfully indifferent. Mr. Raleigh surveyed her with

interest during the light table-talk. He had been possessed with a

restless wish to see her once more, to ascertain if she had yet any

fraction of her old power over him; he had all the more determinedly

banished himself from the city,--to find her in the country. Now he

sought for some trace of what had formerly aroused his heart. He rose

from table convinced that the woman whom he once loved with the whole

fervor of youth and strength and buoyant life was no more, that she did

not exist, and that Mr. Raleigh might experience a new passion, but his

old one was as dead as the ashes that cover the Five Cities of the

Plain. He wondered how it might be with her. For a moment he cursed his

inconstancy; then he feared lest she were of larger heart and firmer

resolve than he,--lest her love had been less light than his; he could

scarcely feel himself secure of freedom,--he must watch. And then stole

in a deeper sense of loneliness than exile and foreign tongues had

taught him,--the knowledge of being single and solitary in the world,

not only for life, but for eternity.

The evening was passed in the recitation of affairs by himself and his

cousins alone together, and until a week completed its tale of dawns and

sunsets there was the same diurnal recurrence of question and answer.

One day, as the afternoon was paling, Rite came.

Mr. Raleigh had fallen asleep on the vine-hidden seat outside the

bay-window, and was awakened, certainly not by Mrs. Laudersdale's

velvets trailing over the drawing-room carpet. She was just entering,

slow-paced, though in haste. She held out both of her beautiful arms. A

little form of airy lightness, a very snow-wreath, blew into them.

"_O ma maman! Est ce que c'est toi_," it cried. "_O comme tu es douce!

Si belle, si molle, si chère!_" And the fair head was lying beneath the

dark one, the face hidden in the bent and stately neck.

Mr. Raleigh left his seat, unseen, and betook himself to another abode.

As he passed the drawing-room door, on his return, he saw the mother

lying on a lounge, with the slight form nestled beside her, playing with

it as some tame leopardess might play with her silky whelp. It was

almost the only portion of the maternal nature developed within her.

It seemed as if the tea-hour were a fated one. Mr. Raleigh had been out

on the water and was late. As he entered, Rite sprang up,

half-overturning her chair, and ran to clasp his hand.

"I did not know that you and Mr. Raleigh were acquainted," said Mrs.

McLean.

"Oh, Madam, Mr. Raleigh and I had the pleasure of being shipwrecked

together," was the reply; and except that Mrs. Laudersdale required

another napkin where her cup had spilled, all went on smoothly.

Mrs. Laudersdale took Marguerite entirely to herself for a while. She

seemed, at first, to be like some one suddenly possessed of a new sense,

and who did not know in the least what to do with it; but custom and

familiarity destroyed this sentiment. She did not appear to entertain a

doubt of her child's natural affection, but she had care to fortify it

by the exertion of every charm she possessed. From the presence of

dangerous rivals in the house, an element of determination blended with

her manner, and she moved with a certain conscious power, as if

wonderful energies were but half-latent with her, as if there were

kingdoms to conquer and crowns to win, and she the destined instrument

You would have selected her, at this time of her lavish devotion to

Marguerite, as the one woman of complete capability, of practical

effective force, and have declared that there was nothing beyond her

strength. The relation between herself and her child was certainly as

peculiar as anything else about them; the disparity of age seemed so

slight that they appeared like sisters, full of mutual trust, the

younger leaning on the elder for support in the most trivial affairs.

They walked through the woods together, learned again its glades and

coverts, searched its early treasure of blossoms; they went out on the

lake and spent long April afternoons together, floating about cove and

inlet of island-shores; they returned with innocent gayety to that house

which once the mother, in her moment of passion, had fancied to be a

possible heaven of delight, and which, since, she had found to be a very

indifferent limbo. For, after all, we derive as much happiness from

human beings as from Nature, and it was a tie of placid affection that

bound her to the McLeans, not of sympathetic union, and her husband was

careful never to oppress her with too much of his society. Whether this

woman, who had lived a life of such wordless emotion, who had never

bestowed a confidence, suddenly blossomed like a rose and took the

little new-comer into the gold-dust and fragrance of her heart, or

whether there was always between them the thin impalpable division that

estranged the past from the present, there was nothing to tell; it

seemed, nevertheless, as if they could have no closer bond, had they

read each other's thoughts from birth.

That this assumption of Marguerite could not continue exclusive Mr.

Raleigh found, when now and then joined in his walks by an airy figure

flitting forward at his side: now and then; since Mrs. Laudersdale,

without knowing how to prevent, had manifested an uneasiness at every

such rencontre;--and that it could not endure forever, another

gentleman, without so much reason, congratulated himself,--Mr. Frederic

Heath, the confidential clerk of Day, Knight, and Company,--a rather

supercilious specimen, quite faultlessly got up, who had accompanied her

from New York at her father's request, and who already betrayed every

symptom of the suitor. Meanwhile, Mrs. McLean's little women clamorously

demanded and obtained a share of her attention,--although Capua and

Ursule, with their dark skins, brilliant dyes, and equivocal dialects,

were creatures of a more absorbing interest.

One afternoon, Marguerite came into the drawing-room by one door, as Mr.

Raleigh entered by another; her mother was sitting near the window, and

other members of the family were in the vicinity, having clustered

preparatory to the tea-bell.

Marguerite had twisted tassels of the willow-catkins in her hair,

drooping things, in character with her wavy grace, and that sprinkled

her with their fragrant yellow powder, the very breath of spring; and in

one hand she had imprisoned a premature lace-winged fly, a fairy little

savage, in its sheaths of cobweb and emerald, and with its jewel eyes.

"Dear!" said Mrs. Purcell, gathering her array more closely about her.

"How do you dare touch such a venomous sprite?"

"As if you had an insect at the North with a sting!" replied Marguerite,

suffering it, a little maliciously, to escape in the lady's face, and

following the flight with a laugh of childlike glee.

"Here are your snowflakes on stems, mamma," she continued, dropping

anemones over her mother's hands, one by one;--"that is what Mr. Raleigh

calls them. When may I see the snow? You shall wrap me in eider, that I

may be like all the boughs and branches. How buoyant the earth must be,

when every twig becomes a feather!" And she moved toward Mr. Raleigh,

singing, "Oh, would I had wings like a dove!"

"And here are those which, if not daffodils,

yet

"'Come before the swallow dares, and take

The winds of March with beauty,'"

he said, giving her a basket of hepaticas and winter-green.

Marguerite danced away with the purple trophy, and, emptying a carafe

into a dish of moss that stood near, took them to Mrs. Laudersdale, and,

sitting on the footstool, began to rearrange them. It was curious to

see, that, while Mrs. Laudersdale lifted each blossom and let the stem

lie across her hand, she suffered it to fall into the place designated

for it by Marguerite's fingers, that sparkled in the mosaic till double

wreaths of gold-threaded purple rose from the bed of vivid moss and

melted into a fringe of the starry spires of winter-green.

"Is it not sweet?" said she then, bending over it.

"They have no scent," said her mother.

"Oh, yes, indeed! the very finest, the most delicate, a kind of aërial

perfume; they must of course alchemize the air into which they waste

their fibres with some sweetness."

"A smell of earth fresh from 'wholesome drench of April rains,'" said

Mr. Raleigh, taking the dish of white porcelain between his brown,

slender hands. "An immature scent, just such an innocent breath as

should precede the epigea, that spicy, exhaustive wealth of savor, that

complete maturity of odor, marriage of daphne and linnaea. The charm of

these first bidders for the year's favor is neither in the ethereal

texture, the depth or delicacy of tint, nor the large-lobed,

blood-stained, ancient leaves. This imponderable soul gives them such a

helpless air of babyhood."

"Is fragrance the flower's soul?" asked Marguerite. "Then anemones are

not divinely gifted. And yet you said, the other day, that to paint my

portrait would be to paint an anemone."

"A satisfactory specimen in the family-gallery," said Mrs. Purcell.

"A flaw in the indictment!" replied Mr. Raleigh. "I am not one of those

who paint the lily."

"Though you've certainly added a perfume to the violet," remarked Mr.

Frederic Heath, with that sweetly lingering accent familiarly called the

drawl, as he looked at the hepaticas.

"I don't think it very complimentary, at any rate," continued

Marguerite. "They are not lovely after bloom,--only the little

pink-streaked, budded bells, that hang so demurely. _Oui, dà!_ I have

exchanged great queen magnolias for rues; what will you give me for

pomegranates and oleanders?"

"Are the old oleanders in the garden yet?" asked Mrs. Laudersdale.

"Not the very same. The hurricane destroyed those, years ago; these are

others, grand and rosy as sunrise sometimes."

"It was my Aunt Susanne who planted those, I have heard."

"And it was your daughter Rite who planted these."

"She buried a little box of old keepsakes at its foot, after her brother

had examined them,--a ring or two, a coin from which she broke and kept

one half"------

"Oh, yes! we found the little box, found it when Mr. Heath was in

Martinique, all rusted and moulded and falling apart, and he wears that

half of the coin on his watch-chain. See!"

Mrs. Laudersdale glanced up indifferently, but Mrs. Purcell sprang from

her elegant lounging and bent to look at her brother's chain.

"How odd that I never noticed it, Fred!" she exclaimed. "And how odd

that I should wear the same!" And, shaking her _châtelaine_, she

detached a similar affair.

They were placed side by side in Mr. Raleigh's hand; they matched

entirely, and, so united, they formed a singular French coin of value

and antiquity, the missing figures on one segment supplied by the other,

the embossed profile continued and lost on each, the scroll begun by

this and ended by that; they were plainly severed portions of the

same piece.

"And this was buried by your Aunt Susanne Le Blanc?" asked Mrs. Purcell,

turning to Mrs. Laudersdale again, with a flush on her cheek.

"So I presume."

"Strange! And this was given to mamma by her mother, whose maiden name

was Susan White. There's some _diablerie_ about it."

"Oh, that is a part of the ceremony of money-hiding," said Mr. Raleigh.

"Kidd always buried a little imp with his pots of gold, you know, to

work deceitful charms on the finder."

"Did he?" said Marguerite, earnestly.

They all laughed thereat, and went in to tea.

[To be continued.]

EPITHALAMIA.

I.

THE WEDDING.

O Love! the flowers are blowing in park and field,

With love their bursting hearts are all revealed.

So come to me, and all thy fragrance yield!

O Love! the sun is sinking in the west,

And sequent stars all sentinel his rest.

So sleep, while angels watch, upon my breast!

O Love! the flooded moon is at its height,

And trances sea and land with tranquil light.

So shine, and gild with beauty all my night!

O Love! the ocean floods the crooked shore,

Till sighing beaches give their moaning o'er.

So, Love, o'erflow me, till I sigh no more!

II.

THE GOLDEN WEDDING.

O wife! the fragrant Mayflower now appears,

Fresh as the Pilgrims saw it through their tears.

So blows our love through all these changing years.

O wife! the sun is rising in the east,

Nor tires to shine, while ages have increased.

So shines our love, and fills my happy breast

O wife! on yonder beach the ocean sings,

As when it bore the Mayflower's drooping wings.

So in my heart our early love-song rings.

O wife! the moon and stars slide down the west

To make in fresher skies their happy quest.

So, Love, once more we'll wed among the blest!

ARTHUR HALLAM.

We were standing in the old English church at Clevedon on a summer

afternoon. And here, said my companion, pausing in the chancel, sleeps

Arthur Hallam, the friend of Alfred Tennyson, and the subject of "In

Memoriam."

"'Tis well, 'tis something, we may stand

Where he in English earth is laid."

His burial-place is on a hill overhanging the Bristol Channel, a spot

selected by his father as a fit resting-place for his beloved boy.

And so

"They laid him by the pleasant shore,

And in the hearing of the wave."

Dying at twenty-two, the hope and pride of all who knew him, "remarkable

for the early splendor of his genius," the career of this young man

concentres the interest of more than his native country. Tennyson has

laid upon his early grave a poem which will never let his ashes be

forgotten, or his memory fade like that of common clay. What Southey so

felicitously says of Kirke White applies most eloquently to young

Hallam:--"Just at that age when the painter would have wished to fix his

likeness and the lover of poetry would delight to contemplate him, in

the fair morning of his virtues, the full spring-blossom of his hopes,--

just at that age hath death set the seal of eternity upon him, and the

beautiful hath been made permanent."

Arthur Henry Hallam was born in Bedford Place, London, on the 1st of

February, 1811. The eldest son of Henry Hallam, the eminent historian

and critic, his earliest years had every advantage which culture and

moral excellence could bring to his education. His father has feelingly

commemorated his boyish virtues and talents by recording his "peculiar

clearness of perception, his facility of acquiring knowledge, and, above

all, an undeviating sweetness of disposition, and adherence to his sense

of what was right and becoming." From that tearful record, not publicly

circulated, our recital is partly gathered. Companions of his childhood

have often told us well-remembered incidents of his life, and this is

the too brief story of his earthly career.

When about eight years of age, Arthur resided some time in Germany and

Switzerland, with his father and mother. He had already become familiar

with the French language, and a year later he read Latin with some

facility. Although the father judiciously studied to repress his son's

marked precocity of talent, Arthur wrote about this time several plays

in prose and in rhyme,--compositions which were never exhibited,

however, beyond the family-circle.

At ten years of age he became a pupil at a school in Putney, under the

tuition of an excellent clergyman, where he continued two years. He then

took a short tour on the Continent, and, returning, went to Eton, where

he studied nearly five years. While at Eton, he was reckoned, according

to the usual test at that place, not a first-rate Latin student, for his

mind had a predominant bias toward English literature, and there he

lingered among the exhaustless fountains of the earlier poetry of his

native tongue. One who knew him well in those years has described him to

us as a sweet-voiced lad, moving about the pleasant playing-fields of

Eton with a thoughtful eye and a most kindly expression. Afterwards, as

Tennyson, singing to the witch-elms and the towering sycamore, paints

him, he mixed in all the simple sports, and loved to gather a happy

group about him, as he lay on the grass and discussed grave questions of

state. And again,--

"Thy converse drew us with delight,

The men of rathe and riper years:

The feeble soul, a haunt of fears,

Forgot his weakness in thy sight."

His taste for philosophical poetry increased with his years, and

Wordsworth and Shelley became his prime favorites. His contributions to

the "Eton Miscellany" were various, sometimes in prose and now and then

in verse. A poet by nature, he could not resist the Muse's influence,

and he expressed a genuine emotion, oftentimes elegantly, and never

without a meaning.

In the summer of 1827 he left Eton, and travelled with his parents eight

months in Italy. And now began that life of thought and feeling so

conspicuous to the end of his too brief career. Among the Alps his whole

soul took the impress of those early introductions to what is most

glorious and beautiful in Nature. After passing the mountains, Italian

literature claimed his attention, and he entered upon its study with all

the ardor of a young and earnest student. An Abbate who recognized his

genius encouraged him with his assistance in the difficult art of

Italian versification, and, after a very brief stay in Italy, at the age

of seventeen, he wrote several sonnets which attracted considerable

attention among scholars. Very soon after acquiring the Italian

language, the great Florentine poet opened to him his mystic visions.

Dante became his worship, and his own spirit responded to that of the

author of the "Divina Commedia."

His growing taste led him to admire deeply all that is noble in Art, and

he soon prized with enthusiasm the great pictures of the Venetian, the

Tuscan, and the Roman schools. "His eyes," says his father, "were fixed

on the best pictures with silent, intense delight." One can imagine him

at this period wandering with all the ardor of youthful passion through

the great galleries, not with the stolid stony gaze of a coldblooded

critic, but with that unmixed enthusiasm which so well becomes the

unwearied traveller in his buoyant days of experience among the unveiled

glories of genius now first revealed to his astonished vision.

He returned home in 1828, and went to reside at Cambridge, having been

entered, before his departure for the Continent, at Trinity College. It

is said that he cared little for academical reputation, and in the

severe scrutiny of examination he did not appear as a competitor for

accurate mathematical demonstrations. He knew better than those about

him where his treasures lay,--and to some he may have seemed a dreamer,

to others an indifferent student, perhaps. His aims were higher than the

tutor's black-board, and his life-thoughts ran counter to the usual

college-routine. Disordered health soon began to appear, and a too rapid

determination of blood to the brain often deprived him of the power of

much mental labor. At Florence he had been seized with a slight attack

of the same nature, and there was always a tendency to derangement of

the vital functions. Irregularity of circulation occasioned sometimes a

morbid depression of spirits, and his friends anxiously watched for

symptoms of returning health. In his third Cambridge year he grew

better, and all who knew and loved him rejoiced in his apparent recovery.

About this time, some of his poetical pieces were printed, but withheld

from publication. It was the original intention for the two friends,

Alfred Tennyson and Arthur Hallam, to publish together; but the idea was

abandoned. Such lines as these the young poet addressed to the man who

was afterwards to lend interest and immortality to the story of his

early loss:--

"Alfred, I would that you beheld me now,

Sitting beneath a mossy, ivied wall

On a quaint bench, which to that structure old

Winds an accordant curve. Above my head

Dilates immeasurable a wild of leaves,

Seeming received into the blue expanse

That vaults this summer noon. Before me lies

A lawn of English verdure, smooth, and bright,

Mottled with fainter hues of early hay,

Whose fragrance, blended with the rose-perfume

From that white flowering bush, invites my sense

To a delicious madness,--and faint thoughts

Of childish years are borne into my brain

By unforgotten ardors waking now.

Beyond, a gentle slope leads into shade

Of mighty trees, to bend whose eminent crown

Is the prime labor of the pettish winds,

That now in lighter mood are twirling leaves

Over my feet, or hurrying butterflies,

And the gay humming things that summer loves,

Through the warm air, or altering the bound

Where yon elm-shadows in majestic line

Divide dominion with the abundant light."

And this fine descriptive passage was also written at this period of his

life:--

"The garden trees are busy with the shower

That fell ere sunset: now methinks they talk,

Lowly and sweetly, as befits the hour,

One to another down the grassy walk.

Hark! the laburnum from his opening flower

This cheery creeper greets in whisper light,

While the grim fir, rejoicing in the night,

Hoarse mutters to the murmuring sycamore.

What shall I deem their converse? Would they hail

The wild gray light that fronts yon massive cloud,

Or the half-bow rising like pillared fire?

Or are they sighing faintly for desire

That with May dawn their leaves may be o'erflowed,

And dews about their feet may never fail?"

The first college prize for English declamation was awarded to him this

year; and his exercise, "The Conduct of the Independent Party during the

Civil War," greatly improved his standing at the University. Other

honors quickly followed his successful essay, and he was chosen to

deliver an oration in the College Chapel just before the Christmas

vacation. This was in the year 1831. He selected as his subject the one

eminently congenial to his thought; and his theme, "The Influence of

Italian upon English Literature," was admirably treated. The oration is

before us as we write, and we turn the pages with a fond and loving eye.

We remember, as we read, his brief sojourn,--that he died "in the sweet

hour of prime,"--and we are astonished at the eloquent wisdom displayed

by a lad of twenty summers. "I cannot help considering," he says, "the

sonnets of Shakspeare as a sort of homage to the Genius of Christian

Europe, necessarily exacted, although voluntarily paid, before he was

allowed to take in hand the sceptre of his endless dominion." And he

ends his charming disquisition in these words;--"An English mind that

has drunk deep at the sources of Southern inspiration, and especially

that is imbued with the spirit of the mighty Florentine, will be

conscious of a perpetual freshness and quiet beauty resting on his

imagination and spreading gently over his affections, until, by the

blessing of Heaven, it may be absorbed without loss in the pure inner

light of which that voice has spoken, as no other can,--

"'Light intellectual, yet full of love,

Love of true beauty, therefore full of joy,

Joy, every other sweetness far above.'"

It was young Hallam's privilege to be among Coleridge's favorites, and

in one of his poems Arthur alludes to him as a man in whose face "every

line wore the pale cast of thought." His conversations with "the old man

eloquent" gave him intense delight, and he often alluded to the

wonderful talks he had enjoyed with the great dreamer, whose magical

richness of illustration took him captive for the time being.

At Abbotsford he became known to Sir Walter Scott, and Lockhart thus

chronicles his visit:--

"Among a few other friends from a distance, Sir Walter received this

summer [1829] a short visit from Mr. Hallam, and made in his company

several of the little excursions which had in former days been of

constant recurrence. Mr. Hallam had with him his son, Arthur, a young

gentleman of extraordinary abilities, and as modest as able, who not

long afterwards was cut off in the very bloom of opening life and

genius. His beautiful verses, 'On Melrose seen in Company with Scott,'

have since been often printed."

"I lived an hour in fair Melrose:

It was not when 'the pale moonlight'

Its magnifying charm bestows;

Yet deem I that I 'viewed it right.'

The wind-swept shadows fast careered,

Like living things that joyed or feared,

Adown the sunny Eildon Hill,

And the sweet winding Tweed the distance crowned well.

"I inly laughed to see that scene

Wear such a countenance of youth,

Though many an age those hills were green,

And yonder river glided smooth,

Ere in these now disjointed walls

The Mother Church held festivals,

And full-voiced anthemings the while

Swelled from the choir, and lingered down the echoing aisle.

"I coveted that Abbey's doom:

For if, I thought, the early flowers

Of our affection may not bloom,

Like those green hills, through countless hours,

Grant me at least a tardy waning

Some pleasure still in age's paining;

Though lines and forms must fade away,

Still may old Beauty share the empire of Decay!

"But looking toward the grassy mound

Where calm the Douglas chieftains lie,

Who, living, quiet never found,

I straightway learnt a lesson high:

And well I knew that thoughtful mien

Of him whose early lyre had thrown

Over these mouldering walls the magic of its tone.

"Then ceased I from my envying state,

And knew that aweless intellect

Hath power upon the ways of Fate,

And works through time and space uncheck'd.

That minstrel of old Chivalry

In the cold grave must come to be;

But his transmitted thoughts have part

In the collective mind, and never shall depart.

"It was a comfort, too, to see

Those dogs that from him ne'er would rove,

And always eyed him reverently,

With glances of depending love.

They know not of that eminence

Which marks him to my reasoning sense;

They know but that he is a man,

And still to them is kind, and glads them all he can.

"And hence their quiet looks confiding,

Hence grateful instincts seated deep,

By whose strong bond, were ill betiding,

They'd risk their own his life to keep.

What joy to watch in lower creature

Such dawning of a moral nature,

And how (the rule all things obey)

They look to a higher mind to be their law and stay!"

At the University he lived a sweet and gracious life. No man had truer

or fonder friends, or was more admired for his excellent

accomplishments. Earnest in whatever he attempted, his enthusiasm for

all that was high and holy in literature stamped his career at Trinity

as one of remarkable superiority. "I have known many young men, both at

Oxford and elsewhere, of whose abilities I think highly, but I never met

with one whom I considered worthy of being put into competition with

Arthur for a moment," writes his early and intimate friend. "I can

scarcely hope to describe the feelings with which I regarded him, much

less the daily beauty of his existence, out of which they grew," writes

another of his companions. Politics, literature, philosophy he discussed

with a metaphysical subtilty marvellous in one so young. The highest

comprehension seemed native to his mind, so that all who came within the

sphere of his influence were alike impressed with his vast and various

powers. The life and grace of a charmed circle, the display of his gifts

was not for show, and he never forgot to keep the solemn injunction,

_"My son, give me thine heart,"_ clearly engraven before him.

Among his favorite authors, while at the University, we have been told

he greatly delighted in the old dramatists, Webster, Heywood, and

Fletcher. The grace and harmony of style and versification which he

found particularly in the latter master became one of his favorite

themes, and he often dwelt upon this excellence. He loved to repeat the

sad old strains of Bion; and Aeschylus and Sophocles interested

him deeply.

On leaving Cambridge, he took his degree and went immediately to London

to reside with his father. It was a beautiful relation which always

existed between the elder and the younger scholar; and now, as soon as

Arthur had been entered on the boards of the Inner Temple, the father

and son sat down to read law together. Legal studies occupied the young

student till the month of October, 1832, when he became an inmate of the

office of an eminent conveyancer in Lincoln's Inn Fields. Although he

applied himself diligently to obtain a sound practical knowledge of the

profession he had chosen, his former habits of literary pursuit did not

entirely desert him. During the winter he translated most of the sonnets

in the "Vita Nuova," and composed a dramatic sketch with Raffaello for

the hero. About this period he wrote brief, but excellent, memoirs of

Petrarch, Voltaire, and Burke, for the "Gallery of Portraits," then

publishing by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. But his

time, when unoccupied at the office, was principally devoted to

metaphysical research and the history of philosophical opinion. His

spirits, sometimes apt to be graver than is the wont of youth, now

became more animated and even gay, so that his family were cheered on to

hope that his health was firmly gaining ground. The unpleasant symptoms

which manifested themselves in his earlier years had almost entirely

disappeared, when an attack of intermittent fever in the spring of 1833

gave the fatal blow to his constitution. In August, the careful, tender

father took his beloved son into Germany, trusting to a change of

climate for restoration. Travelling slowly, they lingered among the

scenes connected with a literature and a history both were so familiar

with, and many pleasant and profitable hours of delightful converse

gladdened Arthur's journey. It is difficult to picture a more

interesting group of travellers through the picturesque regions they

were again exploring.

No child was ever more ardently loved--nay, worshipped--by his father

than Arthur Hallam. The parallel, perhaps, exists in Edmund Burke's fond

attachment for and subsequent calamity in the loss of his son Richard.

That passage in the life of the great statesman is one of the most

affecting in all biographical literature. "The son thus deeply

lamented," says Prior, "had always conducted himself with much filial

duty and affection. Their confidence on all subjects was even more

unreserved than commonly prevails between father and son, and their

esteem for each other higher.... The son looked to the father as one of

the first, if not the very first, character in history; the father had

formed the very highest opinion of the talents of the son, and among his

friends rated them superior to his own." The same confiding

companionship grew up between Henry Hallam and his eldest boy, and

continued till "death set the seal of eternity" upon the young and

gifted Arthur.

The travellers were returning to Vienna from Pesth; a damp day set in

while they were on the journey; again intermittent fever attacked the

sensitive invalid, and suddenly, mysteriously, his life was ended. It

was the 15th of September, 1833, and Arthur Hallam lay dead in his

father's arms. Twenty-two brief years, and all high hopes for him, the

manly, the noble-spirited, this side the tomb, are broken down forever.

Well might his heart-crushed father sob aloud, "He seemed to tread the

earth as a spirit from some better world." The author of "Horae

Subsecivae" aptly quotes Shakspeare's memorable words, in connection

with the tragic bereavement of that autumnal day in Vienna:--

"The idea of thy life shall sweetly creep

Into my study of imagination;

And every lovely organ of thy life

Shall come apparelled in more precious habit,

More moving delicate, and full of life,

Into the eye and prospect of my soul,

Than when thou liv'dst indeed."

Standing by the grave of this young person, now made so renowned by the

genius of a great poet, whose song has embalmed his name and called the

world's attention to his death, the inevitable reflection is not of

sorrow. He sleeps well who is thus lamented, and "nothing can touch

him further."

THE CONFESSIONS OF A MEDIUM.

It is not yet a year since I ceased to act as a Spiritual Medium. (I am

forced to make use of this title as the most intelligible, but I do it

with a strong mental protest.) At first, I desired only to withdraw

myself quietly from the peculiar associations into which I had been

thrown by the exercise of my faculty, and be content with the simple

fact of my escape. A man who joins the Dashaways does not care to have

the circumstance announced in the newspapers. "So, he was an habitual

drunkard," the public would say. I was overcome by a similar

reluctance,--nay, I might honestly call it shame,--since, although I had

at intervals officiated as a Medium for a period of seven years, my name

had been mentioned, incidentally, only once or twice in the papers

devoted especially to Spiritualism. I had no such reputation as that of

Hume or Andrew Jackson Davis, which would call for a public statement of

my recantation. The result would be, therefore, to give prominence to a

weakness, which, however manfully overcome, might be remembered to my

future prejudice.

I find, however, that the resolution to be silent leaves me restless and

unsatisfied. And in reflecting calmly--objectively, for the first

time--upon the experience of those seven years, I recognize so many

points wherein my case is undoubtedly analogous to that of hundreds of

others who may be still entangled in the same labyrinth whence I have

but recently escaped, so clear a solution of much that is enigmatical,

even to those who reject Spiritualism, that the impulse to write weighs

upon me with the pressure of a neglected duty. I _cannot_ longer be

silent, and, in the conviction that the truth of my statement will be

evident enough to those most concerned in hearing it, without the

authority of any name, (least of all, of one so little known as mine,)

I now give my confession to the world. The names of the individuals whom

I shall have occasion to introduce are, of course, disguised; but, with

this exception, the narrative is the plainest possible record of my own

experience. Many of the incidents winch I shall be obliged to describe

are known only to the actors therein, who, I feel assured, will never

foolishly betray themselves. I have therefore no fear that any harm can

result from my disclosures.

In order to make my views intelligible to those readers who have paid no

attention to psychological subjects, I must commence a little in advance

of my story. My own individual nature is one of those apparently

inconsistent combinations which are frequently found in the children of

parents whose temperaments and mental personalities widely differ. This

class of natures is much larger than would be supposed. Inheriting

opposite, even conflicting, traits from father and mother, they assume,

as either element predominates, diverse characters; and that which is

the result of temperament (in fact, congenital inconsistency) is set

down by the unthinking world as moral weakness or duplicity. Those who

have sufficient skill to perceive and reconcile--or, at least,

govern--the opposing elements are few, indeed. Had the power come to me

sooner, I should have been spared the necessity of making these

confessions.

From one parent I inherited an extraordinarily active and sensitive

imagination,--from the other, a sturdy practical sense, a disposition to

weigh and balance with calm fairness the puzzling questions which life

offers to every man. These conflicting qualities--as is usual in all

similar natures--were not developed in equal order of growth. The former

governed my childhood, my youth, and enveloped me with spells, which all

the force of the latter and more slowly ripened faculty was barely

sufficient to break. Luxuriant weeds and brambles covered the soil which

should have been ploughed and made to produce honest grain.

Unfortunately, I had no teacher who was competent to understand and

direct me. The task was left for myself, and I can only wonder, after

all that has occurred, how it has been possible for me to succeed.

Certainly, this success has not been due to any vigorous exercise of

virtue on my part, but solely to the existence of that cool, reflective

reason which lay _perdue_ beneath all the extravagances of my mind.

I possessed, even as a child, an unusual share of what phrenologists

call Concentrativeness. The power of absorption, of self-forgetfulness,

was at the same time a source of delight and a torment. Lost in some

wild dream or absurd childish speculation, my insensibility to outward

things was chastised as carelessness or a hardened indifference to

counsel. With a memory almost marvellous to retain those things which

appealed to my imagination, I blundered painfully over the commonest

tasks. While I frequently repeated the Sunday hymn, at dinner, I was too

often unable to give the least report of the sermon. Withdrawn into my

corner of the pew, I gave myself up, after the enunciation of the text,

to a complete abstraction, which took no note of time or place. Fixing

my eyes upon a knot in one of the panels under the pulpit, I sat

moveless during the hour and a half which our worthy old clergyman

required for the expounding of the seven parts of his discourse. They

could never accuse me of sleeping, however; for I rarely even winked.

The closing hymn recalled me to myself, always with a shock, or sense of

pain, and sometimes even with a temporary nausea.

This habit of abstraction--properly a complete _passivity_ of the

mind--after a while developed another habit, in which I now see the root

of that peculiar condition which made me a Medium. I shall therefore

endeavor to describe it. I was sitting, one Sunday, just as the minister

was commencing his sermon, with my eyes carelessly following the fingers

of my right hand, as I drummed them slowly across my knee. Suddenly, the

wonder came into my mind,--How is it my fingers move? What set them

going? What is it that stops them? The mystery of that communication

between will and muscle, which no physiologist has ever fathomed, burst

upon my young intellect. I had been conscious of no intention of thus

drumming my fingers; they were in motion when I first noticed them: they

were certainly a part of myself, yet they acted without my knowledge or

design! My left hand was quiet; why did its fingers not move also?

Following these reflections came a dreadful fear, as I remembered Jane,

the blacksmith's daughter, whose elbows and shoulders sometimes jerked

in such a way as to make all the other scholars laugh, although we were

sorry for the poor girl, who cried bitterly over her unfortunate,

ungovernable limbs. I was comforted, however, on finding that I could

control the motion of my fingers at pleasure; but my imagination was too

active to stop there. What if I should forget how to direct my hands?

What if they should refuse to obey me? What if my knees, which were just

as still as the hymn-books in the rack before me, should cease to bend,

and I should sit there forever? These very questions seemed to produce a

temporary paralysis of the will. As my right hand lay quietly on my

knee, and I asked myself, with a stupid wonder, "Now, can I move it?" it

lay as still as before. I had only questioned, not willed. "No I cannot

move it," I said, in real doubt I was conscious of a blind sense of

exertion, wherein there was yet no proper exertion, but which seemed to

exhaust me. Fascinated by this new mystery, I contemplated my hand as

something apart from myself,--something subordinate to, but not

identical with, me. The rising of the congregation for the hymn broke

the spell, like the snapping of a thread.

The reader will readily understand that I carried these experiences much

farther. I gradually learned to suspend (perhaps in imagination only,

but therefore none the less really) the action of my will upon the

muscles of my arms and legs; and I did it with the greater impunity,

from knowing that the stir consequent upon the conclusion of the

services would bring me to myself. In proportion as the will became

passive, the activity of my imagination was increased, and I experienced

a new and strange delight in watching the play of fantasies which

appeared to come and go independently of myself. There was still a dim

consciousness of outward things mingled with my condition; I was not

beyond the recall of my senses. But one day, I remember, as I sat

motionless as a statue, having ceased any longer to attempt to control

my dead limbs, more than usually passive, a white, shining mist

gradually stole around me; my eyes finally ceased to take cognizance of

objects; a low, musical humming sounded in my ears, and those creatures

of the imagination which had hitherto crossed my brain as _thoughts_ now

spoke to me as audible voices. If there is any happy delirium in the

first stages of intoxication, (of which, thank Heaven, I have no

experience,) it must be a sensation very much like that which I felt.

The death of external and the birth of internal consciousness

overwhelmed my childish soul with a dumb, ignorant ecstasy, like that

which savages feel on first hearing the magic of music.

How long I remained thus I know not. I was aroused, by feeling myself

violently shaken. "John!" exclaimed my mother, who had grasped my arm

with a determined hand,--"bless the boy! what ails him? Why, his face

is as white as a sheet!" Slowly I recovered my consciousness, saw the

church and the departing congregation, and mechanically followed my

parents. I could give no explanation of what had happened, except to say

that I had fallen asleep. As I ate my dinner with a good appetite, my

mother's fears were quieted. I was left at home the following Sunday,

and afterwards only ventured to indulge sparingly in the exercise of my

newly discovered faculty. My mother, I was conscious, took more note of

my presence than formerly, and I feared a repetition of the same

catastrophe. As I grew older and my mind became interested in a wider

range of themes, I finally lost the habit, which I classed among the

many follies of childhood.

I retained, nevertheless, and still retain, something of that subtile

instinct which mocks and yet surpasses reason. My feelings with regard

to the persons whom I met were quite independent of their behavior

towards me, or the estimation in which they were held by the world.

Things which puzzled my brain in waking hours were made clear to me in

sleep, and I frequently felt myself blindly impelled to do or to avoid

doing certain things. The members of my family, who found it impossible

to understand my motives of action,--because, in fact, there were no

_motives_,--complacently solved the difficulty by calling me "queer." I

presume there are few persons who are not occasionally visited by the

instinct, or impulse, or faculty, or whatever it may be called, to which

I refer. I possessed it in a more than ordinary degree, and was

generally able to distinguish between its suggestions and the mere

humors of my imagination. It is scarcely necessary to say that I assume

the existence of such a power, at the outset. I recognize it as a normal

faculty of the human mind,--not therefore universal, any more than the

genius which makes a poet, a painter, or a composer.

My education was neither general nor thorough; hence I groped darkly

with the psychological questions which were presented to me. Tormented

by those doubts which at some period of life assail the soul of every

thinking man, I was ready to grasp at any solution which offered,

without very carefully testing its character. I eagerly accepted the

theory of Animal Magnetism, which, so far as it went, was satisfactory;

but it only illustrated the powers and relations of the soul in its

present state of existence; it threw no light upon that future which I

was not willing to take upon faith alone. Though sensible to mesmeric

influences, I was not willing that my spiritual nature should be the

instrument of another's will,--that a human being, like myself, should

become possessed of all my secrets and sanctities, touching the keys of

every passion with his unhallowed fingers. In the phenomena of

clairvoyance I saw only other and more subtile manifestations of the

power which I knew to exist in my own mind. Hence, I soon grew weary of

prosecuting inquiries which, at best, would fall short of solving my own

great and painful doubt,--Does the human soul continue to exist after

death? That it could take cognizance of things beyond the reach of the

five senses, I was already assured. This, however, might be a sixth

sense, no less material and perishable in its character than the others.

My brain, as yet, was too young and immature to follow the thread of

that lofty spiritual logic in the light of which such doubts melt away

like mists of the night. Thus, uneasy because undeveloped, erring

because I had never known the necessary guidance, seeking, but almost

despairing of enlightenment, I was a fit subject for any spiritual

epidemic which seemed to offer me a cure for worse maladies.

At this juncture occurred the phenomena known as the "Rochester

Knockings." (My home, let me say, is in a small town not far from New

York.) I shared in the general interest aroused by the marvellous

stories, which, being followed by the no less extraordinary display of

some unknown agency at Norwalk, Connecticut, excited me to such a degree

that I was half-converted to the new faith before I had witnessed any

spiritual manifestation. Soon after the arrival of the Misses Fox in New

York I visited them in their rooms at the Howard House. Impressed by

their quiet, natural demeanor, the absence of anything savoring of

jugglery, and the peculiar character of the raps and movements of the

table, I asked my questions and applied my tests, in a passive, if not a

believing frame of mind. In fact, I had not long been seated, before the

noises became loud and frequent.

"The spirits like to communicate with you," said Mrs. Fish: "you seem to

be nearer to them than most people."

I summoned, in succession, the spirits of my mother, a younger brother,

and a cousin to whom I had been much attached in boyhood, and obtained

correct answers to all my questions. I did not then remark, what has

since occurred to me, that these questions concerned things which I

knew, and that the answers to them were distinctly impressed on my mind

at the time. The result of one of my tests made a very deep impression

upon me. Having mentally selected a friend whom I had met in the train

that morning, I asked,--"Will the spirit whose name is now in my mind

communicate with me?" To this came the answer, slowly rapped out, on

calling over the alphabet,--"_He is living!_"

I returned home, very much puzzled. Precisely those features of the

exhibition (let me call it such) which repulse others attracted me. The

searching daylight, the plain, matter-of-fact character of the

manifestations, the absence of all solemnity and mystery, impressed me

favorably towards the spiritual theory. If disembodied souls, I said,

really exist and can communicate with those in the flesh, why should

they choose moonlight or darkness, graveyards or lonely bedchambers, for

their visitations? What is to hinder them from speaking at times and in

places where the senses of men are fully awake and alert, rather than

when they are liable to be the dupes of the imagination? In such

reflections as these I was the unconscious dupe of my own imagination,

while supposing myself thoroughly impartial and critical.

Soon after this, circles began to be formed in my native town, for the

purpose of table-moving. A number of persons met, secretly at

first,--for as yet there were no avowed converts,--and quite as much for

sport as for serious investigation. The first evening there was no

satisfactory manifestation. The table moved a little, it is true, but

each one laughingly accused his neighbors of employing some muscular

force: all isolated attempts were vain. I was conscious, nevertheless,

of a curious sensation of numbness in the arms, which recalled to mind

my forgotten experiments in church. No rappings were heard, and some of

the participants did not scruple to pronounce the whole thing

a delusion.

A few evenings after this we met again. Those who were most incredulous

happened to be absent, while, accidentally, their places were filled by

persons whose temperaments disposed them to a passive seriousness. Among

these was a girl of sixteen, Miss Abby Fetters, a pale, delicate

creature, with blond hair and light-blue eyes. Chance placed her next to

me, in forming the ring, and her right hand lay lightly upon my left. We

stood around a heavy circular dining-table. A complete silence was

preserved, and all minds gradually sank into a quiet, passive

expectancy. In about ten minutes I began to feel, or to imagine that I

felt, a stream of light,--if light were a palpable substance,--a

something far finer and more subtile than an electric current, passing

from the hand of Miss Fetters through my own into the table. Presently

the great wooden mass began to move,--stopped,--moved again,--turned in

a circle, we following, without changing the position of our hands,--and

finally began to rock from side to side, with increasing violence. Some

of the circle were thrown off by the movements; others withdrew their

hands in affright; and but four, among whom were Miss Fetters and

myself, retained their hold. My outward consciousness appeared to be

somewhat benumbed, as if by some present fascination or approaching

trance, but I retained curiosity enough to look at my companion. Her

eyes, sparkling with a strange, steady light, were fixed upon the table;

her breath came quick and short, and her cheek had lost every trace of

color. Suddenly, as if by a spasmodic effort, she removed her hands; I

did the same, and the table stopped. She threw herself into a seat, as

if exhausted, yet, during the whole time, not a muscle of the hand which

lay upon mine had stirred. I solemnly declare that my own hands had

been equally passive, yet I experienced the same feeling of

fatigue,--not muscular fatigue, but a sense of _deadness_, as if every

drop of nervous energy had been suddenly taken from me.

Further experiments, the same evening, showed that we two, either

together or alone, were able to produce the same phenomena without the

assistance of the others present. We did not succeed, however, in

obtaining any answers to our questions, nor were any of us impressed by

the idea that the spirits of the dead were among us. In fact, these

table-movings would not, of themselves, suggest the idea of a spiritual

manifestation. "The table is bewitched," said Thompson, a hard-headed

young fellow, without a particle of imagination; and this was really the

first impression of all: some unknown force, latent in the dead matter,

had been called into action. Still, this conclusion was so strange, so

incredible, that the agency of supernatural intelligences finally

presented itself to my mind as the readiest solution.

It was not long before we obtained rappings, and were enabled to repeat

all the experiments which I had tried during my visit to the Fox family.

The spirits of our deceased relatives and friends announced themselves,

and generally gave a correct account of their earthly lives. I must

confess, however, that, whenever we attempted to pry into the future, we

usually received answers as ambiguous as those of the Grecian oracles,

or predictions which failed to be realized. Violent knocks or other

unruly demonstrations would sometimes interrupt an intelligent

communication which promised us some light on the other life: these, we

were told, were occasioned by evil or mischievous spirits, whose delight

it was to create disturbances. They never occurred, I now remember,

except when Miss Fetters was present. At the time, we were too much

absorbed in our researches to notice the fact.

The reader will perceive, from what he knows of my previous mental

state, that it was not difficult for me to accept the theories of the

Spiritualists. Here was an evidence of the immortality of the

soul,--nay, more, of its continued individuality through endless future

existences. The idea of my individuality being lost had been to me the

same thing as complete annihilation. The spirits themselves informed us

that they had come to teach these truths. The simple, ignorant faith of

the Past, they said, was worn out; with the development of science, the

mind of man had become skeptical; the ancient fountains no longer

sufficed for his thirst; each new era required a new revelation; in all

former ages there had been single minds pure enough and advanced enough

to communicate with the dead and be the mediums of their messages to

men, but now the time had come when the knowledge of this intercourse

must be declared unto all; in its light the mysteries of the Past became

clear; in the wisdom thus imparted, that happy Future which seems

possible to every ardent and generous heart would be secured. I was not

troubled by the fact that the messages which proclaimed these things

were often incorrectly spelt, that the grammar was bad and the language

far from elegant. I did not reflect that these new and sublime truths

had formerly passed through my own brain as the dreams of a wandering

imagination. Like that American philosopher who looks upon one of his

own neophytes as a man of great and profound mind because the latter

carefully remembers and repeats to him his own carelessly uttered

wisdom, I saw in these misty and disjointed reflections of my own

thoughts the precious revelation of departed and purified spirits.

How a passion for the unknown and unattainable takes hold of men is

illustrated by the search for the universal solvent, by the mysteries of

the Rosicrucians, by the patronage of fortune-tellers, even. Wholly

absorbed in spiritual researches,--having, in fact, no vital interest in

anything else,--I soon developed into what is called a Medium. I

discovered, at the outset, that the peculiar condition to be attained

before the tables would begin to move could be produced at will.[7] I

also found that the passive state into which I naturally fell had a

tendency to produce that trance or suspension of the will which I had

discovered when a boy. External consciousness, however, did not wholly

depart. I saw the circle of inquirers around me, but dimly, and as

phantoms,--while the impressions which passed over my brain seemed to

wear visible forms and to speak with audible voices.

I did not doubt, at the time, that spirits visited me, and that they

made use of my body to communicate with those who could hear them in no

other way. Beside the pleasant intoxication of the semi-trance, I felt a

rare joy in the knowledge that I was elected above other men to be their

interpreter. Let me endeavor to describe the nature of this possession.

Sometimes, even before a spirit would be called for, the figure of the

person, as it existed in the mind of the inquirer, would suddenly

present itself to me,--not to my outward senses, but to my interior,

instinctive knowledge. If the recollection of the other embraced also

the voice, I heard the voice in the same manner, and unconsciously

imitated it. The answers to the questions I knew by the same instinct,

as soon as the questions were spoken.

If the question was vague, asked for information rather than

_confirmation_, either no answer came, or there was an impression of a

_wish_ of what the answer might be, or, at times, some strange

involuntary sentence sprang to my lips. When I wrote, my hand appeared

to move of itself; yet the words it wrote invariably passed through my

mind. Even when blindfolded, there was no difference in its performance.

The same powers developed themselves in a still greater degree in Miss

Fetters. The spirits which spoke most readily through her were those of

men, even coarse and rude characters, which came unsummoned. Two or

three of the other members of our circle were able to produce motions in

the table; they could even feel, as they asserted, the touch of

spiritual hands; but, however much they desired it, they were never

personally possessed as we, and therefore could not properly be

called Mediums.

These investigations were not regularly carried on. Occasionally the

interest of the circle flagged, until it was renewed by the visit of

some apostle of the new faith, usually accompanied by a "Preaching

Medium." Among those whose presence especially conduced to keep alive

the flame of spiritual inquiry was a gentleman named Stilton, the editor

of a small monthly periodical entitled "Revelations from the Interior."

Without being himself a Medium, he was nevertheless thoroughly

conversant with the various phenomena of Spiritualism, and both spoke

and wrote in the dialect which its followers adopted. He was a man of

varied, but not profound learning, an active intellect, giving and

receiving impressions with equal facility, and with an unusual

combination of concentrativeness and versatility in his nature. A

certain inspiration was connected with his presence. His personality

overflowed upon and influenced others. "My mind is not sufficiently

submissive," he would say, "to receive impressions from the spirits, but

my atmosphere attracts them and encourages them to speak." He was a

stout, strongly built man, with coarse black hair, gray eyes, large

animal mouth, square jaws, and short, thick neck. Had his hair been

cropped close, he would have looked very much like a prize-fighter; but

he wore it long, parted in the middle, and as meek in expression as its

stiff waves would allow.

Stilton soon became the controlling spirit of our circle. His presence

really seemed, as he said, to encourage the spirits. Never before had

the manifestations been so abundant or so surprising. Miss Fetters,

especially, astonished us by the vigor of her possessions. Not only

Samson and Peter the Great, but Gibbs the Pirate, Black Hawk, and Joe

Manton, who had died the previous year in a fit of delirium-tremens,

prophesied, strode, swore, and smashed things in turn, by means of her

frail little body. As Cribb, a noted pugilist of the last century, she

floored an incautious spectator, giving him a black eye which he wore

for a fortnight afterwards. Singularly enough, my visitors were of the

opposite cast. Hypatia, Petrarch, Mary Magdalen, Abelard, and, oftenest

of all, Shelley, proclaimed mystic truths from my lips. They usually

spoke in inspired monologues, without announcing themselves beforehand,

and often without giving any clue to their personality. A practised

stenographer, engaged by Mr. Stilton, took down many of these

communications as they were spoken, and they were afterwards published

in the "Revelations." It was also remarked, that, while Miss Fetters

employed violent gestures and seemed to possess a superhuman strength,

I, on the contrary, sat motionless, pale, and with little sign of life

except in my voice, which, though low, was clear and dramatic in its

modulations. Stilton explained this difference without hesitation. "Miss

Abby," he said, "possesses soul-matter of a texture to which the souls

of these strong men naturally adhere. In the spirit-land the

superfluities repel each other; the individual souls seek to remedy

their imperfections: in the union of opposites only is to be found the

great harmonia of life. You, John, move upon another plane; through what

in you is undeveloped, these developed spirits are attracted."

For two or three years, I must admit, my life was a very happy one. Not

only were those occasional trances an intoxication, nay, a coveted

indulgence, but they cast a consecration over my life. My restored faith

rested on the sure evidence of my own experience; my new creed contained

no harsh or repulsive feature; I heard the same noble sentiments which I

uttered in such moments repeated by my associates in the faith, and I

devoutly believed that a complete regeneration of the human race was at

hand. Nevertheless, it struck me sometimes as singular that many of the

Mediums whom I met--men and women chosen by spiritual hands to the same

high office--excited in my mind that instinct of repulsion on which I

had learned to rely as a sufficient reason for avoiding certain persons.

Far as it would have been from my mind, at that time, to question the

manifestations which accompanied them, I could not smother my mistrust

of their characters. Miss Fetters, whom I so frequently met, was one of

the most disagreeable. Her cold, thin lips, pale eyes, and lean figure

gave me a singular impression of voracious hunger. Her presence was

often announced to me by a chill shudder, before I saw her. Centuries

ago one of her ancestors must have been a ghoul or vampire. The trance

of possession seemed, with her, to be a form of dissipation, in which

she indulged as she might have catered for a baser appetite. The new

religion was nothing to her; I believe she valued it only on account of

the importance she obtained among its followers. Her father, a vain,

weak-minded man, who kept a grocery in the town, was himself a convert.

Stilton had an answer for every doubt. No matter how tangled a labyrinth

might be exhibited to him, he walked straight through it.

"How is it," I asked him, "that so many of my fellow-mediums inspire me

with an instinctive dislike and mistrust?"

"By mistrust you mean dislike," he answered; "since you know of no

reason to doubt their characters. The elements of soul-matter are

differently combined in different individuals, and there are affinities

and repulsions, just as there are in the chemical elements. Your feeling

is chemical, not moral. A want of affinity does not necessarily imply an

existing evil in the other party. In the present ignorance of the world,

our true affinities can only he imperfectly felt and indulged; and the

entire freedom which we shall obtain in this respect is the greatest

happiness of the spirit-life."

Another time I asked,--

"How is it that the spirits of great authors speak so tamely to us?

Shakspeare, last night, wrote a passage which he would have been

heartily ashamed of, as a living man. We know that a spirit spoke,

calling himself Shakspeare; but, judging from his communication, it

could not have been he."

"It probably was not," said Mr. Stilton. "I am convinced that all

malicious spirits are at work to interrupt the communications from the

higher spheres. We were thus deceived by one professing to be Benjamin

Franklin, who drew for us the plan of a machine for splitting shingles,

which we had fabricated and patented at considerable expense. On trial,

however, it proved to be a miserable failure, a complete mockery. When

the spirit was again summoned, he refused to speak, but shook the table

to express his malicious laughter, went off, and has never since

returned. My friend, we know but the alphabet of Spiritualism, the mere

A B C; we can no more expect to master the immortal language in a day

than a child to read Plato after learning his letters."

Many of those who had been interested in the usual phenomena gradually

dropped off, tired, and perhaps a little ashamed, in the reaction

following their excitement; but there were continual accessions to our

ranks, and we formed, at last, a distinct clan or community. Indeed, the

number of _secret_ believers in Spiritualism would never be suspected by

the uninitiated. In the sect, however, as in Masonry and the Catholic

Church, there are circles within circles,--concentric rings, whence you

can look outwards, but not inwards, and where he alone who stands at the

centre is able to perceive everything. Such an inner circle was at last

formed in our town. Its object, according to Stilton, with whom the plan

originated, was to obtain a purer spiritual atmosphere, by the exclusion

of all but Mediums and those non-mediumistic believers in whose presence

the spirits felt at ease, and thus invite communications from the

farther and purer spheres.

In fact, the result seemed to justify the plan. The character of the

trance, as I had frequently observed, is vitiated by the consciousness

that disbelievers are present. The more perfect the atmosphere of

credulity, the more satisfactory the manifestations. The expectant

company, the dim light, the conviction that a wonderful revelation was

about to dawn upon us, excited my imagination, and my trance was really

a sort of delirium, in which I spoke with a passion and an eloquence I

had never before exhibited. The fear, which had previously haunted me,

at times, of giving my brain and tongue into the control of an unknown,

power, was forgotten; yet, more than ever, I was conscious of some

strong controlling influence, and experienced a reckless pleasure in

permitting myself to be governed by it. "Prepare," I concluded, (I quote

from the report in the "Revelations,") "prepare, sons of men, for the

dawning day! Prepare for the second and perfect regeneration of man! For

the prison-chambers have been broken into, and the light from the

interior shall illuminate the external! Ye shall enjoy spiritual and

passional freedom; your guides shall no longer be the despotism of

ignorant laws, nor the whip of an imaginary conscience,--but the natural

impulses of your nature, which are the melody of Life, and the natural

affinities, which are its harmony! The reflections from the upper

spheres shall irradiate the lower, and Death is the triumphal arch

through which we pass from glory to glory!"

--I have here paused, deliberating whether I should proceed farther in

my narrative. But no; if any good is to be accomplished by these

confessions, the reader must walk with me through the dark labyrinth

which follows. He must walk over what may be considered delicate ground,

but he shall not be harmed. One feature of the trance condition is too

remarkable, too important in its consequences, to be overlooked. It is a

feature of which many Mediums are undoubtedly ignorant, the existence of

which is not even suspected by thousands of honest Spiritualists.

Let me again anticipate the regular course of my narrative, and explain.

A suspension of the Will, when indulged in for any length of time,

produces a suspension of that inward consciousness of good and evil

which we call Conscience, and which can be actively exercised only

through the medium of the Will. The mental faculties and the moral

perceptions lie down together in the same passive sleep. The subject is,

therefore, equally liable to receive impressions from the minds of

others, and from their passions and lusts. Besides this, the germs of

all good and of all evil are implanted in the nature of every human

being; and even when some appetite is buried in a crypt so deep that its

existence is forgotten, let the warder be removed, and it will gradually

work its way to the light. Persons in the receptive condition which

belongs to the trance may be surrounded by honest and pure-minded

individuals, and receive no harmful impressions; they may even, if of a

healthy spiritual temperament, resist for a time the aggressions of evil

influences; but the final danger is always the same. The state of the

Medium, therefore, may be described as one in which the Will is passive,

the Conscience passive, the outward senses partially (sometimes wholly)

suspended, the mind helplessly subject to the operations of other minds,

and the passions and desires released from all restraining

influences.[8] I make the statement boldly, after long and careful

reflection, and severe self-examination.

As I said before, I did not entirely lose my external consciousness,

although it was very dim and dream-like. On returning to the natural

state, my recollection of what had occurred during the trance became

equally dim; but I retained a general impression of the character of the

possession. I knew that some foreign influence--the spirit of a dead

poet, or hero, or saint, I then believed--governed me for the time; that

I gave utterance to thoughts unfamiliar to my mind in its conscious

state; and that my own individuality was lost, or so disguised that I

could no longer recognize it. This very circumstance made the trance an

indulgence, a spiritual intoxication, no less fascinating than that of

the body, although accompanied by a similar reaction. Yet, behind all,

dimly evident to me, there was an element of terror. There were times

when, back of the influences which spoke with my voice, rose another,--a

vast, overwhelming, threatening power, the nature of which I could not

grasp, but which I knew was evil. Even when in my natural state,

listening to the harsh utterances of Miss Fetters or the lofty spiritual

philosophy of Mr. Stilton, I have felt, for a single second, the touch

of an icy wind, accompanied by a sensation of unutterable dread.

Our secret circle had not held many sessions before a remarkable change

took place in the character of the revelations. Mr. Stilton ceased to

report them for his paper.

"We are on the threshold, at last," said he; "the secrets of the ages

lie beyond. The hands of spirits are now lifting the veil, fold by fold.

Let us not be startled by what we hear: let us show that our eyes can

bear the light,--that we are competent to receive the wisdom of the

higher spheres, and live according to it."

Miss Fetters was more than ever possessed by the spirit of Joe Manton,

whose allowance of grog having been cut off too suddenly by his death,

he was continually clamoring for a dram.

"I tell you," yelled he, or rather she, "I won't stand sich meanness. I

ha'n't come all the way here for nothin'. I'll knock Erasmus all to

thunder, if you go for to turn me out dry, and let him come in."

Mr. Stilton thereupon handed him, or her, a tumbler half-full of brandy,

which she gulped down at a single swallow. Joe Manton presently retired

to make room for Erasmus, who spoke for some time in Latin, or what

appeared to be Latin. None of us could make much of it; but Mr. Stilton

declared that the Latin pronunciation of Erasmus was probably different

from ours, or that he might have learned the true Roman accent from

Cicero and Seneca, with whom, doubtless, he was now on intimate terms.

As Erasmus generally concluded by throwing his arms, or rather the arms

of Miss Fetters, around the neck of Mr. Stilton,--his spirit

fraternizing, apparently, with the spirit of the latter,--we greatly

regretted that his communications were unintelligible, on account of the

superior wisdom which they might be supposed to contain.

I confess, I cannot recall the part I played in what would have been a

pitiable farce, if it had not been so terribly tragical, without a

feeling of utter shame. Nothing but my profound sympathy for the

thousands and tens of thousands who are still subject to the same

delusion could compel me to such a sacrifice of pride. Curiously enough,

(as I thought _then_, but not now,) the enunciation of sentiments

opposed to my moral sense--the abolition, in fact, of all moral

restraint--came from my lips, while the actions of Miss Fetters hinted

at their practical application. Upon the ground that the interests of

the soul were paramount to all human laws and customs, I declared--or

rather, _my voice_ declared--that self-denial was a fatal error, to

which half the misery of mankind could be traced; that the passions,

held as slaves, exhibited only the brutish nature of slaves, and would

be exalted and glorified by entire freedom; and that our sole guidance

ought to come from the voices of the spirits who communicated with us,

instead of the imperfect laws constructed by our benighted fellow-men.

How clear and logical, how lofty, these doctrines seemed! If, at times,

something in their nature repelled me, I simply attributed it to the

fact that I was still but a neophyte in the Spiritual Philosophy, and

incapable of perceiving the truth with entire clearness.

Mr. Stilton had a wife,--one of those meek, amiable, simple-hearted

women whose individuality seems to be completely absorbed into that of

their husbands. When such women are wedded to frank, tender, protecting

men, their lives are truly blessed; but they are willing slaves to the

domestic tyrant. They bear uncomplainingly,--many of them even without a

thought of complaint,--and die at last with their hearts full of love

for the brutes who have trampled upon them. Mrs. Stilton was perhaps

forty years of age, of middle height, moderately plump in person, with

light-brown hair, soft, inexpressive gray eyes, and a meek, helpless,

imploring mouth. Her voice was mild and plaintive, and its accents of

anger (if she ever gave utterance to such) could not have been

distinguished from those of grief. She did not often attend our

sessions, and it was evident, that, while she endeavored to comprehend

the revelations, in order to please her husband, their import was very

far beyond her comprehension. She was now and then a little frightened

at utterances which no doubt sounded lewd or profane to her ears; but

after a glance at Mr. Stilton's face, and finding that it betrayed

neither horror nor surprise, would persuade herself that everything

must be right.

"Are you sure," she once timidly whispered to me, "are you very sure,

Mr. ------, that there is no danger of being led astray? It seems

strange to me; but perhaps I don't understand it."

Her question was so indefinite, that I found it difficult to answer.

Stilton, however, seeing me engaged in endeavoring to make clear to her

the glories of the new truth, exclaimed,--

"That's right, John! Your spiritual plane slants through many spheres,

and has points of contact with a great variety of souls. I hope my wife

will be able to see the light through you, since I appear to be too

opaque for her to receive it from me."

"Oh, Abijah!" said the poor woman, "you know it is my fault. I try to

follow, and I hope I have faith, though I don't see everything as

clearly as you do."

I began also to have my own doubts, as I perceived that an "affinity"

was gradually being developed between Stilton and Miss Fetters. She was

more and more frequently possessed by the spirit of Erasmus, whose

salutations, on meeting and parting with his brother-philosopher, were

too enthusiastic for merely masculine love. But, whenever I hinted at

the possibility of mistaking the impulses of the soul, or at evil

resulting from a too sudden and universal liberation of the passions,

Stilton always silenced me with his inevitable logic. Having once

accepted the premises, I could not avoid the conclusions.

"When our natures are in harmony with spirit-matter throughout the

spheres," he would say, "our impulses will always be in accordance. Or,

if there should be any temporary disturbance, arising from our necessary

intercourse with the gross, blinded multitude, we can always fly to our

spiritual monitors for counsel. Will not they, the immortal souls of the

ages past, who have guided us to a knowledge of the truth, assist us

also in preserving it pure?"

In spite of this, in spite of my admiration of Stilton's intellect, and

my yet unshaken faith in Spiritualism, I was conscious that the harmony

of the circle was becoming impaired to me. Was I falling behind in

spiritual progress? Was I too weak to be the medium for the promised

revelations? I threw myself again and again into the trance, with a

recklessness of soul which fitted me to receive any, even the darkest

impressions, to catch and proclaim every guilty whisper of the senses,

and, while under the influence of the excitement, to exult in the age of

license which I believed to be at hand. But darker, stronger grew the

terror which lurked behind this spiritual carnival. A more tremendous

power than that which I now recognized as coming from Stilton's brain

was present, and I saw myself whirling nearer and nearer to its grasp. I

felt, by a sort of blind instinct, too vague to be expressed, that some

demoniac agency had thrust itself into the manifestations,--perhaps had

been mingled with them from the outset.

For two or three months, my life was the strangest mixture of happiness

and misery. I walked about with the sense of some crisis hanging over

me. My "possessions" became fiercer and wilder, and the reaction so much

more exhausting that I fell into the habit of restoring myself by means

of the bottle of brandy which Mr. Stilton took care should be on hand,

in case of a visit from Joe Manton. Miss Fetters, strange to say, was

not in the least affected by the powerful draughts she imbibed. But, at

the same time, my waking life was growing brighter and brighter under

the power of a new and delicious experience. My nature is eminently

social, and I had not been able--indeed, I did not desire--wholly to

withdraw myself from intercourse with non-believers. There was too much

in society that was congenial to me to be given up. My instinctive

dislike to Miss Abby Fetters and my compassionate regard for Mrs.

Stilton's weakness only served to render the company of intelligent,

cultivated women more attractive to me. Among those whom I met most

frequently was Miss Agnes Honeywood, a calm, quiet, unobtrusive girl,

the characteristic of whose face was sweetness rather than beauty, while

the first feeling she inspired was respect rather than admiration. She

had just that amount of self-possession which conceals without

conquering the sweet timidity of woman. Her voice was low, yet clear;

and her mild eyes, I found, were capable, on occasion, of both flashing

and melting. Why describe her? I loved her before I knew it; but, with

the consciousness of my love, that clairvoyant sense on which I had

learned to depend failed for the first time. Did she love me? When I

sought to answer the question in her presence, all was confusion within.

This was not the only new influence which entered into and increased the

tumult of my mind. The other half of my two-sided nature--the cool,

reflective, investigating faculty--had been gradually ripening, and the

questions which it now began to present seriously disturbed the

complacency of my theories. I saw that I had accepted many things on

very unsatisfactory evidence; but, on the other hand, there was much for

which I could find no other explanation. Let me be frank, and say, that

I do not now pretend to explain all the phenomena of Spiritualism. This,

however, I determined to do,--to ascertain, if possible, whether the

influences which governed me in the trance state came from the persons

around, from the exercise of some independent faculty of my own mind, or

really and truly from the spirits of the dead. Mr. Stilton appeared to

notice that some internal conflict was going on; but he said nothing in

regard to it, and, as events proved, he entirely miscalculated its

character.

I said to myself,--"If this chaos continues, it will drive me mad. Let

me have one bit of solid earth beneath my feet, and I can stand until it

subsides. Let me throw over the best bower of the heart, since all the

anchors of the mind are dragging!" I summoned resolution. I made that

desperate venture which no true man makes without a pang of forced

courage; but, thank God! I did not make it in vain. Agnes loved me, and

in the deep, quiet bliss which this knowledge gave I felt the promise of

deliverance. She knew and lamented my connection with the Spiritualists;

but, perceiving my mental condition from the few intimations which I

dared to give her, discreetly held her peace. But I could read the

anxious expression of that gentle face none the less.

My first endeavor to solve the new questions was to check the _abandon_

of the trance condition, and interfuse it with more of sober

consciousness. It was a difficult task; and nothing but the circumstance

that my consciousness had never been entirely lost enabled me to make

any progress. I finally succeeded, as I imagined, (certainty is

impossible,) in separating the different influences which impressed

me,--perceiving where one terminated and the other commenced, or where

two met and my mind vibrated from one to the other until the stronger

prevailed, or where a thought which seemed to originate in my own brain

took the lead and swept away with me like the mad rush of a prairie

colt. When out of the trance, I noticed attentively the expressions made

use of by Mr. Stilton and the other members of the circle, and was

surprised to find how many of them I had reproduced. But might they not,

in the first place, have been derived from me? And what was the vague,

dark Presence which still overshadowed me at such times? What was that

Power which I had tempted,--which we were all tempting, every time we

met,--and which continually drew nearer and became more threatening? I

knew not; _and I know not_. I would rather not speak or think of it

any more.

My suspicions with regard to Stilton and Miss Fetters were confirmed by

a number of circumstances which I need not describe. That he should

treat his wife in a harsh, ironical manner, which the poor woman felt,

but could not understand, did not surprise me; but at other times there

was a treacherous tenderness about him. He would dilate eloquently upon

the bliss of living in accordance with the spiritual harmonies. Among

_us_, he said, there could be no more hatred or mistrust or

jealousy,--nothing but love, pure, unselfish, perfect love. "You, my

dear," (turning to Mrs. Stilton,) "belong to a sphere which is included

within my own, and share in my harmonies and affinities; yet the

soul-matter which adheres to you is of a different texture from mine.

Yours has also its independent affinities; I see and respect them; and

even though they might lead our bodies--our outward, material

lives--away from one another, we should still be true to that glorious

light of Jove which permeates all soul-matter."

"Oh, Abijah!" cried Mrs. Stilton, really distressed, "how can you say

such a thing of me? You know I can never adhere to anybody else

but you!"

Stilton would then call in my aid to explain his meaning, asserting that

I had a faculty of reaching his wife's intellect, which he did not

himself possess. Feeling a certain sympathy for her painful confusion of

mind, I did my best to give his words an interpretation which soothed

her fears. Then she begged his pardon, taking all the blame to her own

stupidity, and received his grudged, unwilling kiss with a restored

happiness which pained me to the heart.

I had a growing presentiment of some approaching catastrophe. I felt,

distinctly, the presence of unhallowed passions in our circle; and my

steadfast love for Agnes, borne thither in my bosom, seemed like a pure

white dove in a cage of unclean birds. Stilton held me from him by the

superior strength of his intellect. I began to mistrust, even to hate

him, while I was still subject to his power, and unable to acquaint him

with the change in my feelings. Miss Fetters was so repulsive that I

never spoke to her when it could be avoided. I had tolerated her,

heretofore, for the sake of her spiritual gift; but now, when I began to

doubt the authenticity of that gift, her hungry eyes, her thin lips, her

flat breast, and cold, dry hands excited in me a sensation of absolute

abhorrence.

The doctrine of Affinities had some time before been adopted by the

circle, as a part of the Spiritual Truth. Other circles, with which we

were in communication, had also received the same revelation; and the

ground upon which it was based, in fact, rendered its acceptance easy.

Even I, shielded as I was by the protecting arms of a pure love, sought

in vain for arguments to refute a doctrine, the practical operation of

which, I saw, might be so dangerous. The soul had a right to seek its

kindred soul: that I could not deny. Having found, they belonged to each

other. Love is the only law which those who love are bound to obey. I

shall not repeat all the sophistry whereby these positions were

strengthened. The doctrine soon blossomed and bore fruit, the nature of

which left no doubt as to the character of the tree.

The catastrophe came sooner than I had anticipated, and partly through

my own instrumentality; though, in any case, it must finally have come.

We were met together at the house of one of the most zealous and

fanatical believers. There were but eight persons present,--the host and

his wife, (an equally zealous proselyte,) a middle-aged bachelor

neighbor, Mr. and Mrs. Stilton, Miss Fetters and her father, and

myself. It was a still, cloudy, sultry evening, after one of those dull,

oppressive days when all the bad blood in a man seems to be uppermost in

his veins. The manifestations upon the table, with which we commenced,

were unusually rapid and lively. "I am convinced," said Mr. Stilton,

"that we shall receive important revelations to-night. My own mind

possesses a clearness and quickness, which, I have noticed, always

precede the visit of a superior spirit. Let us be passive and receptive,

my friends. We are but instruments in the hands of loftier

intelligences, and only through our obedience can this second advent of

Truth be fulfilled."

He looked at me with that expression which I so well knew, as the signal

for a surrender of my will. I had come rather unwillingly, for I was

getting heartily tired of the business, and longed to shake off my habit

of (spiritual) intoxication, which no longer possessed any attraction,

since I had been allowed to visit Agnes as an accepted lover. In fact, I

continued to hold my place in the circle principally for the sake of

satisfying myself with regard to the real nature and causes of the

phenomena. On this night, something in Mr. Stilton's face arrested my

attention, and a rapid inspiration flashed through my mind. "Suppose," I

thought, "I allow the usual effect to be produced, yet reverse the

character of its operation? I am convinced that he has been directing

the current of my thought according to his will; let me now render

myself so thoroughly passive, that my mind, like a mirror, shall reflect

what passes through his, retaining nothing of my own except the simple

consciousness of what I am doing." Perhaps this was exactly what he

desired. He sat, bending forward a little over the table, his square

jaws firmly set, his eyes hidden beneath their heavy brows, and every

long, wiry hair on his head in its proper place. I fixed my eyes upon

him, threw my mind into a state of perfect receptivity, and waited.

It was not long before I felt his approach. Shadow after shadow flitted

across the still mirror of my inward sense. Whether the thoughts took

words in his brain or in mine,--whether I first caught his disjointed

musings, and, by their utterance reacting upon him, gave system and

development to _his_ thoughts,--I cannot tell. But this I know: what I

said came wholly from him,--not from the slandered spirits of the dead,

not from the vagaries of my own imagination, but from _him_. "Listen to

me!" I said. "In the flesh I was a martyr to the Truth, and I am

permitted to communicate only with those whom the Truth has made free.

You are the heralds of the great day; you have climbed from sphere to

sphere, until now you stand near the fountains of light. But it is not

enough that you see: your lives must reflect the light. The inward

vision is for you, but the outward manifestation thereof is for the

souls of others. Fulfil the harmonies in the flesh. Be the living music,

not the silent instruments."

There was more, much more of this,--a plenitude of eloquent sound, which

seems to embody sublime ideas, but which, carefully examined, contains

no more palpable substance than sea-froth. If the reader will take the

trouble to read an "Epic of the Starry Heavens," the production of a

Spiritual Medium, he will find several hundred pages of the same

character. But, by degrees, the revelation descended to details, and

assumed a personal application. "In you, in all of you, the spiritual

harmonies are still violated," was the conclusion. "You, Abijah Stilton,

who are chosen to hold up the light of truth to the world, require that

a transparent soul, capable of transmitting that light to you, should be

allied to yours. She who is called your wife is a clouded lens; she can

receive the light only through John----, who is her true spiritual

husband, as Abby Fetters is _your_ true spiritual wife!"

I was here conscious of a sudden cessation of the influence which forced

me to speak, and stopped. The members of the circle opposite to me--the

host, his wife, neighbor, and old Mr. Fetters--were silent, but their

faces exhibited more satisfaction than astonishment. My eye fell upon

Mrs. Stilton. Her face was pale, her eyes widely opened, and her lips

dropped apart, with a stunned, bewildered expression. It was the blank

face of a woman walking in her sleep. These observations were

accomplished in an instant; for Miss Fetters, suddenly possessed with

the spirit of Black Hawk, sprang upon her feet. "Ugh! ugh!" she

exclaimed, in a deep, harsh voice, "where's the pale-face? Black Hawk,

he like him,--he love him much!"--and therewith threw her arms around

Stilton, fairly lifting him off his feet. "Ugh! fire-water for Black

Hawk!--big Injun drink!"--and she tossed off a tumbler of brandy. By

this time I had wholly recovered my consciousness, but remained silent,

stupefied by the extraordinary scene.

Presently Miss Fetters became more quiet, and the possession left her.

"My friends," said Stilton, in his cold, unmoved voice, "I feel that the

spirit has spoken truly. We must obey our spiritual affinities, or our

great and glorious mission will be unfulfilled. Let us rather rejoice

that we have been selected as the instruments to do this work. Come to

me, Abby; and you, Rachel, remember that our harmony is not disturbed,

but only made more complete."

"Abijah!" exclaimed Mrs. Stilton, with a pitiful cry, while the tears

burst hot and fast from her eyes; "dear husband, what does this mean?

Oh, don't tell me that I'm to be cast off! You promised to love me and

care for me, Abijah! I'm not bright, I know, but I'll try to understand

you; indeed I will! Oh, don't be so cruel!--don't"----And the poor

creature's voice completely gave way.

She dropped on the floor at his feet, and lay there, sobbing piteously.

"Rachel, Rachel," said he,--and his face was not quite so calm as his

voice,--"don't be rebellious. We are governed by a higher Power. This is

all for our own good, and for the good of the world. Besides, ours was

not a perfect affinity. You will be much happier with John, as he

harmonizes"----

I could endure it no longer. Indignation, pity, the full energy of my

will, possessed me. He lost his power over me then, and forever.

"What!" I exclaimed, "you, blasphemer, beast that you are, you dare to

dispose of your honest wife in this infamous way, that you may be free

to indulge your own vile appetites?--you, who have outraged the dead and

the living alike, by making me utter your forgeries? Take her back, and

let this disgraceful scene end!--take her back, or I will give you a

brand that shall last to the end of your days!"

He turned deadly pale, and trembled. I knew that he made a desperate

effort to bring me under the control of his will, and laughed mockingly

as I saw his knit brow and the swollen veins in his temples. As for the

others, they seemed paralyzed by the suddenness and fierceness of my

attack. He wavered but for an instant, however, and his

self-possession returned.

"Ha!" he exclaimed, "it is the Spirit of Evil that speaks in him! The

Devil himself has risen to destroy our glorious fabric! Help me,

friends! help me to bind him, and to silence his infernal voice, before

he drives the pure spirits from our midst!"

With that, he advanced a step towards me, and raised a hand to seize my

arm, while the others followed behind. But I was too quick for him. Weak

as I was, in comparison, rage gave me strength, and a blow, delivered

with the rapidity of lightning, just under the chin, laid him senseless

on the floor. Mrs. Stilton screamed, and threw herself over him. The

rest of the company remained as if stupefied. The storm which had been

gathering all the evening at the same instant broke over the house in

simultaneous thunder and rain.

I stepped suddenly to the door, opened it, and drew a long, deep breath

of relief, as I found myself alone in the darkness. "Now," said I, "I

have done tampering with God's best gift; I will be satisfied with the

natural sunshine which beams from His Word and from His Works; I have

learned wisdom at the expense of shame!" I exulted in my new freedom, in

my restored purity of soul; and the wind, that swept down the dark,

lonely street, seemed to exult with me. The rains beat upon me, but I

heeded them not; nay, I turned aside from the homeward path, in order to

pass by the house where Agnes lived. Her window was dark, and I knew she

was sleeping, lulled by the storm; but I stood a moment below, in the

rain, and said aloud, softly,--

"Now, Agnes, I belong wholly to you! Pray to God for me, darling, that I

may never lose the true light I have found at last!"

My healing, though complete in the end, was not instantaneous. The habit

of the trance, I found, had really impaired the action of my will. I

experienced a periodic tendency to return to it, which I have been able

to overcome only by the most vigorous efforts. I found it prudent,

indeed, to banish from my mind, as far as was possible, all subjects,

all memories, connected with Spiritualism. In this work I was aided by

Agnes, who now possessed my entire confidence, and who willingly took

upon herself the guidance of my mind at those seasons when my own

governing faculties flagged. Gradually my mental health returned, and I

am now beyond all danger of ever again being led into such fatal

dissipations. The writing of this narrative, in fact, has been a test of

my ability to overlook and describe my experience without being touched

by its past delusions. If some portions of it should not be wholly

intelligible to the reader, the defect lies in the very nature of

the subject.

It will be noticed that I have given but a partial explanation of the

spiritual phenomena. Of the genuineness of the physical manifestations I

am fully convinced, and I can account for them only by the supposition

of some subtile agency whereby the human will operates upon inert

matter. Clairvoyance is a sufficient explanation of the utterances of

the Mediums,--at least of those which I have heard; but there is, as I

have said before, _something_ in the background,--which I feel too

indistinctly to describe, yet which I know to be Evil. I do not wonder

at, though I lament, the prevalence of the belief in Spiritualism. In a

few individual cases it may have been productive of good, but its

general tendency is evil. There are probably but few Stiltons among its

apostles, few Miss Fetterses among its Mediums; but the condition which

accompanies the trance, as I have shown, inevitably removes the

wholesome check which holds our baser passions in subjection. The Medium

is at the mercy of any evil will, and the impressions received from a

corrupt mind are always liable to be accepted by innocent believers as

revelations from the spirits of the holy dead. I shall shock many honest

souls by this confession, but I hope and believe that it may awaken and

enlighten others. Its publication is necessary, as an expiation for some

of the evil which has been done through my own instrumentality.

I learned, two days afterwards, that Stilton (who was not seriously

damaged by my blow) had gone to New York, taking Miss Fetters with him.

Her ignorant, weak-minded father was entirely satisfied with the

proceeding. Mrs. Stilton, helpless and heart-broken, remained at the

house where our circle had met, with her only child, a boy of three

years of age, who, fortunately, inherited her weakness rather than his

father's power. Agnes, on learning this, insisted on having her removed

from associations which were at once unhappy and dangerous. We went

together to see her, and, after much persuasion, and many painful

scenes which I shall not recapitulate, succeeded in sending her to her

father, a farmer in Connecticut. She still remains there, hoping for the

day when her guilty husband shall return and be instantly forgiven.

My task is ended; may it not have been performed in vain!

* * * * *

JOHN ANDRE AND HONORA SNEYD.

Many of our readers will remember the exquisite lines in which Béranger

paints the connection between our mortal lives and the stars of the sky.

With every human soul that finds its way to earth, a new gem is added to

the azure belt of heaven. Thenceforth the two exist in mutual

dependence, each influencing the other's fate; so that, when death comes

to seal the lips of the man, a flame is paled and a lamp extinguished in

the gulf above. In every loosened orb that shoots across the face of

night the experienced eye may trace the story and the fall of a

fellow-being. Youth, beauty, wealth, the humility of indigence and the

pride of power, alike find their term revealed in the bright, silent

course of the celestial spark; and still new signs succeed to provoke

the sympathy or dazzle the philosophy of the observer.

"Quelle est cette étoile qui file,

Qui file, file, et disparait?"

It is unfortunate that such a pretty manner of accounting for the nature

and origin of falling stars should be unsustained by sound astronomical

data, and utterly discountenanced by Herschel and Bond. There is

something in the theory very pleasant and very flattering to human

nature; and there are passages in the history of our race that might

make its promulgation not unacceptable. When, among the innumerable

"patines of bright gold" that strew the floor of heaven, we see one part

from the sphere of its undistinguished fellows, and, filling its pathway

with radiant light, vanish noiselessly into annihilation, we cannot but

be reminded of those characters that, with no apparent reason for being

segregated from the common herd, are, through some strange conjuncture,

hurried from a commonplace life by modes of death that illuminate their

memory with immortal fame. It is thus that the fulfilment of the vow

made in the heat of battle has given Jephthah's name a melancholy

permanence above all others of the captains of Israel. Mutius would long

ago have been forgotten, among the thousands of Roman soldiers as brave

as he, and not less wise, who gave their blood for the good city, but

for the fortunate brazier that stood in the tent of his enemy. And

Leander might have safely passed and repassed the Hellespont for twenty

years without leaving anything behind to interest posterity; it was

failure and death that made him famous.

Eighty years ago a tragedy was consummated by the river Hudson, which,

in the character of its victim and the circumstances of his story, goes

far to yield another example to the list of names immortalized by

calamity. On the 2d of October, 1780, a young British officer of

undistinguished birth and inconsiderable rank was hanged at Tappan.

Amiable as his private life was, and respectable as were his

professional abilities, it is improbable that the memory of John André,

had he died upon the battle-field or in his bed, would have survived the

generation of those who knew and who loved him. The future, indeed, was

opening brilliantly before him; but it was still nothing more than the

future. So far in his career he had hardly accomplished anything better

than the attainment of the mountain-top that commanded a view of the

Promised Land. It is solely and entirely to the occasion and the

circumstances of his death that we are to ascribe the peculiar and

universal interest in his character that has ever since continued to

hold its seat in the bosom of friend and of foe. To this day, the most

distinguished American and English historians are at issue respecting

the justice of his doom; and to this day, the grave inquirer into the

rise and fall of empires pauses by the way to glean some scanty memorial

of his personal adventures. As often happens, the labors of the lesser

author who pursues but a single object may encounter more success on

that score than the writer whose view embraces a prodigious range; and

many trifling details, too inconsiderable to find place in the pages of

the annals of a state, reward the inquiry that confines itself to the

elucidation of the conduct of an individual.

John André was born in England, probably at London,--possibly at

Southampton,--in the year 1751. His father was an honest, industrious

Switzer, who, following the example of his countrymen and his kindred,

had abandoned the rugged land of his birth, and come over to England to

see what could be made out of John Bull. The family-name appears to have

originally been St. André; and this was the style of the famous

dancing-master who gave to the courtiers of Charles II. their

graceful motions.

"St. André's feet ne'er kept more equal time,"

wrote Dryden, in his "MacFlecknoe"; and the same writer again brings him

forward in the third act of "Limberham." It must be remembered that in

those days the teacher of fencing and dancing occupied a very

respectable position; and St. André's career was sufficiently prosperous

to tempt a young kinsman, who felt the elements of success strong within

him, to cross the seas in his own turn, and find wealth and reputation

in those pleasant pastures which England above all other countries then

laid open to the skilful adventurer.

Nicholas St. André, who came to London about the close of the

seventeenth century, and who was undoubtedly nearly related to the

future Major André, seems to have passed through a career hardly

paralleled by that of Gil Blas himself. From the humblest beginnings,

his ready wit, his multifarious accomplishments, and his indomitable

assurance speedily carried him to the topmost wave of social prosperity.

A brief instruction in surgery gave him such a plausible appearance of

proficiency in the art as to permit his public lectures to be favorably

received, and to lead to his employment in the royal household. George

I. made him Anatomist to the Court, and, as a token of especial grace,

on one occasion, went so far as to bestow upon the young Swiss his own

sword. His attainments in all the amusements of a gentleman probably had

more to do with these advancements, however, than any professional

skill. He was a capital linguist; at fencing, leaping, running, and

other manly exercises, he found few rivals; and his dabblings in

architecture and botany were at least as notable as his mastership of

chess and his skill as a musician. But when it came to a scientific test

of his surgical and anatomical pretensions, his failure was lamentable

indeed. The unquenchable thirst for notoriety--which he may have

mistaken for fame--was perpetually leading him into questionable

positions, and finally covered his name with ridicule and confusion.

An impudent woman, known as Mary Tofts, declared to the world, that,

instead of a human child, she had given birth to a litter of rabbits.

How such a ridiculous tale ever found believers, it is impossible to

conceive; but such was the case. All England, with the very small

exception of those who united the possession of learning with common

sense, was imbued with the frenzy. The price of warrens was abated to a

mere song, and for a season a Londoner would as readily have eaten a

baked child as a roasted rabbit. The children of men were believed to

populate the burrows, and authorities of the highest reputation lent an

unhesitating support to the delusion. The learned Whiston published in

the circumstance a fulfilment of a prophecy of Esdras, and St. André

loudly urged the authenticity of the entire fable and of the theories

that were founded upon it. But the satiric pen of Swift, the burin of

Hogarth, and the graver investigations of Cheselden at last turned the

popular tide, and covered St. André in particular with such a load of

contemptuous obloquy as to drive him forever from the high circles he

had moved in. So great was his spleen, that, from that time forth, he

would never suffer a dish upon his table or a syllable in his

conversation that could in any way bring to mind the absurd occasion of

his disgrace.

If all reports are to be believed, St. André's career had led him into

many singular adventures. He had saved Voltaire's life, by violently

detaining Lord Peterborough, when the latter stood prepared to punish

with peremptory death some peccadillo of the Frenchman's. Voltaire fled

from the scene, while his adversary struggled to be released. His

services to Pope, when the poet was overturned in Lord Bolingbroke's

coach, did not protect him from a damaging allusion in the Epilogue to

the Satires, where the source of the wealth that he got by his marriage

with Lady Betty Molyneux is more plainly than politely pointed out.

Leaving forever, therefore, the sphere in which he had encountered so

much favor and so much severity, he retired to Southampton to end his

days in the society of his kindred; and it is more than probable that an

indisposition to proclaim too loudly their identity of race with the

unlucky surgeon was the cause of their modification of name by the

immediate family from which John André sprung.

The father of our hero was a thrifty London trader, whose business as a

Turkey merchant had been prosperous enough to persuade him that no other

career could possibly be so well adapted for his son. The lad was of

another opinion; but those were not the days when a parent's will might

be safely contravened. Sent to Geneva to complete the education that had

been commenced at London, he returned to a seat in the counting-room

with intellectual qualifications that seemed to justify his aspirations

for a very different scene of action. He was a fluent linguist, a ready

and graceful master of the pencil and brush, and very well versed in the

schools of military design. Add to these a proficiency in poetry and

music, a person of unusual symmetry and grace, a face of almost feminine

softness, yet not descending from the dignity of manhood, and we have an

idea of the youth who was already meditating the means of throwing off

the chains that bound him to the inkhorn and ledger, and embracing a

more brilliant and glorious career. With him, the love of fame was an

instinctive passion. The annals of his own fireside taught him how

easily the path to distinction might be trod by men of parts and

address; and he knew in his heart that opportunity was the one and the

only thing needful to insure the accomplishment of his desires. Of very

moderate fortunes and utterly destitute of influential connections, he

knew that his education better qualified him for the useful fulfilment

of military duties than perhaps any man of his years in the service of

the king. Once embarked in the profession of arms, he had nothing to

rely upon but his own address to secure patronage and promotion,--nothing

but his own merits to justify the countenance that his ingenuity

should win. Without undue vanity, it is tolerably safe to say

now that he was authorized by the existing state of things to

confidently predicate his own success on these estimates.

It is not easy to underrate the professional standard of the English

officer a hundred years ago. That some were good cannot be denied; that

most were bad is very certain. As there was no school of military

instruction in the realm, so no proof of mental or even of physical

capacity was required to enable a person to receive and to hold a

commission. A friend at the Horse Guards, or the baptismal gift of a

godfather, might nominate a baby three days old to a pair of colors.

Court influence or the ready cash having thus enrolled a puny suckling

among the armed defenders of the state, he might in regular process of

seniority come out a full-fledged captain or major against the season

for his being soundly birched at Eton; and an ignorant school-boy would

thus be qualified to govern the lives and fortunes of five hundred

stalwart men, and to represent the honor and the interests of the empire

in that last emergency when all might be depending on his courage and

capacity. Even women were thus saddled upon the pay-lists; and the time

is within the memory of living men, when a gentle lady, whose knowledge

of arms may be presumed to have never extended beyond the internecine

disputes of the nursery, habitually received the salary of a captaincy

of dragoons. In ranks thus officered, it was easy to foresee the speedy

and sure triumph of competent ability, when once backed by patronage.

So long, however, as his dependence upon his father endured, it was

useless for André to anticipate the day when he might don the king's

livery. The repugnance with which his first motion in the matter was

greeted, and the affectionate opposition of his mother and sisters, seem

to have at least silenced, if they did not extinguish his desires. And

when the death of his father, in 1769, left him free to select his own

pathway through the world, a new conjuncture of affairs again caused him

to smother his cherished aspirations.

The domestic relations of the André family were ever peculiarly tender

and affectionate; and in the loss of its head the survivors confessed a

great and a corroding sorrow. To repair the shattered health and recruit

the exhausted spirits of his mother and sisters, the son resolved to

lead them at once away from the daily contemplation of the grave to more

cheerful scenes. The medicinal waters of Derbyshire were then in vogue,

and a tour towards the wells of Buxton and of Matlock was undertaken.

Among the acquaintances that ensued from this expedition was that of the

family of the Rev. Mr. Seward of Lichfield; and while a warm and lasting

friendship rapidly grew up between André and Miss Anna Seward, his heart

was surrendered to the charms of her adopted sister, Miss Honora Sneyd.

By every account, Honora Sneyd must have been a paragon of feminine

loveliness. Her father was a country-gentleman of Staffordshire, who had

been left, by the untimely death of their mother, to the charge of a

bevy of infants. The solicitude of friends and relatives had sought the

care of these, and thus Honora became virtually a daughter of Mrs.

Seward's house. The character of this establishment may be conjectured

from the history of Anna Seward. Remote from the crushing weight of

London authority, she grew up in a provincial atmosphere of literary and

social refinement, and fondly believed that the polite praises (for

censure was a thing unknown among them) that were bandied about in her

own coterie would be cordially echoed by the voices of posterity. In

this she has been utterly deceived; but at the same time it must be

confessed that there was much in the tone of the reigning circles at

Lichfield, in those days, to contrast most favorably with the manners of

the literary sovereigns of the metropolis, or the intellectual elevation

of the rulers of fashion. At Lichfield, it was polite to be learned, and

good-breeding and mutual admiration went hand in hand.

In such an atmosphere had Miss Sneyd been educated; and the

enthusiastic, not to say romantic, disposition of Miss Seward must have

given additional effect to every impulse that taught her to acknowledge

and rejoice in the undisguised admiration of the young London merchant.

His sentiments were as pure and lofty as her own; his person was as

attractive as that of any hero of romance; and his passion was deep and

true. With the knowledge and involuntary approbation of all their

friends, the love-affair between the two young people went on without

interruption or opposition. It seemed perfectly natural and proper that

they should be brought together. It was not, therefore, until a formal

betrothal began to loom up, that the seniors on either side bethought

themselves of the consequences. Neither party was a beggar; but neither

was in possession of sufficient estate to render a speedy marriage

advisable. It was concluded, then, to prohibit any engagement, which

must inevitably extend over several years, between two young persons

whose acquaintance was of so modern a date, and whose positions involved

a prolonged and wide separation. To this arrangement it would appear

that Honora yielded a more implicit assent than her lover. His feelings

were irretrievably interested; and he still proposed to himself to press

his suit without intermission during the term of his endurance. His

mistress, whose affections had not yet passed entirely beyond her own

control, was willing to receive as a friend the man whom she was

forbidden to regard as an elected husband.

It was by the representations of Miss Seward, who strongly urged on him

the absolute necessity of his adherence to trade, if he wished to secure

the means of accomplishing matrimony, that André was now persuaded to

renounce, for some years longer, his desire for the army. He went back

to London, and applied himself diligently to his business. An occasional

visit to Lichfield, and a correspondence that he maintained with Miss

Seward, served to keep his flame sufficiently alive. His letters are

vivacious and characteristic, and the pen-and-ink drawings with which

his text was embellished gave them additional interest. Here is a

specimen of them. It will be noted, that, according to the sentimental

fashion of the day, his correspondent must be called Julia because her

name is Anna.

"_London, October_ 19, 1769.

"From the midst of books, papers, bills, and other implements of gain,

let me lift up my drowsy head awhile to converse with dear Julia. And

first, as I know she has a fervent wish to see me a quill-driver, I must

tell her that I begin, as people are wont to do, to look upon my future

profession with great partiality. I no longer see it in so

disadvantageous a light. Instead of figuring a merchant as a middle-aged

man, with a bob wig, a rough beard, in snuff-coloured clothes, grasping

a guinea in his red hand, I conceive a comely young man, with a

tolerable pig-tail, wielding a pen with all the noble fierceness of the

Duke of Marlborough brandishing a truncheon upon a sign-post, surrounded

with types and emblems, and canopied with cornucopias that disembogue

their stores upon his head; Mercuries reclin'd upon bales of goods;

Genii playing with pens, ink, and paper; while, in perspective, his

gorgeous vessels 'launched on the bosom of the silver Thames' are

wafting to distant lands the produce of this commercial nation. Thus all

the mercantile glories crowd on my fancy, emblazoned in the most

effulgent colouring of an ardent imagination. Borne on her soaring

pinions, I wing my flight to the time when Heaven shall have crowned my

labours with success and opulence. I see sumptuous palaces rising to

receive me; I see orphans, and widows, and painters, and fidlers, and

poets, and builders, protected and encouraged; and when the fabrick is

pretty nearly finished by my shattered pericranium, I cast my eyes

around, and find John André by a small coal-fire in a gloomy

compting-house in Warnford Court, nothing so little as what he has been

making himself, and in all probability never to be much more than he is

at present. But, oh! my dear Honora! it is for thy sake only I wish for

wealth.--You say she was somewhat better at the time you wrote last. I

must flatter myself that she will soon be without any remains of this

threatening disease.

"It is seven o'clock.--You and Honora, with two or three more select

friends, are now probably encircling your dressing-room fireplace. What

would I not give to enlarge that circle! The idea of a clean hearth, and

a snug circle round it, formed by a few select friends, transports me.

You seem combined together against the inclemency of the weather, the

hurry, bustle, ceremony, censoriousness, and envy of the world. The

purity, the warmth, the kindly influence of fire, to all for whom it is

kindled, is a good emblem of the friendship of such amiable minds as

Julia's and her Honora's. Since I cannot be there in reality, pray,

imagine me with you; admit me to your _conversationés_:--Think how I

wish for the blessing of joining them!--and be persuaded that I take

part in all your pleasures, in the dear hope, that, ere it be very long,

your blazing hearth will burn again for me. Pray, keep me a place; let

the poker, tongs, or shovel represent me:--But you have Dutch tiles,

which are infinitely better; so let Moses, or Aaron, or Balaam's ass be

my representative.

"But time calls me to Clapton. I quit you abruptly till to-morrow: when,

if I do not tear the nonsense I have been writing, I may perhaps

increase its quantity. Signora Cynthia is in clouded majesty. Silvered

with her beams, I am about to jog to Clapton upon my own stumps; musing,

as I homeward plod my way.--Ah! need I name the subject of my

contemplations?

"_Thursday_.

"I had a sweet walk home last night, and found the Claptonians, with

their fair guest, a Miss Mourgue, very well. My sisters send their

amities, and will write in a few days.

"This morning I returned to town. It has been the finest day imaginable;

a solemn mildness was diffused throughout the blue horizon; its light

was clear and distinct rather than dazzling; the serene beams of an

autumnal sun! Gilded hills, variegated woods, glittering spires,

ruminating herds, bounding flocks, all combined to enchant the eyes,

expand the heart, and 'chase all sorrows but despair.' In the midst of

such a scene, no lesser sorrow can prevent our sympathy with Nature. A

calmness, a benevolent disposition seizes us with sweet, insinuating

power. The very brute creation seem sensible of these beauties. There is

a species of mild chearfulness in the face of a lamb, which I have but

indifferently expressed in a corner of my paper, and a demure, contented

look in an ox, which, in the fear of expressing still worse, I leave

unattempted.

"Business calls me away--I must dispatch my letter. Yet what does it

contain? No matter--You like anything better than news. Indeed, you have

never told me so; but I have an intuitive knowledge upon the subject,

from the sympathy which I have constantly perceived in the tastes of

Julia and _Cher Jean_. What is it to you or me,

"If here in the city we have nothing but riot;

If the Spitalfield weavers can't be kept quiet;

If the weather is fine, or the streets should be dirty;

Or if Mr. Dick Wilson died aged of thirty?

"But if I was to hearken to the versifying grumbling I feel within me, I

should fill my paper, and not have room left to intreat that you would

plead my cause with Honora more eloquently than the enclosed letter has

the power of doing. Apropos of verses, you desire me to recollect my

random description of the engaging appearance of the charming Mrs.----.

Here it is at your service.

"Then rustling and bustling the lady comes down,

With a flaming red face and a broad yellow gown,

And a hobbling out-of-breath gait, and a frown.

"This little French cousin of our's, Delarise, was my sister Mary's

playfellow at Paris. His sprightliness engages my sisters extremely.

Doubtless they tell much of him to you in their letters.

"How sorry I am to bid you adieu! Oh, let me not be forgot by the

friends most dear to you at Lichfield. Lichfield! Ah, of what magic

letters is that little word composed! How graceful it looks, when it is

written! Let nobody talk to me of its original meaning, 'The Field of

Blood'! Oh, no such thing! It is the field of joy! 'The beautiful city,

that lifts her fair head in the valley, and says, _I am, and there is

none beside me.'_ Who says she is vain? Julia will not say so,--nor yet

Honora,--and least of all, their devoted

"John André."

It is not difficult to perceive in the tone of this letter that its

writer was not an accepted lover. His interests with the lady, despite

Miss Seward's watchful care, were already declining; and the lapse of a

few months more reduced him to the level of a valued and entertaining

friend, whose civilities were not to pass the conventional limits of

polite intercourse. To André this fate was very hard. He was hopelessly

enamored; and so long as fortune offered him the least hope of eventual

success, he persevered in the faith that Honora might yet be his own.

But every returning day must have shaken this faith. His visits were

discontinued and his correspondence dropped. Other suitors pressed their

claims, and often urged an argument which it was beyond his means to

supply. They came provided with what Parson Hugh calls good gifts:

"Seven hundred pounds and possibilities is good gifts." Foremost among

these dangerous rivals were two men of note in their way: Richard Lovell

Edgeworth, and the eccentric, but amiable Thomas Day.

Mr. Day was a man whose personal charms were not great. Overgrown,

awkward, pitted with the small-pox, he offered no pleasing contrast to

the discarded André: but he had twelve hundred pounds a year. His

notions in regard to women were as peculiar as his estimate of his own

merit. He seems to have really believed that it would be impossible for

any beautiful girl to refuse her assent to the terms of the contract by

which she might acquire his hand. These were absurd to a degree; and it

is not cause for surprise that Miss Sneyd should have unhesitatingly

refused them. Poor Mr. Day was not prepared for such continued ill-luck

in his matrimonial projects. He had already been very unfortunate in his

plans for obtaining a perfect wife,--having vainly provided for the

education of two foundlings between whom he promised himself to select a

paragon of a helpmate. To drop burning sealing-wax upon their necks, and

to discharge a pistol close to their ears, were among his philosophical

rules for training them to habits of submission and self-control; and

the upshot was, that they were fain to attach themselves to men of less

wisdom, but better taste. Miss Sneyd's conduct was more than he could

well endure, after all his previous disappointments; and he went to bed

with a fever that did not leave him till his passion was cured. He could

not at this time have anticipated, however, that the friendly hand which

had aided the prosecution of his addresses was eventually destined to

receive and hold the fair prize which so many were contending for.

Richard Lovell Edgeworth, the ambassador and counsellor of Mr. Day in

this affair, was at the very moment of the rejection himself enamored of

Miss Sneyd. But Edgeworth had a wife already,--a pining, complaining

woman, he tells us, who did not make his home cheerful,--and honor and

decency forbade him to open his mouth on the subject that occupied his

heart. He wisely sought refuge in flight, and in other scenes the

natural exuberance of his disposition afforded a relief from the pangs

of an unlawful and secret passion. Lord Byron, who met him forty years

afterwards, in five lines shows us the man: if he was thus seen in the

dry wood, we can imagine what he was in the green:--"I thought Edgeworth

a fine old fellow, of a clarety, elderly, red complexion, but active,

brisk, and endless. He was seventy, but did not look fifty,--no, nor

forty-eight even." He was in France when the death of his father left

him to the possession of a good estate,--and that of his wife occurring

in happy concurrence, he lost little time in opening in his own behalf

the communications that had failed when he spoke for Mr. Day. His wooing

was prosperous; in July, 1773, he married Miss Sneyd.

It is a mistake, sanctioned by the constant acceptance of historians, to

suppose that it was this occasion that prompted André to abandon a

commercial life. The improbability of winning Honora's hand, and the

freedom with which she received the addresses of other men, undoubtedly

went far to convince him of the folly of sticking to trade with but one

motive; and so soon as he attained his majority, he left the desk and

stool forever, and entered the army. This was a long time before the

Edgeworth marriage was undertaken, or even contemplated.

Lieutenant André of the Royal Fusileers had a very different line of

duty to perform from Mr. André, merchant, of Warnford Court, Throgmorton

Street; and the bustle of military life, doubtless, in some degree

diverted his mind from the disagreeable contemplation of what was

presently to occur at Lichfield. Some months were spent on the Continent

and among the smaller German courts about the Rhine. After all was over,

however, and the nuptial knot fairly tied that destroyed all his

youthful hopes, he is related to have made a farewell expedition to the

place of his former happiness. There, at least, he was sure to find one

sympathizing heart. Miss Seward, who had to the very last minute

contended with her friend against Mr. Edgeworth and in support of his

less fortunate predecessor, now met him with open arms. No pains were

spared by her to alleviate, since she could not remove, the

disappointment that evidently possessed him. A legend is preserved in

connection with this visit that is curious, though manifestly of very

uncertain credibility. It is said that an engagement had been made by

Miss Seward to introduce her friend to two gentlemen of some note in the

neighborhood, Mr. Cunningham and Mr. Newton. On the appointed morning,

while awaiting their expected guests, Cunningham related to his

companion a vision--or rather, a series of visions--that had greatly

disturbed his previous night's repose. He was alone in a wide forest, he

said, when he perceived a rider approaching him. The horseman's

countenance was plainly visible, and its lines were of a character too

interesting to be readily forgotten. Suddenly three men sprang forth

from an ambush among the thickets, and, seizing the stranger, hauled him

from his horse and bore him away. To this succeeded another scene. He

stood with a great multitude near by some foreign town. A bustle was

heard, and he beheld the horseman of his earlier dream again led along a

captive. A gibbet was erected, and the prisoner was at once hanged. In

narrating this tale, Cunningham averred that the features of its hero

were still fresh in his recollection; the door opened, and in the face

of André, who at that moment presented himself, he professed to

recognize that which had so troubled his slumbers.

Such is the tale that is recorded of the supernatural revelation of

André's fate. If it rested on somewhat better evidence than any we are

able to find in its favor, it would be at least more interesting. But

whether or no the young officer continued to linger in the spirit about

the spires of Lichfield and the romantic shades of Derbyshire, it is

certain that his fleshly part was moving in a very different direction.

In 1774, he embarked to join his regiment, then posted in Canada, and

arrived at Philadelphia early in the autumn of the year.

It is not within the design of this paper to pursue to any length the

details of André's American career. Regimental duties in a country

district rarely afford matter worthy of particular record; and it is not

until the troubles of our Revolutionary War break out, that we find

anything of mark in his story. He was with the troops that Carleton sent

down, after the fall of Ticonderoga, to garrison Chambly and St. John's,

and to hold the passage of the Sorel against Montgomery and his little

army. With the fall of these forts, he went into captivity. There is

too much reason to believe that the imprisonment of the English on this

occasion was not alleviated by many exhibitions of generosity on the

part of their captors. Montgomery, indeed, was as humane and honorable

as he was brave; but he was no just type of his followers. The articles

of capitulation were little regarded, and the prisoners were, it would

seem, rapidly despoiled of their private effects. "I have been taken by

the Americans," wrote André, "and robbed of everything save the picture

of Honora, which I concealed in my mouth. Preserving that, I think

myself happy." Sent into the remote parts of Pennsylvania, his

companions and himself met with but scant measure of courtesy from the

mountaineers of that region; nor was he exchanged for many long and

weary months. Once more free, however, his address and capacity soon

came to his aid. His reports and sketches speedily commended him to the

especial favor of the commander-in-chief, Sir William Howe; and ere long

he was promoted to a captaincy and made aide-de-camp to Sir Charles

Grey. This was a dashing, hard-fighting general of division, whose

element was close quarters and whose favorite argument was the cold

steel. If, therefore, André played but an inactive part at the

Brandywine, he had ample opportunity on other occasions of tasting the

excitement and the horrors of war. The night-surprises of Wayne at

Paoli, and of Baylor on the Hudson,--the scenes of Germantown and

Monmouth,--the reduction of the forts at Verplanck's Ferry, and the

forays led against New Bedford and the Vineyard,--all these familiarized

him with the bloody fruits of civil strife. But they never blunted for

one moment the keenness of his humanity, or warped those sentiments of

refinement and liberality that always distinguished him. Within the

limited range of his narrow sphere, he was constantly found the friend

and reliever of the wounded or captive Americans, and the protector and

benefactor of the followers of his own banner. Accomplished to a degree

in all the graces that adorn the higher circles of society, he was free

from most of their vices; and those who knew him well in this country

have remarked on the universal approbation of both sexes that followed

his steps, and the untouched heart that escaped so many shafts. Nor,

while foremost in the brilliant pleasures that distinguished the British

camp and made Philadelphia a Capua to Howe, was he ever known to descend

to the vulgar sports of his fellows. In the balls, the theatricals, the

picturesque _Mischianza_, he bore a leading hand; but his affections,

meanwhile, appear to have remained where they were earliest and last

bestowed. In our altered days, when marriage and divorce seem so often

interchangeable words, and loyal fidelity but an Old-World phrase,

ill-fashioned and out of date, there is something very attractive in

this hopeless constancy of an exiled lover.

Beyond the seas, meanwhile, the object of this unfortunate attachment

was lending a happy and a useful life in the fulfilment of the various

duties of a wife, a mother, and a friend. Her husband was a large landed

proprietor, and in public spirit was inferior to no country-gentleman of

the kingdom. Many of his notions were fanciful enough, it must be

allowed; but they were all directed to the improvement and amelioration

of his native land and its people. In these pursuits, as well as in

those of learning, Mrs. Edgeworth was the active and useful coadjutor of

her husband; and it was probably to the desire of this couple to do

something that would make the instruction of their children a less

painful task than had been their own, that we are indebted for the

adaptation of the simpler rudiments of science to a childish dress. In

1778 they wrote together the First Part of "Harry and Lucy," and printed

a handful of copies in that largo black type which every one associates

with the first school-days of his childhood. From these pages she taught

her own children to read. The plan was communicated to Mr. Day, who

entered into it eagerly; and an educational library seemed about to be

prepared for the benefit of a far-away household in the heart of

Ireland. But a hectic disorder, that had threatened Mrs. Edgeworth's

life while yet a child, now returned upon her with increased virulence;

and the kind and beautiful mistress of Edgeworthstown was compelled to

forego this and every other earthly avocation. Mr. Day expanded his

little tale into the delightful story of "Sandford and Merton," a book

that long stood second only to "Robinson Crusoe" in the youthful

judgment of the great boy-world; and in later years, Maria Edgeworth

included "Harry and Lucy" in her "Early Lessons." It is thus a point to

be noticed, that nothing but the _res angusta domi_, the lack of wealth,

on the part of young André, was the cause of that series of little

volumes being produced by Miss Edgeworth, which so long held the first

place among the literary treasures of the nurseries of England and

America. Lazy Lawrence, Simple Susan, and a score more of excellently

conceived characters, might never have been called from chaos to

influence thousands of tender minds, but for André's narrow purse.

The ravages of the insidious disease with which she was afflicted soon

came to an end; and after a term of wedlock as brief as it was

prosperous, Mrs. Edgeworth's dying couch was spread.--"I have every

blessing," she wrote, "and I am happy. The conversation of my beloved

husband, when my breath will let me have it, is my greatest delight: he

procures me every comfort, and, as he always said he thought he should,

contrives for me everything that can ease and assist my weakness,--

"'Like a kind angel, whispers peace,

And smooths the bed of death.'"

Rightly viewed, the closing scenes in the life of this estimable woman

are not less solemn, not less impressive, than those of that memorable

day, when, with all the awful ceremonials of offended justice and the

stern pageantries of war, her lover died in the full glare of noonday

before the eyes of assembled thousands. He had played for a mighty

stake, and he had lost. He had perilled his life for the destruction of

our American empire, and he was there to pay the penalty: and surely

never, in all the annals of our race, has a man more gallantly yielded

up his forfeited breath, or under circumstances more impressive. He

perished regretted alike by friend and foe; and perhaps not one of the

throng that witnessed his execution but would have rejoicingly hailed a

means of reconciling his pardon with the higher and inevitable duties

which they owed to the safety of the army and the existence of the

state. And in the aspect which the affair has since taken, who can say

that André's fate has been entirely unfortunate? He drank out the wine

of life while it was still sparkling and foaming and bright in his cup:

he tasted none of the bitterness of its lees till almost his last sun

had risen. When he was forever parted from the woman whom he loved, a

new, but not an earthly mistress succeeded to the vacant throne; and

thenceforth the love of glory possessed his heart exclusively. And how

rarely has a greater lustre attached to any name than to his! His bones

are laid with those of the wisest and mightiest of the land; the

gratitude of monarchs cumbers the earth with his sepulchral honors; and

his memory is consecrated in the most eloquent pages of the history not

only of his own country, but of that which sent him out of existence.

Looked upon thus, death might have been welcomed by him as a benefit

rather than dreaded as a calamity, and the words applied by Cicero to

the fate of Crassus be repeated with fresh significancy,--"_Mors dortata

quam vita erepta_."

The same year that carries on its records the date of André's fall

witnessed the death of a second Honora Edgeworth, the only surviving

daughter of Honora Sneyd. She is represented as having inherited all the

beauty, all the talents of her mother. The productions of her pen and

pencil seem to justify this assertion, so far as the precocity of such a

mere child may warrant the ungarnered fruits of future years. But with

her parent's person she received the frailties of its constitution; and,

ere girlhood had fairly opened upon her way of life, she succumbed to

the same malady that had wrecked her mother.

* * * * *

WE SHALL RISE AGAIN.

We know the spirit shall not taste of death:

Earth bids her elements,

"Turn, turn again to me!"

But to the soul, unto the soul, she saith,

"Flee, alien, flee!"

And circumstance of matter what doth weigh?

Oh! not the height and depth of this to know

But reachings of that grosser element,

Which, entered in and clinging to it so,

With earthlier earthiness than dwells in clay,

Can drag the spirit down, that, looking up,

Sees, through surrounding shades of death and time,

With solemn wonder, and with new-born hope,

The dawning glories of its native clime;

And inly swell such mighty floods of love,

Unutterable longing and desire,

For that celestial, blessed home above,

The soul springs upward like the mounting fire,

Up, through the lessening shadows on its way,

While, in its raptured vision, grows more clear

The calm, the high, illimitable day

To which it draws more near and yet more near.

Draws near? Alas! its brief, its waning strength

Upward no more the fetters' weight can bear:

It falters,--pauses,--sinks; and, sunk at length,

Plucks at its chain in frenzy and despair.

Not forever fallen! Not in eternal prison!

No! hell with fire of pain

Melteth apart its chain;

Heaven doth once more constrain:

It hath arisen!

And never, never again, thus to fall low?

Ah, no!

Terror, Remorse, and Woe,

Vainly they pierced it through with many sorrows;

Hell shall regain it,--thousand times regain it;

But can detain it

Only awhile from ruthful Heaven's to-morrows.

That sin is suffering,

It knows,--it knows this thing;

And yet it courts the sting

That deeply pains it;

It knows that in the cup

The sweet is but a sup,

That Sorrow fills it up,

And who drinks drains it.

It knows; who runs may read.

But, when the fetters dazzle, heaven's far joy seems dim;

And 'tis not life but so to be inwound.

A little while, and then--behold it bleed

With madness of its throes to be unbound!

It knows. But when the sudden stress

Of passion is resistlessness,

It drags the flood that sweeps away,

For anchorage, or hold, or stay,

Or saving rock of stableness,

And there is none,--

No underlying fixedness to fasten on:

Unsounded depths; unsteadfast seas;

Wavering, yielding, bottomless depths:

But these!

Yea, sometimes seemeth gone

The Everlasting Arm we lean upon!

So blind, as well as maimed and halt and lame,

What sometimes makes it see?

Oppressed with guilt and gnawed upon of shame,

What comes upon it so,

Faster and faster stealing,

Flooding it like an air or sea

Of warm and golden feeling?

What makes it melt,

Dissolving from the earthiness that made it hard and heavy?

What makes it melt and flow,

And melt and melt and flow,--

Till light, clear-shining through its heart of dew,

Makes all things new?

Loosed from the spirit of infirmity, listen its cry.

"Was it I that longed for oblivion,

O wonderful Love! was it I,

That deep in its easeful water

My wounded soul might lie?

That over the wounds and anguish

The easeful flood might roll?

A river of loving-kindness

Has healed and hidden the whole.

Lo! in its pitiful bosom

Vanish the sins of my youth,--

Error and shame and backsliding

Lost in celestial ruth.

"O grace too great!

O excellency of my new estate!

"No more, for the friends that love me,

I shall veil my face or grieve

Because love outrunneth deserving;

I shall be as they believe.

And I shall be strong to help them,

Filled of Thy fulness with stores

Of comfort and hope and compassion.

Oh, upon all my shores,

With the waters with which Thou dost flood me,

Bid me, my Father, o'erflow!

Who can taste Thy divineness,

Nor hunger and thirst to bestow?

Send me, oh, send me!

The wanderers let me bring!

The thirsty let me show

Where the rivers of gladness spring,

And fountains of mercy flow!

How in the hills shall they sit and sing,

With valleys of peace below!"

Oh that the keys of our hearts the angels would bear in their bosoms!

For revelation fades and fades away,

Dream-like becomes, and dim, and far-withdrawn;

And evening comes to find the soul a prey,

That was caught up to visions at the dawn;

Sword of the spirit,--still it sheathes in rust,

And lips of prophecy are sealed with dust.

High lies the better country,

The land of morning and perpetual spring;

But graciously the warder

Over its mountain-border

Leans to us, beckoning,--bids us, "Come up hither!"

And though we climb with step unfixed and slow,

From visioning heights of hope we look off thither,

And we must go.

And we shall go! And we shall go!

We shall not always weep and wander so,--

Not always in vain,

By merciful pain,

Be upcast from the hell we seek again!

How shall we,

Whom the stars draw so, and the uplifting sea?

Answer, thou Secret Heart! how shall it be,

With all His infinite promising in thee?

Beloved! beloved! not cloud and fire alone

From bondage and the wilderness restore

And guide the wandering spirit to its own;

But all His elements, they go before:

Upon its way the seasons bring,

And hearten with foreshadowing

The resurrection-wonder,

What lands of death awake to sing

And germs of hope swell under;

And full and fine, and full and fine,

The day distils life's golden wine;

And night is Palace Beautiful, peace-chambered.

All things are ours; and life fills up of them

Such measure as we hold.

For ours beyond the gate,

The deep things, the untold,

We only wait.

THE PROFESSOR'S STORY.

CHAPTER XXIII.

THE WILD HUNTSMAN.

The young master had not forgotten the old Doctor's cautions. Without

attributing any great importance to the warning he had given him, Mr.

Bernard had so far complied with his advice that he was becoming a

pretty good shot with the pistol. It was an amusement as good as many

others to practise, and he had taken a fancy to it after the first

few days.

The popping of a pistol at odd hours in the back-yard of the Institute

was a phenomenon more than sufficiently remarkable to be talked about in

Rockland. The viscous intelligence of a country-village is not easily

stirred by the winds which ripple the fluent thought of great cities,

but it holds every straw and entangles every insect that lights upon it.

It soon became rumored in the town that the young master was a wonderful

shot with the pistol. Some said he could hit a fo'pence-ha'penny at

three rod; some, that he had shot a swallow, flying, with a single ball;

some, that he snuffed a candle five times out of six at ten paces, and

that he could hit any button in a man's coat he wanted to. In other

words, as in all such cases, all the common feats were ascribed to him,

as the current jokes of the day are laid at the door of any noted wit,

however innocent he may be of them.

In the natural course of things, Mr. Richard Venner, who had by this

time made some acquaintances, as we have seen, among that class of the

population least likely to allow a live cinder of gossip to go out for

want of air, had heard incidentally that the master up there at the

Institute was all the time practising with a pistol, that they say he

can snuff a candle at ten rods, (that was Mrs. Blanche Creamer's

version,) and that he could hit anybody he wanted to right in the eye,

as far as he could see the white of it.

Dick did not like the sound of all this any too well. Without believing

more than half of it, there was enough to make the Yankee schoolmaster

too unsafe to be trifled with. However, shooting at a mark was pleasant

work enough; he had no particular objection to it himself. Only he did

not care so much for those little popgun affairs that a man carries in

his pocket, and with which you couldn't shoot a fellow,--a robber,

say,--without getting the muzzle under his nose. Pistols for boys;

long-range rifles for men. There was such a gun lying in a closet with

the fowling-pieces. He would go out into the fields and see what he

could do as a marksman.

The nature of the mark that Dick chose for experimenting upon was

singular. He had found some panes of glass which had been removed from

an old sash, and he placed these successively before his target,

arranging them at different angles. He found that a bullet would go

through the glass without glancing or having its force materially

abated. It was an interesting fact in physics, and might prove of some

practical significance hereafter. Nobody knows what may turn up to

render these out-of-the-way facts useful. All this was done in a quiet

way in one of the bare spots high up the side of The Mountain. He was

very thoughtful in taking the precaution to get so far away;

rifle-bullets are apt to glance and come whizzing about people's ears,

if they are fired in the neighborhood of houses. Dick satisfied himself

that he could be tolerably sure of hitting a pane of glass at a distance

of thirty rods, more or less, and that, if there happened to be anything

behind it, the glass would not materially alter the force or direction

of the bullet.

About this time it occurred to him also that there was an old

accomplishment of his which he would be in danger of losing for want of

practice, if he did not take some opportunity to try his hand and regain

its cunning, if it had begun to be diminished by disuse. For his first

trial, he chose an evening when the moon was shining, and after the hour

when the Rockland people were like to be stirring abroad. He was so far

established now that he could do much as he pleased without

exciting remark.

The prairie horse he rode, the mustang of the Pampas, wild as he was,

had been trained to take part in at least one exercise. This was the

accomplishment in which Mr. Richard now proposed to try himself. For

this purpose he sought the implement of which, as it may be remembered,

he had once made an incidental use,--the lasso, or long strip of hide

with a slip-noose at the end of it. He had been accustomed to playing

with such a thong from his boyhood, and had become expert in its use in

capturing wild cattle in the course of his adventures. Unfortunately,

there were no wild bulls likely to be met with in the neighborhood, to

become the subjects of his skill. A stray cow in the road, an ox or a

horse in a pasture, must serve his turn,--dull beasts, but moving marks

to aim at, at any rate.

Never, since he had galloped in the chase over the Pampas, had Dick

Venner felt such a sense of life and power as when he struck the long

spurs into his wild horse's flanks, and dashed along the road with the

lasso lying like a coiled snake at the saddle-bow. In skilful hands, the

silent, bloodless noose, flying like an arrow, but not like that leaving

a wound behind it,--sudden as a pistol-shot, but without the tell-tale

explosion,--is one of the most fearful and mysterious weapons that arm

the hand of man. The old Romans knew how formidable, even in contest

with a gladiator equipped with sword, helmet, and shield, was the almost

naked _retiarius_ with his net in one hand and his three-pronged javelin

in the other. Once get a net over a man's head, or a cord round his

neck, or, what is more frequently done nowadays, _bonnet_ him by

knocking his hat down over his eyes, and he is at the mercy of his

opponent. Our soldiers who served against the Mexicans found this out

too well. Many a poor fellow has been lassoed by the fierce riders from

the plains, and fallen an easy victim to the captor who had snared him

in the fatal noose.

But, imposing as the sight of the wild huntsmen of the Pampas might have

been, Dick could not help laughing at the mock sublimity of his

situation, as he tried his first experiment on an unhappy milky mother

who had strayed from her herd and was wandering disconsolately along the

road, laying the dust, as she went, with thready streams from her

swollen, swinging udders. "Here goes the Don at the windmill!" said

Dick, and tilted full speed at her, whirling the lasso round his head as

he rode. The creature swerved to one side of the way, as the wild horse

and his rider came rushing down upon her, and presently turned and ran,

as only cows and--it wouldn't be safe to say it--can run. Just before he

passed,--at twenty or thirty feet from her,--the lasso shot from his

hand, uncoiling as it flew, and in an instant its loop was round her

horns. "Well cast!" said Dick, as he galloped up to her side and

dexterously disengaged the lasso. "Now for a horse on the run!"

He had the good luck to find one, presently, grazing in a pasture at the

roadside. Taking down the rails of the fence at one point, he drove the

horse into the road and gave chase. It was a lively young animal enough,

and was easily roused to a pretty fast pace. As his gallop grew more and

more rapid, Dick gave the reins to the mustang, until the two horses

stretched themselves out in their longest strides. If the first feat

looked like play, the one he was now to attempt had a good deal the

appearance of real work. He touched the mustang with the spur, and in a

few fierce leaps found himself nearly abreast of the frightened animal

he was chasing. Once more he whirled the lasso round and round over his

head, and then shot it forth, as the rattlesnake shoots his head from

the loops against which it rests. The noose was round the horse's neck,

and in another instant was tightened so as almost to stop his breath.

The prairie horse knew the trick of the cord, and leaned away from the

captive, so as to keep the thong tensely stretched between his neck and

the peak of the saddle to which it was fastened. Struggling was of no

use with a halter round his windpipe, and he very soon began to tremble

and stagger,--blind, no doubt, and with a roaring in his ears as of a

thousand battle-trumpets,--at any rate, subdued and helpless. That was

enough. Dick loosened his lasso, wound it up again, laid it like a pet

snake in a coil at his saddle-bow, turned his horse, and rode slowly

along towards the mansion-house.

The place had never looked more stately and beautiful to him than as he

now saw it in the moonlight. The undulations of the land,--the grand

mountain-screen which sheltered the mansion from the northern blasts,

rising with all its hanging forests and parapets of naked rock high

towards the heavens,--the ancient mansion, with its square chimneys, and

bodyguard of old trees, and cincture of low walls with marble-pillared

gateways,--the fields, with their various coverings,--the beds of

flowers,--the plots of turf, one with a gray column in its centre

bearing a sun-dial on which the rays of the moon were idly shining,

another with a white stone and a narrow ridge of turf,--over all these

objects, harmonized with all their infinite details into one fair whole

by the moonlight, the prospective heir, as he deemed himself, looked

with admiring eyes.

But while he looked, the thought rose up in his mind like waters from a

poisoned fountain, that there was a deep plot laid to cheat him of the

inheritance which by a double claim he meant to call his own. Every day

this ice-cold beauty, this dangerous, handsome cousin of his, went up to

that place,--that usher's girltrap. Every day,--regularly now,--it used

to be different. Did she go only to get out of his, her cousin's, reach?

Was she not rather becoming more and more involved in the toils of this

plotting Yankee?

If Mr. Bernard had shown himself at that moment a few rods in advance,

the chances are that in less than one minute he would have found himself

with a noose round his neck, at the heels of a mounted horseman.

Providence spared him for the present. Mr. Richard rode his horse

quietly round to the stable, put him up, and proceeded towards the

house. He got to his bed without disturbing the family, but could not

sleep. The idea had fully taken possession of his mind that a deep

intrigue was going on which would end by bringing Elsie and the

schoolmaster into relations fatal to all his own hopes. With that

ingenuity which always accompanies jealousy, he tortured every

circumstance of the last few weeks so as to make it square with this

belief. From this vein of thought he naturally passed to a consideration

of every possible method by which the issue he feared might be avoided.

Mr. Richard talked very plain language with himself in all these inward

colloquies. Supposing it came to the worst, what could be done then?

First, an accident might happen to the schoolmaster which should put a

complete and final check upon his projects and contrivances. The

particular accident which might interrupt his career must, evidently, be

determined by circumstances; but it must be of a nature to explain

itself without the necessity of any particular person's becoming

involved in the matter. It would be unpleasant to go into particulars;

but everybody knows well enough that men sometimes get in the way of a

stray bullet, and that young persons occasionally do violence to

themselves in various modes,--by fire-arms, suspension, and other

means,--in consequence of disappointment in love, perhaps, oftener than

from other motives. There was still another kind of accident which might

serve his purpose. If anything should happen to Elsie, it would be the

most natural thing in the world that his uncle should adopt him, his

nephew and only near relation, as his heir. Unless, indeed, Uncle Dudley

should take it into his head to marry again. In that case, where would

he, Dick, be? This was the most detestable complication which he could

conceive of. And yet he had noticed--he could not help noticing--that

his uncle had been very attentive to, and, as it seemed, very much

pleased with, that young woman from the school. What did that mean? Was

it possible that he was going to take a fancy to her?

It made him wild to think of all the several contingencies which might

defraud him of that good-fortune which seemed but just now within his

grasp. He glared in the darkness at imaginary faces: sometimes at that

of the handsome, treacherous schoolmaster; sometimes at that of the

meek-looking, but, no doubt, scheming, lady-teacher; sometimes at that

of the dark girl whom he was ready to make his wife; sometimes at that

of his much respected uncle, who, of course, could not be allowed to

peril the fortunes of his relatives by forming a new connection. It was

a frightful perplexity in which he found himself, because there was no

one single life an accident to which would be sufficient to insure the

fitting and natural course of descent to the great Dudley property. If

it had been a simple question of helping forward a casualty to any one

person, there was nothing in Dick's habits of thought and living to make

that a serious difficulty. He had been so much with lawless people, that

a life between his wish and his object seemed only as an obstacle to be

removed, provided the object were worth the risk and trouble. But if

there were two or three lives in the way, manifestly that altered

the case.

His Southern blood was getting impatient. There was enough of the

New-Englander about him to make him calculate his chances before he

struck; but his plans were liable to be defeated at any moment by a

passionate impulse such as the dark-hued races of Southern Europe and

their descendants are liable to. He lay in his bed, sometimes arranging

plans to meet the various difficulties already mentioned, sometimes

getting into a paroxysm of blind rage in the perplexity of considering

what object he should select as the one most clearly in his way. On the

whole, there could be no doubt where the most threatening of all his

embarrassments lay. It was in the probable growing relation between

Elsie and the schoolmaster. If it should prove, as it seemed likely,

that there was springing up a serious attachment tending to a union

between them, he knew what he should do, if he was not quite so sure how

he should do it.

There was one thing at least which might favor his projects, and which,

at any rate, would serve to amuse him. He could, by a little quiet

observation, find out what were the schoolmaster's habits of life:

whether he had any routine which could be calculated upon; and under

what circumstances a strictly private interview of a few minutes with

him might be reckoned on, in case it should be desirable. He could also

very probably learn some facts about Elsie: whether the young man was in

the habit of attending her on her way home from school; whether she

stayed about the school-room after the other girls had gone; and any

incidental matters of interest which might present themselves.

He was getting more and more restless for want of some excitement. A mad

gallop, a visit to Mrs. Blanche Creamer, who had taken such a fancy to

him, or a chat with the Widow Rowens, who was very lively in her talk,

for all her sombre colors, and reminded him a good deal of some of his

earlier friends, the _señoritas_,--all these were distractions, to be

sure, but not enough to keep his fiery spirit from fretting itself in

longings for more dangerous excitements. The thought of getting a

knowledge of all Mr. Bernard's ways, so that he would be in his power at

any moment, was a happy one.

For some days after this he followed Elsie at a long distance behind, to

watch her until she got to the school-house. One day he saw Mr. Bernard

join her: a mere accident, very probably, for it was only once this

happened. She came on her homeward way alone,--quite apart from the

groups of girls who strolled out of the school-house yard in company.

Sometimes she was behind them all,--which was suggestive. Could she

have stayed to meet the schoolmaster?

If he could have smuggled himself into the school, he would have liked

to watch her there, and see if there was not some understanding between

her and the master which betrayed itself by look or word. But this was

beyond the limits of his audacity, and he had to content himself with

such cautious observations as could be made at a distance. With the aid

of a pocket-glass he could make out persons without the risk of being

observed himself.

Mr. Silas Peckham's corps of instructors was not expected to be off duty

or to stand at ease for any considerable length of time. Sometimes Mr.

Bernard, who had more freedom than the rest, would go out for a ramble

in the day-time; but more frequently it would be in the evening, after

the hour of "retiring," as bed-time was elegantly termed by the young

ladies of the Apollinean Institute. He would then not unfrequently walk

out alone in the common roads, or climb up the sides of The Mountain,

which seemed to be one of his favorite resorts. Here, of course, it was

impossible to follow him with the eye at a distance. Dick had a hideous,

gnawing suspicion that somewhere in these deep shades the schoolmaster

might meet Elsie, whose evening wanderings he knew so well. But of this

he was not able to assure himself. Secrecy was necessary to his present

plans, and he could not compromise himself by over-eager curiosity. One

thing he learned with certainty. The master returned, after his walk one

evening, and entered the building where his room was situated. Presently

a light betrayed the window of his apartment. From a wooded bank, some

thirty or forty rods from this building, Dick Venner could see the

interior of the chamber, and watch the master as he sat at his desk, the

light falling strongly upon his face, intent upon the book or manuscript

before him. Dick contemplated him very long in this attitude. The sense

of watching his every motion, himself meanwhile utterly unseen, was

delicious. How little the master was thinking what eyes were on him!

Well,--there were two things quite certain. One was, that, if he chose,

he could meet the schoolmaster alone, either in the road or in a more

solitary place, if he preferred to watch his chance for an evening or

two. The other was, that he commanded his position, as he sat at his

desk in the evening, in such a way that there would be very little

difficulty,--so far as that went; of course, however, silence is always

preferable to noise, and there is a great difference in the marks left

by different casualties. Very likely nothing would come of all this

espionage; but, at any rate, the first thing to be done with a man you

want to have in your power is to learn his habits.

Since the tea-party at the Widow Rowens's, Elsie had been more fitful

and moody than ever. Dick understood all this well enough, you know. It

was the working of her jealousy against that young school-girl to whom

the master had devoted himself for the sake of piquing the heiress of

the Dudley mansion. Was it possible, in any way, to exasperate her

irritable nature against him, and in this way to render her more

accessible to his own advances? It was difficult to influence her at

all. She endured his company without seeming to enjoy it. She watched

him with that strange look of hers, sometimes as if she were on her

guard against him, sometimes as if she would like to strike at him as in

that fit of childish passion. She ordered him about with a haughty

indifference which reminded him of his own way with the dark-eyed women

whom he had known so well of old. All this added a secret pleasure to

the other motives he had for worrying her with jealous suspicions. He

knew she brooded silently on any grief that poisoned her comfort,--that

she fed on it, as it were, until it ran with every drop of blood in her

veins,--and that, except in some paroxysm of rage, of which he himself

was not likely the second time to be the object, or in some deadly

vengeance wrought secretly, against which he would keep a sharp

look-out, so far as he was concerned, she had no outlet for her

dangerous, smouldering passions.

Beware of the woman who cannot find free utterance for all her stormy

inner life either in words or song! So long as a woman can talk, there

is nothing she cannot bear. If she cannot have a companion to listen to

her woes, and has no musical utterance, vocal or instrumental,--then,

if she is of the real woman sort, and has a few heartfuls of wild blood

in her, and you have done her a wrong,--double-bolt the door which she

may enter on noiseless slipper at midnight,--look twice before you taste

of any cup whose draught the shadow of her hand may have darkened!

But let her talk, and, above all, cry, or, if she is one of the

coarser-grained tribe, give her the run of all the red-hot expletives in

the language, and let her blister her lips with them until she is tired,

she will sleep like a lamb after it, and you may take a cup of coffee

from her without stirring it up to look for its sediment. So, if she

can sing, or play on any musical instrument, all her wickedness will run

off through her throat or the tips of her fingers. How many tragedies

find their peaceful catastrophe in fierce roulades and strenuous

bravuras! How many murders are executed in double-quick time upon the

keys which stab the air with their dagger-strokes of sound! What would

our civilization be without the piano? Are not Erard and Broadwood and

Chickering the true humanizers of our time? Therefore do I love to hear

the all-pervading _tum tum_ jarring the walls of little parlors in

houses with double door-plates on their portals, looking out on streets

and courts which to know is to be unknown, and where to exist is not to

live, according to any true definition of living. Therefore complain I

not of modern degeneracy, when, even from the open window of the small

unlovely farm-house, tenanted by the hard-handed man of bovine flavors

and the flat-patterned woman of broken-down countenance, issue the same

familiar sounds. For who knows that Almira, but for these keys, which

throb away her wild impulses in harmless discords, would not have been

floating, dead, in the brown stream which runs through the meadows by

her father's door,--or living, with that other current which runs

beneath the gas-lights over the slimy pavement, choking with wretched

weeds that were once in spotless flower?

Poor Elsie! She never sang nor played. She never shaped her inner life

in words: such utterance was as much denied to her nature as common

articulate speech to the deaf mute. Her only language must be in action.

Watch her well by day and by night, Old Sophy! watch her well! or the

long line of her honored name may close in shame, and the stately

mansion of the Dudleys remain a hissing and a reproach till its roof is

buried in its cellar!