[Illustration: JULY
GRAHAM’S MAGAZINE.
1849.]
GRAHAM’S MAGAZINE.
Vol. XXXV. July, 1849. No. 1.
Table of Contents
Fiction, Literature and Articles
A Biography of Major-General Stephen Watts Kearny
Jasper St. Aubyn
True Unto Death
Thoughts on the Thermometer
The Foundling
The Neglected Grave-Yard
The Widow of Nain
A Voice from the Wayside
The Dream of Mehemet
Wild-Birds of America
Cross Purposes
Uncle Tom
Editor’s Table
Review of New Books
Poetry, Music, and Fashion
I Will Be a Miner Too
The Emigrant’s Daughters
Mary
I’m Thinking of Thee!
The Tulip-Tree
To My Wife
A Daughter’s Memory
From Amalthæus.
To ——
The Omnipresence of God
New Year Meditation
The Image
The Pilgrim’s Fast
To My Mother in Heaven
The Fortieth Sonnet of Petrarca
Lines on Burning Some Old Journals and Letters
Le Follet
What’s a Tear?
Transcriber’s Notes can be found at the end of this eBook.
* * * * *
GRAHAM’S
AMERICAN MONTHLY
MAGAZINE
Of Literature and Art,
EMBELLISHED WITH
MEZZOTINT AND STEEL ENGRAVINGS, MUSIC, ETC.
WILLIAM C. BRYANT, J. FENIMORE COOPER, RICHARD H. DANA, JAMES K. PAULDING,
HENRY W. LONGFELLOW, N. P. WILLIS, J. R. LOWELL, HENRY B. HIRST.
MRS. LYDIA H. SIGOURNEY, MISS C. M. SEDGWICK, MRS. FRANCES S. OSGOOD,
MRS. EMMA C.EMBURY, MRS. ANN S. STEPHENS, MRS. AMELIA B. WELBY,
MRS. A. M. F. ANNAN, ETC.
PRINCIPAL CONTRIBUTORS.
G. R. GRAHAM, J. R. CHANDLER AND J. B. TAYLOR, EDITORS.
VOLUME XXXV
PHILADELPHIA:
SAMUEL D. PATTERSON & CO. 98 CHESTNUT STREET.
. . . . . .
1849.
* * * * *
CONTENTS
OF THE
THIRTY-FIFTH VOLUME.
JUNE, 1849, TO JANUARY, 1850.
A Biography of Major-General Stephen Watts Kearny, U. 1
S. A. By Fayette Robinson,
A Voice from the Wayside. By Caroline C——, 47
A Memory. By Jane Taylor Worthington, 122
A Traveler’s Story. By Lydia Jane Peirson, 179
A Year and a Day. By Caroline H. Butler, 193, 275
A Harmless Glass of Wine. By Kate Sutherland, 230
An Adventure of Jasper C——, 239
A Case of Gold Fever. By John Jones, 356
Cross Purposes. By Kate, 59
Colored Birds. The Bullfinch. By Bechstein, 177
Editor’s Table, 67
Editor’s Table, 127
Effie Deans, 244
Editor’s Table, 248
Editor’s Table, 307
Editor’s Table, 372
General Training. By Alfred B. Street, 133
Homewood. By P. C. Shannon, 286
Indian Legend. By Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh, 80
Ibad’s Vision. By Richard Penn Smith, 229
Jasper St. Aubyn; Or the Course of Passion. By Henry W. 7, 82, 140,
Herbert, 204, 253, 322
Jessie Lincoln. By Miss M. J. B. Browne, 164
Legend. By Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh, 155
Love Tests of Halloween. By T. S. Arthur, 158
Mary Wilson. By D. W. Belisle, 99
Minnie Clifton. By Emma C. Embury, 222
Men at Home. By Mrs. C. B. Marston, 266
Major Anspach. By Marc Fournier, 282, 343
Mr. Merritt and His Family. By F. Summers, 293
My First Love. By Mrs. E. F. Ellet, 360
Olden Times. By J. R. Chandler, 102
Sketches of Life in Our Village. By Giftie, 93
Sketches of Life in Our Village. By Giftie, 151
Self-Devotion. By Giftie, 349
True Unto Death. By Caroline H. Butler, 17
Thoughts on the Thermometer, 25
The Foundling. By Jessie Howard, 27
The Neglected Grave-Yard. By Prof. Alden, 36
The Widow of Nain. By J. R. Chandler, 41
The Dream of Mehemet. By R. Penn Smith, 55
The Curtain Lifted. By Caroline H. Butler, 73
Two Hours of Doom. By Mrs. Juliet H. L. Campbell, 110
The Captive of York. By Stella Martin, 113
The Two Paths. By Mrs. Mary B. Horton, 185
The Engraver’s Daughter. By H. Sunderland, 201
The Recreant Missionary. By Caroline C——, 215
The Village Schoolmaster. By C. M. Farmer, 233
The Battle of Trenton. By C. J. Peterson, 288
The Life Insurance. By Henry G. Lee, 301
The Balize, 304
The Conscript. By Joseph R. Chandler, 313
Three Pictures. By Caroline C——, 334
The Two Cousins. By Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh, 365
Uncle Tom. By Simon, 61
Unfading Flowers. By T. S. Arthur, 366
Wild-Birds of America. By Professor Frost, 57
Wild-Birds of America. By Professor Frost, 126
Wild-Birds of America. By Professor Frost, 189
Wild-Birds of America. By Professor Frost, 245
Wild-Birds of America. By Professor Frost, 304
Wild-Birds of America. By Professor Frost, 369
POETRY.
A Daughter’s Memory. By Mary L. Lawson, 34
Alice. By Thomas Dunn English, 200
A Parting Song. By Professor Campbell, 214
A Thought. By Isaac Gray Blanchard, 232
Alice Vernon. By E. Curtiss Hine, 342
Bunker-Hill at Midnight. By E. Curtiss Hine, 303
Communion of the Sea and Sky. By E. Jones, 176
Dirge. By Richard Penn Smith, 371
Elim. By Virginia, 91
Ermengarde’s Awakening. By F. S. Osgood, 112
From Amalthæus. By Richard Penn Smith, 34
Faith’s Warning. By Henry T. Tuckerman, 92
Fragments of an Unfinished Story. By Mrs. Frances S. 263
Osgood,
Flower Fancies. By H. Marion Stephens, 306
Good-Night. By Walter Herries, Esq. 139
I will be a Miner too. By Mrs. Juliet H. L. Campbell, 6
I’m Thinking of Thee! By A. D. Williams, 16
Kubleh. By Bayard Taylor, 120
Lines. By Walter Herries, Esq. 60
Lament of the Gold-Digger. By E. C. Hine, 92
Little Willie. By Mrs. H. Marion Stephens, 98
Lily Leslie. By Gretta, 156
Lines. By Forlorn Hope, 281
Lines. By Sarah Helen Whitman, 303
Mary. By Mrs. O. M. P. Lord, 15
My Spirit. By Henry Morford, 125
New Year Meditation. By Enna Duval, 40
Northampton. By Henry T. Tuckerman, 232
Parting. By Miss Phœbe Carey, 265
Pleasant Words. By Caroline May, 370
Passing Away. By Annie Grey, 371
Song. By Thomas Fitzgerald, 228
Speak Out. By S. D. Anderson, 238
Spiritual Presence. By Mary G. Horsford, 306
Summer’s Night. By Sam. C. Reid, Jr. 332
Song. By Agnes, 342
The Emigrant’s Daughters. By Gretta, 6
The Tulip-Tree. By Bayard Taylor, 16
To My Wife. By S. D. Anderson, 26
To ——. By Henry B. Hirst, 35
The Omnipresence of God. By R. Coe, Jr. 35
The Image. By A. J. Requier, 46
The Pilgrim’s Fast. By Mary G. Horsford, 54
To My Mother in Heaven. By T. Fitzgerald, 54
The Fortieth Sonnet of Petrarca. By F. R. 58
The Improvisatrice. By Mary G. Horsford, 81
The Eighteenth Sonnet of Petrarca. By F. R. 81
To Mary. By Lucy Cabell, 98
Translation from Sappho. By G. Hill, 109
This World of Ours. By S. D. Anderson, 124
To the Lily of the Valley. By Prof. Campbell, 139
The Spanish Maiden. By Agnes Coleman, 150
The Angel’s Visit. By Mrs. S. Anna Lewis, 154
To a Portrait. By Mrs. H. Marion Stephens, 157
The Odalisque. By Bayard Taylor, 163
To Inez. By S. D. Anderson, 175
Time and Change. By Isaac Gray Blanchard, 178
The Rain. By T. A. Swan, 188
The Fountain in Winter. By Bayard Taylor, 213
The Light of Life. By Mrs. O. M. P. Lord, 214
The Bride of Broek-in-Waterland. By C. P. Shiras, 220
The Willow by the Spring. By J. Hunt, Jr. 247
The Broken Household. By Alice Carey, 262
The Fear of Death. By Mary L. Lawson, 274
The Seminoles’ Last Look. By Fayette Robinson, 291
To My Sister E. By Adaliza Cutter, 300
To My Steed. By S. Anderson, 321
The Death of the Year. By Henry B. Hirst, 333
The Cottage. By J. Hunt, Jr. 333
The Misanthrope. By A New Contributor, 340
The Broken Reed. By S. S. Hornor, 318
The Old Wooden Church on the Green. By Henry Morford, 359
The Death of Cleopatra. By W. G. Simms, 363
The Fairies’ Song. By Heinrich, 364
The Undivided Heart. By Myrrha, 371
Watouska. By Kate St. Clair, 79
Words of Waywardness. By Prof. Campbell, 100
Woman’s Heart. By Rufus Henry Bacon, 178
We are Changed. By Edith Blythe, 247
REVIEWS.
H. Kavanagh. A Tale. By H. W. Longfellow, 71
My Uncle the Curate. By the Author of “The Bachelor of 71
the Albany,” etc.
The Personal History and Experience of David 71
Copperfield the Younger. By Charles Dickens,
Characteristics of Literature. By Henry T. Tuckerman, 131
The Earth and Man. By Arnold Guyot, 131
The History of the United States of America. By Richard 191
Hildreth,
Dante’s Divine Comedy: The Inferno. By John A. Carlyle, 192
M. D.
A Second Visit to the United States of North America. 251
By Sir Charles Lyell, F. R. S.
The Liberty of Rome. By Samuel Eliot, 251
The Penance of Roland. By Henry B. Hirst, 252
History of the National Constituent Assembly. By J. F. 252
Corkran,
Oliver Goldsmith: A Biography. By Washington Irving, 311
Bulwer and Forbes on the Water Treatment, 311
The Child’s First History of Rome. By E. M. Sewell, 312
A Lift for the Lazy, 312
Poems. By Robert Browning, 378
Physician and Patient. By Worthington Hooker, 379
History of England. By David Hume, 379
Success in Life. By Mrs. L. C. Tuthill, 379
Sketches of Life and Character. By T. S. Arthur, 380
History of the French Revolution of 1848. By A. De 380
Lamartine,
MUSIC.
What’s a Tear? Composed by M. W. Balfe.
Yes, Let Me Like a Soldier Fall. Written and Adapted by
E. R. Johnston.
Oh, Let Thy Locks Unbraided Fall. Words by John W.
Watson, Esq. Music by John A. Janke, Jr.
I Love, When the Morning Beams. By D. W. Belisle.
Wake, Lady, Wake. Music Composed and Arranged for the
Piano, by B. W. Helfenstein, M. D.
My Life is Like the Summer’s Rose. Words by Hon.
Richard Henry Wilde. Music by An Amateur.
ENGRAVINGS.
Cross Purposes, engraved by J. M. Butler.
General Kearny, engraved by T. B. Welch.
Nature’s Triumph, engraved by F. Humphreys.
The Widow of Nain.
Paris Fashions, from Le Follet.
Title Page, engraved by W. E. Tucker.
The Golden Age, engraved by W. E. Tucker.
La Siesta, engraved by Geo. P. Ellis.
Paris Fashions, from Le Follet.
Olden Times.
No Rose Without a Thorn, engraved by J. M. Butler.
The Bullfinch, engraved by F. Humphreys.
Love Tests of Hallowe’en, Nos. 1 and 2.
Paris Fashions, from Le Follet.
Effie Deans, engraved by T. B. Welch.
Rose Carlton, engraved by W. H. Egleton.
The Baggage Wagon, engraved by A. L. Dick.
Paris Fashions, from Le Follet.
The Engraver’s Daughter.
Happy as a King, engraved by J. M. Butler.
Head-Quarters of Gen. Knox, engraved by W. H. Ellis.
Paris Fashions, from Le Follet.
The Balize.
The Death of the Year, engraved by Wm. E. Tucker.
Opera Extravagance.
The Conscript’s Departure and Return, engraved by John
M. Butler.
A Case of Gold Fever.
Paris Fashions, from Le Follet.
* * * * *
[Illustration: _FROM AN ORIGINAL DAGUERREOTYPE._
S. W. KEARNY
_Engraved by T. B. Welch expressly for Graham’s Magazine._]
* * * * *
GRAHAM’S MAGAZINE.
Vol. XXXV. PHILADELPHIA, JULY, 1849. No. 1.
* * * * *
A BIOGRAPHY
OF MAJOR-GENERAL STEPHEN WATTS KEARNY, U. S. A.
[WITH AN ENGRAVING]
BY FAYETTE ROBINSON.
Few men who have ever been in the service of the United States have
enjoyed a more enviable reputation than Stephen Watts Kearny, or have
left behind them more admiring friends. The recent death of this
excellent soldier, and above all his distinguished services, covering a
space of more than forty years, make his career at this time peculiarly
an object of interest to the country.
Stephen Watts Kearny was born in the year 1793, in the town of Newark,
New Jersey, in a mansion yet the property of his family. Though not
prone to admit that the adventitious circumstances of birth add any real
dignity to individuals, either in America or elsewhere, it may not be
improper to state that the family connections of the deceased general
were of such a character as to have entitled him to a prominent social
position any where, he being a relation of the well-known Lady Mary
Watts, and a connection of the gallant and noble General Alexander (Lord
Stirling) of the revolutionary army. The grandson of an emigrant, who
settled in New Jersey, before the revolution, the family of Gen. Kearny
had always occupied a prominent position in society, and exerted much
influence in his native state.
At the commencement of the war of 1811, young Kearny, then about
eighteen, was a student at Princeton College. Contrary, it is said, to
the advice of his friends, he obtained a commission from Mr. Madison,
and reported for duty as a lieutenant in the 13th regiment of infantry,
in which he was attached to the company of which the present very
distinguished General John E. Wool was the captain.
With two companies of his regiment he was present at the gallant affair
of Queenstown, and with Colonel, since Gen. Scott, was surrendered a
prisoner of war. This was on the 13th of October, 1812. In this affair
the companies of the thirteenth had been long opposed to the greatly
celebrated and highly disciplined forty-ninth British infantry, a
regiment which had stood the ordeal of the Peninsula War, and had won
laurels from the best troops of France. The forty-ninth had occupied,
with heavy reinforcements of Canadian militia, a battery on a commanding
position. The cannonade and musketry from this point was so severe that
every commissioned officer was in the first assault either killed or
wounded, and Col. Van Rensselaer who commanded, was carried from the
field unable to stand. Before he left, however, he ordered every man who
could move to storm the battery. Three more gallant officers than those
who carried his order into execution probably never lived. They were
Captain Wool, Lieutenant Kearny, and 2nd Lieutenant T. B. Randolph, late
of the Virginia regiment. By orders of Capt. Wool the two companies of
the 13th, which originally had numbered but one hundred, all told, were
extended and ordered to close upon the guns. This perilous manœuvre was
executed with brilliant success, the enemy were driven precipitately
from his guns, which were the first trophies to the United States of the
war with Great Britain. This field was young Kearny’s first arms, and
was a brilliant promise of what was to be his future career. The battle
was important to the United States, though, as is well known, Col. Scott
and his gallant command of regulars were forced to surrender. To the
English it was most disastrous, Major Gen. Sir Isaac Brock, the captor
of Detroit, a man thought worthy to compete with Wellington for the
command of the British army in Spain, having been picked off by an
American marksman. Throughout this trying engagement young Kearny
sustained himself with the firmness which he maintained through life.
When driven to the hill selected by the present Col. Totten as the
strongest point, his perseverance was as distinguished as his
impetuosity had been during the charge.
After the surrender, Kearny, with the other prisoners, was marched to
the Canadian village of Niagara, where, it is said, they were scarcely
treated with the consideration due such gallant soldiers. There occurred
a circumstance of thrilling character often told—the attempted murder
of Col. Scott by the Indian chiefs “young Brandt and Captain Jacobs,”
which, had it proved successful, would have made irreconcilable the war
between Great Britain and the United States. It failed through the great
personal courage of Col. Scott and the gallantry of Captain Coffin, an
aide of Gen. Sheafe, but the would-be murderers were never punished by
the British government. The recurrence of such scenes, and the
probability of long confinement, exercised a most unhappy effect on the
mind of Kearny, who saw as the consequence of his captivity (at that day
there were no exchanges of prisoners) the ruin of his professional
prospects. After a confinement of some weeks at Niagara, Kearny was with
the other prisoners sent to Quebec. For a long time he continued moody
and morose, until a circumstance occurred, which the present
general-in-chief relates, that restored his wonted alertness. The
prisoners were taken to Quebec in a vessel, and from the carelessness
incident to this mode of travel, the idea of a possible escape occurred
to Col. Scott. The plan was to overpower the guard, to march at once to
the nearest division of the United States troops on the frontier, and
take their conductors with them as captives. Col. Scott imparted this
plan to Kearny, who at once entered into it with his whole soul. His
energy returned, and he became again the wild subaltern who had led the
first platoon of the thirteenth at Queenstown. Circumstances prevented
this plot from being carried into execution, but it had gone far enough
to show that the subject of this memoir had as much prudence as valor.
The prisoners at last arrived at Quebec, and their situation at once
became most painful. They were confined in the old French castle, and
were subjected to many indignities. This was before Niagara and Lundy’s
Lane, and countless other fields had taught the British army that the
American soldiers were worthy antagonists. At that time the British army
was filled with the aristocracy of the country, which could not conceive
or imagine the true position of a country without a nobility. Countless
trivial insults were daily given, and which galled to the last degree
the forbearance of the prisoners. The following anecdote may explain
what they were.
On one occasion, when the American prisoners dined at the garrison mess,
an officer of the British staff arose, and with a pointed pomposity gave
the toast, “Mr. Madison, dead or alive.” The faces of the American
officers flushed with indignation, which was not diminished when they
saw a young American lieutenant rise from his chair, and in the blandest
manner, and with a most insinuating smile, give thanks for the
remembrance of the Chief Magistrate of the United States. All thought
him drunk or mad, as he proceeded to say, “he felt the weightiness of
the burden imposed on him by the silence of his seniors, that he would
not give thanks for the toast last drunken, but would give another in
return. He was sure the officers of both services present would
understand him when he gave ‘the health of his royal highness, the
Prince of Wales, DRUNK OR SOBER.’” If a shell had exploded under the
table the surprise could not have been greater, and the danger of a
collision became imminent, when the senior officer of the British army
present, a man of tact and taste, interfered, and sent the person who
had given the first toast from the table under arrest. This anecdote is
variously told in the service, and sometimes is attributed to Gen.
Kearny, and sometimes to the late Mann Page Lomax, major of artillery,
who was at the time a prisoner in the castle of Quebec. It is perfectly
characteristic of each of these officers, and whether Gen. Kearny be the
hero or not, aptly enough illustrates this portion of his career. The
American victories in the West, by which hosts of prisoners were
acquired, soon placed the men of Queenstown in a different position, and
they were exchanged.
Kearny was with Scott at the time the latter officer resisted the
attempt to place in confinement the Irishmen surrendered at Queenstown,
and ably sustained him in his energetic action in relation to this
high-handed measure. He sailed in the cartel to Boston, and immediately
on his arrival, proceeded to rejoin his regiment. He was subsequently
stationed at Sacket’s Harbor, where he acquired the reputation for
discipline and soldiership which never deserted him. While at this post
the British commander, Sir James Yoe, and Commodore Chauncy, were
manœuvring for possession of the lake. On one occasion, when in
possession of a temporary superiority, Sir James appeared in front of
the harbor and challenged the commodore to a fight. This the latter
refused, because he had no marines. When the reason was told Capt.
Kearny, (he had in the interim been promoted) a gallant officer of New
York, a captain of artillery, named Romain, offered at once to go on
board and serve as marine. The offer was not, however, accepted, much to
the chagrin of Kearny and Romain.
Captain Kearny served through the war, and on the reductions of 1815 and
1821, was retained in the service with his old grade and rank. In 1823
he received the usual brevet for ten years faithful service, and was
assigned to the command of the beautiful post of Bellefontaine, near St.
Louis, and in that year accompanied Brigadier General Atkinson in his
famous expedition to the Upper Missouri. This was before the
introduction of steamboats into those waters, and the expedition was one
of the most tedious imaginable. The boats were necessarily to be
propelled by poles and oars against the rapid current of the Missouri,
and not unfrequently by the tedious process of _cordelling_. This is
done by extending from the capstan of the boat a cable, which is made
fast to the shore, and thus the vessel must carefully be wound up until
the rope is exhausted. Then a new rope is stretched, and the same
tedious process undergone. Often, when in the midst of _rapids_, the
cable would break, and before the vessel could be brought up, a greater
distance than had been gained in a week would be passed over. In the
course of two years they reached the Yellow Stone river, twenty-two
hundred miles above St. Louis, and displayed the colors of the 1st and
6th infantry where the United States flag had never been seen before.
The Sioux, the Pawnee, the Mandan, and Arickra, were made acquainted
with the government, of which before they had but a vague knowledge, and
the vast resources of that immense country for the first time revealed
to the nation.
On his return Major Kearny received a full majority in the third
infantry, and was removed to a new sphere, to the southern extremity of
the Indian territory. While major of this regiment he established the
post of Towson, on the banks of Red River. To reach this place, easy of
access as it is at present, it was necessary to pass through what was
then a wilderness of prairie, but which to the soldiers inured to the
incessant storms of the Upper Missouri, seemed almost an Arcadia. After
crossing the northern tributaries of the Arkansas, they were in the
midst of the range of the buffalo, and the countless herds of wild
horses which then abounded even there. The latter, not unfrequently,
amazed at the novel sight of the marching troops, would dash up, as if
to charge the columns, pause with as much unanimity as if they acted by
command, encircle it, and tossing their long manes and forelocks, hurry
out of view. New objects continually met his gaze, and the information
then amassed was among the most valuable ever collected under the
auspices of the government. On this march Major Kearny was accompanied
by his accomplished wife, a step-daughter of Gen. M. Clark, of St.
Louis, whom, about the time of his promotion, he had married. With the
third infantry Major Kearny remained until the Black Hawk war, when
almost all the troops of the country were concentrated in the country of
the hostile Indians.
While a major of the third, an incident occurred, which, though often
told, will bear repetition. On one occasion, while stationed at
Jefferson Barracks, Major Kearny was drilling a brigade on one of the
open fields near the post. The manœuvre was the simple exercise of
marching in line to the front. An admirable horseman, he sat with his
face toward the troops, while the horse he rode, perfectly trained, was
backed in the same direction, along which the command was marched. At
once the animal fell, fastening the rider to the ground by his whole
weight. His brigade had been drilled to such a state of insensibility,
that not one of them came to his assistance; nor was it necessary. The
line advanced to within about ten feet of him, when, in a loud, distinct
voice, calmly as if he had been in the saddle under no unusual
circumstance, Major Kearny gave the command, “_Fourth
company—obstacle—march._” The fourth company, which was immediately in
front of him, was flanked by its captain in the rear of the other half
of the grand division. The line passed on, and when he was thus left in
the rear of his men, he gave the command, “_Fourth company into
line—march._” He was not seriously injured—extricated himself from his
horse, mounted again, passed to the front of the regiment, and executed
the next manœuvre in the series he had marked out for the day’s drill.
We are now, however, to see Major Kearny in a new and more important
sphere of action.
During the whole of the last war with Great Britain cavalry was not once
employed as a battle-piece, and in spite of the great services of the
horse which had been commanded, during the revolution, by Cols. Lee and
Washington, and by Count Pulaski, this great arm had become most
unpopular. Consequently, on the reduction, no skeleton even of a corps
had been retained—the sabres were locked up, the saddles and horses
sold, and the officers and men disbanded. The policy, however, of
disposing the eastern tribes along the western frontier, and the rapid
strides of emigration west ward, brought the army into contact with the
mounted tribes of the prairie, who evidently could never be overtaken or
punished for depredations they at that time used to commit, by
foot-soldiers, armed with heavy muskets, and laden down with knapsacks
and camp equipage. Of this evident proof had been obtained in the
expedition of Gen. Atkinson, mentioned above, and other excursions which
had brought the officers and men of the 6th, 3rd and 1st infantry into
contact with the nomad tribes of the Camanch. If other demonstration
were required, it was furnished by the events of the Black Hawk war,
when it became necessary to raise a body of mounted gunmen for special
service, which was done under the auspices of the present distinguished
Senator from Wisconsin, Mr. Dodge. These troops, called Rangers, did
good service enough to induce Congress to authorize the levy of a strict
cavalry corps called Dragoons. The whole army, with very few exceptions,
was impressed with the necessity of this corps, for which the most
distinguished men in their several grades of the service applied. On its
organization, Major Kearny was appointed lieutenant-colonel of the
regiment, and on him depended almost exclusively the discipline, the
colonel, Dodge, though a brave man, not having the military education or
experience requisite to make him the active head of a new corps, in the
details of which not only men but officers were to be instructed. Col.
Kearny, during his long seclusion in the west, had been a patient
student, and had made himself master of all the theory of his
profession, and in a short time made his regiment one of the best in the
world. Within less than a year after the first muster of the regiment,
it was sent, under its colonel, as a part of the command with which the
lamented Gen. Leavenworth marched to the Spanish Peaks. This disastrous
march, in the course of which so many men and officers died, was most
trying to a new corps, which had no guide to direct them. Here all the
experience of the old world was at fault. Cavalry had there to march but
from one hamlet to another, finding forage and grain everywhere. Here
eight hundred miles of wilderness were to be overcome, and more than
once the jaded horses were without even water. This proved the
perfectness of the regiment, and the thoroughness of the discipline
which induced the gallant and veteran Gen. Gaines to speak, in an
official letter, of the first dragoons as “the best troops I ever saw;”
and the officer who had defended Fort Erie, beaten back a victorious
enemy at Chrysler’s Field, and received the keys of St. Augustine,
certainly knew what a soldier was.
In 1835, Col. Kearny visited with one wing of his regiment, the Sioux,
on the Upper Missouri, and had the satisfaction at a council to
reconcile the long animosity between them and the Sauks and Foxes. He
also made a long march to the head-waters of the Mississippi, visiting
the village of Wabisha, and effecting a cessation of the trespassing of
the British subjects, from the Earl of Selkirk’s settlement at Pembina,
on the territories of the United States. In July, 1836, he was made
colonel of the first dragoons; and from this period a sketch of his
services would be almost a history of the West, not one trouble on the
frontier occurred in the settlement of which he was not instrumental;
and with six companies of his regiment he was able to protect a line of
frontier eight hundred miles long. Stationed at Fort Leavenworth, be
made himself the idol of the West, and devoting himself to his regiment,
made its discipline perfect. He had now acquired a high rank, and the
qualities he had always possessed became conspicuous. Bland in his
manners, but of iron firmness, kind to his juniors, his equals, or those
nearly so, requiring the strictest obedience, measuring his expectations
by the rank of the officer, his conduct became proverbial. To his men he
was most considerate, so that they looked on him as a protector. It is
believed that during the whole time he commanded the first dragoons no
soldier ever received a blow, except by the sentence of a general court
martial for the infamous crime of desertion. The lash disappeared, and
though probably the strictest disciplinarian in the service, there was
less punishment in his corps than in any other. About this time the
system of drill of the dragoons was changed, and he was long engrossed
in the instruction of his regiment, having the troublesome task of
unlearning them all he had taught of the old system, from which the new
one differed entirely in mode and principle of combination.
In the year 1839, the two Ridges, father and son, and Elias Boudinot,
chiefs of the Cherokees, were murdered by a hostile clique of their own
tribe, and there seemed imminent danger that a war would originate.
Immediately on the receipt of the news of a possible collision, Col.
Kearny determined to proceed to the scene. The officer of the
quarter-master’s department on duty with him being unable to furnish the
requisite funds, the colonel provided them from his own resources, and
after a very rapid march appeared with six companies of his regiment at
Fort Wayne. Words can not express the difference between his companies
and those in garrison at that post; the beautiful condition of the men
and horses of the first, and the rough-coated nags and unclean condition
of the men of the second. After the difficulty had gone by, he effected
an exchange of garrisons, and with the neglected and abused left wing,
proceeded to Fort Leavenworth, where, in a short time these companies
became equal in discipline to the others of the corps. The companies of
the Fort Wayne garrison which he took with him to Leavenworth, were
those which, under the command of the gallant and lamented Capt.
Burgwin, and the excellent soldier, Major Grier, did such good service,
and so much distinguished themselves in the campaign in New Mexico
against the revolters and the Pueblo and Navajo Indians.
In 1842, he was appointed to the command of the third military
department, with head-quarters at St. Louis. There he remained until
1846, with the exception of his long march to the South Pass of the
Rocky Mountains in 1845. There is no doubt that this is one of the most
extraordinary marches on record, both from its distance, its rapidity,
and the fact that he passed among semi-hostile tribes nearly two
thousand miles; crossed deep and rapid streams by swimming, gave
protection to the immense army of emigrants _en route_ to California,
and returned without losing a man or horse.
In 1846, the war with Mexico began, and he was assigned to the command
of the army of the West with orders to occupy New Mexico and California.
To reach Santa Fe an immense march was to be undertaken across a country
but sparsely furnished with wood and water, and where no supplies were
to be met with or obtained until the enemy’s country should be reached,
and in all probability a battle fought and won. To accomplish this,
precisely such a man as Col. Kearny was required. He was familiar with
the service, and possessed the unbounded confidence of the people of
Missouri, from which state the volunteers who were to compose the main
body of his army were to be drawn. In a most unprecedented short time
the men were enrolled, and all necessaries supplied, and before Armijo,
the governor of New Mexico was aware of his approach, the army was in
the capital of the province. Like Cæsar, Gen. Kearny might say, “I came,
I saw, I conquered.”
Immediately before the capture of Santa Fe, Col. Kearny had received his
promotion to the grade of Brigadier-General, and abandoned to his
successor the standard of a regiment he had borne from the Gulf of
Mexico to the head-waters of the Mississippi, and which was to be the
first flag of the army which waved on the shores of the Pacific. After
obeying his orders, and providing for the future peace of the country,
he proceeded to California, across a country where an army had never
marched before, and which was considered impassable. Cold, a wilderness,
absolute barrenness, were all to be overcome. Scarcely, however, had he
set out on this expedition than he was met by an express, informing him
that California was conquered. Relying on this, he sent back all his
troops except one hundred men, and proceeded to the valley of the Gila.
Of the sufferings of his men, of the almost starvation which forced them
to eat the flesh of the emaciated dragoon-horses which had borne them so
far we will not speak. When he emerged into the fertile country, it was
not until after severe contests against immense odds, and until he had
lost many favorite officers and picked men, to all of whom he had become
endeared by participation in the dangers of a march across the American
continent.
On the 2d of December, 1846, Gen. Kearny arrived at Warner’s Rancho, one
of the extreme eastward settlements of California. He there learned
certainly what he had previously heard from a party of Californians,
that the population had risen against the invaders and that Andreas Pico
was near San Diego with a superior party, intending to give him battle.
Though exhausted by a long march, and mounted on broken-down mules, Gen.
Kearny hurried to attack him. On the night of December 5, he heard that
Pico was at the village of San Pascual, and on the next morning met him.
At once a charge was ordered, which broke Pico’s line and forced it to
retreat. After a flight of half a mile, however, it was rallied and
charged the head of the American force, and lanced many of the foremost
men. A desperate hand to hand fight ensued, which resulted in the
discomfiture of Pico, not, however, until Captains Moore and Johnston,
and Lieutenant Hammond, and sixteen men had been killed, and fourteen
persons wounded, including the general himself, and all the officers
except Captain Turner, who, though he greatly distinguished himself,
escaped untouched. The inequality of the contest was immense, when we
remember that the Californians, the most superb horsemen in the world,
were mounted on excellent chargers, while the dragoons were on mules
which had marched from Santa Fe. The dead were buried; this sad duty,
and the necessity of making further arrangements, detained the party all
day. On the next day the march was resumed, but encumbered as they were,
they were able to proceed but nine miles when the enemy charged them
again. The needful preparations to receive them were made, when the
enemy wheeled off, and attempted to occupy an eminence which commanded
the route. From this, after a sharp skirmish, they were driven with some
loss, and then Gen. Kearny encamped. As Pico evidently intended to
dispute every pass, the general determined to remain where he was until
reinforcements, for which he had sent to the naval commander at San
Diego, should arrive. Four days afterward a force of marines, under
Capt. Zelin, U. S. M. C. and of sailors, commanded by Lieutenant Gray,
arrived, and with this force Gen. Kearny marched without molestation to
San Diego, a distance of thirty miles. A difficulty about the command
here arose between Commodore Stockton and Gen. Kearny, which could not
be settled in California, where the naval commander had far the superior
force. It did not prevent their undertaking a joint expedition against
Puebla de los Angelos, which was in possession of a strong Mexican force
under Flores.
On the 8th of January the Mexicans were met six hundred strong, with
four guns, in the face of whom the American force of sailors, marines,
and the remnant of the dragoons, forded the river, and after a short,
sharp, and decisive affair, drove them from the field. On the next day
the enemy again appeared, and, as usual, were beaten, and on the 10th
Puebla de los Angelos was occupied. At these affairs both the naval and
army commanders were present, and the question of who was commander
added somewhat to the difficulty already existing between them. At this
time Lieut. Col. J. C. Fremont, then of the mounted rifles, commanded a
numerous body of volunteers in California. Gen. Kearny ordered this
officer to join him. This Col. Fremont did not do, but on the contrary,
considered Com. Stockton as his commander. Consequently, when on the
arrival of land reinforcements from the United States, Gen. Kearny
assumed and maintained his command, he ordered Col. Fremont to accompany
him home. Col. Fremont was subsequently arrested and tried for this
dereliction of duty, found guilty of mutinous conduct, and sentenced to
be dismissed the service. A portion of the court which tried him having
recommended the remission of the sentence, the President acquiesced, and
he was ordered to duty, but immediately resigned his commission. The
prosecution of the charges against Col. Fremont detained Gen. Kearny in
Washington during a portion of the winter of ’47 and ’48, and was,
doubtless, most painful to him, for no man in the army had previously
borne a higher character for soldiership than Col. Fremont. The court
martial fully sustained Gen. Kearny in every pretension, and but one
person has been found in America to cavil at the sentence.
In the spring of 1848, Gen. Kearny was ordered to Mexico, whither he
proceeded at once. All hostilities were, however, then over, and though
he was in the discharge of his duty, his service there was uneventful.
On the conclusion of the war he returned home, and was assigned to the
command of the military division of which St. Louis is the
head-quarters. He there had the proud satisfaction to receive the brevet
of major-general for his services in New Mexico and California. He had,
however, brought with him the seeds of an insidious disease which soon
overcame his strength, enfeebled as it was by privations and trials of
every kind. He died at St. Louis, October 31, 1848, leaving a wife and a
family of young sons to regret him.
In the eventful career of Gen. Kearny he had always been distinguished
as one of the best officers of his grade in the service. From a
subaltern to the highest rank he rose, every step having been won by
service. He was bland in his manners, dispassionate and calm. Quick and
ready in forming his opinions, he yet did not act hastily, and when once
he had decided, was immutable in his course. A great student and
thinker, he never talked except when he had something to say, yet
possessed a fund of anecdote and universal information rarely to be met
with. In the West he was a popular idol, so that the whole population
acquiesced in the apparently arbitrary steps he was often called on to
take in the discharge of his duty. To his subalterns he was endeared by
a thousand kindnesses, and to the whole army by respect and admiration.
He left in all the army list no one superior to him in personal courage,
science in his profession, or the minor qualities which contribute so
much to make the soldier.
Immediately on the receipt of the news of his death, the Secretary of
War, Mr. Marcy, published an order containing the following high tribute
to his important services.
“War Department.
_Washington, Nov. 6, 1848._
The President with feelings of deep regret announces to the Army
the death of Brigadier-General Stephen W. Kearny, Major-General
by brevet. The honorable and useful career of this gallant
officer terminated on the 31st of October at St. Louis, in
consequence of a disease contracted while in the discharge of
his official duties in Mexico.
General Kearny entered the army in 1812 as lieutenant, and
continued in it until his death—a period of more than
thirty-six years. His character and bearing as an accomplished
officer were unsurpassed, and challenge the admiration of his
fellow citizens and the emulation of his professional brethren.
His conquest of New Mexico and valuable services in California
have inseparably connected his name with the future destiny of
these territories, and it will be ever held in grateful
remembrance by the successive generations which will inhabit
these extensive regions of our confederacy.”
He was buried in St. Louis by the 7th and 8th regiments of infantry and
a squadron of that regiment of dragoons which he had made so famous,
commanded by one of his favorite captains, the present Col. E. V.
Sumner, of the 1st dragoons. All the city of St. Louis accompanied the
cortège to pay their last tribute of respect to the general and the MAN.
* * * * *
I WILL BE A MINER TOO.
BY MRS. JULIET H. L. CAMPBELL.
All around me men are delving,
Deep within the troubled earth,
Searching for the darksome treasures
Hidden since creation’s birth.
Wearying toil and ceaseless effort
Bring the buried ore to view;—
Though I be but feeble woman,
I will be a miner too!
Heart of mine! thou art a cavern,
Sad and silent, dark and deep—
In thy fathomless recesses
Spirit gnomes their treasures keep.
Gems of love, and hope, and joyance,
Bury there their flashing beam—
Wilder passions fret their prison
With the fierceness of their gleam.
Though unburnished, prized and precious,
To the enraptured poet’s sight,
As the jewels, proudly flashing,
On the brow of beauty bright.
True, unto the sordid worldling
These are gems of little worth,
Yet, for thee, high-hearted poet!
I will strive to bring them forth!
Lamp of truth, my brow adorning,
Lighting up the weary way—
I, in pain, will probe my bosom,
Bare its treasures to the day.
Wearying toil and ceaseless effort
Bring the buried ore to view;—
Though I be but feeble woman,
I will be a miner too!
* * * * *
THE EMIGRANT’S DAUGHTERS.
BY GRETTA.
I had but two; they were my only treasure,
Two lovely daughters of the imperial isle;
They gave my quiet hearth-stone every pleasure,
They gave my lone heart every sunny smile,
And to your land I brought them o’er the sea,
To hear the tones which tell of Liberty!
They were twin lasses; one was like the Rose,
With deep, dark crimson on its opening breast;
The other like the Daisy, when it glows
With evening’s pearls upon its snowy crest.
And when they nestled near me lovingly,
They were like morn and quiet eve to me.
But she, the golden haired, is with the stars!
She, the blue-eyed, the fondest of the twain,
For her was opened heaven’s glorious bars,
Just as the sun was sinking in the main,
And flowers less fair, each in its soft green nest,
On the far shore, had sunk like her to rest.
Upon the waves she died—the sounding waves—
The sands her pillow, and the weeds her pall;
And there the deepest, tideless water laves
The mortal part of half my little all;
And though I know her soul is bright above,
Still earth is desolate without her love.
She drooped from day to day—within my arms
I cradled her dear form, so slight, so fair,
And gazed with doating love upon her charms,
While my big tears were glistening in her hair,
Till o’er her upturned eyes the fringed-lid fell,
And soft she said—I know she said—“Farewell!”
She died without a moan, without a sigh;
A golden day had faded in the west,
And mother Night descending from on high,
Was hushing Nature to her dreamy rest;
And ere another day broke o’er the sea,
Deep rolled the waves between my child and me.
I chanted o’er her lays of her old home—
And she, the stricken mourner by my side,
Mingled her tears with ocean’s moonlit foam,
And sent her wail upon the shoreless tide.
Oh! it was sad to hear that heart-wrung moan
On the wild sea, so vast, so still, so lone!
On my own native Scotland’s hallowed ground,
In a low glen, from worldly din afar,
The stars look down upon the grassy mound
Where _she_ is laid—my young life’s morning star—
And in the trackless deep, the bud she gave
From her fond bosom, fills a briny grave.
And with this one, all that my heart has left,
I raise my altar where your heaven glows;
Here the lone pair, of all they loved bereft,
Would find in you, Bethesda for their woes.
They’ll think of home, with memory’s burning tear,
But turn to meet Hope’s smiling welcome here!
* * * * *
JASPER ST. AUBYN;
OR THE COURSE OF PASSION.
BY HENRY WILLIAM HERBERT.
INTRODUCTION.
In the commencement of the seventeenth century, there stood among the
woody hills and romantic gorges which sweep southwardly down from the
bleak expanse of Dartmoor, one of those fine old English halls, which,
dating from the reign of the last of the Tudors, united so much of
modern comfort with so much of antique architectural beauty. Many
specimens of this style of building are still to be found scattered
throughout England, with their broad terraces, their quaintly sculptured
porticoes, their tall projecting oriels, their many stacks of richly
decorated chimneys, and their heraldic bearings adorning every salient
point, grotesquely carved in the red freestone, which is their most
usual, as indeed their most appropriate material. No one, however,
existed, it is probable, at that day, more perfect in proportion to its
size, or more admirably suited to its wild and romantic site, than the
manor-house of Widecomb-Under-Moor, or, as it was more generally called
in its somewhat sequestered neighborhood, the House in the Woods. Even
at the present time, that is a very rural and little frequented
district; its woods are more extensive, its moorlands wilder, its
streams less often turned to purposes of manufacturing utility, than in
any other tract of the southern counties; but at the time of which I
write, when all England was comparatively speaking an agricultural
country; when miles and miles of forest existed, where there now can
scarcely be found acres; when the communications even between the
neighboring country towns were difficult and tedious, and those between
the country and metropolis almost impracticable; the region of Dartmoor
and its surrounding woodlands was less known and less frequented, except
by its own inhabitants, rude for the most part and uncultured as their
native hills, than the prairies of the Far West, or the solitudes of the
Rocky Mountains.
The few gentry, and lords of manors who owned estates, and had their
castellated or Elizabethan dwellings, scattered here and there, at long
intervals, among the sylvan scenery of that lonely region, were for the
greater part little superior in habits, in refinement, and in mental
culture, to the boors around them. Staunch hunters, and hard drinkers,
up with the lark and abed before the curfew, loyal to their king, kind
and liberal to their dependents, and devout before their God, they led
obscure and blameless lives, careless of the great world, a rumor of
which rarely wandered so far as to reach their ears, unknown to fame,
yet neither useless nor unhonored within the sphere of their humble
influence, marked by few faults and many unpretending virtues.
To this general rule, however, the lords of Widecomb Manor had long been
an exception. Endowed with larger territorial possessions than most of
their neighbors, connected with many of the noblest families of the
realm, the St. Aubyns of Widecomb Manor had for several generations held
themselves high above the squires of the vicinity, and the burghers of
the circumjacent towns. Not confining themselves to the remote limits of
their rural possessions, many of them had shone in the court and in the
camp; several had held offices of trust and honor under Elizabeth and
her successor; and when, in the reign of the unfortunate Charles, the
troubles between the king and his Parliament broke out at length into
open war, the St. Aubyn of that day, like many another gallant
gentleman, emptied his patrimonial coffers to replenish the exhausted
treasury; and melted his old plate and felled his older oaks, in order
to support the king’s cause in the field, at the head of his own
regiment of horse.
Thence, when the good cause succumbed for a time, and democratic
license, hardly restrained by puritanic rigor, strode rampant over the
prerogative of England’s crown, and the liberties of England’s people,
fines, sequestrations, confiscations, fell heavily on the confirmed
malignancy, as it was then termed, of the Lord of Widecomb; and he might
well esteem himself fortunate, that he escaped beyond the seas with his
head upon his shoulders, although he certainly had not where to lay it.
Returning at the restoration with the Second Charles, more fortunate
than many of his friends, Sir Miles St. Aubyn recovered a considerable
portion of his demesnes, which, though sequestrated, had not been sold,
and with these the old mansion, now, alas! all too grand and stately for
the diminished revenues of its owner, and the shrunken estates which it
overlooked.
It would not perhaps have been too late, even then for prudence and
economy, joined to a resolute will and energetic purpose, to retrieve
the shaken fortunes of the house; but having recovered peace and a
settled government, the people and the court of England appeared
simultaneously to have lost their senses. The overstrained and somewhat
hypocritical morality of the Protectorate was succeeded by the wildest
license, the most extravagant debauchery; and in the orgies which
followed their restoration to their patrimonial honors, too many of the
gallant cavaliers discreditably squandered the last remnant of fortunes
which had been half ruined in a cause so noble and so holy.
Such was the fate of Sir Miles St. Aubyn. The brave and generous soldier
of the First Charles sank into the selfish, dissipated roysterer under
his unworthy successor. He never visited again the beautiful oak-woods
and sparkling waters of his native place, but frittered away a frivolous
and useless life among the orgies of Alsatia and the revels of
Whitehall; and died, unfriended, and almost alone, leaving an only son,
who had scarce seen his father, the heir to his impoverished fortunes
and little honored name.
His son, who was born before the commencement of the troubles, of a lady
highly-bred, and endowed as highly, who died—as the highly endowed die
but too often—in the first prime of womanhood, was already a man when
the restoration brought his father back to his native land, though not
to his patrimonial estates or his paternal duties.
Miles St. Aubyn, the younger, had been educated during the period of the
civil war, and during the protracted absence of his father, by a distant
maternal relative, whose neutrality and humble position alike protected
him from persecution by either of the hostile parties. He grew up, like
his race, strong, active, bold and gallant; and if he had not received
much of that peculiar nurture which renders men graceful and
courtly-mannered, almost from their cradles, he was at least educated
under the influence of those traditional principles which make them at
the bottom, even if they lack something of external polish, high-souled
and honorable gentlemen.
After the restoration he was sent abroad, as was the habit of the day,
to push his fortunes with his sword in the Netherlands, then, as in all
ages of the world, the chosen battle-ground of nations. There he served
many years, if not with high distinction, at least with credit to his
name; and if he did not win high fortune with his sword—and indeed the
day for such winnings had already passed in Europe—he at least enjoyed
the advantage of mingling, during his adventurous career, with the
great, the noble, and the famous of the age; and when, on his return to
his native land after his father’s death, he turned his sword into a
ploughshare, and sought repose among the old staghorned oaks at
Widecomb, he was no longer the enthusiastic, wild and headstrong youth
of twenty years before; but a grave, polished, calm, accomplished man,
with something of Spanish dignity and sternness engrafted on the
frankness of his English character, and with the self-possession of one
used familiarly to courts and camps showing itself in every word and
motion.
He was a man moreover of worth, energy and resolution, and sitting down
peacefully under the shadow of his own woods, he applied himself
quietly, but with an iron steadiness of purpose that ensured success, to
retrieving in some degree the fortunes of his race.
Soon after he returned he had taken unto himself a wife, not perhaps
very wisely chosen from a family of descent prouder and haughtier even
than his own, and of fortunes if not as much impoverished, at least so
greatly diminished, as to render the lady’s dower a matter merely
nominal. But it was an old affection—a long promise, hallowed by love
and constancy and honor.
She was, moreover, a beautiful and charming creature, and, so long as
she lived, rendered the old soldier a very proud and very happy husband,
and when she died—which, most unhappily for all concerned, was but a
few months after giving birth to an only son—left him so comfortless,
and at the same time so wedded to the memory of the dead, that he never
so much as envisaged the idea of a second marriage.
This gentleman it was, who, many long years after the death of the
gentle Lady Alice, dwelt in serene and dignified seclusion in the old
Hall, which he had never quitted since he became a widower; devoting his
whole abilities to nursing his dilapidated estates, and educating his
only son, whom he regarded with affection bordering on idolatry.
With the last Miles St. Aubyn, however, we shall have little to do
henceforth, for the soldier of the Netherlands had departed so far from
the traditions of his family—the eldest son of which had for
generations borne the same name of Miles—as to drop that patrimonial
appellation in the person of his son, whom he had caused to be
christened Jasper, after a beloved friend, a brother of the lady
afterward his wife, who had fallen by his side on a well-fought field in
the Luxembourg.
What was the cause which induced the veteran, in other respects so
severe a stickler for ancient habitudes, to swerve from this
time-honored custom, it would be difficult to state; some of those who
knew him best, attributing it merely to the desire of perpetuating the
memory of his best friend in the person of his only child; while others
ascribed it to a sort of superstitious feeling, which, attaching the
continued decline of the house to the continual recurrence of the
patronymic, looked forward in some degree to a revival of its honors
with a new name to its lord.
Whatever might have been the cause, the consequences of this deviation
from old family usage, as prognosticated by the dependents of Widecomb,
and the superstitious inhabitants of the neighboring woods and wolds,
were any thing but likely to better the fortunes of the lords of the
manor; for not a few of them asserted, with undoubting faith, that the
last St. Aubyn had seen the light of day, and that in the same
generation which had seen the extinction of the old name the old race
should itself pass away. Nor did they lack some sage authority to which
they might refer for confirmation of their dark forebodings; for there
existed, living yet in the mouths of men, one of those ancient saws,
which were so common a century or two ago in the rural districts of
England, as connected with the fortunes of the old houses; and which
were referred to some Mother Shipton, or other equally infallible
soothsayer of the county, whose dicta to the vulgar minds of the feudal
tenantry were confirmations strong as proofs of Holy Writ.
The prophecy in question was certainly exceeding old; and had been
handed down through many generations, by direct oral tradition, among a
race of men wholly illiterate and uneducated; to whom perhaps alone,
owing to the long expatriation of the late and present lords of the
manor, it was now familiar; although in past times it had doubtless been
accredited by the family to which it related.
It ran as follows, and, not being deficient in a sort of wild harmony
and rugged solemnity, produced, by no means unnaturally, a powerful
effect on the minds of hearers, when recited in awe-stricken tones and
with a bended brow beside some feebly glimmering hearth, in the lulls of
the tempest haply raving without, among the leafless trees, under the
starless night—It ran as follows, and, universally believed by the
vassals of the house, it remains for us to see how far its predictions
were confirmed by events, and how far it influenced or foretold the
course of passion, or the course of fate—
While Miles sits master in Widecomb place,
The cradle shall rock on the oaken floor,
And St. Aubyn rule, where he ruled of yore.
But when Miles departs from the olden race,
The cradle shall rock by the hearth no more,
Nor St. Aubyn rule, where he ruled of yore.
* * * * *
Thus far it has been necessary for us to tread back the path of departed
generations, and to retrace the fortunes of the Widecomb family,
inasmuch as many of the events, which we shall have to narrate
hereafter, and very much of the character of the principal personage, to
whom our tale relates, have a direct relation to these precedents, and
would have been to a certain degree incomprehensible but for this
retrogression. If it obtain no other end, it will serve at least to
explain how, amid scenes so rural and sequestered, and dwelling almost
in solitude, among neighbors so rugged and uncivilized, there should
have been found a family, deprived of all advantages of
intercommunication with equals or superiors in intellect and demeanor,
and even unassisted by the humanizing influence of familiar female
society, which had yet maintained, as if traditionally, all the
principles, all the ideas, and all the habitudes of the brightest
schools of knightly courtesy and gentlemanly bearing, all the graces and
easy dignity of courts, among the remote solitudes of the country.
At the time when our narrative commences, the soldier of the
Netherlands, Sir Miles St. Aubyn—for though he cared not to bear a
foreign title, he had been stricken a knight banneret on a bloody
battle-field of Flanders—had fallen long into the sere, the yellow
leaf; and though his cheek was still ruddy as a winter pippin, his eye
bright and clear, and his foot firm as ever, his hair was as white as
the drifted snow; his arm had lost its nervous power; and if his mind
was still sane and his body sound, he was now more addicted to sit
beside the glowing hearth in winter, or to bask in the summer sunshine,
poring over some old chronicle or antique legend, than to wake the
echoes of the oakwoods with his bugle-horn, or to rouse the heathcock
from the heathy moorland with his blythe springers.
Not so, however, the child of his heart, Jasper. The boy on whom such
anxious pains had been bestowed, on whom hopes so intense reposed, had
reached his seventeenth summer. Like all his race, he was unusually
tall, and admirably formed, both for agility and strength. Never, from
his childhood upward, having mingled with any persons of vulgar station
or unpolished demeanor, he was, as if by nature, graceful and easy. His
manners although proud, and marked by something of that stern dignity
which we have mentioned as a characteristic of the father, but which in
one so youthful appeared strange and out of place, were ever those of a
high and perfect gentleman. His features were marked with all the
ancestral beauties, which may be traced in unmixed races through so many
generations; and as it was a matter of notorious truth, that from the
date of the conquest, no drop of Saxon or of Celtic blood had been
infused into the pure Norman stream which flowed through the veins of
the proud St. Aubyns, it was no marvel that after the lapse of so many
ages the youthful Jasper should display, both in face and form, the
characteristic lines and coloring peculiar to the noblest tribe of men
that has ever issued from the great northern hive of nations.
Accordingly, he had the rich dark chestnut hair, not curled, but waving
in loose clusters; the clear gray eye; the aquiline nose; the keen and
fiery look; the resolute mouth, and the iron jaw, which in all ages have
belonged to the descendant of the Northman. While the spare yet sinewy
frame, the deep, round chest, thin flanks, and limbs long and muscular
and singularly agile, were not less perfect indications of his blood
than the sharp, eagle-like expression of the bold countenance.
Trained in his early boyhood to all those exercises of activity and
strength, which were in those days held essential to the gentleman, it
needs not to say that Jasper St. Aubyn could ride, swim, fence, shoot,
run, leap, pitch the bar, and go through every manœuvre of the _salle
d’armes_, the tilt-yard, and the _manège_, with equal grace and power.
Nor had his lighter accomplishments been neglected; for the age of his
father and grandfather, if profligate and dissolute even to debauchery,
was still refined and polished, and to dance gracefully, and touch the
lute or sing tastefully, was as much expected from the cavalier as to
have a firm foot in the stirrup, or a strong and supple wrist with the
backsword and rapier.
His mind had been richly stored also, if not very sagely trained and
regulated. For Sir Miles, in the course of his irregular and adventurous
life, had read much more than he had meditated; had picked up much more
of learning than he had of philosophy; and what philosophy he had
belonged much more to the cold self-reliance of the camp than to the
sounder tenets of the schools.
While filling his son’s mind, therefore, with much curious lore of all
sorts; while making him a master of many tongues, and laying before him
books of all kinds, the old banneret had taken little pains—perhaps he
would not have succeeded had he taken more—to point the lessons which
the books contained; to draw deductions from the facts which he
inculcated; or to direct the course of the young man’s opinions.
Self-taught himself, or taught only in the hard school of experience,
and having himself arrived at sound principles of conduct, he never
seemed to recollect that the boy would run through no such ordeal, and
reap no such lessons; nor did he ever reflect that the deductions which
he had himself drawn from certain facts, acquired in one way, and under
one set of circumstances, would probably be entirely different from
those at which another would arrive, when his data were acquired in a
very different manner, and under circumstances altogether diverse and
dissimilar.
Thence it came that Jasper St. Aubyn, at the age of seventeen years, was
in all qualities of body thoroughly trained and disciplined; and in all
mental faculties perfectly educated, but entirely untrained, uncorrected
and unchastened.
In manner, he was a perfect gentleman; in body, he was a perfect man; in
mind, he was almost a perfect scholar. And what, our reader will perhaps
inquire, what could he have been more; or what more could education have
effected in his behalf?
Much—very much—good friend.
For as there is an education of the body, and an education of the brain,
so is there also an education of the heart. And that is an education
which men rarely have the faculty of imparting, and which few men ever
have obtained, who have not enjoyed the inestimable advantage of female
nurture during their youth, as well as their childhood; unless they have
learned it in the course of painful years, from those severe and bitter
teachers, those chasteners and purifiers of the heart—sorrow and
suffering, which two _are_ experience.
This, then, was the education in which Jasper St. Aubyn was altogether
deficient; which Sir Miles had never so much as attempted to impart to
him; and which, had he endeavored, he probably would have failed to
bestow.
We do not mean to say that the boy was heartless—boys rarely are so, we
might almost say never—nor that the impulses of his heart were toward
evil rather than good; far from it. His heart, like all young and
untainted hearts, was full of noble impulses—but they were _impulses_;
full of fresh springing generous desires, of gracious sympathies and
lofty aspirations—but he had not one principle—he never had been
taught to question one impulse, before acting upon it—he never had
learned to check one desire, to doubt the genuineness of one sympathy,
to moderate the eagerness of one aspiration. He never had been brought
to suspect that there were such virtues as self-control, or
self-devotion; such vices as selfishness or self-abandonment—in a word,
he never had so much as heard
That Right is right, and that to follow Right
Were wisdom, in the scorn of consequence—
and therefore he was, at the day of which we write, even what he was;
and thereafter, what we propose to show you.
At the time when the youthful heir had attained his seventeenth year,
the great object of his father’s life was accomplished; the fortunes of
the family were so far at least retrieved, that if the St. Aubyns no
longer aspired, as of old, to be the first or wealthiest family of the
county, they were at least able to maintain the household on that
footing of generous liberality and hospitable ease which has been at all
times the pride and passion of the English country gentleman.
For many years Sir Miles had undergone the severest privations, and it
was only by the endurance of actual poverty within doors, that he was
enabled to maintain that footing abroad, without which he could scarcely
have preserved his position in society.
For many years the park had been neglected, the gardens overrun with
weeds and brambles, the courts grass-grown, and the house itself
dilapidated, literally from the impossibility of supporting domestics
sufficiently numerous to perform the necessary labors of the estate.
During much of this period it was to the beasts of the forest, the fowl
of the moorland, and the fish of the streams, that the household of
Widecomb had looked for their support; nor did the table of the banneret
himself boast any liquor more generous than that afforded by the ale
vats of March and October.
Throughout the whole of this dark and difficult time, however, the stout
old soldier had never suffered one particle of that ceremonial, which he
deemed essential as well to the formation as the preservation of the
character of a true gentleman, to be relaxed or neglected by his
diminished household.
Personally, he was at all times clad point device; nor did he ever fail
in being mounted, himself and at least one attendant, as became a
cavalier of honor. The hours of the early dinner, and of the more
agreeable and social supper, were announced duly by the clang of
trumpets, even when there were no guests to be summoned, save the old
banneret and his motherless child, and perhaps the only visiter for
years at Widecomb Manor, the gray-haired vicar of the village, who had
served years before as chaplain of an English regiment in the Low
Countries, with Sir Miles. Nor was the pewter tankard, containing at the
best but toast and ale, stirred with a sprig of rosemary, handed around
the board with less solemnity than had it been a golden hanap mantling
with the first vintages of Burgundy or Xeres.
Thus it was that, as Jasper advanced gradually toward years of manhood,
the fortunes of the house improving in proportion to his growth, seeing
no alteration in the routine of the household, he scarcely was aware
that any change had taken place in more essential points.
The eye and ear of the child had been taken by the banners, the
trumpets, and the glittering board, and his fancy riveted by the
solemnity and grave decorum which characterized the meals partaken in
the great hall; and naturally enough he never knew that the pewter
platters and tankards had been exchanged, since those days, for plate of
silver, and the strong ale converted into claret or canary.
The consequence of this was simply that he found himself a youth of
seventeen, surrounded by all the means and appliances of luxury, with
servants, horses, hounds, and falcons at his command, the leading
personage, beyond all comparison, of the neighborhood, highly born,
handsome, well bred and accomplished. All this, by the way, was entirely
uncorrected by any memory of past sufferings or sorrows, either on his
own part or on that of his family, or by any knowledge of the privations
and exertions on the part of Sir Miles, by which this present affluence
had been purchased; and he became, naturally enough, somewhat over
confident in his own qualities, somewhat over-bearing in his manner, and
not a little intolerant and inconsiderate as to the opinions and
feelings of others. He then presented, in a word, the not unusual
picture of an arrogant, self-sufficient, proud and fiery youth, with
many generous and noble points, and many high qualities, which, duly
cultivated, might have rendered him a good, a happy, and perhaps even a
great man; but which, untrained as they were, and suffered to run up
into a rank and unpruned overgrowth, were but too likely to degenerate
themselves into vices, and to render him at some future day a tormentor
of himself, and an oppressor of others.
Now, however, he was a general favorite, for largely endowed with animal
spirits, indulged in every wish that his fancy could form, never crossed
in the least particular, it was rarely that his violent temper would
display itself, or his innate selfishness rise conspicuous above the
superficial face of good-nature and somewhat careless affability, which
he presented to the general observer.
It was, perhaps, unfortunate for Jasper, no less than for those who were
in after days connected with him, whether for good or evil, that, at
this critical period of his adolescence, when the character of the man
is developed from the accidents of boyhood, in proportion as his
increasing years and altered habits and pursuits led him to be more
abroad, and cast him in some degree into the world, the advancing years
and growing infirmities of his father kept him closer to the library and
the hall.
So that at the very time when his expanding mind and nascent passions
most needed sage advice and moderate coercion, or at least wary
guidance, he was abandoned almost entirely to his own direction. The
first outbreaks, therefore, of evil principles, the germs of a masterful
will, the seeds of fierce and fiery passions, and, above all, the
growing recklessness with regard to the feelings and the rights of
others, which could scarcely have escaped the notice of the shrewd old
man had he accompanied his son abroad, and which, if noticed, would
surely have been repressed, were allowed to increase hourly by
self-indulgence and the want of restraint, unknown and unsuspected to
the youth himself, for whom one day they were to be the cause of so many
and so bitter trials.
But it is now time that, turning from this brief retrospect of previous
events, and this short analysis of the early constitution of the mind of
him whose singular career is to form the subject of this narrative, we
should introduce our reader to the scene of action, and to the person
whose adventures in after life will perhaps excuse the space which has
necessarily been allotted to the antecedents of the first marked event
which befel him, and from which all the rest took their rise in a train
of connection, which, although difficult to trace by a casual observer,
was in reality close and perfect.
The manor-house of Widecomb, such as it has been slightly sketched
above, stood on a broad flat terrace, paved with slabs of red freestone,
and adorned with a massive balustrade of the same material, interspersed
with grotesque images at the points where it was reached from the
esplanade below, by three or four flights of broad and easy steps.
The mansion itself was large, and singularly picturesque, but the
beauties of the building were as nothing to those of the scenery which
it overlooked.
It was built on the last and lowest slope of one of those romantic spurs
which trend southerly from the wild and heathery heights of Dartmoor.
And although the broad and beautifully kept lawn was embosomed in a very
woody and sylvan chase, full of deep glens and tangled dingles, which
was in turn framed on three sides by the deep oak-woods, which covered
all the rounded hills in the rear of the estate and to the right and
left hand, yet as the land continued to fall toward the south for many
and many a mile, the sight could range from the oriel windows of the
great hall, and of the fine old library, situated on either hand of the
entrance and armory, over a wide expanse of richly cultivated country,
with more than one navigable river winding among the woods and
corn-fields, and many a village steeple glittering among the hedgerows,
until in the far distance it was bounded by a blue hazy line, which
seemed to melt into the sky, but which was in truth, though not to be
distinguished as such unless by a practiced eye, the British Channel.
The Hall itself and even the southern verge of the chase, which bounded
the estate in that direction, lay, however, at a very considerable
distance from the cultivated country, and was divided from it by a vast
broken chasm, with banks so precipitous and rocky that no road had ever
been carried through it, while its great width had deterred men from the
idea of bridging it. Through this strange and terrific gorge there
rushed an impetuous and powerful torrent, broken by many falls and
rapids, with many a deep and limpid pool between them, favorite haunts
of the large salmon and sea trout which abounded in its waters. This
brook, for it scarcely can be called a river, although after the rains
of autumn or the melting snows of spring it sent down an immense volume
of dark, rust colored water, with a roar that could be heard for miles,
to the distant Tamar, swept down the hills in a series of cascades from
the right hand side of the park, until it reached the brink of the chasm
we have described, lying at right angles to its former course, down
which it plunged in an impetuous shoot of nearly three hundred feet, and
rushed thence easterly away, walled on each side by the precipitous
rock, until some five miles thence it was crossed at a deep and somewhat
dangerous ford, by the only great road which traversed that district,
and by which alone strangers could reach the Hall and its beautiful
demesnes.
To the westward or right hand side of the chase the country was entirely
wild and savage, covered with thick woods, interspersed with lonely
heaths, and intersected by hundreds of clear brawling rills. To the
eastward, however, although much broken by forest ground, there was a
wide range of rich pasture fields and meadows, divided by great
overgrown hawthorn hedges, each hedge almost a thicket, and penetrated
by numerous lanes and horse-roads buried between deep banks, and
overcanopied by foliage, that, even at noonday, was almost impenetrable
to the sunshine.
Here and there lay scattered among the fields and woods innumerable
farm-houses and granges, the abodes of small freeholders, once tenants
and vassals of the great St. Aubyns; and, at about six miles from the
Hall, nestled in a green valley, through which ran a clear, bright
trout-stream to join the turbulent torrent, stood the little market town
of Widecomb-Under-Moor, from their unalienated property in which the
family of St. Aubyn derived the most valuable portion of their incomes.
Over the whole of this pleasant and peaceful tract, whether it was still
owned by themselves, or had passed into the hands of the free yeomanry,
the Lords of Widecomb still held manorial rights, and the few feudal
privileges which had survived the revolution; and, through the whole of
it, Sir Miles St. Aubyn was regarded with unmixed love and veneration,
while the boy Jasper was looked upon almost as a son in every family,
though some old men would shake their heads doubtfully, and mutter sage
but unregarded saws concerning his present disposition and future
prospects; and some old grandames would prognosticate disasters,
horrors, and even crimes as hanging over his career, in consequence,
perhaps, of the inauspicious change in the patronymic of his race.
They were a happy and an unsophisticated race who inhabited those lonely
glens. Sufficiently well provided to be above the want of necessaries,
or the fear of poverty, they were not so far removed from the necessity
of labor as to have incurred vicious ambitions—moderate, frugal, and
industrious, they lived uncorrupted, and died happy in their unlearned
innocence.
It was the boast of the district that bars and locks were appendages to
doors entirely unusual and useless; that the cage of Widecomb had not
held a tenant since the days of stiff old Oliver; and that no deed of
violence or blood had ever tainted those calm vales with horror.
Alas! how soon was that boast to be annulled; how soon were the details
of a dread domestic tragedy, full of dark horrors, and reproductive of
guilt through generations, to render the very name of Widecomb a terror,
and to invest the beauteous scenery with images of superstitious awe and
hatred. But we must not anticipate, nor seek as yet to penetrate the
secrets of that destiny, which even during the morn of promising young
life, seemed to overhang the house,
And hushed in grim repose,
Expects its evening prey.
CHAPTER I.
_The Peril._
I say beware—
That way perdition lies, the very path
Of seeming safety leading to the abyss.
—MS.
It was as fair a morning of July as ever dawned in the blue summer sky;
the sun as yet had risen but a little way above the waves of fresh green
foliage which formed the horizon of the woodland scenery surrounding
Widecomb Manor; and his heat, which promised ere midday to become
excessive, was tempered now by the exhalations of the copious
night-dews, and by the cool breath of the western breeze, which came
down through the leafy gorges, in long, soft swells from the open
moorlands.
All nature was alive and joyous; the air was vocal with the piping
melody of the blackbirds and thrushes, caroling in every brake and bosky
dingle; the smooth, green lawn, before the windows of the old Hall was
peopled with whole tribes of fat, lazy hares, limping about among the
dewy herbage, fearless, as it would seem, of man’s aggression; and to
complete the picture, above a score of splendid peacocks were strutting
to and fro on the paved terraces, or perched upon the carved stone
balustrades, displaying their gorgeous plumage to the early sunshine.
The shadowy mists of the first morning twilight had not been long
dispersed from the lower regions, and were suspended still in the middle
air in broad fleecy masses, though melting rapidly away in the
increasing warmth and brightness of the day.
And still a faint blue line hovered over the bed of the long rocky
gorge, which divided the chase from the open country, floating about it
like the steam of a seething caldron, and rising here and there into
tall smoke-like columns, probably where some steeper cataract of the
mountain-stream sent its foam skyward.
So early, indeed, was the hour, that had my tale been recited of these
degenerate days, there would have been no gentle eyes awake to look upon
the loveliness of new-awakened nature.
In the good days of old, however, when daylight was still deemed to be
the fitting time for labor and for pastime, and night the appointed time
for natural and healthful sleep, the dawn was wont to brighten beheld by
other eyes than those of clowns and milkmaids, and the gay songs of the
matutinal birds were listened to by ears that could appreciate their
untaught melodies.
And now, just as the stable clock was striking four, the great oaken
door of the old Hall was thrown open with a vigorous swing that made it
rattle on its hinges, and Jasper St. Aubyn came bounding out into the
fresh morning air, with a foot as elastic as that of the mountain roe,
singing a snatch of some quaint old ballad.
He was dressed simply in a close-fitting jacket and tight hose of
dark-green cloth, without any lace or embroidery, light boots of
untanned leather, and a broad-leafed hat, with a single eagle’s feather
thrust carelessly through the band. He wore neither cloak nor sword,
though it was a period at which gentlemen rarely went abroad without
both these, their distinctive attributes; but in the broad black belt
which girt his rounded waist he carried a stout wood-knife with a
buckhorn hilt; and over his shoulder there swung from a leathern thong,
a large wicker fishing-basket.
Nothing, indeed, could be simpler or less indicative of any particular
rank or station in society than young St. Aubyn’s garb, yet it would
have been a very dull and unobservant eye which should take him for
aught less than a high-born and high-bred gentleman.
His fine intellectual face, his bearing erect before heaven, the
graceful ease of his every motion, as he hurried down the flagged steps
of the terrace, and planted his light foot on the dewy greensward, all
betokened gentle birth and gentle associations.
But he thought nothing of himself, nor cared for his advantages,
acquired or natural. The long and heavy salmon-rod which he carried in
his right hand, in three pieces as yet unconnected, did not more clearly
indicate his purpose than the quick marking glance which he cast toward
the half-veiled sun and hazy sky, scanning the signs of the weather.
“It will do, it will do,” he said to himself, thinking as it were aloud,
“for three or four hours at least; the sun will not shake off those
vapors before eight o’clock at the earliest, and if he do come out then
hot and strong, I do not know but the water is dark enough after the
late rains to serve my turn awhile longer. It will blow up, too, I
think, from the westward, and there will be a brisk curl on the pools.
But come, I must be moving, if I would reach Darringford to breakfast.”
And as he spoke he strode out rapidly across the park toward the deep
chasm of the stream, crushing a thousand aromatic perfumes from the dewy
wild-flowers with his heedless foot, and thinking little of the beauties
of nature, as he hastened to the scene of his loved exercise.
It was not long, accordingly, before he reached the brink of the steep
rocky bank above the stream, which he proposed to fish that morning, and
paused to select the best place for descending to the water’s edge.
It was, indeed, a striking and romantic scene as ever met the eye of
painter or of poet. On the farther side of the gorge, scarcely a hundred
yards distant, the dark limestone rocks rose sheer and precipitous from
the very brink of the stream, rifted and broken into angular blocks and
tall columnar masses, from the clefts of which, wherever they could find
soil enough to support their scanty growth, a few stunted oaks shot out
almost horizontally with their gnarled arms and dark-green foliage, and
here and there the silvery bark and quivering tresses of the birch
relieved the monotony of color by their gay brightness. Above, the
cliffs were crowned with the beautiful purple heather, now in its very
glow of summer bloom, about which were buzzing myriads of wild bees
sipping their nectar from its cups of amethyst.
The hither side, though rough and steep and broken, was not in the place
where Jasper stood precipitous; indeed it seemed as if at some distant
period a sort of landslip had occurred, by which the fall of the rocky
wall had been broken into massive fragments, and hurled down in an
inclined plane into the bed of the stream, on which it had encroached
with its shattered blocks and rounded boulders.
Time, however, had covered all this abrupt and broken slope with a
beautiful growth of oak and hazel coppice, among which, only at distant
intervals, could the dun weather-beaten flanks of the great stones be
discovered.
At the base of this descent, a hundred and fifty feet perhaps below the
stand of the young sportsman, flowed the dark arrowy stream—a wild and
perilous water. As clear as crystal, yet as dark as the brown
cairn-gorm, it came pouring down among the broken rocks with a rapidity
and force which showed what must be its fury when swollen by a storm
among the mountains, here breaking into wreaths of rippling foam where
some unseen ledge chafed its current, there roaring and surging white as
December’s snow among the great round-headed rocks, and there again
wheeling in sullen eddies, dark and deceitful, round and round some deep
rock-brimmed basin.
Here and there, indeed, it spread out into wide shallow rippling rapids,
filling the whole bottom of the ravine from side to side, but more
generally it did not occupy above a fourth part of the space below,
leaving sometimes on this margin, sometimes on that, broad pebbly banks,
or slaty ledges, affording an easy footing and a clear path to the
angler in its troubled waters.
After a rapid glance over the well-known scene, Jasper plunged into the
coppice, and following a faint track worn by the feet of the wild-deer
in the first instance, and widened by his own bolder tread, soon reached
the bottom of the chasm, though not until he had flushed from the dense
oak covert two noble black cocks with their superb forked tails, and
glossy purple-lustered plumage, which soared away, crowing their bold
defiance, over the heathery moorlands.
Once at the water’s edge, the young man’s tackle was speedily made
ready, and in a few minutes his long line went whistling through the
air, as he wielded the powerful two-handed rod, as easily as if it had
been a stripling’s reed, and the large gaudy peacock-fly alighted on the
wheeling eddies, at the tail of a long arrowy shoot, as gently as if it
had settled from too long a flight. Delicately, deftly, it was made to
dance and skim the clear, brown surface, until it had crossed the pool
and neared the hither bank; then again, obedient to the pliant wrist, it
arose on glittering wing, circled half round the angler’s head, and was
sent thirty yards aloof, straight as a wild bee’s flight, into a little
mimic whirlpool, scarce larger than the hat of the skillful fisherman,
which spun round and round just to leeward of a gray ledge of limestone.
Scarce had it reached its mark before the water broke all around it, and
the gay deceit vanished, the heavy swirl of the surface, as the break
was closing, indicating the great size of the fish which had risen. Just
as the swirl was subsiding, and the forked tail of the monarch of the
stream was half seen as he descended, that indescribable but well-known
turn of the angler’s wrist, fixed the barbed hook, and taught the scaly
victim the nature of the prey he had gorged so heedlessly.
With a wild bound he threw himself three feet out of the water, showing
his silver sides, with the sea-lice yet clinging to his scales, a fresh
sea-run fish of fifteen, ay, eighteen pounds, and perhaps over.
On his broad back he strikes the water, but not as he meant the
tightened line; for as he leaped the practiced hand had lowered the
rod’s tip, that it fell in a loose bight below him. Again! again! again!
and yet a fourth time he bounded into the air with desperate and
vigorous soubresaults, like an unbroken steed that would dismount his
rider, lashing the eddies of the dark stream into bright bubbling
streaks, and making the heart of his captor beat high with anticipation
of the desperate struggle that should follow, before the monster would
lie panting and exhausted on the yellow sand or moist greensward.
Away! with the rush of an eagle through the air, he is gone like an
arrow down the rapids—how the reel rings, and the line whistles from
the swift working wheel; he is too swift, too headstrong to be checked
as yet; tenfold the strength of that slender tackle might not control
him in his first fiery rush.
But Jasper, although young in years, was old in the art, and skillful as
the craftiest of the gentle craftsmen. He gives him the butt of his rod
steadily, trying the strength of his tackle with a delicate and gentle
finger, giving him line at every rush, yet firmly, cautiously, feeling
his mouth all the while, and moderating his speed even while he yields
to his fury.
Meanwhile, with the eye of intuition and the nerve of iron, he bounds
along the difficult shore, he leaps from rock to rock, alighting on
their slippery tops with the firm agility of the rope-dancer, he
splashes knee deep through the slippery shallows, keeping his line ever
taut, inclining his rod over his shoulder, bearing on his fish ever with
a killing pull, steering him clear of every rock or stump against which
he would fain smash the tackle, and landing him at length in a fine open
roomy pool, at the foot of a long stretch of white and foamy rapids,
down which he has just piloted him with the eye of faith, and the foot
of instinct.
And now the great salmon has turned sulky; like a piece of lead he has
sunk to the bottom of the deep black pool, and lies on the gravel bottom
in the sullenness of despair.
Jasper stooped, gathered up in his left hand a heavy pebble, and pitched
it into the pool, as nearly as he could guess to the whereabout of his
game—another—and another! Aha! that last has roused him. Again he
throws himself clear out of water, and again foiled in his attempt to
smash the tackle, dashes away down stream impetuous.
But his strength is departing—the vigor of his rush is broken. The
angler gives him the butt abundantly, strains on him with a heavier
pull, yet ever yields a little as he exerts his failing powers; see, his
broad, silver side has thrice turned up, even to the surface, and though
each time he has recovered himself, each time it has been with a heavier
and more sickly motion.
Brave fellow! his last race is run, his last spring sprung—no more
shall he disport himself in the bright reaches of the Tamar; no more
shall the Naiads wreathe his clear silver scales with river-greens and
flowery rushes.
The cruel gaff is in his side—his cold blood stains the eddies for a
moment—he flaps out his death-pang on the hard limestone.
“Who-whoop! a nineteen pounder!”
Meantime the morning had worn onward, and ere the great fish was brought
to the basket the sun had soared clear above the mist-wreaths, and had
risen so high into the summer heaven that his slant rays poured down
into the gorge of the stream, and lighted up the clear depths with a
lustre so transparent that every pebble at the bottom might have been
discerned, with the large fish here and there floating mid depth, with
their heads up stream, their gills working with a quick motion, and
their broad tails vibrating at short intervals slowly but powerfully, as
they lay motionless in opposition to the very strongest of the swift
current.
The breeze had died away, there was no curl upon the water, and the heat
was oppressive.
Under such circumstances to whip the stream was little better than mere
loss of time, yet as he hurried with a fleet foot down the gorge,
perhaps with some ulterior object, beyond the mere love of sport, Jasper
at times cast his fly across the stream, and drew it neatly, and, as he
thought, irresistibly right over the recusant fish; but though once or
twice a large lazy salmon would sail up slowly from the depths, and
almost touch the fly with his nose, he either sunk down slowly in
disgust, without breaking the water, or flapped his broad tail over the
shining fraud as if to mark his contempt.
It had now got to be near noon, for in the ardor of his success the
angler had forgotten all about his intended breakfast; and, his first
fish captured, had contented himself with a slender meal furnished from
out his fishing-basket and his leathern bottle.
Jasper had traversed by this time some ten miles in length, following
the sinuosities of the stream, and had reached a favorite pool at the
head of a long, straight, narrow trench, cut by the waters themselves in
the course of time, through the hard shistous rock which walls the
torrent on each hand, not leaving the slightest ledge or margin between
the rapids and the precipice.
Through this wild gorge of some fifty yards in length, the river shoots
like an arrow over a steep inclined plane of limestone rock, the surface
of which is polished by the action of the water, till it is as slippery
as ice, and at the extremity leaps down a sheer descent of some twelve
feet into a large, wide basin, surrounded by softly swelling banks of
greensward, and a fair amphitheatre of woodland.
At the upper end this pool is so deep as to be vulgarly deemed
unfathomable; below, however, it expands yet wider into a shallow
rippling ford, where it is crossed by the high-road, down stream of
which again there is another long, sharp rapid, and another fall, over
the last steps of the hills; after which the nature of the stream
becomes changed, and it murmurs gently onward through a green pastoral
country unrippled and uninterrupted.
Just in the inner angle of the high road, on the right hand of the
stream, there stood an old-fashioned, low-browed, thatch-covered, stone
cottage, with a rude portico of rustic woodwork overrun with jassmine
and virgin-bower, and a pretty flower-garden sloping down in successive
terraces to the edge of the basin. Beside this, there was no other house
in sight, unless it were part of the roof of a mill which stood in the
low ground on the brink of the second fall, surrounded with a mass of
willows. But the tall steeple of a country church raising itself
heavenward above the brow of the hill, seemed to show that, although
concealed by the undulations of the ground, a village was hard at hand.
The morning had changed a second time, a hazy film had crept up to the
zenith, and the sun was now covered with a pale golden veil, and a
slight current of air down the gorge ruffled the water.
It was a capital pool, famous for being the temporary haunt of the very
finest fish, which were wont to lie there awhile, as if to recruit
themselves after the exertions of leaping the two falls and stemming the
double rapid, before attempting to ascend the stream farther.
Few, however, even of the best and boldest fishermen cared to wet a line
in its waters, in consequence of the supposed impossibility of following
a heavy fish through the gorge below or checking him at the brink of the
fall. It is true, that throughout the length of the pass, the current
was broken by bare, slippery rocks peering above the waters, at
intervals, which might be cleared by an active cragsman; and it had been
in fact reconnoitered by Jasper and others in cool blood, but the result
of the examination was that it was deemed impassable.
Thinking, however, little of striking a large fish, and perhaps desiring
to waste a little time before scaling the banks and emerging on the high
road, Jasper threw a favorite fly of peacock’s back and gold tinsel
lightly across the water; and, almost before he had time to think, had
hooked a monstrous fish, which, at the very first leap, he set down as
weighing at least thirty pounds.
Thereupon followed a splendid display of piscatory skill. Well knowing
that his fish must be lost if he once should succeed in getting his head
down the rapid, Jasper exerted every nerve, and exhausted every art to
humor, to meet, to restrain, to check him. Four times the fish rushed
for the pass, and four times Jasper met him so stoutly with the butt,
trying his tackle to the very utmost, that he succeeded in forcing him
from the perilous spot. Round and round the pool he had piloted him, and
had taken post at length, hoping that the worst was already over, close
to the opening of the rocky chasm.
And now perhaps waxing too confident he checked his fish too sharply.
Stung into fury, the monster sprang five times in succession into the
air, lashing the water with his angry tail, and then rushed like an
arrow down the chasm.
He was gone—but Jasper’s blood was up, and thinking of nothing but his
sport, he dashed forward and embarked with a fearless foot in the
terrible descent.
Leap after leap he took with beautiful precision, alighting firm and
erect on the centre of each slippery block, and bounding thence to the
next with unerring instinct, guiding his fish the while with consummate
skill through the intricacies of the pass.
There were now but three more leaps to be taken before he would reach
the flat table-rock above the fall, which once attained, he would have
firm foot-hold and a fair field; already he rejoiced, triumphant in the
success of his bold attainment, and confident in victory, when a shrill
female shriek reached his ears from the pretty flower-garden; caught by
the sound he diverted his eyes, just as he leaped, toward the place
whence it came; his foot slipped, and the next instant he was flat on
his back in the swift stream, where it shot the most furiously over the
glassy rock. He struggled manfully, but in vain. The smooth, slippery
surface afforded no purchase to his gripping fingers, no hold to his
laboring feet. One fearful, agonizing conflict with the wild waters, and
he was swept helplessly over the edge of the fall, his head, as he
glanced down foot foremost, striking the rocky brink with fearful
violence.
He was plunged into the deep pool, and whirled round and round by the
dark eddies long before he rose, but still, though stunned and half
disabled, he strove terribly to support himself, but it was all in vain.
Again he sunk and rose once more, and as he rose that wild shriek again
reached his ears, and his last glance fell upon a female form wringing
her hands in despair on the bank, and a young man rushing down in wild
haste from the cottage on the hill.
He felt that aid was at hand, and struck out again for life—for dear
life!
But the water seemed to fail beneath him.
A slight flash sprang across his eyes, his brain reeled, and all was
blackness.
He sunk to the bottom, spurned it with his feet, and rose once more, but
not to the surface.
His quivering blue hands emerged alone above the relentless waters,
grasped for a little moment at empty space, and then disappeared.
The circling ripples closed over him, and subsided into stillness.
He felt, knew, suffered nothing more.
His young, warm heart was cold and lifeless—his soul had lost its
consciousness—the vital spark had faded into darkness—perhaps was
quenched for ever.
[_To be continued._
* * * * *
MARY.
BY MRS. O. M. P. LORD.
Humble Mary! thus in breaking
Vows I never meant to keep,
Who will blame me for forsaking,
Though a love-sick girl may weep?
Humble Mary! high born maiden
Must my name and honors share,
With ancestral glory laden—
Matters not less good and fair.
. . . . . .
Angel Mary! sadly pleading,
Sinking low on bended knee,
See remorse to scorn succeeding—
Mary! Mary! pardon me.
Angel Mary! lost forever!
What are name and fame to thee?
Cursed the pride that bade us sever—
Angel Mary! pardon me.
Mary! cold the earth above thee,
Cold and calm thy broken heart—
Canst thou not to him who loved thee
Something of thy peace impart?
* * * * *
I’M THINKING OF THEE!
BY A. D. WILLIAMS.
When the wild winds are howling,
Now distant, now nigh,
And the storm-king is growling,
And clouds veil the sky;
When the tempest is foaming,
O’er ocean and lea,
My thoughts are not roaming—
I’m thinking of thee!
When the mild, gentle showers
Distil from the sky,
And the bright blooming flowers
Delight the glad eye;
When the zephyrs are playing
So blandly and free,
My thoughts are not straying—
I’m thinking of thee!
When the beams of Aurora
Are flooding the earth,
With morn’s radiant glory
And day’s jovial mirth;
When the gay birds are singing
In innocent glee,
As their clear tones are ringing,
I’m thinking of thee!
When day’s fading sky-light
Wanes slow from the west,
And the shadows of twilight
Steal soft o’er its breast;
When Luna is shimmering
O’er land and o’er sea—
While the bright stars are glim’ring,
I’m thinking of thee!
Amid gay festive pleasure,
Where mirth lends the song,
There my heart has no treasure—
Thou’rt not in the throng.
But forgetting the present,
Its wild merry glee,
My communings are pleasant—
I’m thinking of thee!
* * * * *
THE TULIP-TREE.
BY BAYARD TAYLOR.
Bounds my blood with long-forgotten fleetness
To the chime of boyhood’s blithest tune,
While I drink a life of brimming sweetness
From the glory of the breezy June.
Far above, the fields of ether brighten;
Forest leaves are twinkling in their glee;
And the daisy’s snows around me whiten,
Drifted down the sloping lea!
On the hills he standeth like a tower,
Shining in the morn—the Tulip-Tree!
On his rounded turrets beats the shower,
While his emerald flags are flapping free:
But when Summer in the fields is standing,
And his blood is stirred with light, like wine,
O’er his branches, all at once expanding,
How the starry blossoms shine!
Through the glossy leaves they burn, unfolded,
Like the breast of some sweet oriole—
Filled with fragrance, as a joy new moulded
Into being by a poet’s soul!
Violet hills, against the sunrise lying,
See them kindle when the stars grow dim,
And the breeze that drinks their odorous sighing
Woos the lark’s rejoicing hymn.
Then all day, in every opening chalice
Drains their honey-drops the reveling bee,
Till the dove-winged Sleep makes thee her palace,
Filled with song-like murmurs, Tulip-Tree!
In thine arms repose the dreams enchanted
Which in childhood’s heart were nestled long,
And, beneath thee, still my brain is haunted
With their tones of vanished song.
Oh, while Earth’s full heart is throbbing over
With its wealth of light and life and joy,
Who can dream the seasons that shall cover
With their frost the visions of the boy?
Who can paint the years that downward darken,
While the splendid morning bids aspire,
Or the turf upon his coffin hearken,
When his pulses leap with fire!
Wind of June, that sweep’st the rolling meadow,
Thou shalt wail in branches rough and bare,
While the tree, o’erhung with storm and shadow,
Writhes and creaks amid the gusty air.
All his leaves, like shields of fairies scattered,
Then shall drop before the Northwind’s spears,
And his limbs, by hail and tempest battered,
Feel the weight of wintry years.
Yet, why cloud the rapture and the glory
Of the Beautiful, that still remains?
Life, alas! will soon reverse the story,
And its sunshine gild forsaken plains.
Let thy blossoms in the morning brighten,
Happy heart, as doth the Tulip-Tree,
While the daisy’s snows around us whiten,
Drifted down the sloping lea!
* * * * *
TRUE UNTO DEATH.
BY MRS. CAROLINE H. BUTLER.
PART I.
A gentle breeze swept through the vine-latticed casement of a small
apartment, filling it with all the balmy odors of a June evening, while
the moonbeams stealing softly on its track, broke through the leafy
screen in fitful shadows. The sighing of the wind through the long,
slender branches of the willows—the plaintive cry of the
whip-poor-will, and at a little distance the murmuring sound of water,
as the waves of the lake broke gently upon the shore—all were in unison
with the sad hearts of the two—a youth and maiden, who, in that little
room bathed by the moonbeams and the breeze, were now about to be
parted, perhaps forever.
Deep anguish was depicted on the countenance of the young man—calm
resolve and pious resignation on that of his companion, who, with her
hands clasped before her, and her deep mournful eyes fixed tenderly upon
his, said,
“No, Richard, it cannot be—urge me no more to a course which seems to
me both cruel and unnatural. Think you this sacrifice is not as painful
to me as to you, dear Richard?” she added, taking his hand and pressing
it to her lips, while a tear trickled slowly down her pale cheek; “then
reproach me not—call me not heartless, unfeeling; rather encourage me
to fulfill faithfully the part which duty allots me—will you not,
Richard?”
“And thus destroy my own happiness and yours, Margaret! It is, indeed, a
cruel task you would impose on me. No—I cannot make our future life so
desolate as to sanction your cruel decision. Believe me, dearest, your
resolution is but the delirium of a moment—grief for the loss of your
beloved mother, and sympathy with your afflicted father renders you
morbidly sensitive on that point alone. I entreat you, then, dearest,
beloved Margaret—I entreat you by all our hopes of happiness, revoke
your cruel words, and reflect longer ere you consign us both to misery.”
“I have well deliberated, Richard, and my decision is unalterable. Call
it not delirium, or the shadow of a grief which a moment’s sunshine may
dispel; every hour, on the contrary, will but strengthen my resolution,
and convince me I have acted rightly. My poor father—can I leave him in
his sad bereavement! who else has he now to love but me—and shall I
selfishly turn from him in his loneliness! Ah, Richard, ask me not—for
never, never will I leave him or forsake him.”
“And have you, then, no care for my wretchedness?” exclaimed her lover
with bitterness, as he rapidly paced the floor; “no sympathy for my
disappointment! Think, Margaret, how long I have waited to call you
mine—how many years I have cheerfully toiled, looking to this dear hand
as my reward. O, Margaret, Margaret!—and now, even now, when that
joyful hour was so near—when but a few days more would have made you
mine forever—it is you who speak those bitter words—it is you who
place a barrier between our loves!—cruel, cruel girl!”
“It is the hand of Death, not mine, which has placed the barrier between
us, Richard—she who would have blessed our union is no more! ‘_Forsake
not your father, my child!_’ were her dying words—and so long as God
gives me breath, I never will! Come here, Richard, listen to me, and
pity me—for not a pang rends your bosom but finds an answering pang in
mine; nor do I hesitate to confess it to you in this sad moment—there
shall be no concealment from you—I will not wrap my heart in maidenly
reserve, but confess alike my tenderness and my grief. No longer, then,
dearest Richard, accuse me of coldly sacrificing your love to filial
duty—for God knows the agony with which I have decided.”
“Forgive me, my beloved.” said Richard, “I have been too selfish. I
should have known that pure heart better. However my own feelings may
dictate, Margaret, I will no longer oppose the course to which the most
devoted filial piety leads you, in thus unselfishly renouncing love and
happiness that you may devote your days to a beloved parent. God bless
and reward you, dearest.”
“Richard, how much your words comfort me,” replied Margaret; “you no
longer oppose but encourage me. Thank you, dear Richard; yet one thing
more, when you leave me, you must be free from all engagement—nay, do
not interrupt me—many long years may intervene ere I shall be free to
give you my hand; nor would I have its disposal linked with such a
dreadful alternative as my father’s death. The few charms I may possess
will ere long have faded, and I would not bind you to me when the light
of youth has passed from cheek and eye. No, Richard—go forth into the
world, it claims your talents and your usefulness, and in time some
other will be to you all that I would have been.”
“Margaret, you do not know me,” he replied. “Think you another can ever
come between me and your image. I go, but the memory of our love shall
go with me—your name shall be my star, and for your dear sake I will
devote all my energies henceforth to the happiness of my fellow-beings;
your noble example shall not pass without its lesson. But promise me one
thing, Margaret—let there be one solace for my wretchedness—one hope,
though faint, to cheer my lonely path—promise me that should any thing
hereafter occur, no matter how long the flight of years, which may
induce you to wave your present decision, you will write to me—will
you—will you promise me this, my best beloved?”
Margaret placed her hand in his: “Yes, Richard, I promise you—should
that time come you shall be informed; and I ask in return this, if your
feelings have meanwhile changed, if through time and absence I may have
become indifferent to you, Richard, then make no reply to my
communication—let there be forever _silence_—or _joy_—between us.”
And thus parted two fond devoted hearts—a noble sacrifice to filial
love.
Never, perhaps, was there a more striking illustration of the frail
basis on which all human hopes are placed, than was presented by those
sudden events overwhelming the inmates of Willow Bank Cottage with
affliction. Thus our most ardent expectations are frequently met by
disappointment, and our most promising joys blighted. Even when
happiness and peace irradiate our hearts, and on the buoyant wing of
hope our fancy soars into a future of unclouded bliss, even then
desolation and wo may be at our very threshold.
Thus it proved with those whose history I will briefly relate.
Willow Bank, for many years the residence of the Gardner family, was
delightfully situated near the borders of a lovely little lake, whose
circling waters rippled gently to the shore beneath the deep shadows of
the maple and sycamore—occasionally weeping willows swept with their
long golden pendants the bright water, or the branches of some stately
pine in green old age, rose proudly above the lowly alder and silvery
birch here and there skirting the bank. Thus rocked in its cradle of
green, lay this beautiful little lake, as blue as the blue sky above it
were its waters, now dimpled by the passing breeze, now breaking in tiny
wavelets, each with its cap of pearly foam, sportively chasing each
other like a band of merry children to lose themselves at the feet of
the brave old trees. From the windows of the cottage the lake was seen
spreading itself out like some broad and beautiful mirror, and then
gently diverging into a narrow rivulet, winding through meadow and
woodland, until it sprang joyously into the bosom of the Ohio. Nature
had done much to beautify the spot Mr. Gardner had selected for his
residence—taste and art had also united their skill; the three combined
had created almost a Paradise.
But it is to those who dwelt therein, not to its local beauties, my pen
must confine itself.
Early in life Mr. Gardner had married a lovely and amiable woman, and
removed from Virginia, his native state, to the beautiful residence I
have described, a few miles from the town of S——, Ohio. Blending his
profession of the law with that of agriculture, a few years saw him one
of the most influential men in the country; and had he offered himself
as a candidate for office, he would have been almost certain of success,
such was his popularity; but his ambition took not that course. Domestic
happiness was to him worth more than all the perishable honors of public
life—to Willow Bank and its beloved inmates were all his wishes
centred; and uninterrupted and continued for many years were the smiles
of Providence. It seemed, indeed, as if this favored spot was exempt
from all the ordinary ills of life—sickness came not to fright the
roses from the cheek of health, neither did strife, envy, or sullen
discontent intrude upon this earthly paradise.
Mr. and Mrs. Gardner had but one child—it was Margaret. When about
seventeen, chance led to an acquaintance with Richard Lelland, employed
by an eminent firm at the South upon business connected with the sale of
lands in Ohio. Among other letters of introduction he brought one to Mr.
Gardner, who, favorably impressed with his appearance, invited him to
pass a few days at Willow Bank.
Upon what slight chances does our happiness or misery rest. _A few
days_—how simple their signification; and yet from their brief circle
how many hours of bitter anguish may take their rise. Little did Lelland
or Margaret dream of the untold future, whose all of earthly weal or wo
these few days decided.
To know Margaret was to love her—yet she was not strictly beautiful;
there may be features more regular, complexions more dazzling, and forms
of more perfect symmetry than she possessed. She was one of those whose
gentle and winning manners stole into your heart, and then only you saw
her loveliness, or acknowledged the light of love and tenderness which
beamed from her large, dark hazel eyes. Her beauty was not that which
attracts the eye of every careless observer—it was the beauty of the
mind and heart.
Richard Lelland was at that time twenty-one, rather above the ordinary
height, and of graceful, polished manners, with a frank and open
countenance, at once a passport to your favor and respect. His
complexion was almost as delicate as a girl’s, a large, full, dark-blue
eye, and hair of rich wavy brown.
Business detaining young Lelland in the vicinity of Willow Bank for some
weeks longer than he had first anticipated, he took frequent
opportunities of improving his acquaintance with Miss Gardner, and the
interest she had first awakened in his heart soon ripened into a deep
and fervent attachment. But he possessed a firmness and decision of
character seldom met with in one so young; and he resolved to bury his
love for Margaret in his own breast, until he could produce such
testimonials as to family, etc., as should warrant his openly paying her
his addresses. He therefore returned to the South leaving his love
unspoken; but there is a language more eloquent even than words, and
this had already made known to Margaret the sentiments of the young
stranger; this, too, had whispered in the lover’s ear, thrilling his
soul with ecstasy, that when he should ask the love of the pure and
gentle girl, it would be his.
Within the year the lovers were betrothed, with the full sanction of
Margaret’s parents, with the proviso that their marriage should not be
consummated until Lelland, who had now nothing but his salary to depend
upon, should be in a situation better calculated for the maintenance of
a family. This was as much his wish as theirs, for he loved Margaret too
well to take her from all the comforts and luxuries of the paternal
roof, only to offer in exchange the embarrassments and privations
attendant upon a narrow and straitened income. For three years,
therefore, early and late did he cheerfully give all his energies to his
business, and at the end of that time became a partner in the mercantile
house in whose employ he had so faithfully exerted himself. There was no
longer, as it would seem, any impediment to his union with his adored
Margaret. The wedding-day was appointed, and the happy Lelland, with all
the rapture of a bridegroom, flew to claim his bride.
Had the hand of misfortune been so long withheld but to crush with one
fell blow so much of love and happiness?
The very evening of his arrival at Willow Bank, Mrs. Gardner was seized
with a sudden and violent illness, which, alas! baffled all medical
skill, and in less than twenty-four hours the beloved and idolized wife
and mother was no more. To depict the anguish of the bereaved husband
and daughter were a vain attempt. To those in whose dwellings the
destroyer has never come, who have never read that fatal sentence,
“_Thou art mine!_” imprinted by his icy fingers on the brow of the loved
and cherished, or followed to the dark and silent chambers the lifeless
forms of earth’s treasured ones, to them death is, indeed, a fearful
thing. To _them_—yes, to all; and did not our Heavenly Father
graciously extend to us the hand of mercy, and bid us, with smiles of
ineffable love, turn to him for consolation in this hour of despair, how
could we sustain the anguish of separation, as one after another the
loved ones go home.
To Margaret the death of her mother at once opened a new path of duty,
and however painful the sacrifice to herself, she hesitated not a moment
as to the course she should pursue. But when she thought of Lelland—of
the anguish her decision would cause him—of the bitter
disappointment—of fond hopes all blasted—then, indeed, she faltered,
and her heart shrunk from inflicting a blow so terrible. And again as
she thought of her unhappy father, her resolution strengthened. Could
she leave him; no! better sacrifice love, happiness, and with them
perhaps life itself, than forsake him in his desolateness.
Stupefied as it were with amazement and grief, Lelland listened at first
in silence to the cruel words of his beloved Margaret—then
remonstrated—entreated—all in vain. Reproaches were alike unavailing
to alter her decision, until touched at length by her grief, and filled
with admiration of her self-sacrificing devotion to her parent, with an
almost breaking heart he yielded to her persuasions.
A new character must now be introduced. Henry Wingate was an orphan
nephew of Mr. Gardner, and since the death of his parents, which took
place when he was quite young, Willow Bank had been his home. As a boy
he was artful and selfish, passionate and cruel. As he grew up to
manhood he still retained the same foibles, with the double art of
veiling them under the most specious and insinuating address. If he
loved any one when a child, it was his Cousin Margaret—she only had
power to quell his wild storms of passion. With years this love (if it
be not profanation to call it so) increased, until it took possession of
his whole being—yet, characteristic of himself, it was purely selfish;
so that he could make her his, it little mattered to him whether his
love was returned.
That he should hate Lelland followed of course, and that his soul should
be filled with jealousy and rage, as he saw the time so rapidly drawing
near when another should snatch from him the charms he so much coveted.
The sudden death of her who had ever been as a kind and tender mother to
him, gave him therefore but a momentary pang. Her grave only opened to
him new hopes, new machinations, and with such joy as filled the Tempter
at the destruction of Eden, did his heart leap at the wretchedness of
his hated rival, thus doomed to see his long cherished hopes all
blasted, and to part, perhaps forever, with her he so devotedly loved.
And now all his sophistry and cunning were brought to bear. Carefully
concealing his own fiendish joy under the mask of deep sympathy and
sorrow, he breathed only to Margaret words of tender pity—stabbing his
own ears by dwelling upon the virtues of Lelland, and assuring her that
his own life would be a cheerful sacrifice if thereby he might advance
her happiness. Thus artfully did he begin his course, trusting in time
to supplant his rival in her affections. But he little understood the
heart of a faithful woman, or he would not have undertaken a task so
hopeless. Margaret was grateful for his kindness, and it was a relief to
unburthen her heart to one who seemed so truly to sympathize with her;
nor did she hesitate to speak of Lelland, or conceal from her cousin the
sorrows which sometimes oppressed her when reflecting upon their
reparation. Like hot molten lead did her every word seethe and scorch
his jealous soul, yet resolved to win her, he persevered in the artful
course he had marked out.
Thus passed two long weary years to Margaret, sustained by the
consciousness that she was administering to the happiness of her father,
and by that Higher Power to whose never-failing support affliction had
taught her to look. But now another trial even more severe awaited her.
Ah, poor return for such filial love and piety. A thankless boon, young
Margaret, did you offer, when for a father’s happiness you so devotedly
sacrificed your own! A sacrifice, however, not the less to be
admired—for where is the heart that does not reverence such a beautiful
trait of filial love.
Mr. Gardner suddenly announced to Margaret his intention of marriage
with a young, thoughtless girl of rather doubtful reputation, who had
been occasionally employed to assist in the work of the family. A cruel
stroke was this, to which all that had gone before seemed light in
comparison. What though it released her from all obligation of duty;
what though she was now free to accept the hand of Lelland, the thought
gave her no satisfaction—not a ray of happiness gleamed from out the
darkness of her despair. To have retained her dear father _her own_; to
feel that in her all his happiness was still treasured, she would have
deemed almost any sacrifice too poor; or had he been about to unite
himself with one more worthy to fill the place of her sainted mother,
she would have schooled herself to resignation. But that her father
should have selected for a wife one so unsuited by birth and education,
and of a character so vain and frivolous, filled her with dread for the
future.
It was a strange hallucination of Mr. Gardner. There is no way of
accounting for a procedure so at variance with the whole tenor of his
former life, and it can only be regarded in the light of insanity.
Margaret shrunk not from the task to which duty impelled her, namely, to
remonstrate and warn her father against the step he was taking. The
winds which hurled the dead leaves of autumn in fitful showers against
the window, as she thus tearfully besought his consideration and
forbearance, would have yielded to her voice as soon.
Passing over the further grief of Margaret, I will only say that in a
few weeks this ill-assorted marriage took place, and a system of petty
tyranny and malice commenced on the part of the new Mrs. Gardner as
almost broke her heart. Captive to the arts of an intriguing woman, her
father heeded neither her tears or her complaints, until at length
Margaret finding all remonstrance vain, passively yielded herself to the
cruel yoke.
Thus repulsed as it were from the affections of her father, all her
domestic happiness destroyed, and subjected more and more to the insults
of a low, vulgar-minded woman, it would seem the time had come when
Margaret might redeem the promise made to Lelland, that should any thing
occur which might induce her to waive her decision, she would write to
him. A doubt of his constancy had never darkened her mind; she judged of
him by her own true heart, which never could know change. If at first
she hesitated, it was from maidenly timidity, not distrust; but when she
reflected what happiness those few brief lines would cause him, she
hesitated no longer. The letter was written. To her cousin, the specious
Wingate, she frankly confided her resolution, and asked his assistance
in forwarding her letter safely and surely to the hands of Lelland.
Skillfully as he wore the mask, he was almost betrayed as he listened to
the artless details of Margaret, who faithfully related to him the
promise each had made at their last sad parting. Recovering himself,
however, he promised to secure the safety of her letter, even if it
should include the necessity of journeying himself to place it in his
hands.
With thanks warm and sincere for his kindness and sympathy, the
deceived, trusting girl gave her letter to his charge—that precious
letter, which thus, like the dove, went forth to seek rest for her weary
soul.
“Ah! think you, my pretty cousin, I value my own purposes so lightly as
to risk the work of years within the delicate folds of this envelope!”
exclaimed Wingate, as he entered his own apartment, and crushing the
letter of Margaret in his hand as he spoke. “I should be a fool,
indeed—no, no, fair lady, content you that my eye alone may read this
pretty sentimental effusion. Now, thanks to my lucky stars, this letter
proves almost a sure passport to my desires—ha! ha! pretty little fool,
how she will wait for an answer! And what then? Did she not entreat
_silence if he no longer loved_—‘let there be forever silence or joy
between us’—were her words—_silence_—ay, of that I will take care,
and then she is mine—mine as surely as yonder setting sun will rise
again! With your leave, Mr. Richard Lelland—” and thus violating every
honorable principle, Wingate tore asunder the seal of affection, and ran
his eye over the sacred contents: “D—n him!” he exclaimed, hurling the
letter across the table with a look almost demoniacal: “I could tear his
very heart out—his heart!—why here it is—yes, fond fool, why here is
his very life—his soul!”—once more snatching the letter—“and thus I
hold him in my power!—if more were needed to spur on my revenge of a
hated, detested rival, I have it here in these tender, trustful lines.
By heavens it turns my very blood to gall to find with what fidelity
that man has been loved—while I—but no matter—your letter goes no
further, fair cousin, and thus do I annihilate your fond hopes and
devote you mine!” thrusting as he spoke poor Margaret’s epistle into the
flames, and watching it with a fiendish smile until of those tender,
confiding lines, nothing but a blackened scroll remained.
At the expiration of a week he informed her that he had heard from the
friend to whose care he had enclosed her letter, stating that he had
delivered it into Lelland’s own hand.
Poor deceived girl! O the wretchedness of hope deferred, as day after
day flew by, and still no answer came! It was only by her more pallid
cheek, her drooping eyelids, and the wan smile by which she strove to
hide her dejection, that Wingate saw his hellish scheme was succeeding,
and his victim sinking under the belief of her lover’s inconstancy—for
she never again mentioned to him the name of Lelland. Nothing could be
kinder, or better calculated to touch the heart of Margaret than the
demeanor which her cousin now assumed. His countenance wore a look of
such subdued pity—such heavy sighs would now and then burst from his
heart—and then meeting her inquiring glance, he would turn from her, or
perhaps rush from the room, as if to conceal the tears her sorrows
called forth.
Thus another six months passed—bringing no change for the better in the
alienated affections of Mr. Gardner for his child—they were all
engrossed by the artful woman he had so unhappily married. He did not,
it is true, treat her with visible unkindness, but with a coldness and
jealousy which stung the heart of Margaret perhaps more deeply.
Wingate now resolved to delay no longer the avowal of his _love_! And
accordingly most adroitly opened the subject to Margaret—he told her
for how many years he had loved her—of the silent grief which he had so
long endured under the conviction that her affections were given to
another—and how by many bitter struggles he had schooled his heart to
relinquish her at last to a happy rival. He did not ask her love in
return, but the privilege to protect her! Her pity and kindness were all
he dared to hope for _now_—but perhaps at a future time his long-tried
devotion might be rewarded with her affection—and for that he was
willing to wait—too happy if he might look for such a priceless
recompense.
Not doubting for a moment his sincerity, and touched by his kindness,
Margaret yielded to the tempter’s wiles and became his wife.
And here we must leave her, allowing for the lapse of some sixteen years
ere we again take up the story.
PART II.
In the summer of 1840, a gentleman embarked at Albany, on board one of
those magnificent steamers which ply between that city and New York. The
morning was one of unrivaled loveliness. A soft haze curtained the
landscape, veiling the shores and the silvery outline of the river in
one dim, undefined perspective of beauty, through which the sun like a
huge ball of fire floated on the verge of the eastern sky. As the
morning wore on, a gentle breeze was seen curling the smooth surface of
the river, and then fold after fold of the beautiful curtain was lifted
from the landscape. The silvery vapors circling, dividing, re-uniting,
and wreathing themselves into a thousand fantastic shapes, floated
lightly away, leaving the charming scenery of the Hudson unveiled to the
admiring eye of the traveler.
The gentleman to whom allusion has been made, was apparently near or
over forty years of age, of a most prepossessing exterior. He was tall,
finely built, and his countenance denoting benevolence and peace with
all men. A shade of sadness, however, evidently of no recent origin, was
stamped upon his fine features, involuntarily claiming your sympathy and
respect. Such was the person who now slowly paced the deck—now stopping
to admire some beautiful point of scenery, now communing with his own
thoughts.
The boat was crowded with passengers, presenting the usual variety
composing the “world” of a steamboat. But with these the stranger held
no communion—not a familiar face met his in all that motley assemblage.
It was already near the dinner hour, and many of the passengers had
descended to the dining-saloon, or gathered around the companion-way
waiting the deafening stroke of the gong, when his attention was
suddenly drawn to a little group seated under the awning aft of the
ladies’ cabin. Reclining on cushions spread over one of the settees was
a lady whose hollow, racking cough betokened the last stages of
consumption. A large shawl carefully enveloped her figure, and one pale,
attenuated hand rested heavily upon her bosom, as if to stay the rapid
pulsation of her heart caused by those violent paroxysms of coughing. A
thin veil was thrown lightly over her head, screening her marble
paleness. Two young girls, almost children, sat by the couch—the
eldest, whose profile only could be seen as she sat with her back nearly
turned to the passengers, was gently fanning her mother, and now and
then moistening her fevered lips with the grateful juice of an orange,
or when seized with coughing, tenderly supporting her head, and wiping
the perspiration from her throbbing temples. The younger, a sweet little
child of perhaps ten years, had thrown off her bonnet, and thick masses
of rich brown ringlets fell over her neck and shoulders. She was seated
on a low ottoman by the side of the settee, reading from a small Bible
which she held in her hand—pausing whenever the terrible cough racked
the poor invalid, and then stooping over her would kiss her pale lips,
and the little white hand, and again in sweet low tones resume her book.
The stranger found himself deeply interested in this little group—it
was in harmony with his own melancholy thoughts, and stirred the deep
waters of kindness in his soul. Mechanically he stopped in his walk, and
leaning over the rail continued to muse upon the sick lady and the
affectionate little girls, occasionally resting his eyes upon the
unconscious objects of his meditation. When the deck was nearly deserted
for the dinner-table, the youngest of the two girls finding her mother
slept, softly rose and without putting on her bonnet drew near the spot
where the stranger was still standing, and bent down her beautiful head
over the railing as if to peer into the depths of old Hudson. At that
moment one of the river gods (possibly) in the shape of a large
sturgeon, his scaly armor all flashing in the bright sunbeams, leaped up
some twelve or fifteen feet above the surface. An exclamation of
surprise burst from the little girl.
“O, sir, what was that?” she asked, turning her large black eyes upon
the stranger.
At that sweet face, and those deep, earnest eyes, sudden emotion
thrilled his heart, and sent the blood coursing rapidly through his
veins. That face—it was so like—so very like one with whose memory
both happiness and misery held divided sway! Scarcely could he command
himself to answer her artless question; and after having done so, in an
agitated voice he asked—
“Will you tell me your name, my dear?”
The child hesitated a moment, as if doubting the propriety of giving her
name to a stranger, but there was something so kind and benevolent in
his looks that compelled her irresistibly to reply.
“My name is Margaret—Margaret Wingate.”
Richard Lelland took her small slender hand, put back the beautiful
curls from her forehead, and gazed long and mournfully into her face,
then turning away walked slowly to the opposite side of the deck and
soon disappeared. And the little girl, wondering at his strange
behaviour, returned to her seat by the side of her mother.
It was more than an hour ere Lelland again made his appearance. He was
pale, and it seemed as if an age of sorrow had in that brief hour swept
over his soul. Again he took his station near the little group.
In the mean time the sick lady had remained quiet, and the sisters still
retained their position by her side. Margaret soon raising her eyes met
those of the stranger, who smilingly beckoned her to approach. Rising
very softly, the child glided to his side, and placed her little hand
confidingly in his.
“Will you ask your sister to come to me, my dear, I would speak with her
a moment?” said Lelland, laying his hand tenderly on her head.
Margaret returned to her sister, who, in a few moments, timid and
blushing, drew near. She seemed about fourteen, of a slight, graceful
figure, and with the same expression of countenance, only more
thoughtful, as her younger sister.
“You will excuse the presumption of a stranger, young lady,” said
Lelland, “but unless I greatly err, I see before me the daughter of a
much loved friend. Tell me, was not your mother’s maiden name Margaret
Gardner?”
“Yes, sir, that was her name,” she replied in evident surprise.
“I knew I could not be mistaken,” continued Lelland, sighing
deeply—then after a pause—“and your—your father—is he with you?”
“He is not—but will meet us on our arrival in New York.”
“Has your mother been long ill?” inquired Lelland, his voice faltering
as he spoke.
“She has been declining for several years,” replied the young girl, “but
for the last six months her strength has rapidly failed. O, my dear
sir,” she added, bursting into tears, “if she should die!”
Lelland could not answer—at length he resumed.
“And are you then traveling alone, my dear young lady?”
“We came as far as Albany under the protection of a neighbor, and the
captain of the boat has promised to take charge of us to the city.”
“Can I do any thing to aid you? Is there not something you would like to
have for your mother? if so, consider me in the light of an old
acquaintance, and frankly tell me. My name is Lelland, Richard
Lelland—I knew your dear mother when she was but a few years older than
yourself;” he paused, and overcome with emotion turned away.
Mary took his hand. “I have often heard her mention you. O let me tell
her at once that such an old and valued friend is near—she will be so
glad to see you!”
“No, my dear girl, not now—the surprise might prove too much for her in
her present weak state—but allow me to be near you, and call upon me if
need require.”
Mary thanked him, and then resumed her faithful care of her mother, who
was now apparently in an easy slumber; and walking lightly around the
settee, Lelland took a seat near the head of the invalid.
Who can describe the anguish of his soul as he thus watched over the
dying form of his first and only love. And yet, with its bitterness was
mingled a strange feeling of happiness, and his heart rose in
thankfulness to be near her—even in death!
The day was now nearly spent, and the boat shooting rapidly past the
beautiful Palisades, when Mrs. Wingate awoke, and complaining of a
slight chilliness proposed retiring to the cabin. With difficulty she
arose and leaning on the arm of Mary attempted to walk, but she was so
feeble she could scarcely stand, and the slender strength of Mary seemed
all too frail a support. Lelland immediately advanced, and, averting his
face, proffered his assistance. Thanking him for his kindness, Mrs.
Wingate placed her arm in his, and carefully supporting her to the
cabin, and placing her in an easy commodious seat, he left her to the
care of her children.
Ah, little did the poor invalid dream whose arm had so tenderly
sustained her feeble steps!
When the boat was nearing the wharf, Mary came out of the cabin and
joined Lelland, who was standing close by the door, and taking his arm
crossed over to the side, that she might recognize, and be recognized at
once by her father, whom she was expecting every moment to appear among
the crowd collected on the wharf. Once or twice she thought she saw him,
but it proved not. The boat stopped at length, and the passengers group
after group dispersed, until scarcely any one was left on board save the
officers of the boat. Still Mr. Wingate did not appear, and overcome by
disappointment and their lonely situation, poor Mary burst into tears.
Lelland strove to comfort her, and having ascertained from her the hotel
where her father lodged, he offered to go himself in search of him.
Bidding her return to her mother, and calm any uneasiness she might feel
at the nonappearance of her husband, he left the boat and proceeded to
the hotel. Mr. Wingate was not there. He had been gone some days, nor
could they give any information respecting him.
What was to be done?—something must be decided upon at once. It was
getting late—already the street lamps were lighted—and hastily
retracing his steps to the steamboat, Lelland sent for Mary. She turned
pale when she saw he was alone.
“My father—where is my father?” she cried.
“No doubt, my dear, your father has been called away unexpectedly—you
will see him I am sure to-morrow. In the mean time don’t be uneasy—you
are with one who will not desert you for a moment—but lest your mother
may hesitate to entrust herself to the protection of an apparent
stranger, I think it will be necessary for me to reveal myself to her.”
Taking a card from his pocket he wrote a few lines upon it, and handed
them to Mary, who quickly glided back into the cabin.
Lelland now strove to calm his agitation, that he might meet his still
beloved Margaret with firmness—without betraying more than the pleasure
one naturally feels at meeting with an old friend.
It was half an hour ere Mary again appeared, and informed him her mother
would be pleased to see him.
He entered the cabin. The light of an argand lamp fell gently upon the
pale countenance of Mrs. Wingate, who was partially reclining upon one
of the settees, with her head resting against the crimson silken panels.
She had thrown off her little cap, on account of the heat, and her
jet-black hair was swept back from her brow by the slender little hand
which pressed her temples. Little Margaret was kneeling at her feet, and
looking up into her face with an expression of childish pity.
The step of Lelland faltered as he drew near—as his eye fell upon that
countenance so changed from its youthful loveliness,—so pallid, so wan,
and on which it seemed Death had already stamped his seal—scarcely
could he command himself to speak.
“Margaret, you will trust yourself with me?” he said at length, forcing
a smile and extending his hand.
A slight color for an instant suffused her pale cheek, and her still
beautiful eyes were lifted to his—she attempted to speak, but could
not, and placing her thin, feverish hand in his, she burst into tears.
For a few moments no word was spoken. Mrs. Wingate was the first to
recover herself.
“My nerves are very weak, as you see,” she said, with a sad smile,
pressing his hand, “and the sight of an old friend quite overpowers
me—but I am very glad to see you, and thank you for your kindness. Mr.
Wingate must have been unexpectedly detained from us, or—” she
hesitated.
“And you will allow me, I trust, the pleasure of attending upon you, and
of procuring lodgings for you until the arrival of your husband,” said
Lelland. “You must be very much fatigued—a carriage is in waiting, and
if you will allow me, I will soon place you in a more comfortable
situation—if you will point out to me your trunks, Miss Mary, I will
take care of them.” And Lelland gladly left the cabin, that he might
school himself to more fortitude ere meeting the poor invalid again.
When all was ready, he tenderly lifted the frail form of Mrs. Wingate
and placed her in the carriage, Mary and little Margaret sprang after,
and then giving the driver the necessary directions Lelland himself took
a seat therein. The carriage in a short time stopped before one of the
large private hotels in the upper part of the city, where he was certain
both quiet and comforts of every kind might be obtained for the invalid.
They were conducted at once to a pleasant, retired little parlor,
opening into a commodious sleeping-room, and after attending to all
their immediate requirements Lelland left them for the purpose of again
seeking Mr. Wingate; resolving to leave a note for him at the hotel
where he had boarded, and also to drop another into the post-office.
Meeting the maid-servant in the hall, he put some money in her hand, and
charged her to be very attentive to the sick lady, promising her she
should be well rewarded for her kindness.
Upon returning to the hotel early in the morning, he was inexpressibly
grieved to find that Mrs. Wingate had passed a wretched night, and was
now so ill that it had been thought advisable to send for a physician.
Doctor M. soon arrived, and after visiting his patient, returned to the
saloon where Lelland was anxiously awaiting him. His opinion was but a
sad confirmation of his worst fears—he pronounced Mrs. Wingate in the
last stage of decline, and that in all probability a few days or weeks
at furthest must close her life. “Was there nothing could be done to
save her?” Lelland asked—nothing—she was past all human aid; and now
all there was left to do, was to smooth her passage to the grave by kind
and tender care. The doctor promised to see her every day, and
expressing much sympathy for the little girls took his leave. That day
Lelland did not see Mrs. Wingate, yet he heard her low stifled moans,
and occasionally the faint tones of her voice, for he had taken an
apartment adjoining hers, that he might be near in case his services
were required. Once or twice during the day and evening he passed out
the hotel, and jumping into a cab, sought the former lodgings of
Wingate, in the faint hope of meeting him, and then returned to his sad
and lonely watch.
For some days Mrs. Wingate remained nearly the same, during which time
nothing was heard of her husband. No doubt the agitation of mind this
caused her had a most injurious effect upon her, and probably hastened
her death. Finding herself growing weaker, Lelland was at length
admitted to her room; and from that time until her death a portion of
every day was spent by him at her bedside. He calmed her apprehensions
when speaking of the strange absence of her husband, and strove to
remove those delicate scruples which she entertained that herself and
children were so entirely dependent upon him, assuring her he thanked
God it was in his power to be of service to her. He read to her from the
sacred Scriptures, and as much as her feeble strength would admit
conversed with her of that unrevealed future into which her soul must so
soon take its flight. Of her husband she never spoke but in terms of
kindness, nor by her words gave him reason to suppose he was not the
best of husbands and fathers.
Days passed on. Mr. Wingate did not come.
And now the last sad hour was at hand. Upon going into her room one
morning, Lelland was shocked at the alteration a few hours had made in
her appearance. Death was there. Not as a tyrant—not armed with terrors
to seize the shrinking soul—but as some gentle messenger, clad in robes
of peace and joy, sent to bear her to the arms of her Father. Lelland
was at first too much overcome to speak, and walked to the window to
recover composure. In a faint voice she called him to her.
“Richard,” she said, pressing his hand, “there is but one pang in
death—it is that I must leave my poor children unprotected.”
“Dearest friend, do not suffer that thought to disturb your peace of
mind,” he replied tenderly; “they shall be mine; until their father’s
return I will be a parent to them, and if he come not, Margaret—still
they will be mine. I have wealth, and how freely it shall be used for
their advantage and happiness you surely cannot doubt. My life has been
a lonely one—they will cheer its decline”—he paused as if irresolute
whether to proceed—“I waited long and in vain for that letter,
Margaret—it came not!”
It was the first allusion made to their former love.
She feebly pressed the hand which held hers: “It was written,
Richard—there came no answer.”
“It _was_ written then—thank God for that!” he exclaimed.
A cold shudder crept over the frame of Margaret.
“Ah! I see it all,” she said. “Richard, we were betrayed! but may God
forgive him, as I do!”
There was no reply; but stooping down Lelland imprinted a kiss upon her
cold brow, and turning away, the strong man wept as a little child!
Once more he approached the bed.
“Give your children to me, Margaret; I swear to you I will faithfully
protect and cherish them. I shall never marry, and my whole life shall
be devoted to them.”
A sweet smile illumined her features. “Yes, Richard, they are yours. For
my sake forgive their father, and should he return, O, I beseech you,
lend him your counsel, and say to him all that I would say—” she
paused—“perhaps he will tear the children from you; if so, at a
distance watch over them, and protect them when they require it. Now, my
friend, call them to me; I would say a few words to them, and I feel my
strength rapidly failing.”
Mary and Margaret remained with their mother near an hour, and then
Lelland was hastily summoned to the chamber of the dying. She was
already speechless, but with a look of ineffable sweetness, she turned
her eyes first upon her children, then upon Lelland; with her little
strength she placed their hands within his, her lips moved as if in
prayer, celestial beauty overspread her countenance, and the weary soul
of Margaret was at rest in the bosom of her God.
Soon after the last melancholy rites Lelland placed the girls at school,
under the care of a most excellent woman whom he engaged to accompany
them. Not a day passed that he did not see them, and on Saturdays he
took them on pleasant excursions into the country, as much as possible
striving to divert their minds from dwelling upon their recent loss. In
the meanwhile he took every measure he could possibly devise to discover
Mr. Wingate—but for many months in vain, his disappearance was veiled
in impenetrable mystery.
It was nearly a year after the death of Margaret, that one day business
took Mr. Lelland to one of the slips on the North river. As he passed
along, his attention was suddenly drawn to a man who stood leaning
against one of the piers. He was very shabbily dressed, and held in his
hand a small faded well-worn carpetbag. Giving no heed to the moving
crowd around him, buried in thought, he stood with his eyes fixed
vacantly on the river. There was something in his features which seemed
familiar. Turning, Mr. Lelland again passed him, fixing his eyes
intently upon him as he did so, and more and more confirmed that his
suspicions were correct, he stepped up to him, and touching him lightly
on the shoulder, said,
“Excuse me—but is not your name Wingate?”
“Suppose it is—what the d——l is yours?” replied the man sullenly,
without turning his head.
“My name is Lelland, Mr. Wingate—for such you are, or I greatly err.”
With an expression of malignant hate, the man suddenly turned, and shook
his fist almost in the very teeth of Lelland.
“So we have met again, Mr. Richard Lelland, have we! Well, we shall see
who will be the better for the meeting, that’s all—d——n you!”
“Your words are idle,” replied Lelland, calmly. “Answer me one
question—do you know aught of your wife and children!”
At the mention of his family, Wingate grew suddenly pale, and seemed
much agitated.
“And you—what—what do you know of them?” he demanded, but in more
subdued tones.
“If you will go with me into the hotel yonder, I may perhaps give you
some information respecting them,” he replied.
Without a word Wingate mechanically followed Lelland, who, ordering a
private room, sat down to the melancholy duty before him.
“You spoke of my wife and children,” exclaimed Wingate, the moment they
entered the room, “if you know any thing of them, for God’s sake tell
me, for it is many months since I heard from them.”
“Prepare yourself for the most melancholy tidings,” said Lelland, in a
sympathizing voice and manner. “You have no longer a wife—it is now ten
months since her death.”
The wretched man buried his face in his hands.
“Dead—dead—dead! and without forgiving me—_dead_!” he exclaimed.
“With her latest breath she forgave and blessed you,” said Lelland,
taking his hand kindly.
“But my children—where are they—are they dead, too!”
“Your children are here—here, in the city; you may see them in an hour
if you will,” replied Lelland.
“_Here!_ here in the city—here, with _you_!” cried Wingate, starting
up, every feature distorted by passion; “with _you_, do you say! how
came _you_ near _her_ death-bed—ha! _did you dare_—” seizing Lelland
by the breast as he spoke. But shaking him off, Lelland placed his hand
on his arm, saying,
“First listen to me, Mr. Wingate, and you will see how little
provocation you have for such anger.”
He then briefly related his unexpected and providential meeting with
Margaret and her children, and the painful scene which so soon followed
it. He spoke of Mary and Margaret—of their loveliness, their sweet
dispositions, and of the consolation and happiness Wingate might yet
receive from their affection.
When he had done speaking, the unhappy man seized the hand of Lelland,
and pressing it fervently, said,
“Wretch—wretch that I am! how little have I merited such goodness. It
is, indeed, more than my guilty soul can bear. I had rather you would
stab me to the heart than thus pierce my soul with deeds of
kindness—for I deserve it not. It was I, Lelland, who robbed you of one
of God’s choicest treasures. When driven almost to despair by the unjust
treatment of her father, who should have been to her more than father
ever was, poor Margaret wrote you that letter which would have confirmed
your happiness and hers. It was _I_, who, goaded on by hate for you, and
a determination to make her mine—it was I who destroyed it! I watched
the struggle of her pure heart; I saw her cheek pale day by day, and yet
I repented not—nay, I gloried in my revenge. At length she became my
wife—and an angel she ever was to me, always so kind, so patient with
my follies; but I knew she loved you—I knew her heart was silently
breaking, her strength wasting, and instead of moving my pity, it only
drove me to madness. I was jealous even of my sweet babes, that they
were loved more than me. For years I ran a wild career of riot and
debauchery, and only came to my senses to see my poor injured wife was
truly dying; then came remorse—but it was too late. My business had
been neglected—my affairs were in ruin, and I saw myself on the brink
of poverty. The doctor had said that change of air would do much toward
her restoration; and now, as anxious to restore as I had been to
destroy, I resolved to come to New York and find some employment which
should warrant my removing my family here. I did so, and was so
fortunate as to obtain a situation as book-keeper, with a handsome
salary. In a few months I wrote my wife and children to join me. I
received for answer that she was now too feeble to journey. This made me
angry, though why, God only knows, except that I would not let her die
among scenes your love had hallowed—and I immediately wrote a
peremptory command for her to come, naming the day I should expect her.
In this wicked frame of mind I went out into the streets, and,
unfortunately meeting a gay companion, was induced to enter a
gambling-house, and ere I left, every dollar I possessed in the world
was swept from me. In the vain hope of winning back my money, I again
sought that den of destruction; need I say, so far from retrieving, I
left it hundreds in debt. Then, then, Richard Lelland, I became a
_forger_—yes, forged the name of my worthy employer—was detected, and
fled with my ill-got gains. The day I had appointed my poor Margaret to
arrive in the city I was on the way to the West Indies. From thence I
went to Paris, where, as long as my money lasted I led a mad career;
that expended, I was forced to the most menial offices to obtain my
daily food. At last driven by remorse, I determined to return to my
native country, see Margaret and my children once more, and then give
myself up to the laws I had outraged. I flattered myself that my wife
still lived, and that not finding me in the city on her arrival, had
gone back to Ohio. I arrived last night, and was even now about to take
passage in a sloop for Albany, thinking I should be less likely to meet
any acquaintance, when you so unexpectedly appeared before me.”
To this dreadful recital Lelland had listened in silence. When it was
ended, he took the hand of Wingate,
“Wretched man,” said he, “I forgive you for the misery of a lifetime, as
did that suffering angel, now in heaven; and may God extend to you his
peace and mercy!”
Then calling for pen, ink and paper, he drew a check for the amount
Wingate had forged, and placed it in his hand.
“There, Mr. Wingate, take that; in the morning see your late employer,
and restore him the money of which you defrauded him; in the meantime I
will see what can be done for you—rely upon me as your friend. But
remain here for the night, and on no account leave the room; have
patience, for to-morrow you shall see your children.” So saying, Lelland
took leave, promising to call for him in a carriage at an early hour in
the morning.
Immediately after breakfast, therefore, he proceeded to the hotel. But
Wingate had already left—had been gone some hours. On the table was a
letter directed to Lelland. Hastily breaking the seal, he read:
“Burthened with grief, and overwhelmed with remorse, life is
insupportable. I can no longer endure the torments of self-reproach, and
I fly to end alike my wretchedness and my life. Heaven is dark—but
earth is hell! Protect my innocent children!”
The next day the body of Henry Wingate was exposed in the Dead-House.
Lelland recognized and claimed it for burial.
Mary and Margaret were told their father was no more—but of the manner
of his wretched death they never knew.
Facts have often the appearance of fiction—such is the story I have
given. If it has called forth any interest in the minds of my readers,
the assurance that its principal incidents were gathered from real life,
will not, I trust, lessen that interest. Names and scene are, of course,
fictitious.
In a splendid mansion on the banks of the Potomac, Mr. Lelland still
resides with the two fair daughters of his adoption. They are beautiful
and accomplished, beloved by all who know them, and most tenderly
protected and cherished by their more than father; while those gems of
early piety implanted in their minds by their mother, have, under the
careful culture of Mr. Lelland, put forth the most lovely and Christian
graces.
Thus in the happiness and the virtues of her children, has God rewarded
the filial piety of poor Margaret.
* * * * *
THOUGHTS ON THE THERMOMETER.
Climate is said to have much influence on the physical, moral, mental,
political and social condition of mankind. Experience and observation
certainly give force to such an opinion. The difference in manners,
customs and character of the Russ and the Italian is as much owing to
latitude as lineality. One’s happiness, and even one’s destiny in life,
depend alike on Seasons and on Self.
The iron constitution, the sharp wit, the keen sense, the peculiar
individuality, the guessing and bartering of the man of Maine, contrasts
with the singing, siesta-seeking, music-loving, rich intellectuality of
the Mexican of the hacienda. Even in religious sentiment the difference
is striking. Look upon the cold, austere meeting-house worship of the
Puritan, and side by side behold the rich, voluptuous cathedral service
of the Catholic. These at least indicate the extremes of the influence
of the climate. The whole physical, mental and moral constitution of man
is operated upon by the temperature of his location, and thus affecting
not only his individual existence but the ultimate condition of his
race.
What would have been the fate of “The Colonists” of the “May-Flower” had
they landed at San Francisco or St. Domingo? If instead of the stern,
bracing, labor-requiring, excess-denying latitude of Plymouth, the
Pilgrims had rested in the land of the palmetto and the pomegranate? Or
who would have ventured on an unknown ocean, in search for a new world,
if the hope, the imagination, the enthusiasm, the poetry, the mental
excitement, the superstition even of Columbus, the child of the South,
had sunk in despair, or yielded to first disappointment? Where would the
close calculation of the North, founded on a philosophical hypothesis,
have sought for continued animation, after error has resulted from
experiment?
Where would the literature of the Past have found admirers, and even
devotees, if the mythology of the East had not been nursed in the soft
lap of a congenial temperature?
Why is it that the Latin classics yet hold a place as familiar as
household words, if a Southern sky had not invited to the rich
developments of the highest mental creations?
Where could the painter and sculptor have sought models and studies, if
the winter of the Mediterranean had been as relentless and as rigid as
that of Moscow?
Can it be maintained that Solon and Lycurgus would have alike given
their fame in trust to immortality, if the genial influences of the land
of their nativity had not been the same “at Rome as it was at Attica”?
Who will venture to assert that a similar fate would have followed the
siege of Troy in a land of snows, or that Marathon would have been a
northern Moscow?
Science, too, has felt the force of the benefit of its more northern
home. With a temperature unshocked by extremes, the highest mental
industry yields more, or rather different, fruit than the richest
intellectual soil. The wheat and the corn of the necessaries to
progress, are gathered only where the wine and the oil of luxury do not
grow.
That Tyre and Sidon were marts for the cosmopolite, and now are but the
refuge for the wanderer, while Boston, New York, New Orleans were the
seaboards of the savage, and are now the emporiums of a hemisphere, is
as true as that the causes are to be found in some degree dependent upon
the influences of climate.
That Rome was the mother of nations, the terror of thrones, and the
great entrance into eternity, and now is the dismantled wreck of her
illustrious past—while the hunting-grounds of the “Six Nations” are
transformed into a mighty empire, is but the melancholy picture of the
past, gorgeous in its dilapidation, under the luxurious warmth of an
Italian sky, while the other is the picture of the present, more
magnificent and vigorous, tinted by the rays of a western sun.
Climate was not alone in producing these changes, yet its influence was
potent.
The Religion of Nazareth took its metaphors from the land of Aristotle,
its enthusiasm from the nations on the “seacoast,” its energy from the
Northmen, but _its divinity from God_!
The songs of labor are heard loudest and sweetest where the valley and
forest yield an annual tribute over the grave of all that is beautiful,
born of the spring; while the songs of the sentiments take their
melodies from the land of soft sunlight, scented with perennial
perfumes.
In considering the Future let us look at the Past, and among the most
remarkable of physical causes which have marked their existence on the
history of nations and of men, climate will be found to have exercised
by no means an inconsiderable influence.
* * * * *
TO MY WIFE.
BY S. D. ANDERSON.
Gladly to thee, amid the wreck of years,
Will memory’s pinions wing their eager way;
To thee, who ever through this life of tears
Has lit its darkness with thy sunny ray;
Thou wast my empress in the morning hours,
The star amid my dreams of poesy;
The single rose amid the dewy bowers,
That lured my soul to thoughts of purity.
As rivers glancing in the glorious sun,
Voice out their gladness to the perfumed air,
So ’neath the presence of that treasured one
My hopes were mirrored in a world more fair;
A magic world, within whose blesséd light
All things the richest and the best did come,
Bringing unto the weary dreams as bright
As those that flit around our quiet home.
And I did love thee, not a transient flame,
Burned on the altar of an early dream;
No, I have dwelt upon that cherished name
Till it became the priestess and the beam,
And softly came around our household hearth,
The angel wings of woman’s ministry,
Rich hopes, as wild and joyous in their birth
As were the early dreams of loving thee.
And ever thus has been the full, deep tide,
Upheaving from this ocean love of mine;
A memory forever by my side,
To lead me onward to a nobler shrine;
The calm, hushed voice still sounding in my sleep,
Like to a strain of distant melody,
The holy light from out those eyes so deep,
That shines on all so clear and tranquilly.
Amid my dreams of human faith and love—
Of _love_, that stems the tempest and the blast—
Of _faith_, that in its tenderness shall prove
Its holy office even to the last,
Thou hast been present with thy watchful care,
Guarding a heart too prone to _dream_ at best,
Too much forgetting _one_ whose sinless prayer
Has lingered round his home a heavenly guest.
But brightly now the sun of promise shines,
The dark and stormy waves of time along,
With all some token of thy virtue twines,
Sweet as the cadence of the evening song;
And truly now, when youth’s wild day is o’er,
And every fancied passion’s hushed to rest,
I give this song to _thee_ from memory’s shore,
The echo of the tide within my breast.
* * * * *
THE FOUNDLING.
BY JESSIE HOWARD.
CHAPTER I.
The March winds blew chillingly over a wide and barren moor in the
Highlands of Scotland, and howled fiercely around the isolated dwelling
in the middle of it, from whence gleamed a faint light like a beacon in
the midst of that desolate waste. Black majestic clouds gathered darker
over head, and the wild whistle of the coming tempest grew every moment
more shrill; but little were the boding sounds noted within the cottage
of Donald McLane, for sterner and fiercer was the storm of sorrow
gathering in the human heart of the one lonely watcher, bending over the
low pallet where lay, in a still dreamless slumber, the forerunner of
one more dreamless yet, the form of her only child. Long silken curls
fell on the white pillow, from the still whiter brow of the little
sufferer, and pearly lids, with long, dark fringes, drooped over the
fair cheek. The coverlet had been cast aside, as by some restless
motion, and the snow-white drapery fell in careless folds,
half-covering, half-revealing those round and dimpled limbs.
The light from a solitary candle flickered over the child’s face, so
marble-like in its quiet beauty; oh! there is a touching loveliness that
waking life never bestows in that death-like slumber which precedes the
parting hour of a young, sinless spirit! Angels waited to bear it
upward, and the shining light from their own immortal faces, was
reflected upon the form of clay it was so soon to leave. Close beside
the couch, with clasped hands and a fixed gaze, motionless as the object
of her solicitude, knelt the young mother—so very young and so fair;
surely it was early for such sorrow to weigh down her happy heart.
The dull moments wore away, and still those two pale faces gleamed in
the half-darkness, silent and still. The embers on the hearth burned
low, louder howled the tempest without, and the white snow-flakes dashed
against the window with a startling sound—but the mother heard it not,
until the door softly opened, and a light touch upon her arm roused her
to consciousness.
“Oh, Donald, Donald, I’m glad ye’re come,” was her tremulous salutation.
“And yet, Maggie,” he said, “I’m not so sure o’ that when you see what
I’ve brought you. I would not add to your cares if I could help it, but
I could not leave a babe to perish in the cold snow to-night,” and
unfolding his plaid, he displayed to her astonished eyes, a fair and
beautiful infant, richly dressed, who, as she took it tenderly in her
arms, opened its large dark-blue eyes, and smiled in her face.
“Oh, Donald, how lovely!” she exclaimed, almost forgetting for the
moment her sorrow; but a glance toward the couch again brought the tears
to her eyes, and again she sunk beside it, with the little stranger in
her arms.
By the exertions of Donald, a brisk fire was soon burning on the hearth,
and the bright blaze disclosed the table, with its neat white cloth, on
which his frugal repast was spread; but he seemed to think little of his
supper that night, for drawing near to the bedside, he bent over his
child with an earnest, anxious expression on his manly features.
“How long has she been so, Maggie?” he asked, in a low tone.
“Since noon,” was the reply, and her breath came more quickly as Donald
bent closer and closer to the quiet face, placing his hand softly on the
still breast, and his lips to the dimpled mouth whence no breath seemed
issuing, then, with a stifled sigh as he gazed lingeringly on those
beautiful features, he turned to his wife, who was looking up in his
face with that gaze of mute terror which says so much more than words,
“Maggie, God has taken our Ally to be an angel in Heaven.”
No loud exclamation of grief followed his words. Tearless she stood with
her eyes fixed upon her husband’s face, as if unable to comprehend his
meaning, but, sinking on his knees beside her, and enfolding her in his
arms, he prayed from a full heart that God would be with them in this
their first trial. The low, soothing tones of his voice unlocked the
fountains of the mother’s heart, and blessed tears came to her relief.
Long might she have indulged in this luxury, but a faint cry awoke her
maternal sympathies. She had forgotten the babe so strangely thrown upon
her care, but now her gentle nature could not think of self, while
another was suffering and in preparations for the comfort of her charge,
the first wild burst of anguish was passed through.
“We will call her Ally, after our own lost one, Donald. Surely God has
sent her to soften this sore trial to us, and we will love her as our
own. May He help us to submit. Oh, my Ally! my darling, my precious
one—can any one ever fill thy place? God help us!”