CHAPTER XVI.

It was full two o'clock before I began to think of sleeping, but

nevertheless I was on the rocks next morning at seven; and my

punctuality was rewarded by the sight of Miss Lenox walking on the shore

in a white dress. I clambered down and joined her before she seemed

aware of my presence: then she turned and laughed softly in my face.

"What an early riser you are!" she exclaimed. "You have brought

excellent habits home from the lazy Old World."

"But it would be such a pity to miss 'the prettiest hour of the day'!" I

retorted quickly.

"Were you surprised to meet me last night?" she asked.

"Perhaps so. I had at least not expected it. I was in Belfield on

Wednesday, and supposed that you were there."

"You could easily have found out my whereabouts if you had called upon

mamma. I should not have expected you to be in Belfield without going

near our house."

"Mrs. Lenox has too often snubbed me in my boyhood for me to count upon

her grace now," I returned. "But I hope your mother is very well."

But it was very droll to me that I had embarked upon something like an

adventure for the sake of talking about old Mrs. Lenox. Still, Miss

Georgy was well worth coming out to see with the flush of healthy sleep

still upon cheek and lip and the morning light in her eyes.

"Mamma is well," said she soberly. "Poor papa too: though he is worked

to death, he is still quite well."

"What does he do, then?" I asked. I knew that he was one of the

book-keepers at the factories, but I wanted her to be the first to speak

Jack's name.

"As soon as Mr. John Holt went into the business," she returned, very

coolly, "he gave my father a position. He had promised to do it years

before, and you know how well Jack keeps all his promises."

"Jack is faithful and true," I said, looking at her keenly. "No one will

ever be able to say of him, 'That man has wronged me.'"

"What did he say about me?" she demanded suddenly, stopping short in

her walk and facing me. "I shall have no disguises with you, Floyd: you

know me too well. I never really loved Jack, good, kind and noble

although I recognize him to be. When he offered me my freedom I took it.

How could I have endured to wait for him, ruined, disgraced as he was,

through the uncertainty and pain of years? It is impossible that he

should be in a position to marry until my youth is passed."

Her voice was so tremulous and pleading, her eyes and lips so eloquent,

that she needed no vindication. I pitied Jack more than ever, but still

I no longer blamed her.

"You men have a hundred chances," she went on. "If the first fails you,

you have no reason for despondency, for a better one is sure to come. We

poor women find our golden opportunity but once. Do not call me

mercenary or false. I was neither. I had been talked into a belief that

I ought to marry Jack, but when the trial came all the potential reasons

failed. Had I kept my engagement to him, I should have been a clog, an

encumbrance, upon him: he is better off without me."

"Nothing but devoted love could have held you to him in his trouble,"

said I. "If you did not feel that, your bondage through a hopeless

engagement would have been a terrible burden."

"Tell me what he said," she murmured coaxingly. "Is he angry with me?

does he complain of me?"

"No: no man could have spoken of you more kindly."

"Is he forgetting me?"

I met her look and smile with a curious thrill that I thought I had

lived down years ago.

"I am afraid, Georgy," said I, "that you are not one of those women whom

men forget."

"Jack will forget me. He is wedded to his business: he is angry with the

world, maddened, desperate. I have walked out behind him at church in

Belfield, and he has not seen me: I have met him driving in the streets,

and he has not turned his head. The men who once trusted and believed

in his father treated him shamefully after his misfortunes came, and

Jack resented it: he goes about the place seeing nobody, holding his

head high, and showing the men he meets that he asks no favor of any one

of them. All the softness has gone out of him."

I told her how wrong her idea of him was, and presently found myself

repeating many things that he had said. Before I ended I had even let

her hear of our midnight stroll about the place and our look at the

gabled room where we believed her to be sleeping. This pleased her.

"That is not unlike you," she remarked with charming complacency, "but I

never before heard of Jack's doing anything so poetic."

"Jack is not a man to write poems," said I, "but he is one of the men

poets write about. After you had gone up stairs last night Helen sang to

her father, and the words of one of her songs were Heine's: it reminded

me of Holt beneath your window."

"One of those German songs? I understand nothing but English."

"They have translated it, and it runs like this:

Silent the streets by night overtaken:

This house my darling's presence did grace;

But she the town has long forsaken,

Yet there stands the house in the selfsame place;

And there stands a man who upward is staring,

His hands hard wringing in outbursts of woe!"

I paused and looked into her face.

"That is not all of it?"

"No: I will tell you the rest some day."

"Did Jack 'wring his hands in outbursts of woe'?"

"Good Heavens, no! I presume we both stood with our hands in our

pockets: I was smoking a cigar myself. It is only in poetry that one may

be picturesque in one's grief now-a-days."

"Did you think of me when you stood there, Floyd?"

Her little fingers closed on the edge of my coat and she looked up in my

eyes. I smiled demurely. I was determined to be quite the master of

myself with Georgina. I had suffered too much from her in the past not

to be on my guard. Still, it was hard to resist the upturned face--the

face with which was associated all the passionate inspiration of my

early life--the face I had carried in my mind and heart through all my

wanderings, finding none to compare with it--the face which always came

with flash and quickness when I felt the warm desire and longing to love

somebody which youth must always know.

I kissed her.

She looked at me startled, and ran ten paces away and sat down upon a

rock.

"Upon my word!" she exclaimed, bursting into light laughter, "you have

learned pretty manners abroad!"

"I am so glad you like them," said I, going up to her.

"But I don't like them at all," she retorted, shaking her head. "You

remind me of a toy I used to play with years ago--a very pretty,

harmless, inoffensive-looking toy, but which when touched unguardedly

changed all of a sudden into a dreadful little fiend that flew right up

into your face. Such a surprise is enough to make one's hair turn gray."

"At any rate, I have vindicated myself from the charge of being,

'pretty, harmless and inoffensive,' have I not? As for the gray hairs, I

don't see one."

"I quite admired you last night," sighed Georgy, "you looked so

interesting and innocent. Now--"

"Have I then suffered in your estimation?"

"I shall remember hereafter," she said with a delightful little laugh,

"to whom I am talking. Now let us forget all about it. There are other

things I want to talk about. I want to ask you how you like Helen."

"How I like Helen?" I did not fancy her question: I had never approved

her tone regarding her cousin. "I think Miss Floyd very beautiful, and a

very elegant girl besides."

"Do you like her proud cold manner?"

"Is she proud and cold? Perhaps so to Thorpe: certainly, she is the most

unaffected child where the rest of us are concerned."

"She never forgets her wealth and position. I do not blame her: in her

place I should be quite spoiled. Think of it!" she went on, with such

eagerness that tears stood in her eyes: "Mr. Raymond left her

everything--everything except a hundred thousand dollars which he gave

to a college. She is so rich that she can lose a hundred thousand

dollars and never feel it. It did not belong to the property, but came

from a deposit which had accumulated ever since she was a baby. She

begged her grandfather to do some good with it: she did not want to have

everything herself. Might he not have given it to me?--Helen would have

liked that--but no: he hated me too well for that. It has all gone for a

dreary old professorship in the college where he graduated sixty years

ago. And I am as poor as ever!"

"But Helen is generous with her wealth, I am sure: she will do a great

deal for you."

"She gave me the money to buy the dress I am wearing, the very shoes on

my feet;" and she granted me a delicious glimpse of French slippers.

"But do you suppose I like alms? If I am a beggar, Floyd, it is from

necessity, not because I have not plenty of pride. The child means to be

good to me, I suppose, but it makes me bitterly angry with her at times

that she has the right to be gracious and condescending. I am such an

unlucky girl!"

But she laughed while she complained, and I echoed her laugh when she

said she was unlucky.

"You unlucky!" I exclaimed. "You are one of those women who have it in

their power to have every wish in life granted."

"I am not so sure of that. Besides, it is hard for me to know what I

want now-a-days. I used to think if a fairy came offering me the

fulfilment of my dearest longing, it would be easy enough to secure

lifelong happiness at once: I should have asked for wealth. But now they

are comfortable at home: they would not know how to spend more money

than papa earns at the factory. And I am comparatively rich: I have

almost five hundred dollars in my purse, part of the thousand which

Helen gave me a month ago. I cried myself to sleep last night, I was so

unhappy; yet, all the same, I am not quite sure what I want. Life is so

dull! That is what ails me, I think."

I looked at her in uncertainty as to her mood, but she left me in doubt,

and began telling me about society at the Point, her friend Mrs.

Woodruff, and the houseful of guests. She told me stories with some

scandalous flavor about them, enough to give them a zest; she mimicked

all the earnest people and spoke with contempt of all the shallow ones;

she appeared to have fathomed all the petty under-currents which

influenced people's actions, detected every shade of pretension and

studied all the affectations and habits of the men and women she saw

intimately. All this, too, without betraying any personal liking for one

of them, and seeming to regard them all as mere puppets, to some of whom

she attached herself when there was anything to gain, and from whom she

withdrew herself when there was anything to lose. But she was too clever

to allow me time to think what qualities of mind and heart lay behind

this philosophy, and I was very much diverted.

"I must take you to see Mrs. Woodruff," she remarked. "You will be

welcome in the set as flowers in May. You are spending the summer here,

I suppose?"

"I have no plans. Where my mother is I shall be for the present, I have

been separated from her so long."

"How beautiful! But about your future, Floyd? Have you a career decided

upon, or are you to be a gentleman of leisure?"

I flushed: "My resolution is not taken as to what I shall be--certainly

not an idle man."

"I can tell your fortune," she said in a low voice. "You need not cross

my palm with silver for it, either."

"With gold, then?"

"I will tell it for love, but it is a golden fortune. You will marry

Helen Floyd."

"No," said I with decision and some anger, "I shall never marry Helen.

You do me too much honor. She would never look at me; and if she would

there is something within me which forbids my marrying a rich woman. But

it is nonsense. For Heaven's sake don't allude to it again! The man who

marries her will be, to my thinking, the most fortunate of men, but--"

"We won't talk about it," said she good-naturedly. "There comes Mr.

Thorpe to bid us good-morning. Astonishing how well he likes the walk to

The Headlands!"

It was Thorpe indeed, carelessly but irreproachably dressed as usual,

and looking at us with a smile of internal amusement, which he was

probably too well-bred to express in words, for he merely drawled a

good-morning and remarked on the beauty of the day.

"You're a famous pedestrian in these days, Thorpe," I said, rising with

a trifle of embarrassment from my seat as close to Miss Lenox's as the

rocks permitted, "and an early riser too. When I got up this morning at

half-past six I told myself that I should see nobody for three hours at

least, yet both Miss Lenox and you equal me in my love for the early

morning hours."

But Thorpe was indifferent, and I saw at once that his mind was too

preoccupied to allow of his wasting a thought upon the reason of my

rising earlier than usual. "If you got up at half-past six," said he

coolly, looking at his watch, "you must be ready for your breakfast, for

it is a quarter to nine."

"I shall go in," remarked Georgy, rising and shaking out her white

skirts and putting herself to rights generally after the manner in which

birds and women plume themselves. "Did you come to breakfast, Mr.

Thorpe?" she inquired with bare civility.

"I thought of dropping in," he returned; and as I assisted Miss Lenox up

the ledge I turned to see if he were following us. He seemed to be

waiting, however, for us to get away, and when I gained another distant

glimpse of him he was apparently searching for something in a crevice of

the rocks. Yet we were scarcely on the back piazza, before he had

rejoined us in high spirits, and I was conscious of a gleam in his eyes

which I had never seen before.

I could not resist speculations upon the reasons of his intimacy at the

house, but dismissed them all as idle, for I knew very well that the

habits of a young man at a watering-place are made by the necessity of

filling up the hours of the day with occupation. The cottagers have

perfect leisure as a rule, and with amiable, courteous ways press upon

all acquaintances an incessant hospitality; and Thorpe, always

frivolous, had at once fallen into the general way. Here at The

Headlands the house was still under the shadow of deep mourning, but his

old acquaintance with Mr. Floyd and my mother made his frequent visits

admissible. At any rate, beyond Mr. Floyd's unobtrusive sarcasm at his

expense, I heard no objections to Thorpe's dropping in to breakfast.

Mills brought him a plate, and he himself chose a seat at Helen's left

hand, and devoted himself to her service in a way that I knew bored her

immeasurably. He sugared her strawberries and creamed them generously,

and she sent them to her parrot. "I will take some more strawberries,

Mills," she said then, and treated Thorpe's further attempts to serve

her with chilly disdain.

"Now that Floyd is here," said Mr. Floyd when we were through breakfast,

"I shall indulge in laziness no longer, but shall sit by and see him

work." And the result was that for the next two weeks he and my mother,

Helen and I, all sat in Mr. Raymond's study for an hour or two every

morning and looked over his papers. Two or three times Mr. Wickham the

lawyer came from New York, and it was easy enough to see that Helen's

property was so large, its investments so various, that its proper care

was work enough for one man.

"I shall look about for a husband for her at once," Mr. Floyd said half

a dozen times to the lawyer when we three men were alone: "nobody can

expect me to waste my few energies in looking after all these

interests."

"Depend upon it, sir," Mr. Wickham would return with an easy chuckle,

"you will find the world full of young men who will be happy to relieve

you of every responsibility regarding Miss Floyd's fortune."

"They shall none of them have her," her father exclaimed once,

fiercely--"not one! No man but one who loves her for her sweet self

alone shall ever have my little girl." At such times Mr. Wickham always

looked at me with a critical curiosity which I could forgive in so old a

friend of Helen's, but which at the same time robbed me of a certain

composure I should have liked to carry through the difficulties of my

present position. For I was, in truth, performing all the duties of an

executor and mastering the details of the schedule of property, while

Mr. Floyd sat by and made jokes upon the way Helen would spend her

income.

"Hair-pins cost a great deal," he would affirm solemnly, "and pins. How

much pin-money had the princess royal? Put down fifteen thousand dollars

for hair-pins, black pins, white pins: what other pins do women use?"

"But," I would expostulate, "you must attend to this."

"And why?" he would ask, turning his fine melancholy eyes upon me.

"Don't tire me out, Floyd."

We were alone, although my mother and Helen were almost within hearing

on the balcony.

"I am willing to do everything for you, sir," I said, "but nevertheless

it seems to me that it is scarcely prudent for you to entrust me with

your duties. I am totally inexperienced; my knowledge of finance is the

mere mastery of figures; I am--"

"Look here, dear boy," said Mr. Floyd in a kind but weary voice: "I am

only trying to save you trouble. When I die you will take my place as

Helen's executor and trustee. It would be harder then for you to learn

the mystery of all these details by yourself. Now I am here to teach

you."

ELLEN W. OLNEY.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

TO THE RAINBOW.

O Iris! bringing balm for Summer's tears,

So lightly gliding down thy bridge of rose,

I know not why my spirit drinks repose

Soon as thy footfall the horizon nears.

Spellbound I watch the crimson-shaded piers

As arch by arch the blooming pathway grows,

And where the richest flush of color glows

I trace thy trailing garments. Sighs and fears

Have vanished: in one long and ardent gaze

Thy steps I follow down the heavenly slope.

Iris, be mine thy message! Let thy rays

Write out how I with destiny may cope.

Ah! spanned with light would be all coming days,

Could I but read thy oracle of hope.

FRANCES L. MACE.

THE PARIS EXPOSITION OF 1878.

III.--FINE ARTS.

It is the "Memorial Hall" of the Champ de Mars--the Gallery of Fine Arts

which there takes the place of the familiar building in Fairmount

Park--that has decided the really great success of the Exposition of

1878. The unanimous verdict of popular admiration was given at

Philadelphia to the machinery: in Paris it is as strongly pronounced in

favor of the fine arts. Paris is, indisputably, the capital of modern

art, and her title to this proud distinction is to-day confirmed by the

assembled peoples with all the solemnity and authority of a universal

congress.

I have, like all visitors no doubt, yielded to the seductive spell of

this magnificent collection of objects of art, to which two worlds have

contributed, and under the influence of the keen and exalted enjoyment

of the first few days I should have found it impossible to qualify by a

single censure the expression of my admiration. But after a short

retirement in the country, where I allowed my mind to lie fallow, I

found that I could revisit the galleries of the Champ de Mars with more

judgment and method, and that the beauties of the first order, which I

admired as much as ever, no longer made me blind to the defects and the

weak points of certain parts.

First of all, it must be admitted that the Exhibition of this year is

not equal to that of 1855; and this is no more than was to be expected,

when one remembers that the latter had brought together the scattered

masterpieces of the long period of half a century--a period illustrated

by such names as Ingres, Delacroix, Decamps and others. This splendid

assemblage of so many important works could not be repeated in 1867; and

at that time there were unmistakable indications that a new artistic

current had set in, and we saw the first rays of the coming glory of the

painter of genre and of landscape--the triumph of Meissonier, of Gerome,

of Theodore Rousseau, of Corot.

This year, the tiny, pleasing genre pictures are still very numerous,

and in this respect the Exposition of 1878 is not unlike that of 1867,

while in another aspect it is superior to it. If, on the one hand, we

miss the names of the great masters of landscape, who, dying, have left

no successors, we have, on the other hand, to hail the advent of some

others who have risen above the level of genre and have returned to the

traditions of high art: I refer to MM. Bonnat, J.P. Laurens and Baudry.

Thanks to these great artists, one can assert with confidence that there

has been an advance within the last ten years. And how art widens its

borders and augments the number of its adepts! How many painters there

are to-day!--of the second or of the third rank, to be sure, but masters

of their business, skilful and conscientious. In 1867 the jury admitted

but four hundred pictures. In 1878 it has had to receive eleven hundred!

Evidently, French art is in the fulness of its summer bloom. Its decline

will come, for Art, which knows no country, and has wandered from the

East to the South, and from the South to the West, will doubtless travel

still, and will some day leave Paris to dwell with other races and under

other skies. But to-day her home is Paris--Paris, her well-beloved city.

Since 1871 especially, we have witnessed a fresh starting into life, an

activity, indeed, almost feverish. In 1871 and in 1874 the Minister of

Fine Arts officially recognized a general return toward serious and

vigorous work, and in 1876 he bore testimony to the exceptional

brilliancy of the Salon, which showed the "influence and impulse of a

genuine revival."

Historical painting, unfortunately, can never be adequately represented

at exhibitions. Designed for the civil and religious monuments of

France, whence, from the nature of the case, they cannot be removed, its

most important illustrations are to be found at the Opera, at the Palace

of Justice and of the Legion of Honor, at the museums of Marseilles and

of Amiens, the Hotel de Ville of Poitiers, and in the numerous churches

of Paris and throughout the country. The immense work which Baudry has

executed for the foyer of the Opera is absent from the Exhibition, and

this great painter, whom some consider the first of his time, is not

represented at the Champ de Mars by even a sketch. Fortunately, the

Palace of Justice has parted with two principal works of Leon Bonnat,

his _Christ_ and _Justice between Guilt and Innocence_. The Pantheon has

permitted the exhibition of the large decorative paintings in which

Cabanel has represented the principal episodes of the history of St.

Louis. But the largest historical canvases on the walls of the gallery

are those by J.P. Laurens, belonging to the museums of Florence, of

Havre, of Nantes and of Toulouse. Laurens delights in the Middle Ages,

gloomy and stately periods of ecclesiastical domination and feudal

violence. He is the painter of tortures and of tombs (the _Exhumation of

Pope Formosus_, _The Interdict_, _Francis Borgia before the Coffin of

Isabella of Portugal_), but his vigorous and severe genius never suffers

him to fall into overstrained action and theatrical artifice. He does

not move us by declamatory gestures and forced attitudes. Nothing can be

more simple, yet nothing more affecting, than the _Execution of the Duc

d'Enghien_ and the _Death of Marceau_. Many young artists are following

this new path, which has opened such success to M. Laurens. MM. Cormon,

Dupain (in his _Good Samaritan_), Benjamin Constant (_Entry of Mohammed

II. into Constantinople_), and Sylvestre (_Locusta and Nero trying a

Poison_) have sent to the Champ de Mars the fine historical compositions

that gained for them the first medals and the prize of honor at the last

Salons. M. Tony Robert-Fleury has two vast canvases, the _Sack of

Corinth_ and the _Reform of the Mad-house in 1795_--large and admirable

compositions, which engraving has already made popular. Of course we

find M. Landelle's inevitable _Eastern Dancing-Girl_, and an _Italian

Woman_ by M. Hebert. There could be no exhibition without these. These

two painters have talent, individuality, delicacy of feeling, but they

are absolutely without imagination. M. Hebert, in particular, has

learned nothing since his _Malaria_, which has been for a long time at

the Museum of the Luxembourg. He has not discovered, nor even sought

for, anything beyond this; and this eternal repetition of the same

subject is a malady which afflicts too many of the artists of our day.

One no longer distinguishes between the pictures of certain of our

popular painters. Even M. Luminais never travels beyond his specialty,

which is the barbarian Gaul, though he does vary somewhat the attitudes

and physiognomy of his characters. Henner and Ribot, two great artists,

who are better appreciated by their professional brethren than by the

public, will undoubtedly gain much by this year's exhibition. The eulogy

of competent criticism will be accepted as authoritative, and will

compel the admiration of the crowd, which is not very apt to comprehend

new and original forms in painting. Schopenhauer has classified the

professions according to the degree of difficulty which they find in

making their merits understood by the world at large; and he puts in the

front rank, as the most quickly and easily comprehended and applauded,

acrobats, dancers and players; philosophers come last of all; and

immediately before them the painters.

Portraiture would seem to be more in esteem than ever. Everywhere along

the walls are to be seen nothing but statesmen, poets and women of the

world, whose identity is indicated in the official catalogue by initials

only, but whom everybody recognizes at a glance. Many of these portraits

are life-like and admirable in expression, and one can say of them what

Victor Cherbuliez said of Mademoiselle Nelly Jacquemart's picture of

Thiers: "The house is inhabited: some one is looking out of the

window." This time Mademoiselle Jacquemart exhibits portraits of M.

Duruy, M. Dufaure and a young lady. Singularly enough, she paints men

better than she does women. Her portrait of Mademoiselle G---- B---- is

very inferior to the others. Virility, in short, is the distinguishing

characteristic of the talent of this woman.

M. Cabanel's portraits of women of the great world are conventionally

painted, and with the coldness of manner which distinguishes him. One

feels that if these fine creatures should speak they would utter nothing

but the commonplaces which pass for conversation in the salons. The

duchess of Vallambrosa--"the queen of the strand," as they call her at

Cannes--Madame de Lavalette, the countess of Mercy-Argenteau, are all

there, as if against their will and disdainful of the vulgar herd which

is staring at them. To make amends, however, the duchess of Luynes is

charming, surrounded and, as it were, adorned by her beautiful children.

M. Cabanel is the recognized head of what may be called the official

school. To get medals and crosses or the prize of Rome, to obtain

commissions from government, it is now-a-days almost necessary to have

been his pupil. Never had painter a more lofty position. Perhaps it is

the opinion at the ministry of Fine Arts that Bonnat and Laurens will be

so well paid by posthumous fame and the admiration of future generations

that it is but fair to keep the balance between the masters even by

rewarding M. Cabanel in his lifetime.

I have said that there are many portraits at the Exhibition, but I do

not mean to complain of this. Indeed, we cannot too highly applaud the

revival of this noble branch of art, to which we owe the _Joconde_ of

the Louvre and the _Violin-player_ of the Sciarra Palace. Many a fair

young girl unknown to fame, many a matron whose quiet life will pass

unheeded by the world, will by her portrait enter into immortality.

Torn, sooner or later, from the family roof and carried to a museum,

there to be gazed upon by thousands of eyes, her smile or her reverie

will recall for generations to come that sigh of Senancour's: "O woman

that I might have loved!"

It is doubtful if this regretful tribute to genius--which may perhaps

some day be heard before the portraits of Henner, of Bonnat or of

Madrazzo--will ever be inspired by those of M. Carolus Duran. This

artist is the painter of elegant trifles and worldly vanities, of grand

and striking toilettes, of blondes in violet and yellow and brunettes in

gray and rose, for, like M. Worth the man-milliner, it pleases his fancy

to attempt the reconciliation of the most inimical colors. For the rest,

the future will no doubt owe him a debt of gratitude for the precious

evidence which his pictures will furnish of the dress of the period.

Indeed, without the help of certain of our portrait-painters future

investigators would find themselves sadly at a loss in reconstructing

the Paris of Napoleon III. and of the Third Republic. We are so much

under the influence of the past that our artists scarcely have the

sentiment of the civilization which surrounds them. Our colleges send us

into the world, not Frenchmen, but Greeks and Romans, knowing nothing of

modern life, and inspired by our classical studies with a profound

contempt for the manners and usages of the present day. Our statues,

bas-reliefs, medals and pictures represent the events of all ages except

our own. The attempts in the direction of realism of these latest days,

the paintings of Courbet and Manet, seem, by a sort of instinctive

preference, to seek out the _ugly_, rather than to give us an exact

reproduction of contemporaneous Nature. Some of our genre

painters--Millet, for example, and Jules Breton--have, it is true,

studied the actual and the modern, but their types are all taken from

the rustic class, and it is safe to say that outside of portraiture

neither the men nor the women of the world will leave a trace upon the

art of the period.

Let us note, however, one exception to this statement. I refer to

certain painters of military scenes who have chosen to call up the

spectre of the Franco-German war--Edouard Detaille, Neuville, Boulanger.

These have ventured to depict one side of modern life--and an important

one, alas!--modern warfare, not by showing us those episodes of

classical combat where half a dozen cavaliers, mounted upon their heavy

historical horses, fight hand to hand for the possession of a flag, and

trample under foot a wounded wretch whose very _pose_ is traditional,

but by giving us actual scenes witnessed during the autumn of 1870 and

the winter of 1871--scenes often frightful, but always grandly effective

and worthy of art. A sentiment of diplomatic propriety, with which the

Germans were but little troubled at Philadelphia, has naturally kept

these paintings out of the Champ de Mars, and banished them to Goupil's

in the Rue Chaptal. We certainly do not complain of this, but we cannot

help regretting that modern life should be so slightly represented in

the art of an epoch indued with a life so intense. There are laurels yet

to be won in the field of serious painting--triumphs such as Balzac,

Thackeray and Tourgueneff have achieved in literature, and Gavarni in

caricature, by the faithful representation of phases of modern life.

Since so many Frenchmen are converted by their early classical training

not only into citizens of Rome or of Athens, but into veritable pagans,

we naturally find the Exhibition full of gods and goddesses, of demigods

and nymphs--the _Truth_ of M. Jules Lefebvre, for instance, and his

_Vision_, losing itself in the mists of morning; the _Sarpedon_ of M.

Levy; M. Bouguereau's _Flora and Zephyr_ and _Meeting of Nymphs_; the

_Naiads_ of Henner, etc. Amongst all these mythological tableaux one's

attention is arrested by the striking productions of M. Gustave Moreau,

a remarkable union of technical ability and poetical

fancy--hallucinations of an opium-smoker who should be able to paint his

visions with all the confidence and knowledge of a master. Paul de

Saint-Victor, the eminent critic, has called these canvases "painted

dreams;" and they cannot be better described. _Hercules fighting the

Hydra of Lerna_, _Salome_, _Jacob and the Angel_, _Moses exposed upon

the Nile_, are dazzling phantoms, which, eluding the literal text of

history, recede to the depths of an unknown past. We do not think of

discussing their accuracy: we are absorbed in admiration of this

wondrous art, at once subtle and splendid, which makes us dream of lost

civilizations and buried empires. Gustave Moreau is more than a painter:

he is a magician and his pencil is an enchanter's wand.

For the rest, we have plenty of archaeological painters, who painfully

restore antiquity for us, following accurate authorities and examples.

The curiosity to know the past, which has created a literature of its

own, the researches of travellers and of learned men, the excavations

made in Greece, in Asia Minor, in Africa, at Pompeii, have led many

artists to search for new effects in this direction. Every one will

recall the circuses and the Roman scenes of Gerome. This year he

exhibits hardly anything but modern Oriental subjects--Turkish baths,

Bashi-Bazouks and lions--but his pupils have now taken the place which

their master held in 1867. Hector Leroux, one of the thousand and one

painters of this Neo-Grecian school, shows us a _Toilette of Minerva

Polias_ and _A Miracle in the Temple of Vesta_, his most celebrated

work. Gustave Boulanger exhibits his _Roman Baths_, his _Roman Comedians

rehearsing their Roles_, and his _Roman Promenades_, which the

wealthiest amateurs, MM. Aguado, Andre, Stebbins, contended for at the

late Salons; M. Lecomte du Nouy his _Pharoah slaying the Bearers of Evil

Tidings_ and his _Homer Begging_; while M. Alma-Tadema completes the

group with his best-known pictures, including _The Studio of an Antique

Painter_, _An Audience at the House of Agrippa_, and _The Vintage at

Rome_, which was also at Philadelphia. Americans will remember the young

reddish-haired priestess of Ceres, so elegantly attired and _coiffee_,

advancing with torch in hand and followed by flute-players. The details,

which are multiplied almost to profusion, are all calculated to enhance

the effect, and are distributed with exquisite art. The amount of

research which this work suggests is almost incredible, and it was

perhaps a more laborious undertaking to paint the _Vintage at Rome_ than

to write the Carthaginian romance of Gustave Flaubert. Alma-Tadema

exhibits in the English gallery, and his contribution has raised the

average of that section by a good third. If I have spoken of this

painter in connection with the pupils of Gerome, it is that, considering

his place of birth (Dromvyp, Netherlands), I think that I have an equal

right with the English to classify him according to my fancy.

But let us leave the remote antiquity in which the poet-painters of the

Neo-Greek school delight to dwell, and come back to modern times.

Passing through one of the central rooms, one is struck by the

appearance of a great space of gilded wall hung with pictures

considerable in number, but mostly quite diminutive in size. It needs no

reference to the catalogue nor to the signature of these works to tell

us the name of their author. If the singular talent which they display

were not enough, the _mise en scene_ would leave no doubt that this

extraordinary piece of wall has the honor of supporting the exhibit of

M. Meissonier. M. Meissonier holds a great position in contemporary

art--a fact which is known to everybody, and to no one better than to M.

Meissonier. But it was in 1867 rather than in 1878 that he ought to have

gilded his wall. It was in the former year that he exhibited his _1814_,

his _Reading at Diderot's_ and other incomparable works, which placed

him beyond all dispute at the head of the French school. To-day he shows

us but one considerable work, the _Cuirassiers of 1805_, and fifteen

small pieces--very pretty things, but then he has taught his pupils to

imitate him too well! They have so often and so skilfully counterfeited

the art of their master that the dignity of his work seems lessened and

its value diluted, as it were, until for the substance we are given the

shadow, and the _tableau_ is replaced by the _tableautin_. The same

tendency to contraction is apparent in every country. Paintings are

growing smaller, as if to keep in proportion with the small modern

salons. That this is due to the great influence of M. Meissonier there

is no doubt, but no diminution of his own fame accompanies the dwindling

of his pictures.

And yet there are half a dozen painters at the Champ de Mars who lack

nothing but the golden wall to make them the equals of the master. M.

Detaille is absent, but we have M. Worms, with seven little chefs

d'oeuvre; M. Vibert, with his _Departure of the Spanish Bride and

Bridegroom_, the _Serenade_, and the _Toilette of the Madonna_; M.

Firmin Girard, with his _Flower-Girl_; M. Berne-Bellecour, in his famous

_Coup de Canon_; MM. Fichel, Lesrel, Louis Leloir and others whom I have

not space to mention, as exact and as minute in detail as their _chef_,

and, moreover, almost as well paid by amateurs, especially Americans.

Landscape-painting mourns the loss of its greatest masters. Amongst all

the painters, Death seems to have singled out the _paysagistes_ by

preference. Since the last Exhibition how many have gone! Chintreuil,

Belly, Corot, Courbet, Daubigny, Millet, Diaz, are no more. A few

canvases recall them--the _Wave_ of Courbet, an admirable effect of snow

by Daubigny, and four or five pictures by Corot--but one regrets that

the illustrious dead have not had the honor of a room apart. The members

of the jury have been careful to keep the best places for their own

works, while the masterpieces of departed genius have been banished to

the top of the walls or half hidden in corners. M. Cabanel and M.

Bouguereau fill whole rooms with their pale compositions, and--Millet is

absent!

Has the school of French landscape-painting survived these serious

losses? We may reply with confidence that it has. This very year, in the

Exposition of the Champs Elysees, the _Haymaking_ of M. Bastien Lepage

reveals a great painter. At the Champ de Mars there are admirable

landscapes by living artists--Hanoteau, who with such masterly power of

execution bends and crooks in every direction the knotted branches of

his giant oaks; Emile Breton, painter of the melancholy scenes of

winter; Harpignies, faithful interpreter of the varying aspects of the

valley of the Allier under all the changes of day and season; Eugene

Feyen and Feyen-Perrin, who delight us with the sea-coast of Brittany

and its fisher-women and bathing-women; Van-Marcke, who is less than the

successor, but more than the imitator, of Troyon; and finally, MM.

Pelouse and Sege, representatives of new forces and processes.

Americans are supposed in Paris to prefer highly-finished and elaborate

work, like that of Gerome, but I have seen in America examples of the

painter who elaborates least of all, who lays on his colors in the

boldest manner--in a word, the painter of general effect, Isabey. It is

refreshing to meet again, here, his _Wedding-Feast_, a delightful repose

to the eye, almost wearied with minute perfection of detail.

Before quitting the labyrinth of French art we must not forget a class

of painters who have received a great deal of admiration, and who

deserve it, whatever rank one may be disposed to assign to their special

branch of art. I refer to the painters of still-life. There is Vollon,

for instance, whose name suggests those wonderful representations of

armor, of rich goldsmith's work, superb tapestries and damascened metal,

to say nothing of the equally admirable counterfeits of warming-pans and

saucepans, which delight the lover of _nature-morte_. We find here his

famous kettle of red copper, sold at a price which might suggest that it

was of solid gold. Amateurs and dealers pronounce Vollon the first of

painters in his specialty, though there are some who profess a

preference for his rival, Blaise-Desgoffes, of whom there are three

examples in the Exposition; and though these are only Venetian glass,

Gothic missals, jewel-boxes and the like, there are some of them worth

thirty thousand francs at the very least: it will be understood that I

speak of the paintings, and not of what they represent. Philippe

Rousseau displays not less than a dozen pictures, and the names of

their owners, Alexandre Dumas, the baroness de Rothschild, Barbedienne,

Edouard Dubufe, etc., show how much he is the _mode_. Indeed, it is

impossible to imagine cheeses more savory, fresher oysters, peaches and

vegetables more inviting, and flowers--I had almost said more fragrant,

so perfect is the illusion of reality.

But we must tear ourselves from these fascinating galleries, for should

we write for ever we shall always be sure to forget some celebrity who

deserves to be mentioned. We have said nothing of the scenes from

fashionable life; nor of the dogs and horses which MM. Claude and J.

Lewis Brown render so capitally; nor of the portraits of Perignon,

Edouard Dubufe and Cot; nor of the flowers of Mademoiselle Escallier.

Three great names, Jules Dupre, Rosa Bonheur and Puvis de Chavannes, are

absent--one knows not why.

Belgium is next in order--thrifty Belgium, where painting is a

commercial industry and its products an important article of

exportation. The Belgian display in the Champ de Mars is certainly a

considerable one in point of numbers, which will not surprise us when we

remember that there are at least twelve art-schools in the country--to

say nothing of the great academies of Brussels and Antwerp--where

hundreds of young men are daily drilled in the grammar and technique of

art. But genius is the gift of Nature, not of schools. All that the

latter can bestow is probably here, but we miss the imagination, the

variety, the sentiment of the born artist, and it needs no very critical

examination of these paintings to show us that the acquired dexterity of

the academy, the mere _business_ of the painter, is almost the only

characteristic of the Belgian school.

There are some examples of "high art," such as _The Pope and the Emperor

of Germany at Canossa in 1077_, by M. Cluysenaar, a composition as cold

as it is vast; some illustrations of the national history by M. Wauters,

who reminds us, in some respects, of the great French painter Laurens,

though lacking his power; and there are the historico-religious

pictures of M. Verlat. But much the best things in the Belgian

collection are the numerous works of a painter whose aims are not so

high, and who in Brussels seems like an exile from Paris. M. Alfred

Stevens draws his inspiration from fashionable life; and no Parisian

could surpass the execution of his velvets and laces and the thousand

new stuffs which Fashion invents every year--_gants de Suede_, and faces

too of a certain type, the pretty _chiffonnees_ faces of girls of every

rank in life. But the pretty faces are, after all, mere accessories in a

picture where the principals are the hat and the dress and the parasol,

upon which, as any one can see, the artist has bestowed all his loving

care. Nothing of his, however, in the Exposition can compare with his

_Young Mother_, which I saw last year in the Academy at Philadelphia.

Next after Stevens, in point of reputation, comes M. Willems, who really

belongs to the French school of Gerome, but who feels himself under

obligation, in his character of Fleming, to paint nothing but what

Terburg and Metzu painted two centuries before him. The man without a

plumed hat and big boots and a great sword at his side has, for M.

Willems, no existence. I would not say that he does not paint hat, boots

and sword as well as the old Flemish masters themselves did, but while

they drew from the life he paints at second hand, and the modern artist

who passes his days in the vain effort to revivify the models of his

predecessors will always rank below the masters whom he imitates, as M.

Willems does, with so many others whom a false public taste encourages

in a hopeless pursuit.

There are no landscapes in the Belgian section, if one may be allowed to

except the _marines_ of M. Clays, and yet Belgium can boast of at least

one excellent _paysagiste_, M. Cesar de Cock, who, unfortunately, is not

represented in the Exposition.

French painters have often been blamed for neglecting the material

around them, and for trespassing upon the domain of foreign artists by

representing Russian peasants and Italian beggars or selecting subjects

from Spain or Japan; but I have looked in vain through the various

galleries for any evidence that other countries are a whit less

obnoxious to this reproach than our own. Each nation forages in its

neighbor's field. Is it too much to hope that modern art may free itself

from the bondage of a senseless fashion, and may take to the study of

the living types close at hand? Russia and America, for instance, have

shown themselves capable of producing a literature distinctively

national and characteristic: must they ever remain without a school of

art as indigenous to the soil, and shall their painting never have its

Tourgueneff and its Bret Harte? The law of development may require that

the birth of a nation's art shall succeed that of its letters--though

the history of the Renaissance would seem to contradict this theory--but

whether this be so or not, it is certain that one does not imagine one's

self in Moscow while perambulating the Russian _salon_ in the Champ de

Mars, where the best representative of the national art, M. Siemiradski,

has chosen for the two paintings which have deservedly won a medal of

honor subjects from ancient Rome--the one an amateur hesitating in his

choice between two articles of equal value--namely, a chased cup and a

female slave--and the other representing a soiree of Nero. The subject

of this last is horrible. The tyrant, crowned with flowers and

surrounded by women and freedmen, descends from his palace. Attached to

long poles and besmeared with pitch, ready for the fatal flame, are the

living bodies of wretched Christians which will illumine to-night the

gardens of Caesar. _Living Torches_ is the title of the picture, which is

one of the most successful paintings of the Exposition, and has given

its author a high rank among contemporary artists.

The painters of the United States naturally feel the inspiration of the

country of their sojourn, be it France or Italy or Germany, for most of

them study abroad; but it is to be hoped that they will, after their

return to their own beautiful land, find motives for grander and more

picturesque studies than these hackneyed Old-World scenes of ours can

afford. Mr. Bridgman has painted--and well painted too--the _Obsequies

of a Mummy upon the Nile_, but why could he not as well have gratified

us with some equally impressive scene from the life of the pioneers in

the Far West, where wondrous landscape and romantic incident might so

well combine to furnish a new sensation to the amateurs of London and

Paris? Mr. Du Bois deserves our thanks for his _View upon the Hudson_,

and so does Mr. J.B. Bristol for his upon Lake Champlain. The

admiration which these two pictures have excited, amongst critics as

well as the public, is evidence enough that these two painters, or Mr.

Wyatt Eaton or Mr. Swain Gifford or Mr. Bolton Jones, may, if they so

will, make American landscape the _mode_ in Europe. Mr. J.M.L.

Hamilton has, to say the least, damaged his prospects of success by a

strangely inconsiderate choice of subject. Critics do not deny that his

_Woman in Black_ is firmly and solidly painted, but they are quite

unanimous in the opinion--in which everybody agrees with them--that the

composition is in the worst possible taste. I have a vague recollection

of having seen this painting in Philadelphia, and Americans may

recognize it by the general description of a woman smoking a cigarette

and holding her knee with both hands. Altogether, it might have been

tolerated in another age and country, which took no offence at the

coarse manners of Dutch fairs and merrymakings, but we are not living

in the time of the _kermesses_, and Mr. Hamilton, moreover, is not a

Hollander, but a Philadelphian.

The contribution of Sweden, Norway and Denmark may be said to be, upon

the whole, less important than that of the United States, and to show,

perhaps, less ability in execution; but it has, upon the other hand, the

charm of local interest, which the American collection lacks. It is

refreshing to meet with these honest, simple little pictures of

Scandinavian life, with its typical faces and figures, its costumes and

interiors, all so little known to us, and so delightful from their

novelty. Amongst the Danish painters we may note especially the names of

Exner, Carl Bloch, Kroeger and Bache; and amongst the Swedes, those of

Zetterstein, Ross and Hagborg, who follow very closely, in manner and

composition, the German school of Duesseldorf.

Art is migratory. If she sojourns to-day in France, it is but as a guest

who reposes a while ere she continues her unceasing journey. This

reflection--with which we opened our rapid review of the Exhibition in

the Champ de Mars--haunts us especially as we linger in the galleries

devoted to Holland and Italy. Even in those favored lands, where Art

once seemed to have fixed her eternal abode, the inspiration of genius

is succeeded by the technical skill of the academician. There are

excellent sea-pieces, by Mesdag and Gabriel in the Dutch gallery, but

Italy, which has fairly crowded her allotted space with canvases, has

nothing to challenge our admiration except a few pretty genre pictures.

M. de Nittis--whom, by the way, we are apt to think of as a Parisian,

but who is, it appears, Neapolitan--exhibits a dozen pictures quite as

_modern_ in conception as the latest scenes from the comedies of Henri

Meilhac, and which will, one day, serve as valuable documents in the

authentication of the manners and costume of the present epoch.

Connoisseurs of the twenty-first century will curiously study our

cavalcades in Hyde Park or upon the Brindisi road, the return from the

races on the avenue of the Bois de Boulogne, and the hundred other

incidents of our every-day life, certified by the signature of Nittis.

Clear and brilliant, too, and full of movement and gayety, are the

compositions of MM. Michetti, Mancini and Delleani (_A Fete on the Grand

Canal_, _The Return from the Fete of the Madonna_, etc.); but the most

remarkable of these little Italian masters is Pasini, the Orientalist.

His _Suburbs of Constantinople_ and his _Promenade in the Garden of the

Harem_ are pictures on which the eye may feast, so finely drawn are

their diminutive figures, so wonderful is their variety of intense

color--yellow, blue, green, rose--and so clear and transparent withal,

startling and amusing us like a display of fireworks.

In the English section are plenty of old acquaintances: we have seen

them at Philadelphia, in London and I know not where besides. Frith's

_Railway Station_ and _Derby Day_ we all remember, so badly realistic

and modern, and the _Casual Ward_ of Fildes--pictures that have gained

in England the popularity and success due to veritable works of art, and

in Paris the sort of praise we should give to a large colored

photograph--if it were well done. This English school is hardly to our

taste: Leslie, Leighton, Millais, Orchardson, the painters most in vogue

in their own country, have not succeeded in overcoming the cold

indifference of the public, who pass through the galleries without

caring even to stop. Whence comes the strange disregard for art in a

country which lavishes such vast sums for the encouragement of artists?

Here are canvases which have been covered with gold, but Parisian

criticism treats them as contemptuously as if they were mere

chromo-lithographs. The English school is severely condemned for its

inharmonious colors, which are either too violent or too cold; for its

drawing, which is without what we call _distinction_; and for that

unaccountable light which seems to shine through their figures from

within, giving many of the heads the appearance of lanterns. Naturally,

Professor Ruskin comes in for his share of this harsh criticism--which,

I beg my readers to observe, is not ventured as my own, but is only the

echo of the opinion of competent authorities, members of the Institute

of France--and the veteran apostle of Pre-Raphaelism is accused of an

affected simplicity, and, at the same time, of an offensive and coarse

realism, of a mongrel combination of the styles of Courbet and of the

old missals, of a want of perspective, and, in short, of all the faults

which mark the contemporary English school.

It was only at the last moment that Germany decided to exhibit, and it

would be hardly fair to judge of the art of that country by the small

number of examples on the walls. There are some paintings by M. Knauss

and his followers, however, in whom, if we may accept the opinion of

certain connoisseurs, is to be found the true representation of the

genius of the land beyond the Rhine. The subjects are invariably

peasants or children, rendered according to the monotonous processes of

this school, the shape clearly projected upon a dull and sombre ground,

the attitudes correct and the gestures faultless, but there is an

absence of everything brilliant or striking. No one of the attributes

which go to make up a good picture is allowed to assert itself above

another: there is an equalization of many talents, sure of themselves,

and as incapable of weakness or failure as of telling strokes of genius.

One cannot fail to look with curiosity at the _Furnace_ of M. Menzel, a

picture of much celebrity in Germany, representing an immense foundry

with its massive framework of iron, its machinery and furnaces, the

powerful glare of light from a melted casting vividly illuminating the

faces and figures of the workmen. Worthy of mention too are the

portraits of men by the Bavarian Lembach, and Richter's fine portrait of

the beautiful princess Karolath-Beuthen in a ball-dress of white satin,

seated by the chimney with an enormous house-dog at her feet. Nor must

we omit the _Baptism after the Death of the Father_ by M. Hoff, the

chief of the Realistic school, and the landscapes of the two Achembachs

and of Breudel and Munthe.

One of the greatest successes of the Exposition has been achieved by

Spain. M. Pradilla's remarkable composition representing a passage from

the national history--the mad queen Joanna watching by the corpse of her

husband, Philip the Handsome--has received a medal of honor. This

important painting, which was exhibited at Philadelphia, has attracted

so much attention at Madrid during the past two years that the Chambers

voted a sum for its acquisition by the state. MM. F. and R. de Madrazzo,

father and son, who are well known in America, are also represented,

the former (who is director of the Museum of Madrid) by some admirable

portraits, one of which is especially noticeable. In a large arm-chair

covered in red reclines a very young girl, whose dress, of a light

rose-color, is nearly of the same tint as her own delicate complexion,

while the red carpet at her feet, the carnations and red geraniums upon

the table, all thrown out boldly upon a background of intense blue,

produce a strange but wonderfully harmonious effect of color. M.

Madrazzo's eldest daughter was the wife of the young and lamented

Fortuny, and her bright and lovely face reappears in many, if not in

most, of the compositions of her gifted husband.

Fortuny, who sold his first picture to a costermonger in Madrid for a

bag of peas, is represented at the Champ de Mars by several canvases,

the smallest of which would bring forty thousand francs. His best works

are in France. _The Wedding at the Vicarage_, his chef-d'oeuvre,

belongs to Madame de Cassin; M. Andre owns his _Serpent-Charmer_; and

the well-known _Choice of a Model_ and _The Judgment-Hall at Granada_

are in the possession of M. Stewart, the painter's intimate friend,

whose collection of Fortuny's works is worth, at the current prices of

the day, not less than six hundred thousand francs. Fortuny's painting

is indescribable. It has the sparkle of diamonds and rubies and emeralds

in the brilliant light of a ball-room. His figures are small, and as

minutely elaborated and as highly finished as those of Meissonier

himself, whose cherished pupil he was; and I could not but smile, while

examining them, at the notion of an enthusiastic young Philadelphian, an

almost idolatrous worshipper of Fortuny, that he could imitate this

incomparable work by a rapid and free sort of sketching, and all on the

faith of two pictures of the master which he had had the happiness to

see at an exhibition in Broad street. The immense influence of Fortuny

upon the younger contemporary painters of Spain is very apparent in the

Exposition. MM. Rico, Simonetti, Domingo, Melida, Casanova vie with each

other in their imitation of his manner, but, excellent artists as they

are, they are doing so at the expense of originality. The qualities of

Fortuny belonged to the nature and temperament of this extraordinary

artist, and are not to be acquired by any amount of labor or by any

effort of will.

My favorite corner at the Champ de Mars is here before the sparkling

little canvases of the Spanish master. But this prodigality of color

will sometimes dazzle and fatigue the eye, and turning from it one sees,

framed by the heavy red curtains which enclose the Spanish gallery, the

immense canvas of the Austrian Hans Makart. This is the _Entry of

Charles V. into Antwerp_. The emperor is surrounded by nearly nude

women, who in the midst of horsemen and men-at-arms are offering him

flowers and wreaths. These figures, with those of ladies upon balconies

gay with flags, and the vast architecture, fill this enormous canvas,

which is much larger than even the _Catharine Cornaro_ with which the

Philadelphia Exhibition made Americans familiar. The nudity of the women

mingled with clothed personages in the streets of a city of the

sixteenth century has naturally called forth much adverse criticism, and

people have fancied that they saw in it an unworthy attempt to achieve a

popular success by means of the scandal; but M. Makart replies that he

has respected the truth of history if we are not to disbelieve a

contemporary letter of Albert Duerer to Melanchthon. Be this as it may,

this great effort receives the applause of the public, notwithstanding

the monotonous amber tint which pervades this picture as it did the

_Catharine Cornaro_. Another Austrian, the historical painter Matejko,

has received a medal of honor for pictures full of energy, truth and

character, though marred by that unaccountable scattering of the light

which is a peculiar eccentricity of Austrian painters.

L. LEJEUNE.

DESERTED.

"What a glorious, all-satisfying country this Nevada desert would be if

one were only all eyes, and had no need of food, drink and shelter!

Wouldn't it, Miss Dwyer? Do you know, I've no doubt that this is the

true location of heaven. You see, the lack of water and vegetation would

be no inconvenience to spirits, while the magnificent scenery and the

cloudless sky would be just the thing to make them thrive."

"But what I can't get over," responded the young lady addressed, "is

that these alkali plains, which have been described as so dreary and

uninteresting, should prove to be in reality one of the most wonderfully

impressive and beautiful regions in the world. What awful fibbers or

what awfully dull people they must have been whose descriptions have so

misled the public! It is perfectly unaccountable. Here, I expected to

doze all the way across the desert, while, in fact, I've grudged my eyes

time enough to wink ever since I left my berth this morning."

"The trouble is," replied her companion, "that persons in search of the

picturesque, or with much eye for it, are rare travellers along this

route. The people responsible for the descriptions you complain of are

thrifty business-men, with no idea that there can be any possible

attraction in a country where crops can't be raised, timber cut or ore

dug up. For my part, I thank the Lord for the beautiful barrenness that

has consecrated this great region to loneliness. Here there will always

be a chance to get out of sight and sound of the swarming millions who

have already left scarcely standing-room for a man in the East. I

wouldn't give much for a country where there are no wildernesses left."

"But I really think it is rather hard to say in just what the beauty of

the desert consists," said Miss Dwyer. "It is so simple. I scribbled two

pages of description in my note-book this morning, but when I read them

over, and then looked out of the window, I tore them up. I think the

wonderfully fine, clear, brilliant air transfigures the landscape and

makes it something that must be seen and can't be told. After seeing how

this air makes the ugly sagebrush and the patches of alkali and brown

earth a feast to the eye, one can understand how the light of heaven may

make the ugliest faces beautiful."

The pretty talker is sitting next the window of palace-car No. 30 of the

Central Pacific line, which has already been her flying home for two

days. The gentleman who sits beside her professes to be sharing the

view, but it is only fair I should tell the reader that under this

pretence he is nefariously delighting in the rounded contour of his

companion's half-averted face as she, in unfeigned engrossment, scans

the panorama unrolled before them by the swift motion of the car. How

sweet and fresh is the bright tint of her cheek against the ghastly

white background of the alkali-patches as they flit by! Still, it can't

be said that he isn't enjoying the scenery too, for surely there is no

such Claude-Lorraine glass to reflect and enhance the beauty of a

landscape as the face of a spirituel girl.

With a profound sigh, summing up both her admiration and that despair of

attaining the perfect insight and sympathy imagined and longed for which

is always a part of intense appreciation of natural beauty, Miss Dwyer

threw herself back in her seat and fixed her eyes on the car-ceiling

with an expression as if she were looking at something at least as far

away as the moon.

"I'm going to make a statue when I get home," she said--"a statue which

will personify Nevada and represent the tameless, desolate, changeless,

magnificent beauty and the self-sufficient loneliness of the desert. I

can see it in my mind's eye now. It will probably be the finest statue

in the world."

"If you'd as lieve put your ideal into a painting I will give you a

suggestion that will be original if nothing else," he observed.

"What's that?"

"Why, having in view these white alkali-patches that chiefly

characterize Nevada, paint her as a leper."

"That's horrid! You needn't talk to me any more," she exclaimed

emphatically.

With this sort of chatter they had beguiled the time since leaving San

Francisco the morning of the day before. Acquaintances are indeed made

as rapidly on an overland train as on an ocean steamship, but theirs had

dated from the preceding winter, during which they had often met in San

Francisco. When Mr. Lombard heard that Miss Dwyer and Mrs. Eustis, her

invalid sister, were going East in April, he discovered that he would

have business to attend to in New York at about that time; and oddly

enough--that is, if you choose to take that view of it--when the ladies

came to go it turned out that Lombard had taken his ticket for the

selfsame train and identical sleeping-car. The result of which was that

he had the privilege of handing Miss Dwyer in and out at the

eating-stations, of bringing Mrs. Eustis her cup of tea in the car, and

of sharing Miss Dwyer's seat and monopolizing her conversation when he

had a mind to, which was most of the time. A bright and congenial

companion has this advantage over a book, that he or she is an author

whom you can make discourse on any subject you please, instead of being

obliged to follow an arbitrary selection by another, as when you commune

with the printed page.

By way of peace-offering for his blasphemy in calling the Nevada desert

a leper, Lombard had embezzled a couple of chairs from the smoking-room

and carried them to the rear platform of the car, which happened to be

the last of the train, and invited Miss Dwyer to come thither and see

the scenery. Whether she had wanted to pardon him or not, he knew very

well that this was a temptation which she could not resist, for the

rear platform was the best spot for observation on the entire train,

unless it were the cowcatcher of the locomotive.

The April sun mingled with the frosty air like whiskey with ice-water,

producing an effect cool but exhilarating. As she sat in the door of the

little passage leading to the platform she scarcely needed the shawl

which he wrapped about her with absurdly exaggerated solicitude. One of

the most unmistakable symptoms of the lover is the absorbing and

superfluous care with which he adjusts the wraps about the object of his

affections whether the weather be warm or cold: it is as if he thought

he could thus artificially warm her heart toward him. But Miss Dwyer did

not appear vexed, pretending indeed to be oblivious of everything else

in admiration of the spectacle before her.

The country stretched flat and bare as a table for fifty miles on either

side the track--a distance looking in the clear air not over one-fifth

as great. On every side this great plain was circled by mountains, the

reddish-brown sides of some of them bare to the summits, while others

were robed in folds of glistening snow and looked like white curtains

drawn part way up the sky. The whitey-gray of the alkali-patches, the

brown of the dry earth and the rusty green of the sagebrush filled the

foreground, melting in the distance into a purple-gray. The wondrous

dryness and clearness of the air lent to these modest tints a tone and

dazzling brilliance that surprised the eye with a revelation of

possibilities never before suspected in them. But the mountains were the

greatest wonder. It was as if the skies, taking pity on their nakedness,

had draped their majestic shoulders in imperial purple, while at this

hour the westering sun tipped their pinnacles with gilt. In the distance

half a dozen sand-spouts, swiftly-moving white pillars, looking like

desert genii with too much "tanglefoot" aboard, were careering about in

every direction.

But as Lombard pointed out the various features of the scene to his

companion, I fear that his chief motive was less an admiration of Nature

that sought sympathy than a selfish delight in making her eyes flash,

seeing the color come and go in her cheeks, and hearing her charming

unstudied exclamations of pleasure--a delight not unmingled with

complacency in associating himself in her mind with emotions of delight

and admiration. It is appalling, the extent to which spoony young people

make the admiration of Nature in her grandest forms a mere sauce to

their lovemaking. The roar of Niagara has been notoriously utilized as a

cover to unlimited osculation, and Adolphus looks up at the sky-cleaving

peak of Mont Blanc only to look down at Angelina's countenance with a

more vivid appreciation of its superior attractions.

It was delicious, Lombard thought, sitting there with her on the rear

platform, out of sight and sound of everybody. He had such a pleasant

sense of proprietorship in her! How agreeable--flatteringly so, in

fact--she had been all day! There was nothing like travelling together

to make people intimate. It was clear that she understood his intentions

very well: indeed, how could she help it? He had always said that a

fellow had shown himself a bungler at lovemaking if he were not

practically assured of the result before he came to the point of the

declaration. The sensation of leaving everything else so rapidly behind

that people have when sitting on the rear platform of a train of cars

makes them feel, by force of contrast, nearer to each other and more

identified. How pretty she looked sitting there in the doorway, her eyes

bent so pensively on the track behind as the car-wheels so swiftly

reeled it off! He had tucked her in comfortably. No cold could get to

the sweet little girl, and none ever should so long as he lived to make

her comfort his care.

One small gloved hand lay on her lap outside the shawl. What a jolly

little hand it was! He reached out his own and took it, but, without

even a moment's hesitation for him to extract a flattering inference

from, she withdrew it. Perhaps something in his matter-of-course way

displeased her.

To know when it is best to submit to a partial rebuff, rather than make

a bad matter worse by trying to save one's pride, is a rare wisdom.

Still, Lombard might have exercised it at another time. But there are

days when the magnetisms are all wrong, and a person not ordinarily

deficient in tact, having begun wrong, goes on blundering like a

schoolboy. Piqued at the sudden shock to the pleasant day-dream, in

which he had fancied himself already virtually assured of this young

lady--a day-dream which she was not really accountable for spoiling,

since she had not been privy to it--what should he do but find

expression for his mingled vexation and wounded affection by reminding

her of a previous occasion on which she had allowed him the liberty she

now denied? Doubtless helping to account for this lack of tact was the

idea that he should thus justify himself for so far presuming just now.

Not, of course, that there is really any excuse for a young man's

forgetting that ladies have one advantage over Omniscience, in that not

only are they privileged to remember what they please, but also to

ignore what they see fit to forget.

"You have forgotten that evening at the California Theatre," was what

this devoted youth said.

"I'm sure I don't know to what you refer, sir," she replied freezingly.

He was terrified at the distant accent of her voice. It appeared to come

from somewhere beyond the fixed stars, and brought the chill of the

interstellar spaces with it. He forgot in an instant all about his

pique, vexation and wounded pride, and was in a panic of anxiety to

bring her back. In a moment more he knew that she would rise from her

chair and remark that it was getting cold and she must go in. If he

allowed her to depart in that mood he might lose her for ever. He could

think of but one way of convincing her instantaneously of his devotion;

and so what should he do but take the most inopportune occasion in the

entire course of their acquaintance to make his declaration? He was like

a general whose plan of battle has been completely deranged by an

utterly unexpected repulse in a preliminary movement, compelling him to

hurry forward his last reserves in a desperate attempt to restore the

battle.

"What have I done, Miss Dwyer? Don't you know that I love you? Won't you

be my wife?"

"No, sir," she said flatly, her taste outraged and her sensibilities set

on edge by the stupid, blundering, hammer-and-tongs onset which from

first to last he had made. She loved him, and had meant to accept him,

but if she had loved him ten times as much she couldn't have helped

refusing him just then, under those circumstances--not if she died for

it. As she spoke she rose and disappeared within the car.

It is certainly to be hoped that the noise of the wheels, which out on

the platform was considerable, prevented the recording angel from

getting the full force of Lombard's ejaculation.

It is bad enough to be refused when the delicacy and respectfulness of

the lady's manner make "No" sound so much like "Yes" that the rejected

lover can almost persuade himself that his ears have deceived him. It is

bad enough to be refused when she does it so timidly and shrinkingly and

deprecatingly that it might be supposed she were the rejected party. It

is bad enough to be refused when she expresses the hope that you will

always be friends, and shows a disposition to make profuse amends in

general agreeableness for the consummate favor which she is forced to

decline you. Not to put too fine a point upon it, it is bad enough to be

refused anyhow you can arrange the circumstances, but to be refused as

Lombard had been, with a petulance as wounding to his dignity as was the

refusal itself to his affections, is to take a bitter pill with an

asafoetida coating.

In the limp and demoralized condition in which he was left the only

clear sentiment in his mind was that he did not want to meet her again

just at present. So he sat for an hour or more longer out on the

platform, and had become as thoroughly chilled without as he was within

when at dusk the train stopped at a little three-house station for

supper. Then he went into one of the forward day-cars, not intending to

return to the sleeping-car till Miss Dwyer should have retired. When the

train reached Ogden the next morning; instead of going on East he would

take the same train back to San Francisco, and that would be the end of

his romance. His engagement in New York had been a myth, and with Miss

Dwyer's "No, sir," the only business with the East that had brought him

on this trip was at an end.

About an hour after leaving the supper-station the train suddenly

stopped in the midst of the desert. Something about the engine had

become disarranged which it would take some time to put right. Glad to

improve an opportunity to stretch their legs, many of the passengers

left the cars and were strolling about, curiously examining the

sagebrush and the alkali, and admiring the ghostly plain as it spread,

bare, level and white as an ice-bound polar sea, to the feet of the

far-off mountains.

Lombard had also left the car, and was walking about, his hands in his

overcoat pockets, trying to clear his mind of the wreckage that

obstructed its working; for Miss Dwyer's refusal had come upon him as a

sudden squall that carries away the masts and sails of a vessel and

transforms it in a moment from a gallant bounding ship to a mere hulk

drifting in an entangled mass of debris. Of course she had a perfect

right to suit herself about the kind of a man she took for a husband,

but he certainly had not thought she was such an utter coquette. If ever

a woman gave a man reason to think himself as good as engaged, she had

given him that reason, and yet she refused him as coolly as she would

have declined a second plate of soup. There must be some truth, after

all, in the rant of the poets about the heartlessness and fickleness of

women, although he had always been used to consider it the merest bosh.

Suddenly he heard the train moving. He was perhaps fifty yards off, and,

grumbling anathemas at the stupidity of the conductor, started to run

for the last car. He was not quite desperate enough to fancy being left

alone on the Nevada desert with night coming on. He would have caught

the train without difficulty if his foot had not happened to catch in a

tough clump of sage, throwing him violently to the ground. As he

gathered himself up the train was a hundred yards off, and moving

rapidly. To overtake it was out of the question.

"Stop! ho! stop!" he yelled at the top of his lungs. But there was no

one on the rear platform to see him, and the closed windows and the

rattle of the wheels were sufficient to render a much louder noise than

he could make inaudible to the dozing passengers. And now the engineer

pulled out the throttle-valve to make up for lost time, and the clatter

of the train faded into a distant roar and its lights began to twinkle

into indistinctness.

"Damnation!"

A voice fell like a falling star: "Gentlemen do not use profane language

in ladies' company."

He first looked up in the air, as on the whole the likeliest quarter for

a voice to come from in this desert, then around. Just on the other side

of the track stood Miss Dwyer, smiling with a somewhat constrained

attempt at self-possession. Lombard was a good deal taken aback, but in

his surprise he did not forget that this was the young lady who had

refused him that afternoon.

"I beg your pardon," he replied with a stiff bow: "I did not suppose

that there were any ladies within hearing."

"I got out of the car supposing there was plenty of time to get a

specimen of sagebrush to carry home," she explained, "but when the cars

started, although I was but a little way off, I could not regain the

platform;" which, considering that she wore a tie-back of the then

prevalent fashion, was not surprising.

"Indeed!" replied Lombard with the same formal manner.

"But won't the train come back for us?" she asked in a more anxious

voice.

"That will depend on whether we are missed. Nobody will miss me. Mrs.

Eustis, if she hasn't gone to bed, may miss you."

"But she has. She went to bed before I left the car, and is asleep by

this time."

"That's unfortunate," was his brief reply as he lit a cigar and began to

smoke and contemplate the stars.

His services, so far as he could do anything for her, she should, as a

lady, command, but if she thought that he was going to do the agreeable

after what had happened a couple of hours ago, she was mightily

mistaken.

There was a silence, and then she said, hesitatingly, "What are we going

to do?"

He glanced at her. Her attitude and the troubled expression of her face

as well as her voice indicated that the logic of the situation was

overthrowing the jaunty self-possession which she had at first affected.

The desert was staring her out of countenance. How his heart yearned

toward her! If she had only given him a right to take care of her, how

he would comfort her! what prodigies would he be capable of to succor

her! But this rising impulse of tenderness was turned to choking

bitterness by the memory of that scornful "No, sir." So he replied,

coldly, "I'm not in the habit of being left behind in deserts, and I

don't know what is customary to do in such cases. I see nothing except

to wait for the next train, which will come along some time within

twenty-four hours."

There was another long silence, after which she said in a timid voice,

"Hadn't we better walk to the next station?"

At the suggestion of walking he glanced at her close-fitting dress, and

a sardonic grin slightly twitched the corners of his mouth as he dryly

answered, "It is thirty miles one way and twenty the other to the first

station."

Several minutes passed before she spoke again, and then she said, with

an accent almost like that of a child in trouble and about to cry, "I'm

cold."

The strong, unceasing wind, blowing from snowy mountain-caverns across a

plain on which there was not the slightest barrier of hill or tree to

check its violence, was indeed bitterly cold, and Lombard himself felt

chilled to the marrow of his bones. He took off his overcoat and offered

it to her.

"No," said she, "you are as cold as I am."

"You will please take it," he replied in a peremptory manner; and she

took it.

"At this rate we shall freeze to death before midnight," he added as if

in soliloquy. "I must see if I can't contrive to make some sort of a

shelter with this sagebrush."

He began by tearing up a large number of bushes by the roots. Seeing

what he was doing, Miss Dwyer was glad to warm her stiffened muscles by

taking hold and helping; which she did with a vigor that shortly reduced

her gloves to shreds and filled her fingers with scratches from the

rough twigs. Lombard next chose an unusually high and thick clump of

brush, and cleared a small space three feet across in the centre of it,

scattering twigs on the uncovered earth to keep off its chill.

"Now, Miss Dwyer, if you will step inside this spot, I think I can build

up the bushes around us so as to make a sort of booth which may save us

from freezing."

She silently did as he directed, and he proceeded to pile the brush

which they had torn up on the tops of the bushes left standing around

the spot where they were, thus making a circular wall about three feet

high. Over the top he managed to draw together two or three bushes, and

the improvised wigwam was complete.

The moonlight penetrated the loose roof sufficiently to reveal to each

other the faces and figures of the two occupants as they sat in opposite

corners as far apart as possible, she cold and miserable, he cold and

sulky, and both silent. And, as if to mock him, the idea kept recurring

to his mind how romantic and delightful, in spite of the cold and

discomfort, the situation would be if she had only said Yes, instead of

No, that afternoon. People have odd notions sometimes, and it actually

seemed to him that his vexation with her for destroying the pleasure of

the present occasion was something quite apart and in addition to his

main grievance against her. It might have been so jolly, and now she had

spoiled it. He could have boxed her pretty little ears.

She wondered why he did not try to light a fire, but she wouldn't ask

him another thing if she died. In point of fact, he knew the sagebrush

would not burn. Suddenly the wind blew fiercer, there came a rushing

sound, and the top and walls of the wigwam were whisked off like a

flash, and as they staggered to their feet, buffeted by the whirling

bushes, a cloud of fine alkali-dust enveloped them, blinding their eyes,

penetrating their ears and noses, and setting them gasping, sneezing and

coughing spasmodically. Then, like a puff of smoke, the suffocating

storm was dissipated, and when they opened their smarting eyes there was

nothing but the silent, glorious desolation of the ghostly desert around

them, with the snow-peaks in the distance glittering beneath the moon. A

sand-spout had struck them, that was all--one of the whirling

dust-columns which they had admired all day from the car-windows.

Wretched enough before both for physical and sentimental reasons, this

last experience quite demoralized Miss Dwyer, and she sat down and

cried. Now, a few tears, regarded from a practical, middle-aged point of

view, would not appear to have greatly complicated the situation, but

they threw Lombard into a panic. If she was going to cry, something must

be done. Whether anything could be done or not, something _must_ be

done.

"Don't leave me," she cried hysterically as he rushed off to reconnoitre

the vicinity.

"I'll return presently," he called back.

But five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes passed, and he did not

come back. Terror dried her tears, and her heart almost stopped beating.

She had quite given him up for lost, and herself too, when with

inexpressible relief she heard him call to her. She replied, and in a

moment more he was at her side, breathless with running.

"I lost my bearings," he said. "If you had not answered me I could not

have found you."

"Don't leave me again," she sobbed, clinging to his arm.

He put his arms round her and kissed her. It was mean, base,

contemptible to take advantage of her agitation in that way, but she did

not resist, and he did it again and again--I forbear to say how many

times.

"Isn't it a perfectly beautiful night?" he exclaimed with a fine gush of

enthusiasm.

"Isn't it exquisite?" she echoed with a rush of sympathetic feeling.

"See those stars: they look as if they had just been polished," he

cried.

"What a droll idea!" she exclaimed gleefully. "But do see that lovely

mountain."

Holding her with a firmer clasp, and speaking with what might be styled

a fierce tenderness, he demanded, "What did you mean, miss, by refusing

me this afternoon?"

"What did you go at me so stupidly for? I had to refuse," she retorted

smilingly.

"Will you be my wife?"

"Yes, sir: I meant to be all the time."

The contract having been properly sealed, Lombard said, with a

countenance curiously divided between a tragical expression and a smile

of fatuous complacency, "There was a clear case of poetical justice in

your being left behind in the desert to-night. To see the lights of the

train disappearing, leaving you alone in the midst of desolation, gave

you a touch of my feeling on being rejected this afternoon. Of all

leavings behind, there's none so miserable as the experience of the

rejected lover."

"Poor fellow! so he shouldn't be left behind. He shall be conductor of

the train," she said with a bewitching laugh. His response was not

verbal.

"How cold the wind is!" she said.

"Shall I build you another wigwam?"

"No: let us exercise a little. You whistle 'The Beautiful Blue Danube,'

and we'll waltz. This desert is the biggest, jolliest ball-room floor

that ever was, and I dare say we shall be the first to waltz on it since

the creation of the world. That will be something to boast of when we

get home. Come, let's dedicate the Great American Desert to

Terpsichore."

They stepped out from among the ruins of their sagebrush booth upon a

patch of hard bare earth close to the railroad track. Lombard puckered

his lips and struck up the air, and off they went with as much

enthusiasm as if inspired by a first-class orchestra. Round and round,

to and fro, they swept until, laughing, flushed and panting, they came

to a stop.

It was then that they first perceived that they were not without a

circle of appreciative spectators. Sitting like statues on their

sniffing, pawing ponies, a dozen Piute Indians encircled them. Engrossed

with the dance and with each other, they had not noticed them as they

rode up, attracted from their route by this marvellous spectacle of a

pale-face squaw and brave engaged in a solitary war-dance in the midst

of the desert.

At sight of the grim circle of centaurs around them Miss Dwyer would

have fainted but for Lombard's firm hold.

"Pretend not to see them: keep on dancing," he hissed in her ear. He had

no distinct plan in what he said, but spoke merely from an instinct of

self-preservation, which told him that when they stopped the Indians

would be upon them. But as she mechanically, and really more dead than

alive, obeyed his direction and resumed the dance, and he in his

excitement was treading on her feet at every step, the thought flashed

upon him that there was a bare chance of escaping violence if they could

keep the Indians interested without appearing to notice their presence.

In successive whispers he communicated his idea to Miss Dwyer: "Don't

act as if you saw them at all, but do everything as if we were alone.

That will puzzle them, and may make them think us supernatural beings,

or perhaps crazy: Indians have great respect for crazy people. It's our

only chance. We will stop dancing now, and sing a while. Give them a

burlesque of opera. I'll give you the cues and show you how. Don't be

frightened. I don't believe they'll touch us so long as we act as if we

didn't see them. Do you understand? Can you do your part?"

"I understand: I'll try," she whispered.

"Now," he said, and as they separated he threw his hat on the ground,

and, assuming an extravagantly languishing attitude, burst forth in a

most poignant burlesque of a lovelorn tenor's part, rolling his eyes,

clasping his hands, striking his breast, and gyrating about Miss Dwyer

in the most approved operatic style. He had a fine voice and knew a good

deal of music; so that, barring a certain nervousness in the performer,

the exhibition was really not bad. In his singing he had used a

meaningless gibberish varied with the syllables of the scale, but he

closed by singing the words, "Are you ready now? Go ahead, then."

With that she took it up, and rendered the prima donna quite as

effectively, interjecting "The Last Rose of Summer" as an aria in a

manner that would have been encored in San Francisco. He responded with

a few staccato notes, and the scene ended by their rushing into each

other's arms and waltzing down the stage with abandon.

The Indians sat motionless on their horses, not even exchanging comments

among themselves. They were evidently too utterly astonished by the

goings on before them to have any other sentiment as yet beyond pure

amazement. Here were two richly-dressed pale-faces, such as only lived

in cities, out in the middle of an uninhabitable desert, in the freezing

midnight, having a variety and minstrel show all to themselves, and, to

make the exhibition the more unaccountable, without apparently seeing

their auditors at all. Had they started up the show after being

captured, Indian cunning would have recognized in it a device to save

their lives, but the two had been at it before the party rode up--had,

in fact, first attracted attention by their gyrations, which were

visible for miles out on the moony plain.

Lombard, without ever letting his eyes rest a moment on the Indians so

as to indicate that he saw them, had still managed by looks askance and

sweeping glances to keep close watch upon their demeanor, and noted with

prodigious relief that his wild scheme was succeeding better than he had

dared to hope. Without any break in the entertainment he communicated

his reassurance to Miss Dwyer by singing, to the tune of "My Country,

'tis of Thee," the following original hymn:

"We're doing admir'blee--

They're heap much tickledee:

Only keep on."

To which she responded, to the lugubrious air of "John Brown's Body,"

"Oh what do you s'pose they'll go for to do,

Oh what do you s'pose they'll go for to do,

Oh what do you s'pose they'll go for to do,

When we can sing no more?"

A thing may be ridiculous without being amusing, and neither of these

two felt the least inclination to smile at each other's poetry. After

duly joining in the chorus of "Glory, Hallelujah!" Lombard endeavored to

cheer his companion by words adapted to the inspiriting air of "Rally

Round the Flag, Boys," This was followed by a series of popular airs,

with solos, duets and choruses.

But this sort of thing could not go on for ever. Lombard was becoming

exhausted in voice and legs, and as for Miss Dwyer, he was expecting to

see her drop from moment to moment. Indeed, to the air of "'Way Down

upon the S'wanee River" she now began to sing,

"Oh dear! I can't bear up much longer:

I'm tired to death;

My voice's gone all to pie-ee-ee-ces,

My throat is very sore."

They must inevitably give out in a few minutes, and then he--and,

terribly worse, she--would be at the mercy of these bestial savages, and

this seeming farce would turn into most revolting tragedy. With this

sickening conviction coming over him, Lombard cast a despairing look

around the horizon to see if there were no help in their bitter

extremity. Suddenly he burst forth, to the tune of "The Star-Spangled

Banner:"

"Oh, say can you see,

Far away to the east,

A bright star that doth grow

Momentarily brighter?

'Tis the far-flashing headlight

Of a railroad-train:

Ten minutes from now

We shall be safe and sound."

What they did in those ten minutes neither could tell afterward. The

same idea was in both their minds--that unless the attention of the

Indians could be held until the train arrived, its approach would only

precipitate their own fate by impelling the savages to carry out

whatever designs of murder, insult or capture they might have. Under the

influence of the intense excitement of this critical interval it is to

be feared that the performance degenerated from a high-toned concert and

variety show into something very like a Howling-Dervish exhibition. But,

at any rate, it answered its purpose until, after a period that seemed

like a dozen eternities, the West-bound overland express with a

tremendous roar and rattle drew up beside them, in response to the

waving of Miss Dwyer's handkerchief and to Lombard's shouts.

Even had the Indians contemplated hostile intentions--which they were

doubtless in a condition of too great general stupefaction to do--the

alacrity with which the two performers clambered aboard the cars would

probably have foiled their designs. But as the train gathered headway

once more Lombard could not resist the temptation of venting his

feelings by shaking his fist ferociously at the audience which he had

been so conscientiously trying to please up to that moment. It was a

gratification which had like to have cost him dear. There was a quick

motion on the part of one of the Indians, and the conductor dragged

Lombard within the car just as an arrow struck the door.

Mrs. Eustis had slept sweetly all night, and was awakened the next

morning an hour before the train reached Ogden by the sleeping-car

porter, who gave her a telegram which had overtaken the train at the

last station. It read:

"Am safe and sound. Was left behind by your train last night, and

picked up by West-bound express. Will join you at Ogden to-morrow

morning."

"JENNIE DWYER."

Mrs. Eustis read the telegram through twice without getting the least

idea from it. Then she leaned over and looked down into Jennie's berth.

It had not been slept in. Then she began to understand. Heroically

resisting a tendency to scream, she thus secured space for second

thought, and, being a shrewd woman of the world, ended by making up her

mind to tell no one about the matter. Evidently, Jennie had been having

some decidedly unconventional experience, and the less publicity given

to all such passages in young ladies' lives the better for their

prospects. It so happened that in the bustle attending the approach to

the terminus and the prospective change of cars everybody was too busy

to notice that any passengers were missing. At Ogden, Mrs. Eustis left

the train and went to a hotel. The following morning, a few minutes

after the arrival of the Central Pacific train, Jennie Dwyer walked into

her room, Lombard having stopped at the office to secure berths for the

three to Omaha by the Union Pacific. After Jennie had given an outline

account of her experiences, and Mrs. Eustis's equilibrium had been

measurably restored by proper use of the smelling-salts, the latter lady

remarked, "And so Mr. Lombard was alone with you there all night? It's

very unfortunate that it should have happened so."

"Why, I was thinking it very fortunate," replied Jennie with her most

child-like expression. "If Mr. Lombard had not been there, I should

either have frozen to death or by this time been celebrating my

honeymoon as bride of a Piute chief."

"Nonsense, child! You know what I mean. People will talk: such

unpleasant things will be said! I wouldn't have had it happen for

anything. And when you were under my charge too! Do hand me my salts."

"If people are going to say unpleasant things because I pass a night

alone with Mr. Lombard," remarked Jennie with a mischievous smile, "you

must prepare yourself to hear a good deal said, my dear, for I presume

this won't be the last time it will happen. We're engaged to be

married."

EDWARD BELLAMY.

RAMBLING TALK ABOUT THE NEGRO.

What guides the bee when, turning from the "suck," he wheels in air and

strikes his wonderful line for the "gum"? Heaven knows. And by what

process does the negro calculate the shortest distance between the point

he occupies and the place he would be? That also is a mystery, yet the

least observant person familiar with the negro cannot have failed to

note his wonderful--we had almost said his preternatural--power to

discover, without guide or compass, the shortest possible distance

between two given places--to make, as he calls it, a "near cut."

To the right of us lay a berry and wild-fruit tract, on our left was a

large village, and our farm was in a certain portion skirted by an old

field, through which the negroes had discovered the most direct path to

market. At dawn they could be seen winding around the brow of the hill,

men, women and children, with baskets on their heads and buckets on

their arms, singly and in couples, sometimes three, four or a half dozen

together. And how they stole from us! It seemed impossible to prevent,

or even limit, their depredations.

One evening Mr. Smith said to me, "The man Tony is sentenced to be

hung."

Tony was a village negro accused of murder, and as he had been confined

in the village jail and tried at the village court-house, the case

naturally created some excitement in our quiet neighborhood.

"Oh, I am so sorry!" I exclaimed.

"Yes, poor devil!" said Mr. Smith. "But it was a clear case. He belonged

to Mr. Lamkin before the surrender, and the old man made every effort to

get him off--employed the very best counsel. I am sorry for him, but the

wind which is so ill for him will blow us good. He is to be hung in the

old field that edges our farm, and after the execution takes place we

shall have no more negro trespassers in that quarter. I very much doubt

whether I shall be able to obtain hands to work that portion of the

land."

It would require a psychological study of the negro character to enable

one to explain the spirit in which they flocked to the execution of

their comrade, their friend, in some instances their kinsman. They came

in holiday attire and with hurrying steps, and long before the hour

appointed the adjoining fence was crowded with eager spectators, and,

like flocks of blackbirds, they had filled every tree within five

hundred yards, chatting and bustling and moving around with no apparent

emotion except the desire to see.

At length the cart appeared on the brow of the hill, and every neck was

craned for a glimpse of the poor creature who sat on the coffin--a

pitiful-looking, half-dwarf mulatto, who gave you the idea of deformity

and distress without your being able to tell why. He walked bravely to

his place on the scaffold, singing and praying, protesting his innocence

and bequeathing forgiveness to his enemies, apparently full of faith,

like many others who by reason of weariness and despair have attained

resignation; but the fictitious piety born of nervous excitement, and

the abnormal elevation of feeling induced by continued spiritual

exhortation during weeks of unrest and suspense, both gave way when his

old mother, unsightly and pitiful as himself, asked leave to bid him

good-bye, and came tottering to his side, saying as well as she could

for the tears that choked her, "Oh, Tony! mammy ain't gwine back on you!

Mammy don't b'lieve you done it, she don't keer who 'kuses you.

Good-bye, my baby! good-bye! 'Twon't be long 'fo' mammy jines you an'

daddy whar dar ain't no onjestice an' no mizry. Mammy ain't gwine to

stay here long arter you goes."

He threw up his arms with a wild, sobbing cry: "Oh, mammy! mammy! can't

you do nothin' fer me? Ain't you got _no_ way to he'p me? Oh, de sun do

shine so pretty, an' de leaves shakes 'bout on de trees so natchul! An'

I nuvver knowed de birds to sing like dey does to-day. It ain't

fa'r--no, it's not fa'r to shet me up in de groun' for what I ain't

done. So many 'ginst one, an' me so little an' so po'! I ain't got a

fren' on top o' de yuth. Nary one outen all dese folks, what I use ter

go to shuckin's wid 'em, an' play de banjer, an' hunt possums--nary one

uv 'em didn't stand up for me an' try to git me off! Not eben you,

mammy, didn't try to git in jail an' gimme somethin' to wu'k my way out,

an' I a-lis'nin' night an' day! Night an' day, an' you nuvver come!"

"Lord! Lord! my baby!" sobbed the poor old thing, her trembling limbs

hardly able to sustain the feeble frame. "What could yo' ole mammy do

'ginst all dem folks? Ef Mars' Henry couldn't make 'em let you 'lone,

what could a po' ole nigger do what ain't got no money, an' no sense,

an' no fren's? Lord! Lord! my blessed chile!" she sobbed, the tears

raining down her withered black cheeks, "ef mammy had a hundred nakes

she would put dat rope 'roun' 'em all to keep it off o' your'n."

That was true, poor soul! but could avail nothing, and the appointed

sentence was carried into execution. The soul of the boy returned to its

Creator and its Judge, and the old mother was taken to her cabin almost

as lifeless as the body that swung in the air half a mile away.

If the fact that they flocked to the place of execution cannot be

ascribed to any idiosyncrasy of the negro race, it was curious to see

how they were afterward overwhelmed with superstitious fear. We had no

more trouble about the melons and grapes. The negroes found another

route to the village market, and the little well-worn path became

overgrown with grass and ox-eyed daisies, like the rest of the old

field. Even after the body had been buried far off and the scaffold

removed, in broad daylight they shunned the place, but at dusk or after

dark neither bribery nor persuasion could have induced one of them to

go near it. Mr. Smith tried some of them.

"But what the d----l are you afraid of?" he asked impatiently.

"I dunno, sir," returned one of the men doggedly. "All I does know is, I

ain't gwine (no disrespek, sir). But when a man is took off dat

onnateral kind o' way, de sperrit is always hangin' 'roun', tryin' to

git back whar it come from."

"But Tony is buried a mile away."

"I can't help dat, sir. De sperrit were let out in de ole field, an'

maybe it don't know whar to find the pusson it 'longs to. Anyhow, ef it

come back dar lookin' for Tony, I gwine take good keer it don't find

_me_!"