CHAPTER XXIV.

"HAME FAIN WOULD I BE."

Unexpected circumstances had detained Mrs. Kavanagh and her daughter

in London long after everybody else had left, but at length they were

ready to start for their projected trip into Switzerland. On the day

before their departure Ingram dined with them--on his own invitation.

He had got into a habit of letting them know when it would suit him to

devote an evening to their instruction; and it was difficult indeed to

say which of the two ladies submitted the more readily and meekly

to the dictatorial enunciation of his opinions. Mrs. Kavanagh, it is

true, sometimes dissented in so far as a smile indicated dissent, but

her daughter scarcely reserved to herself so much liberty. Mr. Ingram

had taken her in hand, and expected of her the obedience and respect

due to his superior age.

And yet, somehow or other, he occasionally found himself indirectly

soliciting the advice of this gentle, clear-eyed and clear-headed

young person, more especially as regarded the difficulties surrounding

Sheila; and sometimes a chance remark of hers, uttered in a timid

or careless or even mocking fashion, would astonish him by the rapid

light it threw on these dark troubles. On this evening--the last

evening they were spending in London--it was his own affairs which he

proposed to mention to Mrs. Lorraine, and he had no more hesitation in

doing so than if she had been his oldest friend. He wanted to ask her

what he should do about the money that Mrs. Lavender had left him; and

he intended to be a good deal more frank with Mrs. Lorraine than with

any of the others to whom he had spoken about the matter. For he was

well aware that Mrs. Lavender had at first resolved that he should

have at least a considerable portion of her wealth, or why should she

have asked him how he would like to be a rich man?

"I do not think," said Mrs. Lorraine quietly, "that there is any use

in your asking me what you should do, for I know what you will do,

whether it accords with any one's opinion or no. And yet you would

find a great advantage in having money."

"Oh, I know that," he said readily. "I should like to be rich beyond

anything that ever happened in a drama; and I should take my chance of

all the evil influences that money is supposed to exert. Do you know,

I think you rich people are very unfairly treated."

"But we are not rich," said Mrs. Kavanagh, passing at the time.

"Cecilia and I find ourselves very poor sometimes."

"But I quite agree with Mr. Ingram, mamma," said Cecilia--as if any

one had had the courage to disagree with Mr. Ingram!--"rich people are

shamefully ill-treated. If you go to a theatre, now, you find that all

the virtues are on the side of the poor, and if there are a few vices,

you get a thousand excuses for them. No one takes account of the

temptations of the rich. You have people educated from their infancy

to imagine that the whole world was made for them, every wish they

have gratified, every day showing them people dependent on them and

grateful for favors; and no allowance is made for such a temptation to

become haughty, self-willed and overbearing. But of course it stands

to reason that the rich never have justice done them in plays and

stories, for the people who write are poor."

"Not all of them."

"But enough to strike an average of injustice. And it is very hard.

For it is the rich who buy books and who take boxes at the theatres,

and then they find themselves grossly abused; whereas the humble

peasant who can scarcely read at all, and who never pays more than

sixpence for a seat in the gallery, is flattered and coaxed and

caressed until one wonders whether the source of virtue is the

drinking of sour ale. Mr. Ingram, you do it yourself. You impress

mamma and me with the belief that we are miserable sinners if we are

not continually doing some act of charity. Well, that is all very

pleasant and necessary, in moderation; but you don't find the poor

folks so very anxious to live for other people. They don't care much

what becomes of us. They take your port wine and flannels as if

they were conferring a favor on you, but as for _your_ condition and

prospects in this world and the next, they don't trouble much about

that. Now, mamma, just wait a moment."

"I will not. You are a bad girl," said Mrs. Kavanagh severely. "Here

has Mr. Ingram been teaching you and making you better for ever so

long back, and you pretend to accept his counsel and reform yourself;

and then all at once you break out, and throw down the tablets of the

law, and conduct yourself like a heathen."

"Because I want him to explain, mamma. I suppose he considers it

wicked of us to start for Switzerland to-morrow. The money we shall

spend in traveling might have despatched a cargo of muskets to some

missionary station, so that--"

"Ceilia!"

"Oh no," Ingram said carelessly, and nursing his knee with both his

hands as usual, "traveling is not wicked: it is only unreasonable. A

traveler, you know, is a person who has a house in one town, and who

goes to live in a house in another town, in order to have the pleasure

of paying for both."

"Mr. Ingram," said Mrs. Kavanagh, "will you talk seriously for one

minute, and tell me whether we are to expect to see you in the Tyrol?"

But Ingram was not in a mood for talking seriously, and he waited to

hear Mrs. Lorraine strike in with some calmly audacious invitation.

She did not, however, and he turned round from her mother to question

her. He was surprised to find that her eyes were fixed on the ground

and that something like a tinge of color was in her face. He turned

rapidly away again. "Well, Mrs. Kavanagh," he said with a fine air

of indifference, "the last time we spoke about that I was not in the

difficulty I am in at present. How could I go traveling just now,

without knowing how to regulate my daily expenses? Am I to travel with

six white horses and silver bells, or trudge on foot with a wallet?"

"But you know quite well," said Mrs. Lorraine warmly--"you know you

will not touch that money that Mrs. Lavender has left you."

"Oh, pardon me," he said: "I should rejoice to have it if it did not

properly belong to some one else. And the difficulty is, that Mr.

Mackenzie is obviously very anxious that neither Mr. Lavender nor

Sheila should have it. If Sheila gets it, of course she will give it

to her husband. Now, if it is not to be given to her, do you think I

should regard the money with any particular horror and refuse to touch

it? That would be very romantic, perhaps, but I should be sorry, you

know, to give my friends the most disquieting doubts about my sanity.

Romance goes out of a man's head when the hair gets gray."

"Until a man has gray hair," Mrs. Lorraine said, still with some

unnecessary fervor, "he does not know that there are things much more

valuable than money. You wouldn't touch that money just now, and all

the thinking and reasoning in the world will never get you to touch

it."

"What am I to do with it?" he said meekly.

"Give it to Mr. Mackenzie, in trust for his daughter," Mrs. Lorraine

said promptly; and then, seeing that her mother had gone to the end

of the drawing-room to fetch something or other, she added quickly,

"I should be more sorry than I can tell you to find you accepting this

money. You do not wish to have it. You do not need it. And if you did

take it, it would prove a source of continual embarrassment and regret

to you, and no assurances on the part of Mr. Mackenzie would be able

to convince you that you had acted rightly by his daughter. Now, if

you simply hand over your responsibilities to him, he cannot refuse

them, for the sake of his own child, and you are left with the sense

of having acted nobly and generously. I hope there are many men who

would do what I ask you to do, but I have not met many to whom I

could make such an appeal with any hope. But, after all, that is only

advice. I have no right to ask you to do anything like that. You asked

me for my opinion about it. Well, that is it. But I should not have

asked you to act on it."

"But I will," he said in a low voice; and then he went to the other

end of the room, for Mrs. Kavanagh was calling him to help her in

finding something she had lost.

Before he left that evening Mrs. Lorraine said to him, "We go by the

night-mail to Paris to-morrow night, and we shall dine here at five.

Would you have the courage to come up and join us in that melancholy

ceremony?"

"Oh yes," he said, "if I may go down to the station to see you away

afterward."

"I think if we got you so far we should persuade you to go with us,"

Mrs. Kavanagh said with a smile.

He sat silent for a minute. Of course she could not seriously mean

such a thing. But at all events she would not be displeased if he

crossed their path while they were actually abroad.

"It is getting too late in the year to go to Scotland now," he said

with some hesitation.

"Oh most certainly," Mrs. Lorraine said.

"I don't know where the man in whose yacht I was to have gone may be

now. I might spend half my holiday in trying to catch him."

"And during that time you would be alone," Mrs. Lorraine said.

"I suppose the Tyrol is a very nice place," he suggested.

"Oh most delightful," she exclaimed. "You know, we should go round by

Switzerland, and go up by Luzerne and Zurich to the end of the Lake

of Constance. Bregenz, mamma, isn't that the place where we hired that

good-natured man the year before last?"

"Yes, child."

"Now, you see, Mr. Ingram, if you had less time than we--if you

could not start with us to-morrow--you might come straight down by

Schaffhausen and the steamer, and catch us up there, and then mamma

would become your guide. I am sure we should have some pleasant days

together till you got tired of us, and then you could go off on a

walking-tour if you pleased. And then, you know, there would be no

difficulty about our meeting at Bregenz, for mamma and I have plenty

of time, and we should wait there for a few days, so as to make sure."

"Cecilia," said Mrs. Kavanagh, "you must not persuade Mr. Ingram

against his will. He may have other duties--other friends to see,

perhaps."

"Who proposed it, mamma?" said the daughter calmly.

"I did, as a mere joke. But of course, if Mr. Ingram thinks of going

to the Tyrol, we should be most pleased to see him there."

"Oh, I have no other friends whom I am bound to see," Ingram said with

some hesitation, "and I should like to go to the Tyrol. But--the fact

is--I am afraid--"

"May I interrupt you?" said Mrs. Lorraine. "You do not like to leave

London so long as your friend Sheila is in trouble. Is not that the

case? And yet she has her father to look after her. And it is clear

you cannot do much for her when you do not even know where Mr.

Lavender is. On the whole, I think you should consider yourself a

little bit now, and not get cheated out of your holidays for the

year."

"Very well," Ingram said, "I shall be able to tell you to-morrow."

To be so phlegmatic and matter-of-fact a person, Mr. Ingram was sorely

disturbed on going home that evening, nor did he sleep much during the

night. For the more that he speculated on all the possibilities that

might arise from his meeting those people in the Tyrol, the more

pertinaciously did this refrain follow these excursive fancies: "If

I go to the Tyrol I shall fall in love with that girl, and ask her to

marry me. And if I do so, what position should I hold, with regard to

her, as a penniless man with a rich wife?"

He did not look at the question in such light as the opinion of the

world might throw on it. The difficulty was what she herself might

afterward come to think of their mutual relations. True it was, that

no one could be more gentle and submissive to him than she appeared

to be. In matters of opinion and discussion he already ruled with an

autocratic authority which he fully perceived himself, and exercised,

too, with some sort of notion that it was good for this clear-headed

young woman to have to submit to control. But of what avail would this

moral authority be as against the consciousness she would have that it

was her fortune that was supplying both with the means of living?

He went down to his office in the morning with no plans formed. The

forenoon passed, and he had decided on nothing. At mid-day he suddenly

be-thought him that it would be very pleasant if Sheila would go and

see Mrs. Lorraine; and forthwith he did that which would have driven

Frank Lavender out of his senses--he telegraphed to Mrs. Lorraine

for permission to bring Sheila and her father to dinner at five.

He certainly knew that such a request was a trifle cool, but he had

discovered that Mrs. Lorraine was not easily shocked by such audacious

experiments on her good nature. When he received the telegram in

reply he knew it granted what he had asked. The words were merely,

"Certainly, by all means, but not later than five."

Then he hastened down to the house in which Sheila lived, and

found that she and her father had just returned from visiting some

exhibition. Mr. Mackenzie was not in the room.

"Sheila," Ingram said, "what would you think of my getting married?"

Sheila looked up with a bright smile and said, "It would please me

very much--it would be a great pleasure to me; and I have expected it

for some time."

"You have expected it?" he repeated with a stare.

"Yes," she said quietly.

"Then you fancy you know--" he said, or rather stammered, in great

embarrassment, when she interrupted him by saying,

"Oh yes, I think I know. When you came down every evening to tell me

all the praises of Mrs. Lorraine, and how clever she was, and kind,

I expected you would come some day with another message; and now I

am very glad to hear it. You have changed all my opinions about her,

and--"

Then she rose and took both his hands, and looked frankly into his

face.

"--And I do hope most sincerely you will be happy, my dear friend."

Ingram was fairly taken aback at the consequences of his own

imprudence. He had never dreamed for a moment that any one would have

suspected such a thing; and he had thrown out the suggestion to Sheila

almost as a jest, believing, of course, that it compromised no one.

And here, before he had spoken a word to Mrs. Lorraine on the subject,

he was being congratulated on his approaching marriage.

"Oh, Sheila," he said, "this is all a mistake. It was a joke of mine.

If I had known you would think of Mrs. Lorraine, I should not have

said a word about it."

"But it is Mrs. Lorraine?" Sheila said.

"Well, but I have never mentioned such a thing to her--never hinted it

in the remotest manner. I dare say if I had she might laugh the matter

aside as too absurd."

"She will not do that," Sheila said. "If you ask her to marry you,

she will marry you: I am sure of that from what I have heard, and she

would be very foolish if she was not proud and glad to do that. And

you--what doubt can you have, after all that you have been saying of

late?"

"But you don't marry a woman merely because you admire her cleverness

and kindness," he said; and then he added suddenly, "Sheila, would you

do me a great favor? Mrs. Lorraine and her mother are leaving for the

Continent to-night. They dine at five, and I am commissioned to ask

you and your papa if you would go up with me and have some dinner with

them, you know, before they start. Won't you do that, Sheila?"

The girl shook her head, without answering. She had not gone to any

friend's house since her husband had left London, and that

house, above all others, was calculated to awaken in her bitter

recollections.

"Won't you, Sheila?" he said. "You used to go there. I know they

like you very much. I have seen you very well pleased and comfortable

there, and I thought you were enjoying yourself."

"Yes, that is true," she said; and then she looked up, with a strange

sort of smile on her lips, "But 'what made the assembly shine?'"

That forced smile did not last long: the girl suddenly burst into

tears, and rose and went away to the window. Mackenzie came into the

room: he did not see his daughter was crying: "Well, Mr. Ingram, and

are you coming with us to the Lewis? We cannot always be staying in

London, for there will be many things wanting the looking after in

Borva, as you will know ferry well. And yet Sheila she will not go

back; and Mairi too, she will be forgetting the ferry sight of her own

people; but if you wass coming with us, Mr. Ingram, Sheila she would

come too, and it would be ferry good for her whatever."

"I have brought you another proposal. Will you take Sheila to see the

Tyrol, and I will go with you?"

"The Tyrol?" said Mr. Mackenzie. "Ay, it is a ferry long way away, but

if Sheila will care to go to the Tyrol--oh yes, I will go to the Tyrol

or anywhere if she will go out of London, for it is not good for

a young girl to be always in the one house, and no company and no

variety; and I was saying to Sheila what good will she do sitting by

the window and thinking over things, and crying sometimes? By Kott, it

is a foolish thing for a young girl, and I will hef no more of it!"

In other circumstances Ingram would have laughed at this dreadful

threat. Despite the frown on the old man's face, the sudden stamp of

his foot and the vehemence of his words, Ingram knew that if Sheila

had turned round and said that she wished to be shut up in a dark

room for the rest of her life, the old King of Borva would have

said, "Ferry well, Sheila," in the meekest way, and would have been

satisfied if only he could share her imprisonment with her.

"But first of all, Mr. Mackenzie, I have another proposal to make to

you," Ingram said; and then he urged upon Sheila's father to accept

Mrs. Lorraine's invitation.

Mr. Mackenzie was nothing loath: Sheila was living by far too

monotonous a life. He went over to the window to her and said,

"Sheila, my lass, you was going nowhere else this evening; and it

would be ferry convenient to go with Mr. Ingram, and he would see

his friends away, and we could go to a theatre then. And it is no new

thing for you to go to fine houses and see other people; but it is new

to me, and you wass saying what a beautiful house it wass many a

time, and I hef wished to see it. And the people they are ferry kind,

Sheila, to send me an invitation; and if they wass to come to the

Lewis, what would you think if you asked them to come to your house

and they paid no heed to it? Now, it is after four, Sheila, and if you

wass to get ready now--"

"Yes, I will go and get ready, papa," she said.

Ingram had a vague consciousness that he was taking Sheila up to

introduce to her Mrs. Lorraine in a new character. Would Sheila

look at the woman she used to fear and dislike in a wholly different

fashion, and be prepared to adorn her with all the graces which he had

so often described to her? Ingram hoped that Sheila would get to like

Mrs. Lorraine, and that by and by a better acquaintance between them

might lead to a warm and friendly intimacy. Somehow, he felt that if

Sheila would betray such a liking--if she would come to him and say

honestly that she was rejoiced he meant to marry--all his doubts would

be cleared away. Sheila had already said pretty nearly as much as

that, but then it followed what she understood to be an announcement

of his approaching marriage, and of course the girl's kindly nature at

once suggested a few pretty speeches. Sheila now knew that nothing

was settled: after looking at Mrs. Lorraine in the light of these

new possibilities, would she come to him and counsel him to go on and

challenge a decision?

Mr. Mackenzie received with a grave dignity and politeness the

more than friendly welcome given him both by Mrs. Kavanagh and her

daughter, and in view of their approaching tour he gave them to

understand that he had himself established somewhat familiar relations

with foreign countries by reason of his meeting with the ships and

sailors hailing from those distant shores. He displayed a profound

knowledge of the habits and customs and of the natural products of

many remote lands which were much farther afield than a little bit of

inland Germany. He represented the island of Borva, indeed, as a

sort of lighthouse from which you could survey pretty nearly all the

countries of the world, and broadly hinted that so far from insular

prejudice being the fruit of living in such a place, a general

intercourse with diverse peoples tended to widen the understanding and

throw light on the various social experiments that had been made by

the lawgivers, the philanthropists, the philosophers of the world.

It seemed to Sheila, as she sat and listened, that the pale, calm and

clear-eyed young lady opposite her was not quite so self-possessed

as usual. She seemed shy and a little self-conscious. Did she suspect

that she was being observed, Sheila wondered? and the reason? When

dinner was announced she took Sheila's arm, and allowed Mr. Ingram to

follow them, protesting, into the other room, but there was much more

of embarrassment and timidity than of an audacious mischief in her

look. She was very kind indeed to Sheila, but she had wholly abandoned

that air of maternal patronage which she used to assume toward the

girl. She seemed to wish to be more friendly and confidential with

her, and indeed scarcely spoke a word to Ingram during dinner, so

persistently did she talk to Sheila, who sat next her.

Ingram got vexed. "Mrs. Lorraine," he said, "you seem to forget that

this is a solemn occasion. You ask us to a farewell banquet, but

instead of observing the proper ceremonies you pass the time in

talking about fancy-work and music, and other ordinary, every--day

trifles."

"What are the ceremonies?" she said.

"Well," he answered, "you need not occupy the time with crochet--"

"Mrs. Lavender and I are very well pleased to talk about trifles."

"But I am not," he said bluntly, "and I am not going to be shut out by

a conspiracy. Come, let us talk about your journey."

"Will my lord give his commands as to the point at which we shall

start the conversation?"

"You may skip the Channel."

"I wish I could," she remarked with a sigh.

"We shall land you in Paris. How are we to know that you have arrived

safely?"

She looked embarrassed for a moment, and then said, "If it is of any

consequence for you to know, I shall be writing in any case to Mrs.

Lavender about some little private matter."

Ingram did not receive this promise with any great show of delight.

"You see," he said, somewhat glumly, "if I am to meet you anywhere, I

should like to know the various stages of your route, so that I could

guard against our missing each other."

"You have decided to go, then?"

Ingram, not looking at her, but looking at Sheila, said, "Yes;" and

Sheila, despite all her efforts, could not help glancing up with

a brief smile and blush of pleasure that were quite visible to

everybody.

Mrs. Lorraine struck in with a sort of nervous haste: "Oh, that will

be very pleasant for mamma, for she gets rather tired of me at times

when we are traveling. Two women who always read the same sort of

books, and have the same opinions about the people they meet, and

have precisely the same tastes in everything, are not very amusing

companions for each other. You want a little discussion thrown in."

"And if we meet Mr. Ingram we are sure to have that," Mrs. Kavanagh

said benignly.

"And you want somebody to give you new opinions and put things

differently, you know. I am sure mamma will be most kind to you if you

can make it convenient to spend a few days with us, Mr. Ingram."

"And I have been trying to persuade Mr. Mackenzie and this young lady

to come also," said Ingram.

"Oh, that would be delightful!" Mrs. Lorraine cried, suddenly taking

Sheila's hand. "You will come, won't you? We should have such a

pleasant party. I am sure your papa would be most interested; and we

are not tied to any route: we should go wherever you pleased."

She would have gone on beseeching and advising, but she saw something

in Sheila's face which told her that all her efforts would be

unavailing.

"It is very kind of you," Sheila said, "but I do not think I can go to

the Tyrol."

"Then you shall go back to the Lewis, Sheila," her father said.

"I cannot go back to the Lewis, papa," she said simply; and at this

point Ingram, perceiving how painful the discussion was for the girl,

suddenly called attention to the hour, and asked Mrs. Kavanagh if all

her portmanteaus were strapped up.

They drove in a body down to the station, and Mr. Ingram was most

assiduous in supplying the two travelers with an abundance of

everything they could not possibly want. He got them a reading-lamp,

though both of them declared they never read in a train. He got them

some eau-de-cologne, though they had plenty in their traveling-case.

He purchased for them an amount of miscellaneous literature that would

have been of benefit to a hospital, provided the patients were strong

enough to bear it. And then he bade them good-bye at least half a

dozen times as the train was slowly moving out of the station, and

made the most solemn vows about meeting them at Bregenz.

"Now, Sheila," he said, "shall we go to the theatre?"

"I do not care to go unless you wish," was the answer.

"She does not care to go anywhere now," her father said; and then the

girl, seeing that he was rather distressed about her apparent want of

interest, pulled herself together and said cheerfully, "Is it not too

late to go to a theatre? And I am sure we could be very comfortable

at home. Mairi, she will think it unkind if we go to the theatre by

ourselves."

"Mairi!" said her father impatiently, for he never lost an opportunity

of indirectly justifying Lavender. Mairi has more sense than you,

Sheila, and she knows that a servant-lass has to stay at home, and she

knows that she is ferry different from you; and she is a ferry good

girl whatever, and hass no pride, and she does not expect nonsense in

going about and such things."

"I am quite sure, papa, you would rather go home and sit down and have

a talk with Mr. Ingram, and a pipe and a little whisky, than go to any

theatre."

"What I would do! And what I would like!" said her father in a vexed

way. "Sheila, you have no more sense as a lass that wass still at the

school. I want you to go to the theatre and amuse yourself, instead

of sitting in the house and thinking, thinking, thinking. And all for

what?"

"But if one has something to be sorry for, is it not better to think

of it?"

"And what hef you to be sorry for?" said her father in amazement, and

forgetting that, in his diplomatic fashion, he had been accustoming

Sheila to the notion that she too might have erred grievously and been

in part responsible for all that had occurred.

"I have a great deal to be sorry for, papa," she said; and then she

renewed her entreaties that her two companions should abandon their

notion of going to a theatre, and resolve to spend the rest of the

evening in what she consented to call her home.

After all, they found a comfortable little company when they sat round

the fire, which had been lit for cheerfulness rather than for warmth,

and Ingram at least was in a particularly pleasant mood. For Sheila

had seized the opportunity, when her father had gone out of the room

for a few minutes, to say suddenly, "Oh, my dear friend, if you care

for her, you have a great happiness before you."

"Why, Sheila!" he said, staring.

"She cares for you more than you can think: I saw it to-night in

everything she said and did."

"I thought she was just a trifle saucy, do you know. She shunted me

out of the conversation altogether."

Sheila shook her head and smiled: "She was embarrassed. She suspects

that you like her, and that I know it, and that I came to see her. If

you ask her to marry you, she will do it gladly."

"Sheila," Ingram said with a severity that was not in his heart, "you

must not say such things. You might make fearful mischief by putting

these wild notions into people's heads."

"They are not wild notions," she said quietly. "A woman can tell what

another woman is thinking about better than a man."

"And am I to go to the Tyrol and ask her to marry me?" he said with

the air of a meek scholar.

"I should like to see you married--very, very much indeed," Sheila

said.

"And to her?"

"Yes to her," the girl said frankly. "For I am sure she has great

regard for you, and she is clever enough to put value on--on--But I

cannot flatter you, Mr. Ingram."

"Shall I send you word about what happens in the Tyrol?" he said,

still with the humble air of one receiving instructions.

"Yes."

"And if she rejects me, what shall I do?"

"She will not reject you."

"Shall I come to you for consolation, and ask you what you meant by

driving me on such a blunder?"

"If she rejects you," Sheila said with a smile, "it will be your own

fault, and you will deserve it. For you are a little too harsh with

her, and you have too much authority, and I am surprised that she

will be so amiable under it. Because, you know, a woman expects to

be treated with much gentleness and deference before she has said she

will marry. She likes to be entreated, and coaxed, and made much of,

but instead of that you are very overbearing with Mrs. Lorraine."

"I did not mean to be, Sheila," he said, honestly enough. "If anything

of the kind happened it must have been in a joke."

"Oh no, not a joke," Sheila said; "and I have noticed it before--the

very first evening you came to their house. And perhaps you did not

know of it yourself; and then Mrs. Lorraine, she is clever enough to

see that you did not mean to be disrespectful. But she will expect you

to alter that a great deal if you ask her to marry you; that is, until

you are married."

"Have I ever been overbearing to you, Sheila?" he asked.

"To me? Oh no. You have always been very gentle to me; but I know how

that is. When you first knew me I was almost a child, and you treated

me like a child; and ever since then it has always been the same.

But to others--yes, you are too unceremonious; and Mrs. Lorraine will

expect you to be much more mild and amiable, and you must let her have

opinions of her own."

"Sheila, you give me to understand that I am a bear," he said in tones

of injured protest.

Sheila laughed: "Have I told you the truth at last? It was no matter

so long as you had ordinary acquaintances to deal with. But now, if

you wish to marry that pretty lady, you must be much more gentle if

you are discussing anything with her; and if she says anything that

is not very wise, you must not say bluntly that it is foolish, but you

must smooth it away, and put her right gently, and then she will be

grateful to you. But if you say to her, 'Oh, that is nonsense!' as

you might say to a man, you will hurt her very much. The man would not

care--he would think you were stupid to have a different opinion from

him; but a woman fears she is not as clever as the man she is talking

to, and likes his good opinion; and if he says something careless

like that, she is sensitive to it, and it wounds her. To-night you

contradicted Mrs. Lorraine about the _h_ in those Italian words, and

I am quite sure you were wrong. She knows Italian much better than you

do, and yet she yielded to you very prettily."

"Go on, Sheila, go on," he said with a resigned air. "What else did I

do?"

"Oh, a great many rude things. You should not have contradicted Mrs.

Kavanagh about the color of an amethyst."

"But why? You know she was wrong; and she said herself a minute

afterward that she was thinking of a sapphire."

"But you ought not to contradict a person older than yourself," said

Sheila sententiously.

"Goodness gracious me! Because one person is born in one year, and one

in another, is that any reason why you should say that an amethyst

is blue? Mr. Mackenzie, come and talk to this girl. She is trying to

pervert my principles. She says that in talking to a woman you have to

abandon all hope of being accurate, and that respect for the truth is

not to be thought of. Because a woman has a pretty face she is to be

allowed to say that black is white, and white pea-green. And if you

say anything to the contrary, you are a brute, and had better go and

bellow by yourself in a wilderness."

"Sheila is quite right," said old Mackenzie at a venture.

"Oh, do you think so?" Ingram asked coolly. "Then I can understand how

her moral sentiment has been destroyed, and it is easy to see where

she has got a set of opinions that strike at the very roots of a

respectable and decent society."

"Do you know," said Sheila seriously, "that it is very rude of you to

say so, even in jest? If you treat Mrs. Lorraine in this way--"

She suddenly stopped. Her father had not heard, being busy among

his pipes. So the subject was discreetly dropped, Ingram reluctantly

promising to pay some attention to Sheila's precepts of politeness.

Altogether, it was a pleasant evening they had, but when Ingram had

left, Mr. Mackenzie said to his daughter, "Now, look at this, Sheila.

When Mr. Ingram goes away from London, you hef no friend at all then

in the place, and you are quite alone. Why will you not come to the

Lewis, Sheila? It is no one there will know anything of what has

happened here; and Mairi she is a good girl, and she will hold her

tongue."

"They will ask me why I come back without my husband," Sheila said,

looking down.

"Oh, you will leave that all to me," said her father, who knew he

had surely sufficient skill to thwart the curiosity of a few simple

creatures in Borva. "There is many a girl hass to go home for a time

while her husband he is away on his business; and there will no one

hef the right to ask you any more than I will tell them; and I will

tell them what they should know--oh yes, I will tell them ferry

well--and you will hef no trouble about it. And, Sheila, you are a

good lass, and you know that I hef many things to attend to that is

not easy to write about--"

"I do know that, papa," the girl said, "and many a time have I wished

you would go back to the Lewis."

"And leave you here by yourself? Why, you are talking foolishly,

Sheila. But now, Sheila, you will see how you could go back with me;

and it would be a ferry different thing for you running about in the

fresh air than shut up in a room in the middle of a town. And you are

not looking ferry well, my lass, and Scarlett she will hef to take the

charge of you."

"I will go to the Lewis with you, papa, when you please," she said,

and he was glad and proud to hear her decision; but there was no happy

light of anticipation in her eyes, such as ought to have been awakened

by this projected journey to the far island which she had known as her

home.

And so it was that one rough and blustering afternoon the Clansman

steamed into Stornoway harbor, and Sheila, casting timid and furtive

glances toward the quay, saw Duncan standing there, with the wagonette

some little distance back under charge of a boy. Duncan was a proud

man that day. He was the first to shove the gangway on to the vessel,

and he was the first to get on board; and in another minute Sheila

found the tall, keen-eyed, brown-faced keeper before her, and he was

talking in a rapid and eager fashion, throwing in an occasional scrap

of Gaelic in the mere hurry of his words.

"Oh yes, Miss Sheila, Scarlett she is ferry well whatever, but there

is nothing will make her so well as your coming back to sa Lewis; and

we wass saying yesterday that it looked as if it wass more as three or

four years, or six years, since you went away from sa Lewis, but now

it iss no time at all, for you are just the same Miss Sheila as we

knew before; and there is not one in all Borva but will think it iss a

good day this day that you will come back."

"Duncan," said Mackenzie with an impatient stamp of his foot, "why

will you talk like a foolish man? Get the luggage to the shore,

instead of keeping us all the day in the boat."

"Oh, ferry well, Mr. Mackenzie," said Duncan, departing with an

injured air, and grumbling as he went, "it iss no new thing to you to

see Miss Sheila, and you will have no thocht for any one but yourself.

But I will get out the luggage--oh yes, I will get out the luggage."

Sheila, in truth, had but little luggage with her, but she remained on

board the boat until Duncan was quite ready to start, for she did

not wish just then to meet any of her friends in Stornoway. Then she

stepped ashore and crossed the quay, and got into the wagonette; and

the two horses, whom she had caressed for a moment, seemed to know

that they were carrying Sheila back to her own country, from the

speed with which they rattled out of the town and away into the lonely

moorland.

Mackenzie let them have their way. Past the solitary lakes they

went, past the long stretches of undulating morass, past the lonely

sheilings perched far up on the hills; and the rough and blustering

wind blew about them, and the gray clouds hurried by, and the old,

strong-bearded man who shook the reins and gave the horses their heads

could have laughed aloud in his joy that he was driving his daughter

home. But Sheila--she sat there as one dead; and Mairi, timidly

regarding her, wondered what the impassable face and the bewildered,

sad eyes meant. Did she not smell the sweet strong smell of the

heather? Had she no interest in the great birds that were circling in

the air over by the Barbhas mountains? Where was the pleasure she used

to exhibit in remembering the curious names of the small lakes they

passed?

And lo! the rough gray day broke asunder, and a great blaze of fire

appeared in the west, shining across the moors and touching the blue

slopes of the distant hills. Sheila was getting near to the region of

beautiful sunsets and lambent twilights and the constant movement and

mystery of the sea. Overhead the heavy clouds were still hurried on

by the wind; and in the south the eastern slopes of the hills and the

moors were getting to be of a soft purple; but all along the west,

where her home was, lay a great flush of gold, and she knew that

Loch Roag was shining there, and the gable of the house at Borvabost

getting warm in the beautiful light.

"It is a good afternoon you will be getting to see Borva again," her

father said to her; but all the answer she made was to ask her father

not to stop at Garrana-hina, but to drive straight on to Callernish.

She would visit the people at Garra-na-hina some other day.

The boat was waiting for them at Callernish, and the boat was the

Maighdean-mhara.

"How pretty she is! How have you kept her so well, Duncan?" said

Sheila, her face lighting up for the first time as she went down the

path to the bright-painted little vessel that scarcely rocked in the

water below.

"Bekaas we neffer knew but that it was this week, or the week before,

or the next week you would come back, Miss Sheila, and you would want

your boat; but it wass Mr. Mackenzie himself, it wass he that did all

the pentin of the boat; and it iss as well done as Mr. McNicol could

have done it, and a great deal better than that mirover."

"Won't you steer her yourself, Sheila?" her father suggested, glad to

see that she was at last being interested and pleased.

"Oh yes, I will steer her, if I have not forgotten all the points that

Duncan taught me."

"And I am sure you hef not done that, Miss Sheila," Duncan said, "for

there wass no one knew Loch Roag better as you, not one, and you hef

not been so long away; and when you tek the tiller in your hand it

will all come back to you, just as if you wass going away from Borva

the day before yesterday."

She certainly had not forgotten, and she was proud and pleased to see

how well the shapely little craft performed its duties. They had a

favorable wind, and ran rapidly along the opening channels, until in

due course they glided into the well-known bay over which, and shining

in the yellow light from the sunset, they saw Sheila's home.

Sheila had escaped so far the trouble of meeting friends, but she

could not escape her friends in Borvabost. They had waited for her for

hours, not knowing when the Clansman might arrive at Stornoway; and

now they crowded down to the shore, and there was a great shaking

of hands, and an occasional sob from some old crone, and a thousand

repetitions of the familiar "And are you ferry well, Miss Sheila?"

from small children who had come across from the village in defiance

of mothers and fathers. And Sheila's face brightened into a wonderful

gladness, and she had a hundred questions to ask for one answer she

got, and she did not know what to do with the number of small brown

fists that wanted to shake hands with her.

"Will you let Miss Sheila alone?" Duncan called out, adding something

in Gaelic which came strangely from a man who sometimes reproved his

own master for swearing. "Get away with you, you brats: it wass better

you would be in your beds than bothering people that wass come all the

way from Styornoway."

Then they all went up in a body to the house, and Scarlett, who had

neither eyes, ears nor hands but for the young girl who had been the

very pride of her heart, was nigh driven to distraction by Mackenzie's

stormy demands for oatcake and glasses and whisky. Scarlett angrily

remonstrated with her husband for allowing this rabble of people to

interfere with the comfort of Miss Sheila; and Duncan, taking her

reproaches with great good-humor, contented himself with doing her

work, and went and got the cheese and the plates and the whisky, while

Scarlett, with a hundred endearing phrases, was helping Sheila to take

off her traveling things. And Sheila, it turned out, had brought

with her in her portmanteau certain huge and wonderful cakes, not of

oatmeal, from Glasgow; and these were soon on the great table in the

kitchen, and Sheila herself distributing pieces to those small folks

who were so awestricken by the sight of this strange dainty that they

forgot her injunctions and thanked her timidly in Gaelic.

"Well, Sheila my lass," said her father to her as they stood at the

door of the house and watched the troop of their friends, children

and all, go over the hill to Borvabost in the red light of the sunset,

"and are you glad to be home again?"

"Oh yes," she said heartily enough; and Mackenzie thought that things

were going on favorably.

"You hef no such sunsets in the South, Sheila," he observed, loftily

casting his eye around, although he did not usually pay much attention

to the picturesqueness of his native island. "Now look at the light

on Suainabhal. Do you see the red on the water down there, Sheila? Oh

yes, I thought you would say it wass ferry beautiful--it is a ferry

good color on the water. The water looks ferry well when it is red.

You hef no such things in London--not any, Sheila. Now we must go

in-doors, for these things you can see any day here, and we must not

keep our friends waiting."

An ordinary, dull-witted or careless man might have been glad to have

a little quiet after so long and tedious a journey, but Mr. Mackenzie

was no such person. He had resolved to guard against Sheila's first

evening at home being in any way languid or monotonous, and so he had

asked one or two of his especial friends to remain and have supper

with them. Moreover, he did not wish the girl to spend the rest of

the evening out of doors when the melancholy time of the twilight

drew over the hills and the sea began to sound remote and sad. Sheila

should have a comfortable evening in-doors; and he would himself,

after supper, when the small parlor was well lit up, sing for her one

or two songs, just to keep the thing going, as it were. He would let

nobody else sing. These Gaelic songs were not the sort of music to

make people cheerful. And if Sheila herself would sing for them?

And Sheila did. And her father chose the songs for her, and they were

the blithest he could find, and the girl seemed really in excellent

spirits. They had their pipes and their hot whisky and water in this

little parlor; Mr. Mackenzie explaining that although his daughter was

accustomed to spacious and gilded drawing-rooms where such a thing

was impossible, she would do anything to make her friends welcome and

comfortable, and they might fill their glasses and their pipes with

impunity. And Sheila sang again and again, all cheerful and sensible

English songs, and she listened to the odd jokes and stories her

friends had to tell her; and Mackenzie was delighted with the success

of his plans and precautions. Was not her very appearance now a

triumph? She was laughing, smiling, talking to every one: he had not

seen her so happy for many a day.

In the midst of it all, when the night had come apace, what was this

wild skirl outside that made everybody start? Mackenzie jumped to his

feet, with an angry vow in his heart that if this "teffle of a piper

John" should come down the hill playing "Lochaber no more" or "Cha

till mi tualadh" or any other mournful tune, he would have his chanter

broken in a thousand splinters over his head. But what was the wild

air that came nearer and nearer, until John marched into the house,

and came, with ribbons and pipes, to the very door of the room, which

was flung open to him? Not a very appropriate air, perhaps, for it was

The Campbells are coming, oho! oho!

The Campbells are coming, oho! oho!

The Campbells are coming to bonny Lochleven!

The Campbells are coming, oho! oho!

But it was, to Mr. Mackenzie's rare delight, a right good joyous tune,

and it was meant as a welcome to Sheila; and forthwith he caught the

white-haired piper by the shoulder and dragged him in, and said, "Put

down your pipes and come into the house, John--put down your pipes and

tek off your bonnet, and we shall hef a good dram together this night,

by Kott! And it is Sheila herself will pour out the whisky for you,

John; and she is a good Highland girl, and she knows the piper was

never born that could be hurt by whisky, and the whisky was never yet

made that could hurt a piper. What do you say to that, John?"

John did not answer: he was standing before Sheila with his bonnet in

his hand, but with his pipes still proudly over his shoulder. And he

took the glass from her and called out "Shlainte!" and drained every

drop of it out to welcome Mackenzie's daughter home.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP

MR. E. LYTTON BULWER.

In looking over, not very long since, a long--neglected, thin

portfolio of my twin-brother, the late Willis Gaylord Clark of

Philadelphia, I came across a sealed parcel endorsed "London

Correspondence." It contained letters to him from many literary

persons of more or less eminence at that time in the British

metropolis; among others, two from Miss Landon ("L.E.L."); two

from Mrs. S. C. Hall, the versatile and clever author of _Tales

and Sketches of the Irish Peasantry_, cordial, closely--written and

recrossed to the remotest margin; one from her husband, Mr. S.C. Hall;

three or four from Mr. Chorley; and lastly, five or six elaborate

letters from Mr. E. Lytton Bulwer, sent through his American

publishers, the Brothers Harper, by Washington Irving, then secretary

of legation to the American embassy "near the court of St. James."

Enclosed with these last-mentioned letters was a communication from

Miss Fanny Kemble, to whom they had been sent for perusal, and who,

in returning them, did not hesitate to say that she did Not share his

young American correspondent's admiration for the author of _Pelham_.

She had met him frequently in London society, and regarded his manners

as affected and himself as a reflex of his own conceited model of

a gentleman--a style which Thackeray perhaps did not too grossly

caricature when he made Chawls Yellowplush announce, from his

own lips, his sounding name and title to a distinguished London

drawing-room as "Sa-wa-Edou-wah'd-à-Lyttod-à-Bulwig!"

The poems which my brother had written for two London journals at

the time of their first appearance and sudden popularity, the

_London Literary Gazette_ and, I believe, the _Athenæum_, led to the

correspondence I have mentioned; and from the letters of Mr. Bulwer I

have extracted a few passages, as somewhat personal in their nature,

besides being characteristic of his tone of thought and manner of

expression at that period of his career:

"An author who has a just confidence in his attainments and powers,

who knows that his mind is imperishable and capable of making daily

additions to its own strength, is always more desirous of seeing the

censures (if not _mere_ abuse) than the praises of those who aspire to

judge him; and any suggestions or admonitions thus bestowed are seldom

disregarded. But if he is to profit by criticism, the _motive_ must

be known to him. It is by no means natural to take the advice of an

enemy. When the critic enters his department of literature in the

false guise of urbanity and candor merely to conceal an incapable and

huckstering soul, he only awakens for himself the irrevocable contempt

of the very mind that he would gall or subdue; since that mind, under

such circumstances, invariably rises _above_ its detractor, and leaves

him exposed on the same creaking gibbet that he has prepared for the

object of his fear or envy."

"Seldom indeed is it that injustice fails to be seen through, or that

the policy of interested condemnation escapes undetected. They first

produce the excitements, then furnish the triumphs, of genius."

"There is a charm in writing for the pure and intelligent young worth

all the plaudits of sinister or hypocritical wisdom. At a certain age,

and while the writings that please have a gloss of novelty about

them, hiding the blemishes that may afterward be discovered as

their characteristics,--_then_ it is that the young convert their

approbation into enthusiasm. An author benefits in a wide and

most pleasing range of public opinion by this natural and common

disposition in the young; and the only cloud thrown athwart the rays

of pleasure thus saluting his spirit is flung from the thought that

they who are thus moved by the movings of his own mind may come in

a few years to look upon his pages with hearts less ardent in their

sympathies, and with altered eyes, which have acquired additional

keenness by looking longer upon the world."

"The competent American _littérateur_ has a glorious career

before him. So much is there in your magnificent country, hitherto

undescribed and unexpressed, in scenery, manners, morals, that all

may be wells from which he may be the first to drink. Yet it cannot be

expected--for it has passed to a proverb that escape from persecution

and detraction can never and nowhere be the lot of literature--that

there will not be many instances, even in America, where every attempt

on the part of gifted writers (and young writers especially, who are

commonly regarded with eyes of invidious jaundice by the elders,

whose waning reputations they may through industry either supplant or

explode) will be rendered an uneasy struggle, and sometimes almost a

curse, by the envy of those who deny approval while blind to success,

and the affected disdain of those who exaggerate demerit. Yet

these obstacles warm the spirit of honest ambition, and enhance its

inevitable conquests."

"It is a sight of gratification and pride to behold a laborer in the

vineyard of letters escaping from the envy, the jealousy, the rivalry,

the leaven of all uncharitableness, with which literary intercourse

is so often polluted. The writers of England have been tardy in

their justice, not only to the progress, circumstances and customs

of America, but to her intellectual offspring; and the time is not

remote--nay, has already dawned--when, in this regard, the spirit of

Change wields his wand and finds obedience to his prerogatives."

"'No hostility between nations affects the arts:' so said the old

maxim, but it has rarely been found a truism. They who feel it, feel

also the virtue which dictated the aphorism. Men whose object is to

enlighten the nations or exalt the judgment or (the least ambition) to

refine the tastes of others--men who feel that this object is dearer

to them than a petty and vain ambition--feel also that all who labor

in the same cause are united with them in a friendship which exists

in one climate as in another--in a I republic or in a despotism: these

are the best cosmopolites, the truest citizens of the world."

The foregoing extracts will make it obvious that Mr. Bulwer was

at that time sore at the treatment he had received at the hands

of certain of his critics, who were by no means unanimous in their

estimation of his genius. He was very sensitive at all times of

adverse comment upon his writings. Thackeray wounded him woefully when

he made "Chawls Yellowplush" review him characteristically in _Punch_.

These most amusing papers ought to have been included in Thackeray's

published miscellaneous writings, but they were not, although Bulwer

is humorously travestied in _Punch's_ "Prize Novelists," together with

Lover, Ainsworth, and Disraeli. The subjoined will show the style

of the "littery" footman, who, as a critic, "sumtimes gave kissis,

sumtimes kix":

"One may objeck to an immence deal of your writings, witch, betwigst

you and me, contain more sham sentiment, sham morallaty and sham potry

than you'd like to own; but in spite of this, there's the _stuf_

you; you've a kind and loyal heart in your buzm, bar'net--a trifle

deboshed, praps: a keen i, igspecially for what is comick (as for your

tragady, it's mighty flatchulent), and a ready pleasn't pen. The man

who says you're an As, is an As himself. Dont b'lieve him, bar'net:

not that I suppose you will; for, if I've formed a correck opinion of

you from your wuck, you think your small beear as good as most men's.

Every man does--and wy not? We brew, and we love our own tap--amen;

but the pint betwigst us is this steupid, absudd way of crying out

because the public don't like it too. Wy _should_ they, my dear

bar'net? You may vow that they are fools, or that the critix are your

enemies, or that the world should judge your poams by _your_ critikle

rules, and not by their own. You may beat your brest, and vow that

you are a martyr, but you won't mend the matter."

After these general remarks, the critic-footman takes up the subject

of style, and argues with a good deal of ingenuity and force in favor

of simplicity and terseness, especially in his performance of _The

Sea-Captain_:

"Sea-captings should not be eternly spowting, and invoking gods, hevn,

starz, and angels, and other silestial influences. We can all do it,

bar'net: no-think in life is easier. I can compare my livery buttons

to the stars, or the clouds of my backr pipe to the dark vollums that

ishew from Mount Hetna; or I can say that angles are looking down from

them, and the tobacco-silf, like a happy soil released, is circling

round and upwards, and shaking sweetness down. All this is as easy as

to drink; but it's not potry, bar'net, nor natral. Pipple, when their

mothers reckonise them, don't howl about the suckumambient air, and

paws to think of the happy leaves a-rustling--leastways, one mistrusts

them if they do...Look at the neat grammaticle twist of Lady Arundel's

spitch too, who in the cors of three lines has made her son a prince,

a lion with a sword and coronal, and a star. Wy gauble, and sheak up

metafers in this way, bar'net? One simile is quite enuff in the best

of sentences; and I preshume I need not tell you that it's as well to

have it _like_ while you are about it. Take my advice, honrabble sir:

listen to an umble footman: it's genrally best in potry to understand

perffickly what you mean yourself, and to igspress your meaning

clearly affterward: the simpler the words the better, praps. You may,

for instans, call a coronet an 'ancestral coronal,' if you like, as

you might call a hat a 'swart sombrero,' a glossy four-and-nine,

a 'silken helm, to storm impermeable,' and 'lightsome as a breezy

gossamer;' but in the long run it's as well to call it a hat. It _is_

a hat, and that name is quite as poeticle as another."

The remarks of Mr. Yellowplush upon some of the segregated passages

are amusing enough. Take the following, for example:

Girl, beware!

The love that trifles round the charm it gilds,

Oft ruins while it shines.

Igsplane this, men and angles! I've tried every way; backards,

forards, and all sorts of trancepositions:

The love that ruins round the charm it shines

Gilds while it trifles oft,

or--

The charm that gilds around the love it ruins,

Oft trifles while it shines,

or--

The ruins that love gilds and shines around

Oft trifles while it charms,

or--

Love while it charms shines round and ruins oft

The trifles that it gilds,

or--

The love that trifles, gilds and ruins oft

While round the charm it shines.

All witch are as sen sable as the ferst passadge. Sir Mr. Bullwig,

ain't I right? Such, barring the style, was the tenor of many of the

critiques upon Bulwer's writings which appeared about that period, and

which, as is now well known, "wrought him much annoy," versatile and

powerful as his genius has since proved itself.

L. GAYLORD CLARK.

SALVINI'S OTHELLO.

It might have been supposed that whatever the fate of the stage among

other races, it would always maintain its position as one of the great

instruments of popular culture with the English-speaking nations,

linked as it is inseparably with the immortal name of Shakespeare in

his double capacity of author and actor, and possessing as it does

in his works a body of dramatic literature supreme alike in all

intellectual qualities and in fitness for scenic representation. Yet

it is but the other day that we were reminded by the announcement of

Macready's death of the long interval that had elapsed since the last

of the English tragedians had dropped a sceptre which there was no

one to take up; and now it is an actor of another race, speaking a

different language, who presents himself to fill the vacant place, and

to interpret for us anew creations which we study indeed more closely

than ever in the printed page, but of which we had ceased to ask for

any adequate palpable embodiment. Our impression, however, of a drama

is and must be incomplete until we have seen it on the stage: it must

be put in action before our eyes ere we can hope fully to understand

it. The amount of thoughtful and learned criticism to which

Shakespeare's plays have been subjected makes us forget at times that

the ultimate test of their excellence is to be found on the boards,

and that they were meant, above all things, to be acted.

Taking Othello as Salvini presents him to us, and merely in the

light of a dramatic performance, having cast from out our minds the

recollection of all that we have ever heard, read or thought about the

character--more than this, forgetting our native English and knowing

Shakespeare only through the libretto in our hands (of which, however,

we must forbear to speak slightingly, for from it, we are told,

Salvini himself has gained his knowledge of the part),--putting

ourselves in this mental attitude, the performance may safely be said

to defy criticism, or rather to be above it, except such criticism

as accords with enthusiastic admiration. It is absolutely without

a shortcoming, seen from this standpoint. His majestic bearing,

his beautiful elocution, his pure voice, his graceful, expressive

gestures, and above all his perfect freedom from affectation or

self-consciousness, delight us throughout; and when to these qualities

are added the marvelous vigor of expression and force of passion with

which he shakes his audience from the middle of the play on, one feels

as if there were nothing more to ask of acting. No description, in

fact, can do justice to the perfect consistency and harmony of his

conception, or to the marvelous delicacy of his points, which are

yet as penetrating as they are subtle, and which never fail of their

effect, whether rendered by a gesture whose power of expression seems

to make words superfluous, as when in reply to Iago's hypocritically

sympathetic "I see this has a little dashed your spirits," which

is answered in the play by "Not a jot, not a jot," Salvini tries to

speak, but chokes with the words, and lifting his hand with a motion

of denial and deprecation, tells us what he would fain say, but

cannot; or by an intonation of voice, as when in answer to Iago's

"You would be satisfied?" he replies, marking the difference between

conditional and imperative with a tone that would of itself betray him

born to command--

Vorrei, che dico--io voglio

(Would?--Nay, I _will_).

And when in his desperate pain and fury, maddened by the poison

working within, he drags Iago to the front of the stage, and holding

him by the throat speaks Shakespeare's meaning, if not Shakespeare's

words, thick and fast, as if he were not an actor, but Othello

himself, and while his audience listen with bated breath and

quick-beating hearts, he hurls him to the ground, and in the uncurbed

fury of his mood raises his foot to spurn him like a dog,--then he

rises far above ordinary dramatic effect: his art does "hold the

mirror up to Nature." We feel that we have seen Othello.

Again, in the fourth act, when Iago brings home to him the realization

of his wife's infidelity, what can be finer than the sharpening of

his voice from stress of pain, changing from the full roundness of

its usual masculine robustness to a high womanish key, as he asks the

fatal questions, "Che disse? Che? Che fece?" What words could have

said so much as the dumb show with which he signifies that terrible

fact of which he can neither ask nor hear in words? And who can doubt

when he hears that cry of agony that bursts from his lips at Iago's

gross confirmation of his suggestion that it is the cry of a man

stabbed to the heart? His suffering is as real to us as the agony of

a lion would be if we stood by and saw some one drive a knife into the

beast up to the hilt. It equals in reality any exhibition of simple

unfeigned bodily pain, with all its intensity of violence. The word

"rant" never once comes into our minds.

Salvini expresses everything. He demands nothing from his audience but

eyes and ears; he _acts_ the part in every detail; he does just what

he aims to do. His motion is as unconscious and unfettered as that of

a deer or a tiger: whether he paces with a stealthy, restless tread up

and down the back of the stage, reminding us irresistibly of a caged

wild beast, or whether he half crouches, then drags himself along, and

then darts upon Iago in the last scene, it is always plain that his

body is the servant of his mind: he moves in harmony with his mood.

Despite, therefore, the natural tendency to scrutinize closely

the claims of a foreigner seeking to rule over our hearts as the

vicegerent of Shakespeare's sovreignty, there has been, and happily

can be, no question in regard to one essential point. That Salvini is

a born actor, a great tragedian, none will be bold enough to dispute.

In that rare combination of intellectual and physical qualities without

which no particular gift would justify his pretensions--intensity of

emotion, subtlety of perception, a power of impersonation implying of

itself the union of all the natural requirements with a mastery in their

display attainable only by consummate art--it is hard to believe that he

can ever have been excelled; though doubtless the mingled fire and

pathos of Kean transcended in their effect any like exhibition ever

witnessed on the stage. Except for the few--if any still survive--who can

remember the Othello of Kean, living recollection affords no opportunity

for a judgment founded on comparison.

The only question therefore which it is possible to raise relates to

Salvini's conception of the character--a question such as must always

exist in the case of any representation of Shakespeare, with whose

creations no actor can ever hope to identify himself, however he may

modify our former impressions. Let it be remembered, too, that an

actor's conception of a character must never be vague, undefined or

shadowy, as that of a mere reader may well be, and probably will be in

the exact degree in which he is a keen and appreciative student. The

actor must not strive to suggest all possible solutions, but must

hold firmly to one, and that the most dramatic; he must seize upon

the salient points; his subtleties must not be too subtle for gesture,

glance and tone to express; he must choose which meaning out of many

meanings he shall enforce, which mood out of many moods he shall make

predominate.

The exceptions which have been taken to Salvini's performance all rest

upon the notion that he has misconceived the character. It is superb,

we are told, but it is not Shakespeare. It is a representation not of

Othello the Moor, but of a Moor named Othello. The idea that dominates

throughout is that of race: the character loses its individuality

and becomes a mere type, an embodiment of the tropical nature, an

illustration of Byron's lines:

Africa is all the sun's,

And as her earth her human clay is kindled.

The unbridled passion, the revengeful fury, is that of a savage. The

anguish and indignation of a noble spirit believing itself outraged

and wronged are transformed into the blind rage and capricious fury of

a wild beast.

This objection seems to us to spring from the state of mind often

induced by long familiarity with a subject, in which the gain of

minute knowledge is accompanied by a loss of the force and vividness

of the first impression. People study Shakespeare as they study

the Bible, softening whatever they find revolting until they have

convinced themselves that it does not exist. Actors in general share

in this sentiment or strive to gratify it. Othello's complexion is

forgotten in the reading, and becomes in the representation such

that the spectator feels no repugnance to his marriage with the fair

Desdemona. Betrayed through the mere openness and generosity of his

nature, he acts only as a sensitive and vehement nature would be

compelled to act in so terrible a complication, and the emotions

kindled by his demeanor and conduct are never those of horror and

repulsion, but only of pity and admiration.

But, however noble and pathetic such a rendering may be, it consorts

better with the ideas and demands of the present time than with those

of the Elizabethan age. The dramatist who began by writing _Titus

Andronicus_ had at least no instinctive distaste to repulsive

subjects, no fear of shocking his audience by an exhibition of untamed

barbarity. Othello is "of a free and open nature," he is "great of

heart," he is above doing wrong without provocation, real or supposed.

But his nature admits no possibility of self-control, of reason in

the midst of doubts, of patience under injury. His temperament betrays

itself in physical exhibitions wild and portentous. "You are fatal

_then_ when your eyes roll so," is the suggestive cry of Desdemona. In

his perplexity and fury he swoons and foams. He overhears an insult to

Venice and slays the traducer. His language to the wife whom he

still loves while believing himself dishonored by her is such that "a

beggar, in his drink, could not have laid such terms upon his callet."

He outrages her kinsman and a throng of attendants by striking her in

their presence. Her protestations of innocence serve only to inflame

him, and he cuts short her last pleadings with his murderous hand in

a way which would have forced M. Dumas _fils_ himself to cry out, "Ne

tue la _pas_!"

How are this fury and this credulity, both equally insensate, to

be explained, how are they to be reconciled with traits that

compel sympathy and admiration, except as the workings of a nature

essentially uncivilized? The object of a great drama is to exhibit men

not as they appear in the ordinary affairs of life, but while subject

to those fiery tests under which all that is foreign or acquired melts

away, and the primal components of the character are revealed in their

bareness and in their depths. Othello's race is the hinge on which

the tragedy turns. It throws a fatality on that marriage which seems

unnatural even to those who yet do not suspect that the discordancy

lies deeper than in the complexion. It makes him the easy victim of a

plot which would otherwise only have ensnared its concoctor. It sweeps

away all impediments to the catastrophe, making it swift, inevitable

and dire. And it is by seizing upon this central fact that Salvini has

been enabled to render his performance artistically perfect. Were the

conception radically false, there could not be the same unity in the

execution, the same harmony in the details. We shall not assert

that his is the ideal Othello, or that such an Othello is possible.

Shakespeare's creations cannot be bounded by the limit of another

idiosyncrasy. But we hold that, if he does not put into the character

all that belongs to it, he puts nothing into it that does not belong

to it. We may miss in the accents of his despair a pathos capable of

assuaging our horror; but this latter emotion, equally legitimate,

is commonly stifled altogether, leaving us more disposed to linger

lovingly beside the dead than to shudder and exclaim with Ludovico,

"The object poisons sight;--let it be hid."

A.F.

A LETTER FROM NEW YORK.

I have come from the country. I have seen Salvini. All emotion has to

be expressed now in the above form, for Salvini rules. He is simply

the greatest actor since Rachel, and his troupe the most perfect ever

seen in this country. The whole plane of their acting is forty steps

higher than we are accustomed to; therefore it has been slow of

gaining appreciation, and the panic having burst over the devoted city

just as Salvini opened, the houses have been poor. He should play, too

(all actors should), in a smaller house than the Academy of Music. His

first great success may therefore date from a matinée at Wallack's,

where he had the most distinguished audience I have ever seen in

New York, on Saturday, October 11th. Salvini lunched while here with

Madame Botta, and expressed himself surprised that any one should care

to go to hear him who could not understand the language. "I am sure

I should not go," said the great actor. He thinks he has not had a

success, but he will not think so after he becomes accustomed to his

audiences. He is in private one of the most cultivated and intelligent

of men, and has brought to the practice of his art a scholar's study,

a soldier's experience and a gentleman's taste. I say a soldier's

experience, for Salvini has been a soldier, and fought for united

Italy in 1857 and earlier.

Nilsson is much improved by marriage. Her beauty is softer, she has

gained flesh--not to the detriment of that girlish outline, but to the

improvement of those somewhat aggressive cheek-bones. She sings better

than ever, with rounded voice. Never since the days of Salvi and

Steffanoni have we had such opera in New York. The orchestra is

better, Maurel is superb, Capoul is still better, and Campanini is

very admirable. We miss Jamet very much in Mephisto, but every one

else is better than before. The house is not gay--it misses many of

its old habitués. Five empty boxes in a row tell of the financial

troubles. It was the fashion to laugh at the Wall street men, but they

gave gayety and life and movement up town as well as down town. Many

of those whose names are recorded on the wrong side of the list were

our most generous givers and most amiable hosts. Their misfortunes

cause nothing but regrets.

The races at first felt the effects of the panic, but the crowd on

Saturday, the 11th of October, was immense. Somebody must get the

money that everybody loses; therefore somebody can still afford to go

to the races, and the last day was also very full. Two drags set the

English example of having the horses taken off and dining on the top

of the coach. The notes of a key-bugle from one of them seemed to

suggest Mr. Bob Sawyer and Mr. Ben Allen; but whether those young

gentlemen were of the party or not I did not hear. With our delicious

sky, and particularly this golden autumn, there seems to be no reason

why we should not adopt the fashions of Chantilly and Ascot. We are,

however, a gregarious people, and the tendency is to gather together

under the protection of the grand stand.

Poor Maretzek is always the first to go, and it is understood that

his opera is among the great unpaid. Every one is sorry for the poor

singers, always excepting Lucca, whose jealousy of Nilsson is so

aggressive that she has declared that she would sing her off the

boards of the Academy of Music. _She_ is driven like a bad angel out

of Paradise, while the starry Nilsson in magnificent triumph sings

on superbly to constantly increasing houses at the Academy, and is

lunched and fêted to her heart's content.

The Evangelical Alliance has gone, and left behind it nothing but

animosities. It was really a vast movement of the Presbyterian Church:

Geneva and Calvin were the exclusive proprietors. Episcopalians,

Unitarians and Baptists, Methodists and Universalists, were requested

to stand aside. The communions were always at some Presbyterian

church. Perhaps _they_ thought the Episcopal Church exclusive, as some

one said an Englishman carried his pride into his prayers, and said,

"O Lord, I do most _haughtily_ beseech thee," and that the Unitarians

felt "that any man who had been born in Boston did not see the

necessity of being born again."

Every one is extremely well dressed, in spite of the panic. The hair

is worn plain and off the brow, let us thank the genius of Fashion,

so that every woman has a purer, better look. Nothing destroys the

expression of a good woman like breaking over that line which Nature

has made about the forehead. Our women have made themselves into

wicked Faustinas and vulgar Anonymas long enough with their frizzes

and short curls and "banging," as the square-cut straight lock on the

forehead is called. Let us see the Madonna brow once more. The high

ruff, the sleeve to the elbow, the dress cut to show the figure, all

bring-back the days of our great-grandmothers: the opera is filled

with Copley's portraits. The bonnets, too, are delightfully large,

with long feathers. Every new fashion brings out a new crop of

beauties, but I could not see what beauties were brought out by those

bold bonnets of last year, which were hung on at the back of the head.

We expect great fun from Dundreary rehearsing _Hamlet_ for private

theatricals. Mr. Sothern has been asked to write down Dundreary, that

so great an eccentric conception may not be lost to the world. He

answers that he has twelve volumes of Dundreary literature! That shows

how much industry goes to even an "inconsiderate trifle." This fine

actor and most accomplished and agreeable man has been playing in two

of the poorest plays ever presented to a New York audience. Nothing

but a capital "make up," resembling one of the most fashionable men in

town, who is Sothern's particular friend, has given them point--even

_then_ only to New Yorkers. Sothern's fondness for practical joking

has brought about so many false charges that he is getting very tired

of being fathered with every stupid trick which any one chooses to

play, and will probably drop that form of wit, so really unworthy of

his great genius and true refinement, for the man who could invent

Dundreary and who can play Garrick is a genius.

I assisted with four thousand others at the first representation

of the _Magic Flute_ at the Grand Opera House, where the late James

Fisk's monogram is decently covered up by Gothic shields, hastily

improvised after _that_ distinguished actor met the reward of

his crimes. I heard lima di Murska for the first time. She is an

unpleasant miracle, compelling your reluctant astonishment. Such vocal

gymnastics I never heard. The flute and the musical-box are left in

the background, but her voice is nasal and disagreeable at first.

Lucca's splendid, rich, full organ rang out gloriously by contrast,

although her constitutional jealousy showed itself unpleasantly in

some parts of the opera where Murska was so deliriously applauded.

Lucca, little woman, conquered herself at last, and handed the flowers

up to her rival with a pretty grace which was loudly applauded. It is

strange that the tact of woman, usually so apprehensive, does not more

often see the good effect of generosity.

One effect of the panic, it is to be hoped, will be to make the

dinners less magnificently heavy. I am sure every lady in New York who

was last winter constrained to sit from seven o'clock until eleven at

those monstrously elaborate and expensive dinners which have become so

much the fashion, will be glad to dine in a more simple manner, in

a shorter time, with less display, and with fewer courses, and fewer

excitements. One entertainer last winter introduced live swans and

small canaries to enliven his dinner. The swans splashed rather

disagreeably.

"Do you know why he had the swans?" said a lady to a gentleman.

"I suppose, he wanted the _Ledas_ of society," said the gentleman.

"Well, yes," said the lady, "but I did not know, although he is as

rich as a Jew, that he was a Jupiter."

The faces of the "panicstricken" seem to look brighter, although

everybody talks of "shrinkage" and ruin. Meanwhile the beautiful

weather keeps the carriages going and Fifth Avenue looking gay. "I

shall fail, but my wife need not give up her horses," said a young

broker the other day. The old days of commercial morality, when people

reduced their style of living because they had failed, seem to have

gone out of fashion.

A letter from New York, this Queen of Commerce, is almost necessarily

mercantile, as is our conversation.

"How you all talk stocks and money!" said a gentleman just arrived

from a ten years' sojourn in Europe. "When I went away you were

talking of books, of art, of social ethics, of fine women, of good

dinners, of whist and bezique: now you are all talking of longs and

shorts, bulls and bears, a fraction of per cent., etc. etc.--all of

you, men, women and children."

We have a beautiful collection at the Art Museum in Fourteenth street

of jewelry, objets d'art, and a good ceramic display, all clustered

round the Di Cesnola sculptures and pottery. This collection, founded

on the idea of the South Kensington Museum, makes a most agreeable

lounging-place in the Kruger mansion, and is, in the absence of most

of the opulent owners of private picture-galleries and the closing of

the National Academy, almost our only artistic amusement at present.

But the first of December will throw open many hospitable doors, and

the new pictures and statues which have been accumulated during

the past summer will become in one sense the property of the gazing

public.

MARGARET CLAYSON.

NOTES.

Amongst the traditional scenes of the drama probably none plays a part

more useful than the village festival. This merrymaking appears twice

or thrice in an ordinary pantomime, regularly adorns the melodrama, is

almost an essential of the opera, could not be dispensed with in the

plays of the _Fanchon_ type, and may even relieve the sombre tints of

dire tragedy. We all know the charming spectacle: peasant youths and

maidens, clad in all the wealth of the dramatic wardrobe, are skipping

around a Maypole; presently Baptiste and Lisette are discovered

kissing behind a pasteboard hedge, and are drawn out with universal

laughing, in the midst of which enters the recruiting-sergeant with

his squad and whisks off poor Baptiste to the wars. It is a pleasing

scene--a trifle monotonous now with repetition; and for this latter

reason it might be well to vary it by substituting the rural Feast of

the Onion, which a 'correspondent of the Cambrai _Gazette_ witnessed

in the suburbs of Gouzeaucourt. Every year, between June 24th and July

2d, the inhabitants of the two neighboring villages of Gouzeaucourt

and Gonnelieu perform the ceremony of "turning the onion"--that is to

say, they dance in a circle, joining hands, on the village green of

one or the other hamlet. Thanks to this ancient custom, the two French

communes raise the finest onions in the department, this vegetable

never failing, as carrots are apt to do in that locality: on the

contrary, the onions are well-grown, finely rounded, and in short,

magnificently "turned." On this festive occasion three or four hundred

persons of every age and condition dance around a well in Sunday best,

rigged out in ribbons and with smiling faces. The more they hop the

bigger the crop of onions; and naturally they skip and sing till out

of breath, always repeating the popular song, "Ah! qu'il est malaisé

d'être amoureux et sage." Surely, all this would form a pleasant

variety on the ordinary festal scene of the stage; and we hasten

to remind the fastidious that though this ceremony is the Feast

of Onions, yet it does not appear that that odorous esculent need

actually be present; besides, even if it were, surely a garland of

"well-turned" onions would add strength to the picturesque ropes of

theatrical paper roses. The well, too, would replace with a certain

grace the too familiar pole. And again, since all ages and conditions

assist at this feast, it would utilize that extraordinary company of

figurantes, varying from the longest and slimmest to the shortest

and plumpest, which every manager thinks it incumbent to put upon

the stage for the rural fête. Finally, to complete the tableau

satisfactorily, it appears that this year at Gonnelieu, at the height

of the dancing, half a dozen gendarmes rushed upon the scene, causing

a general stampede among the disciples of the onion and a hasty

adjournment of the festival. What law against irregular assemblages

was infringed by these onion-worshipers is not clear, for one can

hardly detect sedition lurking under the rustic ditty, and it is

equally difficult to suspect an Orsini bomb conspiracy of being

typified by the conjuring of prodigious prize onions.

It is a vast pity that so many excellent stories are "almost too good

to be true." Such a tale seems to be the one which explains the origin

of that prodigious collection of monkeys that forms so large a part of

the population of the Jardin d'Acclimation in Paris; and yet, as this

curious account has not been questioned, so far as we are aware, by

those who ought to know the facts, it is hardly gracious in us

to begin the relation of it by gratuitous skepticism. A Bordeaux

ship-owner, who is noted for insisting on a strict obedience to

instructions on the part of his captains, some time ago gave written

orders to one of the latter to bring back from Brazil, whither he was

going, one or two monkeys--"_Rapportez-moi 1 ou 2 singes_." The _ou_

was so badly written that the captain read "1002 singes;" and

the result was that the owner, three months after, found his ship

returning, to his utter stupefaction, overrun with monkeys from

keel to mast-head. However, inflexibly just even in his surprise,

he recognized the fault to be that of his own hasty handwriting, and

praised the scrupulous captain who had executed his apparent order

even to the odd pair of monkeys over the thousand. For a week apes

were a drug in the Bordeaux market, and, adds the story, the Jardin,

hearing the news, took care not to lose so good an opportunity of

laying in a large stock.

The traditional union of fidelity, obedience to orders, strict

discipline and stupidity in the old-fashioned military servant is

wittily illustrated in a story told by the _Gazette de Paris_ at the

expense of a captain of the Melun garrison. This officer, who had been

invited to dine at a neighboring castle, sent his valet with a note

of "regrets," adding, as the boy started, "Be sure and bring me my

dinner, Auguste, when you have left the letter." The soldier took the

letter to the castle and was told, of course, "It's all right." "Yes,

but I want the dinner," said the lad: "the captain ordered me to bring

it back, and I always obey orders." The baroness, being informed

of the good fellow's blunder, carried out the joke by despatching a

splendid repast. The officer, too amused to make any explanation to

his servant, merely sent him back at once to buy a bouquet to carry

with his compliments to the baroness. Successfully accomplishing this

feat, the brilliant Auguste was handed a five-franc piece from the

lady. "That won't do," says the honest fellow: "I paid thirty francs

for the flowers." The difference was made up to him, and he returned

to the fort, quite proud at having so ably discharged his duty. We

think this incident will fairly match some of the experiences which

our own officers are fond of narrating, regarding the way in which

their servants have interpreted and executed their orders.

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

Sub-Tropical Rambles in the Land of the Aphanapteryx. By Nicholas

Pike. New York: Harper & Brothers.

The story of a bright and educated traveler is always a capital one,

and Mr. Pike has done wonders for Mauritius, which would seem in

itself to be one of the most deplorably dull and fatiguing prominences

on the face of the sea. An enthusiastic botanist and naturalist, as

well as an interested ethnologist, this lively observer relieves the

monotony of a seemingly easy consulate and repulsive population by

watching all the secrets of animated nature around him. It is a very

bloodthirsty island that his fates have guided him to: everything

bites or stings or poisons. When wading out into the sea for

shells, Mr. Pike is attacked by "a tazarre, a fish something like

a fresh-water pike," which comes right at him repeatedly, "like a

bulldog," and is only subdued by being speared in the head with a

harpoon. Creatures elsewhere the most evasive and timid are here

found fighting like gladiators: the eels bite everybody within their

reach--one of these combative eels caught by our author measured

twelve feet three inches; the fresh-water prawns "strike so sharply

with their tails as to draw blood if not carefully handled." The

exquisite polyps and anemones, whose painted beauty our author is

never weary of relating, have mostly poisoned weapons concealed under

their flounces, and treat the naturalist who would coquet with them

to a swelled arm or a lamed hand. Centipedes, scorpions and virulently

poisonous snakes animate the land, while the shoals, where the natives

declare there are "more fish than water," teem with every sort of

man-eating shark, and with the cuttle-fish watching for his prey from

each interstice of the coral-reef. The latter, often of immense size,

are caught and eaten, both fresh and salt, some fishermen collecting

nothing else: they dexterously turn the ugly stomach inside out and

thread it on a string slung round the neck. The horror of the lobster

for these cuttle-fish is something curious; and it affords a gauge for

the sensitiveness of crustaceae (and incidentally an argument against

those who maintain the greater reasonableness of fishing than of

hunting on account of the lower organization of the prey) to learn

that the lobster must not be taken to market in company with the

cuttle-fish, "or the flesh will be spoilt before he gets there, the

creature being literally sick from fright." Meantime, in the ooze

which forms a connecting link between sea and shore lurks the

mud-laff, indescribably hideous in shape, leprous-looking, slimy, and

darting a greenish poison through the spines on its back. Treading on

one of these, the poor naked fisherman is apt to die of lockjaw;

and Mr. Pike's kitten, having its paw touched with a single spine,

perished of convulsions in an hour. Some of the sea-carnivora,

however, are so beautiful that one is ready to forgive their more or

less Clytemnestra-like tempers. Of some gymnobranchiata the writer

observes: "I never saw any living animals with such gorgeous

colors--the most vivid carmine and pure white, mixed with golden

yellow in the bodies and mantles, and the gills of pale lemon-color

and lilac. No painting could give an idea of the harmony of the

shades as they blended into each other, or the undulating grace of the

movements of the mantles. I have sat for an hour at a time watching

them, lost in admiration, and frequently turning them over to see the

expert way they would contract the elegant gill-branches, and reopen

them as soon as they had righted themselves." Such are some of the

animated charms of Paul and Virginia's island. Of Bernardin Saint

Pierre's romance as an illustration of the spot, Mr. Pike dryly

observes that writers when about to draw largely on their imaginations

should be careful to conceal the actual whereabouts of their stories:

we live in an age of exploration that is sure to "display their

ridiculous side when reduced to fact." There was, however, a

foundation in fact, quite enough for the purpose of a prose poem, in

the loves and deaths of Paul and Virginia: it is doubtless the island

scenes alone that Mr. Pike would satirize. The great shipwreck was in

1744, a year of famine, which the wise and prudent French

governor, the most able man who ever adorned the colony, M. Mahé de

Labourdonnais, was unable to avert. The ship St. Géran, sent with

provisions from France, was ignorantly driven on the reef shortly

before dawn, and all perished save nine souls. There were on board two

lovers, a Mademoiselle Mallet and Monsieur de Peramon, who were to

be united in marriage on arriving at the island, then called Isle de

France. The young man made a raft, and implored his mistress to remove

the heavier part of her garments and essay the passage. This the pure

young creature refused to do, with that exaggerated modesty which has

been called mawkishness in the story, but which in a real occurrence

looks very like heroism. Their bodies were soon washed ashore together

in the harbor, since called the Bay of Tombs. Two structures of

whitewashed brick under some beautiful palms and feathery bamboos, in

an inland garden called "Pamplemousses" (the Shaddocks), now cover the

remains of the ill-starred lovers. Mr. Pike appears to have visited

the site but once, when, as there had been heavy rains, he could not

reach the tombs. He is evidently more in his element when wading after

sea-urchins. His observations on such races as coolies, Chinese and

Malabar-men are all, however, to the purpose. The island is peopled

with these varieties, in addition to a mixed white population, the

Indians having been brought from Hindostan for the cane-fields since

the English occupation in 1810, and serving a good purpose. Their

manners illustrate the lower horrors of the Hindoo mythology, they

appearing to worship pretty exclusively a race of gods and goddesses

invented for robber tribes, who are appeased only by blood-curdling

rites: our author saw their young men running, with yells and

contortions, over a bed of live coals twenty-five feet across to earn

the favor of one such cruel goddess. The Chinese, though in worship

they exhibit the milder sacrificial spirit of offering sheets

of paper, yet in a more stolid way show an equal talent for

self-sacrifice. A neighbor of Mr. Pike's, an excellent quiet fellow,

having gambled with his own servant for his shop, stock and person,

was seen one morning sweeping and serving customers, whilst the

youngster sat leisurely smoking, the game having gone contrarily.

"There was no appearance of triumph on the boy's face: master and

servant reversed their places with the most perfect _sang-froid_."

Of the Creoles, we learn that they believe the presence of pieces of

coral in the house induces headache; of the women from Malabar, that

they can only wear toe-rings after marriage; of the handsomest Indian

tribe in the island, the Reddies, we are told that the boys marry

at five or six, their bride living with the father-in-law or other

husband's relative and rearing children to him: when the boy grows

up, his wife being then aged, he "takes up with some boy's wife in a

manner precisely similar to his own, and procreates children for the

boy-husband." The remaining wonder of Mauritius appears to be the

great Peter Both Mountain, so nearly inaccessible that a rage for

climbing it has been developed. The first successful attempt was

made by Claude Penthé, who planted the French flag on it in 1790, and

English ascents were made in 1832, 1848, 1858, 1864 and 1869. We must

not omit, however, the Aphanapteryx, though Mr. Pike does: it is a red

bird which in Mauritius has survived its whilom companion the dodo,

and which is to be described in a future volume. Mr. Pike has obliged

us with a book of admirable temper, inexhaustible research and fine

manly spirit: we could wish for our own sakes nothing better than

that all our sub-tropical and tropical consulships were filled by

his brothers, and that they would all make volumes out of their

experiences.

Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist. By William Ellery Ghanning. Boston:

Roberts Bros.

Mr. Charming is a boon, and we would not have missed his lucubration

on any account. Now we know how Margaret Fuller talked and in what

dialect they wrote _The Dial_. It was with this sententiousness,

this solemn attitude over the infinitely little, this care to compose

paragraphs out of short sentences completely disconnected, that the

old Concord philosophy was enunciated. Nobody outside the circle ever

caught the exact accent except one of Dickens's characters--Mr. F.'s

aunt--who would interrupt a dinner conversation to observe, "There's

milestones on the Dover road." "Above our heads," says Mr. Channing,

"the nighthawk rips;" "see the frog bellying the world in the warm

pool;" "the rats scrabbling." This sententiousness is consistent, on

Mr. Channing's part, with the most stupefying ignorance of words and

things, as in the sentence, "forced to conceal the raveled sleeve of

care by buttoning up his outer garments." It is particularly imposing

in the judgments, nearly always severe, of individuals, and the reader

lays down the present book sure that here, at last, he has found a

truly superior person. Schoolcraft is simply "poor Schoolcraft," and

of course subsides; Miss Martineau is "that Minerva mediocre;" Carlyle

is "Thomas Carlyle with his bilious howls and bankrupt draughts

on hope." Hawthorne, he learns, though we cannot tell from whence,

"thought it inexpressibly ridiculous that any one should notice man's

miseries, these being his staple product," and was "swallowed up in

the wretchedness of life;" also, "the Concord novelist was a handsome,

bulky character, with a soft rolling gait; a wit said he seemed like a

_boned pirate_." From these more or less contemptuous views of mankind

at large Mr. Channing turns with a kind of somersault to an intense

admiration for Thoreau. Could he but write of him in his own

style--supposing him to have a style--he would have been in danger

of producing a sensible book, and _nous autres_ would have lost one

delight; but it is the perfection of comedy to see the apocalyptic

trio--Emerson stepping off grandly and gladly into the clouds--Thoreau,

his principal disciple, following with a good imitation of the gait, but

with evident self-consciousness--and finally Mr. Channing--

to see him's rare sport

Step in Emerson's tracks with legs painfully short.

It would be unfair to judge Henry D. Thoreau by the indiscreet

laudations of his friends. He was cut out more nearly in the pattern

of a hermit than any man of modern time. His love of solitude was

probably sincere, his surliness was his breeding, and he extracted

from his painful, unsocial habitudes the peculiar poetry which suits

with hardship. It was not for him to sing of summer and nectarines,

nor to honestly appreciate or kindly judge those who did so; but

he sang of winter, of crab-apples, of cranberries, of reptiles, of

field-mice, with just the right accent and with a tingling vibration

of life in his chords. The Bernard Palissy of literature, he modeled

his frogs and water-snakes so true that they seemed better than birds

of paradise.

Babolain. From the French of Gustave Droz. New York: Henry Holt & Co.

This is a tragical little romance which draws the reader along with

it by every line in every page, yet its power is derived from the

resources of caricature: it is rather the hollow side of a comic mask

than a true expression of pathos. Scientific and stupid, Professor

Babolain enters the world of Paris armed with his innocence, his

uncle's legacy, his deep learning and his utter ignorance. A couple

of adventuresses, mother and daughter, swoop down upon him as a lawful

prey, and he is quickly a doting husband and a terrified son-in-law.

The sole redeeming trait about the younger woman, who is a beauty and

who paints, is that she never makes the least pretence of loving

him: in his first moments of adoration she mystifies him heartlessly,

crushing him with her wit and confounding him with her art:

"Difficult? oh no! In the first place, you need rabbits' hair: that

is indispensable. If you had no rabbits, or if you were in a country

where rabbits had no hair, painting could not be thought of." She

never melts, except when he presents her with a rivière of diamonds,

and, after finding a leisure moment to give birth to a little girl,

rushes off to Italy with Count Vaugirau, followed promptly by a

certain Timoleon. This Timoleon, who loves her unsuccessfully, is the

beneficiary of poor Babolain, borrowing his money at the same time

that he tries to borrow his wife, and returning with outrageous

reproaches to the hero impoverished and desolate. This precious friend

is a specimen of all the rest. The very daughter, sole consolation

of her parent's straitened existence, but ill fulfills the rapturous

anticipations of early fatherhood. He is at first her nurse and

teacher: "I saw the satin-like skin of her little neck, and behind her

ear, fresh and pink like the petal of a flower, the soft curls upon

the nape of her neck, half hair, half down, sucking in with their

greedy roots the sweet juices of this living cream." He throws his

hat into the river to teach her the laws of gravity. But she grows up

ungrateful and estranged, and, having married an ambitious physician,

allows her father to live as a neglected pensioner under a part of her

roof. The details of Babolain's decline are exquisitely painful, but

partake of that style of exaggeration and caricature which causes even

the heartless beings who make up his world to seem more like grotesque

puppets with bosoms of wood than responsible beings to be really

execrated and condemned. As the abused victim, starving and ragged,

treads the road of sacrifice to death, our sympathy is checked by

the consciousness of his unmitigated and needless pliancy, until we

withhold the tribute of sorrow due to the misfortunes of a Lear or a

Père Goriot. The romance, however, though sketched out extravagantly

between hyperbole and parable, fairly scintillates with brilliancies

and good things: we could hardly indicate another imported novel of

the length actually containing so much. Nothing can be more comical

than the grand airs of the ladies, whether in their poor or rich

estate, or than the perpetual suite of victimizations endured by the

helpless Babolain: the muses of Comedy and Tragedy rush together over

the stage to crush this fly with their buskins. The translator of

_Babolain_ reveals his quality by calling pantaloons, in several

places, _pants_, and by adopting an ugly locative common enough in New

York--"Perhaps I did not have that amount," for "perhaps I had not,"

etc. The work revels in that buff binding which has given to the

_Leisure Hour Series_ the popular sobriquet of the "Linen Duster

Series," a livery now well known as the certain indication of honest

entertainment and literary excellence.

Impressions et Souvenirs. Par George Sand. Paris: Levy Frères; New

York: F.W. Christern.

This little collection of papers is made from Madame Sand's private

journal, the extracts being sometimes recent and sometimes thirty

years old, sometimes short and sometimes improved into essays, and

in any case stitched together by the slightest of threads. A few

allusions, hardly important enough to be called anecdotes, reveal the

relations of the authoress with the great men of the time, and the

least momentous recital becomes charming from the assured ease and

native grace of this veteran artist's style. One amusing reminiscence

is the odd paradox of Théophile Gautier, that plants are unwholesome

absorbents of vital air, and that for him the ideal of a garden would

be a succession of asphaltum paths, with fine-cushioned seats, and

narghiles for ever burning in the guise of flowers and shrubbery. A

retort of Sainte-Betive's shows the sincerity of his free-thinking

opinions. Madame Sand having declared that she was sure we had

three souls--one for our bodily organs, one for society and one for

worship--the critic replied, "I wish we could be sure that we had

one." There is a delightful chapter, dated 1831, where Chopin and

Delacroix encounter each other at the author's Paris home, where the

painter explains the principle of reflections to Maurice Sand, and

Chopin plays the piano so entrancingly for his auditor that the

episode of a bed-room on fire passes by unnoticed. Of Maurice Sand,

gifted son of an inspired mother, there is an exquisite chapter of

literary criticism tempered with maternity. Other papers treat of

infantine instruction as practiced by the writer herself, and readers

are conscious of a thrill of envy at the thought of that little circle

of Dudevantine grandchildren learning the elements of spelling and

grammar from such a mistress of style, and with all the advantages

due to the noble teacher's genius for simplification. A chapter on

punctuation, which has been largely quoted both in French and English,

is incorporated, and there are eventless and fascinating records of

the wonderful drives around Nohant. The little brochure is a pure cup

of refreshment.

_Books Received_.

The Nesbits; or, A Mother's Last Request, and Other Tales. By Uncle

Paul. New York: Catholic Publication Society.

Rouge et Noir. From the French of Edmond About. By E.R. Philadelphia:

Claxton, Remsen & Haffelfinger.

Florida and South Carolina as Health Resorts. By William W. Morland,

M.D., Harv. Boston: James Campbell.

Third Annual Report of the Board of Education of the State of Rhode

Island. Providence: Providence Press Co.

High Life in New York. By Jonathan Slick. Illustrated. Philadelphia:

T.B. Peterson & Brothers.

Pay-day at Babel, and Odes. By Robert Burton Rodney, U.S.N. New York:

D. van Nostrand.

Report of the Commissioner of Fisheries of the State of New York.

Albany: The Argus Company.

Lord Hope's Choice. By Mrs. Ann S. Stephens. Philadelphia: T.B.

Peterson & Brothers.

The New Japan Primer. Number One. San Francisco: A.L. Bancroft & Co.

Miss Leslie's New Cook Book. Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson & Brothers.

Artiste: A Novel. By Maria M. Grant. Boston: Loring.