A snake with two heads, lurking so near!--

Judge of the wonder, guess at the fear!

Think what ancient gossips might say,

Shaking their heads in their dreary way,

Between the meetings on Sabbath-day!

How urchins, searching at day's decline

The Common Pasture for sheep or kine,

The terrible double-ganger heard

In leafy rustle or whirr of bird!

Think what a zest it gave to the sport

In berry-time of the younger sort,

As over pastures blackberry-twined

Reuben and Dorothy lagged behind,

And closer and closer, for fear of harm,

The maiden clung to her lover's arm;

And how the spark, who was forced to stay,

By his sweetheart's fears, till the break of day,

Thanked the snake for the fond delay!

Far and wide the tale was told,

Like a snowball growing while it rolled.

The nurse hushed with it the baby's cry;

And it served, in the worthy minister's eye,

To paint the primitive Serpent by.

Cotton Mather came posting down

All the way to Newbury town,

With his eyes agog and his ears set wide,

And his marvellous inkhorn at his side;

Stirring the while in the shallow pool

Of his brains for the lore he learned at school,

To garnish the story, with here a streak

Of Latin, and there another of Greek:

And the tales he heard and the notes he took,

Behold! are they not in his Wonder-Book?

Stories, like dragons, are hard to kill.

If the snake does not, the tale runs still

In Byfield Meadows, on Pipestone Hill.

And still, whenever husband and wife

Publish the shame of their daily strife,

And, with mad cross-purpose, tug and strain

At either end of the marriage-chain,

The gossips say, with a knowing shake

Of their gray heads, "Look at the Double Snake!

One in body and two in will,

The Amphisbaena is living still!"

A PLEA FOR THE FIJIANS;

OR, CAN NOTHING BE SAID IN FAVOR OF ROASTING ONE'S EQUALS?

It is with a feeling of no mean satisfaction, that, in this year of

1859, the philosopher can calmly propose the investigation of a subject,

the mere mention of which would have created universal disgust, and even

horror, at a period not long past. Thanks to the progress of liberal

ideas and sound criticism, we are able, in the middle of the

ever-memorable Nineteenth Century, serenely to examine anew those

questions which for entire centuries stolid prejudice and narrow

dogmatism considered settled, and adjudicated in the High Court of

Humanity for all times to come. However signal the progress of our age

may be in the useful arts and in aesthetics, especially in upholstery,

in chemistry, in the government of large cities, and in the purity of

commerce, in pottery, pills, and poetry, and in the dignity of politics,

nothing, we may venture to say, will so distinctly and so broadly

characterize the period in which we happily live, when the future

historian shall sweep with his star-seeker over the past, as the

joyful fact, that we, above all others, have divested ourselves of

long-cherished errors, hugged by our forefathers as truths full of life

and vigor, and have, indeed, so to speak, founded a Novum Organon in

fact and reality, while the great Bacon proposed one in mind and theory.

To our enlightened age it was reserved to return to polygamy, after

nearly three thousand dragging years of dull adhesion of our race to

tiresome monogamy, leaping back by one bound over the whole European

Past into ancient and respectable Asia. _Ex Oriente lux; ex Oriente

gaudia seraglii!_ It is in our blessed epoch that atheism, by some, and

pantheism, by others, are boldly taught and vindicated, as once they

were by Greeks or Orientals, and with an earnestness and enthusiasm very

different from the sneer with which Encyclopaedists of Voltaire's time

attacked Christianity and Deism. To prove, however, the magnificent

many-sidedness of our noble times, it is we that have returned once more

to pictures of the Virgin Mary with winking and with weeping eyes, or

to her apparitions talking _patois_, as that of La Valette, and to a

hundred things in the Church, cautiously passed over _sub silentio_ in

the last century, but now joyously proclaimed and sustained with defiant

erudition by English and German _doctores graces_, and by the Parisian

"Univers," which, openly rejoicing in the English blood spilt by

the Sepoys,--for it is but Protestant blood, and that of hateful

freemen,--heralds the second or third advent of universal love

and Papacy. It is in our age that representative, and indeed all

institutional government, for the first time, is called effete

parliamentarism, a theatrical delusion, for which, according to the

requirements of advanced civilization, the beneficent, harmonious, and

ever-glorious Caesarism, _pur et simple_, must be substituted, as it

was once sublimely exhibited in the attractive Caesars of Rome, those

favorites of History and very pets of Clio. In the time of Tiberius, as

President Troplong beautifully and officially expressed it, "Democracy

at last seated herself on the imperial throne, embodied in the

Caesars,"--those worshipful incarnations of democracy, brought to our

view in the _tableaux_ of Suetonius and by the accounts of Tacitus. We

have at last returned to Caesarism, or Asiatic absolutism, improved by

modern light, and making the emperor a Second Providence, opening and

shutting the mouths of the universal-suffrage people, for words or

bread, as imperial divinity finds best. This is the progress of our age

in Europe, while we, in this hemisphere, have taken, for the first

time in history, a rational view of party strife, and with unclouded

intelligence maintain that judges and presidents are, and ought to be,

party exponents, doing away with those once romantic, but certainly

superannuated ideas of Country, Justice, Truth, and Patriotism. All real

progress tends toward simplification; and how simple are the idea of

party and the associations clustering around this sacred word, compared

with the confusing and embarrassing unreality of those ideas and

juvenile feelings we have mentioned last!

But we have not done yet with the glory of our age. It is this, the

decennium we are soon going to close, that has risen to that enviable

eminence whence slavery is declared a precious good of itself,

a hallowed agent of civilization, an indispensable element of

conservatism, and a foundation of true socialism. From this lofty

eminence the seer-statesman--rising far above the philosophical sagacity

displayed by Aristotle and Varro, when they discussed the sacred

topic--proclaims that Capital ought to own, and has a divine right to

own, and always more or less does own, Labor; and that, since Labor

constitutes the whole humanity of the laboring man, it clearly follows

that he himself must be owned, if his labor be owned. Would you own the

bird without its cage? Generous gospel of the rich! Blessed are the

wealthy!

It is the destiny of the middle of the nineteenth century--well may

we be forgiven, if we pronounce it with some pride--unhesitatingly

to defend the African slave-trade, and to smile at what sickly

philanthropists used to consider the unutterable woe, the unmeasured

crime, and the diabolical hard-heartedness of that traffic. We have

changed all this; and, to say the truth, it was high time to discover

that the negro-trade forms a charming chapter in the history of Europe,

and that the protracted efforts to put it down were unchristian and

unstatesmanlike. Pitt, Roscoe, Wilberforce, Burke, Washington, Franklin,

Madison, Adams, Lowndes,--puny names! short-sighted men! By the African

slave-trade, creatures that are hardly deserving the name of men, on

account of organic, intellectual, and moral incapacity, are forcibly

carried into the regions of Christian religion and civilization, there

to become civilized in spite of their unfitness for civilization. The

mariners, usually occupied in risking life or health merely for the

sake of base traffic and filthy lucre, are suddenly transformed into

ministering agents of civilization and religion. It gives a priestly

character to the captain of a slave-ship,--to him that is willing to

break the laws of his country, even daring the gallows, for the benefit

of the sable brother, and of his law-abiding conservative society. How

different from those dark times when the poet could say, _--Homo ignoto

homini lupus est!_ The missionary only endeavors to carry the Church to

Africa; the slave-trader carries Africa to the Church, to civilization,

and to the auction-table.

There are but two more returns to truth and justice necessary,--the

Inquisition and the Witch-Trials. These restored, we may safely

congratulate ourselves on having regained the ground on which our race

stood before the Reformation, that untoward event, whence all the

mischief dates that has befallen man in the shape of human rights,

liberty, and other deplorable things, as lately a grave writer--not a

Catholic, nor a Jew either--gravely assured us. Gentle readers, let us

not be impatient. Progress has been of late so rapid, that many of you,

it is to be hoped, will yet have an opportunity of hailing the return of

those two noble institutions, _pro majore gloriâ Dei_, for which they

always existed, as long as chill and misty skepticism did not extinguish

their glowing poetry. Ah! happy times! poetic age! when there existed

not only "words that burn," but also laws that burned!

In the mean time, it may not be inappropriate to commence the

consideration of a topic somewhat farther removed from us, but which,

according to our humble opinion, ought not to remain wholly beyond the

limits of a candid, liberal, and unprejudiced examination,--we mean the

important question, Whether the choicest of all substances, the most

delicate of all muscular texture, that substance of which kings,

philosophers, policemen, and supporters of crinoline are fashioned

by the plastic hand of Nature, ought forever to be excluded from the

reproductive process of wasted energy and proportionably consumed

nervous and cerebral fibre. Reader, do not shrink; grant us a patient

ear. You do not know how rapidly you may change your own opinion and

feelings. Do you not remember with what awe we first read in the

"Almanach des Gourmands," that a certain _sauce piquante_ was so fine

that with it a man would eat his own mother? This was only twenty years

ago; yet all of us, now, are helping a high-bred gentleman, trading, on

a gigantic scale, in the bones of his great ancestor. What sublimity of

peddling!

To those who say, It is unnatural to eat our friends, we would answer,

that it is the office of civilization to remove us farther and farther

from Nature. Analyze the present magnitude called Lady, and you can

arithmetically state it, how little of it is nature-woman, and how

much is hoop-civilization. To those, again, who object, that it is too

primitive, we would reply, that the highest civilization is always a

return to Nature, which is likewise exemplified by many of our ladies in

the ball-room,--we mean by their upper portion.

But _revenons à nos moutons_. The Rev. Messrs. Williams and Calvert,

missionaries, for many long years, among the Fijians, state, in their

recently published work, that those unsophisticated children of Nature

eat "long pig,"--as they call, with graceful humor, roast-man, in

contradistinction to "short-pig," by which they designate our squealing

fellow-roasters,--from three different motives.--When a chief has a

gala-day, or desires to signal his arrival by a right royal feast, it is

considered befitting to slaughter some men, to let the blood run in

the path of royalty, and to have on the table some _roast-homme_. Our

Captain Wilkins told us, years ago, that, for this _roast-homme_, a

plump Fijiana, of some twelve or thirteen years, is preferred. They know

very well what is good!--The second motive is hatred. When a Fijian

mortally hates a person, he endeavors to kill him; and having killed the

enemy, why should the victim not be eaten?--Lastly, it would seem that

affectionate regard, especially for a favorite wife, sometimes rises

to a mordant passion and an unconquerable longing for material

assimilation,--so much so, that the loving husband roasts his Penelope,

and neighbors are invited to participate in his better fourth or fifth,

as the polygamic case may be. Perhaps, years after, when with less

demonstrative nations the memory of the beloved one would have passed

away, the Fijian Fidelio may smack his lips, and exclaim, with

Petrarch's fervor,--

"Perchè Morte fura

Prima i migliori, e lascia star i rei:

Questa aspettata al regno degli Dei

Cosa bella mortal passa e non dura."

Now we are very anxious not to be misunderstood by our readers. In

writing this paper, we do not mean to urge the reintroduction of

Cannibalism among us at once. The public mind may not yet be ripe for

it; but we desire to assist in placing the subject in its proper light,

and in showing that an enlightened impartiality can find very much in

defence of the Fijians,--more, indeed, than the Rev. Mr. Froude has been

able to accumulate in favor of his wife-devouring hero,--or than Mr.

Spratt can say in favor of humanization in general, and the breaking-up

of the Union in particular, by the reopening of the African

slave-trade,--or than our venerable chief-justice has contrived to say

in favor of reintroducing slavery in conquered territory, where positive

law had abolished or excluded it, by the abstract Constitution itself,

_proprio vigore_, (not quite unlike a wagoner, it seems to us, that

carries the soil of distant parts, _ipsâ adhesione_, as it sticks to

his boots, into the tavern-room,) without special law, which even the

ancient civilians very stupidly declared to be necessary. First, you

will remember, it was passionately maintained that the Constitution of

the United States does not know the Common Law; and now it is insisted

that Common Law (so far as slavery is concerned) is as inherent in the

Constitution as the black pigment is in the negro. You cannot wash it

out; it inheres physiologically in the Constitution. I tell you, reader,

we are _fast_ people indeed; we travel fast in our opinions, with now

and then a somerset for the delectation of the philosopher.

Let us sit down, and have a philosophical conversation; above all, let

us discard sentiment, feeling,--what you call heart, and all that sort

of thing. You know how much mischief Las Casas has done by allowing his

feelings to interfere when the Spaniards roasted Indians, from what he

chose to call diabolical lust of gold, and sheer, abstract cruelty. Poor

Bishop! He belonged to the softs. Let us be philosophers, economists,

and, above all, Constitutionalists. Some philosophers, indeed, have

said that all idea of Right and Wrong, and the idea that there is

a difference between the two, must needs, first of all, start from

sentiment; but leave, I implore you, such philosophic fogyism behind

you.

First, then, as to the principle of Right. It is a fact, that most

tribes and races, probably all nations in their earliest days,

have killed old and useless parents, and have eaten enemies, once

slain,--perhaps friends, too. Some nations carried the eating of human

flesh far down into their civilized periods and into recent times. The

Spaniards found the civilized Aztecs enjoying their _petits soupers_

of babes _à la Tartare_, or gorgeous dinners on fattened heroes _aux

truffes_. Have you forgotten that from that fine Introduction to

Prescott's "Conquest of Mexico" a flavor of roast "long pig" steams into

our nostrils as from a royal kitchen? Eating our equals, therefore,

is sound Common Law of all mankind, even more so than slavery, for it

exists before slavery can be introduced. Slavery is introduced when the

prisoner of war may be made to work,--when the tilling of the soil has

commenced; though then not always; for we now know that slavery was

introduced among the Greeks at a comparatively late period: but killing

parents and eating enemies exists in the hunter's state, and at those

periods when people find it hard work to obtain food, each one for

himself, to keep even a starved body and a little bit of soul together.

Chewing our neighbor is even better, for it is older Common Law, than

the universal buying of a wife and consequent selling of daughters which

exists even now over far the greater portion of the globe. We take it

that our species began with eating itself without paying for the fare.

Partaking of our neighbor precedes all _lex scripta_, all statute law,

all constitutions. As to ourselves in particular, whose law is the

English law, we know that the Druids sacrificed human beings to their

gods; and every one knows full well, that man, when in gastronomic

contact with the gods, always appropriates the most savory morsels

and the largest portions of the sacrifice to himself, leaving to the

ethereal taste of Jove or Tezcatlipoca the smell of some burnt bones or

inwards. Yet there is no law on record abolishing human sacrifices. We

know, indeed, that some Teutonic tribes, when they adopted Christianity,

positively prohibited the eating of horse-flesh, but no law ever forbade

to honor our fathers and mothers by making them parts of our feasts; so

that no lawyer of the true sort will deny, that, to this day, the right

of sacrificing fellow-men, and the reasonable concomitant of eating the

better portion of the sacrifice, still exists. Greeks and Romans have

sacrificed men; why should not we? That men have their individual rights

is no valid objection. Rights depend exclusively upon the law; and the

law, we have shown, does not grant equal rights (at least, not equal

destinations) to the Eater and the Eatee; for it seems to be one thing

to eat, and another to be eaten. It was a very silly maxim of the

ancient Civil Law, That the law, the _regula_, is derived from the right

(_jus_), not the _jus_ from the law. Has not a Supreme Court in one of

our States lately denied to a negro even the right to choose between

liberty and slavery,--the choice being left to him by his deceased

master,--because the creature (which, when doing wrong, is responsible

and has a will imputed to him) has no will to choose, because it cannot

have any, says the Supreme Court of that State?

However, it will doubtless be objected by some, that it is simply

disgusting to eat our fellow-creatures of the same species,--that it is

unnatural and against our religion,--and that so remarkable a diversity

of taste can be explained only on the ground of our belonging to

different races. We do not believe that the Fijians belong to a

different race. Fijian, or Fijician, results, by a slight change of

letters, from the word Phoenician; and there can be no doubt that

the Fijians are descendants of those Phoenicians who, according to

Herodotus, sailed, in the reign of the Egyptian King Necho, from the

Persian Gulf round the Cape of Good Hope, and entered the Mediterranean

through the Pillars of Hercules. How they came to be wafted to the

opposite hemisphere is not for us to explain, nor do we know it. Suffice

it to say, that Fijician and Phoenician are the same word. Possibly old

Admiral Hanno preceded Captain Cook. Who can prove the contrary?

As to the first of these objections, we admit that some people may

feel a degree of aversion to _roast-homme_; but so does the Mahometan

abominate roast "short pig"; and a Brahmin, taken to Cincinnati and its

environs, at the sanguinary hog-murder time, would die outright, of

horror. We almost died, ourselves, at the sickening sight of that

porcian massacre. _De gustibus non est disputantibus_, as our colonel

used to say. Disgust, is the result of a special treaty of amity and

reciprocity between the stomach and the imagination, differing according

to difference in the contracting parties. We have known many persons

who would not touch mutton, and others who would rather starve than eat

oysters; while we ourselves revolt at sourkrout, which, nevertheless,

millions of Germans, French, and Americans consider delicious. Disgust

is arbitrary; it does not furnish us with a philosophical ground for

argumentation. The Fijian does not feel disgust at the flavor of a

well-roasted white sailor; and as long as he does not insist upon our

relishing his fare, what right have we to ask him to feel disgusted?

When the panther-tailed Aztec priest fattened his prisoner, or carried

along the children decked with wreaths, soon to be smothered in their

own juice, he cannot have felt disgust, any more than the Malay, of whom

Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles tells us, that, with epicurean refinement,

he cut the choicest bits from his living prisoner, in order to baste

them to a turn and season them with choice pepper.

Is it unnatural? We have once seen, with our own eyes, a very large

unroasted "small pig" devour one of her own piglets, whilst the others

lustily drew nourishment from the grunting mother. It look our appetite

away for forty-eight hours; yet it was nature; and in some portions of

Europe, people express the highest degree of fondness by the expressive

phrase,--"I could eat you." We may rely upon it, that, as Mr. Agassiz

says,--"There is no difference in kind, but only in degree."

With reference to religion, we readily acknowledge that dining _à la

Fijienne_ does not appear exactly to be a divine institution, as slavery

has recently been discovered to be. From olden times it used to be the

belief of superstitious man that there was a divine afflatus in liberty;

but our profound theological scholars and Biblical critics have found

out that the divinity is on the other side. Neither Tertullian nor

Austin, neither St. Bernard nor any Pope, good or bad, neither Luther,

Bossuet, Calvin, nor Baxter, no commentator, exegetist, or preacher,

ever found out, what these profoundest inquirers have at length

discovered, that slavery is divine, like matrimony. Had they discovered

this great truth before the Catholic Church settled the number of

sacraments, there must have been eight instead of seven. Why was their

advent so late?

Possibly these grave and candid, deep and fervent theologians, whose

opinions on theology are quoted everywhere, whose works are spread over

the globe, and whose lore is stupendous, may yet discover that there is

a divine flavor even in a soup _à la Mexicaine_. One thing, however,

is quite certain, namely,--that there is no prohibition of digestively

assimilating our neighbor with ourselves, from one end of the Bible to

the other. Was not Fielding's parson logical, who preferred punch to

wine, because it is nowhere spoken ill of in Scripture? When Baron

Viereck was rebuked by a friend for having given his daughter in

marriage to the King of Denmark, the Queen, undivorced, continuing to

occupy the throne, the shrewd father replied, that he had found no

passage in the Bible that prohibits a King of Denmark from having two

wives; and has not the democratic Fijian as good a right to that logic

as the noble Baron had?

To say the truth, all these objections are founded mainly upon

sentiment, and we trust that morbid sentimentality will have no weight

in an age which ridicules the horror of the British Commons at the

descriptions of the middle passage, and demands calm judgment when the

question arises, how to increase the number of representatives and the

profits on sugar and cotton,--in our poetic age, in which republican

senators have openly declared their chivalrous allegiance to the

sovereign substance of which night-caps are made, and petticoats,--to

His Majesty, King Cotton,--not a very merry king, it must be owned, as

young King Charles was, or old King Cole, but still a worthy sovereign;

for, after all, he is but a new and most bulky avatar of Almighty

Dollar.

No objection whatsoever can be made to the _deglutinatio Fijiana_ on the

score of utility. The islands of the Fijians are but small; no Fijian

Attila can lead forth his hosts into neighboring countries; no Fijian

Goths can pour down from Polynesian Alps into an Oceanic Italy; no

Athenians can there send sons and gods to a Coreyra: and no Fijian Miles

Standish can there walk up and down before his pipe-clayed bandoleers in

foreign colonies. How, then, can an over-increase of population be more

harmoniously prevented than by making the young and sleek furnish the

starving with a plump existence? Is it not, economically viewed,

the principle of Dr. Franklin's smoke-consuming pipe applied to the

infinitely more important sphere of human existence? The festive table,

to which, according to the great Malthus, Nature declines inviting a

large portion of every well-peopled country, will never be known by

the happy Fijian Say or Senior, so long as wise conservatism shall not

change its old and sacred laws, and shall allow Nature to invite one

happy portion as guests, and another happy portion as savory dishes. It

is Nature in modest simplicity, as it is exhibited in half-a-dozen mice

in a deep kettle, of whom one survivor and material representative

remains. The Chinese expose female infants, and lawful infanticide has

been abolished in some districts of the British East Indies within these

thirty years only. Would it not be wiser to reassimilate the tender dear

ones, and think of them ever after with smacking memory?

It is true, indeed, that, upon the whole, Fijian gastronomy leers more

toward the tender sex than toward that which in our country wears the

trousers uncrinolined. But, we submit, is this a fair objection? Why

_is_ the tender sex more _tender?_ Lately, when an orator had strongly

expressed himself against the maxim of patriotic office-hunters,--"To

the victor belong the spoils," he was very logically asked,--"And pray,

Sir, to whom should the spoils belong, if not to the victor?" So we

would ask, should any one complain of girls being thus economized by

men,--"Who, in the name of common sense, should, if not men? Would you

have them perform that sacrificial duty for one another?"

But whatever may be thought, by some of our lovely readers, of this last

argument, (which henceforth may be termed _argumentum marcianum_,) and

which, in the case before us, will always be an _ex parte_ argument, all

will agree that no objection can be taken to making repasts on _porcus

longus_ once fairly killed,--for instance, on heroes stretched on the

battle-field. This was the cogent argument of the New Zealander, after

baptism,--used in discussing the topic with the Rev. Mr. Yale. Willing

to give up slaughtering fellow-men for the sake of eating them, he could

not see why it was not wicked to waste so much good food.

If it were objected, that, admitting the making of your enemy's

flesh flesh of your own flesh would necessarily lead to skirmishes,

"surprise-parties," and battles for the sole purpose of getting a

dinner,--to a sort of pre-prandial exercise, as in fishing,--we would

simply answer, "Too late!" Our friends who desire the reopening of the

African slave-trade declare that they wish to buy slaves only. When

statesmen, and missionaries, and simple people with simple sense and

simple hearts, cry out to them, "Stop! for the sake of our common

Father, stop! By reopening the slave-trade, you revive the vilest

crimes, and, for every negro ultimately sold to you on the coast, you

cause the murder of at least ten in the interior, not to speak of those

that are coolly massacred in the barracoon, when no demand exists,"--the

satisfactory reply is: "We have nothing to do with all that; we do not

travel beyond the record. We buy the negro who is a slave; what made him

a slave we do not care to know. The pearl in the market does not show

the toil of the fisher." And so the Fijian would properly reply: "Do not

mix up different subjects. I rescue my departed brother from ignominious

decay, and remake a man of him. How he came to depart,--that belongs to

quite a different chapter."

This utilitarian view acquires a still greater importance when applied

to criminals under sentence of capital punishment. Soon after Beccaria,

it was asked, if we mistake not, by Voltaire: "Of what use is the

dead body of a criminal? You cannot restore the victim to life by the

execution of the murderer." And many pardons in America have been

granted on the assumption that no satisfactory answer could be given to

the philosophical question: "What use can the swinging body of the poor

creature be to any one?" The Fijian alone has a perfectly satisfactory

reply.

The missionaries, already named in this paper, give a long account of

the execution of a supposed Fijian conspirator, which ends with these

words: "At last he was brought down to the ground by a club; after which

he was eaten."

We can discern many advantages to be derived from the introduction of

what we will call "_pâtés penitentiaires_."

There would be no waste of food.

The sentence of the judge would sound more civilized; for, instead of

hearing the odious words, "You shall be hanged by the neck until you

are dead," words would be pronounced somewhat like these: "You shall be

taken to Delmonico, and there and by him be served up on such a day, as

_scélérat en papillotes_."

There would be a greater readiness in jurors to convict interesting

criminals, who now-a-days cannot be found guilty,--especially were a law

passed that the jury should have the criminal. We read in the "Scottish

Criminal Trials," that a woman, clearly convicted of an atrocious

murder, was, nevertheless, found not guilty. The astonished lord

justiciary asked the foreman, how it was possible to find the prisoner

not guilty, with such overwhelming evidence, and was answered: "Becaase,

my laird, she is purty." Would not the delicacy of the prisoner have

been an additional reason for finding her guilty with Fijian jurors?

Fourthly, there would be an obvious national advantage in some

countries, in which the government is at one and the same time busily

engaged in finding cheap food for the people, and in transporting

annually many hundreds of political _suspects_ to killing colonies. It

is, indeed, surprising, that so sagacious and parental a government as

that of Napoleon the Third,--may His Majesty be long preserved for the

civilization of France, the peace of Europe, and the glory of mankind in

general!--it is surprising, that his all-providing and all-foreseeing

government has not long ago discovered how the craving of the national

stomach for food, and of the popular mind for political purification,

might be stilled by no longer transporting political offenders and

_suspects_ to French Guiana or Lambessa, where they uselessly and

ignobly perish, but by sentencing them, instead, to the enviable lot of

making a feast for their brethren. Would not every Socialist, receiving

permission thus to help feed society, exclaim: _C'est magnifique! mais

c'est sublime!_

When Robespierre was in the zenith of his guillotinacious glory, the

_bonnes_ would sit around the scaffold, minding children and knitting

stockings, to see the head of a marquis or of a shoemaker fall. We leave

it to every reader, whether there would not be more historic unity and

poetic completeness in the _tableau_, were we to read that these good

creatures dined upon the _ci-devant_, after the execution.

Imperial Rome is the _beau idéal_ of the present government of _la belle

France_; and we must own, that, when perusing the exhilarating pages of

Suetonius, it has often occurred to our mind that there is something

wanting in the list of high deeds related of those superb specimens of

humanity exhibited in the Caligulas and Heliogabali. They did so much

for cookery! Yet they seem never to have risen above an indirect

consumption of their subjects, by feeding their lobsters with ignoble

slaves; never did they directly bestow upon Roman freemen the honor of

being served up for the imperial table. Nero murdered his mother and

bade his teacher open his own veins. Would it not read much more

civilized, if the annals of the empire were telling us: _Nero, jam

divus, leniter dixit: O Seneca, Pundit delectabilis et philosophe laute,

quis dubitet te libentissime mihi hodie proferre artocreatem stoicum?_

Strange as it may appear to some readers, that thus the polished Romans

might have learned a lesson of civilization from the Fijians, they will

not reject our suggestion, when they reflect, that, only a short time

ago, they were, probably, as much surprised at finding the government

of so great a country as France adopting imperial Rome as a model

body-politic. Familiarize your mind with the idea, and all difficulties

vanish. It is only the last step which costs,--not the first.

There are many more reasons that might be urged in favor of the

Fijians. We are not aware that the reverend missionaries have given

any statistical tables, showing a regularity in the annual numbers of

consumed persons, male and female, classed according to the reasons why

consumed; but no one can doubt that such tables might be given, and if

so, the whole question of anthropophagism could be very easily buckled

up in a tidy little valise. The Fijians, in the plural, we take it,

have little or nothing to do with it; it is the abstract, will-less,

impersonal Fijian--who, according to the learned Ferrari,[A] would be

called, now, Podesta Fijian, now Consul Fijian, now Papa Fijianus--that

snuffs the flavor of his own dear natural _pot à feu_; and Right

or Wrong, Just or Unjust, Commendable or Revolting, are schoolboy

distinctions, no longer recognized by the philosophical historian, who

treats all moral questions and national movements like questions of

natural philosophy,--like social chemistry, in which so puerile a word

as poison has no place. Arsenic is arsenic with certain effects, and

nothing more; and society poisons itself annually to such an amount,

arithmetically expressed.

[Footnote A: _Histoire des Revolutions d'Italie, ou Guelf's et

Gibelins_. Par J. Ferrari. Paris, 1858.]

We ask leave to add two suggestions in favor of the Fijians, both, it

would seem, of philosophic importance. If you do not like the Fijian

national dish,--_national_ in more than one sense,--have the dear

sons of Nature, as Carlyle probably would call them, not the right to

reply,--"We do not like your _sauerkraut_, if you are a German; your

_polenta_, if you are an Italian; your _olla podrida_, if you are a

Spaniard; nor your _grit_, if you are a Dane; your bacon and greasy

greens, if you are a Southerner; nor your baked beans, if you are a

Northerner; nor any other stuff called national dishes,--all of which

are vile, except English roast beef and plum-pudding, and Neapolitan

maccaroni."

The other suggestion is this: Is it likely that Nature has placed the

Fijians exactly in the same meridian with Greenwich, which in some

measure may be called the meridian of civilization, for nothing?--is it

likely that all the solar and cosmic influences which must result from

this fact have really left the Fijian in that state of hyper-brutality

which you think is proved by his _menage_? Is it, we ask, fairly to be

supposed? We think not.

We do not presume to know whether we have carried conviction to the

minds of our readers; but even if we have not,--if we have only been

sufficiently fortunate to give the first impulse to the great inquiry,

we shall be satisfied. If we consider the history of some opinions now

openly preached and vehemently maintained,--how timidly they were

first hinted at, within our own recollection, and with what surprising

rapidity they have risen to an unblushing amplitude, rustling and

sweeping proudly and defiantly along the Broadway of human events

and opinions,--how that which but a lustre ago was wicked is now

virtuous,--we see no reason for despair; and our century may yet witness

the time when it will be considered the highest mixture of philosophic

courtesy and Christian urbanity to make the most graceful semi-lateral

bow, as you pass your friend in the street, and, kissing the tip of your

finger, to lisp, with bending head and smiling eye,--

"May I never disagree with you!"

THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE.

WHAT HE SAID, WHAT HE HEARD, AND WHAT HE SAW.

[_The Professor talks with the Reader. He tells a Young Girl's Story_.]

When the elements that went to the making of the first man, father of

mankind, had been withdrawn from the world of unconscious matter, the

balance of creation was disturbed. The materials that go to the making

of one woman were set free by the abstraction from inanimate nature of

one man's-worth of masculine constituents. These combined to make our

first mother, by a logical necessity involved in the previous creation

of our common father. All this, mythically, illustratively, and by no

means doctrinally or polemically.

The man implies the woman, you will understand. The excellent gentleman

whom I had the pleasure of setting right in a trifling matter a few

weeks ago believes in the frequent occurrence of miracles at the present

day. So do I. I believe, if you could find an uninhabited coral-reef

island, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, with plenty of cocoa-palms

and bread-fruit on it, and put a handsome young fellow, like our

Marylander, ashore upon it, if you touched there a year afterwards, you

would find him walking under the palm trees arm in arm with a pretty

woman.

Where would she come from?

Oh, that's the miracle!

----I was just as certain, when I saw that fine, high-colored youth at

the upper right-hand corner of our table, that there would appear some

fitting feminine counterpart to him, as if I had been a clairvoyant,

seeing it all beforehand.

----I have a fancy that those Marylanders are just about near enough to

the sun to ripen well.--How some of us fellows remember Joe and Harry,

Baltimoreans, both! Joe, with his cheeks like lady-apples, and his eyes

like black-heart cherries, and his teeth like the whiteness of the flesh

of cocoa-nuts, and his laugh that set the chandelier-drops rattling

overhead, as we sat at our sparkling banquets in those gay times! Harry,

champion, by acclamation, of the College heavyweights, broad-shouldered,

bull-necked, square-jawed, six feet and trimmings, a little science,

lots of pluck, good-natured as a steer in peace, formidable as a

red-eyed bison in the crack of hand-to-hand battle! Who forgets the

great muster-day, and the collision of the classic with the democratic

forces? The huge butcher, fifteen stone,--two hundred and ten

pounds,--good weight,--steps out like Telamonian Ajax, defiant. No words

from Harry, the Baltimorean,--one of the quiet sort, who strike first,

and do the talking, if there is any, afterwards. No words, but, in the

place thereof, a clean, straight, hard hit, which took effect with a

spank like the explosion of a percussion-cap, knocking the slayer of

beeves down a sand-bank,--followed, alas! by the too impetuous youth, so

that both rolled down together, and the conflict terminated in one of

those inglorious and inevitable Yankee _clinches_, followed by a general

_melée_, which make our native fistic encounters so different from such

admirably-ordered contests as that which I once saw at an English fair,

where everything was done decently and in order, and the fight began and

ended with such grave propriety, that a sporting parson need hardly have

hesitated to open it with a devout petition, and, after it was over,

dismiss the ring with a benediction.

I can't help telling one more story about this great field-day, though

it is the most wanton and irrelevant digression. But all of us have a

little speck of fight underneath our peace and goodwill to men,--just

a speck, for revolutions and great emergencies, you know,--so that we

should not submit to be trodden quite flat by the first heavy-heeled

aggressor that came along. You can tell a portrait from an ideal head, I

suppose, and a true story from one spun out of the writer's invention.

See whether this sounds true or not.

Admiral Sir Isaac Coffin sent out two fine blood-horses, Barefoot and

Scrab by name, to Massachusetts, something before the time I am talking

of. With them came a Yorkshire groom, a stocky little fellow, in velvet

breeches, who made that mysterious hissing noise, traditionary in

English stables, when he rubbed down the silken-skinned racers, in great

perfection. After the soldiers had come from the muster-field, and

some of the companies were on the village-common, there was still some

skirmishing between a few individuals who had not had the fight taken

out of them. The little Yorkshire groom thought he must serve out

somebody. So he threw himself into an approved scientific attitude, and,

in brief, emphatic language, expressed his urgent anxiety to accommodate

any classical young gentleman who chose to consider himself a candidate

for his attentions. I don't suppose there were many of the college boys

that would have been a match for him in the art which Englishmen know

so much more of than Americans, for the most part. However, one of the

Sophomores, a very quiet, peaceable fellow, just stepped out of the

crowd, and, running straight at the groom, as he stood there, sparring

away, struck him with the sole of his foot, a straight blow, as if it

had been with his fist,--and knocked him heels over head and senseless,

so that he had to be carried off from the field. This ugly way of

hitting is the great trick of the French _savate,_ which is not

commonly thought able to stand its ground against English pugilistic

science.--These are old recollections, with not much to recommend them,

except, perhaps, a dash of life, which may be worth a little something.

The young Marylander brought them all up, you may remember. He recalled

to my mind those two splendid pieces of vitality I told you of. Both

have been long dead. How often we see these great red flaring flambeaux

of life blown out, as it were, by a puff of wind,--and the little,

single-wicked night-lamp of being, which some white-faced and attenuated

invalid shades with trembling fingers, flickering on while they go out

one after another, until its glimmer is all that is left to us of the

generation it belonged to!

I told you that I was perfectly sure, beforehand, we should find some

pleasing girlish or womanly shape to fill the blank at our table and

match the dark-haired youth at the upper corner.

There she sits, at the very opposite corner, just as far off as accident

could put her from this handsome fellow, by whose side she ought, of

course, to be sitting. One of the "positive" blondes, as my friend,

you may remember, used to call them. Tawny-haired, amber-eyed,

full-throated, skin as white as a blanched almond. Looks dreamy to me,

not self-conscious, though a black ribbon round her neck sets it off as

a Marie-Antoinette's diamond-necklace could not do. So in her dress,

there is a harmony of tints that looks as if an artist had run his eye

over her and given a hint or two like the finishing touch to a picture.

I can't help being struck with her, for she is at once rounded and fine

in feature, looks calm, as blondes are apt to, and as if she might run

wild, if she were trifled with.--It is just as I knew it would be,--and

anybody can see that our young Marylander will be dead in love with her

in a week.

Then if that little man would only turn out immensely rich and have the

good-nature to die and leave them all his money, it would be as nice as

a three-volume novel.

Little Boston is in a flurry, I suspect, with the excitement of having

such a charming neighbor next him. I judge so mainly by his silence and

by a certain rapt and serious look on his face, as if he were thinking

of something that had happened, or that might happen, or that ought to

happen,--or how beautiful her young life looked, or how hardly Nature

had dealt with him, or something which struck him silent, at any rate. I

made several conversational openings for him, but he did not fire up as

he often does. I even went so far as to indulge in a fling at the State

House, which, as we all know, is in truth a very imposing structure,

covering less ground than St. Peter's, but of similar general effect.

The little man looked up, but did not reply to my taunt. He said to

the young lady, however, that the State House was the Parthenon of our

Acropolis, which seemed to please her, for she smiled, and he reddened a

little,--so I thought. I don't think it right to watch persons who are

the subjects of special infirmity,--but we all do it.

I see that they have crowded the chairs a little at that end of

the table, to make room for another new-comer of the lady sort. A

well-mounted, middle-aged preparation, wearing her hair without

a cap,--pretty wide in the parting, though,--contours vaguely

hinted,--features very quiet,--says little as yet, but seems to keep her

eye on the young lady, as if having some responsibility for her.--

* * * * *

My record is a blank for some days after this. In the mean time I have

contrived to make out the person and the story of our young lady,

who, according to appearances, ought to furnish us a heroine for a

boarding-house romance before a year is out. It is very curious that

she should prove connected with a person many of us have heard of.

Yet, curious as it is, I have been a hundred times struck with the

circumstance that the most remote facts are constantly striking each

other; just as vessels starting from ports thousands of miles apart pass

close to each other in the naked breadth of the ocean, nay, sometimes

even touch, in the dark, with a crack of timbers, a gurgling of water, a

cry of startled sleepers,--a cry mysteriously echoed in warning dreams,

as the wife of some Gloucester fisherman, some coasting skipper, wakes

with a shriek, calls the name of her husband, and sinks back to uneasy

slumbers upon her lonely pillow,--a widow.

Oh, these mysterious meetings! Leaving all the vague, waste, endless

spaces of the washing desert, the ocean-steamer and the fishing-smack

sail straight towards each other as if they ran in grooves ploughed for

them in the waters from the beginning of creation! Not only things and

events, but our own thoughts, are so full of these surprises, that, if

there were a reader in my parish who did not recognize the familiar

occurrence of what I am now going to mention, I should think it a case

for the missionaries of the Society for the Propagation of Intelligence

among the Comfortable Classes.

There are about as many twins in the births of thought as of children.

For the first time in your lives you learn some fact or come across some

idea. Within an hour, a day, a week, that same fact or idea strikes

you from another quarter. It seems as if it had passed into space and

bounded back upon you as an echo from the blank wall that shuts in the

world of thought. Yet no possible connection exists between the two

channels by which the thought or the fact arrived. Let me give an

infinitesimal illustration.

One of the Boys mentioned, the other evening, in the course of a very

pleasant poem he read us, a little trick of the Commons table-boarders,

which I, nourished at the parental board, had never heard of. Young

fellows being always hungry----Allow me to stop dead-short, in order

to utter an aphorism which has been forming itself in one of the blank

interior spaces of my intelligence, like a crystal in the cavity of a

geode.

* * * * *

_Aphorism by the Professor._

In order to know whether a human being is young or old, offer it food of

different kinds at short intervals. If young, it will eat anything at

any hour of the day or night. If old, it observes stated periods, and

you might as well attempt to regulate the time of high-water to suit a

fishing-party as to change these periods.

The crucial experiment is this. Offer a bulky and boggy bun to the

suspected individual just ten minutes before dinner. If this is eagerly

accepted and devoured, the fact of youth is established. If the subject

of the question changes color and expresses surprise and incredulity, as

if you could not possibly be in earnest, the fact of maturity is no less

clear.

* * * * *

----Excuse me,--I return to my story of the Commons-table.--Young

fellows being always hungry, and tea and dry toast being the meagre fare

of the evening meal, it was a trick of some of the Boys to impale a

slice of meat upon a fork, at dinner-time, and stick the fork holding it

beneath the table, so that they could get it at tea-time. The dragons

that guarded this table of the Hesperides found out the trick at last,

and kept a sharp look-out for missing forks;--they knew where to find

one, if it was not in its place.--Now the odd thing was, that, after

waiting so many years to hear of this college trick, I should hear it

mentioned _a second time_ within the same twenty-four hours by a college

youth of the present generation. Strange, but true. And so it has

happened to me and to every person, often and often, to be hit in rapid

succession by these twinned facts or thoughts, as if they were linked

like chain-shot.

I was going to leave the simple reader to wonder over this, taking it as

an unexplained marvel. I think, however, I will turn over a furrow of

subsoil in it. The explanation is, of course, that in a great many

thoughts there must be a few coincidences, and these instantly arrest

our attention. Now we shall probably never have the least idea of the

enormous number of impressions which pass through our consciousness,

until in some future life we see the photographic record of our thoughts

and the stereoscopic picture of our actions. There go more pieces to

make up a conscious life or a living body than you think for. Why,

some of you were surprised when a friend of mine told you there

were fifty-eight separate pieces in a fiddle. How many "swimming

glands"--solid, organized, regularly formed, rounded disks, taking an

active part in all your vital processes, part and parcel, each one of

them, of your corporeal being--do you suppose are whirled along, like

pebbles in a stream, with the blood which warms your frame and colors

your cheeks?--A noted German physiologist spread out a minute drop

of blood, under the microscope, in narrow streaks, and counted the

globules, and then made a calculation. The counting by the micrometer

took him _a week_.--You have, my full-grown friend, of these little

couriers in crimson or scarlet livery, running on your vital errands day

and night as long as you live, sixty-five billions, five hundred and

seventy thousand millions. Errors excepted.--Did I hear some gentleman

say, "Doubted?"--I am the Professor. I sit in my chair with a petard

under it that will blow me through the skylight of my lecture-room, if I

do not know what I am talking about and whom I am quoting.

Now, my dear friends, who are putting your hands to your foreheads, and

saying to yourselves that you feel a little confused, as if you had been

waltzing until things began to whirl slightly round you, is it possible

that you do not clearly apprehend the exact connection of all that I

have been saying, and its bearing on what is now to come? Listen, then.

The number of these living elements in our bodies illustrates the

incalculable multitude of our thoughts; the number of our thoughts

accounts for those frequent coincidences spoken of; these coincidences

in the world of thought illustrate those which we constantly observe in

the world of outward events, of which the presence of the young girl now

at our table, and proving to be the daughter of an old acquaintance some

of us may remember, is the special example which led me through this

labyrinth of reflections, and finally lands me at the commencement of

this young girl's story, which, as I said, I have found the time and

felt the interest to learn something of, and which I think I can tell

without wronging the unconscious subject of my brief delineation.

* * * * *

IRIS.

You remember, perhaps, in some papers published awhile ago, an odd poem

written by an old Latin tutor? He brought up at the verb _amo_, I love,

as all of us do, and by and by Nature opened her great living dictionary

for him at the word _filia_, a daughter. The poor man was greatly

perplexed in choosing a name for her. _Lucretia_ and _Virginia_ were the

first that he thought of; but then came up those pictured stories of

Titus Livius, which he could never read without crying, though he had

read them a hundred times.

--Lucretia sending for her husband and her father, each to bring one

friend with him, and awaiting them in her chamber. To them her wrongs

briefly. Let them see to the wretch, she will take care of herself. Then

the hidden knife flashes out and sinks into her heart. She slides

from her seat, and falls dying. "Her husband and her father cry

aloud."--No,--not Lucretia.

--Virginius,--a brown old soldier, father of a nice girl. She engaged

to a very promising young man. Decemvir Appius takes a violent fancy to

her,--must have her at any rate. Hires a lawyer to present the arguments

in favor of the view that she was another man's daughter.

There used to be lawyers in Rome that would do such things.--All right.

There are two sides to everything. _Audi alteram partem_. The legal

gentleman has no opinion,--he only states the evidence.--A doubtful

case. Let the young lady be under the protection of the Honorable

Decemvir until it can be looked up thoroughly.--Father thinks it best,

on the whole, to give in. Will explain the matter, if the young lady and

her maid will step this way. _That_ is the explanation,--a stab with a

butcher's knife, snatched from a stall, meant for other lambs than this

poor bleeding Virginia!

The old man thought over the story. Then he must have one look at the

original. So he took down the first volume and read it over. When he

came to that part where it tells how the young gentleman she was engaged

to and a friend of his took up the poor girl's bloodless shape and

carried it through the street, and how all the women followed, wailing,

and asking if that was what their daughters were coming to,--if that was

what they were to get for being good girls,--he melted down into his

accustomed tears of pity and grief, and, through them all, of delight at

the charming Latin of the narrative. But it was impossible to call his

child Virginia. He could never look at her without thinking she had a

knife sticking in her bosom.

_Dido_ would be a good name, and a fresh one. She was a queen, and the

founder of a great city. Her story had been immortalized by the greatest

of poets,--for the old Latin tutor clove to "Virgilius Maro," as he

called him, as closely as ever Dante did in his memorable journey. So

he took down his Virgil,--it was the smooth-leafed, open-lettered quarto

of Baskerville,--and began reading the loves and mishaps of Dido. It

wouldn't do. A lady who had not learned discretion by experience, and

came to an evil end. He shook his head, as he sadly repeated,

"--misera ante diem, subitoque accensa

furore";

but when he came to the lines,

"Ergo Iris croceis per coelum roscida pennis

Mille trahens varios adverso Sole colores,"

he jumped up with a great exclamation, which the particular recording

angel who heard it pretended not to understand, or it might have gone

hard with the Latin tutor some time or other.

"_Iris_ shall be her name!"--he said. So her name was Iris.

--The natural end of a tutor is to perish by starvation. It is only a

question of time, just as with the burning of college libraries. These

all burn up sooner or later, provided they are not housed in brick or

stone and iron. I don't mean that you will see in the registry of deaths

that this or that particular tutor died of well-marked, uncomplicated

starvation. They _may_, even, in extreme cases, be carried off by a

thin, watery kind of apoplexy, which sounds very well in the returns,

but means little to those who know that it is only debility settling on

the head. Generally, however, they fade and waste away under various

pretexts,--calling it dyspepsia, consumption, and so on, to put a decent

appearance upon the case and keep up the credit of the family and the

institution where they have passed through the successive stages of

inanition.

In some cases it takes a great many years to kill a tutor by the

process in question. You see, they do get food and clothes and fuel, in

appreciable quantities, such as they are. You will even notice rows of

books in their rooms, and a picture or two,--things that look as if

they had surplus money; but these superfluities are the _water of

crystallization_ to scholars, and you can never get them away till

the poor fellows effloresce into dust. Do not be deceived. The tutor

breakfasts on coffee made of beans, edulcerated with milk watered to the

verge of transparency; his mutton is tough and elastic, up to the

moment when it becomes tired out and tasteless; his coal is a sullen,

sulphurous anthracite, which rusts into ashes, rather than burns, in

the shallow grate; his flimsy broadcloth is too thin for winter and too

thick for summer. The greedy lungs of fifty hot-blooded boys suck the

oxygen from the air he breathes in his recitation-room. In short, he

undergoes a process of gentle and gradual starvation.

--The mother of little Iris was not called Electra, like hers of the old

story, neither was her grandfather Oceanus. Her blood-name, which she

gave away with her heart to the Latin tutor, was a plain old English

one, and her water-name was Hannah, beautiful as recalling the mother of

Samuel, and admirable as reading equally well from the initial letter

forwards and from the terminal letter backwards. The poor lady, seated

with her companion at the chess-board of matrimony, had but just pushed

forward her one little white pawn upon an empty square, when the Black

Knight, that cares nothing for castles or kings or queens, swooped down

upon her and swept her from the larger board of life.

The old Latin tutor put a modest blue stone at the head of his late

companion, with her name and age and _Eheu!_ upon it,--a smaller one

at her feet, with initials; and left her by herself, to be rained and

snowed on,--which is a hard thing to do for those whom we have cherished

tenderly.

About the time that the lichens, falling on the stone, like drops of

water, had spread into fair, round rosettes, the tutor had starved into

a slight cough. Then he began to draw the buckle of his black pantaloons

a little tighter, and took in another reef in his never-ample waistcoat.

His temples got a little hollow, and the contrasts of color in his

cheeks more vivid than of old. After a while his walks fatigued him, and

he was tired and breathed hard after going up a flight or two of stairs.

Then came on other marks of inward trouble and general waste, which he

spoke of to his physician as peculiar, and doubtless owing to accidental

causes; to all which the doctor listened with deference, as if it had

not been the old story that one in five or six of mankind in temperate

climates tells, or has told for him, as if it were something new. As

the doctor went out, he said to himself,--"On the rail at last.

Accommodation train. A good many stops, but will get to the station by

and by." So the doctor wrote a recipe with the astrological sign of

Jupiter before it, (just as your own physician does, inestimable reader,

as you will see, if you look at his next prescription,) and departed,

saying he would look in occasionally. After this, the Latin tutor began

the usual course of "getting better," until he got so much better that

his face was very sharp, and when he smiled, three crescent lines

showed at each side of his lips, and when he spoke, it was in a muffled

whisper, and the white of his eye glistened as pearly as the purest

porcelain,--so much better, that he hoped--by spring--he----might be

able--to--attend----to his class again.--But he was recommended not

to expose himself, and so kept his chamber, and occasionally, not having

anything to do, his bed. The unmarried sister with whom he lived took

care of him; and the child, now old enough to be manageable, and even

useful in trifling offices, sat in the chamber, or played about.

Things could not go on so forever, of course. One morning his face was

sunken and his hands very, very cold. He was "better," he whispered, but

sadly and faintly. After a while he grew restless and seemed a little

wandering. His mind ran on his classics, and fell back on the Latin

grammar.

"Iris!" he said,--"_filiola mea!_"--The child knew this meant _my dear

little daughter_ as well as if it had been English.--"Rainbow!"--for he

would translate her name at times, "come to me,--_veni_"--and his lips

went on automatically, and murmured, "_vel venito!_"--The child came

and sat by his bedside and took his hand, which she could not warm, but

which shot its rays of cold all through her slender frame. But there she

sat, looking steadily at him. Presently he opened his lips feebly, and

whispered, "_Moribundus._" She did not know what that meant, but she saw

that there was something new and sad. So she began to cry; but presently

remembering an old book that seemed to comfort him at times, got up and

brought a Bible in the Latin version, called the Vulgate. "Open it," he

said,--"I will read,--_segnius irritant_,--don't put the light

out,--ah! _haeret lateri_,--I am going,--_vale, vale, vale_, good-bye,

good-bye,--the Lord take care of my child!--_Domine, audi_--_vel

audito!_" His face whitened suddenly, and he lay still, with open eyes

and mouth. He had taken his last degree.

----Little Miss Iris could not be said to begin life with a very

brilliant rainbow over her, in a worldly point of view. A limited

wardrobe of man's attire, such as poor tutors wear,--a few good books,

especially classics,--a print or two, and a plaster model of the

Pantheon, with some pieces of furniture which had seen service,--these,

and a child's heart full of tearful recollections and strange doubts and

questions, alternating with the cheap pleasures which are the anodynes

of childish grief; such were the treasures she inherited.--No,--I

forgot. With that kindly sentiment which all of us feel for old men's

first children,--frost-flowers of the early winter season,--the old

tutor's students had remembered him at a time when he was laughing and

crying with his new parental emotions, and running to the side of the

plain crib in which his _alter ego_, as he used to say, was swinging,

to hang over the little heap of stirring clothes, from which looked the

minute, red, downy, still, round face, with unfixed eyes and working

lips,--in that unearthly gravity which has never yet been broken by a

smile, and which gives to the earliest moon-year or two of an infant's

life the character of a _first old age_, to counterpoise that _second

childhood_ which there is one chance in a dozen it may reach by and by.

The boys had remembered the old man and young father at that tender

period of his hard, dry life. There came to him a fair, silver goblet,

embossed with classical figures, and bearing on a shield the graven

words, _Ex dono pupillorum_. The handle on its side showed what use the

boys had meant it for; and a kind letter in it, written with the best of

feeling, in the worst of Latin, pointed delicately to its destination.

Out of this silver vessel, after a long, desperate, strangling cry,

which marked her first great lesson in the realities of life, the child

took the blue milk, such as poor tutors and their children get, tempered

with water, and sweetened a little, so as to bring it nearer the

standard established by the touching indulgence and partiality of

Nature,--who has mingled an extra allowance of sugar in the blameless

food of the child at its mother's heart, as compared with that of its

infant brothers and sisters of the bovine race.

But a willow will grow in baked sand wet with rain-water. An air-plant

will grow by feeding on the winds. Nay, those huge forests that

overspread great continents have built themselves up mainly from the

air-currents with which they are always battling. The oak is but a

foliated atmospheric crystal deposited from the aërial ocean that holds

the future vegetable world in solution. The storm that tears its leaves

has paid tribute to its strength, and it breasts the tornado clad in the

spoils of a hundred hurricanes.

Poor little Iris! What had she in common with the great oak in the

shadow of which we are losing sight of her?--She lived and grew like

that,--this was all. The blue milk ran into her veins and filled them

with thin, pure blood. Her skin was fair, with a faint tinge, such as

the white rosebud shows before it opens. The doctor who had attended

her father was afraid her aunt would hardly be able to "raise"

her,--"delicate child,"--hoped she was not consumptive,--thought there

was a fair chance she would take after her father.

A very forlorn-looking person, dressed in black, with a white

neckcloth, sent her a memoir of a child who died at the age of two years

and eleven months, after having fully indorsed all the doctrines of the

particular persuasion to which he not only belonged himself, but

thought it very shameful that everybody else did not belong. What with

foreboding looks and dreary deathbed stories, it was a wonder the child

made out to live through it. It saddened her early years, of course,--it

distressed her tender soul with thoughts which, as they cannot be fully

taken in, should be sparingly used as instruments of torture to break

down the natural cheerfulness of a healthy child, or, what is infinitely

worse, to cheat a dying one out of the kind illusions with which the

Father of All has strewed its downward path.

The child would have died, no doubt, and, if properly managed, might

have added another to the long catalogue of wasting children who have

been as cruelly played upon by spiritual physiologists, often with the

best intentions, as ever the subject of a rare disease by the curious

students of science.

Fortunately for her, however, a wise instinct had guided the late Latin

tutor in the selection of the partner of his life, and the future mother

of his child. The deceased tutoress was a tranquil, smooth woman, easily

nourished, as such people are,--a quality which is inestimable in a

tutor's wife,--and so it happened that the daughter inherited enough

vitality from the mother to live through childhood and infancy and fight

her way towards womanhood, in spite of the tendencies she derived from

her other parent.

----Two and two do not always make four, in this matter of hereditary

descent of qualities. Sometimes they make three, and sometimes five. It

seems as if the parental traits at one time showed separate, at another

blended,--that occasionally the force of two natures is represented in

the derivative one by a diagonal of greater value than either original

line of living movement,--that sometimes there is a loss of vitality

hardly to be accounted for, and again a forward impulse of variable

intensity in some new and unforeseen direction.

So it was with this child. She had glanced off from her parental

probabilities at an unexpected angle. Instead of taking to classical

learning like her father, or sliding quietly into household duties like

her mother, she broke out early in efforts that pointed in the direction

of Art. As soon as she could hold a pencil she began to sketch outlines

of objects round her with a certain air and spirit. Very extraordinary

horses, but their legs looked as if they could move. Birds unknown to

Audubon, yet flying, as it were, with a rush. Men with impossible legs,

which did yet seem to have a vital connection with their most improbable

bodies. By-and-by the doctor, on his beast,--an old man with a face

looking as if Time had kneaded it like dough with his knuckles, with a

rhubarb tint and flavor pervading himself and his sorrel horse and all

their appurtenances. A dreadful old man! Be sure she did not forget

those saddlebags that held the detestable bottles out of which he used

to shake those loathsome powders which, to virgin childish palates that

find heaven in strawberries and peaches, are----Well, I suppose I had

better stop. Only she wished she was dead sometimes when she heard him

coming. On the next leaf would figure the gentleman with the black coat

and white cravat, as he looked when he came and entertained her with

stories concerning the death of various little children about her age,

to encourage her, as that wicked Mr. Arouet said about shooting Admiral

Byng. Then she would take her pencil and with a few scratches there

would be the outline of a child, in which you might notice how one

sudden sweep gave the chubby cheek, and two dots darted at the paper

looked like real eyes.

By-and-by she went to school, and caricatured the schoolmaster on the

leaves of her grammars and geographies, and drew the faces of her

companions, and, from time to time, heads and figures from her fancy,

with large eyes, far apart, like those of Raffaelle's mothers and

children, sometimes with wild floating hair, and then with wings and

heads thrown back in ecstasy. This was about twelve, as the dates of

these drawings show, and, therefore, three or four years before she came

among us. Soon after this time, the ideal figures began to take the

place of portraits and caricatures, and a new feature appeared in her

drawing-books in the form of fragments of verse and short poems.

It was dull work, of course, for such a young girl to live with an old

spinster and go to a village school. Her books bore testimony to this;

for there was a look of sadness in the faces she drew, and a sense of

weariness and longing for some imaginary conditions of blessedness or

other, which began to be painful. She might have gone through this

flowering of the soul, and, casting her petals, subsided into a sober,

human berry, but for the intervention of friendly assistance and

counsel.

In the town where she lived was a lady of honorable condition, somewhat

past middle age, who was possessed of pretty ample means, of cultivated

tastes, of excellent principles, of exemplary character, and of more

than common accomplishments. The gentleman in black broadcloth and white

neckerchief only echoed the common voice about her, when he called her,

after enjoying, beneath her hospitable roof, an excellent cup of tea,

with certain elegancies and luxuries he was unaccustomed to, "The Model

of all the Virtues."

She deserved this title as well as almost any woman. She did really

bristle with moral excellences. Mention any good thing she had not done;

I should like to see you try! There was no handle of weakness to take

hold of her by: she was as unseizable, except in her totality, as a

billiard-ball; and on the broad, green, terrestrial table, where she had

been knocked about, like all of us, by the cue of Fortune, she glanced

from every human contact, and "caramed" from one relation to another,

and rebounded from the stuffed cushion of temptation, with such exact

and perfect angular movements, that the Enemy's corps of Reporters had

long given up taking notes of her conduct, as there was no chance for

their master.

What an admirable person for the patroness and directress of a slightly

self-willed child, with the lightning zigzag line of genius running like

a glittering vein through the marble whiteness of her virgin nature! One

of the lady-patroness's peculiar virtues was calmness. She was resolute

and strenuous, but still. You could depend on her for every duty; she

was as true as steel. She was kind-hearted and serviceable in all

the relations of life. She had more sense, more knowledge, more

conversation, as well as more goodness, than all the partners you have

waltzed with this winter put together.

Yet no man was known to have loved her, or even to have offered himself

to her in marriage. It was a great wonder. I am very anxious to

vindicate my character as a philosopher and an observer of Nature by

accounting for this apparently extraordinary fact.

You may remember certain persons who have the misfortune of presenting

to the friends whom they meet a cold, damp hand. There are states of

mind in which a contact of this kind has a depressing effect on the

vital powers that makes us insensible to all the virtues and graces of

the proprietor of one of these life-absorbing organs. When they touch

us, virtue passes out of us, and we feel as if our electricity had been

drained by a powerful negative battery, carried about by an overgrown

human torpedo.

"The Model of all the Virtues" had a pair of searching eyes as clear as

Wenham ice; but they were slower to melt than that fickle jewelry. Her

features disordered themselves slightly at times in a surface-smile, but

never broke loose from their corners and indulged in the riotous tumult

of a laugh--which, I take it, is the mob-law of the features,--and

propriety the magistrate who reads the riot-act. She carried the

brimming cup of her inestimable virtues with a cautious, steady hand,

and an eye always on them, to see that they did not spill. Then she

was an admirable judge of character. Her mind was a perfect laboratory

of tests and reagents; every syllable you put into breath went into

her intellectual eudiometer, and all your thoughts were recorded on

litmus-paper. I think there has rarely been a more admirable woman.

Of course, Miss Iris was immensely and passionately attached

to her.----Well,--these are two highly oxygenated adverbs,--grateful,--

suppose we say,--yes,--grateful, dutiful, obedient to her wishes for

the most part,--perhaps not quite up to the concert pitch of such a

perfect orchestra of the virtues.

We must have a weak spot or two in a character before we can love it

much. People that do not laugh or cry, or take more of anything than

is good for them, or use anything but dictionary-words, are admirable

subjects for biographies. But we don't always care most for those

flat-pattern flowers that press best in the herbarium.

This immaculate woman,--why couldn't she have a fault or two? Isn't

there any old whisper which will tarnish that wearisome aureole of

saintly perfection? Doesn't she carry a lump of opium in her pocket?

Isn't her cologne-bottle replenished oftener than its legitimate use

would require? It would be such a comfort!

Not for the world would a young creature like Iris have let such words

escape her, or such thoughts pass through her mind. Whether at the

bottom of her soul lies any uneasy consciousness of an oppressive

presence, it is hard to say, until we know more about her. Iris sits

between the little man and the "Model of all the Virtues," as the

black-coated gentleman called her.--I will watch them all.

----Here I stop for the present. What the Professor said has had to make

way this time for what he saw and heard.

* * * * *

----And now you may read these lines, which were written for gentle

souls who love music, and read in even tones, and, perhaps, with

something like a smile upon the reader's lips, at a meeting where these

musical friends had gathered. Whether they were written with smiles or

not, you can guess better after you have read them.

THE OPENING OF THE PIANO.

In the little southern parlor of the house you

may have seen

With the gambrel-roof, and the gable looking

westward to the green,

At the side toward the sunset, with the window

on its right,

Stood the London-made piano I am dreaming

of to-night.

Ah me! how I remember the evening when it

came!

What a cry of eager voices, what a group of

cheeks in flame,

When the wondrous box was opened that had

come from over seas,

With its smell of mastic-varnish and its flash

of ivory keys!

Then the children all grew fretful in the restlessness

of joy,

For the boy would push his sister, and the

sister crowd the boy,

Till the father asked for quiet in his grave

paternal way,

But the mother hushed the tumult with the

words, "Now, Mary, play."

For the dear soul knew that music was a very

sovereign balm;

She had sprinkled it over Sorrow and seen its

brow grow calm,

In the days of slender harpsichords with tapping

tinkling quills,

Or carolling to her spinet with its thin metallic

thrills.

So Mary, the household minstrel, who always

loved to please,

Sat down to the new "Clementi," and struck

the glittering keys.

Hushed were the children's voices, and every

eye grew dim,

As, floating from lip and finger, arose the

"Vesper Hymn."

--Catharine, child of a neighbor, curly and

rosy-red,

(Wedded since, and a widow--something like

ten years dead,)

Hearing a gush of music such as none

before,

Steals from her mother's chamber and peeps

at the open door.

Just as the "Jubilate" in threaded whisper

dies,

--"Open it! open it, lady!" the little maiden

cries

(For she thought 'twas a singing creature

caged in a box she heard,)

"Open it! open it, lady! and let me see the

_bird!_"

THE UTAH EXPEDITION;

ITS CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES.

If General Henry Knox, of Revolutionary memory, the first Secretary of

War of the Republic, had dreamed that the successor to his portfolio,

after an interval of seventy years, would recommend to Congress the

purchase of a thousand camels for military purposes, he would have

attributed the fancy to excited nerves or a too hearty dinner. Had he

dreamed, further, that the grotesque mounted corps was to be employed

in regions two thousand miles beyond the frontier of the Anglo-Saxon

pioneer of 1789, to guard travel to an actual El Dorado, the vision

would have appeared still more extraordinary. And its absurdity would

have seemed complete, if he had fancied the high road of this travel

as leading through a community essentially Oriental in its social and

political life, which was nevertheless ripening into a State of the

American Union. Yet if General Knox could be roused from his grave at

Thomaston, he would see the dream realized. On the Pacific lies El

Dorado; among the fastnesses of the Rocky Mountains there is a community

which blends the voluptuousness of Bagdad with the economy of Cape Cod;

and within two years a regiment of camel-riders will be scouring the

Great American Plains after Cheyennes, Navajoes, and Camanches.

The propagation of the religion of which Joseph Smith was the prophet

has just begun to attract the notice its extraordinary success

deserves. So long as the head of the Mormon Church was considered a kind

of Mahometan Sam Slick, and his associates a crazy rabble, it was vain

to expect that the whole sect could be treated with more attention than

any of the curiosities in a popular museum. But a juster appreciation of

the constitution of the Mormon community begins to prevail, and with it

comes a conviction that questions are involved in its relations to the

parent government which are not exceeded in importance by any that have

ever been agitated at Washington. Brigham Young no longer seems to the

American public a religious mountebank, only one grade removed from the

man Orr, who claimed to be the veritable Angel Gabriel, and was killed

in a popular commotion which he had himself excited in Dutch Guiana. On

the contrary, he begins to appear as a man of great native strength and

scope of mind, who understands the phases of human character and knows

how to avail himself of the knowledge, and who has acquired spiritual

dominion over one hundred and fifty thousand souls, combined with

absolute temporal supremacy over fifty thousand of the number.

The situation of the Mormon community in Utah has been peculiarly

adapted, heretofore, to the eccentricities of its inhabitants. Isolated

from Christendom on the east and west by plains incapable of settlement

for generations to come, and encompassed by mountain-ranges, the line

of whose summits runs above the boundary of eternal snow, it was

independent of the influences of Christian civilization. No missionary

of any Christian sect ever attempted to propagate his doctrines in

Utah,--nor, perhaps, would any such propagation have been tolerated, had

it been attempted. The Mormon religion was free to run its own course

and develop whatever elements it possessed of good and evil. When

Brigham Young and his followers from Nauvoo descended the Wahsatch range

in the summer of 1847, and took up their abode around the Great Salt

Lake, the avowed creed of the Church was different from that proclaimed

to-day. The secret doctrines entertained by its leaders were perhaps

the same as at present, but the religion of the people was a species of

mysticism which it is not impossible to conceive might commend itself

even to a refined mind. The existence of polygamy was officially denied

by the highest ecclesiastical authority, although we know to-day that

the denial was a shameless lie, and that Joseph Smith, during his

lifetime, had a plurality of wives, and at his death bequeathed them to

his successor, who already possessed a harem of his own. Property was

almost equally distributed among the people, the leaders being as poor

as their disciples. In this respect at that time they were accustomed

exultantly to compare their condition with that of the early Christians.

Ten years passed, and the change was extraordinary. The doctrines

of Mormonism, if plainly stated, are no longer such as can commend

themselves to a mind not perverted nor naturally prurient. Polygamy is

inculcated as a religious duty, without which dignity in the Celestial

Kingdom is impossible, and even salvation hardly to be obtained.

Property is distributed unjustly, the bulk of real and personal estate

in the Territory being vested in the Church and its directors, between

whom and the mass of the population there exists a difference in social

welfare as wide as between the Russian nobleman and his serf. In brief,

the Mormons no longer claim to be a Christian sect, but assert, and

truly, that their religion is as distinct from Christianity as that is

from Mahometanism. Many of the doctrines whispered in 1847 only to

those who had been admitted to the penetralia of the Nauvoo Temple are

proclaimed unblushingly in 1857 from the pulpit in the Tabernacle at

Salt Lake City. A system of polytheism has been ingrafted on the creed,

according to which there are grades among the Gods, there being no

Supreme Ruler of all, but the primeval Adam of Genesis being the deity

highest in spiritual rank, and Christ, Mahomet, Joseph Smith, and,

finally, Brigham Young, partaking also of divinity. The business of

these deities in the Celestial Kingdom is the propagation of souls to

people bodies begotten on earth, and the sexual relation is made to

permeate every portion of the creed as thoroughly as it pervaded the

religions of ancient Egypt and India. In the Endowment House at Salt

Lake City, secret rites are practised of a character similar to the

mysteries of the Nile, and presided over by Young and Kimball, two

Vermont Yankees, with all the solemnity of priests of Isis and Osiris.

In these rites, which are symbolical of the mystery of procreation, both

sexes participate, clad in loose flowing robes of white linen, with

cleansed bodies and anointed hair. Since the revelation of the processes

of the Endowment, which was first fully made by a young apostate named

John Hyde, other dissenters, real and pretended, have attempted to

impose on the public exaggerated accounts of these ceremonies; but in

justice to the Mormon Church it ought to be said, that there is no

foundation for the reports that they are such as would outrage decency.

To be sure, an assemblage of members of both sexes, clad in white

shifts, with oiled and dishevelled hair, in a room fitted up in

resemblance of a garden, to witness a performance of the allegory of

Adam and Eve in Eden, which is conducted so as to be sensually symbolic,

is not suggestive of refined ideas; but it is necessary to take into

consideration the character both of performers and witnesses, which is

not distinguished in any way by delicacy. According to their standard of

morality and taste, the rites of the Endowment are devoid of immodesty.

In their political bearing, however, they are more important, and justly

liable to the severest censure. It is established beyond question, that

the initiated, clad in the preposterous costume before described, take

an oath, in the presence of their Spiritual Head, to cherish eternal

enmity towards the government of the United States until it shall have

avenged the death of their prophet, Joseph Smith. And this ceremony is

not a mere empty form of words. It is an oath, the spirit of which the

Endowed carry into their daily life and all their relations with

the Gentile world. In it lies the root of the evasion, and finally

subversion, of Federal authority which occasioned the recent military

expedition to Utah.

When the Territory was organized in 1850, the government at Washington,

acting on an imperfect knowledge of the nature of Mormonism, conferred

the office of Governor upon Brigham Young. For this act Mr. Fillmore has

been unjustly censured. It appeared to him, at the time, a proper, as

well as politic, appointment. But before the succession of General

Pierce to the Presidency, its evil results became apparent, in the

expulsion of civil officers from the Territory and the subversion of

all law. A feeble, and of course unsuccessful, attempt was then made to

supplant Young with Lieutenant-Colonel Steptoe, a meritorious, but too

amiable officer of the regular army,--the same whose defeat by the

Cayuses, Spokans, and Coeur d'Alènes, last May, occasioned the Indian

war in Washington Territory. During the summer of 1855, he led a

battalion overland, wintering in Salt Lake City. It was at his option,

at any time during his sojourn, to have claimed the supreme executive

authority. He did not do so, but even headed a recommendation to

President Pierce for the reappointment of Brigham Young. This was the

result of his winter's residence, during which he and some of his

fellow-officers were feasted to their stomachs' content, and entirely

careless concerning the political condition of the Territory. Late in

the spring, he marched away to California, after having expressed to

the President that it was "his unqualified opinion, based on personal

acquaintance, that Brigham Young is [was] the most suitable person for

the office of Governor." Brigham's views of the winter's proceedings, on

the other hand, were expressed in a sermon preached in the Tabernacle,

the Sunday after the departure of the Lieutenant-Colonel, in which he

repeated his declaration of three years previous:--

"I am, and will be, governor, and no power can hinder it, until the Lord

Almighty says, 'Brigham, you need not be governor any longer.'" And he

added,--"I do not know what I shall say next winter, if such men make

their appearance here as some last winter. I know what I think I shall

say; if they play the same game again, let the women be ever so bad, so

help me God, we will slay them."

Most of the other civil officers who were commissioned about the same

time with Colonel Steptoe arrived the August after he had departed.

Within eighteen months their lot was the same as that of their

predecessors. In April, 1857, before the snow had begun to melt on the

mountains, all of them, in a party led by Surveyor-General Burr, were on

their way to the States, happy in having escaped with life. During the

previous February, the United States District Court had been broken up

in Salt Lake City. A mob had invaded the courtroom, armed with pistols

and bludgeons, a knife was drawn on the judge in his private room,

and he was ordered to adjourn his court _sine die_, and yielded.

Indian-Agent Hurt was the only Gentile official who remained in the

Territory.

In the mean while, however, a change of national administration had

taken place, and General Pierce had been succeeded by Mr. Buchanan. For

nearly three years the country had been convulsed by an agitation of the

Slavery question, originating with Senator Douglas, which culminated in

the Presidential election of 1856. The Utah question, grave though it

was, was forgotten in the excitement concerning Kansas, or remembered

only by the Republican party, as enabling them to stigmatize more

pungently the political theories of the Illinois Senator, by coupling

polygamy and slavery, "twin relics of barbarism," in the resolution of

their Philadelphia Platform against Squatter Sovereignty. In the lull

which succeeded the election, Mr. Buchanan had leisure, at Wheatland, to

draft a programme for his incoming administration. His paramount idea

was to gag the North and induce her to forget that she had been robbed

of her birthright, by forcing on the attention of the country other

questions of absorbing interest. One of the most obvious of these was

supplied by the condition of affairs in Utah. It had been satisfactorily

established, that the Mormons, acting under the influence of leaders

to whom they seemed to have surrendered their judgment, refused to be

controlled by any other authority; that they had been often advised to

obedience, and these friendly counsels had been answered with defiance;

that officers of the Federal Government had been driven from the

Territory for no offence except an effort to do their sworn duty, while

others had been prevented from going there by threats of assassination;

that judges had been interrupted in the performance of their functions,

and the records of their courts seized, and either destroyed or

concealed; and, finally, that many other acts of unlawful violence had

been perpetrated, and the right to repeat them openly claimed by the

leading inhabitants, with at least the silent acquiescence of nearly

all the rest of the population. In view of these facts, Mr. Buchanan

determined to supersede Brigham Young in the office of Governor, and to

send to Utah a strong military force to sustain the new appointee in the

exercise of his authority.

The rumors of the impending expedition reached the Mormons at the very

moment they were prepared to apply to Congress for admission as a State.

A Constitution had been framed by a Convention assembled without the

sanction of an enabling act, and was intrusted to George A. Smith and

John Taylor, two of the Twelve Apostles of the Church, for presentation

to Congress. These men, both of them of more than ordinary ability,

helped to present the Mormon side of the question to the country through

the newspapers, during the winter of 1856-7. The essence of their

vindication was, that the character of some of the Federal officers who

had been sent to Utah was objectionable in the extreme; but, granting

the truth of all their statements on this subject, they supplied no

excuse for the utter subversion of Federal authority in the Territory.

Their narrative, however, formed a most spicy chapter in the annals of

official scandal. The three United States judges, Kinney, Drummond,

and Stiles, were presented to the public stripped of all judicial

sanctity;--Kinney, the Chief Justice, as the keeper of a grocery-store,

dance-room, and boarding-house, enforcing the bills for food and lodging

against his brethren of the law by expulsion from the bar in case of

non-payment, and so tenacious of life, that, before departing from the

Territory, he solicited and received from Brigham Young a patriarchal

blessing; Drummond, as an amorous horse-jockey, who had taken to Utah,

as his mistress, a drab from Washington, and seated her beside him once

upon the bench of the court; Stiles as himself a Mormon, so far as the

possession of two wives could make him one. From the early days of

Joseph Smith, his disciples have never minced their language, and they

expended their whole vocabulary now on such themes as have been cited,

proving, to the satisfaction of everybody, that, in respect to the

judiciary, they had indeed had just cause for complaint. The mission of

Smith and Taylor failed, as might have been expected,--the Chairman of

the Committee on Territories, Mr. Grow, of Pennsylvania, refusing even

to present their Constitution to the House,--and they prepared to return

to Utah.

A month or two later, Mr. Buchanan was inaugurated, and preparations for

the Utah Expedition were immediately ordered. In the first place, an

opinion was solicited from General Scott as to the feasibility of the

undertaking until the next year. That distinguished soldier gave a

decision adverse to the immediate dispatch of the expedition. He

considered that the arrangements necessary to be made were so extensive,

and the distances from which the regiments must be concentrated so

great, that the wiser plan was to consume the year in getting everything

in readiness for the troops to march from the frontier early in the

spring of 1858. It would have been well, had his advice prevailed;

but it was overruled, and the preparations for the expedition were

commenced. The troops detailed for the service were the Fifth Infantry,

then busy fighting Billy Bowlegs among the everglades of Florida,--the

Tenth Infantry, which was stationed at the forts in Upper

Minnesota,--the Second Dragoons, which was among the forces assembled

at Fort Leavenworth, to be used, if necessary, in Kansas, at the

requisition of Governor Walker,--and Phelps's light-artillery battery,

the same which so distinguished itself at Buena Vista, under the command

of Captain Washington. An ordnance-battery, also, was organized for the

purposes of the expedition. Brevet Brigadier-General Harney was assigned

to the command-in-chief, an officer of a rude force of character,

amounting often to brutality, and careless as to those details of

military duty which savor more of the accountant's inkstand than of

the drum and fife, but ambitious, active, and well acquainted with the

character of the service for which he was detailed. He was, at the time,

in command in Kansas, subject in a measure to the will of Governor

Walker.

The whole number of troops under orders for the expedition was hardly

twenty-five hundred, but from this total no estimate can be predicated

of the enormous quantities of commissary stores and munitions of war

necessary to be dispatched to sustain it. It was thought advisable

to send a supply for eighteen months, so that the trains exceeded in

magnitude those which would accompany an army of twenty thousand in

ordinary operations on the European continent, where _dépôts_ could be

established along the line of march. To appreciate such preparations, it

is necessary to understand the character of the country to be traversed

between the Missouri River and the Great Salt Lake.

The route selected for the march was along the emigrant road across

the Plains, first defined fifty years ago by trappers and _voyageurs_

following the trail by which the buffalo crossed the mountains,

described by Lieutenant-Colonel Fremont, in the reports of his earlier

explorations, and subsequently adopted by all the overland emigration

across the continent. It is, perhaps, the most remarkable natural road

in the world. The hand of man could hardly add an improvement to the

highway along which, from the Missouri to the Great Basin, Nature has

presented not a single obstacle to the progress of the heaviest loaded

teams. From the frontier, at Fort Leavenworth, it sweeps over a broad

rolling prairie to the Platte, a river shallow, but of great width,

whose course is as straight as an arrow. Pursuing the river-bottom more

than three hundred miles, to the Black Hills, steep mounds dotted with

dark pines and cedars, it enters the broad belt of mountainous country

which terminates in the rim of the Basin. Following thence the North

Fork of the Platte, and its tributary, the Sweetwater,--so named by an

old French trapper, who had the misfortune to upset a load of sugar into

the stream,--it emerges from the Black Hills into scenery of a different

character. On the northern bank of the Sweetwater are the Rattlesnake

Mountains, huge excrescences of rock, blistering out of an arid plain;

on the southern bank, the hills which bear the name of the river, and

are only exaggerations of the bluffs along the Platte. The dividing

ridge between the waters of the Atlantic and Pacific is reached in the

South Pass, at the foot of a spur of the Wind River range, a group of

gigantic mountains, whose peaks reach three thousand feet above the line

of perpetual snow. There the emigrant strikes his tent in the morning

on the banks of a rivulet which finds its way, through the Platte,

Missouri, and Mississippi, into the Gulf of Mexico,--and pitches it, at

his next camp, upon a little creek which trickles into Green River, and

at last, through the Colorado, into the Gulf of California. Not far

distant spring the fountains of the Columbia. A level table-land extends

to the fords of Green River, a clear and rapid stream, whose entire

course has never yet been mapped by an intelligent explorer. Here the

road becomes entangled again among mountains, and winds its way over

steep ridges, across foaming torrents, and through cañons so narrow that

only noonday sunshine penetrates their depths, until it emerges, through

a rocky gate in the great barrier of the Wahsatch range, upon the bench

above Salt Lake City, twelve hundred miles from Fort Leavenworth. The

view at this point, from the mouth of Emigration Cañon, is enchanting.

The sun, sinking through a cloudless western sky, silvers the long line

of the lake, which is visible twenty miles away. Beyond the city the

River Jordan winds quietly through the plain. Below the gazer are roofs

and cupolas, shady streets, neat gardens, and fields of ripening grain.

The mountains, which bound the horizon on every side, except where a

wavering stream of heated air shows the beginning of the Great Desert,

are tinged with a soft purple haze, in anticipation of the sunset, but

every patch of green grass on their slopes glows through it like an

emerald, while along the summits runs an undulating thread of snow.

Throughout this vast line of road, the only white inhabitants are the

garrisons of the military posts, the keepers of mail-stations, and

_voyageurs_ and mountaineers, whose cabins may be found in every

locality favorable to Indian trade. These last are a singular race

of men, fast disappearing, like the Indian and the buffalo, their

neighbors. Most of them are of French extraction, and some have died

without having learned to speak a word of English. Their wealth consists

in cattle and horses, and little stocks of goods which they purchase

from the sutlers at the forts or the merchants at Salt Lake City. Some

of the more considerable among them have the means of sending to the

States for an annual supply of blankets, beads, vermilion, and other

stuff for Indian traffic; but the most are thriftless, and all are

living in concubinage or marriage with squaws, and surrounded by troops

of unwashed, screeching half-breeds. Once in from three to six years,

they will make a journey to St. Louis, and gamble away so much of their

savings since the last visit as has escaped being wasted over greasy

card-tables during the long winter-evenings among the mountains. The

Indian tribes along the way are numerous and formidable, the road

passing through country occupied by Pawnees, Cheyennes, Sioux,

Arapahoes, Crows, Snakes, and Utahs. With the Cheyennes war had been

waged by the United States for more than two years, which interfered

seriously with the expedition; for, during the month of June, a

war-party from that tribe intercepted and dispersed the herd of

beef-cattle intended for the use of the army.

The natural characteristics of the entire route are as unpromising as

those of its inhabitants. At the distance of about two hundred miles

from the Missouri frontier the soil becomes so pervaded by sand, that

only scientific agriculture can render it available. Along the Platte

there is no fuel. Not a tree is visible, except the thin fringe of

cottonwoods on the margin of the river, all of which upon the south

bank, where the road runs, were hewed down and burned at every

convenient camp, during the great California emigration. When the Rocky

Mountains are entered, the only vegetation found is bunch-grass, so

called because it grows in tufts,--and the _artemisia_, or wild sage, an

odorous shrub, which sometimes attains the magnitude of a tree, with a

fibrous trunk as thick as a man's thigh, but is ordinarily a bush

about two feet in height. The bunch-grass, grown at such an elevation,

possesses extraordinary nutritive properties, even in midwinter. About

the middle of January a new growth is developed underneath the snow,

forcing off the old dry blade that ripened and shed its seed the

previous summer. From Fort Kearney to Fort Laramie, almost the only

fuel to be obtained is the dung of buffalo and oxen, called, in the

vocabulary of the region, "chips,"--the _argal_ of the Tartar deserts.

Among the mountains the sage is the chief material of the traveller's

fire. It burns with a lively, ruddy flame, and gives out an intense

heat. In the settlements of Utah all the wood consumed is hauled from

the cañons, which are usually lined with pines, firs, and cedars, while

the broadsides of the mountains are nothing but terraces of volcanic

rock. The price of wood in Salt Lake City is from twelve to twenty

dollars a cord.

From this brief review of the natural features of the country, some idea

may be formed of the intensity of the religious enthusiasm which has

induced fifty thousand Mormon converts to traverse it, many of them on

foot and trundling handcarts, to seek a home among the valleys of

Utah, in a region hardly more propitious; and some idea, also, of the

difficulties which were to attend the march of the army.

During the spring of 1857, the preparations for the expedition were

hurried forward, and in June the whole force was collected at Fort

Leavenworth. All Western Missouri was in a ferment. The river foamed

with steamboats freighted with military stores, and the levee at

Leavenworth City was covered all summer long with the frames of wagons.

Between the 18th and the 24th of July, all the detachments of the little

army were on the march, except a battalion of two companies of infantry,

which had been unable to join their regiment at the time it moved from

Minnesota, and the Second Dragoons, which Governor Walker retained in

Kansas to overawe the uneasy people of the town of Lawrence. General

Harney also tarried in Kansas, intending to wait until after the October

election there, at which disturbances were anticipated that it might be

necessary to quell by force.

At Washington, movements of equal importance were taking place. The

Postmaster-General, in June, annulled the contract held by certain

Mormons for the transportation of the monthly mall to Utah, ostensibly

on account of non-performance of the service within the stipulated time,

but really because he was satisfied that the mails were violated, either

_en route_ or after arrival at Salt Lake City. The office of Governor

of the Territory was offered by the President to various persons, and

finally accepted, July 11th, by Alfred Cumming, a brother of the Cumming

of Georgia who fought multitudinous duels with McDuffie of South

Carolina, all of which both parties survived. Mr. Cumming had been a

sutler during the Mexican War, and more recently a Superintendent of

Indian Affairs on the Upper Missouri. He was reputed to be a gentleman

of education, ambition, and executive ability. The office of Chief

Justice was conferred on Judge D.R. Eckels, of Indiana, a person well

fitted for the position by the circumstances of his early life, of the

utmost determination, and whose judicial integrity was above suspicion.