Mr. Paul would have seemed the easiest person in the world to worm a

secret out of. He was good-natured, child-like as a Heathen Chinee,

talked freely with everybody in such English as he had at command, knew

all the little people of the village, and was followed round by them

partly from his personal attraction for them, and partly because he was

apt to have a stick of candy or a handful of peanuts or other desirable

luxury in his pocket for any of his little friends he met with. He had

that wholesome, happy look, so uncommon in our arid countrymen,--a look

hardly to be found except where figs and oranges ripen in the open air.

A kindly climate to grow up in, a religion which takes your money and

gives you a stamped ticket good at Saint Peter's box office, a roomy

chest and a good pair of lungs in it, an honest digestive apparatus, a

lively temperament, a cheerful acceptance of the place in life assigned

to one by nature and circumstance,--these are conditions under which life

may be quite comfortable to endure, and certainly is very pleasant to

contemplate. All these conditions were united in Paolo. He was the

easiest; pleasantest creature to talk with that one could ask for a

companion. His southern vivacity, his amusing English, his simplicity and

openness, made him friends everywhere.

It seemed as if it would be a very simple matter to get the history of

his master out of this guileless and unsophisticated being. He had been

tried by all the village experts. The rector had put a number of

well-studied careless questions, which failed of their purpose. The old

librarian of the town library had taken note of all the books he carried

to his master, and asked about his studies and pursuits. Paolo found it

hard to understand his English, apparently, and answered in the most

irrelevant way. The leading gossip of the village tried her skill in

pumping him for information. It was all in vain.

His master's way of life was peculiar,--in fact, eccentric. He had hired

rooms in an old-fashioned three-story house. He had two rooms in the

second and third stories of this old wooden building: his study in the

second, his sleeping-room in the one above it. Paolo lived in the

basement, where he had all the conveniences for cooking, and played the

part of chef for his master and himself. This was only a part of his

duty, for he was a man-of-all-work, purveyor, steward, chambermaid,--as

universal in his services for one man as Pushee at the Anchor Tavern used

to be for everybody.

It so happened that Paolo took a severe cold one winter's day, and had

such threatening symptoms that he asked the baker, when he called, to

send the village physician to see him. In the course of his visit the

doctor naturally inquired about the health of Paolo's master.

"Signor Kirkwood well,--molto bene," said Paolo. "Why does he keep out

of sight as he does?" asked the doctor.

"He always so," replied Paolo. "Una antipatia."

Whether Paolo was off his guard with the doctor, whether he revealed it

to him as to a father confessor, or whether he thought it time that the

reason of his master's seclusion should be known, the doctor did not feel

sure. At any rate, Paolo was not disposed to make any further

revelations. Una antipatia,--an antipathy,--that was all the doctor

learned. He thought the matter over, and the more he reflected the more

he was puzzled. What could an antipathy be that made a young man a

recluse! Was it a dread of blue sky and open air, of the smell of

flowers, or some electrical impression to which he was unnaturally

sensitive?

Dr. Butts carried these questions home with him. His wife was a

sensible, discreet woman, whom he could trust with many professional

secrets. He told her of Paolo's revelation, and talked it over with her

in the light of his experience and her own; for she had known some

curious cases of constitutional likes and aversions.

Mrs. Butts buried the information in the grave of her memory, where it

lay for nearly a week. At the end of that time it emerged in a

confidential whisper to her favorite sister-in-law, a perfectly safe

person. Twenty-four hours later the story was all over the village that

Maurice Kirkwood was the subject of a strange, mysterious, unheard-of

antipathy to something, nobody knew what; and the whole neighborhood

naturally resolved itself into an unorganized committee of investigation.

IV

What is a country village without its mysterious personage? Few are now

living who can remember the advent of the handsome young man who was the

mystery of our great university town "sixty years since,"--long enough

ago for a romance to grow out of a narrative, as Waverley may remind us.

The writer of this narrative remembers him well, and is not sure that he

has not told the strange story in some form or other to the last

generation, or to the one before the last. No matter: if he has told it

they have forgotten it,--that is, if they have ever read it; and whether

they have or have not, the story is singular enough to justify running

the risk of repetition.

This young man, with a curious name of Scandinavian origin, appeared

unheralded in the town, as it was then, of Cantabridge. He wanted

employment, and soon found it in the shape of manual labor, which he

undertook and performed cheerfully. But his whole appearance showed

plainly enough that he was bred to occupations of a very different

nature, if, in deed, he had been accustomed to any kind of toil for his

living. His aspect was that of one of gentle birth. His hands were not

those of a laborer, and his features were delicate and refined, as well

as of remarkable beauty. Who he was, where he came from, why he had come

to Cantabridge, was never clearly explained. He was alone, without

friends, except among the acquaintances he had made in his new residence.

If he had any correspondents, they were not known to the neighborhood

where he was living. But if he had neither friends nor correspondents,

there was some reason for believing that he had enemies. Strange

circumstances occurred which connected themselves with him in an ominous

and unaccountable way. A threatening letter was slipped under the door

of a house where he was visiting. He had a sudden attack of illness,

which was thought to look very much like the effect of poison. At one

time he disappeared, and was found wandering, bewildered, in a town many

miles from that where he was residing. When questioned how he came

there; he told a coherent story that he had been got, under some pretext,

or in some not incredible way, into a boat, from which, at a certain

landing-place, he had escaped and fled for his life, which he believed

was in danger from his kidnappers.

Whoever his enemies may have been,--if they really existed,--he did not

fall a victim to their plots, so far as known to or remembered by this

witness.

Various interpretations were put upon his story. Conjectures were as

abundant as they were in the case of Kaspar Hauser. That he was of good

family seemed probable; that he was of distinguished birth, not

impossible; that he was the dangerous rival of a candidate for a greatly

coveted position in one of the northern states of Europe was a favorite

speculation of some of the more romantic young persons. There was no

dramatic ending to this story,--at least none is remembered by the

present writer.

"He left a name," like the royal Swede, of whose lineage he may have been

for aught that the village people knew, but not a name at which anybody

"grew pale;" for he had swindled no one, and broken no woman's heart with

false vows. Possibly some withered cheeks may flush faintly as they

recall the handsome young man who came before the Cantabridge maidens

fully equipped for a hero of romance when the century was in its first

quarter.

The writer has been reminded of the handsome Swede by the incidents

attending the advent of the unknown and interesting stranger who had made

his appearance at Arrowhead Village.

It was a very insufficient and unsatisfactory reason to assign for the

young man's solitary habits that he was the subject of an antipathy. For

what do we understand by that word? When a young lady screams at the

sight of a spider, we accept her explanation that she has a natural

antipathy to the creature. When a person expresses a repugnance to some

wholesome article of food, agreeable to most people, we are satisfied if

he gives the same reason. And so of various odors, which are pleasing to

some persons and repulsive to others. We do not pretend to go behind the

fact. It is an individual, and it may be a family, peculiarity. Even

between different personalities there is an instinctive elective dislike

as well as an elective affinity. We are not bound to give a reason why

Dr. Fell is odious to us any more than the prisoner who peremptorily

challenges a juryman is bound to say why he does it; it is enough that he

"does not like his looks."

There was nothing strange, then, that Maurice Kirkwood should have his

special antipathy; a great many other people have odd likes and dislikes.

But it was a very curious thing that this antipathy should be alleged as

the reason for his singular mode of life. All sorts of explanations were

suggested, not one of them in the least satisfactory, but serving to keep

the curiosity of inquirers active until they were superseded by a new

theory. One story was that Maurice had a great fear of dogs. It grew at

last to a connected narrative, in which a fright in childhood from a

rabid mongrel was said to have given him such a sensitiveness to the near

presence of dogs that he was liable to convulsions if one came close to

him.

This hypothesis had some plausibility. No other creature would be so

likely to trouble a person who had an antipathy to it. Dogs are very apt

to make the acquaintance of strangers, in a free and easy way. They are

met with everywhere,--in one's daily walk, at the thresholds of the doors

one enters, in the gentleman's library, on the rug of my lady's

sitting-room and on the cushion of her carriage. It is true that there

are few persons who have an instinctive repugnance to this "friend of

man." But what if this so-called antipathy were only a fear, a terror,

which borrowed the less unmanly name? It was a fair question, if,

indeed, the curiosity of the public had a right to ask any questions at

all about a harmless individual who gave no offence, and seemed entitled

to the right of choosing his way of living to suit himself, without being

submitted to espionage.

There was no positive evidence bearing on the point as yet. But one of

the village people had a large Newfoundland dog, of a very sociable

disposition, with which he determined to test the question. He watched

for the time when Maurice should leave his house for the woods or the

lake, and started with his dog to meet him. The animal walked up to the

stranger in a very sociable fashion, and began making his acquaintance,

after the usual manner of well-bred dogs; that is, with the courtesies

and blandishments by which the canine Chesterfield is distinguished from

the ill-conditioned cur. Maurice patted him in a friendly way, and spoke

to him as one who was used to the fellowship of such companions. That

idle question and foolish story were disposed of, therefore, and some

other solution must be found, if possible.

A much more common antipathy is that which is entertained with regard to

cats. This has never been explained. It is not mere aversion to the

look of the creature, or to any sensible quality known to the common

observer. The cat is pleasing in aspect, graceful in movement, nice in

personal habits, and of amiable disposition. No cause of offence is

obvious, and yet there are many persons who cannot abide the presence of

the most innocent little kitten. They can tell, in some mysterious way,

that there is a cat in the room when they can neither see nor hear the

creature. Whether it is an electrical or quasi-magnetic phenomenon, or

whatever it may be, of the fact of this strange influence there are too

many well-authenticated instances to allow its being questioned. But

suppose Maurice Kirkwood to be the subject of this antipathy in its

extremest degree, it would in no manner account for the isolation to

which he had condemned himself. He might shun the firesides of the old

women whose tabbies were purring by their footstools, but these worthy

dames do not make up the whole population.

These two antipathies having been disposed of, a new suggestion was

started, and was talked over with a curious sort of half belief, very

much as ghost stories are told in a circle of moderately instructed and

inquiring persons. This was that Maurice was endowed with the unenviable

gift of the evil eye. He was in frequent communication with Italy, as

his letters showed, and had recently been residing in that country, as

was learned from Paolo. Now everybody knows that the evil eye is not

rarely met with in Italy. Everybody who has ever read Mr. Story's "Roba

di Roma" knows what a terrible power it is which the owner of the evil

eye exercises. It can blight and destroy whatever it falls upon. No

person's life or limb is safe if the jettatura, the withering glance of

the deadly organ, falls upon him. It must be observed that this malign

effect may follow a look from the holiest personages, that is, if we may

assume that a monk is such as a matter of course. Certainly we have a

right to take it for granted that the late Pope, Pius Ninth, was an

eminently holy man, and yet he had the name of dispensing the mystic and

dreaded jettatura as well as his blessing. If Maurice Kirkwood carried

that destructive influence, so that his clear blue eyes were more to be

feared than the fascinations of the deadliest serpent, it could easily be

understood why he kept his look away from all around him whom he feared

he might harm.

No sensible person in Arrowhead Village really believed in the evil eye,

but it served the purpose of a temporary hypothesis, as do many

suppositions which we take as a nucleus for our observations without

putting any real confidence in them. It was just suited to the romantic

notions of the more flighty persons in the village, who had meddled more

or less with Spiritualism, and were ready for any new fancy, if it were

only wild enough.

The riddle of the young stranger's peculiarity did not seem likely to

find any very speedy solution. Every new suggestion furnished talk for

the gossips of the village and the babble of the many tongues in the two

educational institutions. Naturally, the discussion was liveliest among

the young ladies. Here is an extract from a letter of one of these young

ladies, who, having received at her birth the ever-pleasing name of Mary,

saw fit to have herself called Mollie in the catalogue and in her

letters. The old postmaster of the town to which her letter was directed

took it up to stamp, and read on the envelope the direction to "Miss Lulu

Pinrow." He brought the stamp down with a vicious emphasis, coming very

near blotting out the nursery name, instead of cancelling the

postage-stamp. "Lulu!" he exclaimed. "I should like to know if that

great strapping girl isn't out of her cradle yet! I suppose Miss Louisa

will think that belongs to her, but I saw her christened and I heard the

name the minister gave her, and it was n't 'Lulu,' or any such baby

nonsense." And so saying, he gave it a fling to the box marked P, as if

it burned his fingers. Why a grown-up young woman allowed herself to be

cheapened in the way so many of them do by the use of names which become

them as well as the frock of a ten-year-old schoolgirl would become a

graduate of the Corinna Institute, the old postmaster could not guess.

He was a queer old man.

The letter thus scornfully treated runs over with a young girl's written

loquacity:

"Oh, Lulu, there is such a sensation as you never saw or heard of 'in all

your born days,' as mamma used to say. He has been at the village for

some time, but lately we have had--oh, the weirdest stories about him!

'The Mysterious Stranger is the name some give him, but we girls call him

the Sachem, because he paddles about in an Indian canoe. If I should

tell you all the things that are said about him I should use up all my

paper ten times over. He has never made a visit to the Institute, and

none of the girls have ever spoken to him, but the people at the village

say he is very, very handsome. We are dying to get a look at him, of

course--though there is a horrid story about him--that he has the evil

eye did you ever hear about the evil eye? If a person who is born with

it looks at you, you die, or something happens--awful--is n't it?

"The rector says he never goes to church, but then you know a good many

of the people that pass the summer at the village never do--they think

their religion must have vacations--that's what I've heard they

say--vacations, just like other hard work--it ought not to be hard work,

I'm sure, but I suppose they feel so about it. Should you feel afraid to

have him look at you? Some of the girls say they would n't have him for

the whole world, but I shouldn't mind it--especially if I had on my

eyeglasses. Do you suppose if there is anything in the evil eye it would

go through glass? I don't believe it. Do you think blue eye-glasses

would be better than common ones? Don't laugh at me--they tell such

weird stories! The Terror--Lurida Vincent, you know-makes fun of all

they say about it, but then she 'knows everything and doesn't believe

anything,' the girls say--Well, I should be awfully scared, I know, if

anybody that had the evil eye should look at me--but--oh, I don't

know--but if it was a young man--and if he was very--very

good-looking--I think--perhaps I would run the risk--but don't tell

anybody I said any such horrid thing--and burn this letter right

up--there 's a dear good girl."

It is to be hoped that no reader will doubt the genuineness of this

letter. There are not quite so many "awfuls" and "awfullys" as one

expects to find in young ladies' letters, but there are two "weirds,"

which may be considered a fair allowance. How it happened that "jolly"

did not show itself can hardly be accounted for; no doubt it turns up two

or three times at least in the postscript.

Here is an extract from another letter. This was from one of the

students of Stoughton University to a friend whose name as it was written

on the envelope was Mr. Frank Mayfield. The old postmaster who found

fault with Miss "Lulu's" designation would probably have quarrelled with

this address, if it had come under his eye. "Frank" is a very pretty,

pleasant-sounding name, and it is not strange that many persons use it in

common conversation all their days when speaking of a friend. Were they

really christened by that name, any of these numerous Franks? Perhaps

they were, and if so there is nothing to be said. But if not, was the

baptismal name Francis or Franklin? The mind is apt to fasten in a very

perverse and unpleasant way upon this question, which too often there is

no possible way of settling. One might hope, if he outlived the bearer

of the appellation, to get at the fact; but since even gravestones have

learned to use the names belonging to childhood and infancy in their

solemn record, the generation which docks its Christian names in such an

un-Christian way will bequeath whole churchyards full of riddles to

posterity. How it will puzzle and distress the historians and

antiquarians of a coming generation to settle what was the real name of

Dan and Bert and Billy, which last is legible on a white marble slab,

raised in memory of a grown person, in a certain burial-ground in a town

in Essex County, Massachusetts!

But in the mean time we are forgetting the letter directed to Mr. Frank

Mayfield.

"DEAR FRANK,--Hooray! Hurrah! Rah!

"I have made the acquaintance of 'The Mysterious Stranger'! It happened

by a queer sort of accident, which came pretty near relieving you of the

duty of replying to this letter. I was out in my little boat, which

carries a sail too big for her, as I know and ought to have remembered.

One of those fitful flaws of wind to which the lake is so liable struck

the sail suddenly, and over went my boat. My feet got tangled in the

sheet somehow, and I could not get free. I had hard work to keep my head

above water, and I struggled desperately to escape from my toils; for if

the boat were to go down I should be dragged down with her. I thought of

a good many things in the course of some four or five minutes, I can tell

you, and I got a lesson about time better than anything Kant and all the

rest of them have to say of it. After I had been there about an ordinary

lifetime, I saw a white canoe making toward me, and I knew that our shy

young gentleman was coming to help me, and that we should become

acquainted without an introduction. So it was, sure enough. He saw what

the trouble was, managed to disentangle my feet without drowning me in

the process or upsetting his little flimsy craft, and, as I was somewhat

tired with my struggle, took me in tow and carried me to the landing

where he kept his canoe. I can't say that there is anything odd about

his manners or his way of talk. I judge him to be a native of one of our

Northern States,--perhaps a New Englander. He has lived abroad during

some parts of his life. He is not an artist, as it was at one time

thought he might be. He is a good-looking fellow, well developed, manly

in appearance, with nothing to excite special remark unless it be a

certain look of anxiety or apprehension which comes over him from time to

time. You remember our old friend Squire B., whose companion was killed

by lightning when he was standing close to him. You know the look he had

whenever anything like a thundercloud came up in the sky. Well, I should

say there was a look like that came over this Maurice Kirkwood's face

every now and then. I noticed that he looked round once or twice as if to

see whether some object or other was in sight. There was a little

rustling in the grass as if of footsteps, and this look came over his

features. A rabbit ran by us, and I watched to see if he showed any sign

of that antipathy we have heard so much of, but he seemed to be pleased

watching the creature.

"If you ask me what my opinion is about this Maurice Kirkwood, I think he

is eccentric in his habit of life, but not what they call a 'crank'

exactly. He talked well enough about such matters as we spoke of,--the

lake, the scenery in general, the climate. I asked him to come over and

take a look at the college. He did n't promise, but I should not be

surprised if I should get him over there some day. I asked him why he

did n't go to the Pansophian meetings. He did n't give any reason, but

he shook his head in a very peculiar way, as much as to say that it was

impossible.

"On the whole, I think it is nothing more than the same feeling of dread

of human society, or dislike for it, which under the name of religion

used to drive men into caves and deserts. What a pity that Protestantism

does not make special provision for all the freaks of individual

character! If we had a little more faith and a few more caverns, or

convenient places for making them, we should have hermits in these holes

as thick as woodchucks or prairie dogs. I should like to know if you

never had the feeling,

"'Oh, that the desert were my dwelling-place!'

"I know what your answer will be, of course. You will say, 'Certainly,

"'With one fair spirit for my minister;'"

"but I mean alone,--all alone. Don't you ever feel as if you should like

to have been a pillar-saint in the days when faith was as strong as lye

(spelt with a y), instead of being as weak as dish-water? (Jerry is

looking over my shoulder, and says this pun is too bad to send, and a

disgrace to the University--but never mind.) I often feel as if I should

like to roost on a pillar a hundred feet high,--yes, and have it soaped

from top to bottom. Wouldn't it be fun to look down at the bores and the

duns? Let us get up a pillar-roosters' association. (Jerry--still

looking over says there is an absurd contradiction in the idea.)

"What a matter-of-fact idiot Jerry is!

"How do you like looking over, Mr. Inspector general?"

The reader will not get much information out of this lively young

fellow's letter, but he may get a little. It is something to know that

the mysterious resident of Arrowhead Village did not look nor talk like a

crazy person; that he was of agreeable aspect and address, helpful when

occasion offered, and had nothing about him, so far as yet appeared, to

prevent his being an acceptable member of society.

Of course the people in the village could never be contented without

learning everything there was to be learned about their visitor. All the

city papers were examined for advertisements. If a cashier had

absconded, if a broker had disappeared, if a railroad president was

missing, some of the old stories would wake up and get a fresh currency,

until some new circumstance gave rise to a new hypothesis. Unconscious of

all these inquiries and fictions, Maurice Kirkwood lived on in his

inoffensive and unexplained solitude, and seemed likely to remain an

unsolved enigma. The "Sachem" of the boating girls became the "Sphinx"

of the village ramblers, and it was agreed on all hands that Egypt did

not hold any hieroglyphics harder to make out than the meaning of this

young man's odd way of living.

V

THE ENIGMA STUDIED.

It was a curious, if it was not a suspicious, circumstance that a young

man, seemingly in good health, of comely aspect, looking as if made for

companionship, should keep himself apart from all the world around him in

a place where there was a general feeling of good neighborhood and a

pleasant social atmosphere. The Public Library was a central point which

brought people together. The Pansophian Society did a great deal to make

them acquainted with each other for many of the meetings were open to

outside visitors, and the subjects discussed in the meetings furnished

the material for conversation in their intervals. A card of invitation

had been sent by the Secretary to Maurice, in answer to which Paolo

carried back a polite note of regret. The paper had a narrow rim of

black, implying apparently some loss of relative or friend, but not any

very recent and crushing bereavement. This refusal to come to the

meetings of the society was only what was expected. It was proper to ask

him, but his declining the invitation showed that he did not wish for

attentions or courtesies. There was nothing further to be done to bring

him out of his shell, and seemingly nothing more to be learned about him

at present.

In this state of things it was natural that all which had been previously

gathered by the few who had seen or known anything of him should be

worked over again. When there is no new ore to be dug, the old refuse

heaps are looked over for what may still be found in them. The landlord

of the Anchor Tavern, now the head of the boarding-house, talked about

Maurice, as everybody in the village did at one time or another. He had

not much to say, but he added a fact or two.

The young gentleman was good pay,--so they all said. Sometimes he paid

in gold; sometimes in fresh bills, just out of the bank. He trusted his

man, Mr. Paul, with the money to pay his bills. He knew something about

horses; he showed that by the way he handled that colt,--the one that

threw the hostler and broke his collar-bone. "Mr. Paul come down to the

stable. 'Let me see that cult you all 'fraid of,' says he. 'My master,

he ride any hoss,' says Paul. 'You saddle him,' says be; and so they

did, and Paul, he led that colt--the kickinest and ugliest young beast

you ever see in your life--up to the place where his master, as he calls

him, and he lives. What does that Kirkwood do but clap on a couple of

long spurs and jump on to that colt's back, and off the beast goes, tail

up, heels flying, standing up on end, trying all sorts of capers, and at

last going it full run for a couple of miles, till he'd got about enough

of it. That colt went off as ferce as a wild-cat, and come back as quiet

as a cosset lamb. A man that pays his bills reg'lar, in good money, and

knows how to handle a hoss is three quarters of a gentleman, if he is n't

a whole one,--and most likely he is a whole one."

So spake the patriarch of the Anchor Tavern. His wife had already given

her favorable opinion of her former guest. She now added something to

her description as a sequel to her husband's remarks.

"I call him," she said, "about as likely a young gentleman as ever I

clapped my eyes on. He is rather slighter than I like to see a young man

of his age; if he was my sun, I should like to see him a little more

fleshy. I don't believe he weighs more than a hundred and thirty or

forty pounds. Did y' ever look at those eyes of his, M'randy? Just as

blue as succory flowers. I do like those light-complected young fellows,

with their fresh cheeks and their curly hair; somehow, curly hair doos

set off anybody's face. He is n't any foreigner, for all that he talks

Italian with that Mr. Paul that's his help. He looks just like our kind

of folks, the college kind, that's brought up among books, and is

handling 'em, and reading of 'em, and making of 'em, as like as not, all

their lives. All that you say about his riding the mad colt is just what

I should think he was up to, for he's as spry as a squirrel; you ought to

see him go over that fence, as I did once. I don't believe there's any

harm in that young gentleman,--I don't care what people say. I suppose

he likes this place just as other people like it, and cares more for

walking in the woods and paddling about in the water than he doos for

company; and if he doos, whose business is it, I should like to know?"

The third of the speakers was Miranda, who had her own way of judging

people.

"I never see him but two or three times," Miranda said. "I should like

to have waited on him, and got a chance to look stiddy at him when he was

eatin' his vittles. That 's the time to watch folks, when their jaws get

a-goin' and their eyes are on what's afore 'em. Do you remember that chap

the sheriff come and took away when we kep' tahvern? Eleven year ago it

was, come nex' Thanksgivin' time. A mighty grand gentleman from the City

he set up for. I watched him, and I watched him. Says I, I don't

believe you're no gentleman, says I. He eat with his knife, and that

ain't the way city folks eats. Every time I handed him anything I looked

closeter and closeter. Them whiskers never grooved on them cheeks, says

I to myself. Them 's paper collars, says I. That dimun in your

shirt-front hain't got no life to it, says I. I don't believe it's

nothiri' more 'n a bit o' winderglass. So says I to Pushee, 'You jes'

step out and get the sheriff to come in and take a look at that chap.' I

knowed he was after a fellah. He come right in, an' he goes up to the

chap. 'Why, Bill,' says he, 'I'm mighty glad to see yer. We've had the

hole in the wall you got out of mended, and I want your company to come

and look at the old place,' says he, and he pulls out a couple of

handcuffs and has 'em on his wrists in less than no time, an' off they

goes together! I know one thing about that young gentleman,

anyhow,--there ain't no better judge of what's good eatin' than he is. I

cooked him some maccaroni myself one day, and he sends word to me by that

Mr. Paul, 'Tell Miss Miranda,' says he, I that the Pope o' Rome don't

have no better cooked maccaroni than what she sent up to me yesterday,'

says he. I don' know much about the Pope o' Rome except that he's a

Roman Catholic, and I don' know who cooks for him, whether it's a man or

a woman; but when it comes to a dish o' maccaroni, I ain't afeard of

their shefs, as they call 'em,--them he-cooks that can't serve up a cold

potater without callin' it by some name nobody can say after 'em. But

this gentleman knows good cookin', and that's as good a sign of a

gentleman as I want to tell 'em by."

VI

STILL AT FAULT.

The house in which Maurice Kirkwood had taken up his abode was not a very

inviting one. It was old, and had been left in a somewhat dilapidated

and disorderly condition by the tenants who had lived in the part which

Maurice now occupied. They had piled their packing-boxes in the cellar,

with broken chairs, broken china, and other household wrecks. A cracked

mirror lay on an old straw mattress, the contents of which were airing

themselves through wide rips and rents. A lame clothes-horse was saddled

with an old rug fringed with a ragged border, out of which all the colors

had been completely trodden. No woman would have gone into a house in

such a condition. But the young man did not trouble himself much about

such matters, and was satisfied when the rooms which were to be occupied

by himself and his servant were made decent and tolerably comfortable.

During the fine season all this was not of much consequence, and if

Maurice made up his mind to stay through the winter he would have his

choice among many more eligible places.

The summer vacation of the Corinna Institute had now arrived, and the

young ladies had scattered to their homes. Among the graduates of the

year were Miss Euthymia Tower and Miss Lurida Vincent, who had now

returned to their homes in Arrowhead Village. They were both glad to

rest after the long final examinations and the exercises of the closing

day, in which each of them had borne a conspicuous part. It was a

pleasant life they led in the village, which was lively enough at this

season. Walking, riding, driving, boating, visits to the Library,

meetings of the Pansophian Society, hops, and picnics made the time pass

very cheerfully, and soon showed their restoring influences. The

Terror's large eyes did not wear the dull, glazed look by which they had

too often betrayed the after effects of over-excitement of the strong and

active brain behind them. The Wonder gained a fresher bloom, and looked

full enough of life to radiate vitality into a statue of ice. They had a

boat of their own, in which they passed many delightful hours on the

lake, rowing, drifting, reading, telling of what had been, dreaming of

what might be.

The Library was one of the chief centres of the fixed population, and

visited often by strangers. The old Librarian was a peculiar character,

as these officials are apt to be. They have a curious kind of knowledge,

sometimes immense in its way. They know the backs of books, their

title-pages, their popularity or want of it, the class of readers who

call for particular works, the value of different editions, and a good

deal besides. Their minds catch up hints from all manner of works on all

kinds of subjects. They will give a visitor a fact and a reference which

they are surprised to find they remember and which the visitor might have

hunted for a year. Every good librarian, every private book-owner, who

has grown into his library, finds he has a bunch of nerves going to every

bookcase, a branch to every shelf, and a twig to every book. These

nerves get very sensitive in old librarians, sometimes, and they do not

like to have a volume meddled with any more than they would like to have

their naked eyes handled. They come to feel at last that the books of a

great collection are a part, not merely of their own property, though

they are only the agents for their distribution, but that they are, as it

were, outlying portions of their own organization. The old Librarian was

getting a miserly feeling about his books, as he called them.

Fortunately, he had a young lady for his assistant, who was never so

happy as when she could find the work any visitor wanted and put it in

his hands,--or her hands, for there were more readers among the wives

and--daughters, and especially among the aunts, than there were among

their male relatives. The old Librarian knew the books, but the books

seemed to know the young assistant; so it looked, at least, to the

impatient young people who wanted their services.

Maurice had a good many volumes of his own,--a great many, according to

Paolo's account; but Paolo's ideas were limited, and a few well-filled

shelves seemed a very large collection to him. His master frequently

sent him to the Public Library for books, which somewhat enlarged his

notions; still, the Signor was a very learned man, he was certain, and

some of his white books (bound in vellum and richly gilt) were more

splendid, according to Paolo, than anything in the Library.

There was no little curiosity to know what were the books that Maurice

was in the habit of taking out, and the Librarian's record was carefully

searched by some of the more inquisitive investigators. The list proved

to be a long and varied one. It would imply a considerable knowledge of

modern languages and of the classics; a liking for mathematics and

physics, especially all that related to electricity and magnetism; a

fancy for the occult sciences, if there is any propriety in coupling

these words; and a whim for odd and obsolete literature, like the

Parthenologia of Fortunius Licetus, the quaint treatise 'De

Sternutatione,' books about alchemy, and witchcraft, apparitions, and

modern works relating to Spiritualism. With these were the titles of

novels and now and then of books of poems; but it may be taken for

granted that his own shelves held the works he was most frequently in the

habit of reading or consulting. Not much was to be made out of this

beyond the fact of wide scholarship,--more or less deep it might be, but

at any rate implying no small mental activity; for he appeared to read

very rapidly, at any rate exchanged the books he had taken out for new

ones very frequently. To judge by his reading, he was a man of letters.

But so wide-reading a man of letters must have an object, a literary

purpose in all probability. Why should not he be writing a novel? Not a

novel of society, assuredly, for a hermit is not the person to report the

talk and manners of a world which he has nothing to do with. Novelists

and lawyers understand the art of "cramming" better than any other

persons in the world. Why should not this young man be working up the

picturesque in this romantic region to serve as a background for some

story with magic, perhaps, and mysticism, and hints borrowed from

science, and all sorts of out-of-the-way knowledge which his odd and

miscellaneous selection of books furnished him? That might be, or

possibly he was only reading for amusement. Who could say?

The funds of the Public Library of Arrowhead Village allowed the managers

to purchase many books out of the common range of reading. The two

learned people of the village were the rector and the doctor. These two

worthies kept up the old controversy between the professions, which grows

out of the fact that one studies nature from below upwards, and the other

from above downwards. The rector maintained that physicians contracted a

squint which turns their eyes inwardly, while the muscles which roll

their eyes upward become palsied. The doctor retorted that theological

students developed a third eyelid,--the nictitating membrane, which is so

well known in birds, and which serves to shut out, not all light, but all

the light they do not want. Their little skirmishes did not prevent

their being very good friends, who had a common interest in many things

and many persons. Both were on the committee which had the care of the

Library and attended to the purchase of books. Each was scholar enough

to know the wants of scholars, and disposed to trust the judgment of the

other as to what books should be purchased. Consequently, the clergyman

secured the addition to the Library of a good many old theological works

which the physician would have called brimstone divinity, and held to be

just the thing to kindle fires with,--good books still for those who know

how to use them, oftentimes as awful examples of the extreme of

disorganization the whole moral system may undergo when a barbarous

belief has strangled the natural human instincts. The physician, in the

mean time, acquired for the collection some of those medical works where

one may find recorded various rare and almost incredible cases, which may

not have their like for a whole century, and then repeat themselves, so

as to give a new lease of credibility to stories which had come to be

looked upon as fables.

Both the clergyman and the physician took a very natural interest in the

young man who had come to reside in their neighborhood for the present,

perhaps for a long period. The rector would have been glad to see him at

church. He would have liked more especially to have had him hear his

sermon on the Duties of Young Men to Society. The doctor, meanwhile, was

meditating on the duties of society to young men, and wishing that he

could gain the young man's confidence, so as to help him out of any false

habit of mind or any delusion to which he might be subject, if he had the

power of being useful to him.

Dr. Butts was the leading medical practitioner, not only of Arrowhead

Village, but of all the surrounding region. He was an excellent specimen

of the country doctor, self-reliant, self-sacrificing, working a great

deal harder for his living than most of those who call themselves the

laboring classes,--as if none but those whose hands were hardened by the

use of farming or mechanical implements had any work to do. He had that

sagacity without which learning is a mere incumbrance, and he had also a

fair share of that learning without which sagacity is like a traveller

with a good horse, but who cannot read the directions on the guideboards.

He was not a man to be taken in by names. He well knew that oftentimes

very innocent-sounding words mean very grave disorders; that all, degrees

of disease and disorder are frequently confounded under the same term;

that "run down" may stand for a fatigue of mind or body from which a week

or a month of rest will completely restore the over-worked patient, or an

advanced stage of a mortal illness; that "seedy" may signify the

morning's state of feeling, after an evening's over-indulgence, which

calls for a glass of soda-water and a cup of coffee, or a dangerous

malady which will pack off the subject of it, at the shortest notice, to

the south of France. He knew too well that what is spoken lightly of as

a "nervous disturbance" may imply that the whole machinery of life is in

a deranged condition, and that every individual organ would groan aloud

if it had any other language than the terrible inarticulate one of pain

by which to communicate with the consciousness.

When, therefore, Dr. Butts heard the word antipatia he did not smile, and

say to himself that this was an idle whim, a foolish fancy, which the

young man had got into his head. Neither was he satisfied to set down

everything to the account of insanity, plausible as that supposition

might seem. He was prepared to believe in some exceptional, perhaps

anomalous, form of exaggerated sensibility, relating to what class of

objects he could not at present conjecture, but which was as vital to the

subject of it as the insulating arrangement to a piece of electrical

machinery. With this feeling he began to look into the history of

antipathies as recorded in all the books and journals on which he could

lay his hands.

------------------------------

The holder of the Portfolio asks leave to close it for a brief interval.

He wishes to say a few words to his readers, before offering them some

verses which have no connection with the narrative now in progress.

If one could have before him a set of photographs taken annually,

representing the same person as he or she appeared for thirty or forty or

fifty years, it would be interesting to watch the gradual changes of

aspect from the age of twenty, or even of thirty or forty, to that of

threescore and ten. The face might be an uninteresting one; still, as

sharing the inevitable changes wrought by time, it would be worth looking

at as it passed through the curve of life,--the vital parabola, which

betrays itself in the symbolic changes of the features. An inscription

is the same thing, whether we read it on slate-stone, or granite, or

marble. To watch the lights and shades, the reliefs and hollows, of a

countenance through a lifetime, or a large part of it, by the aid of a

continuous series of photographs would not only be curious; it would

teach us much more about the laws of physiognomy than we could get from

casual and unconnected observations.

The same kind of interest, without any assumption of merit to be found in

them, I would claim for a series of annual poems, beginning in middle

life and continued to what many of my correspondents are pleased to

remind me--as if I required to have the fact brought to my knowledge--is

no longer youth. Here is the latest of a series of annual poems read

during the last thirty-four years. There seems to have been one

interruption, but there may have been other poems not recorded or

remembered. This, the latest poem of the series, was listened to by the

scanty remnant of what was a large and brilliant circle of classmates and

friends when the first of the long series was read before them, then in

the flush of ardent manhood:--

THE OLD SONG.

The minstrel of the classic lay

Of love and wine who sings

Still found the fingers run astray

That touched the rebel strings.

Of Cadmus he would fair have sung,

Of Atreus and his line;

But all the jocund echoes rung

With songs of love and wine.

Ah, brothers! I would fair have caught

Some fresher fancy's gleam;

My truant accents find, unsought,

The old familiar theme.

Love, Love! but not the sportive child

With shaft and twanging bow,

Whose random arrows drove us wild

Some threescore years ago;

Not Eros, with his joyous laugh,

The urchin blind and bare,

But Love, with spectacles and staff,

And scanty, silvered hair.

Our heads with frosted locks are white,

Our roofs are thatched with snow,

But red, in chilling winter's spite,

Our hearts and hearthstones glow.

Our old acquaintance, Time, drops in,

And while the running sands

Their golden thread unheeded spin,

He warms his frozen hands.

Stay, winged hours, too swift, too sweet,

And waft this message o'er

To all we miss, from all we meet

On life's fast-crumbling shore:

Say that to old affection true

We hug the narrowing chain

That binds our hearts,--alas, how few

The links that yet remain!

The fatal touch awaits them all

That turns the rocks to dust;

From year to year they break and fall,

They break, but never rust.

Say if one note of happier strain

This worn-out harp afford,

--One throb that trembles, not in vain,

Their memory lent its chord.

Say that when Fancy closed her wings

And Passion quenched his fire,

Love, Love, still echoed from the strings

As from Anacreon's lyre!

January 8, 1885.

VII

A RECORD OF ANTIPATHIES

In thinking the whole matter over, Dr. Butts felt convinced that, with

care and patience and watching his opportunity, he should get at the

secret, which so far bad yielded nothing but a single word. It might be

asked why he was so anxious to learn what, from all appearances, the

young stranger was unwilling to explain. He may have been to some extent

infected by the general curiosity of the persons around him, in which

good Mrs. Butts shared, and which she had helped to intensify by

revealing the word dropped by Paolo. But this was not really his chief

motive. He could not look upon this young man, living a life of

unwholesome solitude, without a natural desire to do all that his science

and his knowledge of human nature could help him to do towards bringing

him into healthy relations with the world about him. Still, he would not

intrude upon him in any way. He would only make certain general

investigations, which might prove serviceable in case circumstances

should give him the right to counsel the young man as to his course of

life. The first thing to be done was to study systematically the whole

subject of antipathies. Then, if any further occasion offered itself, he

would be ready to take advantage of it. The resources of the Public

Library of the place and his own private collection were put in

requisition to furnish him the singular and widely scattered facts of

which he was in search.

It is not every reader who will care to follow Dr. Butts in his study of

the natural history of antipathies. The stories told about them are,

however, very curious; and if some of them may be questioned, there is no

doubt that many of the strangest are true, and consequently take away

from the improbability of others which we are disposed to doubt.

But in the first place, what do we mean by an antipathy? It is an

aversion to some object, which may vary in degree from mere dislike to

mortal horror. What the cause of this aversion is we cannot say. It acts

sometimes through the senses, sometimes through the imagination,

sometimes through an unknown channel. The relations which exist between

the human being and all that surrounds him vary in consequence of some

adjustment peculiar to each individual. The brute fact is expressed in

the phrase "One man's meat is another man's poison."

In studying the history of antipathies the doctor began with those

referable to the sense of taste, which are among the most common. In any

collection of a hundred persons there will be found those who cannot make

use of certain articles of food generally acceptable. This may be from

the disgust they occasion or the effects they have been found to produce.

Every one knows individuals who cannot venture on honey, or cheese, or

veal, with impunity. Carlyle, for example, complains of having veal set

before him,--a meat he could not endure. There is a whole family

connection in New England, and that a very famous one, to many of whose

members, in different generations, all the products of the dairy are the

subjects of a congenital antipathy. Montaigne says there are persons who

dread the smell of apples more than they would dread being exposed to a

fire of musketry. The readers of the charming story "A Week in a French

Country-House" will remember poor Monsieur Jacque's piteous cry in the

night: "Ursula, art thou asleep? Oh, Ursula, thou sleepest, but I cannot

close my eyes. Dearest Ursula, there is such a dreadful smell! Oh,

Ursula, it is such a smell! I do so wish thou couldst smell it!

Good-night, my angel!----Dearest! I have found them! They are apples!"

The smell of roses, of peonies, of lilies, has been known to cause

faintness. The sight of various objects has had singular effects on some

persons. A boar's head was a favorite dish at the table of great people

in Marshal d'Albret's time; yet he used to faint at the sight of one. It

is not uncommon to meet with persons who faint at the sight of blood.

One of the most inveterately pugnacious of Dr. Butts's college-mates

confessed that he had this infirmity. Stranger and far more awkward than

this is the case mentioned in an ancient collection, where the subject of

the antipathy fainted at the sight of any object of a red color. There

are sounds, also, which have strange effects on some individuals. Among

the obnoxious noises are the crumpling of silk stuffs, the sound of

sweeping, the croaking of frogs. The effects in different cases have

been spasms, a sense of strangling, profuse sweating,--all showing a

profound disturbance of the nervous system.

All these effects were produced by impressions on the organs of sense,

seemingly by direct agency on certain nerve centres. But there is

another series of cases in which the imagination plays a larger part in

the phenomena. Two notable examples are afforded in the lives of two

very distinguished personages.

Peter the Great was frightened, when an infant, by falling from a bridge

into the water. Long afterward, when he had reached manhood, this hardy

and resolute man was so affected by the sound of wheels rattling over a

bridge that he had to discipline himself by listening to the sound, in

spite of his dread of it, in order to overcome his antipathy. The story

told by Abbe Boileau of Pascal is very similar to that related of Peter.

As he was driving in his coach and four over the bridge at Neuilly, his

horses took fright and ran away, and the leaders broke from their harness

and sprang into the river, leaving the wheel-horses and the carriage on

the bridge. Ever after this fright it is said that Pascal had the

terrifying sense that he was just on the edge of an abyss, ready to fall

over.

What strange early impression was it which led a certain lady always to

shriek aloud if she ventured to enter a church, as it is recorded? The

old and simple way of accounting for it would be the scriptural one, that

it was an unclean spirit who dwelt in her, and who, when she entered the

holy place and brought her spiritual tenant into the presence of the

sacred symbols, "cried with a loud voice, and came out of" her. A very

singular case, the doctor himself had recorded, and which the reader may

accept as authentic, is the following: At the head of the doctor's front

stairs stood, and still stands, a tall clock, of early date and stately

presence. A middle-aged visitor, noticing it as he entered the front

door, remarked that he should feel a great unwillingness to pass that

clock. He could not go near one of those tall timepieces without a

profound agitation, which he dreaded to undergo. This very singular

idiosyncrasy he attributed to a fright when he was an infant in the arms

of his nurse.

She was standing near one of those tall clocks, when the cord which

supported one of its heavy leaden weights broke, and the weight came

crashing down to the bottom of the case. Some effect must have been

produced upon the pulpy nerve centres from which they never recovered.

Why should not this happen, when we know that a sudden mental shock may

be the cause of insanity? The doctor remembered the verse of "The

Ancient Mariner:"

"I moved my lips; the pilot shrieked

And fell down in a fit;

The holy hermit raised his eyes

And prayed where he did sit.

I took the oars; the pilot's boy,

Who now doth crazy go,

Laughed loud and long, and all the while

His eyes went to and fro."

This is only poetry, it is true, but the poet borrowed the description

from nature, and the records of our asylums could furnish many cases

where insanity was caused by a sudden fright.

More than this, hardly a year passes that we do not read of some person,

a child commonly, killed outright by terror,--scared to death, literally.

Sad cases they often are, in which, nothing but a surprise being

intended, the shock has instantly arrested the movements on which life

depends. If a mere instantaneous impression can produce effects like

these, such an impression might of course be followed by consequences

less fatal or formidable, but yet serious in their nature. If here and

there a person is killed, as if by lightning, by a sudden startling sight

or sound, there must be more numerous cases in which a terrible shock is

produced by similar apparently insignificant causes,--a shock which falls

short of overthrowing the reason and does not destroy life, yet leaves a

lasting effect upon the subject of it.

This point, then, was settled in the mind of Dr. Butts, namely, that, as

a violent emotion caused by a sudden shock can kill or craze a human

being, there is no perversion of the faculties, no prejudice, no change

of taste or temper, no eccentricity, no antipathy, which such a cause may

not rationally account for. He would not be surprised, he said to

himself, to find that some early alarm, like that which was experienced

by Peter the Great or that which happened to Pascal, had broken some

spring in this young man's nature, or so changed its mode of action as to

account for the exceptional remoteness of his way of life. But how could

any conceivable antipathy be so comprehensive as to keep a young man

aloof from all the world, and make a hermit of him? He did not hate the

human race; that was clear enough. He treated Paolo with great kindness,

and the Italian was evidently much attached to him. He had talked

naturally and pleasantly with the young man he had helped out of his

dangerous situation when his boat was upset. Dr. Butts heard that he had

once made a short visit to this young man, at his rooms in the

University. It was not misanthropy, therefore, which kept him solitary.

What could be broad enough to cover the facts of the case? Nothing that

the doctor could think of, unless it were some color, the sight of which

acted on him as it did on the individual before mentioned, who could not

look at anything red without fainting. Suppose this were a case of the

same antipathy. How very careful it would make the subject of it as to

where he went and with whom he consorted! Time and patience would be

pretty sure to bring out new developments, and physicians, of all men in

the world, know how to wait as well as how to labor.

Such were some of the crude facts as Dr. Butts found them in books or

gathered them from his own experience. He soon discovered that the story

had got about the village that Maurice Kirkwood was the victim of an

"antipathy," whatever that word might mean in the vocabulary of the

people of the place. If he suspected the channel through which it had

reached the little community, and, spreading from that centre, the

country round, he did not see fit to make out of his suspicions a

domestic casus belli. Paolo might have mentioned it to others as well as

to himself. Maurice might have told some friend, who had divulged it.

But to accuse Mrs. Butts, good Mrs. Butts, of petit treason in telling

one of her husband's professional secrets was too serious a matter to be

thought of. He would be a little more careful, he promised himself, the

next time, at any rate; for he had to concede, in spite of every wish to

be charitable in his judgment, that it was among the possibilities that

the worthy lady had forgotten the rule that a doctor's patients must put

their tongues out, and a doctor's wife must keep her tongue in.

VIII

THE PANSOPHIAN SOCIETY.

The Secretary of this association was getting somewhat tired of the

office, and the office was getting somewhat tired of him. It occurred to

the members of the Society that a little fresh blood infused into it

might stir up the general vitality of the organization. The woman

suffragists saw no reason why the place of Secretary need as a matter of

course be filled by a person of the male sex. They agitated, they made

domiciliary visits, they wrote notes to influential citizens, and finally

announced as their candidate the young lady who had won and worn the

school name of "The Terror," who was elected. She was just the person

for the place: wide awake, with all her wits about her, full of every

kind of knowledge, and, above all, strong on points of order and details

of management, so that she could prompt the presiding officer, to do

which is often the most essential duty of a Secretary. The President,

the worthy rector, was good at plain sailing in the track of the common

moralities and proprieties, but was liable to get muddled if anything

came up requiring swift decision and off-hand speech. The Terror had

schooled herself in the debating societies of the Institute, and would

set up the President, when he was floored by an awkward question, as

easily as if he were a ninepin which had been bowled over.

It has been already mentioned that the Pansophian Society received

communications from time to time from writers outside of its own

organization. Of late these had been becoming more frequent. Many of

them were sent in anonymously, and as there were numerous visitors to the

village, and two institutions not far removed from it, both full of

ambitious and intelligent young persons, it was often impossible to trace

the papers to their authors. The new Secretary was alive with curiosity,

and as sagacious a little body as one might find if in want of a

detective. She could make a pretty shrewd guess whether a paper was

written by a young or old person, by one of her own sex or the other, by

an experienced hand or a novice.

Among the anonymous papers she received was one which exercised her

curiosity to an extraordinary degree. She felt a strong suspicion that

"the Sachem," as the boat-crews used to call him, "the Recluse," "the

Night-Hawk," "the Sphinx," as others named him, must be the author of it.

It appeared to her the production of a young person of a reflective,

poetical turn of mind. It was not a woman's way of writing; at least, so

thought the Secretary. The writer had travelled much; had resided in

Italy, among other places. But so had many of the summer visitors and

residents of Arrowhead Village. The handwriting was not decisive; it had

some points of resemblance with the pencilled orders for books which

Maurice sent to the Library, but there were certain differences,

intentional or accidental, which weakened this evidence. There was an

undertone in the essay which was in keeping with the mode of life of the

solitary stranger. It might be disappointment, melancholy, or only the

dreamy sadness of a young person who sees the future he is to climb, not

as a smooth ascent, but as overhanging him like a cliff, ready to crush

him, with all his hopes and prospects. This interpretation may have been

too imaginative, but here is the paper, and the reader can form his own

opinion:

MY THREE COMPANIONS.

"I have been from my youth upwards a wanderer. I do not mean constantly

flitting from one place to another, for my residence has often been fixed

for considerable periods. From time to time I have put down in a

notebook the impressions made upon me by the scenes through which I have

passed. I have long hesitated whether to let any of my notes appear

before the public. My fear has been that they were too subjective, to

use the metaphysician's term,--that I have seen myself reflected in

Nature, and not the true aspects of Nature as she was meant to be

understood. One who should visit the Harz Mountains would see--might

see, rather his own colossal image shape itself on the morning mist. But

if in every mist that rises from the meadows, in every cloud that hangs

upon the mountain, he always finds his own reflection, we cannot accept

him as an interpreter of the landscape.

"There must be many persons present at the meetings of the Society to

which this paper is offered who have had experiences like that of its

author. They have visited the same localities, they have had many of the

same thoughts and feelings. Many, I have no doubt. Not all,--no, not

all. Others have sought the companionship of Nature; I have been driven

to it. Much of my life has been passed in that communion. These pages

record some of the intimacies I have formed with her under some of her

various manifestations.

"I have lived on the shore of the great ocean, where its waves broke

wildest and its voice rose loudest.

"I have passed whole seasons on the banks of mighty and famous rivers.

"I have dwelt on the margin of a tranquil lake, and floated through many

a long, long summer day on its clear waters.

"I have learned the 'various language' of Nature, of which poetry has

spoken,--at least, I have learned some words and phrases of it. I will

translate some of these as I best may into common speech.

"The OCEAN says to the dweller on its shores:--

"You are neither welcome nor unwelcome. I do not trouble myself with the

living tribes that come down to my waters. I have my own people, of an

older race than yours, that grow to mightier dimensions than your

mastodons and elephants; more numerous than all the swarms that fill the

air or move over the thin crust of the earth. Who are you that build

your palaces on my margin? I see your white faces as I saw the dark

faces of the tribes that came before you, as I shall look upon the

unknown family of mankind that will come after you. And what is your

whole human family but a parenthesis in a single page of my history? The

raindrops stereotyped themselves on my beaches before a living creature

left his footprints there. This horseshoe-crab I fling at your feet is

of older lineage than your Adam,--perhaps, indeed, you count your Adam as

one of his descendants. What feeling have I for you? Not scorn, not

hatred,--not love,--not loathing. No!---indifference,--blank

indifference to you and your affairs that is my feeling, say rather

absence of feeling, as regards you.---Oh yes, I will lap your feet, I

will cool you in the hot summer days, I will bear you up in my strong

arms, I will rock you on my rolling undulations, like a babe in his

cradle. Am I not gentle? Am I not kind? Am I not harmless? But hark!

The wind is rising, and the wind and I are rough playmates! What do you

say to my voice now? Do you see my foaming lips? Do you feel the rocks

tremble as my huge billows crash against them? Is not my anger terrible

as I dash your argosy, your thunder-bearing frigate, into fragments, as

you would crack an eggshell?--No, not anger; deaf, blind, unheeding

indifference,--that is all. Out of me all things arose; sooner or later,

into me all things subside. All changes around me; I change not. I look

not at you, vain man, and your frail transitory concerns, save in

momentary glimpses: I look on the white face of my dead mistress, whom I

follow as the bridegroom follows the bier of her who has changed her

nuptial raiment for the shroud.

"Ye whose thoughts are of eternity, come dwell at my side. Continents and

islands grow old, and waste and disappear. The hardest rock crumbles;

vegetable and animal kingdoms come into being, wax great, decline, and

perish, to give way to others, even as human dynasties and nations and

races come and go. Look on me! "Time writes no wrinkle" on my forehead.

Listen to me! All tongues are spoken on my shores, but I have only one

language: the winds taught me their vowels the crags and the sands

schooled me in my rough or smooth consonants. Few words are mine but I

have whispered them and sung them and shouted them to men of all tribes

from the time when the first wild wanderer strayed into my awful

presence. Have you a grief that gnaws at your heart-strings? Come with

it to my shore, as of old the priest of far-darting Apollo carried his

rage and anguish to the margin of the loud-roaring sea. There, if

anywhere you will forget your private and short-lived woe, for my voice

speaks to the infinite and the eternal in your consciousness.

"To him who loves the pages of human history, who listens to the voices

of the world about him, who frequents the market and the thoroughfare,

who lives in the study of time and its accidents rather than in the

deeper emotions, in abstract speculation and spiritual contemplation, the

RIVER addresses itself as his natural companion.

"Come live with me. I am active, cheerful, communicative, a natural

talker and story-teller. I am not noisy, like the ocean, except

occasionally when I am rudely interrupted, or when I stumble and get a

fall. When I am silent you can still have pleasure in watching my

changing features. My idlest babble, when I am toying with the trifles

that fall in my way, if not very full of meaning, is at least musical. I

am not a dangerous friend, like the ocean; no highway is absolutely safe,

but my nature is harmless, and the storms that strew the beaches with

wrecks cast no ruins upon my flowery borders. Abide with me, and you

shall not die of thirst, like the forlorn wretches left to the mercies of

the pitiless salt waves. Trust yourself to me, and I will carry you far

on your journey, if we are travelling to the same point of the compass.

If I sometimes run riot and overflow your meadows, I leave fertility

behind me when I withdraw to my natural channel. Walk by my side toward

the place of my destination. I will keep pace with you, and you shall

feel my presence with you as that of a self-conscious being like

yourself. You will find it hard to be miserable in my company; I drain

you of ill-conditioned thoughts as I carry away the refuse of your

dwelling and its grounds."

But to him whom the ocean chills and crushes with its sullen

indifference, and the river disturbs with its never-pausing and

never-ending story, the silent LAKE shall be a refuge and a place of rest

for his soul.

"'Vex not yourself with thoughts too vast for your limited faculties,' it

says; 'yield not yourself to the babble of the running stream. Leave the

ocean, which cares nothing for you or any living thing that walks the

solid earth; leave the river, too busy with its own errand, too talkative

about its own affairs, and find peace with me, whose smile will cheer

you, whose whisper will soothe you. Come to me when the morning sun

blazes across my bosom like a golden baldric; come to me in the still

midnight, when I hold the inverted firmament like a cup brimming with

jewels, nor spill one star of all the constellations that float in my

ebon goblet. Do you know the charm of melancholy? Where will you find a

sympathy like mine in your hours of sadness? Does the ocean share your

grief? Does the river listen to your sighs? The salt wave, that called

to you from under last month's full moon, to-day is dashing on the rocks

of Labrador; the stream, that ran by you pure and sparkling, has

swallowed the poisonous refuse of a great city, and is creeping to its

grave in the wide cemetery that buries all things in its tomb of liquid

crystal. It is true that my waters exhale and are renewed from one

season to another; but are your features the same, absolutely the same,

from year to year? We both change, but we know each other through all

changes. Am I not mirrored in those eyes of yours? And does not Nature

plant me as an eye to behold her beauties while she is dressed in the

glories of leaf and flower, and draw the icy lid over my shining surface

when she stands naked and ashamed in the poverty of winter?'

"I have had strange experiences and sad thoughts in the course of a life

not very long, but with a record which much longer lives could not match

in incident. Oftentimes the temptation has come over me with dangerous

urgency to try a change of existence, if such change is a part of human

destiny,--to seek rest, if that is what we gain by laying down the burden

of life. I have asked who would be the friend to whom I should appeal

for the last service I should have need of. Ocean was there, all ready,

asking no questions, answering none. What strange voyages, downward

through its glaucous depths, upwards to its boiling and frothing surface,

wafted by tides, driven by tempests, disparted by rude agencies; one

remnant whitening on the sands of a northern beach, one perhaps built

into the circle of a coral reef in the Pacific, one settling to the floor

of the vast laboratory where continents are built, to emerge in far-off

ages! What strange companions for my pall-bearers! Unwieldy

sea-monsters, the stories of which are counted fables by the spectacled

collectors who think their catalogues have exhausted nature; naked-eyed

creatures, staring, glaring, nightmare-like spectres of the ghastly-green

abysses; pulpy islands, with life in gelatinous immensity,--what a

company of hungry heirs at every ocean funeral! No! No! Ocean claims

great multitudes, but does not invite the solitary who would fain be rid

of himself.

"Shall I seek a deeper slumber at the bottom of the lake I love than I

have ever found when drifting idly over its surface? No, again. I do

not want the sweet, clear waters to know me in the disgrace of nature,

when life, the faithful body-servant, has ceased caring for me. That

must not be. The mirror which has pictured me so often shall never know

me as an unwelcome object.

"If I must ask the all-subduing element to be my last friend, and lead me

out of my prison, it shall be the busy, whispering, not unfriendly,

pleasantly companionable river.

"But Ocean and River and Lake have certain relations to the periods of

human life which they who are choosing their places of abode should

consider. Let the child play upon the seashore. The wide horizon gives

his imagination room to grow in, untrammelled. That background of

mystery, without which life is a poor mechanical arrangement, is shaped

and colored, so far as it can have outline, or any hue but shadow, on a

vast canvas, the contemplation of which enlarges and enriches the sphere

of consciousness. The mighty ocean is not too huge to symbolize the

aspirations and ambitions of the yet untried soul of the adolescent.

"The time will come when his indefinite mental horizon has found a solid

limit, which shuts his prospect in narrower bounds than he would have

thought could content him in the years of undefined possibilities. Then

he will find the river a more natural intimate than the ocean. It is

individual, which the ocean, with all its gulfs and inlets and

multitudinous shores, hardly seems to be. It does not love you very

dearly, and will not miss you much when you disappear from its margin;

but it means well to you, bids you good-morning with its coming waves,

and good-evening with those which are leaving. It will lead your

thoughts pleasantly away, upwards to its source, downwards to the stream

to which it is tributary, or the wide waters in which it is to lose

itself. A river, by choice, to live by in middle age.

"In hours of melancholy reflection, in those last years of life which

have little left but tender memories, the still companionship of the

lake, embosomed in woods, sheltered, fed by sweet mountain brooks and

hidden springs, commends itself to the wearied and saddened spirit. I am

not thinking of those great inland seas, which have many of the features

and much of the danger that belong to the ocean, but of those 'ponds,' as

our countrymen used to call them until they were rechristened by summer

visitors; beautiful sheets of water from a hundred to a few thousand

acres in extent, scattered like raindrops over the map of our Northern

sovereignties. The loneliness of contemplative old age finds its natural

home in the near neighborhood of one of these tranquil basins."

Nature does not always plant her poets where they belong, but if we look

carefully their affinities betray themselves. The youth will carry his

Byron to the rock which overlooks the ocean the poet loved so well. The

man of maturer years will remember that the sonorous couplets of Pope

which ring in his ears were written on the banks of the Thames. The old

man, as he nods over the solemn verse of Wordsworth, will recognize the

affinity between the singer and the calm sheet that lay before him as he

wrote,--the stainless and sleepy Windermere.

"The dwellers by Cedar Lake may find it an amusement to compare their own

feelings with those of one who has lived by the Atlantic and the

Mediterranean, by the Nile and the Tiber, by Lake Leman and by one of the

fairest sheets of water that our own North America embosoms in its

forests."

Miss Lurida Vincent, Secretary of the Pansophian Society, read this

paper, and pondered long upon it. She was thinking very seriously of

studying medicine, and had been for some time in frequent communication

with Dr. Butts, under whose direction she had begun reading certain

treatises, which added to such knowledge of the laws of life in health

and in disease as she had brought with her from the Corinna Institute.

Naturally enough, she carried the anonymous paper to the doctor, to get

his opinion about it, and compare it with her own. They both agreed that

it was probably, they would not say certainly, the work of the solitary

visitor. There was room for doubt, for there were visitors who might

well have travelled to all the places mentioned, and resided long enough

on the shores of the waters the writer spoke of to have had all the

experiences mentioned in the paper. The Terror remembered a young lady,

a former schoolmate, who belonged to one of those nomadic families common

in this generation, the heads of which, especially the female heads, can

never be easy where they are, but keep going between America and Europe,

like so many pith-balls in the electrical experiment, alternately

attracted and repelled, never in contented equilibrium. Every few years

they pull their families up by the roots, and by the time they have begun

to take hold a little with their radicles in the spots to which they have

been successively transplanted up they come again, so that they never get

a tap-root anywhere. The Terror suspected the daughter of one of these

families of sending certain anonymous articles of not dissimilar

character to the one she had just received. But she knew the style of

composition common among the young girls, and she could hardly believe

that it was one of them who had sent this paper. Could a brother of this

young lady have written it? Possibly; she knew nothing more than that

the young lady had a brother, then a student at the University. All the

chances were that Mr. Maurice Kirkwood was the author. So thought

Lurida, and so thought Dr. Butts.

Whatever faults there were in this essay, it interested them both. There

was nothing which gave the least reason to suspect insanity on the part

of the writer, whoever he or she might be. There were references to

suicide, it is true, but they were of a purely speculative nature, and

did not look to any practical purpose in that direction. Besides, if the

stranger were the author of the paper, he certainly would not choose a

sheet of water like Cedar Lake to perform the last offices for him, in

case he seriously meditated taking unceremonious leave of life and its

accidents. He could find a river easily enough, to say nothing of other

methods of effecting his purpose; but he had committed himself as to the

impropriety of selecting a lake, so they need not be anxious about the

white canoe and its occupant, as they watched it skimming the surface of

the deep waters.

The holder of the Portfolio would never have ventured to come before the

public if he had not counted among his resources certain papers belonging

to the records of the Pansophian Society, which he can make free use of,

either for the illustration of the narrative, or for a diversion during

those intervals in which the flow of events is languid, or even ceases

for the time to manifest any progress. The reader can hardly have failed

to notice that the old Anchor Tavern had become the focal point where a

good deal of mental activity converged. There were the village people,

including a number of cultivated families; there were the visitors, among

them many accomplished and widely travelled persons; there was the

University, with its learned teachers and aspiring young men; there was

the Corinna Institute, with its eager, ambitious, hungry-souled young

women, crowding on, class after class coming forward on the broad stream

of liberal culture, and rounding the point which, once passed, the

boundless possibilities of womanhood opened before them. All this

furnished material enough and to spare for the records and the archives

of the society.

The new Secretary infused fresh life into the meetings. It may be

remembered that the girls had said of her, when she was The Terror, that

"she knew everything and didn't believe anything." That was just the

kind of person for a secretary of such an association. Properly

interpreted, the saying meant that she knew a great deal, and wanted to

know a great deal more, and was consequently always on the lookout for

information; that she believed nothing without sufficient proof that it

was true, and therefore was perpetually asking for evidence where, others

took assertions on trust.

It was astonishing to see what one little creature like The Terror could

accomplish in the course of a single season. She found out what each

member could do and wanted to do. She wrote to the outside visitors whom

she suspected of capacity, and urged them to speak at the meetings, or

send written papers to be read. As an official, with the printed title

at the head of her notes, PANSOPHIAN SOCIETY, she was a privileged

personage. She begged the young persons who had travelled to tell

something of their experiences. She had contemplated getting up a

discussion on the woman's rights question, but being a wary little body,

and knowing that the debate would become a dispute and divide the members

into two hostile camps, she deferred this project indefinitely. It would

be time enough after she had her team well in hand, she said to

herself,--had felt their mouths and tried their paces. This expression,

as she used it in her thoughts, seems rather foreign to her habits, but

there was room in her large brain for a wide range of illustrations and

an ample vocabulary. She could not do much with her own muscles, but she

had known the passionate delight of being whirled furiously over the road

behind four scampering horses, in a rocking stage-coach, and thought of

herself in the Secretary's chair as not unlike the driver on his box. A

few weeks of rest had allowed her nervous energy to store itself up, and

the same powers which had distanced competition in the classes of her

school had of necessity to expend themselves in vigorous action in her

new office.

Her appeals had their effect. A number of papers were very soon sent in;

some with names, some anonymously. She looked these papers over, and

marked those which she thought would be worth reading and listening to at

the meetings. One of them has just been presented to the reader. As to

the authorship of the following one there were many conjectures. A

well-known writer, who had spent some weeks at Arrowhead Village, was

generally suspected of being its author. Some, however, questioned

whether it was not the work of a new hand, who wrote, not from

experience, but from his or her ideas of the condition to which a

story-teller, a novelist, must in all probability be sooner or later

reduced. The reader must judge for himself whether this first paper is

the work of an old hand or a novice.

SOME EXPERIENCES OF A NOVELIST.

"I have written a frightful number of stories, forty or more, I think.

Let me see. For twelve years two novels a year regularly: that makes

twenty-four. In three different years I have written three

stories annually: that makes thirty-three. In five years one a

year,--thirty-eight. That is all, is n't it? Yes. Thirty-eight, not

forty. I wish I could make them all into one composite story, as Mr.

Galton does his faces.

"Hero--heroine--mamma--papa--uncle--sister, and so on. Love

--obstacles--misery--tears--despair--glimmer of hope--unexpected solution

of difficulties--happy finale.

"Landscape for background according to season. Plants of each month got

up from botanical calendars.

"I should like much to see the composite novel. Why not apply Mr.

Galton's process, and get thirty-eight stories all in one? All the

Yankees would resolve into one Yankee, all the P----West Britons into one

Patrick, etc., what a saving of time it would be!

"I got along pretty well with my first few stories. I had some

characters around me which, a little disguised, answered well enough.

There was the minister of the parish, and there was an old schoolmaster

either of them served very satisfactorily for grandfathers and old

uncles. All I had to do was to shift some of their leading

peculiarities, keeping the rest. The old minister wore knee-breeches. I

clapped them on to the schoolmaster. The schoolmaster carried a tall

gold-headed cane. I put this in the minister's hands. So with other

things,--I shifted them round, and got a set of characters who, taken

together, reproduced the chief persons of the village where I lived, but

did not copy any individual exactly. Thus it went on for a while; but by

and by my stock company began to be rather too familiarly known, in spite

of their change of costume, and at last some altogether too sagacious

person published what he called a 'key' to several of my earlier stories,

in which I found the names of a number of neighbors attached to aliases

of my own invention. All the 'types,' as he called them, represented by

these personages of my story had come to be recognized, each as standing

for one and the same individual of my acquaintance. It had been of no

use to change the costume. Even changing the sex did no good. I had a

famous old gossip in one of my tales,--a much-babbling Widow Sertingly.

'Sho!' they all said, that 's old Deacon Spinner, the same he told about

in that other story of his,--only the deacon's got on a petticoat and a

mob-cap,--but it's the same old sixpence.' So I said to myself, I must

have some new characters. I had no trouble with young characters; they

are all pretty much alike,--dark-haired or light-haired, with the outfits

belonging to their complexion, respectively. I had an old great-aunt,

who was a tip-top eccentric. I had never seen anything just like her in

books. So I said, I will have you, old lady, in one of my stories; and,

sure enough, I fitted her out with a first-rate odd-sounding name, which

I got from the directory, and sent her forth to the world, disguised, as

I supposed, beyond the possibility of recognition. The book sold well,

and the eccentric personage was voted a novelty. A few weeks after it

was published a lawyer called upon me, as the agent of the person in the

directory, whose family name I had used, as he maintained, to his and all

his relatives' great damage, wrong, loss, grief, shame, and irreparable

injury, for which the sum of blank thousand dollars would be a modest

compensation. The story made the book sell, but not enough to pay blank

thousand dollars. In the mean time a cousin of mine had sniffed out the

resemblance between the character in my book and our great-aunt. We were

rivals in her good graces. 'Cousin Pansie' spoke to her of my book and

the trouble it was bringing on me,--she was so sorry about it! She liked

my story,--only those personalities, you know. 'What personalities?'

says old granny-aunt. 'Why, auntie, dear, they do say that he has

brought in everybody we know,--did n't anybody tell you about--well,--I

suppose you ought to know it,--did n't anybody tell you you were made fun

of in that novel?' Somebody--no matter who--happened to hear all this,

and told me. She said granny-aunt's withered old face had two red spots

come to it, as if she had been painting her cheeks from a pink saucer.

No, she said, not a pink saucer, but as if they were two coals of fire.

She sent out and got the book, and made her (the somebody that I was

speaking of) read it to her. When she had heard as much as she could

stand,--for 'Cousin Pansie' explained passages to her,--explained, you

know,--she sent for her lawyer, and that same somebody had to be a

witness to a new will she had drawn up. It was not to my advantage.

'Cousin Pansie' got the corner lot where the grocery is, and pretty much

everything else. The old woman left me a legacy. What do you think it

was? An old set of my own books, that looked as if it had been bought

out of a bankrupt circulating library.

"After that I grew more careful. I studied my disguises much more

diligently. But after all, what could I do? Here I was, writing stories

for my living and my reputation. I made a pretty sum enough, and worked

hard enough to earn it. No tale, no money. Then every story that went

from my workshop had to come up to the standard of my reputation, and

there was a set of critics,--there is a set of critics now and

everywhere,--that watch as narrowly for the decline of a man's reputation

as ever a village half drowned out by an inundation watched for the

falling of the waters. The fame I had won, such as it was, seemed to

attend me,--not going before me in the shape of a woman with a trumpet,

but rather following me like one of Actaeon's hounds, his throat open,

ready to pull me down and tear me. What a fierce enemy is that which bays

behind us in the voice of our proudest bygone achievement!

"But, as I said above, what could I do? I must write novels, and I must

have characters. 'Then why not invent them?' asks some novice. Oh, yes!

Invent them! You can invent a human being that in certain aspects of

humanity will answer every purpose for which your invention was intended.

A basket of straw, an old coat and pair of breeches, a hat which has been

soaked, sat upon, stuffed a broken window, and had a brood of chickens

raised in it,--these elements, duly adjusted to each other, will

represent humanity so truthfully that the crows will avoid the cornfield

when your scarecrow displays his personality. Do you think you can make

your heroes and heroines,--nay, even your scrappy supernumeraries,--out

of refuse material, as you made your scarecrow? You can't do it. You

must study living people and reproduce them. And whom do you know so

well as your friends? You will show up your friends, then, one after

another. When your friends give out, who is left for you? Why, nobody

but your own family, of course. When you have used up your family, there

is nothing left for you but to write your autobiography.

"After my experience with my grand-aunt, I be came more cautious, very

naturally. I kept traits of character, but I mixed ages as well as

sexes. In this way I continued to use up a large amount of material,

which looked as if it were as dangerous as dynamite to meddle with. Who

would have expected to meet my maternal uncle in the guise of a

schoolboy? Yet I managed to decant his characteristics as nicely as the

old gentleman would have decanted a bottle of Juno Madeira through that

long siphon which he always used when the most sacred vintages were

summoned from their crypts to render an account of themselves on his

hospitable board. It was a nice business, I confess, but I did it, and I

drink cheerfully to that good uncle's memory in a glass of wine from his

own cellar, which, with many other more important tokens of his good

will, I call my own since his lamented demise.

"I succeeded so well with my uncle that I thought I would try a course of

cousins. I had enough of them to furnish out a whole gallery of

portraits. There was cousin 'Creeshy,' as we called her; Lucretia, more

correctly. She was a cripple. Her left lower limb had had something

happen to it, and she walked with a crutch. Her patience under her trial

was very pathetic and picturesque, so to speak,--I mean adapted to the

tender parts of a story; nothing could work up better in a melting

paragraph. But I could not, of course, describe her particular

infirmity; that would point her out at once. I thought of shifting the

lameness to the right lower limb, but even that would be seen through.

So I gave the young woman that stood for her in my story a lame elbow,

and put her arm in a sling, and made her such a model of uncomplaining

endurance that my grandmother cried over her as if her poor old heart

would break. She cried very easily, my grandmother; in fact, she had

such a gift for tears that I availed myself of it, and if you remember

old Judy, in my novel "Honi Soit" (Honey Sweet, the booksellers called

it),--old Judy, the black-nurse,--that was my grandmother. She had

various other peculiarities, which I brought out one by one, and saddled

on to different characters. You see she was a perfect mine of

singularities and idiosyncrasies. After I had used her up pretty well, I

came dawn upon my poor relations. They were perfectly fair game; what

better use could I put them to? I studied them up very carefully, and as

there were a good many of them I helped myself freely. They lasted me,

with occasional intermissions, I should say, three or four years. I had

to be very careful with my poor relations,--they were as touchy as they

could be; and as I felt bound to send a copy of my novel, whatever it

might be, to each one of them,--there were as many as a dozen,--I took

care to mix their characteristic features, so that, though each might

suspect I meant the other, no one should think I meant him or her. I got

through all my relations at last except my father and mother. I had

treated my brothers and sisters pretty fairly, all except Elisha and

Joanna. The truth is they both had lots of odd ways,--family traits, I

suppose, but were just different enough from each other to figure

separately in two different stories. These two novels made me some

little trouble; for Elisha said he felt sure that I meant Joanna in one

of them, and quarrelled with me about it; and Joanna vowed and declared

that Elnathan, in the other, stood for brother 'Lisha, and that it was a

real mean thing to make fun of folks' own flesh and blood, and treated me

to one of her cries. She was n't handsome when she cried, poor, dear

Joanna; in fact, that was one of the personal traits I had made use of in

the story that Elisha found fault with.

"So as there was nobody left but my father and mother, you see for

yourself I had no choice. There was one great advantage in dealing with

them,--I knew them so thoroughly. One naturally feels a certain delicacy

it handling from a purely artistic point of view persons who have been so

near to him. One's mother, for instance: suppose some of her little ways

were so peculiar that the accurate delineation of them would furnish

amusement to great numbers of readers; it would not be without hesitation

that a writer of delicate sensibility would draw her portrait, with all

its whimsicalities, so plainly that it should be generally recognized.

One's father is commonly of tougher fibre than one's mother, and one

would not feel the same scruples, perhaps, in using him professionally as

material in a novel; still, while you are employing him as bait,--you see

I am honest and plain-spoken, for your characters are baits to catch

readers with,--I would follow kind Izaak Walton's humane counsel about

the frog you are fastening to your fish-hook: fix him artistically, as he

directs, but in so doing I use him as though you loved him.'

"I have at length shown up, in one form and another, all my townsmen who

have anything effective in their bodily or mental make-up, all my

friends, all my relatives; that is, all my blood relatives. It has

occurred to me that I might open a new field in the family connection of

my father-in-law and mother-in-law. We have been thinking of paying them

a visit, and I shall have an admirable opportunity of studying them and

their relatives and visitors. I have long wanted a good chance for

getting acquainted with the social sphere several grades below that to

which I am accustomed, and I have no doubt that I shall find matter for

half a dozen new stories among those connections of mine. Besides, they

live in a Western city, and one doesn't mind much how he cuts up the

people of places he does n't himself live in. I suppose there is not

really so much difference in people's feelings, whether they live in

Bangor or Omaha, but one's nerves can't be expected to stretch across the

continent. It is all a matter of greater or less distance. I read this

morning that a Chinese fleet was sunk, but I did n't think half so much

about it as I did about losing my sleeve button, confound it! People

have accused me of want of feeling; they misunderstand the artist-nature,

--that is all. I obey that implicitly; I am sorry if people don't like

my descriptions, but I have done my best. I have pulled to pieces all

the persons I am acquainted with, and put them together again in my

characters. The quills I write with come from live geese, I would have

you know. I expect to get some first-rate pluckings from those people I

was speaking of, and I mean to begin my thirty-ninth novel as soon as I

have got through my visit."

IX

THE SOCIETY AND ITS NEW SECRETARY.

There is no use in trying to hurry the natural course of events, in a

narrative like this. June passed away, and July, and August had come,

and as yet the enigma which had completely puzzled Arrowhead Village and

its visitors remained unsolved. The white canoe still wandered over the

lake, alone, ghostly, always avoiding the near approach of the boats

which seemed to be coming in its direction. Now and then a circumstance

would happen which helped to keep inquiry alive. Good horsemanship was

not so common among the young men of the place and its neighborhood that

Maurice's accomplishment in that way could be overlooked. If there was a

wicked horse or a wild colt whose owner was afraid of him, he would be

commended to Maurice's attention. Paolo would lead him to his master

with all due precaution,--for he had no idea of risking his neck on the

back of any ill-conditioned beast,--and Maurice would fasten on his long

spurs, spring into the saddle, and very speedily teach the creature good

behavior. There soon got about a story that he was what the fresh-water

fisherman called "one o' them whisperers." It is a common legend enough,

coming from the Old World, but known in American horse-talking circles,

that some persons will whisper certain words in a horse's ear which will

tame him if he is as wild and furious as ever Cruiser was. All this

added to the mystery which surrounded the young man. A single improbable

or absurd story amounts to very little, but when half a dozen such

stories are told about the same individual or the same event, they begin

to produce the effect of credible evidence. If the year had been 1692

and the place had been Salem Village, Maurice Kirkwood would have run the

risk of being treated like the Reverend George Burroughs.

Miss Lurida Vincent's curiosity had been intensely excited with reference

to the young man of whom so many stories were told. She had pretty

nearly convinced herself that he was the author of the paper on Ocean,

Lake, and River, which had been read at one of the meetings of the

Pansophian Society. She was very desirous of meeting him, if it were

possible. It seemed as if she might, as Secretary of the Society,

request the cooperation of any of the visitors, without impropriety. So,

after much deliberation, she wrote a careful note, of which the following

is an exact copy. Her hand was bold, almost masculine, a curious

contrast to that of Euthymia, which was delicately feminine.

PANSOPHIAN SOCIETY.

ARROWHEAD VILLAGE, August 3, 18-.

MAURICE KIRKWOOD, ESQ.

DEAR SIR,--You have received, I trust, a card of invitation to the

meetings of our Society, but I think we have not yet had the pleasure of

seeing you at any of them. We have supposed that we might be indebted to

you for a paper read at the last meeting, and listened to with much

interest. As it was anonymous, we do not wish to be inquisitive

respecting its authorship; but we desire to say that any papers kindly

sent us by the temporary residents of our village will be welcome, and if

adapted to the wants of our Association will be read at one of its

meetings or printed in its records, or perhaps both read and printed.

May we not hope for your presence at the meeting, which is to take place

next Wednesday evening? Respectfully yours,

LURIDA VINCENT, Secretary of the Pansophian Society.

To this note the Secretary received the following reply:

MISS LURIDA VINCENT,

ARROWHEAD VILLAGE, August 4, 18-.

Secretary of the Pansophian Society:

DEAR MISS VINCENT,--I have received the ticket you refer to, and desire

to express my acknowledgments for the polite attention. I regret that I

have not been and I fear shall not be able to attend the meetings of the

Society; but if any subject occurs to me on which I feel an inclination

to write, it will give me pleasure to send a paper, to be disposed of as

the Society may see fit.

Very respectfully yours,

MAURICE KIRKWOOD.

"He says nothing about the authorship of the paper that was read the

other evening," the Secretary said to herself. "No matter,--he wrote

it,--there is no mistaking his handwriting. We know something about him,

now, at any rate. But why doesn't he come to our meetings? What has his

antipathy to do with his staying away? I must find out what his secret

is, and I will. I don't believe it's harder than it was to solve that

prize problem which puzzled so many teachers, or than beating Crakowitz,

the great chess-player."

To this enigma, then, The Terror determined to bend all the faculties

which had excited the admiration and sometimes the amazement of those who

knew her in her school-days. It was a very delicate piece of business;

for though Lurida was an intrepid woman's rights advocate, and believed

she was entitled to do almost everything that men dared to, she knew very

well there were certain limits which a young woman like herself must not

pass.

In the mean time Maurice had received a visit from the young student at

the University,--the same whom he had rescued from his dangerous

predicament in the lake. With him had called one of the teachers,--an

instructor in modern languages, a native of Italy. Maurice and the

instructor exchanged a few words in Italian. The young man spoke it with

the ease which implied long familiarity with its use.

After they left, the instructor asked many curious questions about

him,--who he was, how long he had been in the village, whether anything

was known of his history,--all these inquiries with an eagerness which

implied some special and peculiar reason for the interest they evinced.

"I feel satisfied," the instructor said, "that I have met that young man

in my own country. It was a number of years ago, and of course he has

altered in appearance a good deal; but there is a look about him of--what

shall I call it?---apprehension,--as if he were fearing the approach of

something or somebody. I think it is the way a man would look that was

haunted; you know what I mean,--followed by a spirit or ghost. He does

not suggest the idea of a murderer,--very far from it; but if he did, I

should think he was every minute in fear of seeing the murdered man's

spirit."

The student was curious, in his turn, to know all the instructor could

recall. He had seen him in Rome, he thought, at the Fountain of Trevi,

where so many strangers go before leaving the city. The youth was in the

company of a man who looked like a priest. He could not mistake the

peculiar expression of his countenance, but that was all he now

remembered about his appearance. His attention had been called to this

young man by seeing that some of the bystanders were pointing at him, and

noticing that they were whispering with each other as if with reference

to him. He should say that the youth was at that time fifteen or sixteen

years old, and the time was about ten years ago.

After all, this evidence was of little or no value. Suppose the youth

were Maurice; what then? We know that he had been in Italy, and had been

there a good while,--or at least we infer so much from his familiarity

with the language, and are confirmed in the belief by his having an

Italian servant, whom he probably brought from Italy when he returned.

If he wrote the paper which was read the other evening, that settles it,

for the writer says he had lived by the Tiber. We must put this scrap of

evidence furnished by the Professor with the other scraps; it may turn

out of some consequence, sooner or later. It is like a piece of a

dissected map; it means almost nothing by itself, but when we find the

pieces it joins with we may discover a very important meaning in it.

In a small, concentrated community like that which centred in and

immediately around Arrowhead Village, every day must have its local

gossip as well as its general news. The newspaper tells the small

community what is going on in the great world, and the busy tongues of

male and female, especially the latter, fill in with the occurrences and

comments of the ever-stirring microcosm. The fact that the Italian

teacher had, or thought he had, seen Maurice ten years before was

circulated and made the most of,--turned over and over like a cake, until

it was thoroughly done on both sides and all through. It was a very

small cake, but better than nothing. Miss Vincent heard this story, as

others did, and talked about it with her friend, Miss Tower. Here was

one more fact to help along.

The two young ladies who had recently graduated at the Corinna Institute

remained, as they had always been, intimate friends. They were the

natural complements of each other. Euthymia represented a complete,

symmetrical womanhood. Her outward presence was only an index of a

large, wholesome, affluent life. She could not help being courageous,

with such a firm organization. She could not help being generous,

cheerful, active. She had been told often enough that she was fair to

look upon. She knew that she was called The Wonder by the schoolmates

who were dazzled by her singular accomplishments, but she did not

overvalue them. She rather tended to depreciate her own gifts, in

comparison with those of her friend, Miss Lurida Vincent. The two agreed

all the better for differing as they did. The octave makes a perfect

chord, when shorter intervals jar more or less on the ear. Each admired

the other with a heartiness which if they had been less unlike, would

have been impossible.

It was a pleasant thing to observe their dependence on each other. The

Terror of the schoolroom was the oracle in her relations with her friend.

All the freedom of movement which The Wonder showed in her bodily

exercises The Terror manifested in the world of thought. She would fling

open a book, and decide in a swift glance whether it had any message for

her. Her teachers had compared her way of reading to the taking of an

instantaneous photograph. When she took up the first book on Physiology

which Dr. Butts handed her, it seemed to him that if she only opened at

any place, and gave one look, her mind drank its meaning up, as a moist

sponge absorbs water. "What can I do with such a creature as this?" he

said to himself. "There is only one way to deal with her, treat her as

one treats a silkworm: give it its mulberry leaf, and it will spin its

own cocoon. Give her the books, and she will spin her own web of

knowledge."

"Do you really think of studying medicine?" said Dr. Butts to her.

"I have n't made up my mind about that," she answered, "but I want to

know a little more about this terrible machinery of life and death we are

all tangled in. I know something about it, but not enough. I find some

very strange beliefs among the women I meet with, and I want to be able

to silence them when they attempt to proselyte me to their whims and

fancies. Besides, I want to know everything."

"They tell me you do, already," said Dr. Butts.

"I am the most ignorant little wretch that draws the breath of life!"

exclaimed The Terror.

The doctor smiled. He knew what it meant. She had reached that stage of

education in which the vast domain of the unknown opens its illimitable

expanse before the eyes of the student. We never know the extent of

darkness until it is partially illuminated.

"You did not leave the Institute with the reputation of being the most

ignorant young lady that ever graduated there," said the doctor. "They

tell me you got the highest marks of any pupil on their record since the

school was founded."

"What a grand thing it was to be the biggest fish in our small aquarium,

to be sure!" answered The Terror. "He was six inches long, the

monster,--a little too big for bait to catch a pickerel with! What did

you hand me that schoolbook for? Did you think I did n't know anything

about the human body?"

"You said you were such an ignorant creature I thought I would try you

with an easy book, by way of introduction."

The Terror was not confused by her apparent self-contradiction.

"I meant what I said, and I mean what I say. When I talk about my

ignorance, I don't measure myself with schoolgirls, doctor. I don't

measure myself with my teachers, either. You must talk to me as if I

were a man, a grown man, if you mean to teach me anything. Where is your

hat, doctor? Let me try it on."

The doctor handed her his wide-awake. The Terror's hair was not

naturally abundant, like Euthymia's, and she kept it cut rather short.

Her head used to get very hot when she studied hard. She tried to put

the hat on.

"Do you see that?" she said. "I could n't wear it--it would squeeze my

eyes out of my head. The books told me that women's brains were smaller

than men's: perhaps they are,--most of them,--I never measured a great

many. But when they try to settle what women are good for, by

phrenology, I like to have them put their tape round my head. I don't

believe in their nonsense, for all that. You might as well tell me that

if one horse weighs more than another horse he is worth more,--a

cart-horse that weighs twelve or fourteen hundred pounds better than

Eclipse, that may have weighed a thousand. Give me a list of the best

books you can think of, and turn me loose in your library. I can find

what I want, if you have it; and what I don't find there I will get at

the Public Library. I shall want to ask you a question now and then."

The doctor looked at her with a kind of admiration, but thoughtfully, as

if he feared she was thinking of a task too formidable for her slight

constitutional resource.

She returned, instinctively, to the apparent contradiction in her

statements about herself.

"I am not a fool, if I am ignorant. Yes, doctor, I sail on a wide sea of

ignorance, but I have taken soundings of some of its shallows and some of

its depths. Your profession deals with the facts of life that interest

me most just now, and I want to know something of it. Perhaps I may find

it a calling such as would suit me."

"Do you seriously think of becoming a practitioner of medicine?" said the

doctor.

"Certainly, I seriously think of it as a possibility, but I want to know

something more about it first. Perhaps I sha'n't believe in medicine

enough to practise it. Perhaps I sha'n't like it well enough. No matter

about that. I wish to study some of your best books on some of the

subjects that most interest me. I know about bones and muscles and all

that, and about digestion and respiration and such things. I want to

study up the nervous system, and learn all about it. I am of the nervous

temperament myself, and perhaps that is the reason. I want to read about

insanity and all that relates to it."

A curious expression flitted across the doctor's features as The Terror

said this.

"Nervous system. Insanity. She has headaches, I know,--all those

large-headed, hard-thinking girls do, as a matter of course; but what has

set her off about insanity and the nervous system? I wonder if any of

her more remote relatives are subject to mental disorder. Bright people

very often have crazy relations. Perhaps some of her friends are in that

way. I wonder whether"--the doctor did not speak any of these thoughts,

and in fact hardly shaped his "whether," for The Terror interrupted his

train of reflection, or rather struck into it in a way which startled

him.

"Where is the first volume of this Medical Cyclopaedia?" she asked,

looking at its empty place on the shelf.

"On my table," the doctor answered. "I have been consulting it."

Lurida flung it open, in her eager way, and turned the pages rapidly

until she came to the one she wanted. The doctor cast his eye on the

beading of the page, and saw the large letters A N T.

"I thought so," he said to himself. "We shall know everything there is

in the books about antipathies now, if we never did before. She has a

special object in studying the nervous system, just as I suspected. I

think she does not care to mention it at this time; but if she finds out

anything of interest she will tell me, if she does anybody. Perhaps she

does not mean to tell anybody. It is a rather delicate business,--a

young girl studying the natural history of a young man. Not quite so

safe as botany or palaeontology!"

Lurida, lately The Terror, now Miss Vincent, had her own plans, and chose

to keep them to herself, for the present, at least. Her hands were full

enough, it might seem, without undertaking the solution of the great

Arrowhead Village enigma. But she was in the most perfect training, so

far as her intelligence was concerned; and the summer rest had restored

her bodily vigor, so that her brain was like an overcharged battery which

will find conductors somewhere to carry off its crowded energy.

At this time Arrowhead Village was enjoying the most successful season it

had ever known. The Pansophian Society flourished to an extraordinary

degree under the fostering care of the new Secretary. The rector was a

good figure-head as President, but the Secretary was the life of the

Society. Communications came in abundantly: some from the village and

its neighborhood, some from the University and the Institute, some from

distant and unknown sources. The new Secretary was very busy with the

work of examining these papers. After a forenoon so employed, the carpet

of her room looked like a barn floor after a husking-match. A glance at

the manuscripts strewed about, or lying in heaps, would have frightened

any young writer away from the thought of authorship as a business. If

the candidate for that fearful calling had seen the process of selection

and elimination, he would have felt still more desperately. A paper of

twenty pages would come in, with an underscored request to please read

through, carefully. That request alone is commonly sufficient to condemn

any paper, and prevent its having any chance of a hearing; but the

Secretary was not hardened enough yet for that kind of martial law in

dealing with manuscripts. The looker-on might have seen her take up the

paper, cast one flashing glance at its title, read the first sentence and

the last, dip at a venture into two or three pages, and decide as swiftly

as the lightning calculator would add up a column of figures what was to

be its destination. If rejected, it went into the heap on the left; if

approved, it was laid apart, to be submitted to the Committee for their

judgment. The foolish writers who insist on one's reading through their

manuscript poems and stories ought to know how fatal the request is to

their prospects. It provokes the reader, to begin with. The reading of

manuscript is frightful work, at the best; the reading of worthless

manuscript--and most of that which one is requested to read through is

worthless--would add to the terrors of Tartarus, if any infernal deity

were ingenious enough to suggest it as a punishment.

If a paper was rejected by the Secretary, it did not come before the

Committee, but was returned to the author, if he sent for it, which he

commonly did. Its natural course was to try for admission into some one

of the popular magazines: into "The Sifter," the most fastidious of them

all; if that declined it, into "The Second Best;" and if that returned

it, into "The Omnivorous." If it was refused admittance at the doors of

all the magazines, it might at length find shelter in the corner of a

newspaper, where a good deal of very readable verse is to be met with

nowadays, some of which has been, no doubt, presented to the Pansophian

Society, but was not considered up to its standard.

X

A NEW ARRIVAL.

There was a recent accession to the transient population of the village

which gave rise to some speculation. The new-comer was a young fellow,

rather careless in his exterior, but apparently as much at home as if he

owned Arrowhead Village and everything in it. He commonly had a cigar in

his mouth, carried a pocket pistol, of the non-explosive sort, and a

stick with a bulldog's bead for its knob; wore a soft bat, a coarse check

suit, a little baggy, and gaiterboots which had been half-soled,--a

Bohemian-looking personage, altogether.

This individual began making explorations in every direction. He was

very curious about the place and all the people in it. He was especially

interested in the Pansophian Society, concerning which he made all sorts

of inquiries. This led him to form a summer acquaintance with the

Secretary, who was pleased to give him whatever information he asked for;

being proud of the Society, as she had a right to be, and knowing more

about it than anybody else.

The visitor could not have been long in the village without hearing

something of Maurice Kirkwood, and the stories, true and false, connected

with his name. He questioned everybody who could tell him anything about

Maurice, and set down the answers in a little note-book he always had

with him.

All this naturally excited the curiosity of the village about this new

visitor. Among the rest, Miss Vincent, not wanting in an attribute

thought to belong more especially to her sex, became somewhat interested

to know more exactly who this inquiring, note-taking personage, who

seemed to be everywhere and to know everybody, might himself be. Meeting

him at the Public Library at a fortunate moment, when there was nobody

but the old Librarian, who was hard of hearing, to interfere with their

conversation, the little Secretary had a chance to try to find out

something about him.

"This is a very remarkable library for a small village to possess," he

remarked to Miss Lurida.

"It is, indeed," she said. "Have you found it well furnished with the

books you most want?"

"Oh, yes,--books enough. I don't care so much for the books as I do for

the Newspapers. I like a Review well enough,--it tells you all there is

in a book; but a good abstract of the Review in a Newspaper saves a

fellow the trouble of reading it."

"You find the papers you want, here, I hope," said the young lady.

"Oh, I get along pretty well. It's my off-time, and I don't do much

reading or writing. Who is the city correspondent of this place?"

"I don't think we have any one who writes regularly. Now and then, there

is a letter, with the gossip of the place in it, or an account of some of

the doings at our Society. The city papers are always glad to get the

reports of our meetings, and to know what is going on in the village."

"I suppose you write about the Society to the papers, as you are the

Secretary."

This was a point-blank shot. She meant to question the young man about

his business, and here she was on the witness-stand. She ducked her

head, and let the question go over her.

"Oh, there are plenty of members who are willing enough to write,

--especially to give an account of their own papers. I think they like

to have me put in the applause, when they get any. I do that sometimes."

(How much more, she did not say.)

"I have seen some very well written articles, which, from what they tell

me of the Secretary, I should have thought she might have written

herself."

He looked her straight in the eyes.

"I have transmitted some good papers," she said, without winking, or

swallowing, or changing color, precious little color she had to change;

her brain wanted all the blood it could borrow or steal, and more too.

"You spoke of Newspapers," she said, without any change of tone or

manner: "do you not frequently write for them yourself?"

"I should think I did," answered the young man. "I am a regular

correspondent of 'The People's Perennial and Household Inquisitor.'"

"The regular correspondent from where?"

"Where! Oh, anywhere,--the place does not make much difference. I have

been writing chiefly from Naples and St. Petersburg, and now and then

from Constantinople."

"How long since your return to this country, may I ask?"

"My return? I have never been out of this country. I travel with a

gazetteer and some guide-books. It is the cheapest way, and you can get

the facts much better from them than by trusting your own observation. I

have made the tour of Europe by the help of them and the newspapers. But

of late I have taken to interviewing. I find that a very pleasant

specialty. It is about as good sport as trout-tickling, and much the

same kind of business. I should like to send the Society an account of

one of my interviews. Don't you think they would like to hear it?"

"I have no doubt they would. Send it to me, and I will look it over; and

if the Committee approve it, we will have it at the next meeting. You

know everything has to be examined and voted on by the Committee," said

the cautious Secretary.

"Very well,--I will risk it. After it is read, if it is read, please

send it back to me, as I want to sell it to 'The Sifter,' or 'The Second

Best,' or some of the paying magazines."

This is the paper, which was read at the next meeting of the Pansophian

Society.

"I was ordered by the editor of the newspaper to which I am attached,

'The People's Perennial and Household Inquisitor,' to make a visit to a

certain well-known writer, and obtain all the particulars I could

concerning him and all that related to him. I have interviewed a good

many politicians, who I thought rather liked the process; but I had never

tried any of these literary people, and I was not quite sure how this one

would feel about it. I said as much to the chief, but he pooh-poohed my

scruples. 'It is n't our business whether they like it or not,' said he;

'the public wants it, and what the public wants it's bound to have, and

we are bound to furnish it. Don't be afraid of your man; he 's used to

it,--he's been pumped often enough to take it easy, and what you've got

to do is to pump him dry. You need n't be modest,--ask him what you

like; he is n't bound to answer, you know.'

"As he lived in a rather nice quarter of the town, I smarted myself up a

little, put on a fresh collar and cuffs, and got a five-cent shine on my

best high-lows. I said to myself, as I was walking towards the house

where he lived, that I would keep very shady for a while and pass for a

visitor from a distance; one of those 'admiring strangers' who call in to

pay their respects, to get an autograph, and go home and say that they

have met the distinguished So and So, which gives them a certain

distinction in the village circle to which they belong.

"My man, the celebrated writer, received me in what was evidently his

reception-room. I observed that he managed to get the light full on my

face, while his own was in the shade. I had meant to have his face in

the light, but he knew the localities, and had arranged things so as to

give him that advantage. It was like two frigates manoeuvring,--each

trying to get to windward of the other. I never take out my note-book

until I and my man have got engaged in artless and earnest

conversation,--always about himself and his works, of course, if he is an

author.

"I began by saying that he must receive a good many callers. Those who

had read his books were naturally curious to see the writer of them.

"He assented, emphatically, to this statement. He had, he said, a great

many callers.

"I remarked that there was a quality in his books which made his readers

feel as if they knew him personally, and caused them to cherish a certain

attachment to him.

"He smiled, as if pleased. He was himself disposed to think so, he said.

In fact, a great many persons, strangers writing to him, had told him so.

"My dear sir, I said, there is nothing wonderful in the fact you mention.

You reach a responsive chord in many human breasts.

'One touch of Nature makes the whole world kin.'

"Everybody feels as if he, and especially she (his eyes sparkled), were

your blood relation. Do they not name their children after you very

frequently?

"He blushed perceptibly. 'Sometimes,' he answered. 'I hope they will

all turn out well.'

"I am afraid I am taking up too much of your time, I said.