mansion and broad fields, and again he opened his book. The jokes were
better now than a little while before.
But the bees buzzed on; the trees sang their old soothing song; the air
remained warm; and soon Moses Grant began to nod assent to his book,
though the matters it contained were not of opinion, but of fancy. By
which I mean that he grew sleepy.
* * * * *
Sudden darkness fell upon the earth. The sun, after sending its rays to
glitter in the river so brightly that Moses Grant put his hand over his
eyes as he looked from his arbor-door, went out, and the blackness of
night wrapped itself about the world. The elms, that had rattled their
deep green leaves in the wind, and the birch, that had so gracefully
bowed its slender, yellowish head, were all colorless now. There was no
storm-cloud to veil the heavens, and yet the sad-faced moon came not out
to remind the world of their lost loves and deferred hopes--nor the
stars, to twinkle in their silence, as though there were a great Soul in
the skies that longed to speak to men, but had no utterance save a
thousand love-lit eyes. All was darkness--dense, universal.
Yet Moses Grant had sat unmoved in his vine-grown arbor. His soul was
passionless, his face was calm. His book had fallen to the ground, and
his head rested on the back of his chair.
Suddenly there came a visitor to the arbor. Moses raised his head and
saw a being--whether man or woman I can not tell--with a face, oh! so
bright and calm, with eyes that looked from the deepest soul, and a pure
forehead that spoke of unworldly rest--a face that shone in its own
vista of light when all around was dark. The Presence bore an open book
in its hands, and came and stood before Moses Grant and looked earnestly
into his face.
'Who are you?' he cried, half in fear, before the calm look of his
visitor, and half in confidence, because of the look of love.
'I am the census-taker.'
'No, no; it was he who came a little while ago.'
'He was one census-taker--he came to learn how much you _seemed_ to
possess; I come to learn your _real_ possessions. I am the real
census-taker.'
Moses Grant knew not what it meant; he sat speechless, in wonder. He
would have fled, but he knew not where he could flee in the darkness; he
must remain with his strange visitor, as all men must one day stand
alone with an awakened Conscience.
'When were you born?' asked the Presence.
'Sixty years ago,' answered Moses.
'You understand me not. I do not ask for the time when you were born
into your outward show of life, but when you commenced to live.'
'Still I do not know your meaning,' said Moses.
'Then you have not yet been born. You exist--you do not live. Say not
again that you have lived sixty years, for your being has not yet
expanded into life.'
Oh! what great thoughts and dark memories came into the mind of Moses
Grant! Great thoughts of a nobler life of love than he had ever
known--of realities to which he was fast approaching--and a thousand
dark memories that he had often tried to obliterate from his mind. A
little while before, he thought he possessed a spotless reputation--and
so he did possess a spotless reputation when judged by human law. No man
ever knew him to steal; no man ever knew him to transgress any important
law. Nevertheless, he had had his own ends to gain, and he had gained
them. Yes--we might as well confess it--Moses Grant had lived a selfish
life. He knew how to take advantage of the technicalities of law, and he
knew how to be severe and unmerciful toward the poor. He remembered how,
years before, his son had longed for an education, and how the mother
had pleaded that he might go to school and to college, and how sternly
he said, 'No, I want him in my business;' and he remembered how he kept
him slaving at his uncongenial tasks, how he scolded because he still
pored over his books, until at last the mother had laid the poor boy in
the grave before he had attained to manhood. He remembered how the
mother grew paler day by day--she who had been such a help-meet in all
his selfish schemes of hoarding and saving; how she had talked more and
more about her 'dear lost boy,' till he, Moses Grant, commanded her
never to utter that name again in his presence; how the mother still
faded and faded, till at last she too, was laid in a quiet grave beside
her boy. All this came into the mind of Moses Grant. And then he
remembered how he had taken a poor widow's cottage, because his
mortgage-deed gave him the privilege--he never thought the _right_--to
take it; he remembered her sad face, that told of silent suffering, when
she moved with her children from the cottage her husband had built.
'How,' he asked, in the silence of his own mind, 'oh! how could they say
my reputation was unspotted?' Yet he had transgressed no outward law,
had forged no mortgage-deed. He only acted like a man who thought that
this world could only be enjoyed when he possessed a title-deed to it
all; like one who thought that above and beyond this world there was
nothing.
All this time has the Presence stood before Moses Grant, looking into
his troubled face with its piercing eyes, and reading his every thought.
'Answer me now,' it said, 'have you yet begun to live?'
Then there was another and greater struggle in the mind of Moses. Pride
said to him: 'Send this intrusive visitor away, or flee yourself.' But
still the visitor stood there, waiting so calmly, and again Moses
realized that the great world had faded from his vision; so he could
neither send away the intruder, nor fly himself. Still those calm eyes
looked into his inmost soul.
'Oh!' he cried at last, 'you have searched me through and through. No, I
have not lived--I have not been born, I have no life for you to record
in your book. Now, pray leave me--leave me in peace!'
'That were impossible,' said the Presence, 'you know not peace. You
pride yourself on your possessions; but how can you have life or
possessions, if they are not recorded in my book? The earth, that you
love so well, has faded away. It will return to you for a brief moment,
and then it will fade forever. What you now possess is but a shadow,
like a sun-gilt cloud in a summer sky--changing and changing, and fading
and fading, till at last it disappears. You have, if God wills, a few
more years of mortal existence, and then, oh! then, you must exchange
shadows for realities.'
'Leave me, oh! leave me!' cried Moses.
'Not yet; my mission is not fulfilled. Here in this book your name was
written sixty years age, as one _to be_ born. Here your ledger has been
kept, though you knew it not. Read the pages with your soul, and see how
your account stands.'
Oh! how dark the page. A line was drawn through the middle, from top to
bottom, and the good deeds were recorded on one side, in letters of
gold, and the bad deeds on the other side in letters of ink. As the
pages were turned, Moses looked eagerly for the bright letters, but they
were few--too few; while every page was almost filled with the black
records of selfish and sinful deeds. Every page made Moses Grant sicker
at heart, and he would gladly have withdrawn his eyes from the book, but
they were riveted, and he could not.
'O poor man!' exclaimed the Presence, in pity; 'how poor do you find
yourself, you who were a little while ago so rich! But you must read no
more, lest you sink in despair.'
And the book was closed. Moses Grant said not a word; his heart was too
full to speak--too full of grief--too empty of hope.
'Despair not,' continued the strange Presence. 'Your record is not yet
completed. You may yet cancel all those black letters by writing golden
ones over them--which is to pray with your remaining strength and days
for forgiveness. You have been a hard, selfish man, for sixty years.
Men, for their own interests, have called you respectable; but before
God you have merited displeasure and disapprobation. In the little time
you have left, perhaps you may not be able to leave the world as pure as
you began it; but you may hope for wonderful mercy and forbearance from
God our Father. Have courage, and faith, and hope, and you will yet be
rich indeed--rich in love and joy and peace undefiled, that fadeth not
away.'
Then the Presence vanished. Still Moses sat in his chair. But a hand was
laid on his forehead, and he awoke as he heard Mary say: 'Father, supper
is ready.' He drew his hand across his eyes, and arose from his chair.
He looked from his arbor-door. The world was all bathed in the light of
the declining sun. As he came out and looked on the landscape, he
thought that never before had he seen it so dreamy--never before had he
seen it so beautiful and so glorious, for never before had he so felt
the use of this world as a place in which to attain to the good and to
shun the evil, to overcome temptation and to aspire to life.
His daughter wondered what caused his tone to be so tender that night;
the next day his neighbors wondered that he visited a certain poor,
struggling widow, and gave her the house her husband once owned; and in
the months that have since passed, many a poor family has wondered what
has turned their former oppressor into such a provident friend.
_I_ only wonder that so old and selfish a man could have had so bright
and heavenly a dream.
* * * * *
A SENSIBLE EPITAPH.
'Reader, pass on: ne'er waste your time
On bad biography or bitter rhyme:
For what I _am_, this cumbrous clay insures,
And what I _was_, is no affair of yours.'
THE PELOPONNESUS IN MARCH.
'Fair clime I where every season smiles.
* * * * *
There, mildly dimpling, Ocean's check
Reflects the tints of many a peak
Caught by the laughing tides that lave
These Edens of the Eastern wave.
And if, at times, a transient breeze
Break the blue crystal of the seas,
Or sweep one blossom from the trees,
How welcome is each gentle air
That wakes and wafts the odors there!'
It was with thoughts like these running in our heads, that we found
ourselves, at about half-past four o'clock, on a dark, cloudy, windy
morning, March fifteenth, 18--, rolling slowly along the uneven road
that leads from Athens to the Piraeus. Our guide was Dhemetri, of
course--who ever heard of a guide that was not named Dhemetri? An
excellent guide he was, too, never missing his way, answering correctly
all our questions to which he knew the answers, and fabricating answers
to the rest as near the truth as his moderate knowledge of antiquity
would permit; providing us sedulously with creature comforts, and
besieging our hearts daily with delicious omelettes and endless strings
of figs. Arrived at the Piraeus, we were transferred, with beds, cooking
apparatus, and baggage, to the Lloyd steamer, whose cloud of steam and
smoke was seen dimly in the gray morning. At a reasonable time after the
hour advertised, we sailed into the open bay, passed near enough the
island of Ægina to see the ruined temple on one of its hights--almost to
count its columns--then coasted along the rugged shores of Argolis,
which we eagerly studied with the aid of a map. Here was the peninsula
Methana, and half hiding it, the island Calauria, where Demosthenes put
an end to his life, once the seat of a famous Amphictyony. Then the bold
promontory which shuts in the fertile valley of Troezer, then the
territory of Hermione, stretching between the mountains and the sea. We
touched at Hydhra, famed in the history of the Greek Revolution, a
strange, rambling town, picturesquely situated on a cleft in a bare
island of gray rock, and shortly after at Spetzia, a town of much the
same character; then toward night sailed into the beautiful bay of
Napoli, or Nauplia, once the capital of Greece.
It had been our intention to procure horses that night, and ride as far
as Mycenæ, but we were too late, so contented ourselves with a walk to
Tiryus, and a rapid examination of its ruins. The massive walls of this
venerable town--they were a wonder in the age of Pericles as in
ours--still stand in their whole circuit, and here and there apparently
in their whole hight. It is a small, steep, mound-like hill--you can
walk around it in fifteen minutes--and within the walls the terraced
slope, thickly sprinkled with fragments of ruins, is grown over with the
tall purple flowers of the asphodel--a fit monument to the perished
city. From the citadel of Tiryus the view over the wide plain of the
Inachus, the broad bay beyond, covered with sails, the bold headland of
Napoli crowned with the ruined castle, the noble citadel of Argos, and
the mountain ranges on every side, made a picture beautiful even under
the dull sky of that March evening. Our walk--quickened by the fear that
the city gates would be found closed--gave us a hearty appetite, and a
classic smack was imparted to our modest viands by the fact that Orestes
himself waited on our table. We slept well, notwithstanding the
uncomfortable reputation of the inn, and set off early the next morning
upon our wanderings.
Traveling in Greece is no child's play. Roads there are none, except
between some large towns; indeed, the nature of the country hardly
allows of them, as it is made up chiefly of mountain ridges and ravines.
Neither would the poverty-stricken inhabitants be able at present to
make much use of them. When I expressed to Dhemetri the great benefits I
conceived that roads would confer upon the community, he asked
contemptuously: 'What good would roads be to them, when they have no
carriages?' Inns, too, there are none, or almost none; after leaving
Napoli we found none until we returned to Athens. In their stead, each
village has its _khan_, a house rather larger than ordinary, and
containing one large unfurnished room for guests. Here a fire is made on
the hearth, (the smoke escaping, or intended to escape, through a hole
in the roof, for chimneys do not exist,) and the traveler pitches his
tent metaphorically in this apartment. The beds, which he carries with
him, are spread on the floor, to do double duty as seats during the
evening and beds by night. Thus the accommodations are reduced to their
lowest terms--shelter and fire; to which add a lamb from the flock, eggs
in abundance, or sometimes a chicken, loaf of bread, or string of figs.
Wine, too, flavored with resin in true classic style, and tasting like
weak spirits of turpentine, is to be had every where. But for any
entertainment beyond this, the host is no-way responsible. If you do not
choose to sleep on the bare floor, you must bring beds and bedding with
you. If you wish the luxury of a knife and fork, you must furnish them
yourself. Kettles, plates, saucepans, cups, coffee, sugar, salt,
candles, all came from that mysterious basket which rode on the
pack-horse with the baggage. Were I visiting Greece again, I would
eschew all these vanities--carry nothing but a _Reisesack_, or
travel-bag, as the Germans are wont to call every variety of knapsack--a
shawl, and a copy of _Pausanias_, and live among the Greeks as the
Greeks do; but I was inexperienced then.
So we set out with great pomp and circumstance, each on his
beast--_alogon_, the Unreasonable Thing, is the word for horse--while a
fifth, with two drivers, carried our goods. A ride of about three
hours--passing the silent and deserted Tiryus--brought us to the village
of Charváti, the modern representative of the 'rich Mycenae.' Here,
while Dehmetri prepared our breakfast, we followed a villager, who led
us by rapid strides up the rocky hill toward the angle formed by two
mountains. As we rose over one elevation after another, he plucked his
hands full of dry grass and brush, and then leading us into a hole in
the side of the hill, informed us in good classic Greek that it was the
tomb of Agamemnon. It is a large, round apartment, rising to the hight
of forty-nine feet, and of about the same width, the layers of masonry
gradually approaching one another until a single stone caps the whole;
not conical in shape, however, but like a beehive. A single monstrous
stone, twenty-seven feet long and twenty wide, is placed over the
doorway. The whole is buried with earth, and covered with a growth of
grass and shrubs, and a passage leads from it into a smaller chamber
hewn in the solid rock, in which our guide lighted the fuel he had
gathered. The gloomy walls were lighted up for a moment, then when the
fire died away, we returned to the open air. A little further on is the
famous gateway with two lionesses carved in relief above--the armorial
bearings, we may call it, of the city--and in every direction are seen
massive walls, foundation-stones, ruins of gates and of subterraneous
chambers like the first we visited, conical hillocks, probably
containing others in equally good preservation, and other marks of the
busy hand of man--'_Spuren ordnender Menschenhand unter dem Gesträuch_.'
Sidney Smith says: 'It is impossible to feel affection beyond
seventy-eight degrees or below twenty degrees of Fahrenheit.... Man only
lives to shiver or to perspire.' I think it is so with the sublime and
beautiful, and deeply as I felt in the abstract the privilege I enjoyed
in standing on the citadel of Agamemnon, and seeing the most venerable
ruins that Europe can boast, that keen March wind was too much for me,
and I was not sorry to return to the khan, where, sitting cross-legged
on the floor, we ate with our fingers a roast chicken dissected with the
one knife of the family, and drank a bumper of resinous wine.
After dinner we remounted and rode back through the broad plain to
Argos, traversed its narrow, dirty streets, stared at by the Argive
youth, examined its grass-grown theatre, cast wistful eyes at the lofty
citadel of Larissa, which time forbade us to ascend, then wound along
the foot of the mountain-range, saw at a distance on the seashore a spot
of green, which we were told was Lerna, where Hercules slew the hydra,
and near the road an old ruined pyramid, which we afterward examined
more closely, then followed a mountain-path, catching now and then a
glimpse of the bay, following the crest of the ridge into the valley
beyond. On one of the undulations of the path we passed over the site of
an ancient city, evidenced only by that most sure sign, a soil thickly
covered with potsherds. No classic writer mentions it, no inscription
gives it a name; perhaps the careless traveler would pass without a
suspicion that he was treading on the street, or forum, or temple of a
once thriving town. Striking soon into the carriage-road from Napoli to
Tripolitza, and descending into a charming little valley with the
euphonious name of Achladhókamvo, we were not sorry to find a khan, and
take up our quarters for the night. We found the family sitting on the
floor around a fire blazing on a hearth in the middle of a room, and
here we placed ourselves, watching the women spinning and Dhemetri
making his preparations for supper. Out of the afore-mentioned basket
quickly came all the afore-mentioned articles. A lamb was killed, and
shortly an excellent supper was served up to us. Soon the guest-chamber
was announced to be ready for us, a large open room having a fire at one
end, and containing our beds, spread on the floor, a cricket three
inches high, that served as a table, two windows closed by shutters
instead of glass, and a large quantity of smoke.
The next morning a steep and picturesque path over Mount Parthenion--the
same path, I suppose, on which Phidippides had his well-known interview
with the god Pan--brought us to Arcadia. And at the name of Arcadia let
not the fond mind revert to scenes of pastoral innocence and enjoyment,
such as poets and artists love to paint--a lawn of ever-fresh verdure
shaded by the sturdy oak and wide-spreading beech, watered by
never-failing springs, swains and maidens innocent as the sheep they
tend, dancing on the green sward to the music of the pipe, and snowy
mountains in the distance lending repose and majesty to the scene.
Nothing of this picture is realized by the Arcadia of to-day, but the
snowy mountains, and they, indeed, are all around and near. No, let your
dream of Arcadia he something like this: A bare, open plain, three
thousand feet above the level of the sea, fenced in on every side by
snow-topped mountains, and swept incessantly by cold winds, the sky
heavy with clouds, the ground sown with numberless stones, with here and
there a bunch of hungry-looking grass pushing itself feebly up among
them. Not a tree do you behold, hardly a shrub. You come to a river--it
is a broad, waterless bed of cobble-stones and gravel, only differing
from the dry land in being less mixed with dirt, and wholly, instead of
partly, destitute of vegetation. But your eye falls at last on a sheet
of water--there is surely a placid lake giving beauty and fertility to
its neighborhood. No, it is a _katavothron_, or chasm, in which the
accumulated waters of the plain disappear. For as these Arcadian valleys
are so shut in by mountains as to leave no natural egress to the water,
it gathers in the lowest spot it can reach, and there stagnates, unless
it can wear a passage for itself, or find a subterraneous channel
through the limestone mountain, and come to light again in a lower
valley. Such a reäppearance we saw near Argos, a broad, swift
stream--the Erasmus--rushing from under a mountain with such force as to
turn mills; it is believed to come from a _kalavothron_ in the northern
part of Arcadia. And not far from thence a fountain of fresh water
bubbles up in the sea a few yards from the shore; this is traced to a
similar source. In some parts of Greece the remains may still be seen of
the subterranean channels by which in ancient times the _katavothra_
were kept clear, and thus prevented from overflowing. In this way much
land was artificially redeemed to agriculture.
If, now, you seek for the dwellers in this paradise, behold them in yon
shepherd and his faithful dog--_Arcades ambo_--the shepherd muffled
against the searching wind in hood and cloak, under his arm a veritable
crook, while his sheep and goats are browsing about wherever a blade of
grass or a green leaf can be found. His invariable companion is--I was
about to say a tamed wolf; but in reality, an untamed animal of wolfish
aspect and disposition, always eager to make your acquaintance. These
creatures are the torment of the traveler throughout Greece, and most of
all in Arcadia. If on foot, he can pick up a stone, at sight of which
the enemy will beat a hasty retreat. Greece seems to have been
bountifully supplied with loose stones of the right size for this very
purpose, just as the rattlesnake-plant is said to grow wherever the
rattlesnake itself is found. If on horseback, he can easily escape,
although the animal will not scruple to hang to the horse's tail or bite
his heels. Such was Arcadia in March. No doubt, at another season it is
a delightful retreat from the overpowering heat of the Greek summer. It
may have a beauty of its own at that season; but there can be little of
that quiet rural landscape which we call Arcadian.