PART II.

THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

VOL. XI.--MARCH, 1863.--NO. LXV.

CHRISTOPHER NORTH.

Plutarch, when about to enter upon the crowded lives of Alexander and

Caesar, declares his purpose and sets forth the true nature and province

of biography in these words:--"It must be borne in mind that my design

is not to write histories, but lives. And the most glorious exploits do

not always furnish us with the clearest discoveries of virtue or vice in

men. Sometimes a matter of less moment, an expression or a jest, informs

us better of their characters and inclinations than the most famous

sieges, the greatest armaments, or the bloodiest battles whatsoever.

Therefore, as portrait-painters are more exact in the lines and features

of the face, in which character is seen, than in the other parts of the

body, so I must be allowed to give my more particular attention to the

marks and indications of the souls of men, and while I endeavor by these

to portray their lives, may be free to leave more weighty matters and

great battles to be treated of by others."

That these general principles of biography are correct, and that

Plutarch, by adhering to them, succeeded, beyond all others, in making

his heroes realities, men of flesh and blood, whom we see and know like

those about us, in whom we feel the warmest interest, and from whom we

derive lessons of deep wisdom, as from our own experience,--all this

could best be shown by the enduring popularity of his "Lives," and the

seal of approval set upon them by critics of the most opposite schools.

What a long array of names might be presented of those who have

given their testimony to the wondrous fascination of this undying

Greek!--names of the great and wise through many long centuries, men

differing in age, country, religion, language, and occupation. For ages

he has charmed youth, instructed manhood, and solaced graybeards. His

heroes have become household words throughout the world. He has been

equally familiar with court, with camp, and with cottage. He has been

the companion of the soldier, the text-book of the philosopher, and the

_vade-mecum_ of kings and statesmen. And his name even now, after the

lapse of so many generations, is fresher than ever.

Yet Lord Macaulay could not refrain from a sneer at Plutarch as a pedant

who thought himself a great philosopher and a great politician. Pedant

he may have been; philosopher and politician he may not have been; but

he was, nevertheless, the prince of biographers. Macaulay has praised

Boswell's "Life of Johnson" as the best biography ever written. But was

not Boswell a pedant? Was he a philosopher? Macaulay himself has penned

many biographies. Most of them are quite above the pedantry of

small facts. Instead, they are crammed with deep philosophy, with

abstractions, and with the balancing of antithetical qualities. They

are bloodless frameworks, without life or humanity,--bundles of

peculiarities skilfully grouped, and ticketed with such and such a name.

No one sees a man within. As biographies they will not be remembered,

but as instances of labored learning, of careful special pleading,

and of brilliant rhetoric. Elsewhere, however, he has descended from

philosophy, and not been above the pedantry of detail. And he has given

us, in consequence, charming lives,--successful, in fact, just so far as

he has followed in the footsteps of the old Greek. Yet who would for

a moment compare his Pitt, his Goldsmith, or his William IV., as

biography, with Plutarch's Alcibiades, or Cato the Censor? We remember

the fact that Goldsmith sometimes wore a peach-blossom suit, but we see

Cato in his toga.

Very many works have been written, purporting to be "The Life and Times"

of this or that man. Where a man has occupied a large historic place,

has been moulded by his times, and has moulded in turn the coming years,

such works are well enough as history. As biography they are failures.

The Times get the upper hand, and thrust down the Life. Without the

Life, such works would be better, too, as history; for man and the world

are two different things, and their respective provinces cannot, without

confusion, be thrown into one. Now every leading man bears a twofold

character. He is man, and something more: he is a power in history.

Whatever concerns him as man,--his humanity, his individuality, his

personal qualities, his character and inclinations, "the marks and

indications of the soul," as Plutarch phrases it,--all this, and hardly

more than this, is matter for biography, and for that alone. But so far

as he is a representative man, standing for communities, for nations,

for the world of his time,--so far as he is an historic force, making

and solving, in some degree, large human problems,--so far as he is the

organ chosen by destiny to aid in the development of his race,--just so

far he is a maker of history, and therefore its proper subject, and its

alone. Napoleon was not only a man, but he was Europe for some twenty

years. Louis XIV was the Europe of half a century. There should be lives

of such men, for they were akin to their fellows: histories, too, should

be theirs, for they were allied to Nature, and fate, and law. They

jested; and Biography, smiling, seized her tablets. They embodied a

people; and Clio, pondering, opened the long scrolls of time.

All biography has been said to be eulogistic in its nature. This is well

enough. But it is not well, when the author, high on daring stilts,

overlooks the little matters just about him, and, rapidly running his

eye over the wastes that stretch from Dan to Beersheba, prates of the

fields that lie along the distant horizon. Nor is it well, when he

forgets his hero, and writes himself,--when he constantly thrusts upon

us philosophy, abstractions, and the like,--when he has a pet theory to

sustain through thick and thin,--when narrative becomes disquisition,

memoir is criticism, life is bloodless, and the man is a puppet whose

strings he jerks freakishly. There may be something good in all this;

but it is all quite out of place: it is simply not biography. The

foundation of most biographical sins is, perhaps, ambition,--an ambition

to do something more or something other than the subject demands, and

to pitch the strain in too high a key. Hence we have usually found the

memoirs of comparatively insignificant men to be better reading, and

more fertile in suggestion, than those of what are called great men. Not

that the real life, as he lived it, of a man of mediocrity has in itself

more seeds of thought than that of a hero. Far otherwise. But his

written life has often greater lessons of wisdom for us, precisely

because it is generally found to give us more of the individual, and

more of our common humanity,--which is the very thing we want. There is

less of pretext to pour this one small drop into the broad ocean, and

then treat us to a vague essay on salt-water. What is it, for instance,

that gives to Southey's "Life of Nelson" its great excellence? There

have been many other works on the same subject, larger, fuller, and more

carefully studied. But these will perish, while that will be cherished

by all the generations to come. It is because the author kept throughout

precisely on a level with his subject. He was conscious, on every page,

that he was writing of one man,--that nothing was trivial which could

throw light on this man, and nothing important which did not tend

directly to the same end. Nelson was made to speak, not only in his own

words, but in the many little ways and actions which best show the stuff

one is made of. There is no essay, nothing strictly didactic. Facts are

given: inferences are left entirely with the reader. Few books are more

wearisome than those which are thoroughly exhaustive, which point a

moral and adorn a tale on every page. Imagination and thought must

sit supine, despairing of new conquests. Their work has all been done

before.

Christopher North--Heaven be praised!--was not an "historic force." He

was a good many things, but not that. And so it was always pleasant to

read him and about him. He was so completely vital and individual, that

nothing that concerned him ever lacked in human interest. The world has

known him for a long time, and has lost nothing by the acquaintance.

Latterly it has come to know him better than before in his character

of citizen, son, husband, and father; and it has come to the sage

conclusion that even as a family-man he was not quite so bad, after all.

It is a great relief to know at last that Christopher was throughout

consistent,--that the child was father to the man. One of his first

exploits was fishing with a bent pin. Another was to preach a little

sermon on a naughty fish. The "application," though brief, was earnest.

To the infant expounder, the subject of his discourse doubtless appeared

in the guise of a piscatorial Cockney. After many other the like

foreshadowings, and after draining dry his native village, he went, when

twelve years of age, to Glasgow University. Professor Jardine, who then

held the chair of Logic, was fully alive to the rare promise of his

pupil, and said of him subsequently,--"He lived in my family during the

whole course of his studies at Glasgow, and the general superintendence

of his education was committed to me; and it is but justice to him

to declare, that during my long experience I never had a pupil who

discovered more genius, more ardor, or more active and persevering

diligence." But his ardor was not limited to philosophy and the

humanities; his powers required a larger field than the curriculum. He

walked, ran, wrestled, boxed, boated, fished, wrote poetry, played the

flute, danced, kept a careful diary, and read largely. Even at this

early age, he felt the merit of the then unappreciated Wordsworth, and,

on the appearance of the "Lyrical Ballads," wrote the author a letter

expressive of his admiration.

In 1803, Wilson, now eighteen, was transferred to Oxford as a Gentleman

Commoner of Magdalen. And surely never lighted on the Oxford orb so

glorious a vision, or such a bewildering phenomenon. He was, indeed,

"Rara avis in terris, nigroque simillima cygno."

There, as elsewhere, his life was an extraordinary one. His immense

vitality forced him to seek expression in every possible direction. The

outlets which sufficed for ordinary souls were insignificant conduits

for the great floods pent up within his breast; and he surged forth

mightily at every point, carrying all before him. His tastes and

sympathies were all-embracing. His creed and his practice were alike

catholic. All was fish that came to his net. He sat at the feet of

muscular Gamaliels, and campaigned with veterans of the classics. He

hobnobbed with prize-fighters, and was the choice spirit in the ethereal

feasts of poets. He was king of the ring, and _facile princeps_ in the

Greek chorus. He could "talk horse" with any jockey in the land; yet who

like him could utter tender poetry and deep philosophy? He had no rival

in following the hounds, or scouring the country in breakneck races; and

none so careered over every field of learning. He angled in brooks and

books, and landed many a stout prize. He would pick up here and there

a "fly in amber," and add it to his stores. He was the easy victor in

every foot-race, and took the Newdigate prize for poetry, in 1806. He

burned the midnight oil, and looked through ruddy wine at the small

hours chasing each other over the dial. For hours, almost whole days,

he would sit silent at the helm of his boat on the Isis, his rapt

eye peopling the vacant air with unutterable visions. He swam like

a dolphin, rode like a Centaur, and De Quincey called him the best

unprofessional male dancer he had ever seen. Three times he was

vanquished by a huge shoemaker,--so the story goes,--champion of the

"Town": at the fourth meeting, the Gentleman Commoner proved himself

the better man, knocked his antagonist out of time, and gave him twenty

pounds. Another professor of the manly art of self-defence, who had

ventured to confront the young Titan, and was unexpectedly laid low,

said in astonishment,--"You can be only one of the two: you are either

Jack Wilson or the Devil." He proved himself to be the former, by not

proclaiming, "_Voe victis_!" and by taking his prize of war to the

nearest alehouse, and then and there filling him with porter. Sotheby

said it was worth a journey from London to hear him translate a Greek

chorus; and, at a later day, the brawny Cumberland men called him "a

varra bad un to lick."

Never were such "constitutionals" known, even at old Oxford. He would

wander away alone, sometimes for many days, tramping over the country

leagues and leagues away, making the earth tremble with his heavy tread,

and distancing everything with his long, untiring stride. Then, on his

return, he would be the prince of good-fellows once more, and fascinate

the merry revellers with the witchery of his tongue. Even when a boy, he

had won a bet by walking six miles in two minutes less than an hour. He

once dined in Grosvenor Square, and made his appearance at Oxford at an

early hour the next morning, having walked the fifty-eight miles at a

tremendous pace. In his vacations, he walked over all the Lake region

of England, the North of Scotland, and the greater part of Wales. On

finishing his course at Oxford, he went on foot to Edinburgh,--more than

three hundred miles. He was equally remarkable as a leaper, surpassing

all competitors. He once jumped across the Cherwell--twenty-three feet

clear--with a run of only a few yards. This is, we believe, the greatest

feat of the kind on record. General Washington, it is known, had great

powers in this way; but the greatest distance ever leaped by him, if we

remember right, was but twenty-one feet.

The many vagaries into which he was led, and the innumerable odd pranks

he played, would be sufficient, in the case of any one else, to prove

that he was not a reading man. But not so with Wilson. One of his

contemporaries at Oxford thus described him:--"Wilson read hard, lived

hard, but never ran into vulgar or vicious dissipation. He talked well,

and loved to talk. Such gushes of poetic eloquence as I have heard from

his lips,--I doubt whether Jeremy Taylor himself, could he speak as

well as he wrote, could have kept up with him. Every one anticipated his

doing well, whatever profession he might adopt, and when he left us, old

Oxford seemed as if a shadow had fallen upon its beauty." Wilson himself

confessed that he yielded, for a short time, to "unbridled dissipation,"

seeking solace for the agony he experienced from the conduct of his

stern mother, who ruthlessly nipped in the bud his affection for a bonny

lass at Dychmont. He might have used the very words of Gibbon, whose

father nipped, in a similar way, his attachment for Mademoiselle Susan

Curchod, afterward Madame Necker:--"After a painful struggle, I yielded

to my fate: I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son; my wound was

insensibly healed by time, absence, and the habits of a new life." It

is difficult to conceive of Gibbon's wound as a deep one, or of his

struggle as painful. But Wilson, whose affections were far stronger,

suffered much. He almost made up his mind to run away to Timbuctoo, with

Mungo Park; and his deep gloom showed how the iron had entered his

soul. But time and absence and new habits healed his wound, as well as

Gibbon's, without a journey to Africa.

We mentioned above that Wilson carried off the Newdigate prize for

the best poem, in 1806. His subject was, "Painting, Poetry, and

Architecture." He professed, in general, to put a very low estimate on

college prize-poems, and rated his own so low that he would not allow

it to be published with his subsequent poems. But in the "Noctes

Ambrosianae" for October, 1825, he was not above saying a good word in

favor of these much-berated effusions, as follows:--

"_North._ It is the fashion to undervalue Oxford and Cambridge

prize-poems; but it is a stupid fashion. Many of them are most

beautiful. Heber's 'Palestine!' A flight, as upon angel's wing, over the

Holy Land! How fine the opening!

[We omit the lines quoted,--the well-known beginning of the poem.]

"_Tickler_. More than one of Wrangham's prize-poems are excellent;

Richard's 'Aboriginal Brutus' is a powerful and picturesque performance;

Chinnery's 'Dying Gladiator' magnificent; and Milman's 'Apollo

Belvedere' splendid, beautiful, and majestic.

"_North._ Macaulay and Praed have written very good prize-poems. These

two young gentlemen ought to make a figure in the world."

Heber was a contemporary and friend of Wilson at Oxford; as was also

Lockhart, among others. The distant See of Calcutta interrupted the

intercourse of the former, in after-life, while Maga and party bound

the latter still closer to his old college-friend. One of Wilson's

college-mates has given an odd anecdote descriptive of his appearance at

their social gatherings:--

"I shall never forget his figure, sitting with a long earthen pipe, a

great tie-wig on. Those wigs had descended, I fancy, from the days of

Addison, (who had been a member of our college,) and were worn by

us all, (in order, I presume, to preserve our hair and dress, from

tobacco-smoke,) when smoking commenced after supper; and a strange

appearance we made in them."

Wilson left Oxford in 1807, after passing a highly creditable

examination for his degree. His disappointed affections had so weighed

upon him, that he had a nervous apprehension of being plucked,--which,

however, turned out to be quite unnecessary. He was now twenty-two

years of age, a man singularly favored both by Nature and by

fortune,--possessed of almost everything which might seem to insure the

fullest measure of health, happiness, success, and fame. Rarely, indeed,

do the gods give so freely of their good gifts to a single mortal. His

circumstances were easy: a fortune of some fifty thousand pounds having

come to him from his father, who had died while his son was a mere boy.

After visiting his mother at Edinburgh, and rambling largely here and

there, he purchased the beautiful estate of Elleray on Lake Windermere,

and there fixed his residence. These were the halcyon days of that noted

region: the "Lakers," as they were called, were then in their glory. A

rare coterie, indeed, it was that was gathered together along the banks

of Windermere. Though they are now no more, yet is their memory so

linked to these scenes that thousands of fond pilgrims still visit

these placid waters to throw one glance upon the home of genius, the

birthplace of great thoughts. Here Wilson was in his element. His soul

feasted itself on the wondrous charms of Nature, and held high converse

with the master-minds of literature. There was quite enough to satisfy

the cravings even of his multiform spirit. He soon came to know, and to

be on terms of greater or less intimacy with, Coleridge, Wordsworth, De

Quincey, Southey, the celebrated Bishop Watson, of the See of Llandaff,

Charles Lloyd, and others,--then the _genii loci_. It may be remembered

that his admiration for Wordsworth was already of long standing, his

boyish enthusiasm having led him, when at Glasgow, to send his tribute

of praise to the author of the "Lyrical Ballads." Some fifteen to twenty

years later,--in one of the numbers of the "Noctes,"--his admiration for

the poet had temporarily cooled somewhat. Then was its aphelion, and

soon it began to return once more toward its central sun. It must have

been transient spleen which dictated such sentences as these:--

"_Tickler_. Wordsworth says that a great poet must be great in all

things.

"_North_. Wordsworth often writes like an idiot; and never more so than

when he said of Milton, 'His soul was like a star, and dwelt apart!' For

it dwelt in tumult, and mischief, and rebellion. Wordsworth is, in all

things, the reverse of Milton,--a good man, and a bad poet.

"_Tickler_. What! that Wordsworth whom Maga cries up as the Prince of

Poets?

"_North_. Be it so: I must humor the fancies of some of my friends.

But had that man been a great poet, he would have produced a deep and

lasting impression on the mind of England; whereas his verses are

becoming less and less known every day, and he is, in good truth,

already one of the illustrious obscure ...

"And yet, with his creed, what might not a great poet have done? That

the language of poetry is but the language of strong human passion! ...

And what, pray, has he made out of this true and philosophical creed?

A few ballads, (pretty, at the best,) two or three moral fables, some

natural description of scenery, and half a dozen narratives of common

distress or happiness. Not one single character has he created, not one

incident, not one tragical catastrophe. He has thrown no light on man's

estate here below; and Crabbe, with all his defects, stands immeasurably

above Wordsworth as the Poet of the Poor ... I confess that the

'Excursion' is the worst poem, of any character, in the English

language. It contains about two hundred sonorous lines, some of which

appear to be fine, even in the sense, as well as the sound. The

remaining seven thousand three hundred are quite ineffectual. Then what

labor the builder of that lofty rhyme must have undergone! It is, in its

own way, a small Tower of Babel, and all built by a single man."

Christopher was surely in the dumps, when he wrote thus: he was soured

by an Edinburgh study. After a run in the crisp air of the moors, he

would never have written such atrabilious criticism of a poet whom he

admired highly, for it was not honestly in the natural man. Neither his

postulates nor his inferences are quite correct. It is incorrect to say

that the poet's creed was a true one; that, with it, he might have been

a great poet; but that, from not making the most of it, he was a bad

one. De Quincey's position, we think, was the only true one: that

Wordsworth's poetic creed was radically false,--a creed more honored in

the breach than the observance,--a creed good on paper only; that its

author, though professing, did in fact never follow it; that, with it,

he could never have been a great poet; and that, without it, he was

really great.

Wilson at Windermere, like Wilson at Oxford, was versatile, active,

Titanic, mysterious, and fascinating. An immense energy and momentum

marked the man; and a strange fitfulness, a lack of concentration, made

the sum total of results far too small. There was power; but much of it

was power wasted. He overflowed everywhere; his magnificent _physique_

often got the better of him; his boundless animal spirits fairly ran

riot with him; his poetic soul made him the fondest and closest of

Nature's wooers; his buoyant health lent an untold luxury to the mere

fact of existence; his huge muscles and tuneful nerves always hungered

for action, and bulged and thrilled joyously when face to face with

danger. He was exuberant, extravagant, enthusiastic, reckless,

stupendous, fantastic. It is only by the cumulation of epithets that one

can characterize a being so colossal in proportion, so many-sided in his

phases, so manifold in operation. He was a brilliant of the first water,

whose endless facets were forever gleaming, now here, now there, with a

gorgeous, but irregular light. No man could tell where to look for the

coming splendor. The glory dazzled all eyes, yet few saw their way the

clearer by such fitful flashes.

Wilson, in some of his phases, reminds us often of a great glorified

child, rejoicing in an eternal boyhood. He had the same impulse,

restlessness, glee, zest, and _abandon_. All sport was serious work with

him, and serious work was sport. No frolic ever came amiss, whatever

its guise. He informed play with the earnestness of childhood and the

spirituality of poesy. He could turn everything into a hook on which to

hang a frolic. No dark care bestrode the horse behind this perennial

youth. No haggard spectre, reflected from a turbid soul, sat moping

in the prow of his boat, or kept step with him in the race. Like

the Sun-god, he was buoyant and beautiful, careless, free, elastic,

unfading. Years never cramped his bounding spirits, or dimmed the lustre

of his soul. He was ever ready for prank and pastime, for freak and

fun. Of all his loves at Elleray, boating was the chief. He was the

Lord-High-Admiral of all the neighboring waters, and had a navy at his

beck. He never wearied of the lake: whether she smiled or frowned on her

devotee, he worshipped all the same. Time and season and weather were

all alike to the sturdy skipper. One howling winter's night he was still

at his post, when Billy Balmer brought tidings that "his master was

wellnigh frozen to death, and had icicles a finger-length hanging from

his hair and beard." Though there was storm without, the great child had

his undying sunshine within.

In 1811, he married Miss Jane Penny, of Ambleside, described as the

belle of that region,--a woman of rare beauty of mind and person,

gentle, true, and loving. She was either a pedestrian by nature, or

converted by the arguments of her husband; for, a few years after

marriage, they took a long, leisurely stroll on foot among the

Highlands, making some three hundred and fifty miles in seven weeks. The

union of these two bright spirits was singularly happy and congenial,--a

pleasing exception to the long list of mismated authors. Nought was

known between them but the tenderest attachment and unwearied devotion

to each other. For nearly forty years they were true lovers; and when

death took her, a void was left which nothing could fill. The bereaved

survivor mourned her sincerely for more than seventeen years,--never,

for an instant, forgetting her, until his own summons came. Some one

has related the following touching incident. "When Wilson first met his

class, in the University, after his wife's death, he had to adjudicate

on the comparative merits of various essays which had been sent in on

competition for a prize. He bowed to his class, and, in as firm voice as

he could command, apologized for not having examined the essays,--'for,'

said he, 'I could not see to read them in the darkness of the shadow of

the Valley of Death.' As he spoke, the tears rolled down his cheeks;

he said no more, but waved his hand to his class, who stood up as he

concluded and hurried out of the lecture-room."

The joys of Elleray were destined to be fleeting. The fortune of its

master was melted away by the mismanagement of others, leaving him but

a slender pittance. He bore his loss like a man, sorrowing, but not

repining. The estate was given up, and a new home found with his mother,

in Edinburgh. This was in 1815. Four years later, fortune had smiled on

his cheerful labors, and given him the wherewithal to provide a home

of his own for his wife and little ones,--the well-known house in Anne

Street, which was for so many years the abode of domestic joys, the

shrine of literature, the centre of friendship and hospitality. On his

arrival at Edinburgh, Wilson, already famous, though young, finding fame

an unsubstantial portion for a man with a family, looked about him for

something more tangible, and determined to get his livelihood by the

law. Kit North a lawyer, eating bread earned by legal sweat! The very

idea seems comical enough. Yet it cannot be doubted, that, with his

intellect, energy, eloquence, and capacity for work, he would, when

driven to concentration and persistence by the spurs of necessity, duty,

and affection, have run his race manfully, and reached the goal with the

very foremost. Happily the question is an open one, for his affairs took

another turn, which may have given Scotland one legal lord the less. For

some time the briefless barrister diligently frequented the Edinburgh

courts, on the lookout for business. If he had few cases, he had

excellent company in another "limb," of his own kidney, John Gibson

Lockhart. These two roystering pundits, having little to do, filled up

their moments mainly with much fun, keeping their faculties on the

alert for whatever might turn up. The thing that soon turned up was

"Blackwood."

The "Edinburgh Review"--the first in the field of the modern

politico-literary periodicals--commenced its career in 1802, under the

leadership of Brougham, Sydney Smith, Jeffrey, and Horner, all stanch

Whigs. At first, literature had the second place, while politics

occupied the chief seat; though in later years their relative positions

have been reversed. Then, the one great thing in view was to have an

able party-organ, the fearless champion of a certain policy in matters

of State. The Whigs must be glorified, and the Tories put down, at all

events, whatever else might be done. The rejoicings of the former, and

the discomfiture of the latter, soon bore witness to the ability and

success of this new-fledged champion. But this one-sided state of things

could not continue always. The Tories, too, must have a mouth-piece

to testify of their devotion to "the good old cause," and silence

the clamors of their opponents. Accordingly, in 1809, appeared the

"Quarterly Review," with Gifford as editor, and Scott, Southey, Croker,

Canning, and others, as chief contributors. Under the conduct of such

men, it became at once an organ of great power, yet still not quite what

was wanted. It did not seem to meet entirely the demands of the case.

It had not the wit, pungency, and facility of its rival, and failed

of securing so general a popularity. Its learning and gravity made it

better suited to be the oracle of scholars than the organ of a party.

Compared with its adversary across the Tweed, it was like a ponderous

knight, cased in complete steel, attacking an agile, light-armed Moorish

cavalier; or, to use Ben Jonson's illustration, like a Spanish great

galleon opposed to the facile manoeuvres of a British man-of-war. For

such an enemy there were needed other weapons. Well might the Tories

say,--

"Non tali auxilio, nee defensoribus istis Tempos eget."

William Blackwood, the Prince-Street publisher, thought, that, to be

successful, the war should be carried into Africa,--that the enemy must

be met on his own ground with his own weapons. Hogg, whose weekly paper,

"The Spy," had recently fallen through, also came to the conclusion that

a sprightly monthly publication, of strong Tory proclivities, could not

fail to do well. So, the times being ripe, Blackwood issued, in March,

1817, the first number of his new monthly, then called "The Edinburgh

Monthly Magazine." Though himself a violent Tory, he, singularly enough,

chose as his editors two Whigs,--Pringle the poet, and Cleghorn. Hogg

lent his aid from the beginning. Scott, too, wrote now and then; and

very soon Wilson made his appearance as "Eremus," contributing prose

and verse. But the new magazine did not prove to be what was hoped,--a

decided success. It was, in fact, quite flat and dull, having nothing

life-like and characteristic. The radical error of attempting to build

on such heterogeneous foundations was soon perceived. Vigor of action

could proceed only from entire unanimity of sentiment. Soon a rupture

arose between editors and publisher, and the former seceded with the

list of subscribers, leaving the latter his own master. He at once

decided to remodel his periodical entirely,--to make it a thorough-going

partisan, and to infuse a new life and vigor by means of personality and

wit. How well he succeeded we all know. Thenceforward, until his death

in 1834, he acted as editor, and a better one it would be difficult to

find. The new management went into effect in October, 1817, with the

famous No. VII. The difference was apparent at once, not only in the

ability and style, but also in the title of the periodical, which was

then changed to the name which it has borne ever since. In this number

appeared the first really distinctive article of the magazine,--the

celebrated "Translation from an Ancient Chaldee Manuscript,"--an

allegorical account, in quaint Scripture phrase, of Blackwood's quarrel

with his editors, and a savage onslaught on the leading Whigs of

Edinburgh. So great a hubbub arose immediately on the appearance of this

diatribe that it was suppressed as soon as possible; and though the

editor offered an earnest apology for its insertion, he was finally

mulcted in costs in a large sum for libel. But the general effect was

highly favorable to the new magazine. It gave it--what had been lacking

before--notoriety and a recognized position, and made its existence no

longer a matter of indifference. It was known that Hogg conceived the

idea, and wrote some portion of the article. But few could believe, as

was claimed by some, that all the sharp touches came from his hand.

Hogg, it appears, wrote the first part; Wilson and Lockhart together

contributed most of the remainder, amidst side-splitting guffaws, in a

session in the house of the Dowager Wilson, in Queen Street; while the

philosophic Sir William Hamilton, in adding his mite, was so moved by

uproarious cachinnation that he fairly tumbled out of his chair.

The power and personality which thus early characterized the magazine

were its leading features in after-years. Wilson and Lockhart became at

once its chief contributors,--Wilson especially writing for its columns,

with the most extraordinary profusion, on all conceivable topics, in

prose and verse, for more than thirty years. By these articles he became

known beyond his own circle, and on these his fame must ultimately rest.

His daughter points to them with pride, and unhesitatingly expresses the

opinion that they in themselves are a sufficient answer to all who doubt

whether the great powers of their author ever found adequate expression.

We are unable to agree with her. Able and brilliant as these

articles unquestionably were, we cannot think that such glimpses and

fragments--or, in fact, all the relics left by their author--furnish

results at all commensurate with the man. Though Maga increased his

immediate reputation, we think it diminished his lasting fame, by

leading him to scatter, instead of concentrating his remarkable powers

on some one great work. Scott and other great authorities saw so much

native genius in Wilson, that they often said that it lay in him

to become the first man of his time, though they feared that his

eccentricities and lack of steadiness might prove fatal to his success.

Though never really the editor of "Blackwood," Wilson was from the first

its guiding spirit,--the leaven that leavened the whole lump. The way in

which he threw himself into his work he described as follows:--"We love

to do our work by fits and starts. We hate to keep fiddling away, an

hour or two at a time, at one article for weeks. So off with our coat,

and at it like a blacksmith. When we once get the way of it, hand over

hip, we laugh at Vulcan and all his Cyclops. From nine of the morning

till nine at night, we keep hammering away at the metal, iron or gold,

till we produce a most beautiful article. A biscuit and a glass of

Madeira, twice or thrice at the most,--and then to a well-won dinner. In

three days, gentle reader, have We, Christopher North, often produced

a whole magazine,--a most splendid number. For the next three weeks we

were as idle as a desert, and as vast as an antre,--and thus on we go,

alternately laboring like an ant, and relaxing in the sunny air like a

dragon-fly, enamored of extremes." Of all his contributions, we think

the "Noctes Ambrosianae" give by far the best idea of their author. They

are perfectly characteristic throughout, though singularly various.

Every mood of the man is apparent; and hardly anything is touched which

is not adorned. Their pages reveal in turn the poet, the philosopher,

the scholar, and the pugilist. Though continued during thirteen years,

their freshness does not wither. To this day we find the series

delightful reading: we can always find something to our taste, whether

we crave fish, flesh, or fowl. Whether we lounge in the sanctum, or roam

over the moors, we feel the spirit of Christopher always with us.

It has been attempted, on Wilson's behalf, to excuse the fierce

criticism and violent personality of Maga in its early days, on the

plea that his influence over that periodical was less then than

afterwards,--and that, as his control increased, the bitterness

decreased. This is a special plea which cannot be allowed. The magazine

was moulded, from the beginning, more by Wilson than by all others.

If personalities had been offensive to him, they would not have been

inserted, except in a limited degree. Lockhart, it is true, was far more

bitter, but his influence was less. He could never have been successful

in running counter to Wilson. Besides, though Wilson's nominal power

might have been greater in the control of the magazine in later years,

it was virtually but little, if at all, increased. The fact is, these

onslaughts were perfectly congenial to his nature at that time.

His young blood made him impetuous, passionate, and fond of

extremes,--perhaps unduly so. He was a warm lover, and a strong, though

not malignant, hater,--and consequently deliberately made himself the

fiercest of partisans. It was all pure fun with him, though it was death

to the victims. He dearly loved to have a cut at the Cockneys, and was

never happier than when running a tilt _à l'outrance_ with what seemed

to be a sham. Still, he felt no ill-will, and could see nothing wrong in

the matter. We are entirely disposed, even in reference to this period

of his life, to accept the honest estimate which he made of himself, as

"free from jealousy, spite, envy, and uncharitableness." When the fever

of his youth had been somewhat cooled by time, his feelings and opinions

naturally became more moderate, and his expression of them less violent.

In his early days, when his mother heard of his having written an

article for the "Edinburgh Review," she said, "John, if you turn Whig,

this house is no longer big enough for us both." But his Toryism

then was quite as good as hers. By-and-by, as party became less, and

friendship more, he entertained at his house the leading Whigs, and

admitted them to terms of intimacy. Even his daughter was allowed to

marry a Whig. And in 1852 the old man hobbled out to give his vote for

Macaulay the Whig, as representative in Parliament of the good town

of Edinburgh. Conceive of such a thing in 1820! All this was but the

gradual toning-down of a strong character by time and experience.

"Blackwood" naturally exhibited some of the results of the change.

Much allowance must be made for the altered spirit of the times. A

generation or two ago, there was everywhere far more of rancor and less

of decorum in the treatment of politics and criticism than would now be

tolerated. All the world permitted and expected strong partisanship,

bitter personality, and downright abuse. They would have called our

more sober reticence by the name of feebleness: their truculence we

stigmatize as slander and Billingsgate. Wilson was an extremist in

everything; yet he strained but a point or two beyond his fellows. When

the tide of party began gradually to subside, he fell with it. Mrs.

Gordon has given a very correct picture of the state of things in those

days:--

"It is impossible for us, at this time, to realize fully the state of

feeling that prevailed in the literature and politics of the years

between 1810 and 1830. We can hardly imagine why men who at heart

respected and liked each other should have found it necessary to hold no

communion, but, on the contrary, to wage bitter war, because the one

was an admirer of the Prince Regent and Lord Castlereagh, the other a

supporter of Queen Caroline and Mr. Brougham. We cannot conceive why a

poet should be stigmatized as a base and detestable character, merely

because he was a Cockney and a Radical; nor can we comprehend how

gentlemen, aggrieved by articles in newspapers and magazines, should

have thought it necessary to the vindication of their honor to horsewhip

or shoot the printers or editors of the publications. Yet in 1817 and

the following years such was the state of things in the capital of

Scotland.... You were either a Tory and a good man, or a Whig and a

rascal, and _vice versa_. If you were a Tory and wanted a place, it was

the duty of all good Tories to stand by you; if you were a Whig, your

chance was small; but its feebleness was all the more a reason why

you should be proclaimed a martyr, and all your opponents profligate

mercenaries." But parties changed, and men changed with them. It was

a Whig ministry which gave Wilson, in 1852, a pension of two hundred

pounds.

Mrs. Gordon has praised her father as "the beau-ideal of what a critic

should be, whose judgments will live as _parts_ of literature, and not

merely _talk_ about it." That these so-called judgments are worthy to

live, and will live, we fully believe; yet we could never think him a

model critic, or even a great one. Though not deficient in analytic

power, he wanted the judicial faculty. He could create, but he could not

weigh coolly and impartially what was created. His whole make forbade

it. He was impatient, passionate, reckless, furious in his likes and

dislikes. His fervid enthusiasm for one author dictated a splendid

tribute to a friend; while an irrational prejudice against another

called out a terrific diatribe against a foe. In either case, there

might be "thoughts that breathe and words that burn"; still, there was

but little of true criticism. The matchless papers on Spenser and Homer

represent one class, and the articles on Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt the

other. While the former exhibit the tender sympathy of a poet and the

enthusiasm of a scholar, the latter reveal the uncompromising partisan,

swinging the hangman's cord, and brandishing the scourge of scorpions.

Of the novelist's three kinds of criticism--"the slash, the tickle, and

the plaster"--he recognized and employed only the two extremes. Neither

in criticism nor in the conduct of life was Ovid's "_Medio tutissimus

ibis_" ever a rule for him. In the "Noctes" for June, 1823, some of his

characteristics are wittily set forth, with some spice of caricature, in

a mock defiance given to Francis Jeffrey, "King of Blue and Yellow,"

by the facetious Maginn, under his pseudonym of Morgan Odoherty:

--"Christopher, by the grace of Brass, Editor of Blackwood's and the

Methodist Magazines; Duke of Humbug, of Quiz, Puffery, Cutup, and

Slashandhackaway; Prince Paramount of the Gentlemen of the Press, Lord

of the Magaziners, and Regent of the Reviewers; Mallet of Whiggery, and

Castigator of Cockaigne; Count Palatine of the Periodicals; Marquis of

the Holy Poker; Baron of Balaam and Blarney; and Knight of the most

stinging Order of the Nettle."

In 1820 Wilson was elected Professor of Moral Philosophy in the

University of Edinburgh,--an office which he held for more than thirty

years. The rival candidate was his friend, Sir William Hamilton, a firm

Whig; and the canvass, which was purely a political one, was more fiery

than philosophic. Wilson's character was the grand object of attack and

defence, and round it all the hard fighting was done. Though it was pure

and blameless, it offered some points which an unscrupulous adversary

might readily misconstrue, with some show of plausibility. His free,

erratic life, his little imprudences, his unguarded expressions, and

the reckless "Chaldee MS.," might, with a little twisting, be turned to

handles of offence, and wrested to his disadvantage. But the fanatic

zeal of his opponents could not rest till their accusations had run

through nearly the whole gamut of immoralities. He was not only a

blasphemer towards God, but corrupt to wife and children. It seems

comical enough at this day that he was obliged to bolster up his cause

by sending round to his respectable acquaintances for certificates

of good moral character. When at last he triumphed by a greater than

two-thirds vote, an attempt was made to reconsider; but the new

Professor held his own, and the factious were drowned in hisses.

His personal relations to his pupils were singularly happy. A strange

charm went out from his presence at all times, which fascinated all, and

drew them to him. Their enthusiasm and love for him have been spoken of

as "something more to be thought of than the proudest literary fame."

"As he spoke, the bright blue eye looked with a strange gaze into

vacancy, sometimes darkening before a rush of indignant eloquence;

the tremulous upper lip curving with every wave of thought or hint of

passion; and the golden gray hair floating on the old man's mighty

shoulders,--if, indeed, that could be called age which seemed but the

immortality of a more majestic youth." In his lecture-room utterances,

there was an undue preponderance of rhetoric, declamation, and sentiment

over logic, analysis, and philosophy. Yet he once said of himself, that

he was "thoroughly logical and argumentative; not a rhetorician, as

fools aver." Whether this estimate was right or wrong in the main may be

a matter of question: we think it wrong. His genius, in our view, lay

rather in pictorial passion than in ratiocination. At all events, as

a teacher of philosophy, it appears to us that his conception of the

duties of his office, and his style of teaching, were far inferior to

those of his competitor and subsequent associate, Sir William Hamilton.

The one taught like a trumpet-tongued poet, and the other like an

encyclopaedic philosopher. The personal magnetism of the former led

captive the feelings, while the sober arguments of the latter laid siege

to the understanding. The great fact which impressed Wilson's students

was his overpowering oratory, and not his particular theory, or his

train of reasoning. One of them compares the nature of his eloquence

with that of the leading orators of his day, and thinks that in absolute

power over the hearers it was greater than that of any other.

The matter, too, as well as the manner of the lectures, receives

commendation at the hands of this enthusiastic disciple. He says,--"It

was something to have seen Professor Wilson,--this all confessed; but

it was something also, and more than is generally understood, to have

studied under him. Nothing now remains of the Professor's long series of

lectures save a brief fragment or two. Here and there some pupil may be

found, who has treasured up these Orphic sayings in his memory or his

note-book; but to the world at large these utterances will be always

unknown."

We have been considerably disappointed in Wilson's "Letters." We looked

for something racy, having the full flavor of the author's best spirits.

We found them plain matter-of-fact, not what we should term at all

characteristic. Perhaps it was more natural that they should be of

this sort. Letters are generally vent-holes for what does not escape

elsewhere. Literary men, who are at the same time men of action, seldom

write as good letters as do their more quiet brethren. And this is

because they have so many more ways open to them of sending out what

lies within. They are depleted of almost all that is purely distinctive

and personal, long before they sit down to pen an epistle to a friend.

The formula might be laid down,--Given any man, and the quality of his

correspondence will vary inversely as the quantity of his expression in

all other directions. If, Wilson being the same man, fortune had hemmed

him in, and contracted his sphere of action,--or if, as author, he had

devoted himself to works of solid learning, instead of to the airy pages

of "Blackwood,"--the sprightly humor and broad hilarity that were in

him would have bubbled out in these "Letters," and the "Noctes" and the

"Recreations" would have been a song unsung.

An anecdote of De Quincey, given by Wilson's biographer, is worth

repeating. He and Wilson were warm friends during many long years, and

innumerable were the sessions in which they met together to hold high

converse. One stormy night the philosophic dreamer made his appearance

at the residence of his friend the Professor, in Gloucester Place.

The war of the elements increased to such a pitch, that the guest was

induced to pass the night in his new quarters. Though the storm

soon subsided, not so with the "Opium-Eater." The visit, begun from

necessity, was continued from choice, until the revolving days had

nearly made up the full year. He bothered himself but little with the

family-arrangements, but dined in his own room, often turning night into

day. His repast always consisted of coffee, boiled rice and milk, and

mutton from the loin. Every day be sent for the cook, and solemnly gave

her his instructions. The poor creature was utterly overwhelmed by his

grave courtesy and his "awfu' sicht of words." Well she might be, for he

addressed her in such terms as these:--"Owing to dyspepsia affecting

my system, and the possibility of an additional disarrangement of the

stomach taking place, consequences incalculably distressing would arise,

so much so, indeed, as to increase nervous irritation, and prevent me

from attending to matters of overwhelming importance, if you do not

remember to cut the mutton in a diagonal, rather than a longitudinal

form."

The picture of the aged Christopher, sitting by his own fireside, and

surrounded by his grandchildren, is a charming one. He always loved to

be with and to play with children,--a trait which he had in common with

Agesilaus, Nelson, Burke, Napoleon, Wellington, and many others to

whom was given the spirit of authority. As he grew old, he became

passionately fond of the little men and women, and his affection was

reciprocated. It was rare sport, when grandpapa kept open doors, and

summoned the youthful company into his room. There were games, and

stories, and sweetmeats, and presents. Sometimes notable feasts were set

out, to which the little mouths did large justice, while the stalwart

host took the part of waiter, and decorously responded to every wish. Of

course, he played at fishing; for what would Christopher be without

a hook? When an infant, he fished with thread and pin: when age had

crippled him, the ruling passion still led him to limp into deep waters

on a crutch, and cast out as of yore. So he and the youngsters angled

for imaginary trouts, with imaginary rods, lines, and flies, out of

imaginary boats floating in imaginary lochs. And whether there were

silly nibbles or sturdy bites, all agreed that they had glorious sport.

"With sports like these were all their cares beguiled;

The sports of children satisfy the child."

And--the poet might have added--they often do much to satisfy the child

of larger growth. It was thus that the old man kept alive the embers of

his youth.

Charles Lamb once, considering whom of the world's vanished worthies he

would rather evoke, singled out Fulke Greville, and also--if our memory

is correct--Sir Thomas Browne. He thought, very sensibly, that any

reasonable human being, if permitted to summon spirits from the vasty

deep, would base his choice upon personal qualities, and not on mere

general reputation. There would be an elective affinity, a principle

of natural selection, (not Darwinian,) by which each would aim to draw

forth a spirit to his liking. One would not summon the author of such

and such a book, but this or that man. Milton wrote an admirable epic,

but he would be awful in society. Shakspeare was a splendid dramatist,

but one would hardly ask him for a boon-companion. Who could feel at

ease under that omniscient eye? But, if the Plutonian shore might, for a

few brief moments, render to our call its waiting shades, there are

not very many for whom our lips would sooner syllable the word of

resurrection than for Christopher North. Only to look upon him in his

prime would be worth much. To have a day with him on the moors, or an

ambrosial night, would be a possession forever.

Even now we can almost see him standing radiant before us, illuminated

and transfigured by the halo streaming round him. A huge man, towering

far above his fellows; with Herculean shoulders, deep chest, broad back,

sturdy neck, brawny arms, and massive fists; a being with vast muscle

and tense nerve; of choicest make, and finest tone and temper,--robust

and fine, bulky and sinewy, ponderous and agile, stalwart and elastic; a

hammer to give, and a rock to receive blows; with the light tread of

the deer, and the fell paw of the lion; crowned with a dome-like head,

firm-set, capacious, distinctive, cleanly cut, and covered with long,

flowing, yellow hair; a forehead broad, high, and rounded, strongly and

equally marked by perception and imagination, wit and fancy; light blue

eyes, capable of every expression, and varying with every mood, but

generally having a far, dim, dreamy look into vacancy,--the gaze of

the poet seeing visions; a firm, high, aquiline nose, indicating both

intellect and spirit; flexile lips, bending to every breath of passion;

a voice of singular compass and pliancy, responding justly to all his

wayward humors and all his noble thoughts, now tremulous with

tender passion, now rough with a partisan's fury; a man of strange

contradictions and inconsistencies every way; a hand of iron with

a glove of silk; a tiger's claw sheathed in velvet; one who fought

lovingly, and loved fiercely; champion of the arena, passionate poet,

chastiser of brutes, caresser of children, friend of brawlers, lover of

beauty; a pugilistic Professor of Moral Philosophy, who, in a thoroughly

professional way, gayly put up his hands and scientifically floored his

man in open day, at a public fair;[A] sometimes of the oak, sometimes of

the willow; now bearing grief without a murmur, now howling in his pain

like the old gods and heroes, making all Nature resonant with his cries;

knowing nothing of envy save from the reports of others, yet never

content to be outdone even in veriest trifles; a tropical heart and a

cool brain; full of strong prejudices and fine charities, generous and

exacting, heedless and sympathetic, quick to forgive, slow to resent,

firm in love, transient in hate; to-day scaling the heavens with

frantic zeal, to-morrow relaxing in long torpor; fond of long, solitary

journeys, and given to conviviality; tender eyes that a word or a

thought would fill, and hard lips that would never say die; a child of

Nature thrilled with ecstasy by storm and by sunshine, and a cultured

scholar hungering for new banquets; dreamer, doer, poet, philosopher,

simple child, wisest patriarch; a true cosmopolitan, having largest

aptitudes,--a tree whose roots sucked up juices from all the land, whose

liberal fruits were showered all around; having a key to unlock all

hearts, and a treasure for each; hospitable friend, husband-lover,

doting father; a boisterous wit, fantastic humorist, master of pathos,

practical joker, sincere mourner; always an extremist, yielding to

various excess; an April day, all smiles and tears; January and May met

together; a many-sided fanatic; a universal enthusiast; a large-hearted

sectarian; a hot-headed judge; a strong sketch full of color, with

neutral tints nowhere, but fall of fiery lights and deep glooms;

buoyant, irrepressible, fuming, rampant, with something of divine

passion and electric fire; gentle, earnest, true; a wayward prodigal,

loosely scattering abroad where he should bring together; great in

things indifferent, and indifferent in many great ones; a man who would

have been far greater, if he had been much less,--if he had been less

catholic and more specific; immeasurably greater in his own personality

than in any or all of his deeds either actual or possible;--such was

the man Christopher North, a Hercules-Apollo, strong and immortally

beautiful,--a man whom, with all his foibles, negligences, and

ignorances, we stop to admire, and stay to love.

[Footnote A: One who met him many years ago in Edinburgh, at the

conclusion of a lecture, tells us, as we write these closing sentences,

of his splendid figure, as he saw him twirl an Irish shillalah and show

off its wonderful properties as an instrument of fun at a fair.]

"CHOOSE YOU THIS DAY WHOM YE WILL SERVE."

Yes, tyrants, you hate us, and fear while you hate

The self-ruling, chain-breaking, throne-shaking State!

The night-birds dread morning,--your instinct is true,--

The day-star of Freedom brings midnight for you!

Why plead with the deaf for the cause of mankind?

The owl hoots at noon that the eagle is blind!

"We ask not your reasons,--'t were wasting our time,--

Our life is a menace, our welfare a crime!

"We have battles to fight, we have foes to subdue,--

Time waits not for us, and we wait not for you!

The mower mows on, though the adder may writhe

And the copper-head coil round the blade of his scythe!

"No sides in this quarrel," your statesmen may urge,

Of school-house and wages with slave-pen and scourge!--

No sides in the quarrel! proclaim it as well

To the angels that fight with the legions of hell!

They kneel in God's temple, the North and the South,

With blood on each weapon and prayers in each mouth.

Whose cry shall be answered? Ye Heavens, attend

The lords of the lash as their voices ascend!

"O Lord, we are shaped in the image of Thee,--

Smite down the base millions that claim to be free,

And lend Thy strong arm to the soft-handed race

Who eat _not_ their bread in the sweat of their face!"

So pleads the proud planter. What echoes are these?

The bay of his bloodhound is borne on the breeze,

And, lost in the shriek of his victim's despair,

His voice dies unheard.--Hear the Puritan's prayer!

"O Lord, that didst smother mankind in Thy flood,

The sun is as sackcloth, the moon is as blood,

The stars fall to earth as untimely are cast

The figs from the fig-tree that shakes in the blast!

"All nations, all tribes in whose nostrils is breath,

Stand gazing at Sin as she travails with Death!

Lord, strangle the monster that struggles to birth,

Or mock us no more with Thy 'Kingdom on Earth'!

"If Ammon and Moab must reign in the land

Thou gavest Thine Israel, fresh from Thy hand,

Call Baäl and Ashtaroth out of their graves

To be the new gods for the empire of slaves!"

Whose God will ye serve, O ye rulers of men?

Will ye build you new shrines in the slave-breeder's den?

Or bow with the children of light, as they call

On the Judge of the Earth and the Father of All?

Choose wisely, choose quickly, for time moves apace,--

Each day is an age in the life of our race!

Lord, lead them in love, ere they hasten in fear

From the fast-rising flood that shall girdle the sphere!

* * * * *

THE HORRORS OF SAN DOMINGO.[A]

[Footnote A: See Numbers LVI., LVIII., and LIX. of this magazine.]

CHAPTER V.

INTRODUCTION OF SLAVERY--THE SLAVE-TRADE--AFRICAN TRIBES--THE CODE

NOIR--THE MULATTOES.

It will be necessary for the present to omit the story of the settlement

and growth of the French Colony, and of the pernicious commercial

restrictions which swelled the unhappy heritage of the island, in order

that we may reach, in this and a succeeding article, the great points

of interest connected with the Negro, his relation to the Colony and

complicity with its final overthrow.

The next task essential to our plan is to trace the entrance of Negro

Slavery into the French part of the island, to describe the victims, and

the legislation which their case inspired.

The first French Company which undertook a regular trade with the west

coast of Africa was an association of merchants of Dieppe, without

authority or privileges. They settled a little island in the Senegal,

which was called St. Louis. This property soon passed into the hands of

a more formal association of Rouen merchants, who carried on the trade

till 1664, the date of the establishment of the West-India Company, to

which they were obliged to sell their privileges for one hundred and

fifty thousand livres. This great Company managed its African business

so badly, that it was withdrawn from their hands in 1673, and made over

as a special interest to a Senegal Company. The trade, in palm-oil,

ivory, etc., was principally with France, and negro slaves for the

colonies do not yet appear in numbers to attract attention.[B] But in

1679 this Company engaged with the Crown to deliver yearly, for a term

of eight years, two thousand negroes, to be distributed among the French

Antilles. This displaced a previous engagement, made in 1675, for the

delivery of eight hundred negroes. The Company had also to furnish as

many negroes for the galleys at Marseilles as His Majesty should find

convenient. And the Crown offered a bounty of thirteen livres per head

for every negro, to be paid in "pieces of India."

[Footnote B: Du Tertre, the missionary historian of the Antilles,

proudly says, previously to this date, that the opinion of France in

favor of personal liberty still shielded a French deck from the traffic:

"Selon les lois de la France, qui abhorre la servitude sur toutes les

nations du monde, et ou tous les esclaves recouvrent heureusement la

liberté perdue, sitost qu'ils y abordent, et qu'ils en touchent la

terre."]

This is a famous phrase in the early annals of the slave-trade.

Reckoning by "pieces" was customary in the transaction of business upon

the coast of Africa. Merchandise, provisions, and presents to the native

princes had their value thus expressed, as well as slaves. If the negro

merchant asked ten pieces for a slave, the European trader offered

his wares divided into ten portions, each portion being regarded as a

"piece," without counting the parts which made it up. Thus, ten coarse

blankets made one piece, a musket one piece, a keg of powder weighing

ten pounds was one, a piece of East-India blue calico four pieces, ten

copper kettles one piece, one piece of chintz two pieces, which made

the ten for which the slave was exchangeable: and at length he became

commercially known as a "piece of India." The bounty of thirteen livres

was computed in France upon the wholesale value of the trinkets and

notions which were used in trade with Africa.

The traffic by pieces is as old as the age of Herodotus;[C] it was

originally a dumb show of goods between two trading parties ignorant of

each other's language, but at length it represented a transaction which

the parties should have been ashamed to mention.

[Footnote C: _Melpomene_, § 196.]

Although this second Senegal Company was protected by the rigid

exclusion, under pain of fine and confiscation, of all other Frenchmen

from the trade, it soon fell into debt and parted with its privilege to

a third Company, and this in turn was restricted by the formation of a

Guinea Company, so that it soon sold out to a fourth Senegal Company,

which passed in 1709 into the hands of Rouen merchants who started a

fifth; and this too was merged in the West-India Company which

was formed in 1718. So little did the agriculture of the islands,

overstocked with _engagés_, justify as yet the slave-traders in the

losses and expenses which they incurred.

The Guinea Company was bound to import only one thousand yearly into

all the French Antilles; but it did not flourish until it became an

_Asiento_ Company, when, during the War of Succession, a Bourbon mounted

the throne of Spain. It was called _Asiento_ because the Spanish

Government _let_, or farmed by _treaty_, the privilege of supplying its

colonies with slaves. The two principal articles of this contract, which

was to expire in 1712, related to the number of negroes and the rent of

the privilege. If the war continued, the French Company was bound to

furnish Spain with thirty-eight thousand negroes during the ten years

of the contract, but in case of peace, with forty-eight thousand. Each

negro that the Company could procure was let to it for 33-1/3 piastres,

in pieces of India. In consequence of this treaty, the ports of Chili

and Peru, and those in the South Sea, from which all other nations

were excluded, stood open to the French, who carried into them vast

quantities of merchandise besides the slaves, and brought home great

sums in coin and bars. The raw gold and silver alone which they imported

for the year 1709 was reckoned at thirty millions of livres.

But at the Peace of Utrecht, Louis XIV., exhausted by an unprofitable

war, relinquished his _asiento_ to the English, who were eager enough

to take it. It was for this advantage that Marlborough had been really

fighting; at least, it was the only one of consequence that Blenheim and

Malplaquet secured to his country.

The reign of Louis XV. commenced in 1715. By letters-patent which he

issued on the 16th of January, 1716, he granted permission to all the

merchants in his kingdom to engage in the African trade, provided

their ships were fitted out only in the five ports of Rouen, Rochelle,

Bordeaux, Nantes, and St. Malo; nine articles were specially framed

to encourage the trade in slaves, as by the Peace of Utrecht all the

South-Sea ports were closed to the French, and only their own colonies

remained. France no longer made great sums of money by the trade in

slaves, but her colonies began to thrive and demand a new species of

labor. The poor white emigrants were exhausted and demoralized by an

apprenticeship which had all the features of slavery, and by a climate

which will not readily permit a white man to become naturalized even

when he is free.

It is the opinion of some French anti-slavery writers that the _engagés_

might have tilled the soil of Hayti to this day, if they had labored for

themselves alone. This is doubtful; the white man can work in almost

every region of the Southern States, but he cannot raise cotton and

sugar upon those scorching plains. It is not essential for the support

of an anti-slavery argument to suppose that he can. Nor is it of any

consequence, so far as the question of free-labor is concerned, either

to affirm or to deny that the white man can raise cotton in Georgia or

sugar in Louisiana. The blacks themselves, bred to the soil and wonted

to its products, will organize free-labor there, and not a white man

need stir his pen or his hoe to solve the problem.

At first it seems as if the letters-patent of Louis XV. were inspired by

some new doctrine of free-trade. And he did cherish the conviction that

in the matter of the slave-trade it was preferable to a monopoly; but

his motive sprang from the powerful competition of England and Holland,

which the Guinea Company faced profitably only while the War of

Succession secured to it the _asiento_. The convention of merchants

which Louis XIV. called in Paris, during the year 1701, blamed

monopolies in the address which it drew up, and declared freedom of

trade to be more beneficial to the State; but this was partly because

the Guinea Company arbitrarily fixed the price of slaves too high, and

carried too few to the colonies.

So a free-trade in negroes became at last a national necessity. Various

companies, however, continued to hold or to procure trading privileges,

as the merchants were not restrained from engaging in commerce in such

ways as they preferred. The Cape-Verde, the South-Sea, the Mississippi

or Louisiana, and the San-Domingo Companies tried their fortunes still.

But they were all displaced, and free-trade itself was swallowed up, by

the union of all the French Antilles under the great West-India Company

of 1716. This was hardly done before the Government discovered that the

supply of negroes was again diminishing, partly because so extensive a

company could not undertake the peculiar risks and expenses of a traffic

in slaves. So in the matter of negroes alone trade was once more

declared free in 1741, burdened only with a certain tax upon every slave

imported.

At this time the cultivation of sugar alone in the principal French

islands consumed all the slaves who could be procured. The cry for

laborers was loud and exacting, for the French now made as much sugar

as the English, and were naturally desirous that more negroes should

surrender the sweets of liberty to increase its manufacture. In less

than forty years the average annual export of French sugar had reached

80,000 hogsheads. In 1742 it was 122,541 hogsheads, each of 1200 pounds.

The English islands brought into the market for the same year only

65,950 hogsheads, a decrease which the planters attributed to the

freedom enjoyed by the French of carrying their crops directly to

Spanish consumers without taking them first to France. But whatever may

have been the reason, the French were determined to hold and develop

the commercial advantage which this single product gained for them. The

English might import as many slaves and lay fresh acres open to the

culture, but the French sugar was discovered to be of a superior

quality; that of San Domingo, in particular, was the best in the world.

The French planter took his slaves on credit, and sought to discharge

his debt with the crops which they raised. This increased the

consumption of negroes, and he was constantly in debt for fresh ones.

To stimulate the production of sugar, the Government lifted half the

entry-tax from each negro who was destined for that culture.

A table which follows shortly will present the exports for 1775 of the

six chief products of San Domingo, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Cayenne.

But we must say something first about the value of the _livre_.

In the Merovingian times, the right of coining money belonged to many

churches and abbeys,--among others, to St. Martin de Tours. There were

seigniorial and episcopal coins in France till the reign of Philip

Augustus, who endeavored to reduce all the coin in his kingdom to a

uniform type. But he was obliged still to respect the money of Tours,

although he had acquired the old right of coinage that belonged to it.

So that there was a livre of Paris and a livre of Tours, called _livre

tournois_: the latter being worth five deniers less than the livre of

Paris. The tendency of the Crown to absorb all the local moneys of

France was not completely successful till the reign of Louis XIV., who

abolished the Paris livre and made the livre tournois the money of

account. The earliest livre was that of Charlemagne, the silver value of

which is representable by eighty cents. It steadily depreciated, till

it was worth in the reign of Louis XIV-about sixty cents, from which it

fell rapidly to the epoch of the Revolution, when its value was only

nineteen cents, and the franc took its place.

It is plain from this, that, when livres are spoken of during a period

of a hundred years, their precise equivalent in English or American

money cannot be stated,--still less their market-relations to all

the necessaries of life. The reader can therefore procure from the

statistics of these periods only an approximative idea of the values of

crops and the wealth created by their passing into trade.

A great deal of the current specie of the island consisted of Spanish

and Portuguese coin, introduced by illegal trade. A Spanish _piastre

gourde_ in 1776 was rated at 7-1/2 livres, and sometimes was worth 8-1/4

livres. A _piastre gourde_ was a dollar. If we represent this dollar

by one hundred cents, we can approach the value of the French livre,

because the _gourde_ passed in France for only 5-1/4 livres; that is,

a livre had already fallen to the value of the present franc, or about

nineteen cents.

The difference of value between Paris and the colony was the cause of

great embarrassment. Projects for establishing an invariable money were

often discussed, but never attempted. All foreign specie ought to have

become merchandise in the colony, and to have passed according to its

title and weight. Exchange of France with San Domingo was at 66-2/3:

that is, 66 livres, 13 sols, 4 deniers tournois were worth a hundred

livres in the Antilles. Deduct one-third from any sum to find the sum in

livres tournois.

Pounds. Livres.

Sugar, {To France, 166,353,834 for 61,849,381

{Abroad, 104,099,866 " 38,703,720

Coffee, {To France, 61,991,699 " 29,421,039

{Abroad, 50,058,246 " 23,757,464

Indigo, {To France, 2,067,498 " 17,573,733

{Abroad, 1,130,638 " 9,610,423

Cacao, {To France, 1,562,027 " 1,093,419

{Abroad, 794,275 " 555,992

Roucou,[D] {To France, 352,216 " 220,369

{Abroad, 153,178 " 95,838

Cotton, {To France, 3,407,157 " 11,017,892

{Abroad, 102,011 " 255,027

[Footnote D: This was the scarlet dye of the Caribs, which they procured

from the red pulpy covering of the seeds of the _Bixa orellana_, by

simply rubbing their bodies with them. The seeds, when macerated and

fermented, yielded a paste, which was imported in rolls under the name

of _Orléan_, and was used in dyeing. It was also put into chocolate

to deepen its color and lend an astringency which was thought to be

wholesome. Tonic pills were made of it. The fibres of the bark are

stronger than those of hemp. The name _Roucou_ is from the Carib

_Urucu_. In commerce the dye is also known as Annotto.]

This table, with its alluring figures, that seem to glean gratefully

after the steps of labor, is the negro's manifesto of the French

slave-trade. The surprising totals betray the sudden development of that

iniquity under the stimulus of national ambition. The slave expresses

his misery in the ciphers of luxury. The single article of sugar, which

lent a new nourishment to the daily food of every country, sweetened

the child's pap, the invalid's posset, and the drinks of rich and poor,

yielded its property to medicine, made the nauseous palatable, grew

white and frosted in curious confections, and by simply coming into

use stimulated the trades and inventions of a world, was the slave's

insinuation of the bitterness of his condition. Out of the eaten came

forth meat, and out of the bitter sweetness.

In 1701, Western San Domingo had 19,000 negroes: in 1777, a moderate

estimate gives 300,000, not including 50,000 children under fourteen

years of age,--and in the other French colonial possessions 500,000. In

the year 1785, sixty-five slavers brought to San Domingo 21,662 negroes,

who were sold for 43,236,216 livres; and 32,990 were landed in the

smaller French islands. In 1786, the value of the negroes imported was

estimated at 65,891,395 livres, and the average price of a negro at that

time was 1997 livres.

But we must recollect that these figures represent only living negroes.

A yearly percentage of dead must be added, to complete the number taken

from the coast of Africa. The estimate was five per cent, to cover the

unavoidable losses incurred in a rapid and healthy passage; but such

passages were a small proportion of the whole number annually made, and

the mortality was irregular. It was sometimes frightful; a long calm

was one long agony: asphyxia, bloody flux, delirium and suicide,

and epidemics swept between the narrow decks, as fatally, but more

mercifully than the kidnappers who tore these people from their native

fields. The shark was their sexton, and the gleam of his white belly

piloted the slaver in his regular track across the Atlantic. What need

to revive the accounts of the horrors of the middle passage? We know

from John Newton and other Englishmen what a current of misery swept

in the Liverpool slavers into the western seas. The story of French

slave-trading is the same. I can find but one difference in favor of the

French slaver, that he took the shackles from his cargo after it had

been a day or two at sea. The lust for procuring the maximum of victims,

who must be delivered in a minimum of time and at the least expense,

could not dally with schemes to temper their suffering, or to make

avarice obedient to common sense. It was a transaction incapable of

being tempered. One might as well expect to ameliorate the act of

murder. Nay, swift murder would have been affectionate, compared with

this robbery of life.

Nor is the consumption of negroes by the sea-voyage the only item

suggested by the annual number actually landed. We should have to

include all the people maimed and killed in the predatory excursions

of native chiefs or Christian kidnappers to procure their cargoes. A

village was not always surprised without resistance. The most barbarous

tribes would defend their liberty. We can never know the numbers slain

in wars which were deliberately undertaken to stock the holds of

slavers.

Nor shall we ever know how many victims dropped out of the ruthless

caravan, exhausted by thirst and forced marches, on the routes sometimes

of three hundred leagues from the interior to the sea. They were usually

divided into files containing each thirty or forty slaves, who were

fastened together by poles of heavy wood, nine feet long, which

terminated in a padlocked fork around the neck. When the caravan made a

halt, one end of the pole was unfastened and dropped upon the ground.

When it dropped, the slave was anchored; and at night his arm was tied

to the end of the pole which he carried, so that a whole file was

hobbled during sleep. If any one became too enfeebled to preserve his

place, the brutal keepers transferred him to the swifter voracity of the

hyena, who scented the wake of the caravan across the waste to the sea's

margin, where the shark took up the trail.

The census of the slaves in San Domingo was annually taken upon the

capitation-tax which each planter had to pay; thus the children, and

negroes above forty-five years of age, escaped counting. But in 1789,

Schoelcher says that the census declared five hundred thousand slaves;

that is, in twelve years the increase had been two hundred thousand.

How many negroes deported from Africa do these figures represent! what

number who died soon after landing, too feeble and diseased to become

acclimated!

Here is the prospectus of an expedition to the coast of Guinea in 1782

for the purpose of landing seven hundred slaves in the Antilles. They

were shipped in two vessels, one of six hundred tons, the other a small

corvette.

Outfit of large vessel, 150,000 livres

" " corvette, 50,000 "

Purchase of 700 negroes at 300 livres per head, 210,000 "

Insurance upon the passage at 15 per cent., 61,500 "

" " " premiums at 15 per cent., 9,225 "

---------

Total cost of the passage, 480,725 "

The passage was a very prosperous one: only 35

negroes spoiled, or 5 per cent, of the whole

number. The remaining 665 were sold in San

Domingo at an average price of 2,000 livres,

making 1,330,000 "

Deduct commissions of ships' officers and

correspondents in West Indies, at 11-1/2 per cent 152,950 "

---------

1,177,050 "

Deduct expenses in West Indies, 17,050 "

---------

1,160,000 "

Deduct exchange, freight, and insurance upon

return passage of the vessels, 20 per cent., 232,000 "

---------

928,000 "

Deduct crews' wages for 10 months, reckoning the

length of the voyage at 13 months, 55,000 "

---------

873,000 "

Add value of returned vessels, 90,000 "

---------

963,000 "

Deduct original cost of the whole, 480,725 "

---------

The profit remains, 100 per cent., 482,275 "

Two hundred and seventy-four slavers entered the ports of San Domingo,

from 1767 to 1774, bringing 79,000 negroes. One-third of these perished

from various causes, including the cold of the mountains and the

unhealthiness of the coffee-plantations, so that only 52,667 remained.

These could not naturally increase, for the mortality was nearly double

the number of births, and the negroes had few children during the first

years after their arrival. Only one birth was reckoned to thirty slaves.

There was always a great preponderance of males, because they could bear

the miseries of the passage better than the women, and were worth more

upon landing. Include also the effects of forced labor, which reduced

the average duration of a slave's life to fifteen years, and carried

off yearly one-fifteenth of the whole number, and the reason for the

slaver's profits and for his unscrupulous activity become clear.

Out of the sugar, thus clarified with blood, the glittering frosted-work

of colonial splendor rose. A few great planters debauched the

housekeeping of the whole island. Beneath were debts, distrust,

shiftlessness, the rapacity of imported officials, the discontent

of resident planters with the customs of the mother-country, the

indifference of absentees, the cruel rage for making the most and the

best sugar in the world, regardless of the costly lives which the mills

caught and crushed out with the canes. Truly, it was sweet as honey in

the mouth, and suddenly became bitter as wormwood in the belly.

Let us glance at the people who were thus violently torn from the

climate, habits, diet, and customs which created their natural and

congenial soil, from their mother-tongues, their native loves and

hatreds, from the insignificant, half-barbarous life, which certainly

poisoned not the life-blood of a single Christian, though it sweetened

not his tea. What bitterness has crept into the great heart of Mr.

Carlyle, which beats to shatter the affectations and hypocrisies of

a generation, and to summon a civilized world to the worship of

righteousness and truth! Is this a Guinea trader or a prophet who is

angry when Quashee prefers his pumpkins and millet, reared without the

hot guano of the lash, and who will not accept the reduction of a bale

of cotton or a tierce of sugar, though Church and State be disinfected

of slavery?[E] It is a drop of planter's gall which the sham-hater

shakes testily from his corroded pen. How far the effluvia of the

slave-ship will be wafted, into what strange latitudes of temperance

and sturdy independence, even to the privacy of solemn and high-minded

thought! A nation can pass through epochs of the black-death, and

recover and improve its average health; but does a people ever

completely rally from this blackest death of all?

[Footnote E: _Latter-Day Pamphlets_, No. I. pp. 32, 34; No. II. pp. 23,

25, 47; No. III. p. 3. "And you, Quashee, my pumpkin, idle Quashee,

I say you must get the Devil sent away from your elbow, my poor dark

friend!" We say amen to that, with the reserved privilege of designating

the Devil. "Ware that Colonial Sand-bank! Starboard now, the Nigger

Question!" Starboard it is!]

The Guinea trader brought to San Domingo in the course of eighty years

representatives of almost every tribe upon the west coast of Africa and

of its interior for hundreds of miles. Many who were thus brought were

known only by the names of their obscure neighborhoods; they mingled

their shade of color and of savage custom with the blood of a new Creole

nation of slaves. With these unwilling emigrants the vast areas of

Africa ran together into the narrow plains at the end of a small island;

affinity and difference were alike obedient to the whip of the overseer,

whose law was profit, and whose method cruelty, in making this strange

people grow.

When a great continent has been thus ransacked to stock a little farm,

the qualities which meet are so various, and present such lively

contrasts, that the term _African_ loses all its application. From the

Mandingo, the Foulah, the Jolof, through the Felatahs, the Eboes, the

Mokos, the Feloups, the Coromantines, the Bissagos, all the sullen and

degraded tribes of the marshy districts and islands of the Slave Coast,

and inland to the Shangallas, who border upon Southwestern Abyssinia,

the characters are as distinct as the profiles or the colors. The

physical qualities of all these people, their capacity for labor, their

religious tendencies and inventive skill, their temperaments and diets,

might be constructed into a sliding scale, starting with a Mandingo,

or a Foulah such as Ira Aldridge, and running to earth at length in a

Papel.

The Mandingoes of the most cultivated type seldom found their way to the

West Indies. But if ever slave became noticeable for his temperate and

laborious habits, a certain enterprise and self-subsistence, a cleanly,

regular, and polished way, perhaps keeping his master's accounts, or

those of his own private ventures, in Arabic, and mindful of his future,

he was found to be a Mandingo. Their States are on the Senegal; Arabic

is not their language, but they are zealous Mohammedans, and have

schools in which the children learn the Koran. The men are merchants and

agriculturists; they control the trade over a great extent of country,

and the religion also, for the Koran is among the wares they carry, and

they impose at once the whole form of their social condition. These

Northern African nations have been subjected to Arab and Moorish

influence, and they make it plain that great movements have taken place

in regions which are generally supposed to be sunk in savage quiescence.

The Mandingoes, notwithstanding a shade of yellow in the complexion,

are still negroes, that is, they are an aboriginal people, improved by

contact with Islamism, and capable of self-development afterwards; but

the Moors never ruled them, nor mingled with their blood. Their features

are African, in the popular sense of that word, without one Semitic

trace. Awakened intelligence beams through frank and pleasing

countenances, and lifts, without effacing, the primitive type.

Undoubtedly, their ancestors sprang into being on sites where an

improved posterity reside. But what a history lies between the Fetichism

which is the mental form of African religious sentiment, and the worship

of one God without image or symbol!

In the administration of justice, some classes of their criminals are

sold into slavery, and occasionally a Mandingo would be kidnapped. But

there are many Mandingoes who are still pagans, and know nothing of

Arabic or commerce, yet who have the excellences of the dominant tribes:

these were found in the gangs of the slave-merchant.

So were the Jolofs, handsome, black as jet, with features more regular

than the Mandingoes, almost European, excepting the lips: a nonchalant

air, very warlike upon occasion, but not disposed to labor. They have

magistrates, and some forms for the administration of justice, but a

civilization less developed than the Mandingo, in consequence of early

contact with Christians. It is said that the slave-traders taught them

to lie and steal, and to sell each other, whenever they could not

supply a sufficient number of their neighbors, the simple and pastoral

Serreres.

The Foulahs live upon the elevated plateaus of Senegambia and around the

sources of the Rio Grande. The Mandingoes introduced the Koran among

them. French writers represent them as being capable of sustained

labor; they cultivate carefully the millet, wheat, cotton, tobacco, and

lentils, and have numerous herds. Their mutton is famous, and their oxen

are very fat. The Foulahs are mild and affable, full of _esprit_, fond

of hunting and music; they shun brandy, and like sweet drinks. It is not

difficult to govern them, as they unite good sense to quiet manners, and

have an instinct for propriety. Their horror of slavery is so great,

that, if one of them is condemned to be sold, all the neighbors club

together to pay his forfeit or purchase a ransom; so that few of them

were found in the slave-ships, unless seized in the fields, or carried

off from the villages by night.

They have mechanics who work in iron and silver, leather and wood; they

build good houses, and live in them cleanly and respectable. The Foulahs

show, quite as decidedly as the Mandingoes, that great passions and

interests have given to these parts of Africa a history and developed

stocks of men. When the Foulahs are compared with the wandering

Felatahs, from whom they came, who speak the same language and wear the

same external characters, it will be seen how Nature has yearned for her

children in these unknown regions, and set herself, for their sakes,

great stints of work, in that motherly ambition to bring them forward in

the world. Yes,--thought the Guinea trader,--these skilful Foulahs are

Nature's best gifts to man.

Their pure African origin is, however, still a contested point. Many

ethnologists are unwilling to attribute so much capacity to a native

negro tribe. D'Eichthal objects, that "a pretended negro people,

pastoral, nomadic, warlike, propagating a religious faith, to say

nothing of the difference in physical characteristics, offers an anomaly

which nothing can explain. It would force us to attribute to the black

race, whether for good or for evil, acts and traits that are foreign to

its nature. To cite only one striking example, let me recall that Job

Ben Salomon, the African, who in the last century was carried to America

and thence to England, and was admired by all who knew him for the

loftiness of his character, the energy of his religious fanaticism, and

the extent of his intelligence,--this Ben Salomon, who has been cited as

a model of that which the negro race could produce, did not belong to

that race; he was a Foulah."[F]

[Footnote F: _Mémoires de la Société Ethnologique_, Tom. I. Ptie 2, p.

147.]

D'Eichthal develops at great length his theory, that the Foulahs are

descended from some Eastern people of strong Malay characters, who found

their way to their present site through Madagascar, along the coast, to

Cordofan, Darfour, and Haoussa. They are bronzed, or copper-colored, or

like polished mahogany,--the red predominating over the black. Their

forms are tall and slim, with small hands and feet, thin curved noses,

long hair braided into several queues, and an erect profile. Certain

negro traits do not exist in them.

Burmeister, who saw Ira Aldridge, the Foulah actor, play in Macbeth,

Othello, and his other famous parts, saw nothing negro about him, except

the length of his arm, the shrillness of his voice in excitement, the

terrible animality of the murder-scenes, and his tendency to exaggerate.

"The bright-colored nails were very evident, and his whole physiognomy,

in spite of his beard, was completely negro-like."[G]

[Footnote G: _The Comparative Anatomy and Physiology of the African

Negro_, by Hermann Burmeister.]

But if Ira Aldridge's exaggerated style of acting points to an African

origin, would it not be better, if some of our distinguished actors, who

are presumptively white before the foot-lights, took out free-papers at

once? We have seen Macbeth and Othello so "created" by the Caucasian

models of the stage, that but one line of Shakspeare remained in our

memory, and narrowly escaped the lips,--"Out, hyperbolical fiend!"

It is not unlikely that the Felatah was mixed with Moorish or Kabylic

blood to make the Foulah. If so, it proves the important fact, that,

when the good qualities of the negro are crossed with a more advanced

race, the product will be marked with intelligence, mobility, spiritual

traits, and an organizing capacity. Felatah blood has mixed with white

blood in the Antilles; the Jolof and the Eboe have yielded primitive

affections and excellences to a new mulatto breed. This great question

of the civilizable qualities of a race cannot be decided by quoting

famous isolated cases belonging to pure breeds, but only by observing

and comparing the average quality of the pure or mixed.

When we approach the Slave Coast itself, strong contrasts in appearance

and culture are observable among the inhabitants; they are all negroes,

but in different social conditions, more or less liable to injury from

the presence of the slaver, and yielding different temperaments and

qualities to colonial life. The beautiful and fertile amphitheatre

called Whidah, in North latitude 6°, with Dahomey just behind it, is

populous with a superior race. Where did it come from? The area which

it occupies has only about fifty miles of coast and less than thirty of

interior; its people are as industrious and thrifty as any on the face

of the earth. They never raised sugar and indigo with enthusiasm, but at

home their activity would have interpreted to Mr. Carlyle a soul

above pumpkins. They cultivated every square foot of ground up to

the threshold of their dwellings; the sides of ditches, hedges, and

inclosures were planted with melons and vegetables, and the roads

between the villages shrank to foot-paths in the effort to save land for

planting. On the day when a crop was harvested, another was sown.

Their little State was divided into twenty-six provinces or counties,

ruled by hereditary lords. The King was simply the most important one

of these. Here were institutions which would have deserved the epithet

_patriarchal_, save for the absence of overseers and the auction-block.

The men worked in the field, the women spun at home. Two markets were

held every four days in two convenient places, which were frequented by

five or six thousand traders. Every article for sale had its appropriate

place, and the traffic was conducted without tumult or fraud. A judge

and four inspectors went up and down to hear and settle grievances.

The women had their stalls, at which they sold articles of their own

manufacture from cotton or wood, plates, wooden cups, red and blue

paper, salt, cardamom-seeds, palm-oil, and calabashes.

How did it happen that such a thrifty little kingdom learned the

shiftlessness of slave-trading? Early navigators discovered that they

had one passion, that of gaming. This was sedulously cultivated by the

French and Portuguese who had colonies at stake. A Whidah man, after

losing all his money and merchandise, would play for his wife and

children, and finally for himself. A slave-trader was always ready to

purchase him and his interesting family from the successful gamester,

who, in turn, often took passage in the same vessel. In this way Whidah

learned to procure slaves for itself, who could be gambled away more

conveniently: the markets exposed for sale monthly one thousand

human beings, taken from the inferior tribes of the coast. The whole

administration of justice of these superior tribes was overthrown by the

advent of the European, who taught them to punish theft, adultery, and

other crimes by putting up the criminal for sale.

The Whidah people were Fetich-worshippers; so were the inhabitants

of Benin. But the latter had the singularity of refusing to sell a

criminal, adjudged to slavery, to the foreign slave-traders, unless

it was a woman. They procured, however, a great many slaves from the

interior for the Portuguese and French. The Benin people dealt in magic

and the ordeal; they believed in apparitions, and filled up their cabins

with idols to such an extent as nearly to eject the family.

The slaves of the river Calabar and the Gaboon were drawn from very

inferior races, who lived in a state of mutual warfare for the purpose

of furnishing each other to the trader. They kidnapped men in the

interior, and their expeditions sometimes went so far that the exhausted

victims occasioned the slaver a loss of sixty per cent, upon his voyage.

The toughest of these people were the Eboes; the most degraded were the

Papels and Bissagos.

The Congo negro was more intelligent than these; he understood something

of agriculture and the keeping of cattle. He made Tombo wine and some

kinds of native cloth. The women worked in the fields with their

children slung to their backs. The Congo temperament near the coast was

mild and even, like the climate; but there dwelt in the mountains the

Auziko and N'teka, who were cannibals. The Congoes in Cuba had the

reputation of being stupid, sensual, and brutal; but these African names

have always been applied without much discrimination.

The slavers collected great varieties of negroes along the coasts of

Loango and Benguela; some of them were tall, well-made, and vigorous,

others were stunted and incapable. They were all pagans, accustomed to

Fetich- and serpent-worship, very superstitious, without manliness and

dignity, stupid and unimpressible.

The Benguela women learned the panel game from the Portuguese. This is

an ugly habit of enticing men to such a point of complicity, that an

indignant husband, and a close calculator, can appear suddenly and

denounce the victim. Many a slave was furnished in this way.--But

we restrain the pen from tracing the villanous and savage methods,

suggested by violence or fraud or lust, to keep those decks well stocked

over which the lilies of France drooped with immunity.

All these negroes differed much in their sensitiveness to the condition

of slavery. Many of them suffered silently, and soon disappeared, killed

by labor and homesickness. Others committed suicide, in the belief that

their spirits would return to the native scenes. It was not uncommon for

a whole family to attempt to reinhabit their old cabin in this way. The

planters attributed these expensive deeds of manumission to a depraved

taste or mania; but we do not know that they laid Greek under

contribution for a term, as Dr. Cartwright did, who applied the word

_drapetomania_ to the malady of the American fugitive. Many negroes

sought relief in a marooning life; but their number was not so great

as we might expect. After two or three days' experience, hunger and

exposure drove them back, if they were not caught before. The number of

permanent maroons did not reach a thousand.

But a few tribes were so turbulent and sullen that the planter avoided

buying them, unless his need of field-hands was very urgent. He was

obliged to be circumspect, however; for the traders knew how to jockey a

man with a sick, disabled, or impracticable negro. The Jews made a good

business of buying refuse negroes and furbishing them up for the market.

The French traders thought it merit to deceive a Jew; but the latter

feigned to be abjectly helpless, in order to enjoy this refitting branch

of the business.

The Coromantine negroes were especial objects of suspicion, on account

of their quarrelsome and incendiary temper. Such powerful and capable

men ought to have valued more highly the privileges of their position;

but they could never quite conquer their prejudices, and were

continually interpreting the excellent constitutional motto, _Vera pro

gratis_, into, _Liberty instead of sugar!_ An English physician of the

last century, James Grainger by name, wrote a poem in four books upon

the "Sugar-Cane," published in 1764. Perhaps it would be more correct to

say that he exhibited a dose; but the production yields the following

lines which show that the Coromantine of Jamaica was no better than his

brother of San Domingo:--

"Yet, if thine own, thy children's life, be dear,

Buy not a Cormantee, though healthy, young,

Of breed too generous for the servile field:

They, born to freedom in their native land,

Choose death before dishonorable bonds;

Or, fired with vengeance, at the midnight hour

Sudden they seize thine unsuspecting watch,

And thine own poniard bury in thy breast."

All these kinds of negroes, and many others whom it would be tedious to

mention, differing in intelligence and capability, were alike in the

vividness of their Fetich-worship and the feebleness of their spiritual

sentiments.[H] They brought over the local superstitions, the grotesque

or revolting habits, the twilight exaggerations of their great pagan

fatherland, into a practical paganism, which struck at their rights, and

violated their natural affections, with no more pretence of religious

than of temporal consolation, and only capable of substituting one

Fetich for another. The delighted negroes went to mass as to their

favorite _Calenda_; the tawdry garments and detestable drone of the

priest, whose only Catholicism was his indiscriminate viciousness,

appeared to them a superior sorcery; the Host was a great _Gree-gree;_

the muttered liturgy was a palaver with the spirits; music, incense, and

gilding charmed them for a while away from the barbarous ritual of their

midnight serpent-worship. The priests were white men, for the

negroes thought that black baptism would not stick; but they were

fortune-hunters, like the rest of the colony, mere agents of the

official will, and seekers of their pleasures in the huts of the

negro-quarter.[I] The curates declared that the innate stupidity of the

African baffled all their efforts to instil a truth or rectify an error.

The secret practice of serpent-worship was punishable, as the stolen

gatherings for dancing were, because it unfitted them for the next day's

toil, and excited notions of vengeance in their minds. But the curates

declined the trouble of teaching them the difference in spiritual

association between the wafer in a box and the snake in a hamper. On the

whole, the negro loved to thump his sheepskin drum, and work himself

up to the frantic climax of a barbarous chant, better than to hear the

noises in a church. He admired the pomp, but was continually stealing

away to renew the shadowy recollection of some heathen rite. What

elevating influence could there be in the Colonial Church for these

children of Nature, who were annually reinforcing Church and Colony at a

frightful pace with heathenism? Twenty or thirty tribes of pagans were

imported at the rate of twenty thousand living heads per annum, turned

loose and mixed together, with a sense of original wrong and continual

cruelty rankling amid their crude and wild emotions, and prized

especially for their alleged deficiency of soul, and animal ability to

perform unwholesome labor. Slavery never wore so black a face. The

only refining element was the admixture of superior tribes, a piece of

good-fortune for the colony, which the planter endeavored as far as

possible to miss by distributing the fresh cargoes according to their

native characters. A fresh Eboe was put under the tutelage of a

naturalized Eboe, a Jolof with a Jolof, and so on: their depressed and

unhealthy condition upon landing, and their ignorance of the Creole

dialect, rendered this expedient.[J]

[Footnote H: Sometimes Fetichism furnished a legend which Catholicism,

in its best estate, would not despise. Here is one that belongs to

the Akwapim country, which lies north of Akkra, and is tributary to

Ashantee. "They say that Odomañkama created all things. He created the

earth, the trees, stones, and men. He showed men what they ought to eat,

and also said to them, 'Whenever anybody does anything that is lovely,

think about it, and do it also, only do not let your eye grow red' (that

is, inflamed, lustful). When He had finished the creation. He left men

and went to heaven; and when He went, the Fetiches came hither from the

mountains and the sea. Now, touching these Fetiches, as well as departed

spirits, they are not God, neither created by God, but He has only given

them permission, at their request, to come to men. For which reason no

Fetich ever receives permission to slay a man, except directly from the

Creator."--Petermann's _Mittheiltungen_, 1856, p. 466.]

[Footnote I: _Droit Public des Colonies Françoises, d'après les Lois

faites pour ces Pays_, Tom. I. p. 306.]

[Footnote J: On the other hand, an elaborate _Manuel des Habitans de

St. Domingue_ cautions the planters on this point: "Carefully avoid

abandoning the new negroes to the discretion of the old ones, who are

often very glad to play the part of hosts for the sake of such valets,

to whom they make over the rudest part of their day's work. This

produces disgust and repugnance in the new-comers, who cannot yet bear

to be ordered about, least of all to be maltreated by negroes like

themselves, while, on the contrary, they submit willingly and with

affection to the orders of a white." This Manual, which reads like a

treatise on muck or the breeding of cattle, proceeds to say, that, if

the planter would preserve his negroes' usefulness, he must be careful

to keep off the ticks.]

But these distinctions could not be preserved upon such a limited area

and amid these jostling tribes. People of a dozen latitudes swarmed in

the cabins of a single negro-quarter. Even the small planter could not

stock his habitation with a single kind of negro: the competition at

each trade-sale of slaves prevented it. So did a practice of selling

them by the scramble. This was to shut two or three hundred of them into

a large court-yard, where they were all marked at the same price, and

the gates thrown open to purchasers. A greedy crowd rushed in, with

yells and fighting, each man struggling to procure a quota, by striking

them with his fists, tying handkerchiefs or pieces of string to them,

fastening tags around their necks, regardless of tribe, family, or

condition. The negroes, not yet recovered from their melancholy voyage,

were amazed and panic-stricken at this horrible onslaught of avaricious

men; they frequently scaled the walls, and ran frantically up and down

the town.

As soon as the slaves were procured, by sale on shipboard, by auction,

or by scramble, they received the private marks of their owners. Each

planter had a silver plate, perforated with his letter, figure, or

cipher, which he used to designate his own slaves by branding. If two

planters happened to be using the same mark, the brand was placed upon

different spots of the body. The heated plate, with an interposing piece

of oiled or waxed paper, was touched lightly to the body; the flesh

swelled, and the form of the brand could never be obliterated. Many

slaves passed from one plantation to another, being sold and resold,

till their bodies were as thick with marks as an obelisk. How different

from the symbols of care in the furrowed face and stooping form of a

free laborer, where the history of a humble home, planted in marriage

and nursed by independent sorrow, is printed by the hand of God!

By this fusion of native races a Creole nation of slaves was slowly

formed and maintained. The old qualities were not lost, but new

qualities resulted from the new conditions. The _bozal_ negro was easily

to be distinguished from the Creole. _Bozal_ is from the Spanish,

meaning _muzzled_, that is, ignorant of the Creole language and not able

to talk.[K] Creole French was created by the negroes, who put into it

very few words of their native dialects, but something of the native

construction, and certain euphonic peculiarities. It is interesting to

trace their love of alliteration and a concord of sounds in this mongrel

French, which became a new colonial language. The bright and sparkling

French appears as if submitted to great heat and just on the point of

running together. There is a great family of African dialects in which

a principal sound, or the chief sound of a leading word, appears in

all the words of a sentence, from no grammatical reason at all, but to

satisfy a sweetish ear. It is like the charming gabble of children, who

love to follow the first key that the tongue strikes. Mr. Grout[L] and

other missionaries note examples of this: _Abantu bake bonke abakoluayo

ba hlala ba de ba be ba quedile_, is a sentence to illustrate this

native disposition. The alliteration is sometimes obscured by elisions

and contractions, but never quite disappears. Mr. Grout says: "So

strong is the influence of this inclination to concord produced by the

repetition of initials, that it controls the distinction of number, and

quite subordinates that of gender, and tends to mould the pronoun after

the likeness of the initial element of the noun to which it refers; as,

_Izintombi zake zi ya hamba_, 'The daughters of him they do walk.'"

These characteristics appear in the formation of the Creole French, in

connection with another childlike habit of the negro, who loves to put

himself in the objective case, and to say _me_ instead of _I_, as if he

knew that he had to be a chattel.

[Footnote K: In Cuba, the slave who had lived upon the island long

enough to learn the language was called _Ladino_, "versed in an idiom."]

[Footnote L: _American Oriental Society_, Vol. I. p. 423, _et seq._]

The article _un, une_, could not have been pronounced by a negro. It

became in his mouth _nion_. The personal pronouns _je, tu, il_, were

converted into _mo, to, ly_, and the possessive _mon, ton, son_ into

_à moue, à toue, à ly_, and were placed after the noun, which negro

dialects generally start their sentences with. Possessive pronouns had

the unmeaning syllable _quien_ before them, as, _Nous gagné quien à

nous_, for _Nous avons les nôtres_; and demonstrative pronouns were

changed in this way: _Mo voir z'animaux là yo_, for _J'ai vu ces

animaux_, and _Ci la yo qui té vivre,_ for _Ceux qui ont vécu._ A few

more examples will suffice to make other changes clear. A negro was

asked to lend his horse; he replied, _Mouchée_ (Monsieur), _mo pas gagné

choual, mais mo connais qui gagné ly; si ly pas gagné ly, ly faut mo

gagné ly, pour vous gagné_: "Massa, me no got horse, but me know who got

um; if him no got um, him get me um for you." _Quelquechose_ becomes

_quichou; zozo = oiseau; gourneé = combattre; gueté = voir; zombi =

revenant; bougé = demeurer; helé = appeler,_ etc.[M]

[Footnote M: Harvey's _Sketches of Haiti_, p. 292. See a vocabulary in

_Manuel des Habitans de St. Domingue,_ par L.J. Ducoeurjoly, Tom. II.

Here is a verse of a Creole song, written in imitation of the negro

dialect:--

Dipi mo perdi Lisette,

Mo pas souchié Calinda,[A]

Mo quitté bram-bram sonette,

Mo pas batte bamboula.[B]

Quand mo contré l'aut' negresse,

Mo pas gagné z'yeu pour ly;

Mo pas souchié travail piece,

Tou qui chose a moué mouri.

The French of which is as follows:--

Mes pas, loin de ma Lisette,

S'éloiguent du Calinda;

Et ma ceinture à sonnette

Languit sur mon bamboula.

Mon oeil de toute autre belle

N'aperçoit plus le souris;

Le travail en vain m'appelle,

Mes sens sont anéantis.

[Footnote A: A favorite dance.]

[Footnote B: A kind of tambourine or drum made of a keg stretched with

skins, and sometimes hung with bells.]]

The dialect thus formed by the aid of traits common to many negro tribes

was a solution into which their differences fell to become modified;

when the barriers of language were broken down, the common African

nature, with all its good and evil, appeared in a Creole form. The

forced labor, the caprice of masters, and the cruel supervision of the

overseers engendered petty vices of theft, concealment, and hypocrisy.

The slave became meaner than the native African in all respects; even

his passions lost their extravagant sincerity, but part of the manliness

went with it. Intelligence, ability, adroitness were exercised in

a languid way; rude and impetuous tribes became more docile and

manageable, but those who were already disposed to obedience did not

find either motive or influence to lift their natures into a higher

life. An average slave-character, not difficult to govern, but without

instinct to improve, filled the colony. A colonist would hardly suspect

the fiery Africa whose sun ripened the ancestors of his slaves, unless

he caught them by accident in the midst of their voluptuous _Calenda_,

or watched behind some tree the midnight orgy of magic and Fetichism. A

slave-climate gnawed at the bold edges of their characters and wore them

down, as the weather rusted out more rapidly than anywhere else all

the iron tools and implements of the colony. The gentler traits of the

African character, mirth and jollity, affectionateness, domestic love,

regard and even reverence for considerate masters, were the least

impaired; for these, with a powerful religiosity, are indigenous, like

the baobab and palm, and give a great accent to the name of Africa. What

other safeguard had a planter with his wife and children, who lived with

thirty slaves or more, up to six hundred, upon solitary plantations that

were seldom visited by the _maréchaussée,_ or rural police? The root of

such a domination was less in the white man's superiority than in the

docile ability of those who ought to have been his natural enemies.

"_Totidem esse hostes quot servos_" said Seneca; but he was thinking of

the Scythian and Germanic tribes. A North-American Indian, or a Carib,

though less pagan than a native African, could never become so subdued.

Marooning occurred every day, and cases of poisoning, perpetrated

generally by Ardra negroes, who were addicted to serpent-worship, were

not infrequent; but they poisoned a rival or an enemy of their own race

as often as a white man. The "Affiches Américaines," which was published

weekly at Port-au-Prince, had always a column or two describing fugitive

negroes; but local disturbances or insurrectionary attempts were very

rare: a half-dozen cannot be counted since the Jolofs of Diego Columbus

frightened Spaniards from the colony. If this be so in an island whose

slaves were continually reinforced by native Africans, bringing Paganism

to be confirmed by a corrupt Catholicism, where every influence was

wanton and debased, and the plantation-cruelties, as we shall shortly

see, outheroded everything that slave-holding annals can reveal, how

much less likely is it that we shall find the slave insurrectionary in

the United States, whence the slave-trade has been excluded for nearly

two generations, and where the African, modified by climate, and by

religious exercises of his own which are in harmony with his native

disposition and enjoin him not to be of a stout mind, waits prayerfully

till liberty shall be proclaimed! If the slaveholder ever lived in

dread, it was not so much from what he expected as from what he knew

that he deserved. But the African is more merciful than the conscience

of a slaveholder. Blessed are these meek ones: they shall yet inherit

earth in America!

France was always more humane than her colonies, for every rising sun

did not rekindle there the dreadful paradox that sugar and sweetness

were incompatible, and she could not taste the stinging lash as the

crystals melted on her tongue.[N] An ocean rolled between. She always

endeavored to protect the slave by legislation; but the Custom of Paris,

when it was gentle, was doubly distasteful to the men who knew how

impracticable it was. Louis XIII. would not admit that a single slave

lived in his dominions, till the priests convinced him that it was

possible through the slave-trade to baptize the Ethiopian again. Louis

XIV. issued the famous _Code Noir_ in 1685, when the colonists had

already begun to shoot a slave for a saucy gesture, and to hire

buccaneers to hunt marooning negroes at ten dollars per head.[O]

[Footnote N: There was a proverb as redoubtably popular as Solomon's

"Spare the rod"; it originated in Brazil, where the natives were easily

humiliated:--"_Regarder un sauvage de travers, c'est le battre; le

battre, c'es le tuer: battre un nègre, c'est le nourrir_": Looking hard

at a savage is beating him: beating is the death of him: but to beat a

negro is bread and meat to him.]

[Footnote O: A Commissioner's fee under the Fugitive-Slave Bill. History

will repeat herself to emphasize the natural and inalienable rights of

slave-catchers. In 1706 the planters organized a permanent force of

maroon-hunters, twelve men to each quarter of the island, who received

the annual stipend of three hundred livres. In addition to this, the

owners paid thirty livres for each slave caught in the canes or roads,

forty-five for each captured beyond the _mornes_, and sixty for those

who escaped to more distant places. The hunters might fire at the slave,

if he could not be otherwise stopped, and draw the same sums. In 1711

the maroons became so insolent that the planters held four regular

chases or _battues_ per annum.]

The _Code Noir_ was the basis of all the colonial legislation which

affected the condition of the slave, and it is important to notice its

principal articles. We have only room to present them reduced to their

essential substance.

Negroes must be instructed in the Catholic religion, and _bozals_ must

be baptized within eight days after landing. All overseers must be

Catholic. Sundays and _fête_ days are days of rest for the negro; no

sale of negroes or any other commodity can take place on those days.

Free men who have children by slaves, and masters who permit the

connection, are liable to a fine of two thousand pounds of sugar. If the

guilty person be a master, his slave and her children are confiscated

for the benefit of the hospital, and cannot be freed.

If a free man is not married to any white person during concubinage with

his slave, and shall marry said slave, she and her children shall become

enfranchised.

No consent of father and mother is essential for marriage between

slaves, but no master can constrain slaves to marry against their will.

If a slave has a free black or colored woman for his wife, the male

and female children shall follow the condition of the mother; and if a

slave-woman has a free husband, the children shall follow his condition.

The weekly ration for a slave of ten years old and upwards consists of

five Paris pints of manioc meal, or three cassava loaves, each weighing

two and a half pounds, with two pounds of salt beef, or three of fish,

or other things in proportion, but never any tafia[P] in the place of a

ration; and no master can avoid giving a slave his ration by offering

him a day for his own labor. Weaned children to the age of ten are

entitled to half the above ration. Each slave must also have two suits

of clothes yearly, or cloth in proportion.

[Footnote P: A coarse rum distilled from the sugar-cane.]

Slaves who are not properly nourished and clothed by their masters can

lodge a complaint against them. If it be well-founded, the masters can

be prosecuted without cost to the slave.

Slaves who are old, infirm, diseased, whether incurable or not, must be

supported. If they are abandoned by masters, they are to be sent to the

hospital, and the masters must pay six sols daily for their support.

A slave's testimony can be received as a statement to serve the courts

in procuring light elsewhere; but no judge can draw presumption,

conjecture, or proof therefrom.

The slave who strikes his master or mistress, or their children, so as

to draw blood, or in the face, may be punished even with death; and all

excesses or offences committed by slaves against free persons shall be

severely punished, even with death, if the case shall warrant.

Any free or enfranchised person who shall shelter a fugitive shall be

fined three hundred pounds of sugar for each day.

A slave who is condemned to death shall be valued before execution, and

the estimated price paid to the master, provided the latter has not made

a pretended complaint.

Masters may chain and whip their slaves, but not mutilate, torture, or

kill them.

If a master or overseer shall kill a slave, he shall be prosecuted; but

if he can convince the court of cause, he may be discharged without

pardon from the King.

Masters who are twenty years old can free their slaves at will or by

testamentary act, without being held to give a reason for it; and if

a slave is named by testament a general legatee, or an executor, or

guardian of children, he shall be considered enfranchised.

An enfranchised slave shall be regarded as free as any person born in

France, without letters of naturalization; he can enjoy the advantages

of natives everywhere, even if he was born in a foreign country.

An enfranchised slave must pay singular respect to his ancient master,

his widow, and children; an injury done to them will be punished more

severely than if done to others. But he is free, and quit of all

service, charge, and tenure that may be pretended by his former master,

either respecting his person or property and succession.

An enfranchised slave shall enjoy the same rights, privileges, and

immunities as if he had been born free. The King desires that he may

merit his acquired liberty, and that it may confer upon him, as well in

his person as estate, the same effects which the blessing of natural

liberty confers upon French subjects.

* * * * *

The last article, and all that related to enfranchisement, are notable

for their political effect upon the colony. The free mulattoes

interpreted the liberal clauses of the Code into an extension of the

rights of citizenship to them, as the natural inference from their

freed condition. The lust of masters and the defencelessness of the

slave-woman sowed thickly another retribution in the fated soil.

The custom of enfranchising children of mixed blood, and sometimes their

mothers, commenced in the earliest times of the French colonies, when

the labor of _engagés_ was more valuable than that of slaves, and the

latter were objects of buccaneering license as much as of profit. The

colonist could not bear to see his offspring inventoried as chattels. In

this matter the nations of the South of Europe appear to atone for

acts of passion by after-thoughts of humanity. The free descendants of

mulattoes who were enfranchised by French masters in Louisiana, and

who form a respectable and flourishing class in that State, now stand

beneath the American flag at the call of General Butler. But the

Anglo-American alone seems willing to originate a chattel and to

keep him so. His passion will descend as low for gratification as a

Frenchman's or a Spaniard's, but his heart will not afterwards mount as

high.

Acts of enfranchisement required at first the sanction of the

Government, until in 1682 the three sovereign courts of St. Christophe,

Martinique, and Guadeloupe offered the project of a law which favored

enfranchisements; it led to the articles upon that subject in the Edict

of 1685, quoted above, which sought at once to restrain the license of

masters and to afford them a legal way to be humane and just.[Q]

[Footnote Q: Other motives became influential as soon as the slaves

discovered their advantages. A master in want of money would offer

emancipation for a certain sum; the slave would employ every means, even

the most illicit, to raise the amount upon which his or her freedom

depended. A female slave would demand emancipation for herself or

for some relative as her price for yielding to a master; attractive

negresses wielded a great deal of power in this way. A great evil arose

from testamentary acts of enfranchisement, or equivalent promises; for

the slave in question would sometimes poison his master to hasten the

day of liberty. On the other hand, many masters of the nobler kind

emancipated their slaves as a reward for services: the rearing of

six living children, thirty years of field or domestic labor without

marooning, industry, economy, attachment, the discovery of a poisoning

scheme or of an _émeute_, saving the life of a white person with great

risk,--all these were occasional reasons for enfranchisement.]

In 1703 there were only one hundred and fifty freed persons in San

Domingo. In 1711 a colonial ordinance proscribed every enfranchisement

which did not have the approbation of the colonial government. The King

sanctioned this ordinance in 1713, and declared that all masters who

neglected the formality should lose their slaves by confiscation.

In 1736 the number of freed slaves, black and mulatto, was two thousand.

The Government, alarmed at the increase, imposed a sum upon the master

for each act of enfranchisement, in the hope to check his license. But

the master evaded this and every other salutary provision; the place and

climate, so distant from the Custom of Paris, where men dishonored only

complexions like their own, lent occasion and immunity. Colonial Nature

was more potent than paper restrictions. In 1750 there were four

thousand freed persons.

But the desire of enfranchising children was so great that the colonists

evaded all the regulations, which multiplied yearly, by taking their

slaves to France, where they became free as soon as their feet pressed

the soil. The only measure which the Government could devise to meet

this evasion was to forbid all men of color to contract marriages in

France.

In 1787 the free persons of color in San Domingo numbered 19,632. In

1790 their numbers were 25,000.

In 1681 the white inhabitants of San Domingo numbered four thousand; but

in 1790, notwithstanding a constant tide of emigration from Europe, they

numbered only thirty thousand.

The number of slaves at the same time was about four hundred thousand, a

number which represents the violent removal of several millions of black

men from Africa: some writers not anti-slavery reckon this tremendous

crime of the white man at ten millions!

What a climate, and what a system, in which only the mulatto thrives!

* * * * *

Thus far we have traced the causes and elements, of Nature, race, and

policy, the passions and peculiarities of many kinds of men, which

culminated at length, in no fair forms of humanity nor beneficent

institutions, but in the foremost sugar-plantation of the world, whose

cane-rows were planted and nourished by the first of crimes, whose juice

was expressed by over-hasty avarice and petulant ambition that could

not be satisfied unless the crime preserved features as colossal as the

passion of the hour.

We are now in a condition to perceive that the Horrors of San Domingo

were those of suicide. Bloody licentiousness lays violent hands upon

its life. Its weaknesses were full of fatal vigor, lust poisoned the

humanity which it inspired, the soil of the buccaneer could raise

nothing which was not exuberant with vengeance. Slave-Insurrection was a

mere accidental episode in the closing scenes of this bad and blundering

career.

* * * * *

A LONDON SUBURB.

One of our English summers looks, in the retrospect, as if it had been

patched with more frequent sunshine than the sky of England ordinarily

affords; but I believe that it may be only a moral effect,--a "light

that never was on sea nor land,"--caused by our having found a

particularly delightful abode in the neighborhood of London. In order to

enjoy it, however, I was compelled to solve the problem of living in

two places at once,--an impossibility which I so far accomplished as to

vanish, at frequent intervals, out of men's sight and knowledge on one

side of England, and take my place in a circle of familiar faces on the

other, so quietly that I seemed to have been there all along. It was the

easier to get accustomed to our new residence, because it was not

only rich in all the material properties of a home, but had also the

home-like atmosphere, the household element, which is of too intangible

a character to be let even with the most thoroughly furnished

lodging-house. A friend had given us his suburban residence, with all

its conveniences, elegancies, and snuggeries,--its drawing-rooms and

library, still warm and bright with the recollection of the genial

presences that we had known there,--its closets, chambers, kitchen, and

even its wine-cellar, if we could have availed ourselves of so dear and

delicate a trust,--its lawn and cozy garden-nooks, and whatever else

makes up the multitudinous idea of an English home,--he had transferred

it all to us, pilgrims and dusty wayfarers, that we might rest and take

our case during his summer's absence on the Continent. We had long been

dwelling in tents, as it were, and morally shivering by hearths which,

heap the bituminous coal upon them as we might, no blaze could render

cheerful. I remember, to this day, the dreary feeling with which I sat

by our first English fireside, and watched the chill and rainy twilight

of an autumn day darkening down upon the garden; while the portrait

of the preceding occupant of the house (evidently a most unamiable

personage in his lifetime) scowled inhospitably from above the

mantel-piece, as if indignant that an American should try to make

himself at home there. Possibly it may appease his sulky shade to know

that I quitted his abode as much a stranger as I entered it. But now, at

last, we were in a genuine British home, where refined and warm-hearted

people had just been living their daily life, and had left us a

summer's inheritance of slowly ripened days, such as a stranger's hasty

opportunities so seldom permit him to enjoy.

Within so trifling a distance of the central spot of all the world,

(which, as Americans have at present no centre of their own, we may

allow to be somewhere in the vicinity, we will say, of St. Paul's

Cathedral,) it might have seemed natural that I should be tossed about

by the turbulence of the vast London-whirlpool. But I had drifted into a

still eddy, where conflicting movements made a repose, and, wearied with

a good deal of uncongenial activity, I found the quiet of my temporary

haven more attractive than anything that the great town could offer. I

already knew London well; that is to say, I had long ago satisfied (so

far as it was capable of satisfaction) that mysterious yearning--the

magnetism of millions of hearts operating upon one--which impels every

man's individuality to mingle itself with the immensest mass of human

life within his scope. Day after day, at an earlier period, I had

trodden the thronged thoroughfares, the broad, lonely squares, the

lanes, alleys, and strange labyrinthine courts, the parks, the gardens

and inclosures of ancient studious societies, so retired and silent amid

the city-uproar, the markets, the foggy streets along the river-side,

the bridges,--I had sought all parts of the metropolis, in short, with

an unweariable and indiscriminating curiosity; until few of the native

inhabitants, I fancy, had turned so many of its corners as myself. These

aimless wanderings (in which my prime purpose and achievement were to

lose my way, and so to find it the more surely) had brought me, at one

time or another, to the sight and actual presence of almost all the

objects and renowned localities that I had read about, and which had

made London the dream-city of my youth. I had found it better than my

dream; for there is nothing else in life comparable (in that species of

enjoyment, I mean) to the thick, heavy, oppressive, sombre delight which

an American is sensible of, hardly knowing whether to call it a pleasure

or a pain, in the atmosphere of London. The result was, that I acquired

a home-feeling there, as nowhere else in the world,--though afterwards I

came to have a somewhat similar sentiment in regard to Rome; and as long

as either of those two great cities shall exist, the cities of the Past

and of the Present, a man's native soil may crumble beneath his feet

without leaving him altogether homeless upon earth.

Thus, having once fully yielded to its influence, I was in a manner free

of the city, and could approach or keep away from it as I pleased. Hence

it happened, that, living within a quarter of an hour's rush of

the London Bridge Terminus, I was oftener tempted to spend a whole

summer-day in our garden than to seek anything new or old, wonderful or

commonplace, beyond its precincts. It was a delightful garden, of no

great extent, but comprising a good many facilities for repose and

enjoyment, such as arbors and garden-seats, shrubbery, flower-beds,

rose-bushes in a profusion of bloom, pinks, poppies, geraniums,

sweet-peas, and a variety of other scarlet, yellow, blue, and purple

blossoms, which I did not trouble myself to recognize individually,

yet had always a vague sense of their beauty about me. The dim sky of

England has a most happy effect on the coloring of flowers, blending

richness with delicacy in the same texture; but in this garden, as

everywhere else, the exuberance of English verdure had a greater charm

than any tropical splendor or diversity of hue. The hunger for natural

beauty might be satisfied with grass and green leaves forever. Conscious

of the triumph of England in this respect; and loyally anxious for the

credit of my own country, it gratified me to observe what trouble and

pains the English gardeners are fain to throw away in producing a few

sour plums and abortive pears and apples,--as, for example, in this very

garden, where a row of unhappy trees were spread out perfectly flat

against a brick wall, looking as if impaled alive, or crucified, with a

cruel and unattainable purpose of compelling them to produce rich fruit

by torture. For my part, I never ate an English fruit, raised in the

open air, that could compare in flavor with a Yankee turnip.

The garden included that prime feature of English domestic scenery,

a lawn. It had been levelled, carefully shorn, and converted into

a bowling-green, on which we sometimes essayed to practise the

time-honored game of bowls, most unskilfully, yet not without a

perception that it involves a very pleasant mixture of exercise and

ease, as is the case with most of the old English pastimes. Our little

domain was shut in by the house on one side, and in other directions by

a hedge-fence and a brick wall, which last was concealed or softened by

shrubbery and the impaled fruit-trees already mentioned. Over all the

outer region, beyond our immediate precincts, there was an abundance of

foliage, tossed aloft from the near or distant trees with which that

agreeable suburb is adorned. The effect was wonderfully sylvan and

rural, insomuch that we might have fancied ourselves in the depths of

a wooded seclusion; only that, at brief intervals, we could hear the

galloping sweep of a railway-train passing within a quarter of a mile,

and its discordant screech, moderated by a little farther distance, as

it reached the Blackheath Station. That harsh, rough sound, seeking me

out so inevitably, was the voice of the great world summoning me

forth. I know not whether I was the more pained or pleased to be thus

constantly put in mind of the neighborhood of London; for, on the one

hand, my conscience stung me a little for reading a book, or playing

with children in the grass, when there were so many better things for an

enlightened traveller to do,--while, at the same time, it gave a deeper

delight to my luxurious idleness, to contrast it with the turmoil which

I escaped. On the whole, however, I do not repent of a single wasted

hour, and only wish that I could have spent twice as many in the same

way; for the impression in my memory is, that I was as happy in that

hospitable garden as the English summer-day was long.

One chief condition of my enjoyment was the weather. Italy has nothing

like it, nor America. There never was such weather except in England,

where, in requital of a vast amount of horrible east-wind between

February and June, and a brown October and black November, and a wet,

chill, sunless winter, there are a few weeks of incomparable summer,

scattered through July and August, and the earlier portion of September,

small in quantity, but exquisite enough to atone for the whole year's

atmospherical delinquencies. After all, the prevalent sombreness may

have brought out those sunny intervals in such high relief, that I see

them, in my recollection, brighter than they really were: a little

light makes a glory for people who live habitually in a gray gloom. The

English, however, do not seem to know how enjoyable the momentary gleams

of their summer are; they call it broiling weather, and hurry to the

sea-side with red, perspiring faces, in a state of combustion and

deliquescence; and I have observed that even their cattle have similar

susceptibilities, seeking the deepest shade, or standing mid-leg deep in

pools and streams to cool themselves, at temperatures which our own cows

would deem little more than barely comfortable. To myself, after the

summer heats of my native land had somewhat effervesced out of my blood

and memory, it was the weather of Paradise itself. It might be a little

too warm; but it was that modest and inestimable superabundance which

constitutes a bounty of Providence, instead of just a niggardly enough.

During my first year in England, residing in perhaps the most ungenial

part of the kingdom, I could never be quite comfortable without a fire

on the hearth; in the second twelvemonth, beginning to get acclimatized,

I became sensible of an austere friendliness, shy, but sometimes almost

tender, in the veiled, shadowy, seldom smiling summer; and in the

succeeding years--whether that I had renewed my fibre with English beef

and replenished my blood with English ale, or whatever were the cause--I

grew content with winter and especially in love with summer, desiring

little more for happiness than merely to breathe and bask. At the

midsummer which we are now speaking of, I must needs confess the

noontide sun came down more fervently than I found altogether tolerable;

so that I was fain to shift my position with the shadow of the

shrubbery, making myself the movable index of a sun-dial that reckoned

up the hours of an almost interminable day.

For each day seemed endless, though never wearisome. As far as your

actual experience is concerned, the English summer-day has positively no

beginning and no end. When you awake, at any reasonable hour, the sun is

already shining through the curtains; you live through unnumbered hours

of Sabbath quietude, with a calm variety of incident softly etched upon

their tranquil lapse; and at length you become conscious that it is

bed-time again, while there is still enough daylight in the sky to make

the pages of your book distinctly legible. Night, if there be any such

season, hangs down a transparent veil through which the by-gone day

beholds its successor; or, if not quite true of the latitude of London,

it may be soberly affirmed of the more northern parts of the island,

that Tomorrow is born before Yesterday is dead. They exist together in

the golden twilight, where the decrepit old day dimly discerns the face

of the ominous infant; and you, though a mere mortal, may simultaneously

touch them both, with one finger of recollection and another of

prophecy. I cared not how long the day might be, nor how many of them.

I had earned this repose by a long course of irksome toil and

perturbation, and could have been content never to stray out of the

limits of that suburban villa and its garden. If I lacked anything

beyond, it would have satisfied me well enough to dream about it,

instead of struggling for its actual possession. At least, this was

the feeling of the moment; although the transitory, flitting, and

irresponsible character of my life there was perhaps the most enjoyable

element of all, as allowing me much of the comfort of house and home

without any sense of their weight upon my back. The nomadic life has

great advantages, if we can find tents ready pitched for us at every

stage.

So much for the interior of our abode,--a spot of deepest quiet, within

reach of the intensest activity. But, even when we stepped beyond our

own gate, we were not shocked with any immediate presence of the great

world. We were dwelling in one of those oases that have grown up (in

comparatively recent years, I believe) on the wide waste of Blackheath,

which otherwise offers a vast extent of unoccupied ground in singular

proximity to the metropolis. As a general thing, the proprietorship of

the soil seems to exist in everybody and nobody; but exclusive rights

have been obtained, here and there, chiefly by men whose daily concerns

link them with London, so that you find their villas or boxes standing

along village-streets which have often more of an American aspect than

the elder English settlements. The scene is semi-rural. Ornamental trees

overshadow the sidewalks, and grassy margins border the wheel-tracks.

The houses, to be sure, have certain points of difference from those

of an American village, bearing tokens of architectural design, though

seldom of individual taste; and, as far as possible, they stand aloof

from the street, and separated each from its neighbor by hedge or fence,

in accordance with the careful exclusiveness of the English character,

which impels the occupant, moreover, to cover the front of his dwelling

with as much concealment of shrubbery as his limits will allow. Through

the interstices, you catch glimpses of well-kept lawns, generally

ornamented with flowers, and with what the English call rock-work, being

heaps of ivy-grown stones and fossils, designed for romantic effect in

a small way. Two or three of such village-streets as are here described

take a collective name,--as, for instance, Blackheath Park,--and

constitute a kind of community of residents, with gate-ways, kept by

policemen, and a semi-privacy, stepping beyond which, you find yourself

on the breezy heath.

On this great, bare, dreary common I often went astray, as I afterwards

did on the Campagna of Rome, and drew the air (tainted with London smoke

though it might be) into my lungs by deep inspirations, with a strange

and unexpected sense of desert-freedom. The misty atmosphere helps you

to fancy a remoteness that perhaps does not quite exist. During the

little time that it lasts, the solitude is as impressive as that of a

Western prairie or forest; but soon the railway-shriek, a mile or two

away, insists upon informing you of your whereabout; or you recognize in

the distance some landmark that you may have known,--an insulated villa,

perhaps, with its garden-wall around it, or the rudimental street of a

new settlement which is sprouting on this otherwise barren soil. Half

a century ago, the most frequent token of man's beneficent contiguity

might have been a gibbet, and the creak, like a tavern-sign, of a

murderer swinging to and fro in irons. Blackheath, with its highwaymen

and footpads, was dangerous in those days; and even now, for aught I

know, the Western prairie may still compare favorably with it as a safe

region to go astray in. When I was acquainted with Blackheath, the

ingenious device of garroting had recently come into fashion; and I can

remember, while crossing those waste places at midnight, and hearing

footsteps behind me, to have been sensibly encouraged by also hearing,

not far off, the clinking hoof-tramp of one of the horse-patrols who do

regular duty there. About sunset, or a little later, was the time when

the broad and somewhat desolate peculiarity of the heath seemed to me

to put on its utmost impressiveness. At that hour, finding myself on

elevated ground, I once had a view of immense London, four or five miles

off, with the vast Dome in the midst, and the towers of the two Houses

of Parliament rising up into the smoky canopy, the thinner substance of

which obscured a mass of things, and hovered about the objects that were

most distinctly visible,--a glorious and sombre picture, dusky, awful,

but irresistibly attractive, like a young man's dream of the great

world, foretelling at that distance a grandeur never to be fully

realized.

While I lived in that neighborhood, the tents of two or three sets of

cricket-players were constantly pitched on Blackheath, and matches were

going forward that seemed to involve the honor and credit of communities

or counties, exciting an interest in everybody but myself, who cared not

what part of England might glorify itself at the expense of another. It

is necessary to be born an Englishman, I believe, in order to enjoy

this great national game; at any rate, as a spectacle for an outside

observer, I found it lazy, lingering, tedious, and utterly devoid of

pictorial effects. Choice of other amusements was at hand. Butts for

archery were established, and bows and arrows were to be let, at so

many shots for a penny,--there being abundance of space for a farther

flight-shot than any modern archer can lend to his shaft. Then there

was an absurd game of throwing a stick at crockery-ware, which I have

witnessed a hundred times, and personally engaged in once or twice,

without ever having the satisfaction to see a bit of broken crockery.

In other spots, you found donkeys for children to ride, and ponies of a

very meek and patient spirit, on which the Cockney pleasure-seekers of

both sexes rode races and made wonderful displays of horsemanship. By

way of refreshment there was gingerbread, (but, as a true patriot,

I must pronounce it greatly inferior to our native dainty,) and

ginger-beer, and probably stancher liquor among the booth-keeper's

hidden stores. The frequent railway-trains, as well as the numerous

steamers to Greenwich, have made the vacant portions of Blackheath a

play-ground and breathing-place for the Londoners, readily and very

cheaply accessible; so that, in view of this broader use and enjoyment,

I a little grudged the tracts that have been filched away, so to speak,

and individualized by thriving citizens. One sort of visitors especially

interested me: they were schools of little boys or girls, under the

guardianship of their instructors,--charity-schools, as I often surmised

from their aspect, collected among dark alleys and squalid courts; and

hither they were brought to spend a summer afternoon, these pale little

progeny of the sunless nooks of London, who had never known that the sky

was any broader than that narrow and vapory strip above their native

lane. I fancied that they took but a doubtful pleasure, being half

affrighted at the wide, empty space overhead and round about them,

finding the air too little medicated with smoke, soot, and graveyard

exhalations, to be breathed with comfort, and feeling shelterless and

lost because grimy London, their slatternly and disreputable mother, had

suffered them to stray out of her arms.

Passing among these holiday-people, we come to one of the gate-ways of

Greenwich Park, opening through an old brick wall. It admits us from the

bare heath into a scene of antique cultivation and woodland ornament,

traversed in all directions by avenues of trees, many of which bear

tokens of a venerable age. These broad and well-kept pathways rise and

decline over the elevations and along the bases of gentle hills which

diversify the whole surface of the Park. The loftiest and most abrupt of

them (though but of very moderate height) is one of the earth's noted

summits, and may hold up its head with Mont Blanc and Chimborazo, as

being the site of Greenwich Observatory, where, if all nations will

consent to say so, the longitude of our great globe begins. I used to

regulate my watch by the broad dial-plate against the Observatory-wall,

and felt it pleasant to be standing at the very centre of Time and

Space.

There are lovelier parks than this in the neighborhood of London, richer

scenes of greensward and cultivated trees; and Kensington, especially,

in a summer afternoon, has seemed to me as delightful as any place can

or ought to be, in a world which, some time or other, we must quit. But

Greenwich, too, is beautiful,--a spot where the art of man has conspired

with Nature, as if he and the great mother had taken counsel together

how to make a pleasant scene, and the longest liver of the two had

faithfully carried out their mutual design. It has, likewise, an

additional charm of its own, because, to all appearance, it is the

people's property and play-ground in a much more genuine way than the

aristocratic resorts in closer vicinity to the metropolis. It affords

one of the instances in which the monarch's property is actually the

people's, and shows how much more natural is their relation to the

sovereign than to the nobility, which pretends to hold the intervening

space between the two: for a nobleman makes a paradise only for himself,

and fills it with his own pomp and pride; whereas the people are sooner

or later the legitimate inheritors of whatever beauty kings and queens

create, as now of Greenwich Park. On Sundays, when the sun shone, and

even on those grim and sombre days when, if it do not actually rain,

the English persist in calling it fine weather, it was good to see how

sturdily the plebeians trod under their own oaks, and what fulness of

simple enjoyment they evidently found there. They were the people,--not

the populace,--specimens of a class whose Sunday clothes are a distinct

kind of garb from their week-day ones; and this, in England, implies

wholesome habits of life, daily thrift, and a rank above the lowest. I

longed to be acquainted with them, in order to investigate what manner

of folks they were, what sort of households they kept, their politics,

their religion, their tastes, and whether they were as narrow-minded as

their betters. There can be very little doubt of it: an Englishman is

English, in whatever rank of life, though no more intensely so, I

should imagine, as an artisan or petty shopkeeper, than as a member of

Parliament.

The English character, as I conceive it, is by no means a very lofty

one; they seem to have a great deal of earth and grimy dust clinging

about them, as was probably the case with the stalwart and quarrelsome

people who sprouted up out of the soil, after Cadmus had sown the

dragon's teeth. And yet, though the individual Englishman is sometimes

preternaturally disagreeable, an observer standing aloof has a sense of

natural kindness towards them in the lump. They adhere closer to the

original simplicity in which mankind was created than we ourselves do;

they love, quarrel, laugh, cry, and turn their actual selves inside

out, with greater freedom than any class of Americans would consider

decorous. It was often so with these holiday-folks in Greenwich Park;

and, ridiculous as it may sound, I fancy myself to have caught very

satisfactory glimpses of Arcadian life among the Cockneys there, hardly

beyond the scope of Bow-Bells, picnicking in the grass, uncouthly

gambolling on the broad slopes, or straying in motley groups or by

single pairs of love-making youths and maidens, along the sun-streaked

avenues. Even the omnipresent policemen or park-keepers could not

disturb the beatific impression on my mind. One feature, at all events,

of the Golden Age was to be seen in the herds of deer that encountered

you in the somewhat remoter recesses of the Park, and were readily

prevailed upon to nibble a bit of bread out of your hand. But, though no

wrong had ever been done them, and no horn had sounded nor hound bayed

at the heels of themselves or their antlered progenitors, for centuries

past, there was still an apprehensiveness lingering in their hearts; so

that a slight movement of the hand or a step too near would send a whole

squadron of them scampering away, just as a breath scatters the winged

seeds of a dandelion.

The aspect of Greenwich Park, with all those festal people wandering

through it, resembled that of the Borghese Gardens under the walls of

Rome, on a Sunday or Saint's day; but, I am not ashamed to say, it a

little disturbed whatever grimly ghost of Puritanic strictness might be

lingering in the sombre depths of a New-England heart, among severe and

sunless remembrances of the Sabbaths of childhood, and pangs of remorse

for ill-gotten lessons in the catechism, and for erratic fantasies or

hardly suppressed laughter in the middle of long sermons. Occasionally,

I tried to take the long-hoarded sting out of these compunctious smarts

by attending divine service the open air. On a cart outside of the

Park-wall, (and, if I mistake not, at two or three corners and secluded

spots within the Park itself,) a Methodist preacher uplifts his voice

and speedily gathers a congregation, his zeal for whose religious

welfare impels the good man to such earnest vociferation and toilsome

gesture that his perspiring face is quickly in a stew. His inward flame

conspires with the too fervid sun and makes a positive martyr of him,

even in the very exercise of his pious labor; insomuch that he purchases

every atom of spiritual increment to his hearers by loss of his own

corporeal solidity, and, should his discourse last long enough, must

finally exhale before their eyes. If I smile at him, be it understood,

it is not in scorn; he performs his sacred office more acceptably than

many a prelate. These way-side services attract numbers who would not

otherwise listen to prayer, sermon, or hymn, from one year's end to

another, and who, for that very reason, are the auditors most likely

to be moved by the preacher's eloquence. Yonder Greenwich pensioner,

too,--in his costume of three-cornered hat, and old-fashioned,

brass-buttoned blue coat with ample skirts, which makes him look like a

contemporary of Admiral Benbow,--that tough old mariner may hear a word

or two which will go nearer his heart than anything that the chaplain

of the Hospital can be expected to deliver. I always noticed, moreover,

that a considerable proportion of the audience were soldiers, who came

hither with a day's leave from Woolwich,--hardy veterans in aspect, some

of whom wore as many as four or five medals, Crimean or East-Indian,

on the breasts of their scarlet coats. The miscellaneous congregation

listen with every appearance of heart-felt interest; and, for my own

part, I must frankly acknowledge that I never found it possible to give

five minutes' attention to any other English preaching: so cold and

commonplace are the homilies that pass for such, under the aged roofs of

churches. And as for cathedrals, the sermon is an exceedingly diminutive

and unimportant part of the religious services,--if, indeed, it be

considered a part,--among the pompous ceremonies, the intonations,

and the resounding and lofty-voiced strains of the choristers. The

magnificence of the setting quite dazzles out what we Puritans look

upon as the jewel of the whole affair; for I presume that it was our

forefathers, the Dissenters in England and America, who gave the sermon

its present prominence in the Sabbath exercises.

The Methodists are probably the first and only Englishmen who have

worshipped in the open air since the ancient Britons listened to the

preaching of the Druids; and it reminded me of that old priesthood, to

see certain memorials of their dusky epoch--not religious, however, but

warlike--in the neighborhood of the spot where the Methodist was holding

forth. These were some ancient burrows, beneath or within which are

supposed to lie buried the slain of a forgotten or doubtfully remembered

battle, fought on the site of Greenwich Park as long ago as two or three

centuries after the birth of Christ. Whatever may once have been their

height and magnitude, they have now scarcely more prominence in the

actual scene than the battle of which they are the sole monuments

retains in history,--being only a few mounds side by side, elevated a

little above the surface of the ground, ten or twelve feet in diameter,

with a shallow depression in their summits. When one of them was opened,

not long since, no bones, nor armor, nor weapons were discovered,

nothing but some small jewels, and a tuft of hair,--perhaps from the

head of a valiant general, who, dying on the field of his victory,

bequeathed this lock, together with his indestructible fame, to

after-ages. The hair and jewels are probably in the British Museum,

where the potsherds and rubbish of innumerable generations make the

visitor wish that each passing century could carry off all its fragments

and relics along with it, instead of adding them to the continually

accumulating burden which human knowledge is compelled to lug upon its

back. As for the fame, I know not what has become of it.

After traversing the Park, we come into the neighborhood of Greenwich

Hospital, and will pass through one of its spacious gate-ways for the

sake of glancing at an establishment which does more honor to the heart

of England than anything else that I am acquainted with, of a public

nature. It is very seldom that we can be sensible of anything like

kindliness in the acts or relations of such an artificial thing as a

National Government. Our own Government, I should conceive, is too much

an abstraction ever to feel any sympathy for its maimed sailors and

soldiers, though it will doubtless do them a severe kind of justice, as

chilling as the touch of steel. But it seemed to me that the Greenwich

pensioners are the petted children of the nation, and that the

Government is their dry-nurse, and that the old men themselves have a

childlike consciousness of their position. Very likely, a better sort of

life might have been arranged, and a wiser care bestowed on them;

but, such as it is, it enables them to spend a sluggish, careless,

comfortable old age, grumbling, growling, gruff, as if all the foul

weather of their past years were pent up within them, yet not much more

discontented than such weather-beaten and battle-battered fragments of

human kind must inevitably be. Their home, in its outward form, is on a

very magnificent plan. Its germ was a royal palace, the full expansion

of which has resulted in a series of edifices externally more beautiful

than any English palace that I have seen, consisting of several

quadrangles of stately architecture, united by colonnades and gravel

walks, and inclosing grassy squares, with statues in the centre, the

whole extending along the Thames. It is built of marble, or very

light-colored stone, in the classic style, with pillars and porticos,

which (to my own taste, and, I fancy, to that of the old sailors)

produce but a cold and shivery-effect in the English climate. Had I

been the architect, I would have studied the characters, habits, and

predilections of nautical people in Wapping, Rotherhithe, and the

neighborhood of the Tower, (places which I visited in affectionate

remembrance of Captain Lemuel Gulliver, and other actual or mythological

navigators,) and would have built the hospital in a kind of ethereal

similitude to the narrow, dark, ugly, and inconvenient, but snug and

cozy homeliness of the sailor boarding-houses there. There can be no

question that all the above attributes, or enough of them to satisfy an

old sailor's heart, might be reconciled with architectural beauty and

the wholesome contrivances of modern dwellings, and thus a novel and

genuine style of building be given to the world.

But their countrymen meant kindly by the old fellows in assigning them

the ancient royal site where Elizabeth held her court and Charles II.

began to build his palace. So far as the locality went, it was treating

them like so many kings; and, with a discreet abundance of grog, beer,

and tobacco, there was perhaps little more to be accomplished in behalf

of men whose whole previous lives have tended to unfit them for old age.

Their chief discomfort is probably for lack of something to do or think

about. But, judging by the few whom I saw, a listless habit seems to

have crept over them, a dim dreaminess of mood, in which they sit

between asleep and awake, and find the long day wearing towards bedtime

without its having made any distinct record of itself upon their

consciousness. Sitting on stone benches in the sunshine, they subside

into slumber, or nearly so, and start at the approach of footsteps

echoing under the colonnades, ashamed to be caught napping, and rousing

themselves in a hurry, as formerly on the midnight watch at sea. In

their brightest moments, they gather in groups and bore one another with

endless sea-yarns about their voyages under famous admirals, and about

gale and calm, battle and chase, and all that class of incident that has

its sphere on the deck and in the hollow interior of a ship, where

their world has exclusively been. For other pastime, they quarrel among

themselves, comrade with comrade, and perhaps shake paralytic fists in

furrowed faces. If inclined for a little exercise, they can bestir

their wooden legs on the long esplanade that borders by the Thames,

criticizing the rig of passing ships, and firing off volleys of

malediction at the steamers, which have made the sea another element

than that they used to be acquainted with. All this is but cold comfort

for the evening of life, yet may compare rather favorably with the

preceding portions of it, comprising little save imprisonment on

shipboard, in the course of which they have been tossed all about the

world and caught hardly a glimpse of it, forgetting what grass and

trees are, and never finding out what woman is, though they may have

encountered a painted spectre which they took for her. A country owes

much to human beings whose bodies she has worn out and whose immortal

parts she has left undeveloped or debased, as we find them here; and

having wasted an idle paragraph upon them, let me now suggest that old

men have a kind of susceptibility to moral impressions, and even (up to

an advanced period) a receptivity of truth, which often appears to come

to them after the active time of life is past. The Greenwich pensioners

might prove better subjects for true education now than in their

school-boy days; but then where is the Normal School that could educate

instructors for such a class?

There is a beautiful chapel for the pensioners, in the classic style,

over the altar of which hangs a picture by West. I never could look at

it long enough to make out its design; for this artist (though it pains

me to say it of so respectable a countryman) had a gift of frigidity,

a knack of grinding ice into his paint, a power of stupefying the

spectator's perceptions and quelling his sympathy, beyond any other

limner that ever handled a brush. In spite of many pangs of conscience,

I seize this opportunity to wreak a life-long abhorrence upon the poor,

blameless man, for the sake of that dreary picture of Lear, an explosion

of frosty fury, that used to be a bugbear to me in the Athenaeum

Exhibition. Would fire burn it, I wonder?

The principal thing that they have to show you, at Greenwich Hospital,

is the Painted Hall. It is a splendid and spacious room, at least a

hundred feet long and half as high, with a ceiling painted in fresco by

Sir James Thornhill. As a work of art, I presume, this frescoed canopy

has little merit, though it produces an exceedingly rich effect by its

brilliant coloring and as a specimen of magnificent upholstery. The

walls of the grand apartment are entirely covered with pictures, many

of them representing battles and other naval incidents that were once

fresher in the world's memory than now, but chiefly portraits of

old admirals, comprising the whole line of heroes who have trod the

quarter-decks of British ships for more than two hundred years back.

Next to a tomb in Westminster Abbey, which was Nelson's most elevated

object of ambition, it would seem to be the highest meed of a naval

warrior to have his portrait hung up in the Painted Hall; but, by dint

of victory upon victory, these illustrious personages have grown to be

a mob, and by no means a very interesting one, so far as regards the

character of the faces here depicted. They are generally commonplace,

and often singularly stolid; and I have observed (both in the Painted

Hall and elsewhere, and not only in portraits, but in the actual

presence of such renowned people as I have caught glimpses of) that

the countenances of heroes are not nearly so impressive as those of

statesmen,--except, of course, in the rare instances where warlike

ability has been but the one-sided manifestation of a profound genius

for managing the world's affairs. Nine-tenths of these distinguished

admirals, for instance, if their faces tell truth, must needs have been

blockheads, and might have served better, one would imagine, as wooden

figureheads for their own ships than to direct any difficult and

intricate scheme of action from the quarter-deck. It is doubtful whether

the same kind of men will hereafter meet with a similar degree of

success; for they were victorious chiefly through the old English

hardihood, exercised in a field of which modern science had not yet got

possession. Rough valor has lost something of its value, since their

days, and must continue to sink lower and lower in the comparative

estimate of warlike qualities. In the next naval war, as between England

and France, I would bet, methinks, upon the Frenchman's head.

It is remarkable, however, that the great naval hero of England--the

greatest, therefore, in the world, and of all time--had none of the

stolid characteristics that belong to his class, and cannot fairly

be accepted as their representative man. Foremost in the roughest of

professions, he was as delicately organized as a woman, and as painfully

sensitive as a poet. More than any other Englishman he won the love

and admiration of his country, but won them through the efficacy of

qualities that are not English, or, at all events, were intensified in

his case and made poignant and powerful by something morbid in the man,

which put him otherwise at cross-purposes with life. He was a man of

genius; and genius in an Englishman (not to cite the good old simile of

a pearl in the oyster) is usually a symptom of a lack of balance in

the general making-up of the character; as we may satisfy ourselves by

running over the list of their poets, for example, and observing how

many of them have been sickly or deformed, and how often their lives

have been darkened by insanity. An ordinary Englishman is the healthiest

and wholesomest of human beings; an extraordinary one is almost always,

in one way or another, a sick man. It was so with Lord Nelson. The

wonderful contrast or relation between his personal qualities, the

position which he held, and the life that he lived, makes him as

interesting a personage as all history has to show; and it is a pity

that Southey's biography--so good in its superficial way, and yet so

inadequate as regards any real delineation of the man--should have taken

the subject out of the hands of some writer endowed with more delicate

appreciation and deeper insight than that genuine Englishman possessed.

But the English capacity for hero-worship is full to the brim with what

they are able to comprehend of Lord Nelson's character. Adjoining the

Painted Hall is a smaller room, the walls of which are completely and

exclusively adorned with pictures of the great Admiral's exploits. We

see the frail, ardent man in all the most noted events of his career,

from his encounter with a Polar bear to his death at Trafalgar,

quivering here and there about the room like a blue, lambent flame. No

Briton ever enters that apartment without feeling the beef and ale of

his composition stirred to its depths, and finding himself changed into

a hero for the nonce, however stolid his brain, however tough his heart,

however unexcitable his ordinary mood. To confess the truth, I myself,

though belonging to another parish, have been deeply sensible to the

sublime recollections there aroused, acknowledging that Nelson expressed

his life in a kind of symbolic poetry which I had as much right to

understand as these burly islanders. Cool and critical observer as I

sought to be, I enjoyed their burst of honest indignation when a visitor

(not an American, I am glad to say) thrust his walking-stick almost into

Nelson's face, in one of the pictures, by way of pointing a remark; and

the by-standers immediately glowed like so many hot coals, and would

probably have consumed the offender in their wrath, had he not effected

his retreat. But the most sacred objects of all are two of Nelson's

coats, under separate glass cases. One is that which he wore at the

Battle of the Nile, and it is now sadly injured by moths, which will

quite destroy it in a few years, unless its guardians preserve it as we

do Washington's military suit, by occasionally baking it in an oven. The

other is the coat in which he received his death-wound at Trafalgar. On

its breast are sewed three or four stars and orders of knighthood, now

much dimmed by time and damp, but which glittered brightly enough on the

battle-day to draw the fatal aim of a French marksman. The bullet-hole

is visible on the shoulder, as well as a part of the golden tassels of

an epaulet, the rest of which was shot away. Over the coat is laid a

white waistcoat with a great blood-stain on it, out of which all the

redness has utterly faded, leaving it of a dingy yellow hue, in the

threescore years since that blood gushed out. Yet it was once the

reddest blood in England,--Nelson's blood!

The hospital stands close adjacent to the town of Greenwich, which will

always retain a kind of festal aspect in my memory, in consequence of

my having first become acquainted with it on Easter Monday. Till a few

years ago, the first three days of Easter were a carnival-season in this

old town, during which the idle and disreputable part of London poured

itself into the streets like an inundation of the Thames,--as unclean

as that turbid mixture of the offscourings of the vast city, and

overflowing with its grimy pollution whatever rural innocence, if any,

might be found in the suburban neighborhood. This festivity was called

Greenwich Fair, the final one of which, in an immemorial succession, it

was my fortune to behold.

If I had bethought myself of going through the fair with a note-book and

pencil, jotting down all the prominent objects, I doubt not that the

result might have been a sketch of English life quite as characteristic

and worthy of historical preservation as an account of the Roman

Carnival. Having neglected to do so, I remember little more than a

confusion of unwashed and shabbily dressed people, intermixed with some

smarter figures, but, on the whole, presenting a mobbish appearance

such as we never see in our own country. It taught me to understand why

Shakspeare, in speaking of a crowd, so often alludes to its attribute

of evil odor. The common people of England, I am afraid, have no daily

familiarity with even so necessary a thing as a washbowl, not to mention

a bathing-tub. And furthermore, it is one mighty difference between

them and us, that every man and woman on our side of the water has a

working-day suit and a holiday suit, and is occasionally as fresh as a

rose, whereas, in the good old country, the griminess of his labor or

squalid habits clings forever to the individual, and gets to be a part

of his personal substance. These are broad facts, involving great

corollaries and dependencies. There are really, if you stop to think

about it, few sadder spectacles in the world than a ragged coat or a

soiled and shabby gown, at a festival.

This unfragrant crowd was exceedingly dense, being welded together,

as it were, in the street through which we strove to make our way. On

either side were oyster-stands, stalls of oranges, (a very prevalent

fruit in England, where they give the withered ones a guise of freshness

by boiling them,) and booths covered with old sail-cloth, in which the

commodity that most attracted the eye was gilt gingerbread. It was so

completely enveloped in Dutch gilding that I did not at first recognize

an old acquaintance, but wondered what those golden crowns and images

could be. There were likewise drums and other toys for small children,

and a variety of showy and worthless articles for children of a larger

growth; though it perplexed me to imagine who, in such a mob, could have

the innocent taste to desire playthings, or the money to pay for them.

Not that I have a right to accuse the mob, on my own knowledge, of being

any less innocent than a set of cleaner and better dressed people might

have been; for, though one of them stole my pocket-handkerchief, I could

not but consider it fair game, under the circumstances, and was grateful

to the thief for sparing me my purse. They were quiet, civil, and

remarkably good-humored, making due allowance for the national

gruffness; there was no riot, no tumultuous swaying to and fro of the

mass, such as I have often noted in an American crowd, no noise of

voices, except frequent bursts of laughter, hoarse or shrill, and a

widely diffused, inarticulate murmur, resembling nothing so much as the

rumbling of the tide among the arches of London Bridge. What immensely

perplexed me was a sharp, angry sort of rattle, in all quarters, far off

and close at hand, and sometimes right at my own back, where it sounded

as if the stout fabric of my English surtout had been ruthlessly rent in

twain; and everybody's clothes, all over the fair, were evidently being

torn asunder in the same way. By-and-by, I discovered that this strange

noise was produced by a little instrument called "The Fun of the

Fair,"--a sort of rattle, consisting of a wooden wheel, the cogs of

which turn against a thin slip of wood, and so produce a rasping sound

when drawn smartly against a person's back. The ladies draw their

rattles against the backs of their male friends, (and everybody passes

for a friend at Greenwich Fair,) and the young men return the compliment

on the broad British backs of the ladies; and all are bound by

immemorial custom to take it in good part and be merry at the joke. As

it was one of my prescribed official duties to give an account of such

mechanical contrivances as might be unknown in my own country, I have

thought it right to be thus particular in describing the Fun of the

Fair.

But this was far from being the sole amusement. There were theatrical

booths, in front of which were pictorial representations of the scenes

to be enacted within; and anon a drummer emerged from one of them,

thumping on a terribly lax drum, and followed by the entire _dramatis

personae_, who ranged themselves on a wooden platform in front of the

theatre. They were dressed in character, but woefully shabby, with very

dingy and wrinkled white tights, threadbare cotton-velvets, crumpled

silks, and crushed muslin, and all the gloss and glory gone out of their

aspect and attire, seen thus in the broad daylight and after a long

series of performances. They sang a song together, and withdrew into

the theatre, whither the public were invited to follow them at the

inconsiderable cost of a penny a ticket. Before another booth stood a

pair of brawny fighting-men, displaying their muscle, and soliciting

patronage for an exhibition of the noble British art of pugilism.

There were pictures of giants, monsters, and outlandish beasts, most

prodigious, to be sure, and worthy of all admiration, unless the artist

had gone incomparably beyond his subject. Jugglers proclaimed aloud the

miracles which they were prepared to work; and posture-makers dislocated

every joint of their bodies and tied their limbs into inextricable

knots, wherever they could find space to spread a little square of

carpet on the ground. In the midst of the confusion, while everybody was

treading on his neighbor's toes, some little boys were very solicitous

to brush your boots. These lads, I believe, are a product of modern

society,--at least, no older than the time of Gay, who celebrates their

origin in his "Trivia"; but in most other respects the scene reminded

me of Bunyan's description of Vanity Fair,--nor is it at all improbable

that the Pilgrim may have been a merry-maker here, in his wild youth.

It seemed very singular--though, of course, I immediately classified

it as an English characteristic--to see a great many portable

weighing-machines, the owners of which cried out continually and

amain,--"Come, know your weight! Come, come, know your weight to-day!

Come, know your weight!"--and a multitude of people, mostly large in the

girth, were moved by this vociferation to sit down in the machines. I

know not whether they valued themselves on their beef, and estimated

their standing as members of society at so much a pound; but I shall set

it down as a national peculiarity, and a symbol of the prevalence of the

earthly over the spiritual element, that Englishmen are wonderfully bent

on knowing how solid and physically ponderous they are.

On the whole, having an appetite for the brown bread and the tripe and

sausages of life, as well as for its nicer cates and dainties, I

enjoyed the scene, and was amused at the sight of a gruff old Greenwich

pensioner, who, forgetful of the sailor-frolics of his young days, stood

looking with grim disapproval at all these vanities. Thus we squeezed

our way through the mob-jammed town, and emerged into the Park, where,

likewise, we met a great many merry-makers, but with freer space for

their gambols than in the streets. We soon found ourselves the targets

for a cannonade with oranges, (most of them in a decayed condition,)

which went humming past our ears from the vantage-ground of neighboring

hillocks, sometimes hitting our sacred persons with an inelastic thump.

This was one of the privileged freedoms of the time, and was nowise to

be resented, except by returning the salute. Many persons were running

races, hand in hand, down the declivities, especially that steepest one

on the summit of which stands the world-central Observatory, and (as in

the race of life) the partners were usually male and female, and often

caught a tumble together before reaching the bottom of the hill.

Hereabouts we were pestered and haunted by two young girls, the eldest

not more than thirteen, teasing us to buy matches; and finding no market

for their commodity, the taller one suddenly turned a somerset before

our faces, and rolled heels over head from top to bottom of the hill

on which we stood. Then, scrambling up the acclivity, the topsy-turvy

trollop offered us her matches again, as demurely as if she had never

flung aside her equilibrium; so that, dreading a repetition of the feat,

we gave her sixpence and an admonition, and enjoined her never to do so

any more.

The most curious amusement that we witnessed here--or anywhere else,

indeed--was an ancient and hereditary pastime called "Kissing in the

Ring." It is one of the simplest kinds of games, needing little or no

practice to make the player altogether perfect; and the manner of it

is this. A ring is formed, (in the present case, it was of large

circumference and thickly gemmed around with faces, mostly on the broad

grin,) into the centre of which steps an adventurous youth, and, looking

round the circle, selects whatever maiden may most delight his eye. He

presents his hand, (which she is bound to accept,) leads her into the

centre, salutes her on the lips, and retires, taking his stand in the

expectant circle. The girl, in her turn, throws a favorable regard on

some fortunate young man, offers her hand to lead him forth, makes him

happy with a maidenly kiss, and withdraws to hide her blushes, if any

there be, among the simpering faces in the ring; while the favored swain

loses no time in transferring her salute to the prettiest and plumpest

among the many mouths that are primming themselves in anticipation. And

thus the thing goes on, till all the festive throng are inwreathed and

intertwined into an endless and inextricable chain of kisses; though,

indeed, it smote me with compassion to reflect that some forlorn pair of

lips might be left out, and never know the triumph of a salute, after

throwing aside so many delicate reserves for the sake of winning it. If

the young men had any chivalry, there was a fair chance to display it by

kissing the homeliest damsel in the circle.

To be frank, however, at the first glance, and to my American eye, they

looked all homely alike, and the chivalry that I suggest is more than I

could have been capable of, at any period of my life. They seemed to be

country-lasses, of sturdy and wholesome aspect, with coarse-grained,

cabbage-rosy cheeks, and, I am willing to suppose, a stout texture of

moral principle, such as would bear a good deal of rough usage without

suffering much detriment. But how unlike the trim little damsels of my

native land! I desire above all things to be courteous; but, since

the plain truth must be told, the soil and climate of England produce

feminine beauty as rarely as they do delicate fruit, and though

admirable specimens of both are to be met with, they are the hot-house

ameliorations of refined society, and apt, moreover, to relapse into the

coarseness of the original stock. The men are man-like, but the women

are not beautiful, though the female Bull be well enough adapted to the

male. To return to the lasses of Greenwich Fair, their charms were few,

and their behavior, perhaps, not altogether commendable; and yet it was

impossible not to feel a degree of faith in their innocent intentions,

with such a half-bashful zest and entire simplicity did they keep up

their part of the game. It put the spectator in good-humor to look at

them, because there was still something of the old Arcadian life, the

secure freedom of the antique age, in their way of surrendering their

lips to strangers, as if there were no evil or impurity in the world. As

for the young men, they were chiefly specimens of the vulgar sediment

of London life, often shabbily genteel, rowdyish, pale, wearing the

unbrushed coat, unshifted linen, and unwashed faces of yesterday, as

well as the haggardness of last night's jollity in a gin-shop. Gathering

their character from these tokens, I wondered whether there were any

reasonable prospect of their fair partners returning to their rustic

homes with as much innocence (whatever were its amount or quality) as

they brought to Greenwich Fair, in spite of the perilous familiarity

established by Kissing in the Ring.

The manifold disorders resulting from the fair, at which a vast city was

brought into intimate relations with a comparatively rural district,

have at length led to its suppression; this was the very last

celebration of it, and brought to a close the broad-mouthed merriment of

many hundred years. Thus my poor sketch, faint as its colors are, may

acquire some little value in the reader's eyes from the consideration

that no observer of the coming time will ever have an opportunity to

give a better. I should find it difficult to believe, however, that the

queer pastime just described, or any moral mischief to which that and

other customs might pave the way, can have led to the overthrow of

Greenwich Fair; for it has often seemed to me that Englishmen of station

and respectability, unless of a peculiarly philanthropic turn, have

neither any faith in the feminine purity of the lower orders of their

countrywomen, nor the slightest value for it, allowing its possible

existence. The distinction of ranks is so marked, that the English

cottage-damsel holds a position somewhat analogous to that of the negro

girl in our Southern States. Hence comes inevitable detriment to the

moral condition of those men themselves, who forget that the humblest

woman has a right and a duty to hold herself in the same sanctity as

the highest. The subject cannot well be discussed in these pages; but I

offer it as a serious conviction, from what I have been able to observe,

that the England of to-day is the unscrupulous old England of Tom Jones

and Joseph Andrews, Humphrey Clinker and Roderick Random; and in our

refined era, just the same as at that more free-spoken epoch, this

singular people has a certain contempt for any fine-strained purity, any

special squeamishness, as they consider it, on the part of an ingenuous

youth. They appear to look upon it as a suspicious phenomenon in the

masculine character.

Nevertheless, I by no means take upon me to affirm that English

morality, as regards the phase here alluded to, is really at a lower

point than our own. Assuredly, I hope so, because, making a higher

pretension, or, at all events, more carefully hiding whatever may be

amiss, we are either better than they, or necessarily a great deal

worse. It impressed me that their open avowal and recognition of

immoralities served to throw the disease to the surface, where it might

be more effectually dealt with, and leave a sacred interior not utterly

profaned, instead of turning its poison back among the inner vitalities

of the character, at the imminent risk of corrupting them all. Be that

as it may, these Englishmen are certainly a franker and simpler

people than ourselves, from peer to peasant; but if we can take it as

compensatory on our part, (which I leave to be considered,) that they

owe those noble and manly qualities to a coarser grain in their nature,

and that, with a finer one in ours, we shall ultimately acquire a marble

polish of which they are unsusceptible, I believe that this may be the

truth.

* * * * *

THE VAGABONDS.

We are two travellers, Roger and I.

Roger's my dog.--Come here, you scamp!

Jump for the gentlemen,--mind your eye!

Over the table,--look out for the lamp!--

The rogue is growing a little old;

Five years we've tramped through wind and weather,

And slept out-doors when nights were cold,

And ate and drank--and starved--together.

We've learned what comfort is, I tell you!

A bed on the floor, a bit of rosin,

A fire to thaw our thumbs, (poor fellow!

The paw he holds up there's been frozen,)

Plenty of catgut for my fiddle,

(This out-door business is bad for strings,)

Then a few nice buckwheats hot from the griddle,

And Roger and I set up for kings!

No, thank ye, Sir,--I never drink;

Roger and I are exceedingly moral,--

Aren't we, Roger?--See him wink!--

Well, something hot, then,--we won't quarrel.

He's thirsty, too,--see him nod his head?

What a pity, Sir, that dogs can't talk!

He understands every word that's said,--

And he knows good milk from water-and-chalk.

The truth is, Sir, now I reflect,

I've been so sadly given to grog,

I wonder I've not lost the respect

(Here's to you, Sir!) even of my dog.

But he sticks by, through thick and thin;

And this old coat, with its empty pockets,

And rags that smell of tobacco and gin,

He'll follow while he has eyes in his sockets.

There isn't another creature living

Would do it, and prove, through every disaster,

So fond, so faithful, and so forgiving,

To such a miserable thankless master!

No, Sir!--see him wag his tail and grin I

By George! it makes my old eyes water!

That is, there's something in this gin

That chokes a fellow. But no matter!

We'll have some music, if you 're willing,

And Roger (hem! what a plague a cough is, Sir!)

Shall march a little.--Start, you villain!

Stand straight! 'Bout face! Salute your officer!

Put up that paw! Dress! Take your rifle!

(Some dogs have arms, you see!) Now hold your

Cap while the gentlemen give a trifle,

To aid a poor old patriot soldier!

March! Halt! Now show how the rebel shakes,

When he stands up to hear his sentence.

Now tell us how many drams it takes

To honor a jolly new acquaintance.

Five yelps,--that's five; he's mighty knowing!

The night's before us, fill the glasses!--

Quick, Sir! I'm ill,--my brain is going!--

Some brandy,--thank you,--there!--it passes!

Why not reform? That's easily said;

But I've gone through such wretched treatment,

Sometimes forgetting the taste of bread,

And scarce remembering what meat meant,

That my poor stomach's past reform;

And there are times when, mad with thinking,

I'd sell out heaven for something warm

To prop a horrible inward sinking.

Is there a way to forget to think?

At your age, Sir, home, fortune, friends,

A dear girl's love,--but I took to drink;--

The same old story; you know how it ends.

If you could have seen these classic features,----

You needn't laugh, Sir; they were not then

Such a burning libel on God's creatures:

I was one of your handsome men!

If you had seen HER, so fair and young,

Whose head was happy on this breast!

If you could have heard the songs I sung

When the wine went round, you wouldn't have guessed

That ever I, Sir, should be straying

From door to door, with fiddle and dog,

Ragged and penniless, and playing

To you to-night for a glass of grog!

She's married since,--a parson's wife:

'T was better for her that we should part,--

Better the soberest, prosiest life

Than a blasted home and a broken heart.

I have seen her? Once: I was weak and spent

On the dusty road: a carriage stopped:

But little she dreamed, as on she went,

Who kissed the coin that her fingers dropped!

You've set me talking, Sir; I'm sorry;

It makes me wild to think of the change!

What do you care for a beggar's story?

Is it amusing? you find it strange?

I had a mother so proud of me!

'T was well she died before--Do you know

If the happy spirits in heaven can see

The ruin and wretchedness here below?

Another glass, and strong, to deaden

This pain; then Roger and I will start.

I wonder, has he such a lumpish, leaden,

Aching thing, in place of a heart?

He is sad sometimes, and would weep, if he could,

No doubt, remembering things that were,--

A virtuous kennel, with plenty of food,

And himself a sober, respectable cur.

I'm better now; that glass was warming.--

You rascal! limber your lazy feet I

We must be fiddling and performing

For supper and bed, or starve in the street.--

Not a very gay life to lead, you think?

But soon we shall go where lodgings are free,

And the sleepers need neither victuals nor drink;--

The sooner, the better for Roger and me!

WILLIE WHARTON.

Would you like to read a story which is true, and yet not true? The one

I am going to tell you is a superstructure of imagination on a basis of

facts. I trust you are not curious to ascertain the exact proportion of

each. It is sufficient for any reasonable reader to be assured that many

of the leading incidents interwoven in the following story actually

occurred in one of our Western States, a few years ago.

It was a bright afternoon in the spring-time; the wide, flowery prairie

waved in golden sunlight, and distant tree-groups were illuminated by

the clear, bright atmosphere. Throughout the whole expanse, only two

human dwellings were visible. These were small log-cabins, each with a

clump of trees near it, and the rose of the prairies climbing over the

roof. In the rustic piazza of one of these cabins a woman was sewing

busily, occasionally moving a cradle gently with her foot. On the

steps of the piazza was seated a man, who now and then read aloud some

paragraph from a newspaper. From time to time, the woman raised her eyes

from her work, and, shading them from the sunshine with her hand, looked

out wistfully upon the sea of splendor, everywhere waving in flowery

ripples to the soft breathings of the balmy air. At length she said,--

"Brother George, I begin to feel a little anxious about Willie. He was

told not to go out of sight, and he is generally a good boy to mind; but

I should think it was more than ten minutes since I have seen him. I

wish you would try the spy-glass."

The man arose, and, after looking abroad for a moment, took a small

telescope from the corner of the piazza, and turned it in the direction

the boy had taken.

"Ah, now I see the little rogue!" he exclaimed. "I think it must have

been that island of high grass that hid him from you. He has not gone

very far; and now he is coming this way. But who upon earth is he

leading along? I believe the adventurous little chap has been to the

land of Nod to get him a wife. I know of no little girl, except my

Bessie, for five miles round; and it certainly is not she. The fat

little thing has toppled over in the grass, and Willie is picking her

up. I believe in my soul she's an Indian."

"An Indian!" exclaimed the mother, starting up suddenly. "Have you heard

of any Indians being seen hereabouts? Do blow the horn to hurry him

home."

A tin horn was taken from the nail on which it hung, and a loud blast

stirred the silent air. Moles stopped their digging, squirrels paused in

their gambols, prairie-dogs passed quickly from one to another a signal

of alarm, and all the little beasts wondered what could be the meaning

of these new sounds which had lately invaded the stillness of their

haunts.

George glanced at the anxious countenance of his sister, and said,--

"Don't be frightened, Jenny, if some Indians do happen to call and see

us. You know you always agreed with me that they would be as good as

Christians, if they were treated justly and kindly. Besides, you see

this one is a very small savage, and we shall soon have help enough to

defend us from her formidable blows. I made a louder noise with the horn

than I need to have done; it has startled your husband, and he is coming

from his plough; and there is my wife and Bessie running to see what is

the matter over here."

By this time the truant boy and his companion approached the house, and

he mounted the steps of the piazza with eager haste, pulling her after

him, immediately upon the arrival of his father, Aunt Mary, and Cousin

Bessie. Brief explanation was made, that the horn was blown to hurry

Willie home; and all exclaimed,--

"Why, Willie! who is this?"

"Found her squatting on the grass, pulling flowers," he replied, almost

out of breath. "Don't know her name. She talks lingo."

The whole company laughed. The new-comer was a roly-poly, round enough

to roll, with reddish-brown face, and a mop of black hair, cut in a

straight line just above the eyes. But _such_ eyes! large and lambent,

with a foreshadowing of sadness in their expression. They shone in her

dark face like moonlit waters in the dusky landscape of evening. Her

only garment was a short kirtle of plaited grass, not long enough to

conceal her chubby knees. She understood no word of English, and, when

spoken to, repeated an Indian phrase, enigmatical to all present. She

clung to Willie, as if he were an old friend; and he, quite proud of

the manliness of being a protector, stood with his arm across her brown

shoulders, half offended at their merriment, saying,--

"She's _my_ little girl. _I_ found her."

"I _thought_ he'd been to the land of Nod to get him a wife," said Uncle

George, smiling.

Little Bessie, with clean apron, and flaxen hair nicely tied up with

ribbons, was rather shy of the stranger.

"She'th dirty," lisped she, pointing to her feet.

"Well, s'pose she is?" retorted William. "I guess _you_'d be dirty, too,

if you'd been running about in the mud, without any shoes. But she's

pretty. She's like my black kitten, only she a'n't got a white nose."

Willie's comparison was received with shouts of laughter; for there

really was some resemblance to the black kitten in that queer little

face. But when the small mouth quivered with a grieved expression, and

she clung closer to Willie, as if afraid, kind Uncle George patted her

head, and tried to part the short, thick, black hair, which would not

stay parted, but insisted upon hanging straight over her eyebrows. Baby

Emma had been wakened in her cradle by the noise, and began to rub her

eyes out with her little fists. Being lifted into her mother's lap, she

hid her face for a while; but finally she peeped forth timidly, and

fixed a wondering gaze on the new-comer. It seemed that she concluded

to like her; for she shook her little dimpled hand to her, and began to

crow. The language of children needs no interpreter. The demure little

Indian understood the baby-salutation, and smiled.

Aunt Mary brought bread and milk, which she devoured like a hungry

animal. While she was eating, the wagon arrived with Willie's older

brother, Charley, who had been to the far-off mill with the hired man.

The sturdy boy came in, all aglow, calling out,--"Oh, mother! the boy at

the mill has caught a prairie-dog. Such a funny-looking thing!"

He halted suddenly before the small stranger, gave a slight whistle, and

exclaimed,--

"Halloo! here's a funny-looking prairie-puss!"

"She a'n't a prairie-puss," cried Willie, pushing him back with doubled

fists. "She's a little girl; and she's _my_ little girl. I found her."

"She's a great find," retorted the roguish brother, as he went behind

her, and pulled the long black hair that fell over her shoulders.

"Now you let her alone!" shouted Willie; and the next moment the two

boys were rolling over on the piazza, pommelling each other, half in

play, half in earnest. The little savage sat coiled up on the floor,

watching them without apparent emotion; but when a hard knock made

Willie cry out, she sprang forward with the agility of a kitten, and,

repeating some Indian word with strong emphasis, began to beat Charley

with all her might. Instinctively, he was about to give blows in return;

but his father called out,--

"Hold there, my boy! Never strike a girl!"

"And never harm a wanderer that needs protection," said Uncle George.

"It isn't manly, Charley."

Thus rebuked, Charley walked away somewhat crestfallen. But before he

disappeared at the other end of the piazza, he turned back to sing,--

"Willie went a-hunting, and caught a pappoose."

"She a'n't a pappoose, she's a little girl," shouted Willie; "and she's

_my_ little girl. I didn't hunt her; I found her."

Uncle George and his family did not return to their cabin till the warm,

yellow tint of the sky had changed to azure-gray. While consultations

were held concerning how it was best to dispose of the little wanderer

for the night, she nestled into a corner, where, rolled up like a dog,

she fell fast asleep. A small bed was improvised for her in the kitchen.

But when they attempted to raise her up, she was dreaming of her

mother's wigwam, and, waking suddenly to find herself among strangers,

she forgot the events of the preceding hours, and became a pitiful image

of terror. Willie, who was being undressed in another room, was brought

in in his nightgown, and the sight of him reassured her. She clung to

him, and refused to be separated from him; and it was finally concluded

that she should sleep with her little protector in his trundle-bed,

which every night was rolled out from under the bed of his father and

mother. A tub of water was brought, and as Willie jumped into it, and

seemed to like to splash about, she was induced to do the same. The

necessary ablutions having been performed, and the clean nightgowns put

on, the little ones walked to their trundle-bed hand in hand. Charley

pulled the long hair once more, as they passed, and began to sing,

"Willie went a-hunting"; but the young knight-errant was too sleepy and

tired to return to the charge. The older brother soon went to rest also;

and all became as still within-doors as it was on the wide, solitary

prairie.

The father and mother sat up a little while, one mending a harness, the

other repairing a rip in a garment. They talked together in low tones of

Willie's singular adventure; and Mrs. Wharton asked her husband whether

he supposed this child belonged to the Indians whose tracks their man

had seen on his way to the mill. She shared her brother's kindly feeling

toward the red men, because they were an injured and oppressed race.

But, in her old New-England home, she had heard and read stories that

made a painful impression on the imagination of childhood; and though

she was now a sensible and courageous woman, the idea of Indians in the

vicinity rendered the solitude of the wilderness oppressive. The sudden

cry of a night-bird made her start and turn pale.

"Don't be afraid," said her husband, soothingly, "It is as George says.

Nothing but justice and kindness is needed to render these wild people

firm friends to the whites."

"I believe it," she replied; "but treaties with them have been

so wickedly violated, and they are so shamefully cheated by

Government-agents, that they naturally look upon all white men as their

enemies. How can they know that we are more friendly to them than

others?"

"We have been kind to their child," responded Mr. Wharton, "and that

will prevent them from injuring us."

"I would have been just as kind to the little thing, if we had an army

here to protect us," she rejoined.

"They will know that, Jenny," he said. "Indian instincts are keen. Your

gentle eyes and motherly ways are a better defence than armies would

be." The mild blue eyes thanked him with an affectionate glance. His

words somewhat calmed her fears; but before retiring to rest, she looked

out, far and wide, upon the lonely prairie. It was beautiful, but

spectral, in the ghostly veil of moonlight. Every bolt was carefully

examined, and the tin horn hung by the bedside. When all preparations

were completed, she drew aside the window-curtain to look at the

children in their trundle-bed, all bathed with silvery moonshine. They

lay with their arms about each other's necks, the dark brow nestled

close to the rosy cheek, and the mass of black hair mingled with the

light brown locks. The little white boy of six summers and the Indian

maiden of four slept there as cozily as two kittens with different fur.

The mother gazed on them fondly, as she said,--

"It is a pretty sight. I often think what beautiful significance there

is in the Oriental benediction, 'May you sleep tranquilly as a child

when his friends are with him!'"

"It is, indeed, a charming picture," rejoined her husband. "This would

be a text for George to preach from; and his sermon would be, that

confidence is always born of kindness."

The fear of Indians vanished from the happy mother's thoughts, and she

fell asleep with a heart full of love for all human kind.

The children were out of their bed by daylight. The little savage padded

about with naked feet, apparently feeling much at home, but seriously

incommoded by her night-gown, which she pulled at restlessly, from

time to time, saying something in her own dialect, which no one could

interpret. But they understood her gestures, and showed her the kirtle

of plaited grass, still damp with the thorough washing it had had the

night before. At sight of it she became quite voluble; but what she said

no one knew. "What gibberish you talk!" exclaimed Charley. She would not

allow him to come near her. She remembered how he had pulled her hair

and tussled with Willie. But two bright buttons on a string made peace

between them. He put the mop on his head, and shook it at her, saying,

"Moppet, you'd be pretty, if you wore your hair like folks." Willie was

satisfied with this concession; and already the whole family began to

outgrow the feeling that the little wayfarer belonged to a foreign race.

Early in the afternoon two Indians came across the prairie. Moppet saw

them first, and announced the discovery by a shrill shout, which the

Indiana evidently heard; for they halted instantly, and then walked

on faster than before. When the child went to meet them, the woman

quickened her pace a little, and took her hand; but no signs of emotion

were perceptible. As they approached the cabin, Moppet appeared to be

answering their brief questions without any signs of fear. "Poor little

thing!" said Mrs. Wharton. "I am glad they are not angry with her. I was

afraid they might beat her."

The strangers were received with the utmost friendliness, but their

stock of English was so very scanty that little information could be

gained from them. The man pointed to the child, and said, "Wik-a-nee, me

go way she." And the woman said, "Me tank." No further light was ever

thrown upon Willie's adventure in finding a pappoose alone on the

prairie. The woman unstrapped from her shoulder a string of baskets,

which she laid upon the ground. Moppet said something to her mother, and

placed her hand on a small one brightly stained with red and yellow. The

basket was given to her, and she immediately presented it to Willie. At

the same time the Indian woman offered a large basket to Mrs. Wharton,

pointing to the child, and saying, "Wik-a-nee. Me tank." Money was

offered her, but she shook her head, and repeated, "Wik-a-nee. Me tank."

The man also refused the coin, with a slow motion of his head, saying,

"Me tank." They ate of the food that was offered them, and received a

salted fish and bread with "Me tank."

"Mother," exclaimed Willie, "I want to give Moppet something. May I give

her my Guinea-peas?"

"Certainly, my son, if you wish to," she replied.

He ran into the cabin, and came out with a tin box. When he uncovered

it, and showed Moppet the bright scarlet seeds, each with a shining

black spot, her dark eyes glowed, and she uttered a joyous "Eugh!"

The passive, sad expression of the Indian woman's countenance almost

brightened into a smile, as she said, "Wik-a-nee tank."

After resting awhile, she again strapped the baskets on her shoulder,

and taking her little one by the hand, they resumed their tramp across

the prairie,--no one knowing whence they came, or whither they were

going. As far as they could be seen, it was noticed that the child

looked back from time to time. She was saying to her mother she wished

they could take that little pale-faced boy with them.

"So Moppet is gone," said Charley. "I wonder whether we shall ever see

her again." Willie heaved a sigh, and said, "I wish she was my little

sister."

Thus met two innocent little beings, unconscious representatives of

races widely separated in moral and intellectual culture, but children

of the same Heavenly Father, and equally subject to the attractions of

great Mother Nature. Blessed childhood, that yields spontaneously to

those attractions, ignoring all distinctions of pride or prejudice!

Verily, we should lose all companionship with angels, were it not for

the ladder of childhood, on which they descend to meet us.

It was a pleasant ripple in the dull stream of their monotonous life,

that little adventure of the stray pappoose. At almost every gathering

of the household, for several days after, something was recalled of

her uncouth, yet interesting looks, and of her wild, yet winning ways.

Charley persisted in his opinion that "Moppet would be pretty, if she

wore her hair like folks."

"Her father and mother called her Wik-a-nee," said Willie; "and I like

that name better than I do Moppet." He took great pains to teach it

to his baby sister; and he succeeded so well, that, whenever the

red-and-yellow basket was shown to her, she said, "Mik-a-nee,"--the W

being beyond her infant capabilities.

Something of tenderness mixed with Mrs. Wharton's recollections of the

grotesque little stranger. "I never saw anything so like the light of an

astral lamp as those beautiful large eyes of hers," said she. "I began

to love the odd little thing; and if she had stayed much longer, I

should have been very loath to part with her."

The remembrance of the incident gradually faded; but whenever a far-off

neighbor or passing emigrant stopped at the cabin, Willie brought

forward his basket, and repeated the story of Wik-a-nee,--seldom

forgetting to imitate her strange cry of joy when she saw the scarlet

peas. His mother was now obliged to be more watchful than ever to

prevent him from wandering out of sight and hearing. He had imbibed an

indefinite idea that there was a great realm of adventure out there

beyond. If he could only get a little nearer to the horizon, he thought

he might perhaps find another pappoose, or catch a prairie-dog and tame

it. He had heard his father say that a great many of those animals lived

together in houses under ground,--that they placed sentinels at their

doors to watch, and held a town-meeting when any danger approached.

When Willie was summoned from his exploring excursions, he often

remonstrated, saying, "Mother, what makes you blow the horn so _soon_?

You never give me time to find a prairie-dog. It would be capital fun

to have a dog that knows enough to go to town-meeting." Charley took

particular pleasure in increasing his excitement on that subject.

He told him he had once seen a prairie-dog standing sentinel at the

entrance-hole of their habitations. He made a picture of the creature

with charcoal on the shed-door, and proposed to prick a copy of it into

Willie's arm with India-ink, which was joyfully agreed to. The likeness,

when completed, was very much like a squash upon two sticks, but it

was eminently satisfactory to the boys. There was no end to Willie's

inquiries. How to find that hole which Charley had seen, to crawl into

it, and attend a dogs' town-meeting, was the ruling idea of his life.

Unsentimental as it was, considering the juvenile gallantry he had

manifested, it was an undeniable fact, that, in the course of a few

months, prairie-dogs had chased Wik-a-nee almost beyond the bounds of

his memory.

Autumn came, and was passing away. The waving sea of verdure had become

brown, and the clumps of trees, dotted about like islands, stood denuded

of their foliage. At this season the cattle were missing one day, and

were not to be found. A party was formed to go in search of them,

consisting of all the men from both homesteads, except Mr. Wharton, who

remained to protect the women and children, in case of any unforeseen

emergency. Charley obtained his father's permission to go with Uncle

George; and Willie began to beg hard to go also. When his mother told

him he was too young to be trusted, he did not cry, because he knew it

was an invariable rule that he was never to have anything he cried

for; but he grasped her gown, and looked beseechingly in her face, and

said,--

"Oh, mother, do let me go with Charley, just this once! Maybe we shall

catch a prairie-dog."

"No, darling," she replied. "You are not old enough to go so far. When

you are a bigger boy, you shall go after the cattle, and go a-hunting

with father, too, if you like."

"Oh, dear!" he exclaimed, impatiently, "when _shall_ I be a bigger boy?

You _never_ will let me go far enough to see the prairie-dogs hold a

town-meeting!"

The large brown eyes looked up very imploringly.

Mr. Wharton smiled and said,--

"Jenny, you do keep the little fellow tied pretty close to your

apron-string. Perhaps you had better let him go this time."

Thus reinforced, the petted boy redoubled his importunities, and finally

received permission to go, on condition that he would be very careful

not to wander away from his brother. Charley promised not to trust him

out of his sight; and the men said, if they were detained till dark,

they would be sure to put the boys in a safe path to return home

before sunset. Willie was equipped for the excursion, full of joyous

anticipations of marvellous adventures and promises to return before

sunset and tell his parents about everything he had seen. His mother

kissed him, as she drew the little cap over his brown locks, and

repeated her injunctions over and over again. He jumped down both steps

of the piazza at once, eager to see whether Uncle George and Charley

were ready. His mother stood watching him, and he looked up to her with

such a joyful smile on his broad, frank face, that she called to him,--

"Come and kiss me again, Willie, before you go; and remember, dear, not

to go out of sight of Uncle George and Charley."

He leaped up the steps, gave her a hearty smack, and bounded away.

When the party started, she stood a little while gazing after them. Her

husband said,--

"What a pet you make of that boy, Jenny. And it must be confessed he is

the brightest one of the lot."

"And a good child, too," she rejoined. "He is so affectionate, and so

willing to mind what is said to him! But he is so active, and eager for

adventures! How the prairie-dogs do occupy his busy little brain!"

"That comes of living out West," replied Mr. Wharton, smiling. "You know

the miller told us, when we first came, that there was nothing like it

for making folks know everything about all _natur_'."

They separated to pursue their different avocations, and, being busy,

were consequently cheerful,--except that the mother had some occasional

misgivings whether she had acted prudently in consenting that her

darling should go beyond sound of the horn. She began to look out for

the boys early in the afternoon; but the hours passed, and still they

came not. The sun had sunk below the horizon, and was sending up regular

streaks of gold, like a great glittering crown, when Charley was seen

coming alone across the prairie. A pang like the point of a dagger went

through the mother's heart. Her first thought was,--

"Oh, my son! my son! some evil beast has devoured him."

Charley walked so slowly and wearily that she could not wait for his

coming, but went forth to meet him. As soon as she came within sound of

his voice, she called out,--

"Oh, Charley, where's Willie?"

The poor boy trembled in every joint, as he threw himself upon her neck

and sobbed out,--

"Oh, mother! mother!"

Her face was very pale, as she asked, in low, hollow tones,--

"Is he dead?"

"No, mother; but we don't know where he is. Oh, mother, do forgive me!"

was the despairing answer.

The story was soon told. The cattle had strayed farther than they

supposed, and Willie was very tired before they came in sight of them.

It was not convenient to spare a man to convey him home, and it was

agreed that Charley should take him a short distance from their route

to a log-cabin, with whose friendly inmates they were well acquainted.

There he was to be left to rest, while his brother returned for a while

to help in bringing the cattle together. The men separated, going in

various circuitous directions, agreeing to meet at a specified point,

and wait for Charley. He had a boy's impatience to be at the place of

rendezvous. When he arrived near the cabin, and had led Willie into the

straight path to it, he charged him to go into the house, and not leave

it till he came for him; and then he ran back with all speed to Uncle

George. The transaction seemed to him so safe that it did not occur to

his honest mind that he had violated the promise given to his mother.

While the sun was yet high in the heavens, his uncle sent him back to

the log-cabin for Willie, and sent a man with him to guide them both

within sight of home. Great was their alarm when the inmates of the

house told them they had not seen the little boy. They searched, in hot

haste, in every direction. Diverging from the road to the cabin was a

path known as the Indian trail, on which hunters, of various tribes,

passed and repassed in their journeys to and from Canada. The prints of

Willie's shoes were traced some distance on this path, but disappeared

at a wooded knoll not far off. The inmates of the cabin said a party of

Indians had passed that way in the forenoon. With great zeal they joined

in the search, taking with them horns and dogs. Charley ran hither and

thither, in an agony of remorse and terror, screaming, "Willie! Willie!"

Horns were blown with all the strength of manly lungs; but there was no

answer,--not even the illusion of an echo. All agreed in thinking that

the lost boy had been on the Indian trail; but whether he had taken it

by mistake, or whether he had been tempted aside from his path by hopes

of finding prairie-dogs, was matter of conjecture. Charley was almost

exhausted by fatigue and anxiety, when his father's man guided him

within sight of home, and told him to go to his mother, while he

returned to give the alarm to Uncle George. This was all the unhappy

brother had to tell; and during the recital his voice was often

interrupted by sobs, and he exclaimed, with passionate vehemence,--

"Oh, father! oh, mother! do forgive me! I didn't think I was doing

wrong,--indeed, I didn't!"

With aching hearts, they tried to soothe him; but he would not be

comforted.

Mr. Wharton's first impulse was to rush out in search of his lost child.

But the shades of evening were close at hand, and he deemed it unsafe to

leave Jenny and Mary and their little girls with no other protector than

an overtired boy.

"Oh, why did I advise her to let the dear child go?" was the lamenting

cry continually resounding in his heart; and the mother reproached

herself bitterly that she had consented against her better judgment.

Neither of them uttered these thoughts; but remorseful sorrow manifested

itself in increased tenderness toward each other and the children. When

Emma was undressed for the night, the mother's tears fell fast among her

ringlets; and when the father took her in his arms to carry her to the

trundle-bed, he pressed her to his heart more closely than ever before;

while she, all wondering at the strange tearful silence round her, began

to grieve, and say,--

"I want Willie to go to bed with me. Why don't Willie come?"

Putting strong constraint upon the agony her words excited, the unhappy

parents soothed her with promises until she fell into a peaceful

slumber. As they turned to leave the bedroom, both looked at the vacant

pillow where that other young head had reposed for years, and they fell

into each other's arms and wept.

Charley could not be persuaded to go to bed till Uncle George came; and

they forbore to urge it, seeing that he was too nervous and excited to

sleep. Stars were winking at the sleepy flowers on the prairie, when the

party returned with a portion of the cattle, and no tidings of Willie.

Uncle George's mournful face revealed this, before he exclaimed,--

"Oh, my poor sister! I shall never forgive myself for not going with

your boys. But the cabin was in plain sight, and the distance so short I

thought I could trust Charley."

"Oh, don't, uncle! don't!" exclaimed the poor boy. "My heart will

break!"

A silent patting on the head was the only answer; and Uncle George never

reproached him afterward.

Neither of the distressed parents could endure the thoughts of

discontinuing the search till morning. A wagon was sent for the miller

and his men, and, accompanied by them, Mr. Wharton started for the

Indian trail. They took with them lanterns, torches, and horns, and a

trumpet, to be sounded as a signal that the lost one was found. The

wretched mother traversed the piazza slowly, gazing after them, as their

torches cast a weird, fantastic light on the leafless trees they passed.

She listened to the horns resounding in the distance, till the _tremolo_

motion they imparted to the air became faint as the buzz of insects. At

last, Charles, who walked silently by her side, was persuaded to go to

bed, where, some time after midnight, he cried himself into uneasy,

dreamful slumber. But no drowsiness came to the mother's eyelids. All

night long she sat watching at the bedroom-window, longing for the gleam

of returning torches, and the joyful _fanfare_ of the trumpet. But all

was dark and still. Only stars, like the eyes of spirits, looked down

from the solemn arch of heaven upon the desolate expanse of prairie.

The sun had risen when the exploring party returned, jaded and

dispirited, from their fruitless search. Uncle George, who went forth to

meet them, dreaded his sister's inquiring look. But her husband laid his

hand tenderly on her shoulder, and said.---

"Don't be discouraged, Jenny. I don't believe any harm has happened to

him. There are no traces of wild beasts."

"But the Indians," she murmured, faintly.

"I am glad to hear you say that," said Uncle George. "My belief is that

he is with the Indians; and for that reason, I think we have great cause

to hope. Very likely he saw the Indians, and thought Wik-a-nee was with

them, and so went in pursuit of her. If she, or any of her relatives,

are with those hunters, they will be sure to bring back our little

Willie; for Indians are never ungrateful."

The mother's fainting heart caught eagerly at this suggestion; and

Charley felt so much relieved by it that he was on the point of saying

he was sure it must have been either Moppet or a dogs' town-meeting that

lured Willie from the path he had pointed out to him. But everybody

looked too serious for jesting; and memory of his own fault quickly

repressed the momentary elasticity.

Countless were the times that the bereaved parents east wistful glances

over the prairie, with a vague hope of descrying Indians returning

with their child. The search was kept up for days and weeks. All the

neighbors, within a circuit of fifteen miles, entered zealously into

the work, and explored prairie and forest far and wide. At last these

efforts were given up as useless. Still Uncle George held out the

cheerful prospect that the Indians would bring him, when they returned

from their long hunting-excursion; and with this the mother tried to

sustain her sinking hopes. But month after month she saw the snowy

expanse of prairie gleaming in the moonlight, and no little footstep

broke its untrodden crust. Spring returned, and the sea of flowers again

rippled in waves, as if Flora and her train had sportively taken lessons

of the water-nymphs; but no little hands came laden with blossoms to

heap in Emma's lap. The birds twittered and warbled, but the responsive

whistle of the merry boy was silent; only its echo was left in the

melancholy halls of memory. His chair and plate were placed as usual,

when the family met at meals. At first this was done with an undefined

hope that he might come before they rose from table, and afterward

they could not bear to discontinue the custom, because it seemed like

acknowledging that he was entirely gone.

Mrs. Wharton changed rapidly. The light of her eyes grew dim, the color

faded from her cheeks, and the tones of her once cheerful voice became

plaintive as the "Light of Other Days." Always, from the depths of her

weary heart, came up the accusing cry, "Oh, why did I let him go?" She

never reproached others; but all the more bitterly did Mr. Wharton,

Uncle George, and above all poor Charley, reproach themselves. The once

peaceful cabins were haunted by a little ghost, and the petted child

became an accusing spirit. Alas! who is there that is not chained to

some rock of the past, with the vulture of memory tearing at his vitals,

screaming forever in the ear of conscience? These unavailing regrets are

inexorable as the whip of the Furies.

Four years had passed away, when some fur-traders passed through that

region, and told of a white boy they had seen among the Pottawatomie

Indians. Everybody had heard the story of Willie's mysterious

disappearance, and the tidings were speedily conveyed to the Wharton

family. They immediately wrote to the United-States Agent among that

tribe. After waiting awhile, they all became restless. One day, Uncle

George said to his sister,--

"Jenny, I have never forgiven myself for leaving your boys to take care

of themselves, that fatal day. I cannot be easy. I must go in search of

Willie."

"Heaven bless you!" she replied. "My dear James has just been talking of

starting on the same journey. I confess I want some one to go and look

for the poor boy; but it seems to me selfish; for it is a long and

difficult journey, and may bring fresh misfortunes upon us."

After some friendly altercation between Mr. Wharton and the brother, as

to which should go, it was decided that George should have his way; and

brave, unselfish Aunt Mary uttered no word of dissuasion. He started on

his arduous journey, cheered by hope, and strong in a generous purpose.

It seemed long before a letter was received from him, and when it came,

its contents were discouraging. The Indian Agent said he had caused

diligent search to be made, and he was convinced there was no white

child among the tribes in that region. Uncle George persevered in

efforts to obtain some clue to the report which had induced him to

travel so far. But after several weeks, he was obliged to return alone,

and without tidings.

Mrs. Wharton's hopes had been more excited than she was herself aware

of, and she vainly tried to rally from the disappointment. This

never-ending uncertainty, this hope forever deferred, was harder to

endure than would have been the knowledge that her dear son was dead.

She thought it would be a relief, even if fragments of his clothes

should be found, showing that he had been torn to pieces by wild beasts;

for then she would have the consolation of believing that her darling

was with the angels. But when she thought of him hopelessly out of

reach, among the Indians, imagination conjured up all manner of painful

images. Deeper and deeper depression overshadowed her spirits and

seriously impaired her health. She was diligent in her domestic duties,

careful and tender of every member of her household, but everything

wearied her. Languidly she saw the seasons come and go, and took

no pleasure in them. A village was growing up round her; but the

new-comers, in whom she would once have felt a lively interest, now

flitted by her like the shadows in a magic-lantern. "Poor woman!" said

the old settlers to the new ones. "She is not what she was. She is

heart-broken."

Eight years more passed away, and Mrs. Wharton, always feeble, but never

complaining, continued to perform a share of household work, with a

pensive resignation which excited tenderness in her family and inspired

even strangers with pitying deference. Her heartstrings had not broken,

but they gradually withered and dried up, under the blighting influence

of this life-long sorrow. It was mild October weather, when she lay down

to rise no more. Emma had outgrown the trundle-bed, and no one occupied

it; but it remained in the old place. When they led her into the bedroom

for the last time, she asked them to draw it out, that she might look

upon Willie's pillow once more. Memories of her fair boy sleeping there

in the moonlight came into her soul with the vividness of reality.

Her eyes filled with tears, and she seemed to be occupied with inward

prayer. At a signal from her, the husband and brother lifted her

tenderly, and placed her in the bed, which Aunt Mary had prepared. The

New Testament was brought, and Mr. Wharton read the fourteenth chapter

of John. As they closed the book, she said faintly, "Sing, 'I'm going

home.'" It was a Methodist hymn, learned in her youth, and had always

been a favorite with her. The two families had often sung it together on

Sabbath days, exciting the wonderment of the birds in the stillness of

the prairie. They now sang it with peculiar depth of feeling; and as

the clear treble of Aunt Mary's voice, and the sweet childlike tones of

Emma, followed and hovered over the clear, strong tenor of Uncle George,

and the deep bass of Mr. Wharton, the invalid smiled serenely, while her

attenuated hand moved to the measure of the music.

She slept much on that and the following day, and seemed unconscious of

all around her. On the third day, her watchful husband noticed that her

countenance lighted up suddenly, like a landscape when clouds pass from

the sun.

This was followed by a smile expressive of deep inward joy. He stooped

down and whispered,--

"What is it, dear?"

She looked up, with eyes full of interior light, and said,--

"Our Willie!"

She spoke in tones stronger than they had heard from her for several

days; and after a slight pause, she added,--

"Don't you see him? Wik-a-nee is with him, and he is weaving a string of

the Guinea-peas in her hair. He wears an Indian blanket; but they look

happy, there where yellow leaves are falling and the bright waters are

sparkling."

"It is a flood of memory," said Mr. Wharton, in a low tone. "She recalls

the time when Wik-a-nee was so pleased with the Guinea-peas that Willie

gave her."

"She has wakened from a pleasant dream," said Uncle George, with the

same subdued voice. "It still remains with her, and the pictures seem

real."

The remarks were not intended for her ear, but she heard them, and

murmured,--

"No,--not a dream. Don't you _see_ them?"

They were the last words she ever uttered. She soon dozed away into

apparent oblivion; but twice afterward, that preternatural smile

illumined her whole countenance.

At that same hour, hundreds of miles away, on the side of a wooded hill,

mirrored in bright waters below, sat a white lad with a brown lassie

beside him, among whose black shining tresses he was weaving strings of

scarlet seeds. He was clothed with an Indian blanket, and she with a

skirt of woven grass. Above them, from a tree glorious with sunshine,

fell a golden shower of autumn leaves. They were talking together in

some Indian dialect.

"A-lee-lah," said he, "your mother always told me that I gave you these

red seeds when I was a little boy. I wonder where I was then. I wish I

knew. I never understood half she told me about the long trail. I don't

believe I could ever find my way."

"Don't go!" said his companion, pleadingly. "The sun will shine no more

on A-lee-lah's path."

He smiled and was silent for a few minutes, while he twined some of the

scarlet seeds on grasses round her wrist. He revealed the tenor of his

musings by saying,--

"A-lee-lah, I wish I could see my mother. Your mother told me she had

blue eyes and pale hair. I don't remember ever seeing a woman with blue

eyes and pale hair."

Suddenly he started.

"What is it?" inquired the young girl, springing to her feet.

"My mother!" he exclaimed. "Don't you see her? She is smiling at me.

How beautiful her blue eyes are! Ah, now she is gone!" His whole frame

quivered with emotion, as he cried out, in an agony of earnestness, "I

want to go to my mother! I _must_ go to my mother! Who can tell me where

to find my mother?"

"You have looked into the Spirit-Land," replied the Indian maiden,

solemnly.

Was the mighty power of love, in that dying mother's heart, a spiritual

force, conveying her image to the mind of her child, as electricity

transmits the telegram? Love photographs very vividly on the memory;

when intensely concentrated, may it not perceive scenes and images

unknown to the bodily eye, and, like the sunshine, under favorable

circumstances, make the pictures visible? Who can answer such questions?

Mysterious beyond comprehension are the laws of our complex being.

The mother saw her distant son, and the son beheld his long-forgotten

mother. How it was, neither of them knew or thought; but on the soul

of each, in their separate spheres of existence, the vision was

photographed.

In the desolated dwelling on the prairie, they were all unconscious of

this magnetic transmission of intelligence between the dying mother and

her far-off child. As she lay in her coffin, they spoke soothingly

to each other, that she had passed away without suffering, dreaming

pleasantly of Willie and the little Indian girl. Their memories were

excited to fresh activity, and the sayings and doings of Willie and

the pappoose were recounted for the thousandth time. Emma had no

recollection of her lost brother, and the story of his adventure with

Moppet always amused her young imagination. But such reminiscences never

brought a smile to Charley's face. When he heard the clods fall on

his mother's coffin, heavier and more dismally fell on his heart the

remembrance of his broken promise, which had so dried up the fountains

of her life. Four times had the flowers bloomed above that mother's

grave, and still, for her dear sake, all the memorials of her absent

darling remained as she had liked to have them. The trundle-bed was

never removed, the Indian basket remained under the glass in the

bedroom, where his own little hands had put it, and his chair retained

its place at the table. Out of the family he was nearly forgotten; but

parents now and then continued to frighten truant boys by telling them

of Willie Wharton, who was carried off by Indians and never heard of

after.

The landscape had greatly changed since Mr. Wharton and his

brother-in-law built their cabins in the wilderness. Those cabins were

now sheds and kitchens appended to larger and more commodious dwellings.

A village had grown up around them. On the spire of a new meeting-house

a gilded fish sailed round from north to south, to the great admiration

of children in the opposite schoolhouse. The wild-flowers of the prairie

were supplanted by luxuriant fields of wheat and rye, forever undulating

in wave-like motion, as if Nature loved the rhythm of the sea, and

breathed it to the inland grasses. Neat little Bessie was a married

woman now, and presided over the young Squire's establishment, in a

large white house with green blinds. Charley had taken to himself a

wife, and had a little Willie in the cradle, in whose infant features

grandfather fondly traced some likeness to the lost one.

Such was the state of things, when Charles Wharton returned from the

village-store, one day, with some articles wrapped in a newspaper from

Indiana. A vague feeling of curiosity led him to glance over it, and his

attention was at once arrested by the following paragraph:--

"A good deal of interest has been excited here by the appearance of a

young man, who supposes himself to be twenty-three years old, evidently

white, but with the manners and dress of an Indian. He says he was

carried away from his home by Indians, and they have always told him he

was then six years old. He speaks no English, and an Indian interpreter

who is with him is so scantily supplied with words that the information

we have obtained is very unsatisfactory. But we have learned that the

young man is trying to find his mother. Some of our neighbors regard him

as an impostor. But he does not ask for money, and there is something

in his frank physiognomy calculated to inspire confidence. We therefore

believe his statement, and publish it, hoping it may be seen by some

bereaved family."

Charles rushed into the field, and exclaimed,--

"Father, I do believe we have at last got some tidings of Willie!"

"Where? What is it?" was the quick response.

The offered newspaper was eagerly seized, and the father's hand trembled

visibly while he read the paragraph.

"We must start for Indiana directly," he said; and he walked rapidly

toward the house, followed by his son.

Arriving at the gate, he paused and said,--

"But, Charles, he will have altered so much that perhaps we shouldn't

know him; and it may be, as the people say, that this youth is an

impostor."

The young man replied, unhesitatingly,--

"I can tell whether he is an impostor. I shall know my brother."

His voice quivered a little, as he spoke the last word.

Mr. Wharton, without appearing to notice it, said,--

"You have a great deal of work on hand at this season. Wouldn't it be

better for Uncle George and me to go?"

He answered impetuously,--

"If all my property goes to ruin, I will hunt for Willie all over the

earth, so long as there is any hope of finding him, I always felt as if

mother couldn't forgive me for leaving him that day, though she always

tried to make me think she did. And now, if we find him at last, she is

not here to"----

His voice became choked.

Mr. Wharton replied, impressively,--

"She will come with him, my son. Wherever he may be, they are not

divided now."

The next morning Charles started on his expedition, having made

preparations for an absence of some months, if so long a time should

prove necessary. The first letters received from him were tantalizing.

The young man and his interpreter had gone to Michigan, in consequence

of hearing of a family there who had lost a little son many years ago.

But those who had seen him in Indiana described him as having brown eyes

and hair, and as saying that his mother's eyes were the color of the

sky, Charles hastened to Michigan. The wanderer had been there, but had

left, because the family he sought were convinced he was not their son.

They said he had gone to Canada, with the intention of rejoining the

tribe of Indians he had left.

We will not follow the persevering brother through all his travels.

Again and again he came close upon the track, and had the disappointment

of arriving a little too late. On a chilly day of advanced autumn, he

mounted a pony and rode toward a Canadian forest, where he was told some

Indians had encamped. He tied his pony at the entrance of the wood, and

followed a path through the underbrush. He had walked about a quarter of

a mile, when his ears were pierced by a shrill, discordant yell, which

sounded neither animal nor human. He stopped abruptly, and listened.

All was still, save a slight creaking of boughs in the wind. He pressed

forward in the direction whence the sound had come, not altogether free

from anxiety, though habitually courageous. He soon came in sight of a

cluster of wigwams, outside of which, leaning against trees, or seated

on the fallen leaves, were a number of men, women, and children, dressed

in all sorts of mats and blankets, some with tufts of feathers in their

hair, others with bands and tassels of gaudy-colored wampum. One or two

had a regal air, and might have stood for pictures of Arab chiefs or

Carthaginian generals; but most of them looked squalid and dejected.

None of them manifested any surprise at the entrance of the stranger.

All were as grave as owls. They had, in fact, seen him coming through

the woods, and had raised their ugly war-whoop, in sport, to see whether

it would frighten him. It was their solemn way of enjoying fun. Among

them was a youth, tanned by exposure to wind and sun, but obviously

of white complexion. His hair was shaggy, and cut straight across his

forehead, as Moppet's had been. Charles fixed upon him a gaze so intense

that he involuntarily took up a hatchet that lay beside him, as if he

thought it might be necessary to defend himself from the intruder.

"Can any of you speak English?" inquired Charles.

"Me speak," replied an elderly man.

Charles explained that he wanted to find a white young man who had been

in Indiana and Michigan searching for his mother.

"_Him_ pale-face," rejoined the interpreter, pointing to the youth,

whose brown eyes glanced from one to the other with a perplexed

expression.

Charles made a strong effort to restrain his impatience, while the

interpreter slowly explained his errand. The pale-faced youth came

toward him.

"Let me examine your right arm," said Charles.

The beaver-skin mantle was raised; and there, in a dotted outline of

blue spots, was the likeness of the prairie-dog which in boyish play he

had pricked into Willie's arm. With a joyful cry he fell upon his neck,

exclaiming, "My brother!" The interpreter repeated the word in the

Indian tongue. The youthful stranger uttered no sound; but Charles felt

his heart throb, as they stood locked in a close embrace. When their

arms unclasped, they looked earnestly into each other's faces. That sad

memory of the promise made to their gentle mother, and so thoughtlessly

broken, brought tears to the eyes of the elder brother; but the younger

stood apparently unmoved. The interpreter, observing this, said,--

"Him sorry-glad; but red man he no cry."

There was much to damp the pleasure of this strange interview. The

uncouth costume, and the shaggy hair falling over the forehead, gave

Willie such a wild appearance, it was hard for Charles to realize that

they were brothers. Inability to understand each other's language

created a chilling barrier between them. Charles was in haste to

change his brother's dress, and acquire a stock of Indian words. The

interpreter was bound farther north; but he agreed to go with them three

days' journey, and teach them on the way. They were merely guests at the

encampment, and no one claimed a right to control their motions. Charles

distributed beads among the women and pipes among the men; and two hours

after he had entered the wood, he was again mounted on his pony, with

William and the interpreter walking beside him. As he watched his

brother's erect figure striding along, with such a bold, free step, he

admitted to himself that there were some important compensations for the

deficiencies of Indian education.

Languages are learned rapidly, when the heart is a pupil. Before they

parted from the interpreter, the brothers were able, by the aid of

pantomime, to interchange various skeletons of ideas, which imagination

helped to clothe with bodies. At the first post-town, a letter was

despatched to their father, containing these words: "I have found him.

He is well, and we are coming home. Dear Lucy must teach baby Willie to

crow and clap his hands. God bless you all! Charley."

They pressed forward as fast as possible, and at the last stage of

their journey travelled all night; for Charles had a special reason for

wishing to arrive at the homestead on the following day. The brothers

were now dressed alike, and a family-likeness between them was obvious.

Willie's shaggy hair had been cut, and the curtain of dark brown locks

being turned aside revealed a well-shaped forehead whiter than his

cheeks. He had lost something of the freedom of his motions; for the

new garments sat uneasily upon him, and he wore them with an air of

constraint.

The warm golden light of the sun had changed to silvery brightness,

and the air was cool and bracing, when they rode over the prairie so

familiar to the eye of Charles, but which had lost nearly all the

features that had been impressed on the boyish mind of William. At a

little distance from the village they left their horses and walked

across the fields to the back-door of their father's house; for they

were not expected so soon, and Charles wished to take the family by

surprise. It was Thanksgiving day. Wild turkeys were prepared for

roasting, and the kitchen was redolent of pies and plum-pudding. When

they entered, no one was there but an old woman hired to help on festive

occasions. She uttered a little cry when she saw them; but Charles put

his finger to his lip, and hurried on to the family sitting-room. All

were there,--Father, Emma, Uncle George, Aunt Mary, Bessie and her young

Squire, Charles's wife, baby, and all. There was a universal rush, and

one simultaneous shout of, "Willie! Willie!" Charles's young wife threw

herself into his arms; but all the rest clustered round the young

stranger, as the happy father clasped him to his bosom. When the tumult

of emotion had subsided a little, Charles introduced each one separately

to his brother, explaining their relationship as well as he could in the

Indian dialect. Their words were unintelligible to the wanderer, but he

understood their warmth of welcome, and said,--

"Me tank. Me no much speak."

Mr. Wharton went into the bedroom and returned with a morocco case,

which he opened and placed in the stranger's hand, saying, in a solemn

tone,--

"Your mother."

Charles, with a tremor in his voice, repeated the word in the Indian

tongue. Willie gazed at the blue eyes of the miniature, touched them,

pointed to the sky, and said,--

"Me see she, time ago."

All supposed that he meant the memories of his childhood. But he in fact

referred to the vision he had seen four years before, as he explained to

them afterward, when he had better command of their language.

The whole family wept as the miniature passed from hand to hand, and,

with a sudden outburst of grief, Charles exclaimed,--

"Oh, if _she_ were only here with us this happy day!"

"My son, she is with us," said his father, impressively.

William was the only one who seemed unmoved. He did not remember his

mother, except as he had seen her in that moment of clairvoyance; and it

had been part of his Indian training to suppress emotion. But he put his

hand on his heart, and said,--

"Me no much speak."

When the little red-and-yellow basket was brought forward, it awakened

no recollections in his mind. They pointed to it, and said, "Wik-a-nee,

Moppet"; but he made no response.

His father eyed him attentively, and said,--

"It surely _must_ be our Willie. I see the resemblance to myself. We

cannot be mistaken."

"I _know_ he is our Willie," said Charles; and removing his brother's

coat, he showed what was intended to be the likeness of a prairie-dog.

His father and Uncle George remembered it well; and it was a subject of

regret that William could not be made to understand any jokes about his

boyish state of mind on that subject. Mr. Wharton pointed to the chair

he used to occupy, and said,--

"It seems hardly possible that this tall stranger can be the little

Willie who used to sit there. But it is our Willie. God be praised!"

He paused a moment, and added, "Before we partake of our Thanksgiving

dinner, let us all unite in thanks to our Heavenly Father; 'for this my

son was dead and is alive again, he was lost and is found.'"

They all rose, and he offered a prayer, to which heart-felt emotion

imparted eloquence.

Charles had taken every precaution to have his brother appear as little

as possible like a savage, when he restored him to his family; and now,

without mentioning that he would like raw meat better than all their

dainties, he went to the kitchen to superintend the cooking of some

Indian succotash, and buffalo-steak _very_ slightly broiled.

For some time, the imperfect means of communicating by speech was a

great impediment to confidential intercourse, and a drawback upon their

happiness. Emma, whose imagination had been a good deal excited by the

prospect of a new brother, was a little disappointed. In her own private

mind, she thought she should prefer for a brother a certain Oberlin

student, with whom she had danced the last Thanksgiving evening. Bessie,

always a stickler for propriety, ventured to say to her mother that she

hoped he would learn to use his knife and fork, like other people. But

to older members of the family, who distinctly remembered Willie in his

boyhood, these things seemed unimportant. It was enough for them that

the lost treasure was found.

The obstacle created by difference of language disappeared with a

rapidity that might have seemed miraculous, were it not a well-known

fact that one's native tongue forgotten is always easily restored.

It seems to remain latent in the memory, and can be brought out by

favorable circumstances, as writing with invisible ink reappears under

the influence of warmth. Tidings of the young man's restoration to his

family spread like fire on the prairie. People for twenty miles round

came to see the Willie Wharton of whose story they had heard so much.

Children were disappointed to find that he was not a little rosy-cheeked

boy, such as had been described to them. Some elderly people, who prided

themselves on their sagacity, shook their heads when they observed his

rapid improvement in English, and said to each other,--

"It a'n't worth while to disturb neighbor Wharton's confidence; but

depend upon it, that fellow's an impostor. As for the mark on his arm

that they call a prairie-dog, it looks as much like anything else that

has legs."

To the family, however, every week brought some additional confirmation

that the stranger was their own Willie. By degrees, he was able to make

them understand the outlines of his story. He did not remember anything

about parting from his brother on that disastrous day, and of course

could not explain what had induced him to turn aside to the Indian

trail. He said the Indians had always told him that a squaw, whose

pappoose had died, took a fancy to him, and decoyed him away; and that

afterward, when he cried to go back, they would not let him go. From

them he also learned that he called himself six years old, at the time

of his capture; but his name had been gradually forgotten, both by

himself and them. He wandered about with that tribe eight summers and

winters. Sometimes, when they had but little food, he suffered with

hunger; and once he was wounded by a tomahawk, when they had a fight

with some hostile tribe; but they treated him as well as they did their

own children. He became an expert hunter, thought it excellent sport,

and forgot that he was not an Indian. His squaw-mother died, and, not

long after, the tribe went a great many miles to collect furs. In the

course of this journey they encountered various tribes of Indians. One

night they encamped near some hunters who spoke another dialect, which

they could partly understand. Among them was a woman, who said she knew

him. She told him his mother was a white woman, with eyes blue as the

sky, and that she was very good to her little pappoose, when she lost

her way on the prairie. She wanted her husband to buy him, that they

might carry him back to his mother. He bought him for ten gallons of

whiskey, and promised to take him to his parents the next time the tribe

travelled in that direction,--because, he said, their little pappoose

had liked them very much.

"We remember her very well," said Mr. Wharton. "Her name was Wik-a-nee."

"That not _name_" replied William. "Wik-a-nee mean little small thing."

"You were a small boy when you found the pappoose on the prairie,"

rejoined his father. "You took a great liking to her, and said she

was _your_ little girl. When she went away, you gave her your box of

Guinea-peas."

"Guinea-peas? What that?" inquired the young man.

"They are red seeds with black spots on them," replied his father.

"Emma, I believe you have some. Show him one."

The moment he saw it, he exclaimed,--

"Haha! A-lee-lah show me Guinea-peas. Her say me give she."

"Then you know Wik-a-nee?" said his father, in an inquiring tone.

The wanderer had acquired the gravity of the Indians. He never laughed,

and rarely smiled. But a broad smile lighted up his frank countenance,

as he answered,--

"Me know A-lee-lah very well. She not Wik-a-nee now."

Then he became grave again, and told how he was twining the red seeds in

A-lee-lah's hair, when his mother came and looked at him with great blue

eyes and smiled. Most of his auditors thought he was telling a dream.

But Mr. Wharton said to his oldest son,--

"I told you, Charles, that mother and son were not separated now."

William seemed perplexed by this remark; but he comprehended in part,

and said,--

"Me see into Spirit-Land."

When asked why he had not started in search of his mother then, he

replied,--

"A-lee-lah's father, mother die. A-lee-lah say not go. Miles big many.

Me not know the trail. But Indians go hunt fur. Me go. Me sleep. Me

dream mother come, say go home. Me ask where mother? Charles come. Him

say brother."

The little basket was again brought forth, and Mr. Wharton said,--

"Wik-a-nee gave you this, when she went away; but when we showed it to

you, you did not remember it."

He took it and looked at it, and said,--

"Me not remember"; but when Emma would have put it away, he held it

fast; and that night he carried it with him to his chamber.

Some degree of restlessness had been observed in him previously to this

conversation. It increased as the weeks passed on. He became moody, and

liked to wander off alone, far from the settlement. The neighbors said

to each other,--"He will never be contented. He will go back to the

Indians." The family feared it also. But Uncle George, who was always

prone to look on the bright side of things, said,--

"We shall win him, if we manage right. We mustn't try to constrain him.

The greatest mistake we make in our human relations is interfering too

much with each other's freedom. We are too apt to think _our_ way is

the _only_ way. It's no such very great matter, after all, that William

sometimes uses his fingers instead of a knife and fork, and likes to

squat on the floor better than to sit in a chair. We mustn't drive him

away by taking too much notice of such things. Let him do just as he

likes. We are all creatures of circumstances. If you and I were obliged

to dance in tight boots, and make calls in white kid gloves, we should

feel like fettered fools."

"And _be_ what we felt like," replied Mr. Wharton; "and the worst part

of it would be, we shouldn't long have sense enough to _feel_ like

fools, but should fall to pitying and despising people who were of any

use in the world. But really, brother George, to have a son educated by

Indians is not exactly what one could wish."

"Undoubtedly not, in many respects; but it has its advantages. William

has already taught me much about the habits of animals and the qualities

of plants. Did you ever see an eye so sure as his to measure distances,

or to send an arrow to the mark? He never studied astronomy, but he

knows how to make use of the stars better than we do. Last week, when

we got benighted in the woods, he at once took his natural place as our

leader; and how quickly his sagacity brought us out of our trouble! He

will learn enough of our ways, by degrees. But I declare I would rather

have him always remain as he is than to make a city-fop of him. I once

saw an old beau at Saratoga, a forlorn-looking mortal, creeping about

in stays and tight boots; and I thought I should rather be the wildest

Ojibbeway that ever hunted buffaloes in a ragged blanket."

The rational policy recommended by Uncle George was carefully pursued.

Everything was done to attract William to their mode of life, but no

remark was made when he gave a preference to Indian customs. Still, he

seemed moody, and at times sad. He carried within him a divided heart.

One day, when he was sitting on a log, looking absent and dejected, his

father put his hand gently upon his shoulder, and said,--

"Are you not happy among us, my son? Don't you like us?"

"Me like very much," was the reply. "Me glad find father, brother. All

good."

He paused a moment, and then added,--

"A-lee-lah's father, mother be dead. A-lee-lah alone. A-lee-lah did say

not go. Me promise come back soon."

Mr. Wharton was silent. He was thinking what it was best to say. After

waiting a little, William said,--

"Father, me not remember what is English for squaw."

"Woman," replied Mr. Wharton.

"Not that," rejoined the young man. "What call Charles's squaw?"

"His wife," was the reply.

"Father, A-lee-lah be my wife. Me like bring A-lee-lah. Me fraid father

not like Indian."

Mr. Wharton placed his hand affectionately on his child's head, and

said,--

"Bring A-lee-lah, in welcome, my son. Your mother loved her, when she

was Wik-a-nee; and we will all love her now. Only be sure and come back

to us."

The brown eyes looked up and thanked him, with a glance that well repaid

the struggle those words had cost the wise father.

So the uncivilized youth again went forth into the wilderness, saying,

as he parted from them, "Me bring A-lee-lah." They sent her a necklace

and bracelets of many-colored beads, and bade him tell her that they

remembered Wik-a-nee, and had always kept her little basket, and that

they would love her when she came among them. Charles travelled some

distance with his brother, bought a new Indian blanket for him, and

returned with the garments he had worn during his sojourn at home. They

felt that they had acted wisely and kindly, but it was like losing

Willie again; for they all had great doubts whether he would ever

return.

He was incapable of writing a letter, and months passed without any

tidings of him. They all began to think that the attractions of a wild

life had been strong enough to conquer his newly awakened natural

affections. Uncle George said,--

"If it prove so, we shall have the consciousness of having done right.

We could not have kept him against his will, even if we had wished to do

it. If anything will win him to our side, it will be the influence of

love and freedom."

"They are strong agencies, and I have great faith in them," replied Mr.

Wharton.

Summer was far advanced, when a young man and woman in Indian costume

were seen passing through the village, and people said, "There is

William Wharton come back again!" They entered the father's house like

strange apparitions. Baby Willie was afraid of them, and toddled behind

his mother, to hide his face in the folds of her gown. All the other

members of the family had talked over the subject frequently, and had

agreed how they would treat Wik-a-nee, if she came among them again. So

they kissed them both, as they stood there in their Indian blankets, and

said, "Welcome home, brother! Welcome, sister!" A-lee-lah looked at them

timidly, with her large moonlight eyes, and said, "Me no speak." Mr.

Wharton put his hand gently on her head, and said, "We will love you, my

daughter." William translated the phrase to her, heaved a sigh, which

seemed a safety-valve for too much happiness, and replied, "Me thank

father, brother, sister, all." And A-lee-lah said, "Me tank," as her

mother had said, in years long gone by.

All felt desirous to remove from her eyebrows the mass of straight black

hair, which she considered extremely becoming, but which they regarded

as a great disfigurement to her really handsome face. However, no one

expressed such an opinion, by word or look. They had previously agreed

not to manifest any distaste for Indian fashions.

Mr. Wharton, apart, remarked to Charles,--

"When you were a boy, you said Moppet would be pretty, if she wore her

hair like folks. It was true then, and is still more true now."

"Let us have patience, and we shall see her handsome face come out of

that cloud by-and-by," rejoined Uncle George. "If we prove that we

love her, we shall gain influence over her. Wild-flowers, as well as

garden-flowers, grow best in the sunshine."

Emma tried to conform to the wishes of the family in her behavior; but

she did not feel quite sure that she should ever be able to love the

young Indian. It was not agreeable to have a sister who was clothed in

a blanket and wore her hair like a Shetland pony. Cousin Bessie thought

stockings, long skirts, and a gown ought to be procured for her

immediately. Her father said,--

"Let me tell you, Bessie, it would be far more rational for you to

follow _her_ fashion about short skirts. I should like to see _you_ step

off as she does. She couldn't move so like a young deer, if she had long

petticoats to trammel her limbs."

But Bessie confidentially remarked to Cousin Emma that she thought her

father had some queer notions; to which Emma replied, that, for her

part, she thought A-lee-lah ought to dress "like folks," as Charley used

to say, when he was a boy. They could not rest till they had made a

dress like their own, and had coaxed William to persuade her to wear it.

In a tone of patient resignation, she at last said, "Me try." But she

was evidently very uncomfortable in her new habiliments. She often

wriggled her shoulders, and her limbs were always getting entangled in

the folds of her long, full skirts. She finally rebelled openly, and,

with an emphatic "Me no like," cast aside the troublesome garments and

resumed her blanket.

"I suppose she felt very much as I should feel in tight boots and white

kid gloves," said Uncle George. "You will drive them away from us, if

you interfere with them so much."

It was agreed that Aunt Mary would understand how to manage them better

than the young folks did; and the uncivilized couple were accordingly

invited to stay at their uncle's house. Emma cordially approved of this

arrangement. She told Bessie that she did hope Aunt Mary would make them

more "like folks," before the Oberlin student visited the neighborhood

again; for she didn't know what he _would_ think of some of their ways.

Bessie said,--

"I feel as if I ought to invite William and his wife to dine with us;

but if any of my husband's family should come in, I should feel _so_

mortified to have them see a woman with a blanket over her shoulders

sitting at my table! Besides, they like raw meat, and that is dreadful."

"Certainly it is not pleasant," replied her father; "but I once dined in

Boston, at a house of high civilization, where the odor of venison and

of Stilton cheese produced much more internal disturbance than I have

ever experienced from any of their Indian messes."

This philosophical way of viewing the subject was thought by some of the

neighbors to be assumed, as the best mode of concealing wounded pride.

They said, in compassionate tones, that they really did pity the

Whartons; for, let them say what they would, it must be dreadfully

mortifying to have that squaw about. But if such a feeling was ever

remotely hinted to Uncle George, he quietly replied,--

"So far from feeling ashamed of A-lee-lah, we are truly grateful to her;

and we are deeply thankful that William married her. His love for her

safely bridges over the wide chasm between his savage and his civilized

life. Without her, he could not feel at home among us; and the

probability is that we should not be able to keep him. By help of his

Indian wife, I think we shall make him contented, and finally succeed

in winning them over to our mode of life. Meanwhile, they are happy in

their own way, and we are thankful for it."

The more enlightened portion of the community commended these sentiments

as liberal and wise; but some, who were not distinguished either for

moral or intellectual culture, said, sneeringly,--

"They talk about his Indian wife! I suppose they jumped over a stick

together in some dirty wigwam, and that they call being married!"

Uncle George and Aunt Mary had been so long in the habit of regulating

their actions by their own principles, that they scarcely had a passing

curiosity to know what such neighbors thought of their proceedings. They

never wavered in their faith that persevering kindness and judicious

non-interference would gradually produce such transformations as they

desired. No changes were proposed, till they and their untutored guests

had become familiarly acquainted and mutually attached. At first, the

wild young couple were indisposed to stay much in the house. They

wandered far off into the woods, and spent most of their time in making

mats and baskets. As these were always admired by their civilized

relatives, and gratefully accepted, they were happier than

millionnaires. They talked to each other altogether in the Indian

dialect, which greatly retarded their improvement in English. But it was

thus they had talked when they first made love, and it was, moreover,

the only way in which their tongues could move unfettered. Her language

no longer sounded to William like "lingo," as he had styled it in

the boyish days when he found her wandering alone on the prairie. No

utterance of the human soul, whether in the form of language or belief,

is "lingo," when we stand on the same spiritual plane with the speaker,

and thus can rightly understand it.

The first innovation in the habits of the young Indian was brought about

by the magical power of two side-combs ornamented with colored glass. At

the first sight of them, A-lee-lah manifested admiration almost equal to

that which the scarlet peas had excited in her childish mind. Aunt Mary,

perceiving this, parted the curtain of raven hair, and fastened it on

each side with the gaudy combs. Then she led her to the glass, put her

finger on the uncovered brow, and said,--

"A-lee-lah has a pretty forehead. Aunt Mary likes to see it so."

William translated this to his simple wife, who said,--

"Aunt Mary good. Me tank."

Mr. Wharton happened to come in, and he kissed the brown forehead,

saying--

"Father likes to have A-lee-lah wear her hair so."

The conquest was complete. Henceforth, the large, lambent eyes shone in

their moonlight beauty without any overhanging cloud.

Thus adroitly, day by day, they were guided into increasing conformity

with civilized habits. After a while, it was proposed that they should

be married according to the Christian form, as they had previously been

by Indian ceremonies. No attempt was made to offer higher inducements

than the exhibition of wedding-finery, and the assurance that all

William's relatives would be made very happy, if they would conform

to the custom of his people. The bride's dress was a becoming hybrid

between English and Indian costumes. Loose trousers of emerald-green

merino were fastened with scarlet cord and tassels above gaiters of

yellow beaver-skin thickly embroidered with beads of many colors. An

upper garment of scarlet merino was ornamented with gilded buttons, on

each of which was a shining star. The short, full skirt of this garment

fell a little below the knee, and the border was embroidered with

gold-colored braid. At the waist, it was fastened with a green morocco

belt and gilded buckle. The front-hair, now accustomed to be parted,

had grown long enough to be becomingly arranged with the jewelled

side-combs, which she prized so highly. The long, glossy, black tresses

behind were gathered into massive braids, intertwined on one side with

narrow scarlet ribbon, and on the other with festoons of the identical

Guinea-peas which had so delighted her when she was Wik-a-nee. The

braids were fastened by a comb with gilded points, which made her

look like a crowned Indian queen. Emma was decidedly struck by her

picturesque appearance. She said privately to Cousin Bessie,--

"I should like such a dress myself, if other folks wore it; but don't

you tell that I said so."

Charles smiled, as he remarked to his wife,--

"The grub has come out of her blanket a brilliant butterfly. Uncle

George and Aunt Mary are working miracles."

After the wedding-ceremony had been performed, Mr. Wharton kissed the

bride, and said to the bridegroom,--

"She is handsome as a wild tulip."

"Bright as the torch-flower of the prairies," added Uncle George.

When William made these compliments intelligible to A-lee-lah, she

maintained her customary Indian composure of manner, but her brown

cheeks glowed like an amber-colored bottle of claret in the sunshine.

William, though he deemed it unmanly to give any outward signs of

satisfaction, was inwardly proud of his bride's finery, and scarcely

less pleased with his own yellow vest, blue coat, and brass buttons;

though he preferred above them all the yellow gaiters, which A-lee-lah

had skilfully decorated with tassels and bright-colored wampum.

The next politic movement was to build for them a cabin of their own,

taking care to preserve an influence over them by frequent visits and

kind attentions. They would have been very happy in the freedom of their

new home, had it not been for the intrusion of many strangers, who came

to look upon them from motives of curiosity. The universal Yankee nation

is a self-elected Investigating Committee, which never adjourns its

sessions. This is amusing, and perhaps edifying, to their own inquiring

minds; but William and A-lee-lah had Indian ideas of natural politeness,

which made them regard such invasions as a breach of good manners.

By degrees, however, the young couple became an old story, and were left

in comparative peace. The system of attraction continued to work like a

charm. As A-lee-lah was never annoyed by any assumption of superiority

on the part of her white relatives, she took more and more pains to

please them. This was manifested in many childlike ways, which were

extremely winning, though they were sometimes well calculated to excite

a smile. As years passed on, they both learned to read and write English

very well. William worked industriously on his farm, though he never

lost his predilection for hunting. A-lee-lah became almost as skilful at

her needle as she was at weaving baskets and wampum. Her talk, with its

slightly foreign arrangement, was as pretty as the unformed utterance

of a little child. Her taste for music improved. She never attained

to Italian embroidery of sound, still less to German intonations of

intellect; but the rude, monotonous Indian chants gave place to the

melodies of Scotland, Ireland, and Ethiopia. Her taste in dress changed

also. She ceased to delight in garments of scarlet and yellow, though

she retained a liking for bits of bright, warm color. Nature guided her

taste correctly in this, for they harmonized admirably with her brown

complexion and lustrous black hair. She always wore skirts shorter than

others, and garments too loose to impede freedom of motion. Bonnets were

her utter aversion, but she consented to wear a woman's riding-hat with

a drooping feather. Those outside the family learned to call her Mrs.

William Wharton; and strangers who visited the village were generally

attracted by her handsome person and the simple dignity of her manners.

Her father-in-law regarded her with paternal affection, not unmixed with

pride.

"Who, that didn't know it," said he, "could be made to believe this

fine-looking woman was once little Moppet, who coiled herself up to

sleep on the floor of our log-cabin?"

Uncle George replied,--

"You know I always told you it was the nature of all sorts of flowers to

grow, if they had plenty of genial air and sunshine."

As for A-lee-lah's little daughter, Jenny, she is universally admitted

to be the prettiest and brightest child in the village. Mr. Wharton says

her busy little mind makes him think of his Willie, at her age; and

Uncle Charles says he has no fault to find with her, for she has her

mother's beautiful eyes, and wears her hair "like folks."

* * * * *

A CALL TO MY COUNTRY-WOMEN.

In the newspapers and magazines you shall see many poems--written by

women who meekly term themselves weak, and modestly profess to represent

only the weak among their sex--tunefully discussing the duties which the

weak owe to their country in days like these. The invariable conclusion

is, that, though they cannot fight, because they are not men,--or go

down to nurse the sick and wounded, because they have children to take

care of,--or write effectively, because they do not know how,--or do any

great and heroic thing, because they have not the ability,--they can

pray; and they generally do close with a melodious and beautiful prayer.

Now praying is a good thing. It is, in fact, the very best thing in the

world to do, and there is no danger of our having too much of it; but if

women, weak or strong, consider that praying is all they can or ought to

do for their country, and so settle down contented with that, they make

as great a mistake as if they did not pray at all. True, women cannot

fight, and there is no call for any great number of female nurses;

notwithstanding this, I believe, that, to-day, the issue of this war

depends quite as much upon American women as upon American men,--and

depends, too, not upon the few who write, but upon the many who do not.

The women of the Revolution were not only Mrs. Adams, Mrs. Reed,

and Mrs. Schuyler, but the wives of the farmers and shoemakers and

blacksmiths everywhere. It is not Mrs. Stowe, or Mrs. Howe, or Miss

Stevenson, or Miss Dix, alone, who is to save the country, but the

thousands upon thousands who are at this moment darning stockings,

tending babies, sweeping floors. It is to them I speak. It is they whom

I wish to get hold of; for in their hands lies slumbering the future of

this nation.

The women of to-day have not come up to the level of to-day. They do not

stand abreast with its issues. They do not rise to the height of its

great argument. I do not forget what you have done. I have beheld, O

Dorcases, with admiration and gratitude, the coats and garments, the

lint and bandages, which you have made. Tender hearts, if you could have

finished the war with your needles, it would have been finished long

ago; but stitching does not crush rebellion, does not annihilate

treason, or hew traitors in pieces before the Lord. Excellent as far as

it goes, it stops fearfully short of the goal. This ought ye to do, but

there are other things which you ought not to leave undone. The war

cannot be finished by sheets and pillow-cases. Sometimes I am tempted

to believe that it cannot be finished till we have flung them all away.

When I read of the Rebels fighting bare-headed, bare-footed, haggard,

and unshorn, in rags and filth,--fighting bravely, heroically,

successfully,--I am ready to make a burnt-offering of our stacks of

clothing. I feel and fear that we must come down, as they have done,

to a recklessness of all incidentals, down to the rough and rugged

fastnesses of life, down to the very gates of death itself, before we

shall be ready and worthy to win victories. Yet it is not so, for

the hardest fights the earth has ever known have been made by the

delicate-handed and purple-robed. So, in the ultimate analysis, it is

neither gold-lace nor rags that overpower obstacles, but the fiery

soul that consumes both in the intensity of its furnace-heat, bending

impossibilities to the ends of its passionate purpose.

This soul of fire is what I wish to see kindled in our women,--burning

white and strong and steady, through all weakness, timidity,

vacillation, treachery in Church or State or press or parlor, scorching,

blasting, annihilating whatsoever loveth and maketh a lie,--extinguished

by no tempest of defeat, no drizzle of delay, but glowing on its

steadfast path till it shall have cleared through the abomination of our

desolation a highway for the Prince of Peace.

O my country-women, I long to see you stand under the time and bear it

up in your strong hearts, and not need to be borne up through it. I wish

you to stimulate, and not crave stimulants from others. I wish you to

be the consolers, the encouragers, the sustainers, and not tremble in

perpetual need of consolation and encouragement. When men's brains are

knotted and their brows corrugated with fearful looking for and hearing

of financial crises, military disasters, and any and every form of

national calamity consequent upon the war, come you out to meet them,

serene and smiling and unafraid. And let your smile be no formal

distortion of your lips, but a bright ray from the sunshine in your

heart. Take not acquiescently, but joyfully, the spoiling of your goods.

Not only look poverty in the face with high disdain, but embrace it with

gladness and welcome. The loss is but for a moment; the gain is for all

time. Go farther than this. Consecrate to a holy cause not only the

incidentals of life, but life itself. Father, husband, child,---I do

not say, Give them up to toil, exposure, suffering, death, without

a murmur;--that implies reluctance. I rather say, Urge them to the

offering; fill them with sacred fury; fire them with irresistible

desire; strengthen them to heroic will. Look not on details, the

present, the trivial, the fleeting aspects of our conflict, but fix your

ardent gaze on its eternal side. Be not resigned, but rejoicing. Be

spontaneous and exultant. Be large and lofty. Count it all joy that

you are reckoned worthy to suffer in a grand and righteous cause. Give

thanks evermore that you were born in this time; and _because_ it is

dark, be you the light of the world.

And follow the soldier to the battlefield with your spirit. The great

army of letters that marches Southward with every morning sun is

a powerful engine of war. Fill them with tears and sighs, lament

separation and suffering, dwell on your loneliness and fears, mourn over

the dishonesty of contractors and the incompetency of leaders, doubt if

the South will ever be conquered, and foresee financial ruin, and you

will damp the powder and dull the swords that ought to deal death upon

the foe. Write as tenderly as you will. In camp, the roughest man

idealizes his far-off home, and every word of love uplifts him to a

lover. But let your tenderness unfold its sunny side, and keep the

shadows for His pity who knows the end from the beginning, and whom no

foreboding can dishearten. Glory in your tribulation. Show your soldier

that his unflinching courage, his undying fortitude, are your crown of

rejoicing. Incite him to enthusiasm by your inspiration. Make a mock of

your discomforts. Be unwearying in details of the little interests of

home. Fill your letters with kittens and Canaries, with baby's shoes,

and Johnny's sled, and the old cloak which you have turned into a

handsome gown. Keep him posted in all the village-gossip, the lectures,

the courtings, the sleigh-rides, and the singing-schools. Bring out the

good points of the world in strong relief. Tell every sweet and brave

and pleasant and funny story you can think of. Show him that you clearly

apprehend that all this warfare means peace, and that a dastardly peace

would pave the way for speedy, incessant, and more appalling warfare.

Help him to bear his burdens by showing him how elastic you are under

yours. Hearten him, enliven him, tone him up to the true hero-pitch.

Hush your plaintive _Miserere_, accept the nation's pain for penance,

and commission every Northern breeze to bear a _Te Deum laudamus_.

Under God, the only question, as to whether this war shall be conducted

to a shameful or an honorable close, is not of men or money or material

resource. In these our superiority is unquestioned. As Wellington

phrased it, there is hard pounding; but we shall pound the longest, if

only our hearts do not fail us. Women need not beat their pewter spoons

into bullets, for there are plenty of bullets without them. It is not

whether our soldiers shall fight a good fight; they have played the man

on a hundred battle-fields. It is not whether officers are or are not

competent; generals have blundered nations into victory since the world

began. It is whether this people shall have virtue to endure to the

end,--to endure, not starving, not cold, but the pangs of hope deferred,

of disappointment and uncertainty, of commerce deranged and outward

prosperity cheeked. Will our vigilance to detect treachery and our

perseverance to punish it hold out? If we stand firm, we shall be saved,

though so as by fire. If we do not, we shall fall, and shall richly

deserve to fall; and may God sweep us off from the face of the earth,

and plant in our stead a nation with the hearts of men, and not of

chickens!

O women, stand here in the breach,--for here you may stand powerful,

invincible, I had almost said omnipotent. Rise now to the heights of

a sublime courage,--for the hour has need of you. When the first ball

smote the rocky sides of Sumter, the rebound thrilled from shore to

shore, and waked the slumbering hero in every human soul. Then every eye

flamed, every lip was touched with a live coal from the sacred altar,

every form dilated to the stature of the Golden Age. Then we felt in our

veins the pulse of immortal youth. Then all the chivalry of the ancient

days, all the heroism, all the self-sacrifice that shaped itself into

noble living, came back to us, poured over us, swept away the dross of

selfishness and deception and petty scheming, and Patriotism rose from

the swelling wave stately as a goddess. Patriotism, that had been to us

but a dingy and meaningless antiquity, took on a new form, a new mien, a

countenance divinely fair and forever young, and received once more the

homage of our hearts. Was that a childish outburst of excitement, or

the glow of an aroused principle? Was it a puerile anger, or a manly

indignation? Did we spring up startled pigmies, or girded giants? If

the former, let us veil our faces, and march swiftly (and silently) to

merciful forgetfulness. If the latter, shall we not lay aside every

weight, and this besetting sin of despondency, and run with patience the

race set before us?

A true philosophy and a true religion make the way possible to us. The

Most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever He

will; and He never yet willed that a nation strong in means and battling

for the right should be given over to a nation weak and battling for the

wrong. Nations have their future--reward and penalty--in this world;

and it is as certain as God lives that Providence _and_ the heaviest

battalions will prevail. We have had reverses, but no misfortune hath

happened unto us but such as is common unto nations. Country has been

sacrificed to partisanship. Early love has fallen away, and lukewarmness

has taken its place. Unlimited enthusiasm has given place to limited

stolidity. Disloyalty, overawed at first into quietude, has lifted its

head among us, and waxes wroth and ravening. There are dissensions

at home worse than the guns of our foes. Some that did run well have

faltered; some signal-lights have gone shamefully out, and some are

lurid with a baleful glare. But unto this end were we born, and for this

cause came we into the world. When shall greatness of soul stand forth,

if not in evil times? When the skies are fair and the seas smooth, all

ships sail festively. But the clouds lower, the winds shriek, the waves

boil, and immediately each craft shows its quality. The deep is strown

with broken masts, parted keels, floating wrecks; but here and there

a ship rides the raging sea, and flings defiance to the wind. She

overlives the sea because she is sea-worthy. Not our eighty years

of peace alone, but our two years of war are the touchstone of our

character. We have rolled our Democracy as a sweet morsel under our

tongue; we have gloried in the prosperity which it brought to the

individual; but if the comforts of men minister to the degradation of

man, if Democracy levels down and does not level up, if our era of peace

and plenty leaves us so feeble and frivolous, so childish, so impatient,

so deaf to all that calls to us from the past and entreats us in the

future, that we faint and fail under the stress of our one short effort,

then indeed is our Democracy our shame and curse. Let us show now what

manner of people we are. Let us be clear-sighted and far-sighted to see

how great is the issue that hangs upon the occasion. It is not a mere

military reputation that is at stake, not the decay of a generation's

commerce, not the determination of this or that party to power. It is

the question of the world that we have been set to answer. In the great

conflict of ages, the long strife between right and wrong, between

progress and sluggardy, through the Providence of God we are placed in

the van-guard. Three hundred years ago a world was unfolded for the

battle-ground. Choice spirits came hither to level and intrench. Swords

clashed and blood flowed, and the great reconnoissance was successfully

made. Since then both sides have been gathering strength, marshalling

forces, planting batteries, and to-day we stand in the thick of the

fray. Shall we fail? Men and women of America, will you fail? Shall the

cause go by default? When a great Idea, that has been uplifted on the

shoulders of generations, comes now to its Thermopylae, its glory-gate,

and needs only stout hearts for its strong hands,--when the eyes of a

great multitude are turned upon you, and the fates of dumb millions in

the silent future rest with you,--when the suffering and sorrowful, the

lowly, whose immortal hunger for justice gnaws at their hearts, who

blindly see, but keenly feel, by their God-given instincts, that somehow

you are working out their salvation, and the high-born, monarchs in the

domain of mind, who, standing far off, see with prophetic eye the two

courses that lie before you, one to the Uplands of vindicated Right, one

to the Valley of the Shadow of Death, alike fasten upon you their hopes,

their prayers, their tears,--will you, for a moment's bodily comfort

and rest and repose, grind all these expectations and hopes between the

upper and nether millstone? Will you fail the world in this fateful hour

by your faint-heartedness? Will you fail yourself, and put the knife to

your own throat? For the peace which you so dearly buy shall bring to

you neither ease nor rest. You will but have spread a bed of thorns.

Failure will write disgrace upon the brow of this generation, and shame

will outlast the age. It is not with us as with the South. She can

surrender without dishonor. She is the weaker power, and her success

will be against the nature of things. Her dishonor lay in her attempt,

not in its relinquishment. But we shall fail, not because of mechanics

and mathematics, but because our manhood and womanhood weighed in the

balance are found wanting. There are few who will not share in the sin.

There are none who will not share in the shame. Wives, would you hold

back your husbands? Mothers, would you keep your sons? From what? for

what? From the doing of the grandest duty that ever ennobled man, to the

grief of the greatest infamy that ever crushed him down. You would hold

him back from prizes before which Olympian laurels fade, for a fate

before which a Helot slave might cower. His country in the agony of her

death-struggle calls to him for succor. All the blood in all the ages,

poured out for liberty, poured out for him, cries unto him from the

ground. All that life has of noble, of heroic, beckons him forward.

Death itself wears for him a golden crown. Ever since the world swung

free from God's hand, men have died,--obeying the blind fiat of Nature;

but only once in a generation comes the sacrificial year, the year

of jubilee, when men march lovingly to meet their fate and die for a

nation's life. Holding back, we transmit to those that shall come after

us a blackened waste. The little one that lies in his cradle will be

accursed for our sakes. Every child will be base-born, springing from

ignoble blood. We inherited a fair fame, and bays from a glorious

battle; but for him is no background, no stand-point. His country will

be a burden on his shoulders, a blush upon his cheek, a chain about his

feet. There is no career for the future, but a weary effort, a long, a

painful, a heavy-hearted struggle to lift the land out of its slough of

degradation and set it once more upon a dry place.

Therefore let us have done at once and forever with paltry

considerations, with talk of despondency and darkness. Let compromise,

submission, and every form of dishonorable peace be not so much as

named among us. Tolerate no coward's voice or pen or eye. Wherever the

serpent's head is raised, strike it down. Measure every man by the

standard of manhood. Measure country's price by country's worth, and

country's worth by country's integrity. Let a cold, clear breeze sweep

down from the mountains of life, and drive out these miasmas that befog

and beguile the unwary. Around every hearthstone let sunshine gleam. In

every home let fatherland have its altar and its fortress. From every

household let words of cheer and resolve and high-heartiness ring

out, till the whole land is shining and resonant in the bloom of its

awakening spring.

THE TRUE CHURCH.

I asked a holy man one day,

"Where is the one true church, I pray?"

"Go round the world," said he, "and search:

No man hath found the one true church."

I pointed to a spire, cross-crowned.

"The church is false!" he cried, and frowned.

But, murmuring he had told me wrong,

I pointed to the entering throng.

He answered, "If a church be true,

It hath not many, but a few."

Around the font the people pressed,

And crossed themselves from brow to breast.

"A cross!" he cried, "writ on the brow

In water!--is it Christ's?--look thou!

"Each forehead, frowning, sheds it off:

Christ's cross abides through scowl and scoff."

Then, looking through the open door,

We saw men kneeling on the floor;

Faint candles, by the daylight dimmed,--

Like wicks the foolish virgins trimmed;

Fair statues of the saints, as white

As now their robes are, in God's light;

Sun-ladders, dropped aslant, all gold,--

Like stairs the angels trod of old.

Around, above, from nave to roof,

He gazed, and said, in sad reproof,--

"Alas! who is it understands

God's temple is not made with hands?"

--We walked along a shaded way,

Beneath the apple-blooms of May,

And came upon a church whose dome

Bore still the cross, but not for Rome.

We brushed a cobweb from a pane,

And gazed within the sacred fane

"Do prayers," he asked, "the more avail,

If murmured nigh an altar-rail?

"Does water sprinkled from a bowl

Wash any sin from any soul?

"Do tongues that taste the bread and wine

Speak truer after, by that sign?

"The very priest, in gown and bands,

Hath lying lips and guilty hands!"

"He speaks no error," answered I;

"He says the living all shall die,

"The dead all rise; and both are true;

Both wholesome doctrines,--old, not new."

My friend returned, "He aims a blow

To strike the sins of long ago,--

"Yet shields, the while, with studied phrase,

The evil present in these days.

"Doth God in heaven impute no crime

To prophets who belie their time?"

--We turned away among the tombs:

The bees were in the clover-blooms;

The crickets leaped to let us pass;

And God's sweet breath was on the grass.

We spelled the legends on the stones:

The graves were full of martyrs' bones,--

Of bodies which the rack once brake

In witness for the dear Lord's sake,--

Of ashes gathered from the pyres

Of saints whose souls fled up through fires.

I heard him murmur, as we passed,

"Thus won they all the crown at last;

"Which now men lose, through looking back

To find it at the stake and rack:

"The rack and stake have gathered grime:

God's touchstone is the passing time."

--Just then, amid some olive-sprays,

Two orioles perched, and piped their lays,

Until the gold beneath their throats

Shook molten in their mellow notes.

Then, pealing from the church, a psalm

Rolled forth upon the outer calm.

"Both choirs," said I, "are in accord;

For both give worship to the Lord."

Said he, "The tree-top song, I fear,

Fled first and straightest to God's ear.

"If men bind other men in chains,

Then chant, doth God accept the strains?

"Do loud-lipped hymns His ear allure?--

God hates the church that harms the poor!"

--Then rose a meeting-house in view,

Of bleached and weather-beaten hue,

Where, plain of garb and pure of heart,

Men kept the church and world apart,

And sat in waiting for the light

That dawns upon the inner sight;

Nor did they vex the silent air

With any sound of hymn or prayer;

But on their lips God's hand was pressed,

And each man kissed it and was blessed.

I asked, "Is this the true church, then?"

"Nay," answered he, "a sect of men:

"And sects that lock their doors in pride

Shut God and half His saints outside.

"The gates of heaven, the Scriptures say,

Stand open wide by night and day:

"Whoso shall enter hath no need

To walk by either church or creed:

"The false church leadeth men astray;

The true church showeth men the way."

--Whereat I still more eager grew

To shun the false and find the true;

And, naming all the creeds, I sought

What truth, or lie, or both, they taught:

Thus,--"Augustine--had _he_ a fault?"

My friend looked up to yon blue vault,

And cried, "Behold! can one man's eyes

Bound all the vision of the skies?"

I said, "The circle is too wide."

"God's truth is wider," he replied;

"And Augustine, on bended knee,

Saw just the little he could see;

"So Luther sought with eyes and heart,

Yet caught the glory but in part;

"So Calvin opened wide his soul,

Yet could not comprehend the whole:

"Not Luther, Calvin, Augustine,

Saw half the vision I have seen!"

--Then grew within me a desire

That kindled like a flame of fire.

I looked upon his reverent brow,

Entreating, "Tell me, who art thou?"

When, by the light that filled the place,

I knew it was the Lord's own face!

Through all my blood a rapture stole

That filled my body and my soul.

I was a sinner and afraid:

I bowed me in the dust and prayed:--

"O Christ the Lord I end Thou my search,

And lead me to the one true church!"

Then spake He, not as man may speak:

"The one true church thou shalt not seek;

"Behold, it is enough," He said,

"To find the one true Christ, its Head!"

Then straight He vanished from my sight,

And left me standing in the light.

UNDER THE PEAR-TREE.

PART II.