PART VI.

Thus I rode, amphibious and happy, on the top of the coach, with only

one person sharing the seat with me, and he fortunately a stranger, and

therefore sweet tempered, and a very agreeable and intelligent man,

talking sensibly when he talked at all, and talking at all only now and

then. Very agreeable and polite; but presently he asked me in

courteous phrase if he might smoke, and of course I said yes, and the

fragrant white smoke-wreaths mingled with the valley vapors, and as I

sat narcotized and rapt, looking, looking, looking into the lovely

landscape, and looking it into me, twisting the jagged finger-ends of

my gloves around the protruding ends of my fingers,--dreadfully jagged

and forlorn the poor gloves looked with their long travel. I don't

know how it is, but in all the novels that I ever read, the heroines

always have delicate, spotless, exquisite gloves, which are continually

lying about in the garden-paths, and which their lovers are constantly

picking up and pressing to their hearts and lips, and treasuring in

little golden boxes or something, and saying how like the soft glove,

pure and sweet, is to the beloved owner; and it is all very pretty, but

I cannot think how they manage it. I am sure I should be very sorry to

have my lovers go about picking up my gloves. I don't have them a week

before they change color; the thumb gapes at its base, the little

finger rips away from the next one, and they all burst out at the ends;

a stitch drops in the back and slides down to the wrist before you know

it has started. You can mend, to be sure, but for every darn yawn

twenty holes. I admire a dainty glove as much any one. I look with

enthusiasm not unmingled with despair at these gloves of romance; but

such things do not depend entirely upon taste, as male writers seem to

think. A pair of gloves cost a dollar and a half, and when you have

them, your lovers do not find them in the summer-house. Why not?

Because they are lying snugly wrapped in oiled-silk in the upper

bureau-drawer, only to be taken out on great occasions. You would as

soon think of wearing Victoria's crown for a head-dress, as those

gloves on a picnic. So it happens that the gloves your lovers find

will be sure to be Lisle-thread, and dingy and battered at that; for

how can you pluck flowers and pull vines and tear away mosses without

getting them dingy and battered?--and the most fastidious lover in the

world cannot expect you to buy a new pair every time. For me, I keep

my gloves as long as the backs hold together, and go around for

forty-five weeks of the fifty-two with my hands clenched into fists to

cover omissions.

Let us not, however, dismiss the subject with this apologetic notice,

for there is another side. There is a basis of attack, as well as

defence. I not only apologize, but stand up for this much-abused

article. Though worn gloves are indeed less beautiful than fresh ones,

they have more character. Take one just from the shop, how lank and

wan it is,--a perfect monotony of insipidity; but in a day or two it

plumps out, it curls over, it wabs up, it wrinkles and bulges and

stands alone. All the joints and hollows and curves and motions of

your hands speak through its outlines. Twists and rips and scratches

and stains bear silent witness of your agitation, your activity, your

merry-making. Here breaks through the irrepressible energy of your

nature. Let harmless negatives rejoice in their stupid integrity.

Genius is expansive and iconoclastic. Enterprise cannot be confined by

kid or thread or silk. The life that is in you must have full swing,

even if snap go the buttons and gray go the gloves. Truly, if

historians had but eyes to see, the record of one's experience might be

written out from the bureau-drawer. Happy a thousand times that

historians have not eyes to see.

As to mending gloves, after the first attack it is time lost. Let one

or two pairs, kept for show and state, be irreproachable; but the rest

are for service, and everybody knows that little serving can be done

with bandaged hands. You must take hold of things without gloves, or,

which amounts to the same thing, with gloves that let your fingers

through, or you cannot reasonably expect to take hold of things with

any degree of efficiency.

So, as I was saying, I sat on the coach-top twisting my gloves, and I

wished in my heart that men would not do such things as that very

agreeable gentleman was doing. I do not design to enter on a crusade

against tobacco. It is a mooted point in minor morals, in which every

one must judge for himself; but I do wish men would not smoke so much.

In fact, I should be pleased if they did not smoke at all. I do not

believe there is any necessity for it. I believe it is a mere habit of

self-indulgence. Women connive at it, because--well, because, in a

way, they must. Men are childish, and, as I have said before, animal.

I don't think they have nearly the self-restraint, self-denial, high

dignity and purity and conscience that women have,--take them in the

mass. They give over to habits and pleasures like great boys. People

talk about the extravagance of women. But men are equally so, only

their extravagance takes a different turn. A woman's is aesthetic; a

man's is gross. She buys fine clothes and furniture. He panders to

his bodily appetites. Which is worse? Women love men, and wish to be

loved by them, and are miserable if they are not. So the wife lets her

husband do twenty things which he ought not to do, which it is rude and

selfish and wicked for him to do, rather than run the risk of loosening

the cords which bind him to her. One can see every day how women

manage,--the very word tells the whole story,--MANAGE men, by cunning

strategy, cajolery, and all manner of indirections, just as if they

were elephants. But if men were what they ought to be, there would be

no such humiliating necessity. They ought to be so upright, so candid,

so just, that it is only necessary to show this is right, this is

reasonable, this is wrong, for them to do it, or to refrain from the

doing. As it is, men smoke by the hour together, and their wives are

thankful it is nothing worse. They would not dare to make a serious

attempt to annihilate the pipe. They feel that they hold their own by

a tenure so uncertain, that they are forced to ignore minor

transgressions for the sake of retaining their throne. I do not say

that women are entirely just and upright, but I do think that the

womanly nature is GOOD-er than the manly nature; I think a very large

proportion of female faults are the result of the indirect, but

effective wrong training they receive from men; and I think, thirdly,

that, take women just as they are, wrong training and all, there is not

one in ten thousand million who, if she had a faithful and loving

husband, would not be a faithful and loving wife. Men know this, and

act upon it. They know that they can commit minor immoralities, and

major ones too, and be forgiven. They know it is not necessary for them

to keep themselves pure in body and soul lest they alienate their

wives. So they yield to their fleshly lusts. What an ado would be

made if a woman should form the habit of smoking, or any habit whose

deleterious effects extend through her husband's or her father's rooms,

cling to his wardrobe, books, and all his especial belongings! Suppose

she should even demand an innocent ice-cream as frequently as her

husband demands a cigar,--suppose she should spend as much time and

money on candy as he spends on tobacco,--would she not be considered an

extravagant, selfish, and somewhat vulgar woman? But is it really any

worse? Is it less extravagant for a man to tickle his nose, than for a

woman to tickle her palate? If a cigar would enfoul the purity of a

woman, does it not of a man? Why is it more noble for a man to be the

slave of an appetite or a habit, than for a woman? Why is it less

impure for a man to saturate his hair, his breath and clothing, with

vile, stale odors, than for a woman? What right have men to suppose

that they can perfume themselves with stenches,--for whatever may be

the fragrance of a burning cigar, the after smell is a stench,--and be

any less offensive to a cleanly woman than a woman similarly perfumed

is to them? I have never heard that the female sense of smell is less

acute than the male. How dare men so presume on womanly sufferance?

They dare, because they know they are safe. I can think of a dozen of

my own friends who will read this and bring out a fresh box of cigars,

and smoke them under my very own face and eyes, and know all the time

that I shall keep liking them; and the worst of it is, I know I shall,

too. All the same, I do not thoroughly respect a man who has a habit

of smoking.

But if men will smoke, as they certainly will, because they are animal

and stubborn and self-indulgent and self-willed, let them at least

confine their fireworks to their own apartments. If a wife would rather

admit her fuliginous husband to her sitting-room than forego his

society altogether,--as undoubtedly most women would, for you see it is

not a question between a smoky husband and a clear husband, but between

a smoky one and none at all, because between his wife and his cigar the

man will almost invariably choose the cigar,--I have nothing to say.

But don't let a man go into other people's houses and smoke, or, above

all things, walk smoking by the side of women. No matter if she does

give you permission when you ask it. You should not have asked it. We

don't wish you to do it, you may be sure. It is a disrespectful thing.

It partakes of the nature of an insult. No matter how grand or learned

or distinguished you may be, don't do it. I saw once one of our

Cabinet Ministers walking, with his cigar in his mouth, by the side of

the wife of the British Minister, and it lowered them both in my

opinion, though I don't suppose either of them would take it much to

heart if they knew it. If you are walking in the woods or fields, it

may be pardonable; but in the public streets no private compact can be

of any avail. It is a public mark of disrespect. If you don't regard

us enough to throw away or keep away your cigar when you join us, just

don't join us. Keep your own side of the street. Nobody wants you; at

least I don't. Walk alone if you like, or with whomsoever you can, but

if you walk with me, you shall "behave yourself."

But how frightfully hungry these long coach stages make one! especially

among the mountains. Famine lurks in that wild air, and is ever

springing upon the unwary traveller. The fact was, however, that I had

the most dreadful appetite all the way through. "Really,"

Halicarnassus would say, "it is quite charming to see you in such fine

health," being at the same time reduced to a state of extreme disgust

at my rapacity. He made an estimate, one day, that I had eaten since

we started thirty-one and a half chickens, and I have no doubt I had;

for chickens were my piece de resistance as well as entrees; and then

they WERE chickens, not old hens,--little specks of darlings, just

giving one hop from the egg-shell to the gridiron, and each time the

waiter only brought you one bisegment of the speck, all of whose edible

possibilities could easily be salted down in a thimble. I don't say

this by way of complaint. A thimbleful of delicacy is better than a

"mountain of mummy"; and here let me put in a word in favor of that

much-abused institution, hotels. I cannot see why people should go

about complaining of them as they do, both in literature and in life.

My experience has been almost always favorable. In New York, in

Saratoga, in Canada, all through the mountain district, we found ample

and adequate entertainment for man and beast. Trollope brings his

sledge-hammer down unequivocally. Of course there will be certain

viands not cooked precisely according to one's favorite method, and at

these prolonged dining-tables you miss the home-feeling of quiet and

seclusion; but I should like to know if one does not travel on purpose

to miss the home-feeling? If that is what he seeks, it would be so

easy to stay at home. One loses half the pleasure and profit of

travelling if he must box himself up with his own party. It is a good

thing to triturate against other people occasionally. For eating,

there are, to be sure, the little oval dishes that have so aroused

Trollopian and other ire; and your mutton, it is true, is brought to

you slice-wise, on your plate, instead of the whole sheep set bodily on

the table,--the sole presentation appreciated by your true Briton, who,

with the traditions of his island home still clinging to him, conceives

himself able, I suppose, in no other way to make sure that his meat and

maccaroni are not the remnants of somebody else's feast. But let

Britannia's son not flatter himself that so he shall escape

contamination. His precautions are entirely fruitless. Suppose he

does see the whole beast before him, and the very bean-vines, proof

positive of first-fruits; cannot the economical landlord gather up

heave-shoulder and wave-breast and serve them out to him in next day's

mince-pie? Matter revolves, but is never annihilated. Ultimate and

penultimate meals mingle in the colors of shot-silk. Where there is a

will, there is a way. If the cook is of a frugal mind, and wills you to

eat driblets, driblets you shall eat, under one shape or another. The

only way to preserve your peace, is to be content with appearances.

Take what is set before you, asking no questions for conscience' sake.

If it looks nice, that is enough. Eat and be thankful.

Trollope says he never made a single comfortable meal at an American

hotel. The meat was swimming in grease, and the female servants

uncivil, impudent, dirty, slow, and provoking. Occasionally they are a

little slow, it must be confessed; but I never met with one, male or

female, who was uncivil, impudent, or provoking. If I supposed it

possible that my voice should ever reach our late critic, whose good

sense and good spirit Americans appreciate, and whose name they would

be glad to honor if everything English had not become suspicious to us,

the possible synonyme of Pharisaism or stupidity, I should recommend to

him Lord Chesterfield's assertion, that a man's own good breeding is

the best security against other people's bad manners. For the greasy

meats, let him forego meats altogether and take chickens, and he will

not find grease enough to soil his best coat, if he should carry the

chick away in his pocket. We always found a sufficient variety to

enable us to choose a wholesome and a toothsome dinner, with many

tempting dainties, and scores of dishes that I never heard of before,

and ordered dubiously by way of experiment, and tasted timorously in

pursuit of knowledge. As for the corn-cake of the White Hills, if I

live a thousand years, I never expect anything in the line of biscuit,

loaf, or cakes more utterly satisfactory. It is the very ultimate

crystallization of cereals, the poetry and rhythm of bread, brown and

golden to the eye, like the lush loveliness of October, crumbling to

the touch, un-utterable to the taste. It has all the ethereal,

evanishing fascination of a spirit. Eve might have set it before

Raphael. You scarcely dare touch it lest it disappear and leave you

disappointed and desolate. It is melting, insinuating,--a halo,

hovering on the border-land of dream and reality, beautiful but

uncertain vision, a dissolving view. I said something of the sort to

Halicarnassus one morning, and he said, Yes, it was--on my plate. And

yet I have never had as much as I wanted of it,--never. The others

were perpetually finishing their breakfast and compelling me, by a kind

of moral violence, to finish mine. I made an attempt one morning, the

last of my sojourn among the Delectable Mountains, when the opposing

elements had left the table prematurely to make arrangements for

departure, and startled the waiter by ordering an unlimited supply of

corn-cake. Like a thunder-bolt fell on my ear the terrible answer:

"There isn't any this morning. It is brown bread." Me miserable!

As we went to dinner, in a large dining-room, upon our arrival at the

Glen House, it seemed to me that the guests were the most refined and

elegant in their general appearance of any company I had seen since my

departure, and I had a pleasant New-English feeling of

self-gratulation. But we were drawn up into line directly opposite a

row of young girls, who really made me very uncomfortable. They were

at an advanced stage of their dinner when we entered, and they devoted

themselves to making observations. It was not curiosity, or

admiration, or astonishment, or horror. It was simply fixedness. They

displayed no emotion whatever, but every time your glance reached

within forty-five degrees of them, there they were "staring right on

with calm, eternal eyes," and kept at it till the servants created a

diversion with the dessert. Now, if there is any thing that annoys and

disconcerts me, it is to be looked at. Some women would have put them

down, but I never can put anybody down. It is as much as I can do to

hold my own,--and more, unless I am with well-bred people who always

keep their equilibriums. One of these girls was the companion of a

venerable and courtly gentleman; and the thought arose, how is it

possible for this girl to have possibly that man's blood in her veins,

certainly the aroma of his life floating around her, and the faultless

model of his demeanor before her, and not be the mirror of every grace?

Of how little avail is birth or breeding, if the instinct of politeness

be not in the heart. That last remark, however, must "right about

face" in order to be just. If the instincts be true, birth and

breeding are comparatively of no account, for the heart will dictate to

the quick eye and hand and voice the proper course; but where the

instincts are wanting, breeding is indispensable to supply the

deficiency. What one cannot do by nature he must do by drill.

Sometimes it seems to me that young girlhood is intolerable. There is

much delightful writing about it,--rose-buds and peach-blossoms and

timid fawns; but the timid fawns are scarce in streets and hotels and

schools,--or perhaps it is that the fawns who are not timid draw all

eyes upon themselves, and make an impression entirely disproportionate

to their numbers. I am thinking now, I regret to say, of New England

young girls. Where they are charming, they are irresistible; they need

yield to nobody in the known world. But I do think that an

uninteresting Yankee girl is the most uninteresting of all created

objects. Southern girls have almost always tender voices and soft

manners. Arrant nonsense comes from their lips with such sweet

syllabic flow, such little ripples of pronunciation and musical

interludes, that you are attracted and held without the smallest regard

to what they are saying. I could sit for hours and hear two of them

chattering over a checker-board for the pleasure of the silvery,

tinkling music of their voices. But woe is me for the voices, male and

female, that you so often hear in New England,--the harsh, strident

voices, the monotonous, cranky, yanky, filing, rasping voices, without

modulation, all rise and no fall, a monotonous discord, no soul, no

feeling, and no counterfeit of it, loud, positive, angular, and awful.

Indeed, I do not see how we New-Englanders are ever to rid ourselves of

the reproach of our voices. The number of people who speak well is not

large enough materially to influence the rest. Teachers do not teach

speaking in school,--they certainly did not in my day, and I have no

reason to suppose from results that they do now,--and parents do not

teach it at home, for the simple reason, I suppose, that they do not

know it themselves. We can all perceive the discord; but how to produce

concord, that is the question. This one thing, however, is practicable

if sweetness cannot be increased, volume can be diminished. If you

cannot make the right kind of noise, you can at least make as little as

possible of the wrong kind. Often the discord extends to manners.

Public conveyances and public places produce so many girls who are not

gentle, retiring, shady, attractive. They are flingy and sharp and

saucy, without being piquant. They take on airs without having the

beauty or the brilliancy which alone makes airs delightful. They

agonize to make an impression, and they make it, but not always in the

line of their intent. Setting out to be picturesque, they become

uncouth. They are ridiculous when they mean to be interesting, and

silly when they try to be playful. If they would only leave off

attitudinizing, one would be appeased. It may not be possible to

acquire agreeable manners, any more than a pleasant voice; but it is

possible to be quiet. But no suspicion of defect seems ever to have

penetrated the bosoms of such girls. They act as if they thought

attention was admiration. Levity they mistake for vivacity.

Peevishness is elegance. Boldness is dignity. Rudeness is savoir faire

Boisterousness is their vulgate for youthful high spirits.

And what, let me ask just here, is the meaning of the small waists that

girls are cramming their lives into? I thought tight-lacing was an

effete superstition clean gone forever. But again and again, last

summer, I saw this wretched disease, this cacoethes pectus vinciendi,

breaking out with renewed and increasing virulence; and I heard

women--yes, grown-up women, old women--talking about the "Grecian

bend," and the tapering line of the slender, willowy waist. Now,

girls, when you have laced yourselves into a wand, do not be so

infatuated as to suppose that any sensible man looks at you and thinks

of willows. Not in the least. Probably he is wondering how you manage

to breathe. As for the Grecian bend, you have been told over and over

again that no Grecian woman, whether in the flesh or in the stone, ever

bent such a figure,--spoiled if it was originally good, made worse if

it was originally bad. You wish to be beautiful, and it is a laudable

wish; but nothing is beautiful which is not loyal, truthful, natural.

You need not take my simple word for it; I do not believe a doctor can

anywhere be found who will say that compression is healthful, or a

sculptor who will say that it is beautiful. Which now is the higher

art, the sculptor's or the mantua-maker's? Which is most likely to be

right, the man (or the woman) who devotes his life to the study of

beauty and strength, both in essence and expression, or the woman who

is concerned only with clipping and trimming? Which do you think takes

the more correct view, he who looks upon the human body as God's

handiwork, a thing to be reverenced, to be studied, to be obeyed, or

one who admires it according as it varies more or less from the

standard of a fashion-plate, who considers it as entirely subordinate

to the prevailing mode, and who hesitates at no devices to bring it

down to the desired and utterly arbitrary dimensions? This is what you

do; you give yourselves up into the hands, or you yield submissively to

the opinions, of people who make no account whatever of the form or the

functions of nature; who have never made their profession a liberal

one; who never seem to suspect that God had anything to do with the

human frame; who, whatever station in life they occupy, have not

possessed themselves of the first principles of beauty and grace, while

you ignore the opinions, and lay yourself open to the contempt, of

those whose natural endowments and whose large and varied culture give

them the strongest claim upon your deference. The woman who binds the

human frame into such shapes as haunted the hotels last summer, whether

she be a dressmaker or a Queen of Fashion, is a woman ignorant alike of

the laws of health and beauty; and every woman who submits to such

distortion is either ignorant or weak. The body is fearfully and

wonderfully and beautifully made, a glorious possession, a fair and

noble edifice, the Temple of the Holy Ghost, beautiful its symmetry,

for its adaptations, for its uses; and they who deform and degrade it

by a fashion founded in ignorance, fostered by folly, and fruitful of

woe, are working a work which can be forgiven them only when they know

not what they do.

If this is not true, then I know not what truth is. If it is not a

perfectly plain and patent truth, on the very face of it, then I am

utterly incapable of distinguishing between truth and falsehood. Yet,

if it is true, how account for the tight-lacing among women who are in

a position to be just as intelligent as the doctor and the sculptor are?

Girls, I find a great deal of fault with you, do I not? But I cannot

help it. You have been so written and talked and sung and flattered

into absurdity and falsehood, that there is nothing left but to stab

you with short, sharp words. If I chide you without cause, if I

censure that which is censurable, if I attribute to a class that which

belongs only to individuals, if I intimate that ungentle voices,

uncultivated language, and unpleasing manners are common when they are

really uncommon, if I assume to demand more than every person who loves

his country and believes his countrywomen has a right to demand, on me

be all the blame. But for ten persons who give you flattery and

sneers, you will not find one who will tell you wholesome truths. I

will tell you what seems to me true and wholesome. Poetasters and

cheap sentimentalists will berhyme and beguile you: I cannot help it;

but I will at least attempt to administer the corrective of what should

be common sense. The Magister was forced to let Von Falterle have a

hand in Albano's education, but he "swore to weed as much out of him

every day as that other fellow raked in. Dilettanteism prattles

pleasant things to you: I want you to BE everything that is pleasant.

Where a fulsome if not a false adulation praises your slender grace, I

shall not hesitate to tell you that I see neither slenderness nor

grace, but ribs crushed in, a diaphragm flattened down, liver and

stomach and spleen and pancreas jammed out of place, out of shape, out

of use; and that, if you were born so, humanity would dictate that you

should pad liberally, to save beholders from suffering; but of malice

aforethought so to contract yourselves is barbarism in the first

degree. And all the while I am saying these homely things, I shall

have ten thousand times more real regard and veneration for you than

your venders of dainty compliments. Regard? Jenny, Lilly, Carry,

Hetty, Fanny, and the rest of you, dearly beloved and longed

for,--Mary, my queen my singing-bird, a royal captive, but she shall

come to her crown one day,--my two Ellens, graceful and brilliant, and

you, my sweet-mouthed, soft-eyed islander, with your life deep and

boundless like the sea that lulled you to baby-slumbers,--knowing you,

shall I talk of regard? Knowing you, and from you, all, do I not know

what girls can be? Sometimes it seems as if no one knows girls EXCEPT

me. If the world did but know you, if it knew what deeps are in you,

what strength and salvation for the race lie dormant in your dormant

powers, surely it would throw off the deference that masks contempt and

give you the right hand of royal fellowship.

And if, in the world just as it is, girls did but know themselves! If

they did but know how delightful, how noble and ennobling, how gracious

and consoling and helpful, they might be, how wearied eyes might love

to rest upon them, how sore hearts might be healed, and weak hearts

strengthened, by the fragrance of their unfolding youth! There is not

one girl in a thousand, North or South, who might not be lovely and

beloved. I do not reckon on a difference of race in North and South,

as the manner of some is. The great mass of girls whom one meets in

schools and public places are the ones who in the South would be the

listless, ragged daughters of poverty. The great mass of Southern

girls that we see are the cherished and cultivated upper classes, and

answer only to our very best. Like should always be compared with like.

And I am not afraid to compare our best, high-born or lowly, with the

best of any class or country. They have, besides all that is

beautiful, a substantial substratum of sound sense, high principle,

practical benevolence, and hidden resources. To behold them, they

sparkle like diamonds. To know them, they are beneficent as iron. Let

all the others emulate these. Let none be content with being

intelligent. Let them determine also to be full of grace.

Among the girls that I saw on my journey who did not please me, there

were several who did,--several of whom occasional glimpses promised

pleasant things, if only there were opportunity to grasp them,--and two

in particular who have left an abiding picture in my gallery. Let me

from pure delight linger over the portraiture.

Two sisters taken a-pleasuring by their father,--the younger anywhere

from fourteen to eighteen years old, the elder anywhere from sixteen to

twenty;--this tall and slender, with a modest, sensitive, quiet,

womanly dignity; that animated, unconscious, and entirely girlish;--the

one with voice low and soft, the other low and clear. The father was

an educated and accomplished Christian gentleman. The relations

between the two were most interesting. His demeanor towards them was a

charming combination of love and courtesy. Theirs to him was at once

confiding and polite. The best rooms, the best seats, the best

positions, were not assumed by them or yielded to them with the rude

tyranny on one side and mean servility on the other which one too often

sees, but pressed upon them with true knightly chivalry, and received,

not carelessly as due and usual, but with affectionate deprecation and

reluctance. Yet there was not the slightest affectation of affection,

than which no affectation is more nauseous. True affection,

undoubtedly, does often exist where its expression is caricatured, but

the caricature is not less despicable. The pride of the father in his

daughters was charming,--it was so natural, so fatherly, so frank, so

irresistible, and never offensively exhibited. There was not a taint

of show or selfishness in their mutual regard. They had eyes and ears

and ready hands for everybody.

And they were admirable travellers. They never had any discomforts.

They never found the food bad, or the beds hard, or the servants

stupid. They never were tired when anything was to be done, or cross

when it had been done, or under any circumstances peevish, or pouty or

"offish." They were ready for everything and content with anything.

It was a pleasure to give them a pleasure, because their pleasure was

so manifest. They looked eagerly at everything and into everything.

The younger one, indeed, was so interested, that she often forgot her

feet in her bright, observant eyes, which would lead her right on and

on, regardless of the course of others, till she was discovered to be

missing, a search instituted, and the wanderer returned smiling, but

not disconcerted. They were never restless, uneasy, discontented,

wanting to go somewhere else, or stay longer when every one was ready

to go, or annoying their friends by rushing into needless danger. They

never brought their personal tastes into conflict with the general

convenience. They were thoroughly free from affectation. They never

seemed to say or do anything with a view to the impression it would

make, or even to suspect that they should make an impression. They

were just fond enough of dress to array themselves with neatness,

freshness, a pretty little touch of youthful ornament, and a very nice

sense of fitness. But they were never occupied with their dress, and

they had only as much as was necessary,--though that may have been a

mother's care,--and what of them was not the result of wise parental

care? They did not talk about GENTLEMEN. They had evidently been

brought up in familiar contact with the thing, so that no glamour hung

about the word. They talked of places, people, books, flowers, all

simple things, in a simple way. They were interested in music, in

pictures, in what they saw and what they did. They sang and played

with fresh, natural grace, to the delight and applause of all, and

stopped soon enough to make us wish for more, but not soon enough to

seem capricious or disobliging or pert.

But my pen fails to picture them to you as I saw them,--the one with

her grave, sweet, artless dignity, a perfect Honoria, crowned with the

soft glory of a dawning womanhood; but the other docile and sprightly,

careless, but not thoughtless. The beauty of their characters lay in

the perfect balance. Their qualities were set off against each other,

and symmetry was the result. They combined opposites into a

fascinating harmony. They had all the ease and unconcern of refined

association, without the smallest admixture of forwardness. They were

neither bold nor bashful. They neither pampered nor neglected

themselves,--neither fawned upon nor insulted others. They were

everything that they ought to be, and nothing that they ought not to

be, and I wished I could put them in a cage, and carry them through the

country, and say: "Look, girls, this is what I mean. This is what I

wish you to be."

We wound around the mountains, and wandered back and forth through the

defiles like the Israelites in the wilderness, seeing everything that

was to be seen, and a good deal more. We alighted incessantly, and

struck into little wood-paths after cascades and falls, and got them

to, sometimes. Of course we penetrated into the dripping Flume, and

paddled on the Pool, or the Basin,--I have forgotten which they call

it,--for

a pool is but a big basin, and a basin a small pool. Of

course we sailed and shouted on Echo Lake, and did obeisance to the Old

Man of the Mountains and his numerous and nondescript progeny; for he

has played pranks up there, and infected the whole surrounding country

with a furor of personality. The Old Man himself I acknowledged. That

great stone face is clearly and calmly profiled against the sky. His

knee, too, is susceptible of proof, for I climbed it. A white horse in

the vicinity of Conway is visible to the imaginative eye, and, by a

little forcing of vision and conscience, one can make out a turtle, all

but the head and legs. But there is a limit to all things, and when

Halicarnassus held up both hands in astonishment and admiration, and

declared that he saw a kangaroo, and then, in short and rapid

succession, a rhinoceros, an armadillo, and a crocodile, I felt, in the

words of General Banks, "We have now reached that limit," and shut down

the gates upon credulity.

At a little village among the mountains we met our friends, and stopped

a week or two, loath to leave the charmed spot. "Where?" Never mind.

A place where the sun shines, and lavender-hued clouds whirl in craggy,

defiant, thunderous masses around imperturbable mountain-tops; and

vapors, pearly and amber-tinted, have not forgotten to float softly

among the valleys; and evening skies fling out their pink and purple

banner; and stars throb, and glow, and flash, with a radiant life that

is not of the earth;--where great rivers have not yet put on the

majesty of manhood, but trill over pebbles, curl around rocks, ripple

against banks, waltz little eddies, spread dainty pools for gay little

trout, dash up saucy spray into the eyes of bending ferns, mock the

frantic struggles of lost flowers and twigs, tantalizing them with hope

of a rest that never comes, leap headlong, swirling and singing with a

thousand silver tongues, down cranny and ravine in all the wild

winsomeness of unchecked youth;--a land flowing with maple-molasses and

sugar, and cider applesauce, and cheese new and old, and baked beans,

and three sermons on Sundays, besides Sabbath school at noon, and no

time to go home; and wagons with three seats, [Mem. Always choose the

back seat, if you wish to secure a reputation for amiability,] three on

a seat, two and a colt trotting gravely beside his mother; roads all

sand in the hollows and all ruts on the hills, blocked up by snow in

the winter, and washed away by thunder-showers in the summer;--a land

where carpets are disdained, latches are of wood, thieves unknown,

wainscots and wells au naturel, women are as busy as bees all day and

knit in the chinks, men are invisible till evening, girls braid hats

and have beaux, and everybody goes to bed and to sleep at nine o'clock,

and gets up nobody knows when, and cooks, eats, and "clears away"

breakfast before other people have fairly rubbed their eyes open; where

all the town are neighbors for ten miles round, and know your outgoings

and incomings without impertinence, gossip without a sting, are

intelligent without pretension, sturdy without rudeness, honest without

effort, and cherish an orthodoxy true as steel, straight as a pine,

unimpeachable in quality, and unlimited in quantity. God bless them!

Late may they return to heaven, and never want a man to stand before

the Lord forever!

Some people have conscientious scruples about fishing. I respect them.

I had them once myself. Wantonly to destroy, for mere sport, the

innocent life, in lake and river, seemed to me a cruelty and a shame.

But people must fish. Now, then, how shall your theory and practice be

harmonized? Practice can't yield. Plainly, theory must. A year ago,

I went out on a rock in the Atlantic Ocean, held a line--just to see

how it seemed,--and caught eight fishes; and every time a fish came up,

a scruple went down. They weren't very large,--the fishes, I mean, not

the scruples, though the same adjective might, perhaps, not unjustly be

applied to both,--and I don't know that the enormity of the sin depends

at all upon the size of the fish; but if it did, so entirely had my

success convinced me of man's lawful dominion over the fish of the sea,

that I verily believe, if a whale had hooked himself on the end of my

line, I should have hauled him up without a pang.

I do not insist that you shall accept my system of ethics. Deplorable

results might follow its practical application in every imaginable

case. I simply state facts, leaving the "thoughtful reader" to

generalize from them whatever code he pleases.

Which facts will partially account for the eagerness with which I, one

morning, seconded a proposal to go a-fishing in a river about fourteen

miles away. One wanted the scenery, another the drive, a third a

chowder, and so on; but I--I may as well confess--wanted the

excitement, the fishes, the opportunity of displaying my piscatory

prowess. I enjoyed in anticipation the masculine admiration and

feminine chagrin that would accompany the beautiful, fat, shining,

speckled, prismatic trout into my basket, while other rods waited in

vain for a "nibble." I resolved to be magnanimous. Modesty should

lend to genius a heightened charm. I would win hearts by my humility,

as well as laurels by my dexterity. I would disclaim superior skill,

attribute success to fortune, and offer to distribute my spoil among

the discomfited. Glory, not pelf, was my object. You imagine my

disgust on finding, at the end of our journey, that there was only one

rod for the party. Plenty of lines, but no rods. What was to be done?

It was proposed to improvise rods from the trees. "No," said the

female element. "We don't care. We shouldn't catch any fish. We'd

just as soon stroll about." I bubbled up, if I didn't boil over. "WE

shouldn't, should WE? Pray, speak for yourselves! Didn't I catch

eight cod-fishes in the Atlantic Ocean, last summer? Answer me that!"

I was indignant that they should so easily be turned away, by the

trivial circumstance of there being no rods, from the noble art of

fishing. My spirits rose to the height of the emergency. The story of

my exploits makes an impression. There is a marked respect in the tone

of their reply. "Let there be no division among us. Go you to the

stream, O Nimrod of the waters, since you alone have the prestige of

success. We will wander quietly in the woods, build a fire, fry the

potatoes, and await your return with the fish." They go to the woods.

I hang my prospective trout on my retrospective cod, and march

river-ward. Halicarnassus, according to the old saw, "leaves this

world, and climbs a tree," and, with jackknife, cord, and perseverance,

manufactures a fishing-rod, which he courteously offers to me, which I

succinctly decline, informing him in no ambiguous phrase that I

consider nothing beneath the best as good enough for me. Halicarnassus

is convinced by my logic, overpowered by my rhetoric, and meekly yields

up the best rod, though the natural man rebels. The bank of the river

is rocky, steep, shrubby, and difficult of ascent or descent.

Halicarnassus bids me tarry on the bridge, while he descends to

reconnoitre. I am acquiescent, and lean over the railing awaiting the

result of investigation. Halicarnassus picks his way over the rocks,

sidewise and zigzaggy along the bank, and down the river, in search of

fish. I grow tired of playing Casabianca, and steal behind the bridge,

and pick my way over the rocks, sidewise and zigzaggy along the bank,

and up the river, in search of "fun"; practise irregular and

indescribable gymnastics with variable success for half an hour or so.

Shout from the bridge. I look up. Too far off to hear the words, but

see Halicarnassus gesticulating furiously, and evidently laboring under

great excitement. Retrograde as rapidly as circumstances will permit.

Halicarnassus makes a speaking-trumpet of his hands, and roars, "I've

FOUND--a FISH! LEFT--him for--YOU--to CATCH! Come QUICK!"--and,

plunging headlong down the bank, disappears. I am touched to the heart

by this sublime instance of self-denial and devotion, and scramble up

to the bridge, and plunge down after him. Heel of boot gets entangled

in dress every third step,--fishing-line in tree-top every second;

progress consequently not so rapid as could be desired. Reach the

water at last. Step cautiously from rock to rock to the middle of the

stream,--balance on a pebble just large enough to plant both feet on,

and just firm enough to make it worth while to run the risk,--drop my

line into the spot designated,--a quiet, black little pool in the

rushing river,--see no fish, but have faith in Halicarnassus.

"Bite?" asks Halicarnassus, eagerly.

"Not yet," I answer, sweetly. Breathless expectation. Lips

compressed. Eyes fixed. Five minutes gone.

"Bite?" calls Halicarnassus, from down the river.

"Not yet," hopefully.

"Lower your line a little. I'll come in a minute." Line is lowered.

Arms begin to ache. Rod suddenly bobs down. Snatch it up. Only an

old stick. Splash it off contemptuously.

"Bite?" calls Halicarnassus from afar.

"No," faintly responds Marius, amid the ruins of Carthage.

"Perhaps he will by and by," suggests Halicarnassus, encouragingly.

Five minutes more. Arms breaking. Knees trembling. Pebble shaky.

Brain dizzy. Everything seems to be sailing down the stream. Tempted

to give up, but look at the empty basket, think of the expectant party

and the eight cod-fish, and possess my soul in patience.

"Bite?" comes the distant voice of Halicarnassus, disappearing by a

bend in the river.

"No!" I moan, trying to stand on one foot to rest the other, and ending

by standing on neither for the pebble quivers, convulses, and finally

rolls over and expires; and only a vigorous leap and a sudden

conversion of the fishing-rod into a balancing-pole save me from an

ignominious bath. Weary of the world, and lost to shame, I gather all

my remaining strength, wind the line about the rod, poise it on high,

hurl it out into the deepest and most unobstructed part of the stream,

climb up pugnis et calcibus on the back of an old boulder; coax,

threaten, cajole, and intimidate my wet boots to come off; dip my

handkerchief in the water, and fold it on my head, to keep from being

sunstruck; lie down on the rock, pull my hat over my face, and dream,

to the purling of the river, the singing of the birds, and the music of

the wind in the trees, (whether in the body I cannot tell, or whether

out of the body I cannot tell,) of another river, far, far

away,--broad, and deep, and seaward rushing,--now in shadow, now in

shine,--now lashed by storm, now calm as a baby's sleep,--bearing on

its vast bosom a million crafts, whereof I see only one,--a little

pinnace, frail yet buoyant,--tossed hither and thither, yet always

keeping her prow to the waves,--washed, but not whelmed. So small and

slight a thing, will she not be borne down by the merchant-ships, the

ocean steamers, the men-of-war, that ride the waves, reckless in their

pride of power? How will she escape the sunken rocks, the treacherous

quicksands, the ravening whirlpools, the black and dark night? Lo!

yonder, right across her bows, comes one of the Sea-Kings, freighted

with death for the frail little bark! Woe! woe! for the lithe little

bark! Nay, not death, but life. The Sea-King marks the path of the

pinnace. Not death, but life. Signals flash back and forth. She

discerns the voice of the Master. He, too, is steering seaward,--not

more bravely, not more truly, but a directer course. He will pilot her

past the breakers and the quicksands. He will bring her to the haven

where she would be. O brave little bark! Is it Love that watches at

the masthead? Is it Wisdom that stands at the helm? Is it Strength

that curves the swift keel?--

"Hello! how many?"

I start up wildly, and knock my hat off into the water. Jump after it,

at the imminent risk of going in myself, catch it by one of the

strings, and stare at Halicarnassus.

"Asleep, I fancy?" says Halicarnassus, interrogatively.

"Fancy," I echo, dreamily.

"How many fishes?" persists Halicarnassus.

"Fishes?" says the echo.

"Yes, fishes," repeats Halicarnassus, in a louder tone.

"Yes, it must have been the fishes," murmurs the echo.

"Goodness gracious me!" ejaculates Halicarnassus, with the voice of a

giant; "how many fishes have you caught?"

"Oh! yes," waking up and hastening to appease his wrath;

"eight,--chiefly cod."

Indignation chokes his speech. Meanwhile I wake up still further, and,

instead of standing before him like a culprit, beard him like an

avenging Fury, and upbraid him with his deception and desertion. He

attempts to defend himself, but is overpowered. Conscious guilt dyes

his face, and remorse gnaws at the roots of his tongue.

"Sinful heart makes feeble hand."

We walk silently towards the woods. We meet a small boy with a tin

pail and thirty-six fishes in it. We accost him.

"Are these fishes for sale?" asks Halicarnassus.

"Bet they be!" says small boy, with energy.

Halicarnassus looks meaningly at me. I look meaningly at

Halicarnassus, and both look meaningly at our empty basket.

"Won't you tell?" says Halicarnassus.

"No; won't you?" Halicarnassus whistles, the fishes are transferred

from pan to basket, and we walk away as "chirp as a cricket," reach the

sylvan party, and are speedily surrounded.

"O what beauties! Who caught them? How many are there?"

"Thirty-six," says Halicarnassus, in a lordly, thoroughbred way. "I

caught 'em."

"In a tin pan," I exclaim, disgusted with his conceit, and determined

to "take him down."

A cry of rage from Halicarnassus, a shout of derision from the party.

"And how many did you catch, pray?" demands he.

"Eight,--all cods," I answer, placidly.

Tolerably satisfied with our aquatic experience, we determined to

resume the mountains, but in a milder form; before which, however, it

became necessary to do a little shopping. An individual--one of the

party, whose name I will not divulge, and whose identity you never can

conjecture, so it isn't worth while to exhaust yourself with

guessing--found one day, while she was in the country, that she had

walked a hole through the bottom of her boots. How she discovered this

fact is of no moment; but, upon investigating the subject, she

ascertained that it could scarcely be said with propriety that there

was a hole in her boots, but, to use a term which savors of the street,

though I employ it literally, there WASN'T ANYTHING ELSE. Now the fact

of itself is not worthy of remark. That the integrity of a pair of

boots should yield to the continued solicitations of time, toil, bone,

and muscle, is too nearly a matter of everyday occurrence to excite

alarm. The "irrepressible conflict" between leather and land has, so

far as I know, been suspended but once since

"Adam delved and Eve span,"

and that was only an amnesty of forty years while the Israelites were

wandering in the wilderness. But when you are deep in the heart of the

country, scouring woods, climbing mountains, and fording rivers, having

with your usual improvidence neglected to furnish yourself with stout

boots, then a "horrid chasm," or series of chasms, yawning in the only

pair that are of any use to you, presents a spectacle which no

reflective mind can contemplate without dismay.

It was, in fact, with a good deal of dismay that the individual in

question sat down, one morning, on "Webster's Unabridged,"--that being

the only available seat in an apartment not over-capacious,--and went

into a committee of the whole on the state of her boots. The prospect

was not inviting. Heels frightfully wrenched and askew, and showing

indubitable symptoms of a precipitate secession; binding frayed,

ravelled, evidently stubborn in resistance, but at length overpowered

and rent into innumerable fissures; buttons dislocated, dragged up by

the roots, yet clinging to a forlorn hope with a courage and constancy

worthy of a better cause; upper-leather (glove-kid), once black, now

"the ashen hue of age," gray, purple, flayed, scratched, and generally

lacerated; soles, ah! the soles! There the process of disintegration

culminated. Curled, crisped, jagged, gaping, stratified, laminated,

torn by internal convulsions, upheaved by external forces, they might

have belonged to some pre-Adamic era, and certainly presented a series

of dissolving views, deeply interesting, but not, it must be confessed,

highly entertaining.

After arranging these boots in every possible combination,--side by

side, heel to heel, toe to toe,--and finding that the result of each

and every combination was that

"No light, but rather darkness visible,

Served only to discover sights of woe,"

the Individual at length, with a sigh, placed them, keel upwards, on

the floor in front of her, and, resting her head in her hands, gazed at

them with such a fixedness and rigidity that she might have been taken

for an old Ouate, absorbed in the exercise of his legitimate calling.

(The old Druidical order were divided into three classes, Druids,

Bards, and Ouates. The Druids philosophized and theologized, the Bards

harped and sang, and the Ouates divined and CONTEMPLATED THE NATURE OF

THINGS. I thought I would tell you, as you might not know. I execrate

the self-conceited way some people have of tossing off their erudite

items and allusions in a careless, familiar style, as if it is such A B

C to them that they don't for a moment think of any one's not

understanding it. Worse still is it to have some jagged brickbat, dug

up from a heap of Patagonian rubbish, flung at you with a "we have all

heard of"; or to be turned off, just as your ears are wide open to

listen to an old pre-Thautic myth, with "the story of ---- is too

familiar to need repetition." You have not the most distant conception

what the story is, yet you don't like to say so, because it seems to be

intimated that every intelligent person ought to know it; so you hold

your peace. My dear, don't do it. Don't hold your peace. Don't let

yourself be put down in that way. Don't be deceived. Half the time

these people never knew it themselves, I dare say, more than a week

before-hand, and have been puzzling their brains ever since for a

chance to get it in.)

The Individual came at length to the conclusion that something must be

done. Masterly inactivity must give way to the exigencies of the case.

She had recourse to the "oldest inhabitant." A series of questions

disclosed the important fact that--

"Well, there was a store at Sonose, about fourteen miles away; and Mr.

Williams, he kept candy, and slate-pencils, and sich--"

"Do you suppose be keeps good thick boots?"

"O la! no."

"Do you suppose he keeps any kind of boots? You see I have worn mine

out, and what am I to do?"

"Well, now, I thinks likely you can get 'em mended."

Individual brightens up. "O, do you?"

"Yes, there's Mr. Jacobs, lives right out there, under the hill; he

makes men's boots. I do' know as he could do yours, but you might try.

Thinks likely he ain't got the tools, nor the stuff to do that sort of

work with."

I didn't care for the tools or the stuff. All I wanted was the

shoemaker; if I could find HIM, little doubt that all the rest would

follow naturally from the premises. So I arranged my "sandal shoon and

scallop-shell," and departed on my pilgrimage. The way had been

carefully pointed out to me, but I never can remember such things more

than one turn, or street, ahead; so I made a point of inquiring of

every one I met, where Mr. Jacobs lived. Every one, by the way,

consisted of a little girl with a basket of potatoes, and a man

carrying the United States mail on his arm.

At length the Individual found the house as directed, and found also

that it was no house, but a barn, and the shoemaker's shop was

upstairs, and the stairs were on the outside. If they were firm and

strong, their looks were against them. Neither step nor balustrade

invited confidence. The Individual stood on the lower one in a

meditative mood for a while, and then gave a jump by way of test,

thinking it best to go through the one nearest the ground, if she must

go through any. An ominous creaking and swaying and cracking followed,

but no actual rupture. The second step was tested with the same

result; then the third and fourth; and, reflecting that appearances are

deceitful, and recollecting the rocking-stone at Gloucester,

Massachusetts, and the tower of Pisa, &c., the Individual shook off her

fears, and ascended rapidly. Being somewhat unfamiliar with the

etiquette of shoemaker's shop, she hesitated whether to knock or plunge

at once into the middle of things, but decided to err on the safe side,

and gave a very moderate and conservative rap. Silence. A louder

knock. The door rattled. Louder still. The whole building shook.

Knuckles filed a caveat. Applied the heel of the dilapidated boot in

her hand. Suffocated with a cloud of dust thence ensuing. Contemplated

the nature of things for a while. Heard a voice. A man called from a

neighboring turnip-field, "Arter Jake?"

"Yes, sir,--if he is a shoemaker" (to make sure of identity).

"Yes, well, he ain't to home."

"Oh."

"He's gone to Sonose."

"When will he be back, if you please?"

"Wall, I can't say for sartin. Next week or week after,--leastwise

'fore the fair. Got a job?"

"Yes, sir, but I can't very well wait so long. Do you know of any

shoemakers anywhere about?"

"Wall, ma'am, I do' know as I do. Folks is mostly farmers here.

There's Fuller, just moved, though. Come up from Exton yesterday.

P'r'aps he'll give you a lift. That's his house right down there.

'Taint more 'n half a mile."

"Yes, sir, I see it. Thank you."

Individual descends from her precarious elevation, and marches to the

attack of Fuller. A fresh-faced, good-natured-looking man is just

coming out at the gate. His pleasant countenance captivates her at

once, and, with a silent but intense hope that he may be the

shoemaker, she asks if "Mr. Fuller lives here."

"Well," replies the man, in an easy, drawling tone, that harmonizes

admirably with his face, "when a fellow is moving, he can't be said to

live anywhere. I guess he'll live here, though, as soon as the stove

gets up."

I reciprocated his frankness with an engaging smile, and asked, in a

confidential tone, "Do you suppose he would mend a shoe for me?"

I thought I would begin with a shoe, and, if I found him acquiescent, I

would mount gradually to a boot, then to a pair. But my little

subterfuge was water spilled on the ground.

"I don't know whether he would or not, but I know one thing."

"Well?"

"Couldn't if he wanted to. Ain't got his tools here. They ain't come

up yet."

"Oh! is that all?"

"ALL?"

"Yes; because, if you know how, I shouldn't think it would make so much

difference about the tools. Couldn't you borrow a gimlet or something

from the neighbors?"

"A GIMLET?"

"Yes, or whatever you want, to make shoes with."

"An awl, you mean."

"Well, yes, an awl. Couldn't you borrow an awl?"

"Nary awl."

"When will your tools come?"

"Well, I don't know; you see I don't hurry 'em up, because it's haying,

and I and my men, we'd just as lieves work out of doors a part of the

time as not. We don't mend shoes much. We make 'em mostly."

"Oh that's better still; would you make me a pair?"

"Well, we don't do that kind of work. We work for the dealers. We make

the shoes that they send down South for the niggers. We ain't got the

lasts that would do for you."

Individual goes home, as Chaucer says, "in dumps," and determines to

take the boots under her own supervision. First, she inks over all the

gray parts. Then she takes some sealing-wax, and sticks down all the

bits of cuticle torn up. Then, in lieu of anything better, she takes

some white flannel-silk,--not embroidery-silk, you understand, but

flannel-silk, harder twisted and stronger, such as is to be found, so

far as I have tried, only in Boston,--and therewith endeavors to down

the curled sole to its appropriate sphere, or rather plane. It is not

the easiest or the most agreeable work in the world. How people manage

to MAKE shoes I cannot divine, for of all awkward things to get hold

of, and to handle and manage after you have hold, I think a shoe is the

worst. The place where you put a needle in does not seem to hold the

most distant relation to the place where it comes out. You set it

where you wish it to go, and then proceed vi et armis et thimble, but

it resists your armed intervention. Then you rest the head of the

needle against the windowsill, and push. You feel something move.

Everything is going on and in delightfully. Mind asserts its control

over matter. You pause to examine. In? Yes, head deep in the

pine-wood, but the point not an inch further in the shoe. You pull out.

The shoe comes off the needle, but the needle does not come out of the

windowsill. You pull the silk, and break it, and then work the needle

out as well as you can, and then begin again,--destroying three

needles, getting your fingers "exquisitely pricked," and keeping your

temper--if you can.

By some such process did the Individual, a passage of whose biography I

am now giving you, endeavor to repair the ravages of time and toil. In

so far as she succeeded in making the crooked places straight and the

rough places plain, her efforts may be said to have been crowned with

success. It is but fair to add, however, that the result did not

inspire her with so much confidence but that she determined to lay by

the boots for a while, reserving them for such times as they should be

most needed, with a vague hope also that rest might exercise some

wonderful recuperative power.

About five days after this, they were again brought out, to do duty on

a long walk. The event was most mournful. The flannel-silk gave at

the first fire. The soles rolled themselves again in a most

uncomfortable manner. At every step, the foot had to be put forward,

placed on the ground, and then drawn back. The walk was an agony. It

so happened that on our return, without any intention, we came out of

woods in the immediate vicinity of the shoemaker's aforesaid, and the

Individual was quite sure she heard the sound of his hammer. She

remembered that, when she was young and at school, she was familiar

with a certain "wardrobe" which was generally so bulging-full of

clothes that the doors could not, by any fair, straightforward means,

be shut; but if you sprang upon them suddenly, taking them unawares, as

it were, and when they were off their guard, you could sometimes effect

a closure. She determined to try this plan on the shoemaker. So she

bade the rest of the party go on, while she turned off in the direction

of the hammering. She went straight into the shop, without knocking,

the door being ajar. There he was at it, sure enough.

"Your tools have come!" she exclaimed, with ill-concealed exultation.

"Now, will you mend my shoes?"

"Well, I don't know as I can, hardly. I'm pretty much in a hurry.

What with moving and haying, I've got a little behindhand."

"Oh! but you must mend them, because I am going up on the mountain

tomorrow, and I have no others to wear, and I am afraid of the snakes;

so you see, you must."

"Got 'em here?"

Individual furtively works off the best one, and picks it up,--while

his eyes are bent on his work,--as if she had only dropped it, and

hands it to him. He takes it, turns it over, pulls it, knocks it, with

an evident intention of understanding the subject thoroughly.

"Rather a haggard-looking boot," he remarks, after his close survey.

"Yes, but--"

"Other a'n't so bad, I suppose?"

"Well--I--don't know--that is--"

"Both bad enough."

"Yes, indeed," with an uneasy laugh.

"Let's see the other one." The other one is produced, and examined in

silence.

"Are YOU going to wear them boots up the mountain?" with a tone that

said very plainly, "Of course you're not."

"Why, yes, I WAS going to wear them. Don't you think they will do?"

"I wouldn't trust MY feet in 'em."

"O--h! ARE there snakes? Do you think snakes could bite through them?"

A shake of the head, and a little, low, plaintive whistle, is the only

reply, but they speak in thunder of boa-constrictors, anacondas, and

cobra de capellos.

"They were very good and stout when I had them. I called them very

stout shoes."

"O yes, they're made of good material, but you see they 're worn out.

I don't believe I could mend them worth while. The stitches would tear

out."

"But couldn't you, somehow, glue on a pair of soles? any way to make

them stick. I'll pay you anything, if you'll only make them last till

I go home, or even till I get down the mountain. Now, I am sure you can

do it, if you will only think so. Don't you know Kossuth says,

'Nothing is difficult to him who wills'?"

He was evidently moved by the earnestness of the appeal. "I suppose

they'd be worth more to you now than half a dozen pair when you get

home."

"Worth! why, they would be of inestimable value. Think of the snakes!

I don't care how you do them, nor how you make them look. If you will

only glue on, or sew on, or nail on, or rivet on, something that is

thick and will stick, I will pay you, and be grateful to you through

the remainder of my natural life."

"Well,--you leave 'em, and come over again this afternoon, and if I can

do anything, I'll do it by that time."

"Oh! I am so much obliged to you"; and I went away in high spirits,

just putting my head back through the door to say, "Now you persevere,

and I am sure you will succeed."

I was as happy as a queen. To be sure, I had to walk home without any

shoes; but the grass was as soft as velvet, and the dust as clean as

sand, and it did not hurt me in the least. To be sure, he had not

promised to mend them; but I had faith in him, and how did it turn out?

Verily, I should not have known the boots, if I seen only the soles.

They were clipped, and shaved, and underpinned, and smoothed, and

looked as if they had taken out "a new lease of life."

"I don't suppose they will last you as long as I have been doing them,"

he remarked, with unprofessional frankness. I did not believe him, and

indeed his prophecy was not true, for they are in existence yet, and I

never disposed of "a quarter" in my life with more satisfaction than I

dropped it that day into his benevolent hand.

A thousand years hence, when New Hampshire shall have become as

populous as Babylon, this sketch may become the foundation of some

"Tale of Beowulf" or other. At any rate here it is ready.

Of all the White Mountains, the one of which you hear least said is

Agamenticus, and perhaps justly, for it is not one of the White

Mountains, but an isolated peak by itself. My information concerning

it is founded partly on observation, partly on testimony, and partly on

memory, supported where she is weak by conjecture. These sources,

however, mingle their waters together somewhat too intricately for

accurate analysis, and I shall, therefore, waive distinctions, and

plant myself on the broad basis of assertion, warning the future

historian and antiquary not take this paper as conclusive without

extraneous props.

Agamenticus is a huge rock rising abruptly from a level country along

New Hampshire's half-yard of sea-shore. As it is the only large rock

on the eastern coast of the United States, it is in invaluable beacon

to mariners. The first city ever built on American continent was laid

out at its base, the remains are now visible from its summit; but, as

funds failed, and the founders were killed by the Indians, it was never

completed, in fact was never begun, only laid out. To the east I was

certain I saw Boar's Head and a steamer steaming towards it, till I was

assured that in such case the steamer must have been steaming over the

corn-fields, because, unlike Aenon near to Salim, there was no water

there. So I suppose it must have been

"A painted ship upon a painted ocean."

The ascent to Agamenticus is sidling and uncertain so long as you hug

your carriage; but, leaving that, and confiding yourself to Mother

Earth, you gather both strength and equipoise from the touch, and, with

a little boy to guide you through the woods and over the rocks, you

will find the ascent quite pleasant and safe, if you are careful not to

slip down, which you will be sure to do on your descent, whether you

are careful or not. At the summit of the mountain is a fine and

flourishing growth of muskmelon, sugar, and currant-wine. At least we

found them there in profusion.

Agamenticus has its legend. Many years ago, the Indians, to avert the

plague, drove twenty thousand cattle to the top of the mountain, and

there sacrificed them to the Great Spirit. We could still discern

traces of the sacrifice,--burnt stones, bits of green-black glass, and

charred pine branches. Then we came home.

Perthes says, "That part of a journey which remains after the

travelling is the journey." What remains of my journey, for me, for

you? Will any live over again a pleasant past and look more cheerily

into a lowering future for these wayward words of mine? Are there

clouded lives that will find a little sunshine; pent-up souls that will

catch a breath of blooms in my rambling record? Are there lips that

will relax their tightness; eyes that will lose for a moment the shadow

of remembered pain? Then, indeed, the best part of my journey is yet

to come.

A CALL TO MY COUNTRYWOMEN.

In the newspapers and magazines you shall see many poems and

papers--written by women who meekly term themselves weak, and modestly

profess to represent only the weak among their sex--discussing the

duties which the weak owe to their country in days like these. The

invariable conclusion is, that, though they cannot fight, because they

are not men,--or go down to nurse the sick and wounded, because they

have children to take care of,--or write effectively, because they do

not know how,--or do any great and heroic thing, because they have not

the ability,--they can pray; and they generally do close with a

melodious and beautiful prayer. Now praying is a good thing. It is, in

fact, the very best thing in the world to do, and there is no danger of

our having too much of it; but if women, weak or strong, consider that

praying is all they can or ought to do for their country, and so settle

down contented with that, they make as great a mistake as if they did

not pray at all. True, women cannot fight, and there is no call for

any great number of female nurses; notwithstanding this, the issue of

this war depends quite as much upon American women as upon American

men,--and depends, too, not upon the few who write, but upon the many

who do not. The women of the Revolution were not only Mrs. Adams, Mrs.

Reed, and Mrs. Schuyler, but the wives of the farmers and shoemakers

and blacksmiths everywhere. It is not Mrs. Stowe, or Mrs. Howe, or Miss

Stevenson, or Miss Dix, alone, who is to save the country, but the

thousands upon thousands who are at this moment darning stockings,

tending babies, sweeping floors. It is to them I speak. It is they

whom I wish to get hold of; for in their hands lies slumbering the

future of this nation.

Shall I say that the women of today have not come up to the level of

today,--that they do not stand abreast with its issues,--they do not

rise to the height of its great argument? I do not forget what you have

done. I have beheld, O Dorcases, with admiration and gratitude, the

coats and garments, the lint and bandages, which you have made. If you

could have finished the war with your needle, it would have been

finished long ago; but stitching does not crush rebellion, does not

annihilate treason, or hew traitors in pieces before the Lord.

Excellent as far as it goes, it stops fearfully of the goal. This

ought ye to do, but there other things which you ought not to leave me.

The war cannot be finished by sheets and pillow-cases. Sometimes I am

tempted to believe that it cannot be finished till we have flung them

all away. When I read of the rebels fighting bare-headed, bare-footed,

haggard, and shorn, in rags and filth,--fighting bravely, heroically,

successfully,--I am ready to make a burnt-offering of our stacks of

clothing. I feel and fear that we must come down, as they have to a

recklessness of all incidentals, down to the rough and rugged

fastnesses of life, down to very gates of death itself, before we shall

be ready and worthy to win victories. Yet it is not for the hardest

fights the earth has ever known have been made by the delicate-handed

and purple-robed. So, in the ultimate analysis, it is neither

gold-lace nor rags that overpower obstacles, but the fiery soul that

consumes both in the intensity of its furnace-heat, bending

impossibilities to the ends of its passionate purpose.

This soul of fire is what I wish to see kindled in our women, burning

white and strong and steady, through all weakness, timidity,

vacillation, treachery in church or state or press or parlor,

scorching, blasting, annihilating whatsoever loveth and maketh a

lie,--extinguished by no tempest of defeat, no drizzle of delay, but

glowing on its steadfast path till it shall have cleared through the

abomination of our desolation a highway for the Prince of Peace.

O my countrywomen, I long to see you stand under the time and bear it

up in your strong hearts, and not need to be borne up through it. I

wish you to stimulate, and not crave stimulants from others. I wish

you to be the consolers, the encouragers, the sustainers, and not

tremble in perpetual need of consolation and encouragement. When men's

brains are knotted and their brows corrugated with fearful looking for

and hearing of financial crises, military disasters, and any and every

form of national calamity consequent upon the war, come you out to meet

them, serene and smiling and unafraid. And let your smile be no formal

distortion of your lips, but a bright ray from the sunshine in your

heart. Take not acquiescently, but joyfully, the spoiling of your

goods. Not only look poverty in the face with high disdain, but

embrace it with gladness and welcome. The loss is but for a moment; the

gain is for all time. Go further than this. Consecrate to a holy

cause not only the incidentals of life, but life itself. Father,

husband, child,--I do not say, Give them up to toil, exposure,

suffering, death, without a murmur;--that implies reluctance. I rather

say, Urge them to the offering; fill them with sacred fury; fire them

with irresistible desire; strengthen them to heroic will. Look not on

details, the present, the trivial, the aspects of our conflict, but fix

your ardent gaze on its eternal side. Be not resigned, but rejoicing.

Be spontaneous and exultant. Be large and lofty. Count it all joy

that you are reckoned worthy to suffer in a grand and righteous cause.

Give thanks evermore that you were born in this time; and BECAUSE it is

dark, be you the light of world.

And follow the soldier to the battle-field with spirit. The great army

of letters that marches southward with every morning sun is a powerful

engine of war. Fill them with tears and sighs, lament separation and

suffering, dwell on your loneliness and fears, mourn over the

dishonesty of contractors and the incompetency of leaders, doubt if the

South will ever be conquered, and foresee financial ruin, and you will

damp the powder and dull the swords that ought to deal death upon the

foe. Write as tenderly as you will. In camp, the roughest man

idealizes his far-off home, and every word of love uplifts him to a

lover. But let your tenderness unfold its sunny side, and keep the

shadows for His pity who knows the end from the beginning, and whom no

foreboding can dishearten. Glory in your tribulation. Show your

soldier that his unflinching courage, his undying fortitude, are your

crown of rejoicing. Incite him to enthusiasm by your inspiration. Make

a mock of your discomforts. Be unwearying in details of the little

interests of home. Fill your letters with kittens and canaries, with

baby's shoes, and Johnny's sled, and the old cloak which you have

turned into a handsome gown. Keep him posted in all the

village-gossip, the lectures, the courtings, the sleigh-rides, and the

singing schools. Bring out the good points of the world in strong

relief. Tell every piquant and pleasant and funny story you call think

of. Show him that you clearly apprehend that all this warfare means

peace, and that a dastardly peace would pave the way for speedy,

incessant, and more appalling warfare. Help him to bear his burdens by

showing him how elastic you are under yours. Hearten him, enliven him,

tone him up to the true hero-pitch. Hush your plaintive Miserere,

accept the nation's pain for penance, and commission every Northern

breeze to bear a Te Deum laudamus.

It fell to me once to read the record of a young life laid early on our

country's altar. I saw noble words traced by the still hand,--words of

duty and honor and love and trust that thrilled my heart and brought

back once more the virtue of the Golden Age,--nay, rather revealed the

virgin gold of this; but through all his letters and his life shone,

half concealed, yet wholly revealed, a silver thread of light, woven in

by a woman's hand. Rest and courage and hope, patience in the

weariness of disease, strength that nerved his arm for shock and onset,

and for the last grand that laid his young head low,--all flowed in

upon him through the tones of one brave, sweet voice far off. A

gentle, fragile, soft-eyed woman, what could such a delicate flower do

against the "thunder-storm of battle"? What DID she do? Poured her

own great heart and own high spirit into the patriot's heart and soul,

and so did all. Now as she goes to fro and in her daily life, soft-eyed

still and serene, she seems to me no longer a beautiful girl, but a

saint wrapped around already with the radiance of immortality.

Under God, the only question, as to whether war shall be conducted to a

shameful or an honorable close, is not of men or money or material

resource. In these our superiority is unquestioned. As Wellington

phrased it, there is hard pounding; but we shall pound the longest, if

only our hearts not fail us. Women need not beat their pewter spoon

into bullets, for there are plenty of bullets without them. It is not

whether our soldiers shall fight a good fight; they have played the man

on a hundred battle-fields. It is not whether officers are or are not

competent; generals have blundered nation into victory since the world

began. It is whether this people shall have virtue to endure to the

end,--to endure, not starving, not cold, but the pangs of hope

deferred, of disappointment and uncertainty, of commerce deranged and

outward prosperity checked. Will our vigilance to detect treachery and

our perseverance to punish it hold out? If we stand firm, we shall be

saved, though so as by fire. If we do not, we shall fall, and shall

richly deserve to fall; and may God sweep us off from the face of the

earth, and plant in our stead a nation with the hearts of men!

O women, here you may stand powerful, invincible, I had almost said

omnipotent. Rise now to the heights of a sublime courage,--for the

hour has need of you. When the first ball smote the rocky sides of

Sumter, the rebound thrilled from shore to shore, and waked the

slumbering hero in every human soul. Then every eye flamed, every lip

was touched with a live coal from the sacred altar, every form dilated

to the stature of the ideal time. Then we felt in our veins the pulse

of immortal youth. Then all the chivalry of the ancient days, all the

heroism, all the self-sacrifice that shaped itself into noble living,

came back to us, poured over us, swept away the dross of selfishness

and deception and petty scheming, and Patriotism rose from the swelling

wave stately as a goddess. Patriotism, that had been to us but a dingy

and meaningless antiquity, took on a new form, a new mien, a

countenance divinely fair and forever young, and received once more the

homage of our hearts. Was that a childish outburst of excitement, or

the glow of an aroused principle? Was it a puerile anger, or a manly

indignation? Did we spring up startled pygmies, or girded giants? If

the former, let us veil our faces, and march swiftly (and silently) to

merciful forgetfulness. If the latter, shall we not lay aside every

weight, and this besetting sin of despondency, and run with patience

the race set before us?

A true philosophy and a true religion make the way possible to us. The

Most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever He

will; and he never yet willed that a nation strong in means, and

battling for the right, should be given over to a nation weak and

battling for the wrong. Nations have their future--reward and

penalty--in this world; and it is as certain as God lives, that

Providence AND the heaviest battalions will prevail. We have had

reverses, but no misfortune hath happened unto us but such as is common

unto nations. Country has been sacrificed to partisanship. Early love

has fallen away, and lukewarmness has taken its place. Unlimited

enthusiasm has given place to limited stolidity. Disloyalty, overawed

at first into quietude, has lifted its head among us, and waxes wroth

and ravening. There are dissensions at home worse than the guns of our

foes. Some that did run well have faltered; some signal-lights have

gone shamefully out, and some are lurid with a baleful glare. But unto

this end were we born, and for this cause came we into the world. When

shall greatness of soul stand forth, if not in evil times? When the

skies are fair and the seas smooth, all ships sail festively. But the

clouds lower, the winds shriek, the waves boil, and immediately each

craft shows its quality. The deep is strown with broken masts, parted

keels, floating wrecks; but here and there a ship rides the raging sea,

and flings defiance to the wind. She overlives the sea because she is

sea-worthy. Not our eighty years of peace alone, but our two years of

war, are the touchstone of our character. We have rolled our Democracy

as a sweet morsel under our tongue; we have gloried in the prosperity

which it brought to the individual; but if the comforts of men minister

to the degradation of man, if Democracy levels down and does not level

up, if our era of peace and plenty leaves us so feeble and frivolous,

so childish, so impatient, so deaf to all that calls to us from the

past, and entreats us in the future, that we faint and fail under the

stress of our one short effort, then indeed is our Democracy our shame

and curse. Let us show now what manner of people we are. Let us be

clear-sighted and far-sighted to see how great is the issue that hangs

upon the occasion. It is not a mere military reputation that is at

stake, not the decay of a generation's commerce, not the determination

of this or that party to power. It is the question of the world that

we have been set to answer. In the great conflict of ages, the long

strife between right and wrong, between progress and sluggardy, through

the providence of God we are placed in the vanguard. Three hundred

years ago a world was unfolded for the battle-ground. Choice spirits

came hither to level and intrench. Swords clashed and blood flowed,

and the great reconnaissance was successfully made. Since then both

sides have been gathering strength, marshalling forces, planting

batteries, and today we stand in the thick of the fray. Shall we fail?

Men and women of America, will you fail? Shall the cause go by

default? When a great idea, that has been uplifted on the shoulders of

generations, comes now to its Thermopylae, its glory-gate, and needs

only stout hearts for its strong hands,--when the eyes of a great

multitude are turned upon you, and the of dumb millions in the silent

future rest you,--when the suffering and sorrowful, the lowly, whose

immortal hunger for justice gnaws at hearts, who blindly see, but

keenly feel, by their God-given instincts, that somehow you are working

out their salvation, and the high-born, monarchs in the domain of mind,

who, standing far off; see with prophetic eye the two courses that lie

before you, one to the Uplands of vindicated Right, one to the Valley

of the Shadow of Death, alike fasten upon you their hopes, their

prayers, their tears,--will you, for a moment's bodily comfort and rest

and repose, grind all these expectations and hopes between the upper

and nether millstone? Will you fail the world in this fateful hour by

your faint-heartedness? Will you fail yourself; and put the knife to

your own throat? For the peace which you so dearly buy shall bring to

you neither ease nor rest. You will but have spread a bed of thorns.

Failure will write disgrace upon the brow of this generation, and shame

will outlast the age. It is not with us as with the South. She can

surrender without dishonor. She is the weaker power, and her success

will be against the nature of things. Her dishonor lay in her attempt,

not in its relinquishment. But we shall fail, not because of mechanics

and mathematics, but because our manhood and womanhood weighed in the

balance are found wanting. There are few who will not share in the

sin. There are none who will not share in the shame. Wives, would you

hold back your husbands? Mothers, would you keep your sons? From what?

for what? From the doing of the grandest duty that ever ennobled man,

to the grief of the greatest infamy that ever crushed him down. You

would hold him back from prizes before which Olympian laurels fade,

for a fate before which a Helot slave might cower. His country in the

agony of her death-struggle calls to him for succor. All the blood in

all the ages, poured out for liberty, poured out for him, cries unto

him from the ground. All that life has of noble, of heroic, beckons

him forward. Death itself wears for him a golden crown. Ever since

the world swung free from God's hand, men have died,--obeying the blind

fiat of Nature; but only once in a generation comes the sacrificial

year, the year of jubilee, when men march lovingly to meet their fate

and die for a nation's life. Holding back, we transmit to those that

shall come after us a blackened waste. The little one that lies in his

cradle will be accursed for our sakes. Every child will be base-born,

springing from ignoble blood. We inherited a fair fame, and bays from

a glorious battle; but for him is no background, no stand-point. His

country will be a burden on his shoulders, a blush upon his cheek, a

chain about his feet. There is no career for the future, but a weary

effort, a long, a painful, a heavy-hearted struggle to lift the land

out of its slough of degradation and set it once more upon a dry place.

Therefore let us have done at once and forever paltry considerations,

with talk of despondency and darkness. Let compromise, submission, and

every form of dishonorable peace be not so much as named among us.

Tolerate no coward's voice or pen or eye. Wherever the serpent's head

is raised, strike it down. Measure every man by the standard of

manhood. Measure country's price by country's worth, and country's

worth by country's integrity. Let a cold, clear breeze sweep down from

the mountains of life, and drive out these miasmas that befog and

beguile the unwary. Around every hearthstone let sunshine gleam. In

every home let fatherland have its altar and its fortress. From every

household let words of cheer and resolve and high-heartiness ring out,

till the whole land is shining and resonant in the bloom of its

awakening spring.

A SPASM OF SENSE

The conjunction of amiability and sense in the same individual renders

that individual's position in a world like us very disagreeable.

Amiability without sense, or sense without amiability, runs along

smoothly enough. The former takes things as they are. It receives all

glitter as pure gold, and does not see that it is custom alone which

varnishes wrong with a slimy coat of respectability, and glorifies

selfishness with the aureole of sacrifice. It sets down all collisions

as foreordained, and never observes that they occur because people will

not smooth off their angles, but sharpen them, and not only sharpen

them, but run them into you. It forgets that the Lord made man upright,

but he hath sought out many inventions. It attributes all the collision

and inaptitude which it finds to the nature of things, and never

suspects that the Devil goes around in the night, thrusting the square

men into the round places, and the round men into the square places.

It never notices that the reason why the rope does not unwind easily is

because one strand is a world too large, and another a world too small,

and so it sticks where it ought to roll, and rolls where it ought to

stick. It makes sweet, faint efforts, with tender fingers and

palpitating heart to oil the wheels and polish up the machine, and does

not for a moment imagine that the hitch is owing to original

incompatibility of parts and purposes, that the whole machine must be

pulled to pieces and made over, and that nothing will be done by

standing patiently by, trying to sooth away the creaking and wheezing

and groaning of the laboring, lumbering thing, by laying on a little

drop of sweet oil with a pin-feather. As it does not see any of these

things that are happening before its eyes, of course it is shallowly

happy. And on the other hand, he who does see them, and is not

amiable, is grimly and Grendally happy. He likes to say disagreeable

things, and all this dismay and disaster scatter disagreeable things

broadcast along his path, so that all he has to do is to pick them up

and say them. Therefore this world is his paradise. He would not know

what to do with himself in a world where matters were sorted and folded

and laid away ready for you when you should want them. He likes to see

human affairs mixing themselves up in irretrievable confusion. If he

detects a symptom of straightening, it shall go hard but he will thrust

in his own fingers and snarl a thread or two. He is delighted to find

dogged duty and eager desire butting each other. All the irresistible

forces crashing against all the immovable bodies give him no shock,

only a pleasant titillation. He is never so happy as when men are

taking hold of things by the blade, and cutting their hands, and losing

blood. He tells them of it, but not in order to relieve so much as to

"aggravate" them; and he does aggravate them, and is satisfied. O, but

he is an aggravating person!

It is you, you who combine the heart of a seraph with the head of a

cherub, who know what trouble is. You see where the shoe pinches, but

your whole soul shrinks from pointing out the tender place. You see

why things go wrong, and how they might be set right; but you have a

mortal dread of being thought meddlesome and impertinent, or cold and

cruel, or restless and arrogant, if you attempt to demolish the wrong

or rebel against the custom. When you draw your bow at an abuse,

people think you are trying to bring down religion and propriety and

humanity. But your conscience will not let you see the abuse raving to

and fro over the earth without taking aim; so, either way, you are cut

to the heart.

I love men. I adore women. I value their good opinion. There is much

in them to applaud and imitate. There is much in them to elicit faith

and reverence. If, only, one could see their good alone, or, seeing

their vapid and vicious ones, could contemplate them with no touch of

tenderness for the owner, life might indeed be lovely. As it is, while

I am at one moment rapt in enthusiastic admiration of the strength and

grace, the power and pathos, the hidden resources, the profound

capabilities of my race, at another, I could wish, Nero-like, that all

mankind were concentrated in one person, and all womankind in another,

that I might take them, after the fashion of rural schoolmasters, and

shake their heads together. Condemnation and reproach are not in my

line; but there is so much in the world that merits condemnation and

reproach, and receives indifference and even reward, there is so munch

acquiescence in wrong doing and wrong thinking, so much letting things

jolt along in the same rut wherein we and they were born, without

inquiring whether, lifted into another groove, they might not run more

easily, that, if one who does see the difficulty holds his peace, the

very stones will cry out. However gladly one would lie on a bed of

roses and glide silken-sailed down the stream of life, how exquisitely

painful soever it may be to say what you fear and feel may give pain,

it is only a Sybarite who sets ease above righteousness, only a coward

who misses victory through dread of defeat.

There are many false ideas afloat regarding womanly duties. I do not

design now to open anew any vulgar, worn-out, woman's-rightsy question.

Every remark that could be made on that theme has been made--but one,

and that I will take the liberty to make now in a single sentence,

close the discussion. It is this: the man who gave rubber-boots to

women did more to elevate woman than all the theorizers, male or

female, that were born.

But without any suspicious lunges into that dubious region which lies

outside of woman's universally acknowledged "sphere," (a blight rest

upon the word!) there is within the pale, within boundary-line which

the most conservative never dreamed of questioning, room for a great

divergence of ideas. Now divergence of ideas does not necessarily imply

fighting at short range. People may adopt a course of conduct which

you not approve; yet you may feel it your duty to make no open

animadversio. Circumstances may have suggested such a course to them,

or forced it upon them; and perhaps, considering all things, it is the

best they can do. But when, encouraged by your silence, they publish

it to the world, not only as relatively, but intrinsically, the best

and most desirable,--when, not content with swallowing it themselves as

medicine, they insist on ramming it down your throat as food,--it is

time to buckle on your armor, and have at them.

A little book, published by the Tract Society, "The Mother and her

Work," has been doing just this thing. It is a modest little book. It

makes no pretensions to literary or other superiority. It has much

excellent counsel, pious reflection, and comfortable suggestion. Being

a little book, it costs but little, and it will console, refresh, and

instruct weary, conscientious mothers, and so have a large circulation,

a wide influence, and do an immense amount of mischief. For the Evil

One in his senses never sends out poison labelled "POISON." He mixes it

in with great quantities of innocent and nutritive flour and sugar. He

shapes it in cunning shapes of pigs and lambs and hearts and birds and

braids. He tints it with gay lines of green and pink and rose, and

puts it in the confectioner's glass windows, where you buy--what?

Poison? No, indeed! Candy, at prices to suit the purchasers. So this

good and pious little book has such a preponderance of goodness and

piety that the poison in it will not be detected, except by chemical

analysis. It will go down sweetly, like grapes of Beulah. Nobody will

suspect he is poisoned; but just so far as it reaches and touches, the

social dyspepsia will be aggravated.

I submit a few atoms of the poison revealed by careful examination.

"The mother's is a MOST HONORABLE calling. 'What a pity that one so

gifted should be so tied down!' remarks a superficial observer, as she

looks upon the mother of a young and increasing family. The pale, thin

face and feeble step, bespeaking the multiplied and wearying cares of

domestic life, elicit an earnest sympathy from the many, thoughtlessly

flitting across her pathway, and the remark passes from mouth to mouth,

'How I pity her! What a shame it is! She is completely worn down with

so many children.' It may be, however, that this young mother is one

who needs and asks no pity," etc.

"But the TRUE MOTHER yields herself uncomplainingly, yea, cheerfully,

to the wholesome privation, solitude, and self-denial allotted

her...... Was she fond of travelling, of visiting the wonderful in

Nature and in Art, of mingling in new and often-varying scenes? Now

she has found 'an abiding city,' and no allurements are strong enough

to tempt her thence. Had society charms for her, and in the social

circle and the festive throng were her chief delights? Now she stays

at home, and the gorgeous saloon and brilliant assemblage give place to

the nursery and the baby. Was she devoted to literary pursuits? Now

the library is seldom visited, the cherished studies are neglected, the

rattle and the doll are substituted for the pen. Her piano is silent,

while she chants softly and sweetly the soothing lullaby. Her dress

can last another season now, and the hat--oh, she does not care, if it

is not in the latest mode, for she has a baby to look after, and has no

time for herself. Even the ride and the walk are given up, perhaps too

often, with the excuse, 'Baby-tending is exercise enough for me.' Her

whole life is reversed."

The assumption is, that all this is just as it should be. The

thoughtless person may fancy that it is a pity; but it is not a pity.

This is a model mother and a model state of things. It is not simply to

be submitted to, not simply to be patiently borne; it is to be aspired

to as the noblest and holiest state.

That is the strychnine. You may counsel people to take joyfully the

spoiling of their goods, and comfort, encourage, and strengthen them by

so doing; but when you tell them that to be robbed and plundered is of

itself a priceless blessing, the highest stage of human development,

you do them harm; because, in general, falsehood is always harmful, and

because, in particular, so far as you influence them at all, you

prevent them from taking measures to stop the wrong-doing. You ought

to counsel them to bear with Christian resignation what they cannot

help; but you ought with equal fervor to counsel them to look around

and see if there are not many things which they can help, and if there

are, by all means to help them. What is inevitable comes to us from

God, no matter how many hands it passes through; but submission to

unnecessary evils is cowardice or laziness; and extolling of the evil

as good is sheer ignorance, or perversity, or servility. Even the ills

that must be borne, should be borne under protest, lest patience

degenerate into slavery. Christian character is never formed by

acquiescence in, or apotheosis of wrong.