CHAPTER V.

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THE

CONTINENTAL MONTHLY:

DEVOTED TO

LITERATURE AND NATIONAL POLICY.

VOL. II.--NOVEMBER, 1862.--NO. V.

THE CAUSES OF THE REBELLION.

No other nation was ever convulsed by an internal struggle so tremendous

as that which now rends our own unhappy country. No mere rebellion has

ever before spread its calamitous effects so widely, beyond the scene of

its immediate horrors. Just in proportion to the magnitude of the evils

it has produced, is the enormity of the crime involved, on one side or

the other; and good men may well feel solicitous to know where rests the

burden of this awful responsibility.

The long train of preparatory events preceding the outbreak, and the

extraordinary acts by which the conspirators signalized its

commencement, point, with sufficient certainty, to the incendiaries who

produced the vast conflagration, and who appear to be responsible for

the ruin which has ensued. But it remains to inquire by what means the

great mass of inflammable materials was accumulated and made ready to

take fire at the touch; what justification there may be for the authors

of the fatal act, or what palliation of the guilt which seems to rest

upon them. The reputation of the American people, and of the free

government which is their pride and glory, must suffer in the estimation

of mankind, unless they can be fairly acquitted of all responsibility

for the civil war, which not only desolates large portions of our own

country, but seriously interferes with the prosperity of multitudinous

classes, and the stability of large industrial interests, in other

lands.

Neither in the physical nor in the moral world, can the effects of any

phenomenon go beyond the nature and extent of its causes. Mighty

convulsions, like that which now shakes this continent, must have their

roots in far distant times, and must gather their nutriment of passion

and violence from a wide field of sympathetic opinion. No influence of

mere individuals, no sudden acts of government even, no temporary causes

of any nature whatsoever, are adequate to produce results so widespread

and astounding. The social forces which contend in such a conflict, must

have been 'nursing their wrath' and gathering their strength for years,

in order to exhibit the gigantic death-struggle, in which they are now

engaged.

Gen. Jackson, after having crushed the incipient rebellion of 1832,

wrote, in a private letter, recently published, that the next attempt to

overthrow the Union would be instigated by the same party, but based

upon the question of slavery.

That single-hearted patriot, in his boundless devotion to the Union,

seemed to be gifted with almost preternatural foresight; nor did he

exhibit greater sagacity in penetrating the motives and purposes of men,

than in comprehending the nature and influence of great social causes,

then in operation, and destined, as he clearly foresaw, to be wielded by

wicked men as instruments of stupendous mischief to the country. His

extraordinary prevision of the present attempt to overthrow the Union,

signalizes the evident affiliation of this rebellion with that which he

so wisely and energetically destroyed in embryo, by means of the

celebrated proclamation and force bill.

It was, however, only in the real motive and ultimate object of the

conspirators of 1832, that the attempt of South Carolina at that time

was the lineal progenitor of the rebellion of the present day. The

purpose was the same in both cases, but the means chosen at the two

epochs were altogether different. In the first attempt, the purpose was,

indeed, to break up the Union and to establish a separate confederacy;

but this was to be done upon the ground of alleged inequality and

oppression, as well as unconstitutionality, in the mode of levying

duties upon foreign importations. The attempt, however, proved to be

altogether premature. The question involved, being neither geographical

nor sectional in character, was not then, if it could ever be,

susceptible of being made the instrument of concentrating and

intensifying hostile opinion against the federal power. Louisiana, with

her great sugar interest, was a tariff State, and advocated protection

as ardently as it was opposed in the greater part of the North-West, and

in extensive districts of the North. She was not even invited to join

the proposed confederacy. Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware were decided

in their support of the protective policy, while Tennessee, Missouri,

and North Carolina were divided on the question. Mr. Calhoun himself,

the very prophet of nullification, could not obliterate the memory of

his own former opinions, and it was difficult to induce the people to

coöperate in overthrowing the Federal Government, simply for adopting a

policy which the very authors of this movement had themselves so

recently thoroughly approved.

Thus, opinion was broken into fragments; and nowhere outside of South

Carolina did it acquire sufficient unanimity and power to impart any

great momentum to the revolutionary design. Besides, in the absence of

clear and deep convictions, the question itself was of such a nature,

that strong passions could not easily spring from it. The interests

involved were not necessarily in conflict; their opposition was more

apparent than real, so that an adjustment could readily be made without

sacrifice of principle. In short, the subject of dispute did not contain

within itself the elements of civil war, capable of development to that

extreme, at the time and under the circumstances when the futile attempt

at separation was made. Doubtless, the sinister exertions of restless

and ambitious men, acting upon ignorant prejudices, might, under some

circumstances, have engendered opinions, even upon the tariff question,

sufficiently strong and violent for the production of civil commotion.

Had the conditions been more favorable to the plot; had the conspirators

of that day been as well prepared as those of 1861; had they been

equally successful in sowing dissatisfaction and hatred in the minds of

the Southern people; had they found in Gen. Jackson the weak and pliant

instrument of treason which James Buchanan afterward became in the hands

of Davis and his coadjutors, the present rebellion might have been

anticipated, and the germ of secession wholly extirpated and destroyed,

in the contest which would then have ensued. The Union would doubtless

have been maintained, and, in the end, strengthened; the fatal element

of discord would scarcely have survived to work and plot in secret for

more than a quarter of a century. It is true, slavery would have

remained; but in the absence of other causes, slavery would not

necessarily have brought the country to the present crisis. Providence

may have so ordered the events of that day as to leave the revolutionary

element in existence, in order that it might eventually fasten upon

slavery as the instrument of its treason, and thus bring this system,

condemned alike by the lessons of experience and by the moral sense of

mankind, to that complete eventual destruction, which seems to be

inevitably approaching.

The idea of an independent Southern confederacy, to be constituted of a

fragment of the Union, survived the contest of 1832, and has been

cherished with zeal and enthusiasm, by a small party of malcontents,

from that day to this. Either from honest conviction or from the syren

seductions of ambition, or perhaps from that combination of both which

so often misleads the judgment of the wisest and best of men, this party

has pursued its end with unrivalled zeal and consummate tact, never for

a single moment abating its efforts to convince the South of the

advantages of separation. But all its ability and all its untiring

labors failed to make any serious impression, until the great and

powerful interest of slavery was enlisted in the cause, and used as the

means of reaching the feelings, and arousing the prejudices of the

Southern people. The theories of nullification and secession, while

accepted by many leading minds in that section, never made any serious

impression upon the mass of the people. Indeed, it may be said with

truth, that the honest instincts of the people invariably rejected these

pernicious and dangerous theories, whenever they were distinctly

involved in the elections. Nevertheless, there was an undercurrent of

opinion in favor of them: the minds of the people were familiarized with

the doctrines, and thus made ready to embrace them, whenever they should

be satisfied it was indispensable to their safety and liberty to avail

themselves of their benefit.

These abstract principles, however industriously and successfully

taught, would not of themselves have availed to urge the people on to

the desperate contest into which they have been madly precipitated. The

dogma of the right of secession was not left a mere barren idea: it was

accompanied with constant teachings respecting the incompatibility of

interests, and the inevitable conflict, between the North and the South;

the superiority of slavery over every other form of labor; and the

imminent danger of the overthrow of this benign institution by Northern

fanaticism, and by the unfriendly influence of the commercial and

financial policy of that section. Thus, the mischievous error of

secession was roused to life and action by the exhibition of those

unreal phantoms, so often conjured up to frighten the South--abolition,

agrarianism, and protective oppression.

All these deceptive ideas were required to be infused into the minds of

the people, in order to prepare the way for rebellious action. The right

of secession was an indispensable condition, without which there could

be no justification for the violent measures to be adopted. No

considerable number of American citizens could be found ready to lay

treasonable hands upon their government; but a great step would be taken

if they could be convinced that the constitution provided for its own

abrogation, and that the act of destruction could at any time be legally

and regularly accomplished. The absolute humanity, justice, and morality

of slavery, its excellence as a social institution, and its efficiency

in maintaining order and insuring progress, must be fully established

and universally admitted, in order to enlist the powerful motives of

self-interest on the side of the projected revolution. And finally, it

was necessary to show that the divine institution was in danger, that

the free labor of the North was actively hostile to it and planning its

ruin, and that this hostility was to be aided by all the selfish desires

of the protectionists and the dangerous violence of the agrarian

'mudsills' of the other section. It was not of the least importance that

these statements or any of them should be true. Let them be thoroughly

believed by the people, and that conviction would answer all the

purposes of the conspirators. Accordingly, for more than a quarter of a

century, these heresies and falsehoods were most industriously instilled

into the minds of the Southern people, of whom the great mass are

unfortunately, and, from their peculiar condition, necessarily, kept in

that state of ignorance which would favor the reception of such

incredible and monstrous fallacies.

The argument as to the right of secession has been exhausted; and if it

had not been, it does not come within the scope and design of this paper

to discuss the question. Enemies of the United States, foreign and

domestic, will continue to believe, or at least to profess to believe

and try to convince themselves, that the Constitution of 1787, which

superseded the Confederation, contained all the defects of the latter

which it was specially designed to remedy,--that the league of the

preceding period was prolonged in the succeeding organization, only to

be the fatal object of future discontent and ambition. Certainly this

doctrine is the basis of the rebellion, and without it no successful

movement could have been made to secure cooperation from any of the

States. Nevertheless, it cannot be considered one of the impelling

causes which moved the rebellious States to action, for it is not of

itself an active principle. It rather served to smooth the way, by

removing obstacles which opposed the operation of real motives.

Veneration for the work of the fathers of the republic, respect for the

Constitution and love of the Union, as things of infinite value, worthy

to be cherished and defended, stood in the way of the conspiracy which

compassed the destruction of the government. It was necessary to remove

this obstacle, and to eradicate these patriotic sentiments, which had

taken strong hold of the minds and hearts of the people of both

sections. For more than two generations the Union had been held sacred,

beyond all other earthly blessings. It was an object of the first

magnitude to unsettle this long-cherished sentiment.

The conspirators were altogether too shrewd and full of tact to approach

their object directly. They adopted the artifice of arousing and

studiously cultivating another sentiment of equal strength, which should

spring up side by side with their love of the Union, flourish for a time

in friendly cooperation with it, but ultimately supplant and entirely

supersede it. This was the plausible and attractive sentiment of State

pride, concealing in itself the idea of perfect sovereignty, with the

right of nullification and secession. With consummate ability, with

untiring industry and perseverance, and without a moment's cessation for

more than a quarter of a century, this fruitful but pernicious seed of

disorganization was sown broadcast among the Southern people. So long as

there was no occasion to put the theory into practice, there seemed to

be no ground for alarm. The question was one rather of curious subtlety

than of practical importance. Meanwhile, the minds of men became

familiar with the thought; they entertained it without aversion; the

germs of ultimate discord and dissolution silently took root, and slowly

grew up in the understandings of men. Not that the principle was

adopted; it was rather tolerated than accepted. But this was the very

thing intended by the wily conspirators. They expected nothing better;

for they knew well that an accident or a bold precipitation of events

would cause the popular mind to seize this principle and use it, as the

only justification for revolutionary violence. Thus this doctrine, which

is the embodiment of anarchy, was carefully prepared for the occasion,

and artfully placed within easy mental reach of those who would be

called upon to wield it.

_Pari passu_ with the dissemination and growth of this dangerous

opinion, the political school which cherished it endeavored to promote

the object steadily held in view, by restricting and embarrassing the

action of the Federal Government in every possible way. Notwithstanding

the distrust and aversion of the Jackson party against them, continued

long after the events of 1832, they succeeded in forming, first a

coalition, and finally a thorough union with the great popular

organization--the democratic party. Holding the balance of power between

that party and their opponents, they dictated terms to the successive

democratic conventions, and, in effect, controlled their nominations and

their policy. They imposed upon that party the formidable dogma of 'a

strict construction of the Constitution,' and under that plausible

pretext, denied to the Government the exercise of every useful power

necessary to make it strong and efficient within the limits of its

legitimate functions. Their evident object, though cautiously and

successfully concealed, was to weaken the Federal Government, and build

up the power of the separate States, so that the former, shorn of its

constitutional vigor, and crippled in its proper field of action, might,

at the critical moment, fall an easy prey to their iniquitous designs.

The navigation of the great Mississippi river, the imperial highway of

the continent, could not be improved, because every impediment taken

away, and every facility given to commerce on its bosom, were so much

strength added to the bonds of the Union. The harbors of the great lakes

and of the Atlantic coast could not be rendered secure by the agency of

the Federal Government, because every beneficent act of this nature

fixed it more firmly in the affections of the people, and gave it

additional influence at home and abroad. The great Pacific railroad--a

measure of infinite importance to the unity of the nation, to the

development of the country, and to the general prosperity, as well as to

the public defence--a work so grand in its proportions, and so universal

in its benefits, that only the power of a great nation was equal to its

accomplishment or capable and worthy of its proper control--this great

and indispensable measure was defeated from year to year, so long as the

conspirators remained in Congress to oppose it, and was only passed in

the end, after they had launched the rebellion, and made their open

attack against the Government, which they had so long sought to

embarrass and weaken, in view of this very contingency.

While yielding these principles in theory, the democratic party did not

always adhere to them in practice. The instinct of patriotism was often

stronger than the obligations of party necessity and party policy.

Moreover, the text of these doctrines in the democratic creed was

frequently a subject of grave dispute in the party, and unanimity never

prevailed in regard to it. Yet the subtle poison infused into the body

of the organization, extended its baleful influence to all questions,

and too often paralyzed the arm of the Government in every field of its

appropriate action.

Never was presented in history a better illustration of the effect of

false and mischievous ideas. It would be unjust, because it would be

untrue, to suspect the democratic party of any clear knowledge of the

ends to which these principles were intended to lead, or of any

participation in the treasonable purpose. Many members of that party saw

the danger in time, and abandoned the organization before it was caught

in the meshes of the great conspiracy. Some, however, even in the loyal

States, clung to Breckinridge and the fatal abstractions of the party

creed, until these reached their final and legitimate culmination, in

the ghastly paralysis of the most indispensable functions of the

Government--the ruinous abnegation of all power of self-defence--the

treacherous attempt at national suicide only failing for want of courage

to perpetrate the supreme act, which was exhibited by the administration

of James Buchanan, in its last hours, when it proclaimed the doctrine of

secession to be unfounded in constitutional right, and yet denied the

power of the Government to prevent its own destruction. The threats of

an imperious band of traitors, operating upon the fears of a weak old

man, who was already implicated in the treason, drove him to the verge

of the abyss into which he was willing to plunge his country, but from

which, at the last moment, he drew back, dismayed at the thought of

sacrificing himself.

The doctrine of secession, long and laboriously taught, and the cognate

principles calculated to diminish the power of the Federal Government

and magnify that of the States, thus served to smooth the way, to lay

the track, upon which the engine of rebellion was to be started. But

there was still wanting the motive power which should impel the machine

and give it energy and momentum. Something tangible was

required--something palpable to the masses--on the basis of which

violent antagonisms and hatreds could be engendered, and fearful dangers

could be pictured to the popular imagination.

The protective system, loudly denounced as unequal and oppressive, as

well as unconstitutional, had proved wholly insufficient to arouse

rebellion in 1832. It would have proved equally so in 1861: but then the

ultra free trade tariff of 1856 was still in existence; and it continued

in force, until, to increase dissatisfaction, and invite the very system

which they pretended to oppose and deplore, the conspirators in

Congress, having power to defeat the 'Morrill Tariff,' deliberately

stepped aside, and suffered it to become a law. But this was merely a

piece of preliminary strategy intended to give them some advantage in

the great battle which was eventually to be fought on other fields. It

might throw some additional weight into their scale; it might give them

some plausible ground for hypocritical complaint; and might even, to

some extent, serve to hide the real ground of their movement; yet, of

itself, it could never be decisive of anything. It could neither justify

revolution in point of morals, nor could it blind the people of the

South to the terrible calamities which the experiment of secession was

destined to bring upon them.

Slavery alone, with the vast material prosperity apparently created by

it, with the debatable and exciting questions, moral, political, and

social, which arise out of it, and with the palpable dangers, which, in

spite of every effort to deny it, plainly brood over the system--slavery

alone had the power to produce the civil war, and to shake the continent

to its foundations. In the present crisis of the struggle, it would be a

waste of time and of thought to attempt to trace back to its origin the

long current of excitement on the slavery question, beginning in 1834,

and swelling in magnitude until the present day; or to seek to fix the

responsibility for the various events which marked its progress, from

the earliest agitation down to the great rebellion, which is evidently

the consummation and the end of it all. The only lesson important to be

learned, and that which is the sum of all these great events, plainly

taught by the history of this generation, and destined to characterize

it in all future time, is, that slavery had in itself the germs of this

profound agitation, and that, for thirty years, it stirred the moral and

political elements of this nation as no other cause had power to do. It

is of little consequence, for the purpose in view, to inquire what

antagonisms struggled with slavery in this immense contest, covering so

great an area in space, and so long a period of time. All ideas and all

interests were involved. Moral, social, political, and economical

considerations clashed and antagonized in the gigantic conflict.

Is slavery right or wrong? Has it the sanction of enlightened

conscience, or of the divine law as revealed in the Old and New

Testaments? The last words of this moral contest have scarcely yet

ceased to reverberate in our ears, even while the sound of cannon tells

of other arguments and another arbitrament, which must soon cut short

all the jargon of the logicians. But one of the most remarkable features

of the whole case, has been the indignation with which the slave

interest, from beginning to end, has resisted the discussion of these

moral questions. As if such inquiries could, by any possibility, be

prevented! As if a system, good and right in itself, defensible in the

light of sound reason, could suffer by the fullest examination which

could be made in private or in public, or by the profoundest agitation

which could arise from the use of mere moral means! The discussions, the

agitations, and all the fierce passions which attended them, were

unavoidable. Human nature must be changed and wholly revolutionized

before such agitations can be suppressed. They are the means appointed

by the Creator for the progress of humanity. The seeds of them are

planted in the heart of man, and, in the sunshine and air of freedom,

they must germinate and grow, and eventually produce such fruit as the

eternal laws of God have made necessary from the beginning.

The social question shaped itself amidst the turbulent elements, and

came out clear and well defined, in the perfect contrast and antagonism

of the two sectional systems. Free labor, educated, skilful, prosperous,

self-poised, and independent, grew into great strength, and accumulated

untold wealth, in all the States in which slavery had been supplanted.

Unexampled and prodigious inventive energy had multiplied the physical

power of men by millions, and these wonderful creations of wealth and

power seemed destined to have no bounds in the favored region in which

this system of free labor prevailed. Immigration, attracted by this

boundless prosperity, flowed in with a steady stream, and an overflowing

population was fast spreading the freedom and prosperity of the Northern

States to all the uncultivated regions of the Union.

On the other hand, by a sort of social repulsion--a sort of polarity

which intensifies opposition and repugnance--the theory of slavery was

carried to an extreme never before known in the history of mankind.

Capital claimed to own labor, as the best relation in which the two

could be placed toward each other. The masses of men, compelled to spend

their lives in physical toil, were held to be properly kept in

ignorance, under the guidance of intelligent masters. The skilful

control of the master, when applied to slaves, was hold to be superior

in its results to the self-regulating energies of educated men, laboring

for their own benefit, and impelled by the powerful motives of

self-interest and independent enterprise. The safety of society demanded

the subordination of the laboring class; and especially in free

governments, where the representative system prevails, was it necessary

that working men should be held in subjection. Slavery, therefore, was

not only justifiable; it was the only possible condition on which free

society could be organized, and liberal institutions maintained. This

was 'the corner stone' of the new confederacy. The opposite system in

the free States, at the first touch of internal trouble and civil war,

would prove the truth of the new theory by bread riots and agrarian

overthrow of property and of all other institutions held sacred in the

true conditions of social order.

Such was the monstrous inversion of social phenomena which the Southern

mind accepted at the hands of their leading men, and conceived to be

possible in this advanced age of the world. Seizing upon a system

compatible only with the earliest steps in the progress of man, and

suitable only to the moral sentiments and unenlightened ideas of the

most backward races of the world, they undertook to naturalize and

establish it--nay, to perpetuate it, and to build up society on its

basis--in the nineteenth century, and among the people of one of the

freest and most enlightened nations! Evidently, this was a monstrous

perversion of intellect--a blindness and madness scarcely finding a

parallel in history. It was expected, too, that this anomalous social

proceeding--this backward march of civilization on this continent--would

excite no animadversion and arouse no antagonism in the opposite

section. It involved the reopening of the slave trade, and it was

expected that foreign nations would abate their opposition, lower their

flags, and suffer the new empire, founded on 'the corner stone of

slavery,' to march forward in triumph and achieve its splendid destiny.

These moral and social ideas might have had greater scope to work out

their natural results, had not the political connections between the

North and the South implicated the two sections, alike, in the

consequences of any error or folly on the part of either. Taxation and

representation, and the surrender of fugitive slaves, all provided for

in the Constitution, were the points in which the opposite polities came

into contact in the ordinary workings of the Federal Government.

Perpetual conflicts necessarily arose. But it was chiefly on the

question of territorial extension, and in the formation of new States,

that the most inveterate of all the contests were engendered. The

constitutional provisions applicable to these questions are not without

some obscurity, and this afforded a plausible opportunity for all the

impracticable subtleties arising out of the doctrine of strict

construction. From the time of the admission of Missouri, in 1820, down

to the recent controversy about Kansas, the territorial question was

unsettled, and never failed to be the cause of terrible agitation.

But the march of events soon superseded the question; and even while the

contest was fiercest and most bitter, the silent operation of general

causes was sweeping away the whole ground of dispute. The growth of

population in the Northern States was so unexampled, and so far exceeded

that of the Southern States, that there could be no actual rivalry in

the settlement of the territories. The latter already had more territory

than they could possibly occupy and people. While the Northern

population, swollen by European emigration, was taking possession of the

new territories and filling them with industry and prosperity, slavery

was repelling white emigration, and the South, from sheer want of men,

was wholly unable to meet the competition. Yet, with most unreasonable

clamors, intended only to arouse the passions of the ignorant, Southern

statesmen insisted on establishing the law of slavery where they could

not plant the institution itself. They finally demanded that slavery

should be recognized everywhere within the national domain; and that the

Federal power should be pledged for its protection, even against the

votes of the majority of the people. This was nothing less than an

attempt to check the growth of the country, by the exclusion of free

States, when it was impossible to increase it by the addition of any

others.

Upon the failure of this monstrous demand, civil war was to be

inaugurated! A power which had been relatively dwindling and diminishing

from the beginning--which, in the very nature of things, could not

maintain its equality in numbers and in constitutional weight--this

minority demanded the control of the Government, in its growth, and in

all its policy, and, in the event of refusal, threatened to rend and

destroy it. Such pretensions could not have been made with sincerity.

They were but the sinister means of exciting sectional enmities,

and preparing for the final measures of the great conspiracy.

Having discarded the rational and humane views of their own

fathers--Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and others--it was but the

natural sequel that they should signalize their degeneracy by aiming to

overthrow the work in which those sages had embodied their generous

ideas--the Constitution of the United States and the whole fabric of

government resting upon it.

In what manner these mischievous absurdities became acceptable to the

Southern people--by what psychological miracle so great a transformation

was accomplished in so short a time--is only to be explained by

examining some of the delusions which blinded the authors of the

rebellion, and enabled them to mislead the masses who confided too

implicitly in the leadership of their masters.

Weak as were the Southern people in point of numbers and political

power, compared with those of the opposite section, the haughty

slaveholders easily persuaded themselves and their dependents that they

could successfully cope in arms with the Northern adversary, whom they

affected to despise for his cowardly and mercenary disposition. Wealth,

education, and ample leisure gave them the best opportunity for

political studies and public employments. Long experience imparted skill

in all the arts of government, and enabled them, by superior ability, to

control the successive administrations at Washington. Proud and

confident, they indulged the belief that their great political prestige

would continue to serve them among their late party associates in the

North, and that the counsels of the adversary would be distracted, and

his power weakened, by the fatal effects of dissension. All warlike

sentiment and capacity was believed to be extinct among the traders and

manufacturers, 'the shopkeepers and pedlars,' of the Middle and Eastern

States. Hence a vigorous attack in arms against the Federal Government

was expected to be met with no energetic and effective resistance. A

peaceable dissolution of the Union, and the impossibility of war--at

least of any serious and prolonged hostilities--was a cardinal point in

the teachings of the secessionists. The fraudulent as well as violent

measures by which they sought to disarm the Federal Government and to

forestall its action, were only adopted 'to make assurance doubly sure.'

Beyond all doubt, the system of slavery encourages those habits and

passions which make the soldier, and which instigate and maintain wars.

The military spirit and that of slavery are congenial; for both belong

to an early stage in the progress of civilization, when each is

necessary to the support and continuance of the other. It was therefore

to be expected that the Southern people would be better prepared for the

organization, and also for the manoeuvring of armies. But the mistake

and the fatal delusion cherished by the conspirators, was the belief

that the Northern people were without manly spirit, and incapable of

being aroused by sentiments of patriotism. It was an equal

miscalculation to anticipate that the fabric of Northern free society

would fall to pieces, and be thrown into irremediable disorder, at the

first appearance of civil commotion. This false idea was the offspring

of the slave system, which boasted of the solidity of its own

organization and the impossibility of its overthrow. From their

standpoint, amid the darkness of a social organization, in which one

half the population is not more than semi-civilized, the slaveholders

could not easily obtain any other view. Long accustomed to wield

irresponsible power as masters, enjoying wealth and independence from

the unrewarded labor of the slave, but liberal and humane, condescending

and indulgent, so long as the untutored black was quiet and obedient,

the planter very naturally imagined his system to be the perfection of

social order. In the atmosphere of luxurious ease which surrounded him,

were the elements of a mental mirage which distorted everything in his

deceptive vision. He weighed the two systems, and found his own

immeasurably more powerful than its antagonist. Fatal mistake! fatal but

inevitable, in his condition, in the midst of the blinding refractions

of the medium which enveloped him.

Prosperity had made him giddy. Cotton was not merely King--it was God.

Moral considerations were nothing. The sentiment of right, he argued,

would have no influence over starving operatives; and England and

France, as well as the Eastern States of the Union, would stand aghast

and yield to the masterstroke which should deprive them of the material

of their labor. Millions were dependent on it in all the great centres

of civilization, and the ramifications of its power extended into all

ranks of society and all departments of industry and commerce. It was

only necessary to wave this imperial sceptre over the nations, and all

of them would fall prostrate and acknowledge the supremacy of the power

which wielded it. Nothing could be more plausible than this delusion.

Satan himself, when about to wage war in heaven, could not have invented

one better calculated to marshal his hosts and give promise of success

in rebellion against the authority of the Most High. But alas! the

supreme error of this anticipation lay in omitting from the calculation

all power of principle. The right still has authority over the minds of

men and in the counsels of nations. Factories may cease their din; men

and women may be thrown out of employment; the marts of commerce may be

silent and deserted; but truth and justice still command some respect

among men, and God yet remains the object of their adoration.

Drunk with power and dazzled with prosperity, monopolizing cotton, and

raising it to the influence of a veritable fetich, the authors of the

rebellion did not admit a doubt of the success of their attack on the

Federal Government. They dreamed of perpetuating slavery, though all

history shows the decline of the system as industry, commerce, and

knowledge advance. The slaveholders proposed nothing less than to

reverse the currents of humanity, and to make barbarism flourish in the

bosom of civilization. They even thought of extending the system, by

opening the slave trade and enlarging the boundaries of their projected

empire, Mexico and Central America, Cuba and St. Domingo, with the whole

West Indian group of islands, awaited the consolidation of their power,

and stood ready to swell the glory of their triumph.

But these enticing visions quickly faded away from their sight. At an

early day after the inauguration of their government, they were

compelled to disavow the design of reopening the slave trade, and in no

event is it probable their recognition will be yielded by foreign

governments, except on the basis of ultimate emancipation. How such a

proposition will be received by their deluded followers, remains yet to

be ascertained by an experiment which the authors of the rebellion will

be slow to try among their people. One of the most effective appeals

made to the non-slaveholders of the South, in order to start the

revolution, was to their fears and prejudices against the threatened

equality and competition of the emancipated negro. The immense influence

of this appeal can scarcely be estimated by those not intimately

acquainted with the social condition of the great mass of the Southern

people. Among them, the distinction of color is maintained with the

utmost rigor, and the barrier between the two races, social and

political, is held to be impassable and eternal. The smallest taint of

African blood in the veins of any man is esteemed a degradation from

which he can never recover. Toward the negro, as an inferior, the white

man is often affable and kind, cruelty being the exception, universally

condemned and often punished; but toward the black man as an equal, an

implacable hostility is instantly arrayed. This intense and

unconquerable prejudice, it is well known, is not confined wholly to the

South; but it prevails there without dissent, and is, in fact, one of

the fundamental principles of social organization.

When, therefore, the leaders of the rebellion succeeded in persuading

the Southern masses that the success of the Republican party would

eventually liberate the slave and place him on an equality with the

whites, an irresistible impulse was given to their cause. To the extent

that this charge was credited was the rebellion consolidated and

embittered. Had it been universally believed, there would have been few

dissenting voices throughout the seceding States. All would have rushed

headlong into the rebellion. And even now, every measure adopted on our

part, in the field or in Congress, which can be distorted as looking to

a similar end, must prove to be a strong stimulus in sustaining and

invigorating the enemy. Happily, while the system of slavery naturally

discourages education, and leaves the mass of whites comparatively

uninformed, and peculiarly subject to be deceived and misled, there are

yet many highly intelligent men among the non-slaveholders, and some

liberal and unprejudiced ones among the slaveholders themselves. These

serve to break the force of the appeals made to the ignorant, and they

have had a powerful influence in maintaining the love of the Union and

the true spirit of our institutions, among considerable numbers, in all

parts of the South.

From the foregoing views, it is plain, that only in a certain sense can

slavery be pronounced the cause of the rebellion. It was not the first

and original motive; neither is it the sole end of the conspirators. But

in another sense, it may justly be considered the cause of the war; for

without it, the war could never have taken place.

There was no actual necessity to destroy the Union for the protection of

slavery and for its continued existence. Construed in any rational sense

likely to be adopted, the Constitution afforded ample security--far

more, indeed, than could be found under a separate confederacy. This was

evident to the leaders of the rebellion, though it was their policy to

conceal the truth from the people, by the fierce passions artfully

aroused in the beginning. Slavery could not have been perpetuated,

because its permanence is against the decrees of nature. But it could

have lived out a peaceful and perhaps a prosperous existence, gradually

disappearing without convulsion or bloodshed. Discussion and agitation

could not have been prevented, nor could the inevitable end have been

averted. Yet the whole movement could well have been controlled and

directed, by the adoption of wise and well-considered measures, not

inconsistent with the natural laws governing the case, whose final

operation it was wholly impossible to prevent.

But this system of gradual amelioration, and peaceful development of

ends that must come, did not satisfy the ambition of the conspirators.

They saw their last opportunity for a successful rebellion, and they

determined not to let it pass unimproved. The vast power of the slave

interest; the passions easily to be excited by it; the encouraging

delusions clustering around it; and the fearful apprehensions growing

out of its darker aspects, all contributed to make it the very

instrument for accomplishing the long-cherished design.

Slavery has been the chief means of bringing about the rebellion. It is

the lever, resting upon the fulcrum of State sovereignty, by which the

conspirators have been able, temporarily, to force one section of the

Union from its legitimate connections. Thus used for this unhallowed

purpose, and become tainted with treason and crimsoned with the blood of

slaughtered citizens, slavery necessarily subjects itself to all the

fearful contingencies and responsibilities of the rebellion. Whether the

confederate cause shall succeed or fail, the slave institution, thus

fatally involved in it, cannot long survive. In either event, its doom

is fixed. Like one of those reptiles, which, in the supreme act of

hostility, extinguish their own lives inflicting a mortal wound upon

their victims, slavery, roused to the final paroxysm of its hate and

rage, injects all its venom into the veins of the Union, exhausts itself

in the effort, and inevitably dies.

WORD-MURDER.

The time has come when we must have an entirely new lot

of superlatives--intensifiers of meaning--verifiers of

earnestness--asserters of exactness, etc., etc. The old ones are as dead

as herrings; killed off, too, as herrings are, by being taken from their

natural element. What between passionate men and affected women, all the

old stand-bys are used up, and the only practical question is, Where are

the substitutes to come from? Who shall be trusted to invent them? Not

the linguists: they would make them too long and slim. Not the mob: they

would make them too short and stout.

There are plenty of words made; but in these times they are all nouns,

and what we want are adverbs--'words that qualify verbs, participles,

adjectives, and other adverbs.' We could get along well enough with the

old adjectives, badly as the superlative degree of some of them has been

used. They are capable of being qualified when they become too weak--or,

rather, when our taste becomes too strong--just as old ladies _qualify_

their tea when they begin to find the old excitement insufficient. But

even this must be done with reason, or we shall soon find with the new

supply, as we are now finding with the old, that the bottle gives out

before the tea-caddy. The whole language is sufficient, except in the

_excessives_--the _ultimates_.

Why use up the sublime to express the ridiculous? Why be only noticeable

from the force of your language as compared with the feebleness of what

you have to say? Why chain Pegasus to an ox cart, or make your

Valenciennes lace into horse blankets? If the noble tools did the

ignoble work any better, it might be some satisfaction; but cutting

blocks with a razor is proverbially unprofitable, and a

million-magnifying microscope does not help a bit to tell the time by

the City Hall clock. And again: the beggar doth but make his mishaps the

more conspicuous by climbing a tree, while the poor bird of paradise,

when once fairly on the ground, must needs stay and die, being kept from

rising into her more natural element by the very weight of her beauties.

Like this last-named victim of misdirected ambition, poetical

expressions, being once fairly reduced to the level of ordinary use, so

that all feel at liberty to take them in vain, can never 'revocare

gradem.'

The elegant, however, is not so much of a loss, as the strong and

serviceable part of the language;--which, so far, is like grain in a

hopper, always being added to at the top, and ground away at the bottom.

The good old unmistakable words seem to sink the faster from their

greater specific gravity compared to the chaff that surrounds them; for

example: _Indeed_ used to be a fine and reliable word for impressing an

assertion, but now it is almost discarded except as a sort of

questioning expression of surprise, which might advantageously be

shortened thus:?! Strictly interpreted, it denotes a lack of faith,

suggesting a possible discrepancy between the words of the speaker and

the deeds they relate to. It is but one step removed from the politeness

of the Sligo Irishwomen, who say, 'You are a liar,' meaning exactly

what an American lady does in saying 'You don't mean so!'

I suppose it seemed as if the force of language could no further go,

when men first said _really_. "What is more indisputable than reality?

But it has come to be a sort of vulcanizer, to make plain English,

irony. Nowadays, when a young lady adds, 'really,' one may know that she

means to cast a doubt over the seriousness of what she says, or to

moderate its significance. 'Really, sir, you must not talk so,' is the

appropriate form for a tone of decided encouragement to continue your

remarks--probably complimentary to herself, or the opposite to some

friend. And so we might go on down, taking every word of the sort from

the dictionary, and comparing its usefulness now, with that of the time

when it had no ambiguity.

_Positively_, _seriously_, _perfectly_, and their synonymes, have been

subtracted, one after another, from our list of absolute words,--Burked,

carried off, and consumed, by people who, if they had each had the

finishing off of one word, instead of each doing a part at the ruin of

all, would deserve to have their names handed down to posterity in

connection with the ruin they had wrought, as much as ever Erostratus or

Martin did; the former, we all know, was he of whom it is said:

'The ambitious youth who fired th' Ephesian dome

Outlives in fame the pious fool that reared it.'

The latter, it is not so well known, did likewise by Yorkminster, for a

similar purpose, and is now, as Mrs. Partington would say, 'Expatiating

his offence' in a lunatic asylum. But their name is legion. How many a

man, perhaps, 'father of a family, member of the church, and doing a

snug business,' hears every day or two 'positively and without joking or

exaggeration, the most perfectly absurd and ridiculous thing, he ever

heard in all his born days!'

_Actually_ was a nice word. We suffered a loss when it died, and it

deserves this obituary notice. It was a pretty word to speak and to

write, and there was a crisp exactness about its very sound that gave it

meaning. _Requiescat in pace._ But last and most to be lamented, comes

_literally_. I could be pathetic about that word. So classic--so

perfect--it crystallized the asseveration honored with its assistance.

And so early dead! Cut off untimely in the green freshness of its

days--and I have not even the Homeric satisfaction of burying it! It

still wanders in the shades of purgatory, _Vox et præterea nihil_; being

bandied about from mouth to mouth of the profane vulgar. And not even by

them alone is disrespect offered it, for the grave and practical Mr.

Layard says somewhere in the account of his uncoveries, 'They

_literally_ bathed my shoes with their tears!' _Idem, sed quantum

mutatus ab illo!_ I am almost tempted to the ambiguous wish that he

might have _slipped in literally_ to one of the many graves he robbed

figuratively.

Now listen for a moment to Miss Giggley, who is telling of her

temptation to laugh at some young unfortunate who thought he was making

himself very agreeable. 'Really and truly, upon my word and honor, I

positively thought I--should--die: as sure as I'm alive.' You pretty

liar! You smiling murderess! You playful puss, gracefully toying with

the victims your sweet mouth kills! Those expletives were like five

strong men standing in a row, and you were like a bright,

innocent-looking electric machine, with its transparent and clear-voiced

cylinder, which is capable (give it only enough turnings) of making the

men, at a shock, into five long, prostrate heaps of clay, lifeless,

useless, and offensive, as are the expletives in question, by reason of

a succession of just such shocking assaults as the untruth you this

moment swore to.

Anonymous writers, as a class, might be called the Boythorns of

Literature. All of them, from Junius down, have shown a great

satisfaction in waving a tremendously sharp sword out from behind a

fence. Sometimes the hand that has held the weapon was strong enough to

have done good service wherever it might have been engaged, but always

the wielding is a little more fearless than if the owner's face were

visible, and usually it is the better for his cause that it was not. We

all know what a _very_ large cannon the monkey touched off, and how, if

any one _had_ been in the way, it might have hurt him very much. As when

a traveller writes of a far country, he tries to make it seem worth all

the trouble he took to go there, so a critic must find enough bad about

a book to make his article on it important and interesting.

These exaggerators--these _captatores_ (and _occisores_)

_verborum_--have no idea of the adaptation of means to ends. They are

not deficient in forces--they have a powerful army, but no generalship.

Horse, foot, and artillery; it's all vanguard. Right, left, and

centre--but all vanguard. At the first glimpse, pioneers and scouts,

rank and file, sappers and miners, sutlers and supernumeraries, all come

thundering down like a thousand of brick, and gleaming in the purple and

gold of imagery, to rout, disperse, and confound their obstacle; even if

it's only a corporal's guard of one private!

This _specialité_ in newspapers has occasionally been ridiculed, though

not very well. Dickens's _Eatonsville Gazette_ and _Independent_ are

perhaps the best caricatures; and they are a very good embodiment of a

particular class of partisan provincial papers; but they are utterly

inadequate to characterize the exaggeration that runs riot through the

whole tribe of periodicals--and _amok_ through the serried ranks of

Anglo-Saxon words. See the _New York Rostrum_; daily, weekly, and

semi-weekly. It is rampant! It suspects an abuse, and it ramps against

it. It seizes an idea, and it ramps toward its development. All who are

not with it are against it, and all who are against it are either fools

or knaves. The _Rostrum_ never chronicles railroad accidents. Oh, no! It

only tells its readers of dastardly and cowardly outrages, committed by

blood-thirsty fiends in the shape of presidents and directors against

virtuous and estimable passengers, whole hecatombs of whom are

assassinated to gratify the hideous appetite for carnage of the

officials aforesaid; every one of whom, from the president to the

water-boys, ought to suffer the extremest penalty of the law. It doesn't

say that they ought to be hung. No! capital punishment was the most

benighted characteristic of barbarism. It is a horrid atrocity to bring

it down to the present day. Nobody ought to be subjected to it but the

slimy reptiles who advocate its continuance.

Not only does the _Rostrum_ behave like a wild bull of Bashan when it is

fairly under way, but it is a perfect rocket at starting. It makes haste

to commit itself. It is continually entering into bonds to break the

peace. Its principle is not unlike that of the Irishman in a row:

'Wherever you see a head, hit it.' It deals around little doses of

shillelah, just by way of experiment; and if the unlucky head does not

happen to be that of an enemy, make it one; so it's all right again. It

carries whole baskets of chips on its shoulders, knock one off who will.

Forgive me, good _Rostrum_! I honestly believe thee to be the best paper

in this world; and my morning breakfast and car ride would be as fasting

and a pilgrimage, without thee! It takes all my philosophy and more than

all my piety (besides the lying abed late, and the coffee, which we only

have once a week) to dispense with thee on Sunday. No paper is so

untrammelled as thou art, for thou hast no shackles but those thou

thrustest thine own wrists into; and I prize thee more than a whole

sheaf of thy compeers, who always try to decide safely by deciding last.

Thou art prompt, brave, and straightforward. In nine cases out of ten,

when there are two cages open, thou dashest impetuously into the right

one. Verily, thou art a little more headstrong than strong-headed, and a

little less long-headed than headlong; but I say, rather let me be

occasionally wrong with thee than always mean with some of thy rivals.

But why be intemperate in thine advocacy of the nigger question, so

overbearing in thine efforts for freedom of speech, or why enslave

thyself in the cause of liberty? I could imagine a paper without even

thy faults--and for this, I know full well that if thou notice me at

all, it will be as a besotted and dangerous old fogy.

To be sure, the _Rostrum_ might be found guilty on other counts of the

general crime of word-murder. It has done for the word _height_ by

spelling it _hight_, at the same time giving a supererogatory kick to

the good old English participle (already deceased) of the latter

orthography. And then, it is not always quite certain whether its events

occurred or _transpired_! The misapplication of this last word is a

shocking abuse of our defenceless mother tongue, and one I have not

often seen publicly rebuked. It is not long since I saw the poor

dissyllable in question evidently misapplied in the dedication of a

book, and on Sunday, not long ago, I heard the pastor of one of the

first churches in the city preach of the power directing the events

which _transpire_ in this world!

There are two ways of getting public duties attended to; one of which is

to advertise for proposals,--a very expensive way; and the other is to

get up a public meeting or association, when all men think it an honor

to be elected officers for the sake of seeing their names in the papers.

Now this last way is the best, in so many respects that it shall be

adopted without hesitation for our purposes. Let there be a new Humane

Society established, principally for the prevention of cruelty to words,

and let the chief officer of the society be so named as to suggest its

chief office--that of 'moderator.' And let us hope that as words are the

things in question, deeds will abound, as we so well know the truth of

the reverse, that where deeds are to be looked for, words prevail

amazingly. Outside of its primary beneficent purpose, it may make

provision for charities incidental thereunto. It may appoint one

committee for the prevention of cruelty to compositors, to examine the

chirography of all MSS. about to be 'put in hand,' and, in any case it

thinks necessary, return mercilessly the whole scrawled mass to the

author to have t's crossed, i's dotted, a's and o's joined at the top,

etc., etc. Another privileged three may be merciful to the authors

themselves, by providing for the better reading of proofs, by examining

and qualifying the readers thereof; a class in this country very

deficient, and for a happy reason: namely, that we have not yet a

multitude of literary men, very well educated and very poor, who can

find nothing better to do. This last committee would find comparatively

little occupation, when the previous one had become effective in _its_

line.

To what an illimitable enterprise does the vastness of our plans lead

us! Long vistas open before our eyes, with fine prospects for patronage

and the gift of many offices. It is at least equal in dignity and

grandeur to the city government, and nothing prevents its becoming a

vast scheme of corruption, except that it never can, by any possibility,

possess a penny of revenue. Of course there should be a committee of

repairs and supplies, and one of immigration, the latter to provide for

the naturalization of foreign words and their proper treatment before

they could take care of themselves; the former for furnishing a supply

to meet the growing demand mentioned at the beginning of this article,

and for patching up several of the most obvious imperfections we now

suffer from. We want a word for _the opposite of a compliment_. Not that

this is as great a defect as the lack of the word _compliment_ would be

in these smooth-spoken times, but still the want is felt, and the

feeling is shown by such awkward expedients as the expression 'a

left-handed compliment.' Then, besides, they might give the seal of

legitimacy to a fine lot of words and phrases, the need of which is

shown by their being spontaneously invented, and universally adopted by

the vulgar; but which are not classic, have never been written except in

caricature, and are therefore inadmissible to the writings of us

cowardly fellows who 'do' the current literature. For instance: the word

_onto_, to bear the same relation to _on_ and _upon_, that the word

_into_ does to _in_ and _within_, has no synonyme, and if we had once

adopted it, we should be surprised at our own self-denial in having had

it so long in our ears without taking it for the use of our mouths and

pens.

The judiciary department should have full power to try _all_ defilers of

the well of English, be they these offenders we have been talking

of--spendthrifts and drunkards in the use of its strong waters--or be

they punsters, or be they the latest development of miscreants, the

_transposers_. To the punsters shall be adjudged a perpetual strabismus,

that they may look two ways at once, forever--always seeing double with

their bodily eyes, as they have been in the habit of doing with their

mental ones. Even so to the transposer. Let him be inverted, and hung by

the heels till _healed_ of his disorder.

If this idea of an association is seized upon, I should be happy to

suggest well-qualified persons for all the offices _except_ the highest.

The most appropriate incumbent for that, modesty forbids my mentioning.

But the matter must not be let drop. Unless there can be some check put

to the present extravagance, we shall all take to _swearing_, for I am

sure that is the first step beyond it.

STEWART, AND THE DRY GOODS TRADE OF NEW YORK.

Those who have watched the growth of New York, have found a striking

criterion of its gradual advance in the different aspects of the dry

goods trade. We select this branch of business as a better illustration

of the progress of our metropolis than any other, since in breadth, as

well as in enterprise, it has always taken the lead. What grocer,

hardwareman, druggist, or any other of the different tradesmen of the

metropolis, ever wrought out of nothing the majestic structures or the

enormous traffic which is represented by some of our dry goods concerns.

Dry goods originally held their headquarters between Wall street and

Coenties slip. In those days Front street for grocers, and Pearl for dry

goods men, within the limits above mentioned, sufficed for all the

demands of trade, and in many instances the jobber lived in the upper

part of his store. The great fire of 1835 put an end to all that was

left of these primitive manners, and the burnt district was in due time

covered with new brick stores, of a style vastly superior to those of

the past. At the same time the advance in the price of lots fully made

up the loss of insurance on buildings which was inevitable from the

universal bankruptcy of fire offices. As trade appeared to be firmly

established in that section, a mammoth hotel was built near Coenties

slip for the accommodation of country merchants, and was long famous as

the 'Pearl Street House.' A jobbing concern at that day might be

satisfied with the first floor and basement of a building twenty-five

feet by sixty to eighty, in which a business of from one hundred

thousand to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars could be done. Such

a business was then thought of respectable amount, and few exceeded it.

The trade even at that early day was remarkable for its

precariousness--and while a few made fortunes, whole ranks were swept

away by occasional panics. In 1840, Hanover square was the dry goods

emporium of New York, and there a few years earlier Eno & Phelps

commenced a thriving trade which grew into famous proportions. As an

illustration of the risks of trade, we may mention that we know of no

other concern engaged in that vicinity at that time which escaped

eventual bankruptcy. Near Eno & Phelps stood the granite establishment

of Arthur Tappan & Co., while lesser concerns were crowded in close

proximity. The first disposition to abandon this section was shown by

opening new stores in Cedar street, which soon became so popular as a

jobbing resort that its rents quadrupled. The Cedar street jobbers would

in the present day be considered mere Liliputians, since many of their

stores measured less than eighteen by thirty feet. They were occupied by

a class of active men, who bought of importers and sold to country

dealers on the principle of the nimble sixpence. Of this class (now

about extinct) a few built up large concerns, while others, after

hopelessly contending year after year with adverse fortune, sunk

eventually into bankruptcy, and may in some instances now be found in

the ranks of clerkship. From Cedar street, trade moved to Liberty,

Nassau, and John streets, while as these new emporiums prospered, Pearl

street gradually lost its prestige, until the general hegira of trade in

1848, which left that ancient mart deserted. The Pearl street hotel,

which once was thronged by country dealers and city drummers, was then

altered into a warehouse for storage, while the jobbing houses, where

merchants were wont to congregate, fell into baser uses, and property

sunk in value correspondingly.

The 'hegira,' to which we have referred, led from the east to the north

side of the town, and was so exacting in its demands, that at length no

man could hope to sell goods except in the new locality. Meanwhile,

property in Cortlandt, Dey, Vesey, and the neighboring streets, rose

immensely, and old rookeries were replaced by elegant stores. The chief

features in this improvement were increased size and enlarged room. L.O.

Wilson & Co. took the lead in this by opening a store extending through

from Cortlandt to Dey street, whose spacious hall could have swallowed

up a half dozen old fashioned Pearl street concerns.

It was Mr. Wilson's ambition to break the bondage of antiquated habit,

and inaugurate a revolution in trade. He had been a prominent Pearl

street man, and had retired with a snug fortune, but had too active a

mind to be satisfied with the quiet of retired life, and hence returned

to trade with renewed energy. The new concern created a decided

sensation, and for several years was successful, but we regret that we

cannot record for it any other end than that which is the general fate

of New York merchants. The movement which had now been inaugurated,

continued with rapid progress until Barclay, Warren, Murray, and

Chambers streets were transformed from quiet abodes of wealthy citizens

to bustling avenues of trade. With this change the demand for size and

ornament still continued, and was accompanied by enormous increase in

rents. A newly-built Pearl street jobbing house in 1836 might be worth

$1,500 per annum, while $3,000 was considered enormous; but now rents

advanced to rates, which, compared with these, seemed fabulous. To meet

these expenses, the consolidation of firms was resorted to, and the

standard of a good year's trade extended from $250,000 to a million and

upward.

From 1848 to 1860 the principle of extension was in active operation.

From Chambers street the work of renovation progressed upward, until

even Canal street was invaded by jobbers, and until a space of a half

mile square had been entirely torn down and rebuilt. Vast fortunes were

made in the twinkling of an eye. A German grocer, who held a lease of

the corner of Warren and Church streets, received $10,000 for two years

of unexpired lease. The fellow found that the property was needed for

the improvement of adjacent lots, and made a bold and successful strike

for a premium. The church property, corner of Duane and Church streets,

one hundred feet square, was sold for $28,000, and within a week resold

to a builder for $48,000. The widening of streets now became popular,

and a spot long famed for the degradation of its inhabitants, was thrown

open to the activities of trade, and its rookeries replaced by marble

palaces. What a transformation for Reade, Duane, Church, and Anthony

streets, once synonymous with misery and crime, thus to become the

splendid seats of trade!

The growth of the dry goods trade had by 1860 assumed proportions which

twenty years previously could not have entered into the wildest dreams.

Indeed, had a prophet stood in Hanover square at that epoch, and

portrayed the future, he would have been met with the charge of lunacy.

$30,000 rent for a store was not more absurd than the idea that trade

would ever wing its way to a neighborhood chiefly known through the

police reports, and only visited by respectable people in the work of

philanthropy. The enterprise of New York houses, in either following or

leading this movement, is admirably illustrated, and as the merchants of

New York are among her public men, we purpose a brief reference to a few

leading houses. As it is nothing new to state that only three per cent.

of our mercantile community are successful in making fortunes, the

results of these examples need not surprise the reader.

Among the chief concerns of nearly forty years' career, may be mentioned

C.W. & J.T. Moore & Co., who began in a small way in Pearl street,

followed the flood of trade to Broadway, and afterward took possession

of the splendid store built by James E. Whiting, on the site of the

Broadway theatre. Bowen & McNamee commenced somewhere about 1840, having

sprung from the bankrupt house of Arthur Tappan & Co. Their first

establishment was in Beaver street, whence they removed to a marble

palace which they built in Broadway in 1850, having, in ten years,

realized an enormous fortune in the silk trade. Encouraged by the

success following this second movement, the firm sold their store at an

enormous advance, and purchased the corner of Broadway and Pearl

streets, thus indicating that trade had advanced a mile up town. The

palatial store which they erected on this spot will long mark the

climacteric point in mercantile architecture. It was supposed at the

time of its erection to be the finest jobbing store in existence, and

although since then both Mr. Astor and James E. Whiting have each put up

a splendid marble establishment in Broadway, they have not surpassed the

one we refer to. Messrs. Bowen & McNamee were early identified with the

progressive views of New England politics, which they maintained

throughout their business career. At an early day a system of

persecution was opened upon them by a portion of the New York press on

the score of their anti-slavery sentiments, to which they replied by

announcing that 'they had goods for sale, not opinions.' This bold

expression became quite popular in its day, and did much to extend the

business of the high-toned concern which proclaimed it, so that what was

lost by prejudice was more than gained from legions of new friends,

until, for a time, they reaped a golden harvest from a trade which

ramified to all parts of the North, East, and West.

Another famous concern which sustained a position diametrically

opposite to the one we have just mentioned, was that of Henrys, Smith &

Townsend. This house was for more than a quarter of a century

distinguished in the dry goods line, but held a Southern trade, and its

members were men of corresponding proclivities. Commencing in Hanover

square, the firm had followed the drift of trade into Broadway, and had

become immensely rich. Like Bowen & McNamee (or Bowen, Holmes & Co.,

their later firm), they led in political, as well as in mercantile

enterprise, and these two houses, like Calpe and Abyla, were for years

set over against each other as the trade representatives of the Northern

and Southern sentiment.

Yet, whatever may have been their difference of opinion, we are well

persuaded of the fact that both houses were composed of patriotic and

high-minded men, who differed simply because their views were of an

extreme character. We might record other distinguished firms, which like

these arose to greatness from humble beginnings, and at last fell like

them beneath the revulsion which preceded the present civil war; but

these will serve as general illustrations.

With this revulsion the glory of the great houses has passed away. The

marble palaces which formerly rented for $20,000 to $50,000, either

stand empty or are tenanted at a nominal rate; and the enormous traffic

of millions annually, has sunk down to the proportions of primitive

times. Those grand Broadway stores must hereafter be divided, for no one

concern can fill them, and the dreams of merchant and of builder are

alike exploded. The dry goods trade in New York is now under a process

of change, and as the dispensation of high rents and broad floors, long

credits and enormous sales, seems to be passing away, it is a question

of no small interest what shape the trade will put on. We will not

attempt to answer that question. We prefer to give a sketch of the man

who has done the most to solve it--Mr. A. T. Stewart.

Mr. Stewart possesses one of the most truly executive minds in America.

Indeed, as respects this feature, we doubt if any exception could be

made to according him the very first position among our business men.

Others may occasionally equal him in grasp of intellect, as in the

instance of George Law, or Cornelius Vanderbilt; but, considered in the

point of executive ability, we consider him unapproachable. He has long

been chief among American dry goods dealers, and is known far and wide

as the largest merchant (that is, buyer and seller) on this continent,

and perhaps in the world. Yet there are thousands, including New Yorkers

as well as country people, who have lost sight of Mr. Stewart's

personality, and mention his name daily, and, perhaps, hourly, merely as

the representative of a mammoth house of trade. The reason of this is

obvious: hundreds and thousands have dealt year after year in that

marble palace without ever beholding its proprietor. To such persons the

name 'Stewart' has become merely a symbol, or, at most, a term of

locality. To them he is a myth, with no personal entity. To their minds

the term sets forth, instead of so many feet stature encased in

broadcloth, with countenance, character, and voice like other men,

merely a train of ideas, a marble front, plate glass, gorgeous drapery,

legion of clerks, paradise of fashion, crowds of customers, and all the

fascination of a day of shopping. 'Where did you get that love of a

shawl?' asks Miss Matilda Namby Pamby of her friend Miss Araminta

Vacuum. 'Why, at Stewart's, of course,' is the inevitable reply; 'and so

cheap! only $250.' Now, to this pair of lady economists, what is

'Stewart's' but a mere locality, as impersonal as Paris or Brussels, or

any other mart of finery? We would correct this tendency to the unreal

(which, by the way, is very natural), by stating that behind the mythic

idea, there _is_ a Stewart; not a mere locality, but a man--plain,

earnest, and industrious--who, amid this army of clerks and bustle of

external traffic, drives the secret machinery with wonderful precision.

Purchasers at retail are the most liable to the symbolic idea, since

they never behold the existing Stewart. They see hundreds of salesmen,

some stout and some thin, some long and some short, some florid and some

pale, moving about in broadcloth, with varied port of dignity and

importance, who may look as if they would like to own a palace. Yet

among these the proprietor will be sought in vain. But if one ascends to

the second story, he will find himself in a new world. This is the

wholesale establishment, and here Mr. Stewart appears as the presiding

genius.

As one enters this department he may observe, in a large office on the

side of the house looking into Chambers street, the grandmaster of the

mammoth establishment, sitting at the desk, and occupied by the pressing

demands of so important a position. Here, from eight in the morning

until a late dinner hour, he is engrossed by the schemes and plans of

his active brain. He bears a calm and thoughtful appearance, and yet,

such is his executive ability, that the burden which would crush others

is borne by him with comparative ease. His aspect and manners are plain

and simple to a remarkable degree, and a stranger would be surprised to

acknowledge in that tall form and quiet countenance, the Autocrat of the

Dry Goods Trade. This man did not achieve this position save by patient

toil; his greatness was not 'thrust upon him.' It has arisen from forty

years of close application to the branch of trade which he adopted in

early life, and to which he has bent his rare powers of mind. Like most

of our successful men, he began the world with no capital beside brains;

and like Daniel Webster and Louis Philippe, his early employment was

teaching. The instructor, however, was soon merged in the business man,

and in 1827 his unpretending name was displayed in Broadway, The little

concern in which he then was salesman, buyer, financier, and sole

manager, has gradually increased in importance, until it has become the

present marble palace. It is probable that much of his early prosperity

was owing to a remarkably fine taste in the selection of dress goods;

but the subsequent breadth of his operations and their splendid success

may be ascribed to his love of order, and its influence upon his

operations. Years of practice upon this idea have enabled him to reduce

everything to a system. Beside this, he is a first-class judge of

character, reads men and schemes at a glance, and continually exhibits a

depth of penetration which astonishes all who witness it. Thus, although

sitting alone in his office, he is apparently conscious of whatever is

going on in all parts of his establishment. So completely is he _en

rapport_ with matters on the different floors, that the clerks sometimes

imagine that there must be an invisible telegraph girdling the huge

building. These men often say, by way of pleasant illustration of this

fact, that if any one of them is absent, he is the very man to be first

called for. From this it may be understood that it is not an easy matter

to vary from the rigid system which holds its alternative of diligence

or discharge over all beneath its control. We have referred to Mr.

Stewart's habits of order as a means by which he controls his vast

business with apparent ease. To explain this more explicitly, we may

state that each department or branch of trade is under a distinct

manager. These wholesale departments have been increased every year,

until there is hardly an item in the comprehensive variety of the dry

goods trade that is not here to be found. The advantage of this

progressive movement was lately shown by the fact that, while Mr.

Stewart lost enormous sums by Southern repudiation, he made up a large

portion of the loss by the recent advance in domestics, a department

which he had just added to his stock. The numerous failures which take

place among New York business men give Mr. Stewart the choice among

them for his managers, and a representation of the finest business

talent of the city can, at this moment, be found in his establishment.

These men turn their energies into that mighty channel which flows into

his treasury. Indeed, to this merchant prince, they are what his

marshals were to Napoleon, and, like him, this Autocrat of Trade sits

enthroned in the insulated majesty of mercantile greatness.

It may be inferred that no man in the concern works harder than its

owner, and we believe that this is acknowledged by all its employés. Day

after day he wears the harness of silent and patient toil.

It is not generally known that during these hours of application, and

while engrossed in the management of his immense operations, no one is

allowed to address him personally until his errand or business shall

have been first laid before a subordinate. If it is of such a character

that that gentleman can attend to it, it goes no farther, and hence it

vests with him to communicate it to his principal. To illustrate this

circumstance, we relate the following incident: A few weeks ago a person

entered the wholesale department, with an air of great importance, and

demanded to see the proprietor. That proprietor could very easily be

seen, as he was sitting in his office, but the stranger was courteously

met by the assistant, with the usual inquiry as to the nature of his

business. The stranger, who was a Government man, bristled up and

exclaimed, indignantly, 'Sir, I come from Mr. Lincoln, and shall tell my

business to no one but Mr. Stewart.' 'Sir,' replied the inevitable Mr.

Brown, 'if Mr. Lincoln himself were to come here, he would not see Mr.

Stewart until he should have first told me his business.'

The amount of annual sales made at this establishment is not known

outside of the circle of managers, but may be variously estimated at

from ten to thirty millions. This includes the retail department, whose

daily trade varies, according to weather and season, from three thousand

to twelve thousand dollars per day. To supply this vast demand for

goods, Mr. Stewart has agencies in Paris, London, Manchester, Belfast,

Lyons, and other European marts. Two of the above cities are the

permanent residences of his partners; and while Mr. Fox represents the

house in Manchester, Mr. Warton occupies the same position in Paris.

These gentlemen are the only partners of the great house of A.T. Stewart

& Co.

The marble block which the firm now occupies was built nearly twenty

years ago. It had been the site of an old-fashioned hotel--which, like

many others of its class, bore the name of 'Washington,' and which was

eventually destroyed by fire. Mr. Stewart bought the plot at auction for

less than $70,000, a sum which now would be considered beneath half its

value. To this was subsequently added adjacent lots in Broadway, Reade

and Chambers streets, and the present magnificent pile reared. To such

of our readers as walk Broadway, we need not add any detail of its

dimensions, nor mention what is now well known, that, large as it is, it

is still too small for the increasing business. Hence another mercantile

palace has been erected by Mr. Stewart in Broadway near Tenth street.

This is intended for the retail trade, and is, no doubt, the most

convenient, as well as the most splendid structure of the kind in the

world. After the retail department shall have been thus removed up town

the present store will be devoted to the wholesale trade.

If any of our readers should inquire what impulse moves the energies of

one whose circumstances might warrant a life of ease, we presume that

the reply would be force of character and the strength of habit. Mr.

Stewart has an empire in the world of merchandise which he can neither

be expected to resign or abdicate. We cannot regret that law of

centralization which builds up one marble palace, where hundreds have

failed utterly to make a living. Centralization of trade has its

objections, and yet, upon the whole, there is, no doubt, a much

healthier and happier condition prevailing among the parties connected

with Mr. Stewart, than would be found among the struggling concerns (say

fifty or more) whose place he has taken. Centralization is a law in

trade whose movement crushes the weak by an inevitable step, while, by

compelling them to take refuge beneath the protection of the strong it

affords a better condition than the one from which they have been

driven. To his early perception of this law Mr. Stewart largely owes his

present colossal fortune.

UNHEEDED GROWTH.

As on the top of Lebanon,

Slowly the Temple grew,

All unobserved, though every shaft

A giant shadow threw:

Unheeded, though the golden pomp

Of ponderous roof and spire,

Wrought in the chambers of the earth,

Like subterranean fire:

Until the huge translated pile,

By brother kings upreared,

On Zion's hill, enthroned at last,

In silence reappeared.

So, not with observation comes

God's kingdom in the heart;

But like that Temple, silently,

With golden doors apart.

And all the Mighty Ones that watch,

With folded wings above,

Trembling with awe, now stoop to earth,

On messages of love.

Another Temple riseth fast,

Unbuilt of mortal hands,

Upheaving to the battle-blast

Of Freedom's conquering bands!

The bannered host--the darkened skies--

The thunderings all about,

Foreshadow but a Nation's birth,

Answering a Nation's shout!

RED, YELLOW, AND BLUE.

Alas for the old fashions! Wonder, incredulity, curiosity, and a crowd

of primitive sensations, the whooping host that greeted, like misformed

brutes on Circean shores, the steamboat and the telegraph, are passing

away on a Lethean tide, and our mysteries are departing from among us.

The intelligence which so long gazed wistfully upon the barred door of

nature, or picked unsuccessfully at the bolts, with skeleton theories,

and vague speculations, had learned to try the 'open sesame' of science.

The master key is turning, the shafts yield, and already a dim glory

shines through.

While the strides of a positive philosophy are crippled by enthusiastic

rhapsodies about intuition and instinct, her footsteps are still

indelible, and her progress is certain and accelerating. Reason is

written on her brow; she appeals to the universal gift, and denies the

authoritative dictations of fallible genius, as much as a moral equality

disallows the divine right of kings. Speculators among stars,

speculators among sounds and colors, are the skirmishers in front of an

intellectual post, whose tread reverberates but little in their rear.

Accoutred with a few empiric facts and inductive minds, they aspire to

beautiful and stable theories, whence they may descend, by deductive

steps, accurate even to mathematical absoluteness, to the very arcana of

what has been the inexplicable. To them the true, the beautiful, must be

facts, defined, realized, and vigorously analyzed. Visible embodiments

of an incomprehensible grace must be disintegrated, and the thinnest

essences escape not the analytical rack whereon they confess the causal

entity of their composition. 'Broad-browed genius' may toss his locks in

the studio redolent of art; his eye may light, and his nervous fingers

print the grand creation on the canvas. The divine afflatus is in his

nostrils; it is his spirit, and his picture is the reflex of his soul.

But keen-eyed Science lays a shadowy hand upon the 'holy coloring,' and

says: 'Truly, the harmony is beautiful; it has pleased a sympathetic

instinct from the first. Yet, from the first, my laws have been upon

it--inexorable laws, which answer to the mind as instinct echoes to the

soul.'

The august simile of the philosopher, who likened the world to a vast

animal, is appearing each day as too real for poetry. The ocean lungs

pulse a gigantic breath at every tide, her continental limbs vibrate

with light and electricity, her Cyclopean fires burn within, and her

atmosphere, ever giving, ever receiving, subserves the stupendous

equilibrium, and betrays the universal motion. Motion is material life;

from the molecular quiverings in the crystal diamond, to the light

vibrations of a meridian sun--from the half-smothered sound of a

whispered love, to the whirl of the uttermost orb in space, there is

life in moving matter, as perfect in particulars, and as magnificent in

range, as the animation which swells the tiny lung of the polyp, or

vitalizes the uncouth python floundering in the saurian slime of a

half-cooled planet.

When a polar continent heaves from the bosom of the deep, or when the

inquiring eye rests upon the serrated rock, the antique victim of some

drift-dispersing glacier, the mind perceives the effects and recognizes

the existence of nature's omnipotent muscles, and their appalling power.

But that adventurer who chases the chain of necessity to the sources of

this grand instability, is merged at once in a haze of speculations,

beautiful as sunlight through morning mists, but uncertain as the

veriest chimeras. While beyond the idea of comprehensive motion the

colossal symmetry of Truth expands in ultimate outlines, her features

are shrouded, but in such an attractive clare-obscure of inviting

analogies and semi-satisfying glimpses, that the temptation to guess at

the ideal face almost overpowers the desire to kiss the real and shining

feet below. Unfortunately, there is the domain of the myths and

immaterials, _there_ is the home of the law and the force, _there_ dwell

the Odyles, the electricities, the magnetisms, and affinities, and there

the speculative Æneas pursues shadows more fleeting than the Stygian

ghosts, and the grasp of the metaphysician closes on shapes whose

embrace is vacancy. The bark that ploughs within this mystic expanse,

sheds from its cleaving keel but coruscations of phosphorescent

sparkles, which glimmer and quench in a gloom that Egyptian seers never

penetrated, and modern guessers cannot conjecture through. There is,

indeed, 'oak and triple brass' upon his breast who steeps his lips in

the chalice of the Rosicrucian, and the doom of Prometheus is the fabled

defeat which is waiting for the wanderer in those opaque spaces. While

we warily, therefore, tread not upon the ground whose trespass brought

the vulture of unfilled desire, the craving void for visionary lore upon

the heaven-born, earth-punished speculator, we can still find flowery

paths and full fruition, in meadows wherein the light of reason requires

no support from the _ignes fatui_ of imagination; meadows after all so

broad, that did not metaphysics 'teach man his tether,' they would seem

illimitable. The book of nature is not spread before us, turning leaf

after leaf at every sunrise, with new delineations on every page, to be

stared at with vacant inanity, or criticized with imbecile verbosity.

The rivulet does not tinkle and the sky does not look blue that people

may feed the ear alone with the one, or satisfy the eye alone with the

other; the nerves which carry the sensation to the brain, flutter with

the news, and knock at the house of mind for explanation. We do not

anticipate being hurried into any extravaganza about the rural felicity

of green trees, clinking cowbells, cane chairs, and cigars, when we

recall to the trainer of surburban vines the harmony, the analogy, the

relationship, which he must have observed between sounds and colors in

nature's album of melodies.

When, at evening, the zenith blue melts away toward the horizon in

dreamy violet, and the retreating sun leaves limber shafts of orange

light, like Parthian arrows, among the green branches of the elms, what

sounds can charm the ear like the soft chirrup of the cricket, the

homely drone of the hive-seeking bee, and the cool rustle of the breeze

through the tops of the spring-sodden water grasses? How fondly the mind

blends the evening colors and the incipient voices of the night! 'Oh,'

says the metaphysician, 'this is association: just so a strain of music

reminds you of a fine passage in a book you have read, or a beautiful

tone in a picture you have seen; just so the Ranz des Vaches bears the

exile to the timber house, with shady leaves, corbelled and

strut-supported, whose very weakness appeals to the avalanche that

shakes an icicly beard in monition from the impeding crags.'

Well, let association play her part in some cases; when a habit has

necessitated the recurrence of two distinct ideas together, they will

certainly be associated at times when the habit is gone; but suppose the

analogy is felt when the ideas have never before been in juxtaposition,

or when there has even been no sensation at all to generate one of the

notions. How, for instance, did the sightless imaginer ever conceive

that red must be like the sound of the trumpet? Simply because the

analogy between color and music is deeper than the idea of either, more

absolute than association could make it; because certain tints are

calculated to produce exactly similar impressions on the eye that

certain sounds do upon the ear; or, to use a mathematical turn of

expression, because some color [Greek: x] is to the eye as some sound

[Greek: x] is to the ear.

That this mathematical turn of expression is no vagary, but perfectly

germane to the subject, and accurate in application, we propose to prove

to those who love coincidences and analogies sufficiently to fish them

out of a little dilute science.

Light and sound are the daughters of motion. Color and music, the

ethereal and aërial offspring of this ancestry, born with the world,

fostered in Biblical times, expanded in China and Egypt, living on the

painted jar, and breathing in the oaten reed, deified in Greece, and

analyzed to-day, are natural cousins at the least, and they have come

from the spacious home of their progenitor, upon our dusky and silent

sphere, like Peace and Goodwill, with hands bound in an oath and

contract never to part. We will spare a dissertation on chaos; we will

not speak of matter and inertia; but as our greatest and purest fountain

of light is the sun, we may be allowed a modest exposition of his

philosophical state, as a granite gate to the garden beyond. Ninety-five

millions of miles to the north, east, south, or west of us, up or down,

as the case may be, stands the molten centre of our system--an orb,

whose atoms, turbulent with electricity, gravity, or whatever mechanists

please to call the attraction of particle for particle, are forever

urging to its centre, forever meeting with repulsions when they slide

within the forbidden limits of molecular exclusiveness, and eternally

vibrating with a quake and quiver which lights and heats the worlds

around. In other words, this agitation is one that, transmitted to an

ethereal medium, produces therein corresponding vibrations or waves,

which are light and heat.

As sound is the symmetrical aërial motion, if our atmosphere embraced

our sun, and extended throughout space, we should _perhaps_ hear in the

ambient the fundamental chord, resolvable into the diatonic scale--as we

look upon the beam of white which the prism decomposes into the solar

spectrum, and in the ghostly watches of the night, we might recognize

the 'music of the spheres' as the planets rushed around their airy

orbits, with a noise like the 'noise of many waters,' no longer a poetic

illusion, but a harmonic fact.

Light, whether white or colored, is transmitted through ether in waves

of measurable length: each atom of the medium, when disturbed, moves

around its place of rest in an orbit of variable dimension and

eccentricity. On the character of the orbit depends the character of the

light; and on the velocity of orbit motion, its intensity. Like the

gentle pulsations which circle from the point where fell the pebble in

the purple lake, come the grateful twilight waves, red with the last

kiss of day; like the fierce struggles of the storm-beaten ocean floods

come the lightning waves, blazing through the thunder clouds, howling in

riven agony: so great is the variety of character in these orbicular

disturbances, which, acting upon the optic nerves, produce the sensation

of multiform light and color.

Waves of light, like waves of sound, are of different lengths, and while

the eye prefers some single waves to others, it recognizes a harmony in

certain combinations, which it cannot discover in different ones.

While, however, the constitution of individual eyes acknowledges one

color more pleasing than another, there is none, perhaps, which does not

prefer the coldest monochromatic to entire absence of color, as in blank

white, or to an absolute vacancy of light, as in black.

Sepia pieces are more agreeable than the neatest drawings in China ink,

or the most graceful curves done in chalk upon a blackboard. But however

the eye may admire a severe and simple unity, it relishes still more a

harmonious complexity; and a very mediocre little _pensée_ in water

colors, will prove more generally attractive than the monochromatic

copies in the Liber Veritatis.

But to this complexity there must be limits--an endless and incongruous

variety teases and revolts; the discordant effect of innumerable tints,

among which some are sure to be uncongenial to each other, is always

extremely irritating. There ought, then, to be a scale of color, it

would seem, within whose limits the purest harmonies are to be found,

and beyond which subdivisions should be no more allowed than in constant

musical notes. When this idea strikes, as it must have, many artists,

reason, consideration, instinct, and all, refer at once to the solar

spectrum as such an one. The analogy between this scale, which governs

the chromatics of the sunset and thunderstorm, and that which the

science of man has established, empirically, for harmonies, is

remarkable, and we shall try to make it patent. They are both scales of

seven: the tonic, mediant, and dominant, find their types in red,

yellow, and blue, while the modifications on which the diatonic scale is

constructed, resemble, numerically and esthetically, the well-known

variations in the spectrum.

The theory of harmonies in optics is the same as in acoustics, the same

as in everything--it is based on simplicity. Those colors, like those

notes, the number of whose vibrations or waves in the same time bear

some simple ratio to each other, are harmonious; an absolute equality

produces unison; and a group of harmonies is melody both in music and in

color. At this point we cannot but hint at the analogy already

discovered between the elements of music and the elements of form.

Angles harmonize in simple analysis, or intricate synthesis, whose

circular ratios are simple.

Numerical proportions are the roots of that shaft of harmony which,

springing from motion, rises and spreads into the nature around us,

which the senses appreciate, the spirit feels, and the reason

understands. Beauty is order, and the infinity of the law is testified

in the ever-swelling proofs of an unlimited consonance in creation, of

which these analogies are the smallest types. But the idea of numerical

analogy is not new to our age, now that the atomic theory is

established, and people are turned back to the days when the much

bescouted alchemist pored with rheumy eyes over the crucible, about to

be the tomb of elective affinity, and whence a golden angel was to

develop from a leaden saint: when they are reminded of the Pythagorean

numbers, and the arithmetic of the realists of old, they may very well

imagine that the vain world, like an empty fashion, has cycled around to

some primitive phase, and look for the door of that academy 'where none

could enter but those who understood geometry.'

But to return. When the ear accepts a tone, or the eye a single color,

it is noticed that these organs, satiated finally with the sterile

simplicity, echo, as it were, in a soliloquizing manner, to themselves,

other notes or tints, which are the complementary or harmony-completing

ones: so that if nature does not at once present a satisfaction, the

organization of the senses allows them internal resources whereon to

retreat. 'There is a world without, and a world within,' which may be

called complementary worlds. But nature is ever liberal, and her chords

are generally harmonies, or exquisite modifications of concord. The

chord of the tonic, in music, is the primal type of this harmony in

sound; it is perfectly satisfactory to the tympanum; and the ear,

knowing no further elements (for the tonic chord combines them all), can

ask for nothing more.

This chord, constructed on the tonic C, or Do, as a key note, and

consisting of the 1st, 3d, and 5th of the diatonic scale, or Do, Mi,

Sol, is called the fundamental chord. The harmony in color which

corresponds to this, and leaves nothing for the eye to desire, is, of

course, the light that nature is full of--sunlight. White light is then

the fundamental chord of color, and it is constructed on the red as the

tonic, consisting of red, yellow, and blue, the 1st, 3d, and 5th of the

solar spectrum.

This little analogy is suggestive, but its development is striking.

The diatonic scale in music, determined by calculation and actual

experiment on vibrating chords, stands as follows. It will be easily

understood by musicians, and its discussion appears in most treatises on

acoustics:

Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Ti Do

C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C, &c.

1 9/8 5/4 4/3 3/2 5/3 15/8 2.

The intervals, or relative pitches of the notes to the tonic C, appear

expressed in the fractions, which are determined by assuming the wave

length or amount of vibration of C as unity, and finding the ratio of

the wave length of any other note to it. The value of an interval is

therefore found by dividing the wave length of the graver by that of the

acuter note, or the number of vibrations of the acuter in a given time

by the corresponding number of the graver. These fractions, it is seen,

comprise the simplest ratios between the whole numbers 1 and 2, so that

in this scale are the simple and satisfactory elements of harmony in

music, and everybody knows that it is used as such. Now nature exposes

to us a scale of color to which we have adverted; it is thus:

Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet.

Let us investigate this, and see if her science is as good as mortal

penetration; let us see if she too has hit upon the simplest fractions

between 1 and 2, for a scale of 7. We can determine the relative pitch

of any member of this scale to another, easily, as the wave lengths of

all are known from experiment.

The waves of red are the longest; it corresponds, then, to the tonic.

Let us assume it as unity, and deduce the pitch of orange by dividing

the first by the second.

The length of a red wave is 0.0000266 inches; the length of an orange

wave is 0.0000240 inches; the fraction required then is 266/240;

dividing both members of this expression by 30, it reduces to 9/8,

almost exactly. This is encouraging. We find a remarkable coincidence in

ratio, and in elements which occupy the same place on the corresponding

scales. Again, the length of a yellow wave is 0.0000227 inches; its

pitch on the scale is therefore 266/227; dividing both terms by 55, the

reduced fraction approximates to 5/4 with great accuracy, when we

consider the deviations from truth liable to occur in the delicate

measurements necessary to determine the length of a light vibration, or

the amount of quiver in a tense cord. A green wave is 0.0000211 inches

in length; its pitch is then 266/211, which reduced, becomes 4/3; in

like manner the subsequent intervals may be determined, which all prove

to be complete analogues, except, perhaps, violet, whose fraction is

266/167, which reduces nearer 16/9 than 15/8. But these small

discrepancies, which might be expected in the results of physical

measurements, do not cripple the analogy which appears now in the two

following scales:

DIATONIC OR NATURAL SCALE OF MUSIC.

C, D, E´, F, G, A, B, C´ D´ E´, &c.

1 9/8 5/4 4/3 3/2 5/3 15/8 2 18/8 10/4

DIATONIC OR NATURAL SCALE OF COLOR.

Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet.

1 9/8 5/4 4/3 3/2 5/3 16/9

Thus orange is to red what D is to C; and to resume the proportion we

used before, red is to eye as C is to ear; yellow: eye: Mi: ear; and so

on the proportion extends, till the analogy embraces chords, harmonies,

melodies, and compositions even.

We have already mentioned the chord of the tonic, and the corresponding

eye-music, red, yellow, and blue; let us consider the chord of the

dominant or 5th note, whose analogue is blue. This chord is constructed

on the 5th of the diatonic as a fundamental note, and consists of the

5th, 7th, and 9th, or returning the 9th an octave, the 5th, 7th, and 2d.

The parallel harmony among the spectral colors is blue, violet, and

orange. The name 'dominant' indicates the nature of this chord; its

often recurring importance in harmonic combinations of a certain key

make it easily recognized, and it is even more pleasing than the tonic

in its subdued character.

Out of doors this chord is preëminent in the sunset key, and the western

skies ever chant their evening hymn in the 5th, 7th, and 2d of the

ethereal music. The correspondence of the sub-dominant would be red,

green, and indigo; of the chord of the 6th, red, yellow, and indigo; and

so on, the curious mind may elicit the symmetrical to any notes, half

notes, or combinations of notes. It is evident that as a note may be

interpolated between any two of the scale, for reach or variety, and

called, _e.g._ [sharp]-F or [flat-]G, so a half tint between green and blue

is a kind of analogical [sharp]green or [flat]blue.

It seems to us that the elementary angles which Mr. Hay conceives to be

the tonic, mediant, and dominant, in formal symmetry, will soon be

proved to decompose into a scale of linear harmony, forming another beam

in this glory of natural analogy. These angles are the fundamental ones

of the pentagon square, and equilateral triangle--respectively 108°,

90°, and 60°. Some such scale it is known existed when art was at its

culmination in buried Greece, and it was less the stupendous genius of

her designers than the soul of the universe which their rules taught

them how to infuse into form, which rendered the marbles of Hellas

synonymes for immortality.

The most beautiful and conclusive, and yet most mysterious sign, that

points the seeker to the prosecution of this last analogy, remains yet

for us to remark, and for some investigator yet to take advantage of. It

is the nodal figures which arrange themselves upon an elastic plate (as

of glass), when it is made to vibrate (strewed with sand) by a fiddle

bow drawn across its edge, so as to produce a pitch of some intensity.

These have been investigated, and found subject to certain laws, which

link into the chain of symmetry that philosophers have already grasped.

Among these figures, of which the simplest arise from the deepest

pitches, the angles mentioned occur.

But however interesting it might be to follow out these episodical

instances, they would lead us too far from our original compass.

We have plainly exhibited the identity of principle which governs the

bases of sound and color, and might fairly write Q.E.D. to our

proposition; but the fact so determined has a farther bearing upon art,

which it may not be out of place to enlarge upon.

The painter's palette, charged with color, is the instrument with which

he thrills a melody to the eye, even as the magniloquent organ or the

sigh-breathing flute speak to the ear. And just as the compass of all

instruments is constructed on the diatonic scale, so should the range of

the palette depend upon the tinges of the spectrum.

While artists of a certain school pretend to imitate Nature, who paints

literally with a pencil dipped in rainbow, they make use of a

complication of tints, at which their goddess would shudder. In mixing

and mixing on the groaning palette, they generate an unhappy brood of

misformed tones, which never can agree upon the canvas; while the

pigments, impure at best, become doubly so by amalgamation, the

ramifications of contrast which such differences superinduce are sure to

prove sometimes repulsive.

Contrast is nature's charm, the bubbling source that she exhausts for

her prettiest harmonies and varieties.

But earthen pitchers are easily broken at the brink, and if the

slippery streams thence flowing are not judiciously checked, they merge

into a harsh flood that sweeps away all grace, like the magic fountain

in the German myth, whose fairy tricklings, uncovered for a single

night, burst into a curbless flood, that drowned the sleeping landscape

ere the dawn. The small reactions of contrast in infinitesimal tints,

are perhaps neglected or unforeseen, but their influence is fearfully

apparent in the end.

The simplicity of beauty is very limited, and he who dabbles in infinite

decompositions of color will be certain to encounter turbid and

unnatural tones, whose ultimate result will be an inharmonious and

disunited whole.

It is true that in the landscape, and cloudscape, and waterscape, there

are wonderful extremes of chromatic gradation, for it is the hand and

mind of nature that adorns herself; she can see unerringly, and lay on

divinely, the remotest intricacies of shade, and her colors are pure

light, swimming in ether.

But these media do not come bottled up in tin tubes, and to this gift a

mortal hand ought not to presume. It might as well aspire to draw

infinitely as to tint infinitesimally; for before it can find use for

all the colors in nature, it ought to have all nature upon the canvas.

But finally, we hold that reproductive art is as much part and parcel of

human nature as the appreciative, or sensation of beauty; and that any

one can learn to copy and color a landscape or design, as well as to

perform upon a musical instrument. Let genius still wield the creative

wand, but in the wide domain of art, over his grotto alone be it

written, _Procul o procul este profani_.

ONE OF THE MILLION.

Shoemaker Scheffer opened his shop within sight of the college

buildings, and expected to live by trade. He was young and skilful,

obliging, and prompt, and acquired, ere long, a substantial reputation.

Prosperity did not mislead him; he applied his income to the furtherance

of his business, abhorred debt, squandered nothing, was exact and

persevering.

At work early and late, he seemed the model of contentment, as he was of

industry. Prompt, obliging, careful, he made the future easy of

prediction.

But though the ruddy firelight shines well on the window panes, what

griefs, what agonies, what discords, are developed around the

hearthstone. Scheffer's quiet demeanor was, in some degree, deception.

One woman in the world knew it was so--no other being did.

The immediate excitant of his unrest was found in the college students,

who passed his place of business at all hours of the day. He remembered

that he might have worked his way into the ranks of those fellows.

Nothing vexed him so much as to see a lounger among them; for he must

needs think of the time when, a stripling, he agonized over his choice,

and said to himself, thinking of his mother (dead now, when the comfort

he toiled for was secured), 'Time enough for books when I am sure of

bread; flesh is needy and perishing, spirit is eternal.' He had walked

out of school to the counter of his uncle, and stood behind it seven

years, doing with earnest might what his hand found to do.

And here he was now, on his own ground, wistfully looking over his

barriers into the college yard, and, shall we say it, envying the

career of every studious lad--most of all that of the scholarly Harry

Cromwell, and the broad-browed, proud young Mitchell, who came into his

shop now and then, in remembrance of old days; for these lads could all

remember when they stood in one straight line among the social forces,

and neither had marched out of the old division to take rank in the new.

One day Paul Mitchell strolled into Scheffer's shop. Scheffer, at the

moment, was reading a newspaper, and he did not instantly throw the

sheet aside: he thought it unlikely that Paul required his service. But

at last, laying the paper away, and going up to Mitchell, he asked:

'What will you have, this morning?'

Paul's bright eyes smiled, full of fun.

'I'll have fifty thousand dollars, straight, and a library like that in

the Atheneum.'

'You want shoeing more,' was Scheffer's dry response; and, turning from

the youth, he went back to his counter, and emptied thereon a large box

of patent leathers, which he began to assort.

Gradually Paul approached, and at last he took up a pair of the boots,

and asked the price. Scheffer named it; Paul threw them down again.

'You might as well ask fifty dollars as three. It's you fellows who have

all the money.'

'Do you think so?' answered Scheffer; and he began to collect his goods

again, and to pack them in separate boxes. He was careful, however, to

throw aside the pair that had tempted Mitchell to confess a truth.

At last, when the counter was cleared, he took the boots, and said to

the boy, pointing to one of the sofas:

'Sit down there, my man.'

Paul did as bidden. Scheffer untied his shoestring, drew off the dusty,

worn-out shoe, and tried the pair in his hand. The fit was perfect.

Then Scheffer looked up, and, without rising, asked:

'How long have you to study before you graduate?'

'Five years.'

'Why do you speak in that way?'

'How did I speak?' asked Paul.

'Discouraged like.'

'You're mistaken.'

'Am I? Then why look so solemn? I'd like your chance.'

'You would!' exclaimed Paul, incredulous. 'Why, you had such a chance

yourself once, and you didn't accept it, if they know the facts at

home.'

Scheffer stood up.

'Who says that?' he asked, quietly. Still, the question had a hurried

sound to Paul. '_Did_ any one in that house remember!'

'Josephine told me so. She thinks you made a wise choice. So do I. I

wish I was as well off as you are, doing something for a support. And it

was on account of your mother you made the choice! But my mother insists

on my having a profession. Stuff! But nobody seems satisfied. That's one

kind of consolation.'

Scheffer was silent for a moment. Half of Paul's words were unheard; but

enough had struck through sense to spirit, and he said:

'Do you want to be shod for the next five years? I'll strike a bargain

with you, Paul.'

'What can I do for you?' asked the astonished lad.

'I'll tell you, and if you don't like it, why, no matter--that's all.'

And Scheffer added, in an earnest tone: 'I don't know but it's living

near the college, hearing the bell ring, and seeing the fellows with

their books, has bewitched me; any way, I'm thinking I must have an

education, and I wish to get it systematically. I always thought I could

have it when I chose; but if I don't bestir myself, I shall not be able

to choose much longer.'

August wiped his forehead as he spoke; but he had said it. Gravely,

anxiously he looked at Paul. He could have forgiven him even a smile.

But Paul did not smile. Neither did he hesitate too long to rob his

words of grace.

'What will you study?' he asked.

'Whatever you set me at.'

'Latin?'

'They say a fool is not a perfect fool till he has studied Latin. No, I

thank you. Five years, did you say?'

'Five years,' repeated Paul, this time without sighing.

'Well, get the books I need. You know what they are. Bring the bill to

me. Have it made out in your name, though, I'll settle the account.

Mum's the word, Paul. I won't have snobs laughing at the learned

shoemaker. The secret is mine.'

Paul promised. Scheffer thereupon picked up the student's worn-out

shoes, and tossed them into a distant heap of rubbish, and the lad went

on his way rejoicing. He was a widow's son, and poor; and to be shod as

a gentleman should be was a serious matter to him.

II.

But, as to the secret, there was Josephine, who shared the family burden

of poverty and pride; Josephine, who was a beauty, and not spoiled at

that, but light of heart and cheerful, disposed to make the best of

things; laughing lightly over mishaps which made her mother weep;

Josephine, of whose fair womanhood as much was hoped in a worldly way as

of Paul's talents; Josephine, to whom Paul told everything: how could he

withhold from her August Scheffer's curious secret?

That afternoon, when he went home, Paul found her in the porch. She had

a book; of course, it was one of Cromwell's. Paul discovered that when

he had settled himself near her, with a book in his own hand. He had

come to her so conscious of his late bargain, and the immediate benefit

he had derived therefrom, that he expected an instant leaning toward

discovery on her part. But Josephine was absorbed in her occupation, and

though she looked up and smiled when she saw Paul coming, she looked

down again and sighed the next instant, and continued reading with a

gravity that soon attracted his notice. Her looks troubled him. Of late,

a shadow seemed to have fallen darkly over her; she was, though Paul

understood it not, in the struggle of youth with life. Do you know what

that struggle is? Not all who pass through it go on their way rejoicing,

over the everlasting blessedness won from the 'good and great angel.'

For then this earth more manifestly were the world of the redeemed ones.

Not long before, Paul had heard Josephine say that she would not live on

in this idle way. She must find some work to do. Perhaps, he thought,

the sense of a necessity her mother instantly and constantly denied when

Josephine spoke of it, is now again oppressing her. However occasioned,

Paul's face saddened when he looked at her. The maddening impatience he

had felt many times--impatience for the strength and efficiency of

manhood--once more tormented him; it grew an intolerable thought to him

that so many years must pass before he should be prepared to do a man's

work, earn a man's wages--do as August Scheffer was doing.

Such sombre reflections as these absorbed him, when he became suddenly

conscious of the eyes of Josephine. She sat looking upon him; disturbed

anew, it seemed, by the show of his disturbance. His eyes met hers, and

she said:

'What is it, Paul? What has gone wrong with you?'

'Nothing. But it is enough to give one the horrors to see _you_ looking

so like destruction. Something has happened, Josephine; what is it?'

'What fine shoes you have on, Paul!' she said, quickly, pretending to be

absorbed in the discovery she had only that instant made.

Paul laughed, and blushed.

'I earned them,' said he.

'Earned them!' Josephine's beautiful eyes were full of surprise, of

admiration even, as she now fixed them on her brother. 'I wish I could

earn anything--a row of pins, or a loaf of bread.'

'If you did, you wouldn't eat all the loaf yourself. But I spent all my

wage on myself, you see! But I did earn them--at least, I'm going to,

before I get through.'

'How in the world did you do it, Paul?'

'I am a tutor, Josephine,' said he, with mock gravity. She answered,

earnestly:

'You're a good fellow, any way, tutor or not. It's a secret, then, this

business?'

'Yes, the deadest kind of a dead secret. But I shall tell you. I made a

mental reservation of you. August Scheffer----'

Josephine started, trembled, looked away from Paul, recovered herself in

an instant; then looked back again, and straight into his eyes. Paul saw

nothing strange in this; he went on quietly:

'Scheffer is getting ambitious! If I had a shop and such a business as

his, catch me bothering about books!'

'He was always fond of reading,' answered Josephine. 'You know what a

reader his mother was? No, you don't know. You were too young. Well, he

wants you to help him, and you are to be shod.'

'Yes, that's the whole of it. Why don't you laugh, or be surprised. I

shall do my best with him.'

'I should hope you would do better than your best. Be punctual and

steady in this business; for, really, you owe August Scheffer more than

a shop full of shoes is worth. You will get as much good as you can

possibly give. I wish I had your chance!'

'To teach him, Josephine?'

'To be a helpful man, dear Paul.'

'As far as I can see, everybody in these days is wishing that he was

somebody else. That's what's the matter with Scheffer.'

'No,' said Josephine, quietly; 'it isn't. Not that. He wouldn't take any

man's place that lives. Ask him.'

'Of course he would say 'No.' He is proud as Lucifer.'

'I like his spirit.'

'Yes, and you like Cromwell's spirit, too. What in the world do you

suppose _he_ is going to do?'

'What?' asked Josephine, as if she did not know.

Paul surveyed her for a moment. _Did_ she not know? He could not decide.

He could look through most people, simple, earnest, penetrating fellow

that he was; but not through Josephine.

'Cromwell is going abroad,' he said, finally. 'He's been talking with a

sea captain for a month back. It's all out now. He's going to quit his

class, and take deck passage for Havre; going to the school of mines in

Paris, and, when through with that, on a mineral hunt from Africa to

Siberia. And he hasn't a cent of money! Perhaps that's the spirit you

like. Perhaps you won't object to my going with him.'

Josephine looked at Paul; she was not in the least alarmed. 'I like the

spirit well enough,' she said, 'but it isn't your kind; it would be

misery to do a thing in that way, for you. He has another 'fervor.''

'Yes, he has,' said Paul, with a deeper meaning than his sister guessed.

'You say I like a queer kind of spirit,' said she. 'I like independence.

But there's some great lack in me, there must be. I'm what you call too

prudent, I suppose. I seem unable to put out of sight the chances of

failure; and it can't be that people who venture a great deal think much

of them. I wish, as you do, that Harry had a little money--ever so

little--to fall back on. He never seems to think of accidents, or

sickness; but he is going to a strange country, and, to be sure, if he

is able to do exactly what he expects, he will succeed; and in the _end_

he will, I know, whatever happens. But it would be dreadful for him to

meet with misfortunes, though he laughs at my croaking. Everything is to

turn out just as he wants! But do things often, I wonder?'

'Yes, with August Scheffer--the only one I know of.'

'But you never _can_ know the struggle he passed through; it was

terrible. You call him a philosopher; he is so, because he found out

early how to fight the good fight. Nothing will ever look so alluring to

him as the career he might have had by choosing the thing he did not

choose.' Ceasing to speak aloud and to Paul, Josephine added, in a voice

no one could hear: 'I was in the midst of that struggle; I understand

him as no one else does. And--he knows it.'

'Tell me about it,' said Paul. 'You don't know how much I admire

Scheffer.'

'Well you may,' she answered; 'but there is nothing to tell. He had the

opportunity to keep at school, or to go into his uncle's shop--and he

chose the shop on his mother's account.'

'And I chose a profession on _my_ mother's account,' said Paul bitterly.

Josephine laid her hand on his; it was a gentle touch, but it recalled

him.

'The best choice in both cases,' said she. 'Any one can see you are not

expert enough to make a successful trader. Ask August if a man must not

have a talent for trade, just as an artist must have a genius for

painting.'

'Then you think August a born trader?'

'I know he can do more than one thing well,' she answered.

'If you think so well of August,' said he, 'I don't see how you _can_

think better of another fellow. The town couldn't contain him if he

heard what you said just now.'

Josephine turned a page of her book.

'He knows perfectly well what I think of him, Paul.'

The very frankness of her words and manner misled the boy. The curious

suspicion that for a moment had beset him fled fast before his laughter.

She went on reading--seemed to do so. But an image for which the writer

of that book was not responsible stood, all the while, clear and

immovable in her memory. Before her, in a rude shed, were a boy and a

girl. The girl had a basket in her hand, filled with chips, which she

had raked from the sawdust; the boy was offering her assistance; but he

knew well enough there was no wood to be sawn or split. It was growing

dark and cold within the house, and still more dismal without it. The

hearts of these two are warmer than their hands.

'I've done it,' said the boy. 'I brought my books home last night,

Josey, and I'm going to my uncle in the morning.'

'What did he say?'

'He wouldn't say a word. It was my choice, and I must stand by it,' he

answered. 'It's for my mother! If I had only you, and was working for

you, I would take the other track. But, you see, it is for her; and I'm

her only son.'

'You will be August Scheffer, whatever you may do,' she said, in a soft,

sweet voice.

--And did August Scheffer ever stand for less among powers and places,

than when, in the darkening wood shed, he spoke these words:

'But, Josey, will things always be the same with us?'

--Things had changed, indeed. The whole world had changed since then.

Had the changing world rolled in between them? Since then the widow

Mitchell had worked her way out of the worst of her distresses.

Josephine had become a beautiful woman. Paul was striding on toward a

profession. The family had removed to one of those box-like dwellings

opposite the college grounds, and the fair face of Mrs. Mitchell's

daughter was the theme of many a student's dreaming--of Harry

Cromwell's, most conspicuous among students--of his dreaming, day and

night. It was his book she held.

III.

It happened, of course, that Paul dropped into Scheffer's shop the next

day. August was on the lookout, and conducted him forthwith into a quiet

corner. The books were there delivered, but the package remained

unopened. Scheffer had his reasons. He wanted leisure to examine

them--above all, privacy. He also saw, or thought he saw, that Paul was

in haste to be gone; and there was something on his mind of which he

desired to be free.

Paul was only disturbed about a proposal he wished to make to Scheffer.

He was electrified when Scheffer himself broached the subject, and

transacted it half, at a stroke, though all unconsciously, by asking:

'What has become of Hal Cromwell? He took so many prizes last year.'

Paul's eyes brightened strangely, his whole countenance became luminous.

Scheffer surveyed the change as if it were not half agreeable to him.

'Harry is here yet, but he won't be long. That's a secret, though. He's

going to France. Guess how.'

'In a balloon, I suppose. He hasn't any money.'

'No,' said Paul, half offended at the tone in which this was spoken.

'He's going to work his passage. He's one of the fellows who can do

without money.'

'Indeed!' said Scheffer.

Paul went on: 'He hasn't more than twenty dollars. He sold all his

prizes long ago.'

'Is he going to travel?' asked Scheffer, quietly.

'Travel! no. Not yet awhile, I mean. He's mad, just now, on minerals and

geology. He's going to school in Paris, where he can learn all about

such things. Then he's going to hunt up specimens for cabinets; then

he'll be sending curiosities over here by the ship load. If any one

wanted to speculate, he'd pay an enormous interest on the money lent

him. But catch him asking the loan of a threepenny bit of any man! You

know him.'

'Yes,' he said; 'we've had many a rough day together. About the time his

father got into trouble, my father did more than one good turn for him.

But that's neither here nor there.'

'Yes, it is,' said Paul, quickly; 'if your father helped his father,

it's a token that you will help him.'

Scheffer was not so clear on that point: his reply might have chilled

Paul's enthusiasm, could anything have done that.

'I can tell you what, Mitchell,' he said, 'I don't wonder at Cromwell,

and I don't blame him. I believe it's better to go hungry on your own

earnings than full fed at another man's expense. One can starve at home

with a better grace than he can among strangers. That's my mind. It

mayn't be his.'

'It's mine, though,' said Paul. 'If I had the money--if I had a hundred

dollars, I should insist on his taking them. I wish my mother had put me

to a trade: it's all nonsense, this slaving for the sake of

position--what you call it.'

'Don't talk so,' said Scheffer. 'If Harry Cromwell wants anything of me,

I should be ashamed of him if he wouldn't ask it. As to wishing that you

had a trade, if there's a mechanical turn in you, you'll twist into it

yet. But I don't believe there is. Go on as you have begun. It will all

come out right.'

Paul scanned the fine face of the speaker in a spirit of inquiry

unguessed of August. He was thinking of Josephine, and of her words.

Then he said, 'So you always say. But I can't see it. If I could, then

I'd be a philosopher like you. Do you mean I should speak to Harry?'

Scheffer hesitated.

'I see him every day,' said he. 'Sometimes he comes in here. Don't you

think he would be better pleased if it should happen of itself, you

know--not as if we had talked over his affairs. He is such a proud

fellow.'

Paul readily acceded to this plan. He told Josephine what he had done,

and she worked on with a lighter heart. She was thinking of Scheffer.

How slowly he had grown up into her sight again! Man and woman, if they

looked at each other now, must it be across a great gulf? What had

education done for her! Could she thank the teaching that had brought

her to see in her womanhood something beyond the reach of a man like

Scheffer? Could she thank the culture that gave her a position for which

nature and habits like his were all unfit? This maturity seemed

unnatural to the heart of that remembered childhood, which, in its

brave, loving generosity, could trust a boy to any work or station,

feeling that in the workman would be securely lodged himself.

Even more than she suspected, Josephine had been moved by the secret

Paul had confided to her--of Scheffer's new ambition. No new ambition

was it, she could testify. In the fulness of time the bud had come to

flower, and on the same stem fair fruits were ripening.

And now, it was he who would relieve her of the anxiety she felt on

Cromwell's behalf. She kept these things in her heart.

IV.

Cromwell strolled into Scheffer's shop within the week. When Scheffer

saw him coming, he satisfied himself at a glance that the visit was an

unsuggested one.

There was only one other person in the world whose appearance within his

doors could so much disturb the master of the place as Harry Cromwell's.

That one was Josephine. Let _her_ but come, and it was a day indeed.

But the disturbance created by her presence was very different from that

excited by the entrance of this student. He, inadvertently, or

otherwise, and it mattered not which, set Scheffer's heart into such a

fume of jealousy, as perhaps the heart of philosopher never knew before.

For, it was generally supposed among those who were interested in the

affairs transacted on the point of space occupied by these people, that

Cromwell's ambition was less undefined than that of young men generally.

In short, that he was already, though alone in the world, burdened in

mind with family cares--looking upon himself, even then, as the oldest

son of the widow Mitchell.

He had said frankly, that he could not afford to give so much of his

life to preparatory study as would be required if he chose any one of

the professions open to him. He must go to work in some direction where

the rewards of labor were sooner obtained.

When Cromwell came into the shop, August advanced to wait upon him.

Cromwell was in a cheerful mood. He stretched his hand across the

counter, and shook hands with his old acquaintance, as if he were

thinking of days when the little white house of Daniel Scheffer stood

between two cottages, occupied respectively by families of equal poverty

and condition--the Cromwells and the Mitchells.

It wasn't often that they met in these days, he said; and he looked

about him with a sort of surprise not disagreeable to Scheffer, for

there was nothing offensive in it. Scheffer was always ready to make

allowance for the little vanities and weaknesses of others. He was not

surprised that Cromwell, handsome as he was, and brilliant

intellectually, as he was proving himself to be, should overlook old

times and old friends. Present times, and cares, and neighbors, would,

of course, engage him to the neglect of what was past and gone.

'Prospering as usual!' said Harry, 'How do you manage it, August? for I

am going to launch out into the world, and I can't expect to succeed

more suddenly than you have.'

August answered, taking the praise as if it were well meant, and he knew

it was well earned:

'By sticking to a thing, when I have made up my mind it is best. It's

the only way I know of, Harry. I thought, from all I had heard, that you

had found that out.'

'Don't trust report. I've done little yet to satisfy a man; got a few

prizes; what do you suppose I care for them?'

'You care for what they mean to other folks,' said Scheffer.

'Not much, I assure you. A little praise, like music, is pleasant. But a

man can't live on sound. Show me your seven-league boots, Scheffer; I'm

going to take a stroll around the world.'

'What do you mean?' asked Scheffer, without moving.

'I'm going over the ocean.'

'India rubber soles?' asked Scheffer, again speaking in his quietest

manner, but really feeling great excitement.

Cromwell laughed. 'I suppose they have iron-bound boots, even in Paris;

but I thought I'd like to take something out of your shop with me;

something of your own make, if possible. Do you know, Scheffer, you've

had more to do with me, a vast deal, than you ever supposed? I've had

the feeling that you were watching me as often as ever I got into lazy

ways, just as if you stood by that window and searched me out across the

grounds, no matter where I was lurking. I shall take my time when I am

well rid of you. But I'll have the boots for a token; and when I am

tired and sick of my work, as I shall be a hundred times, I'll pretend

that you put some magic into the soles. Give them to me with a strong

squeak.'

Cromwell laughed, but he was at least two thirds in earnest.

Still August did not stir. 'Are you really going away?' he asked.

'If I'm a live man, next week.'

'Going to France?'

'To France. To Paris for one year. In five years I shall be home again,

and I mean to bring with me two or three cabinets of minerals, worth

thousands of dollars apiece.'

Cromwell's eyes flashed; they fell on Scheffer, who stood silent,

motionless, a cold shiver running over him from his head to his feet.

'What, then, brave fellow?' asked August. It was well to know the worst,

and Harry seemed to be in a communicative mood.

'Why, what are _you_ working for?'

'Because I've nothing else to do,' said Scheffer, with a shrug. 'I hate

to be idle.'

'No; you are making your fortune; you'll have a house and a family some

day. It's written, a hundred girls would think the chance beyond their

desert; or they _might_ think so.'

'Yes; well--I don't want a hundred girls.'

'Nor one, I suppose.'

Behind this idle talk the gravest and sharpest scrutiny was bestowed by

each man on his fellow. Both were thinking of Josephine, but neither

would name her.

'You're a philosopher, Paul says,' continued Cromwell. 'Paul is always

talking about you. I don't like to leave that boy; but knowing that you

are his friend should make me comfortable. Beside, I couldn't do

anything for the lad, if he stood in need of a ten-penny bit.'

Cromwell laughed, but not in recklessness--in pride.

'How can you afford to travel, then?' asked Scheffer.

'Oh, I shall go as some other good fellows have gone--on foot; for I

shall work my passage, and get somehow from Havre to Paris.'

'What next?'

'Hard work, you know.'

'Yes; I know what hard work means. But do you? Such hard work as this

will be?'

'Do you take me for a dunce? Of course I know; and I shall tell you how

I did it, five years from now.'

Then Scheffer said, not hesitating--for anything like a doubtfulness of

manner on his part would have defeated his design:

'I want to invest some money, Harry. Take a couple of hundred for me,

and buy some of the specimens; or find them, if you like that better.

You shall sell them, when you get back, and pay me a percentage,

whatever you can afford.'

There was no delay in the answer. It had all the readiness, and the

sound, of sincerity.

'Sooner from you, August, than from any other man; but not from any man.

I should feel that I was mortgaged. I must begin my own master, as I

told Josephine Mitchell. What I bring to her shall be fruit from the

tree of my own planting.'

August, for a moment, was like a man struck dumb; but when he spoke, he

was the philosopher again.

'That's all foolishness,' he said, in a gentle voice; but there was no

tenderness in it: it was but the firmness of self-control that made the

voice so mild, and the expostulation, so deliberate. 'It's like using an

old tool, when you have a new invention that would save half the labor.

You'd laugh at a man for that.'

'Laugh away! But I must go out my own man, Scheffer. You'd do the same

thing. Don't talk about it. Have you any of those boots I asked for?'

Scheffer found a pair. He named the price. Cromwell paid for them, and

shook his hand when they separated; for, in the press of business, he

said, it might be he should not find time to call on his old friend

again.

The young men did not meet again. But a fortnight after Cromwell sailed,

Scheffer was called upon to pay a note at the bank; a note that bore his

own signature, and stated that, for 'value received, I promise to pay to

the order of Henry Cromwell, four hundred dollars.'

The demand was made in such a manner, and at such a time, as to vex

Scheffer to the utmost.

Cromwell, it seemed, could not consent to accept a favor at his hands;

yet he could condescend to make that manner of use of him! He paid the

sum due on the note, but at the same time was beset by a sore

temptation.

This was the temptation, and this his resistance: If Harry had gone,

leaving anywhere, in any woman's heart, a hope in him, should he not

dispel it? Should he not convince her that it rested on a foundation

looser than the sand? He did not do so! When Paul spoke now and then of

Cromwell, and prophesied proudly of him, August took the words as an

echo of Josephine's thought, and said to himself:

'Oh! well; it makes no difference.'

But, for all that, he kept on with his studies, and sometimes on Sunday

would walk past the college grounds on Monumental square; for that was

also walking past the cottage occupied by Josephine.

V.

The college, in those days, could have produced no student more

industrious than August.

He advanced with rapid strides through the elementary books, for he

chose to begin at the beginning, and he was proud of his progress. But

he kept his studies secret. He would risk nothing by reporting his own

progress. No man should honor his future to the prejudice of his past.

The story of Minerva, born to the prerogatives of wisdom, was more

attractive to him than that life which '_grew_ in grace, and in favor

with God and man.'

He had no plans in reference to future studies. His tutor was fairly

puzzled; for he was not long in discovering that it was not the delight

of knowledge, but the ends which knowledge may serve, that prompted to

such industry.

One evening Paul threw himself on one of the red-plush sofas Scheffer

had transferred to his private apartment. He was in one of those serious

moods that had become frequent since Cromwell went away; or, rather,

since he had come into this near relation with a working and prosperous

man.

'It's easy enough to be poor for one's self,' said the anxious

youngster; 'but whether one _ought_ to be poor, when money is to be

honestly made, and at only a trifling risk, though by desperate hard

work--that's the question.'

'H'm!' said Scheffer.

'Well,' said Paul, irritated by his seeming indifference, 'a fellow is

in a deuced bad plight, if he has to plead poverty, when he ought to be

able to help one or two beside himself! I envy you, Scheffer. I envy you

every time I come here. You can do so much! You could leap all the

college gates in no time, if you were fool enough to try.'

'I'm not,' said Scheffer. 'I know I can't work with many irons in the

fire--never could. And I've nothing to complain of. I'm prospering, as

you say. That's the chief thing, I suppose. Folks seem to think so. I'm

one of the million; I must do as the rest--build a house, and marry a

wife some day. But not till I can support her like a lady, I tell you,

Paul.'

There was the difference of many years between the man and the boy, but

to no other person was Scheffer in the habit of saying such things.

'I'd like to see Madam Scheffer,' said Paul, with a quiet laugh.

Scheffer was indulgent toward that mirth; he smiled as he said:

'Be patient, as I am, and you shall see her. There was a Mrs. Scheffer

once--my mother that was; if there's another like her--I believe there

is!'

'Can't you draw me her portrait?'

'Perhaps I could, if I cared.'

'But you don't care. Well, I can get it out of Josephine; she remembers

your mother.'

Paul looked so much like his sister when he named the name of Josephine

and of his mother in one breath, that Scheffer could not refuse him.

'Medium size,' he said, 'and built to last. Graceful, as any mother

would have been--if--as she was, in spite of hard work--it was her

nature, and her nature was a strong one. She has light hair, that curls

as if it liked to, and her eyes are blue. It is a fair face, Paul, and

she has a kind smile.'

'But tell me her name; for you need not say it's a fancy sketch.'

'May be not; but that, you see, is my secret.'

There was no such thing, in reality, as intruding further on this

ground. Still, half embarrassed, Mitchell persisted:

'Where is she, though?'

'Where? I can't tell that.'

'With Cromwell?'

'It may be.'

'Would you trust her with him?'

'Is he not to be trusted?' asked August, so quickly as to startle Paul.

If Paul was to be startled--but he was not. The teller in the bank had

told him--(Paul was one of those persons with whom acquaintances of

every quality lodge their secrets)--of the note Scheffer had taken up

with so little fuss and so much amazement. He saw that August for a

moment suspected that he knew the facts, but he was not yet prepared to

confess such knowledge; for he knew as well as Scheffer what Harry

Cromwell was to Josephine. So he answered:

'I should say so, August--if any man on earth could be.'

'So I supposed,' said Scheffer, quietly; and Paul hurried back to the

old queer topic, and said, half in jest: 'You mean to keep house,

Scheffer, I'll be bound.'

Scheffer's dark face brightened; he would share with Paul his pleasant

dream--the pleasant dream he cherished, though his sober sense denied

its possibility, and his consistent realism charged upon him the special

folly of fools.

'Aye,' said he; 'there'll be a library in it--but more select than that

of the Atheneum you were wishing for! You shall have the freedom of my

house, lad--I'll not forget how kind you've been to me. I shall have a

flower garden, and a yard deep enough for shade trees like those--but

you don't remember the place.'

Scheffer got up and walked away to the window.

'I've not the slightest doubt that you'll do everything you say! I vow I

wouldn't like to be the man to stand in your way to anything.'

Scheffer came back, and sat on the sofa beside Paul. His voice had an

almost fatherly tenderness in it when he began to speak, and it took no

colder tone.

'You were saying something about an improvement you could suggest in

some of the tools we use. Here they are. What did you mean?' He pulled

out a box from underneath the sofa.

Paul took the box, and looked over its contents; but it was easy to see

that he was in search of nothing. He was soon through his investigation,

and restored the box to its place. Then he looked at Scheffer, and

laughed.

But Scheffer answered the look by one that seemed to say that he

expected an explanation; whereupon Paul, now grave enough, stirred by a

sudden confidence, pulled from his pocket a box much smaller than that

which held August's tools, and passed it into his friend's hands.

Scheffer took it, but he did not attempt to loosen the cord that secured

the cover. Then Paul said:

'You do not really suppose that I am the only idle person in the world.

I have been at work longer than Josephine, though you might not believe

it; but what I have done, no one has yet seen. If I had the money,

Scheffer! I'd--well--look at the thing! I want you should study it, of

course.'

August, however, was in no haste. He was more desirous to learn the

meaning of what Paul had said about Josephine. But that could not be

asked by him; and so he unfastened the cord, opened the box, and beheld

within a miniature machine, whose meaning no one in the world, Paul

Mitchell excepted, could explain. That was Paul's thought of pride.

'That's _my_ secret,' said he. 'That's my beauty! and I'd build a house

for it, if I had the money, to be sure, as you are going to do for

yours. How do you like it?'

'Explain; then I can tell you.' It was still the father-voice that

spoke; but the tone was that of a man whose son has forestalled hope,

and justified the most vague of ambitious wishes.

'That, Scheffer, is a contrivance for printing. Will you please to

examine it? It's to be used henceforth, for all time, understand! by

bankers in their banks, and by all men of great business. See--'

He arose, and brought near to the sofa a small table, on which he placed

the machine. Then he set it in motion. 'For numbering notes, and so on.

Does it work, August?'

Scheffer, though admiring and amazed, said not a word, but sat down

before the machine, and studied it in every part.

His judgment was satisfied when at last he gave it.

'It's worth money to you, Mitchell.'

'Do you believe it, Scheffer? Worth money. Oh, my goodness!'

'Paul, you expected that.'

'I knew it; but to hear you say so, makes me feel like a man. Then I

shall do for my mother what you did for yours, and get Josephine out of

that school-teaching freak of hers. She has actually gone and done it,

Scheffer.... Worth money, eh? Then I shall do some things as well as

others, Mr. Scheffer.'

Scheffer smiled. He understood this exultation too well not to share it

and to be deeply moved by it.

'I suppose so,' said he. 'I always believed in you.'

'Well, then, look here.'

Paul's voice broke; he looked on the floor, and was a long time in

producing the second box. When he had fairly drawn it forth, he gave a

sudden and wonderful look at Scheffer, that penetrated like fire to the

heart of the man.

'There,' said he, 'that's my pet. That's the Rachel of this Jacob. Look

close, and see what you'll do with it, supposing you turn lockpick some

day.'

It was a veritable lock. He drew out a chain of keys, a hundred of

them.

'Now,' said he, in a low voice, 'you may ransack the town, as I've done,

and get all your keys together. I want to see if you can find one, or

contrive one with any locksmith's help, that will fit into that lock.

I'll give you a month to try it. I'd give another man six. But you'll do

the work of six in a sixth of the time. It's a lock on a new principle,

and the principle is mine, because I applied it first. Eh? Hang it! If I

had the money I wouldn't be so beggarly poor as I am. But I've had to

beg and borrow, and almost steal, to get these things, that were in my

brain, into a decent shape, as you see them. When I get started,

Scheffer, you shall inspect all my inventions.'

'Then you are started,' said August. 'Don't say that again, I'd mortgage

my stock but you should have what you need to help you. Have you any

tools to work with, my son?'

'Oh, yes; that is, my neighbor has. He keeps a carpenter's shop, you

know. I'm a capital hand at borrowing.'

'Have you got a room at home where you can work?'

'Acres of room! You've seen the house.'

'I've walked past it sometimes,' answered Scheffer, with a smile.

'Well, it isn't such a mite of a place as you'd think. There's room

enough.'

'It looks pretty and snug. I have often admired those flower beds; the

place don't look much like others in the same row: one might know that.

Paul, I've seen the time when I'd thought the man who offered me help

was an angel. I'm older than you are. Of course you must experiment, and

where's the merit of carrying plans about in your head a dozen years,

waiting a chance to prove whether they're worth anything or not? Tell me

now, do you want any money?'

'No,' Paul answered quickly, yet with inward hesitation. 'I'll come to

you, though,' he added, 'when I do. I'll let you know the very day. But

I I have something to study out yet. I'm going to get patents, you

know.'

VI.

Paul returned home, and in a musing mood seated himself under the

grapevine that grew on the brick wall in the rear of the cottage, the

sole ornament and pride of the narrow yard. He may have been here an

hour, when he heard strange noises in the house, then a heavy closing of

the street door, and the voice of Josephine calling him. In the lobby

stood an open iron-bound chest. A glance at the box explained it to

Paul; but he said nothing--not a word--in explanation to Josephine or

his mother, who stood expressing surprise and wonder, while he found the

key and opened the heavy lid. They saw it was a tool chest.

Paul was the first to speak; for when he exhibited the contents, a

deeper silence seemed to fall upon the women.

'It's no mistake,' he said to his mother. 'This belongs to August

Scheffer. He has lent it to me. Isn't it kind of him? For I told him I

had to borrow when I worked.'

'No,' said Paul's mother. 'It's anything but kind. You could waste time

enough in such doings, Paul, without getting a tempter into the house.

What do you want of tools? Do you get along with your books so fast you

don't know what to do with your time? August Scheffer is just like his

father, he never, as long as he lived, found out the use of money; if he

had, his wife wouldn't have been left a beggar.'

'And August would never have been himself,' said Paul. 'That would have

been a pity.'

'No,' said Josephine; 'he would always have been himself.'

'Don't talk like a simpleton, child. You are old enough to see that

August might have been a very different man from what he is, if his

father before him hadn't always this same ridiculous way of throwing the

money he earned about like dust.'

'Well, mother--' began Paul: he hesitated, but a glance at Josephine

decided him. 'I can tell you that if Harry Cromwell comes to any good,

you and every one else will have to thank Scheffer for it.'

Josephine looked at Paul with serious, curious interest; but he saw that

she was not greatly excited by what he had said. He looked at his

mother, and resolved to say no more. And by that resolution he would

have held, but for his mother's words.

'We shall never hear the end of that,' said she. 'Scheffer's father

signed for Oliver Cromwell; but what of that? he lost his money. Better

men have done as much for worse; but I don't know that it deserved to be

talked of to all generations.'

'It was a generous act,' said Paul. 'But August has beat his father at

that, I can tell you, if you want to hear.'

'Some slander, I suppose,' said the mother. 'I suppose every young man

within fifty miles is jealous of Harry; it's well he has gone far enough

to get rid of it all.'

'Well, mother, keep your good opinion of him. It isn't from Scheffer I

heard it. You don't want to know what a noble fellow he is;' and he

wound up with August's frequent saying, 'it makes no difference.'

'I want to hear what you are going to do with this box, though,' said

Mrs. Mitchell. 'There's not a room in the house big enough to hold it.'

Paul plead for a corner of his own room; a startling proposal, indeed,

for those who heard it, the 'room' being hardly an apology for a closet.

He pleads well, however, for he carried the point, and space was in some

way provided; and Mrs. Mitchell, who had hopes of a future for her

children that should throw a glory round their unfolding and her closing

years, heard the boy say, with, some sort of faith: 'Oh, mother, you

don't know yet what a genius you've got in your boy;' and when she left

him he was still laughing over the boast. But Josephine saw that as he

stooped over the chest there were tears in his eyes.

For that reason she did not leave him to rejoice alone over his

treasure. And for the reason that she did not leave him, he said to her,

observing with what interest she took up one bright tool after another

from its place:

'Scheffer has bought this box for me. You see, don't you, the tools were

never used before? Not one of them.'

'Yes,' said Josephine, 'that's easy to be seen.'

'I must keep them and use them, I suppose!'

'You intend to do it, Paul. Are you trying to deceive me? Do you suppose

I don't know that of course he had a reason for sending them to you!

People are not in the habit of sending such things to boys who don't

know how to use them.'

'But, Josephine, I shall pay him for them.'

'Yes, or else I shall, Paul. But let him enjoy the gift; for I know how

it pleased him to send it.'

'And I won't serve him as another fellow did, too proud to accept a

favor of him till he should get beyond sight and sound, so stingy of his

thanks. That's what your Cromwell did! I hate the hateful fellow.'

'My Cromwell? Did he that?' But Josephine neither swooned, nor cried,

nor blushed; was not overwhelmed with shame, nor indignation, nor

distress. Some such exhibition, that should be as a confession, Paul had

looked for, trembling, when the daring deed was done, of exposing a

lover's baseness to the woman he loved.

'Yes,' said Paul, cooled somewhat by his sister's calmness. 'I knew I

ought to let you know. But I thought I never could. He wouldn't take the

money August offered him, but he got it from the bank, on a forged

note.'

'Paul!' exclaimed Josephine. The lad looked again at his sister; but he

now saw through her horrified surprise; there was really no danger in

continuing this revelation; elated, he went on:

'Forged and paid! so the young fellow told me. That's not Scheffer,

understand. _He_ don't know that I have got wind of it; he thinks it is

safe with him; and you never would have known anything but for me!

August thinks too much of you, I've found that out, to tell you, or me

either, that Cromwell is a scamp.'

'What have I to do with all this, Paul?' asked his sister, with a

well-assumed indifference. She had time now to consider whether she had

not betrayed too much interest in the affairs of these young men, the

scientific forger and the man of trade.

'Why,' answered Paul, with no less composure, inwardly rejoicing in what

he considered his triumph, 'you have to make the best of it, I

suppose--satisfy mother--marry Cromwell when he comes back, rich as

Croesus, with ship-loads of treasure. That's what the handsome girls are

for, to marry off to rich men, isn't it?'

Paul had had his say, but that was his only consolation. Whatever answer

Josephine might have made was prevented by the voice of her mother

calling from the foot of the stairs. Yet he chose to consider that

sufficient confession, in regard to some of his suspicions, was given in

her words as she went down; though what she said was merely,

'Paul, if you don't join the detectives, you'll fail of your mission.'

VII.

Scheffer's uniform good luck took a sudden turn one day. The fine row of

buildings that faced the college grounds took fire one morning, and his

shop was burned with the rest. He saved but little of his stock, and it

was but recently that he had greatly added to it. His loss was a severe

one.

Toward nightfall of that day, Paul looked for Scheffer, and found him in

a room to which he had removed the remnants of his goods. He was alone

there, and trying to come to an understanding with himself, singing

meanwhile, but, it must be said, in not the most straightforward and

perfectly musical manner.

Paul came expressly deputed by his mother to bring Scheffer home to tea

with him. The news of his disaster had set August before her in a

different light from that in which he had stood in the days of his

vulgar prosperity. Calamity restored him to his place again--the son of

an old neighbor, the son of a good woman--one of the heirs of

misfortune: and who might not have expected this event, that knew in

August's veins the Scheffer blood was flowing? Yes; the mother of

Josephine was this day disposed to compassion, helped, may be, to that

gentleness by the letter she had recently received from Cromwell, in

which he detailed his successes in a manner that made the heart of the

prophetess to rejoice.

Scheffer hesitated for a moment, only one, over that invitation. But he

did hesitate. And Paul, the lynx-eyed, saw it. Scheffer might invent

whatever excuse seemed best to his own kindliness of heart: Paul was

convinced that his friend felt no confidence in the impulse that had

obtained for him an open door in the house that he had seen, in spite of

Josephine's friendliness, was closed on him all these years.

Paul did not urge the invitation. Instead, he produced a purse--sole

purse of the house of Mitchell, that had not, in a generation, held as

many bank notes as this now contained. He put this purse into Scheffer's

hands, and said, moving back from him a pace:

'That is yours. I knew you fibbed about the tool chest. You had no use

for it. So we have bought it. Look if I have counted the money right. I

knew you would never tell me the truth about the cost, so I've been to

the maker, and asked him a civil question. No dodging, Mr. Scheffer.'

Mr. Scheffer did not 'dodge.' He emptied the purse, counted the bills,

put them into his own leather pocket-book; then he handed the purse to

Paul.

Paul did not expect this. It was plain that he did not. He thought that

Scheffer would have 'stood' against receiving the payment for his gift.

He had said so to Josephine; but Josephine had replied, 'You are

mistaken, Paul. You don't know him, after all. But, if you _are_ right,

insist on his taking the money. Do not go too far, however. If he should

seem to be offended, bring it back to me, and I will attend to it.'

_Was_ he offended? Paul was in doubt. The doubt made him desperate, and

he exclaimed:

'I meant that for a present. Josephine worked it.'

Scheffer's eye fell on the light and pretty trifle; a change came over

him. He would have struggled hard and long before he would have

surrendered that little tissue of floss, but now less than vanity to

him. 'Josephine worked it.' What are words?

'I suppose,' he began; but he did not conclude what he had on his

tongue; he did _not_ say to Paul that he supposed it was Josephine's

money too--her earnings--that paid for the chest.

There came an awkward silence into the confused and dismal room.

Scheffer stood among his ruins, not like a ruined man: he could not

talk, however. He could say nothing whatever in continuance, about the

fire. It was never his habit to boast; as little his practice to lament.

'Paul,' he said at last, resuming his dismal endeavor to arrange and

assort the chaotic remnant of his goods, 'I got your box under weigh

last night. There's a friend of mine going to see it; and you needn't be

worrying on account of this--this fire; for I shall have money enough to

push your business pretty soon; and there are two good fellows standing

ready to buy your rights to the patent in this State, on your own terms,

I guess, if you are tolerably reasonable. You can have five thousand

dollars, if you will be easy with them about the payments. They are as

safe as the best in town. I settled all that last night. All you have to

do is to come to an agreement.'

Paul's heart beat as fast as any young man's heart beats when the result

of secret toil, of wakeful nights, and patient endurance of home

misconception, is before him in the form of honorable success. But

instead of thanks, these words escaped him in a tumult:

'Scheffer, have you heard the news from Cromwell?'

Scheffer considered ere he answered; he was puzzled, looking at Paul,

such a contradiction and confusion of signs he read in the lad's face.

'I heard that your family had great tidings from him,' he answered

finally.

'He is dead!'

'Poor Josephine!'

What was it that brought so low the head of the man who had stood all

day bravely erect, enduring the condolence of people, sustaining himself

in the shock of integrity? Scheffer sat down when he heard this news,

and wept.

And Paul wept with him. There, in that chamber of ruins, they deplored

the loss of the proud, ambitious, brilliant, and dishonest wordling, who

had long ago gone out of _their_ world with a lie on his soul.

Then Paul produced the foreign letter he had brought with him from the

mail, as he came in his search for Scheffer. The letter he read aloud.

It was written by one of Harry's fellow students, his companion in that

notable journey Cromwell made to the Ural, and the Zavods of Siberia. He

had returned to Paris, and thence had written of his various successes

to his friends: they knew it was his purpose to sail at once for

Alexandria. His preparations, wrote this correspondent, were complete;

but, on the day when the vessel sailed, he died--sickened and died in

one morning; his disease was of the heart.

'Poor Josephine!' groaned August again; this time his pity had comment.

'It's awful!' said Paul. 'Josephine cried when she heard of your

misfortune. She won't do more when she sees this letter.' Paul was

entirely reckless of consequences. He was determined Scheffer's fire

should serve a private purpose of illumination, 'It is so rare a thing,

her crying,' he continued, 'I should have thought the fire would have

been put out by it.'

Scheffer's tears ceased falling. But he spoke in a low voice, somewhat

broken, too:

'It's enough to wipe out _my_ regrets. If she cared that much, I don't

consider it a misfortune. Tell her so, Paul.'

'I will, after you have told her yourself, Scheffer,' said Paul. Then

casting all their fortunes on a word, speaking hurriedly, impetuously,

driven on by admiration and gratitude toward Scheffer, and a

determination to end all misunderstandings at once and forever, he

continued: 'I found it all out, myself, without prying. The young fellow

in the bank told me. I knew that you never would. It made me love you,

that did. I told Josephine, but not till I thought I might safely. He

didn't get that money from the bank till Josephine had told him she

could not promise herself to him before he went away. Poor fellow! It

made him mad, I think.'

'Paul,' said Scheffer, with reproof, and yet the mildest, in his voice,

'he is dead. That was an ugly twist, but it wasn't his nature to grow in

a crooked fashion. Harry will come out straight yet. He is in better

circumstances now than ever before. I could forgive a man for worse

things than he had the wit to do, if he loved Josephine.'

'There! I'm glad we are back on that ground! I hate mysteries,'

exclaimed Paul.

'Except in locks,' said Scheffer.

'Why _wouldn't_ she promise Harry? It is what mother expected. And I was

fool enough to wonder. You are wiser than we; so tell me, Scheffer, did

anything ever happen in old times that binds her yet? Do you suppose she

ever loved a lad when she was a child?'

'I know she did,' said Scheffer, looking not away from Paul, neither

busying himself any longer with the endeavor to bring order out of

chaos. 'I know she did.'

Then Paul laughed again, as he had not laughed in many a day; but it was

laughter that did not jar the silence of the room--such laughter as

formed a fit prelude for words like these:

'Find out if the lad is alive yet. There is a piece of business worthy

of Scheffer himself! I'm tired of hunting out secrets. Promise me,

August--promise before you leave this room--before you breathe again.'

Scheffer did.

Mrs. Mitchell waited tea that evening for at least an hour. Josephine

was sure that if August could be found, Paul would bring him home. At

last they came. Home at last! The darkness might besiege the house, it

could not enter the hearts there; rain might fall on Scheffer's ruins,

it could not prevent the rising of the Phoenix. Not recognized

altogether as the household's eldest son, he stood under the roof of the

little house on Cottage Row. But enough! he was satisfied: he saw two

women smiling on him--one from her heart. And from the circle that night

Paul, triumphant and joyful, excluded the vision of death.

LAS ORACIONES.

I moved among the moving multitude

In old Manila, when the afternoon

Releases labor, and the scorching skies

Are tempered with the coming on of night.

Above the 'ever loyal city,' rose

The surging sound of unloosed tongues and feet,

As the encompassed town and suburbs vast,

The boated river and the sentinelled bridge

Swarmed, parti-colored, with the populace.

The sovereign sun, that through the toilsome day

No eye had seen for brightness, now subdued,

Stepping, like Holy Pontiff, from his throne,

Neared to the people, and, with level rays,

As hands outstretching, benedictions shed.

Full the effulgence flashed upon the walls

Which girt the city with a strength renowned,

Rimming them with new glory: bright it gleamed

Upon the swarthy soldiery, as they filed

A dazzling phalanx through the gaping crowd

With martial intonation, and it played

Softly upon the evening-breathing throng

On the Calsada's broad and dashing drive,

On gay, armorial equipage, wherein

Dozed dowagers: on unbonneted dames

In open chariots, toying daintily

With dark hidalgos, as they sipped the scene

In languishing contentment, and between

Responsive glances, showing hidden fire,

With fluent breath of Spanish repartee.

There lounged senoras, fat officials' wives,

From their soft cushions casting cool disdain

On the mestiza, who, in hired hack,

Blooming in beauty of commingled blood,

And robed in slippery tissue, rainbow-bright,

Sat, in her sandal-footed grace, a queen

Among her fellows, they who yesterday

Whirled her lithe figure in the tireless dance,

And now, with airy compliment, kept bright

The flame she yet may quench in wedlock dull.

Thus rolled the wealthy in their liveried ease,

'Mid walking peasantry and pale Chinese,

And curious-shirted Creole; while, tight swathed

Up to their shrivelled features, mummy like,

The Indian women filled the motley scene.

Meanwhile, the sovereign sun had crowned the palms

Standing in stately clusters; and from thence

Scaled the high walls and climbed the citadel,

Pouring a parting radiance on the tower

Of San Sebastian: mounting to its goal,

It swept the public dial plate and lay,

E'en in the face of stern recording time

Smiling significance; thence slowly crept

Up to the turret, blazing, momently,

Thence reached the dizzy ball; and, last of all,

Kissed with its dying lips the sacred cross.

Then pealed the solemn vesper bell to prayer,

And suddenly--completely--with a hush,

As if a god-like voice had stricken it dead,

Stood still the city!

Motionless the life

That but an instant off stirred the warm air

With murmurs multifarious, and the waves

Of great humanity, sunk silenced there,

With stillness so supreme, that pulses beat

More quickly from the contrast, and the soul

Hearkened to listen, humbled and subdued

As when the Saviour uttered 'Peace, be still.'

The tardy laborer, walled within the town,

Brought the uplifted hammer noiseless down,

And stood in meek confession, tool in hand.

The mother hushed the baby lullaby,

And o'er her sleeping innocence exhaled

Voiceless thanksgiving. Children ceased to play,

Feeling an awe they comprehended not,

And stood, unconscious of their beauty's pose,

As those Murillo's pencil glorifies.

Upon the airy esplanade the steed

No longer pawed the air in wantonness,

But, like his compeer of the fabled song,

Stood statued with his rider, while below

The beggar ceased his cry importunate,

And to a Higher Almoner than man

Sent up a dumb appeal. In folly's court

The laugh was hushed, and the half-uttered jest

Fell witless into air, and burning thought

Cooled, as it flowed, unmoulded into speech.

As throbbed the distant bell with serious pause,--

Standing bareheaded in the dewless air,

Or prostrate in their penitence to earth,

Or bending with veiled lids,--the people prayed.

Then was that moment, in its muteness, worth

The laboring day that bore it, for all sense

Seemed filtered of its grossness; what was earth

Sunk settling with the dust to earth again,

As through the calm, pure atmosphere, arose

One mingling meditation unto Heaven.

Oh, beautiful is silence, when it falls

On housed assemblies bowed in voiceless prayer:

But when it lays its finger on the heart

Of a great city, stilling all the wheels

Of life's employment, that to Heaven may turn

Its many thousand reverend breathing souls

With gesture simultaneous; when proud man

Like multitudinous marble, moveless stands

With God communing, then does silence seem,

In its unworded eloquence, sublime.

Therein, doth Romish worship point rebuke

To him who doth ignore it, for therein

It rises to a majesty of praise

O'erspanning huge cathedrals, for it makes

The censer, candle, rosary, and book

But senseless mockeries.

So sunk the sun

Till on its amber throne, like drapery doffed,

Lay piled th' imperial purple. Then the stir

Of an awakened world swept through the crowd,

As forest leaves are wind-swept after lulls,

And, with the sense of a renewing joy,

The murmurous people turned them to their homes.

MANILA, 1856.

MY MARYLAND!

THE SEPTEMBER RAID.

They took thy boots, they took thy coats,

My Maryland!

And paid for them in 'Confed' notes,

My Maryland!

They gobbled down thy corn like goats,

And rooted up thy truck like shoats,

But then--they didn't get thy votes

Or volunteers--my Maryland!

A MERCHANT'S STORY.

'All of which I saw, and part of which I was.'

CHAPTER V.

On the cleared plot in front of the store were assembled, as I have

said, about a hundred men, women, and children, witnessing a 'turkey

match.' It was a motley gathering. All classes and colors and ages were

there. The young gentleman who boasted his hundred darkies, and the

small planter who worked in the field with his five negroes; the 'poor

trash' who scratched a bare subsistence from a sorry patch of beans and

'collards,' and the swearing, staggering bully who did not condescend to

do anything; the young child that could scarcely walk alone, and the old

man who could hardly stand upright; the brawny field hand who had toiled

over night to finish his task in time for 'de shootin;' and the

well-dressed body servant who had roused 'young massa oncommon airly'

for the same purpose; all, white, black, and yellow--and some neither

white, black, nor yellow--were there; scattered over various parts of

the ground, engaged in lounging, playing, drinking, smoking, chewing,

chatting, swearing, wrangling, and looking on at the turkey match.

A live turkey was fastened to an ordinary bean pole, in a remote quarter

of the ground, and when I emerged from the cabin, seven or eight

'natives' had entered for 'a shot.' The payment of a 'bit,' 'cash down,'

to Tom, who officiated as master of ceremonies, secured a chance of

hitting the turkey's head with a rifle bullet at 'long distance.' Any

other 'hit' was considered 'foul,' and passed for nothing. Whoever shot

the mark took the prize, and was expected to 'treat the crowd.' As 'the

crowd' seemed a thirsty one, it struck me that turkey would prove

expensive eating to the fortunate shots; but they were oblivious to

expense, and in a state of mind that unfitted them for close financial

calculations.

Nearly every marksman present had 'carried off his poultry,' and Tom had

already reaped a harvest of dimes from the whiskey drinking. 'Why, bless

ye,' he said to me, 'I should be broke, clean done up, if it warn't fur

the drinks; I haint got more'n a bit, or three fips, fur nary a fowl;

the fust shot allers brings down the bird; they're all cocksure on the

trigger--ary man on 'em kin hit a turkey's eye at a hundred paces.' This

was true; and in such schools were trained the unerring marksmen who are

now 'bringing down' the bravest youth of our country, like fowls at a

turkey match.

A disturbance had broken out on a remote part of the ground, and,

noticing about twenty negro men and women seated on a log near by, I

went in that direction, in hopes of meeting the negro trader. It was a

dog fight. Inside an imaginary ring about ten feet in diameter, two dogs

were clenched in what seemed a life-and-death struggle. One was holding

the other down by the lower jaw, while a man, evidently the owner of the

half-vanquished brute, was trying to separate them. Outside this ring

about twenty other brutes--men, women, and children--were cheering the

combatants, and calling on the meddler to desist. It was strange how the

peacemaker managed to stand up against the volleys of oaths they

showered on him; he did, however, and persisted in his laudable efforts,

till a tall, rawboned, heavy-jawed fellow stepped into the ring, and,

taking him by the collar, pulled him away, saying: 'Let 'em be--it's a

fair fight; d---- yer pictur--let 'em alone.'

'Take thet! you whelp,' said the other, planting a heavy blow between

the intruder's eyes. Blow followed blow; they clenched; went down; rose

up; fought on--at one end of the ring the canines, at the other the

humans; while the rest looked on, shouting, 'Let 'er rip! Go in, Wade!

Hit 'im agin! Smash his mug! Pluck the grizzly! Hurrah fur Smith! Drown

his peepers! Never say die! Go in agin!' till the blood flowed, and dogs

and men rolled over on the ground together.

Disgusted with this exhibition of nineteenth-century civilization, I

turned and walked away. As I did so, I noticed, following me at a short

distance, a well-dressed man of about thirty-five. He wore a slouched

hat, a gray coat and lower garments, and enormous high-top boots, to one

of which was affixed a brass spur. Over his shoulder, holding the two

ends in his hands, he carried a strong, flexible whip, silver mounted,

and polished like patent leather. He was about six feet high, stoutly

built, with a heavy, inexpressive face, and a clear, sharp gray eye. One

glance satisfied me that he was the negro trader.

As he approached he held out his hand in a free, hearty way, saying:

'Cunnel, good evenin'.'

'Good evenin',' I replied, intentionally adopting his accent; 'but yer

wrong, stranger; I'm nary cunnel.'

'Well, Major, then?'

'No, Gin'ral; not even a sargint.'

'Then ye're _Squire_----,' and he hesitated for me to fill up the blank.

'No; not even Squire----,' I added, laughing. 'I've nary title; I'm

plain _Mister_ Kirke; nothin' else.'

'Well, _Mister_ Kirke, ye're the fust man I've met in the hull Suthern

country who wus jest nobody at all; and drot me ef I doan't like ye

for't. Ev'ry d----d little upstart, now-a-days, has a handle ter his

name--they all b'long ter the nobility, ha! ha!' and he again brought

his hand down upon mine with a concussion that made the woods ring.

'Come,' he added; 'let's take a drink.'

'Glad ter drink with ye, stranger; but I karn't go Tom's sperrets--it's

hard ter take.'

'That's a fact, but I keeps the raal stuff. That's the pizen fur ye;' he

replied, holding up a small willow flask, and starting toward the bar.

Entering a cloud of tobacco smoke, and groping our way over groups of

drunken chivalry, who lay 'loosely around,' we approached the counter.

'Har, you lousy sorrel-top,' said the trader to the red-faced and

red-headed bar tender; 'har, give us some mugs.'

'Sorrel-top' placed two glasses on the counter, and my new acquaintance

proceeded to rinse them thoroughly. They were of a clear grass-green

color, and holding one up to the light, the trader said: 'Now luk a'

them. Them's 'bout as green as the fellers that drink out on 'em--a

man's stumac's got ter be of cast iron ter stand the stuff they sell

har.'

'It's better'n you kin 'ford ter drink,' exclaimed the bar tender, in

high dudgeon.

'Who spoke ter ye--take thet!' rejoined the trader, discharging the

contents of the glass full in the man's face. The sorrel-crowned worthy

bore the indignity silently, evidently deeming discretion the better

part of valor.

'Buy'n ony nigs, Kirke?' said the trader, inserting his arm in mine, and

leading me away from the shanty: 'I've got a prime lot--_prime_;' and he

smacked his lips together at the last word, in the manner that is common

to professional liquor tasters. He scented a trade afar off, and his

organs of taste, sympathizing with his olfactories, gave out that token

of satisfaction.

'Well, I doan't know. What ye got?'

'Some o' the likeliest property ye ever seed--men and wimmin. All bought

round har; haint ben ter Virginny yit. Come 'long, I'll show ye;' and he

proceeded toward the group of chattels. He was becoming altogether too

familiar, but I called to mind a favorite maxim of good old Mr.

Russell--_Necessitus non arbit legum_--and quietly submitted.

The negroes were seated on a fallen pine, in a remote quarter of the

ground, and were chained together by the wrists, in gangs of four or

five, the outside one having one hand secured by a cord bound about the

waist. The men wore woollen hats, and the women neat Madras turbans, and

both had thick linsey clothing, warm enough for any weather. Their dusky

faces were sleek and oily, and their kinky locks combed as straight as

nature would permit. The trader had 'rigged them up,' as a jockey 'rigs

up' his horses for market.

Pausing before a brawny specimen of the yellow species, he said: 'Thar,

Kirke, luk o' thar; thar's a boy fur ye--a nig thet kin work--'tend ten

thousand boxes (turpentine) easy. He's the sort. Prime stuff

_thet_--(feeling of his arms and thighs)--hard--hard as rock--siners

like rope. Come o' good stock, he did--the old Devereaux blood--(a

highly respectable family in those parts)--they's the raal quality--none

on yer shams or mushrooms; but genuwine 'stockracy--blamed if they

haint. What d'ye say ter him?'

'Well, he moight do, p'raps--but I rather reckon ye've done him up sum;

'iled his face, greased his wool, and sech like. It's all right, ye

know--onything's far in trade; but ye karn't come it over me, ole

feller. I'm up ter sech doin's. I _am_, Mr.----,' and I paused for him

to finish the sentence.

'Larkin,' he added quickly and good-humoredly; 'Jake Larkin, and yours,

by----,' and he gave my hand another shake. 'Yer one on 'em, I swar, and

I own up; I _hev_ 'iled em' a trifle--jest a trifle; but ye kin see

through thet; we hev ter do it ter fix the green 'uns, ye knows.'

'Yes, I knows--'iled 'em inside and out, haint ye?'

'No, on my soul--only one glass ter day--true as preachin'.'

'Boy,' I said to the yellow man, 'how much whiskey hev ye drunk ter day?

Now, tell the truth.'

'Nary drop, massa; hed a moufful o' _sperrets_--a berry little

moufful--dat's all.'

'Taint 'nough, Larkin! Come, now, doan't be mean with nigs. Give 'em sum

more--sum o' thet tall brandy o' your'n; a good swig. They karn't stand

it out har in the cold without a little warmin' up.'

'Well, I'm blamed ef I won't. Har, you, Jim,' speaking to a well-dressed

darky standing near. 'Har, go ter thet red-headed woodpecker, thar at

the cabin, and tell him I'll smash his peepers if he doan't send me sum

glasses ter onst--d'ye har? Go.'

The gentlemanly darky went, and soon returned with the glassware; and

meanwhile Larkin directed another well-clad negro man to 'bring the

jugs.' They were strung across the back of a horse which was tied near,

and, uncorking one of them, the trader said: 'I allers carry my own

pizen. 'Taint right to give even nigs sech hell-fire as they sell round

har; it git's a feller's stumac used ter tophet 'fore the rest on him is

'climated.'

'Well, it does,' I replied; 'it's the devil's own warming pan.'

Each negro received a fair quantity of the needed beverage, and seemed

the better for it. A little brandy, 'for the stomach's sake,' is enjoyed

by those dusky denizens of the low latitudes.

When they were all supplied, the trader said to me: 'Now, what d'ye say,

Kirke? What'll ye give fur the boy?'

'Well, I reckon I doan't want no boys jest now; and I doan't know as I

wants ary 'ooman nother; but if ye've got a right likely gal--one

thet'll sew, and nuss good--I moight buy her fur a friend o' mine. His

wife's hed twins, and he moight use her ter look arter the young 'uns.'

'Young or old?'

'Young and sprightly.'

'They is high, ye knows--but thar's a gal that'll suit. Git up gals;'

and a row of five women rose: 'No; git up thar, whar we kin see ye.'

They stepped up on the log. 'Now, thar's a gal fur ye,' he continued,

pointing to a clean, tidy mulatto woman, not more than nineteen, with a

handsome but meek, sorrow-marked face: 'Luk at thet!' and he threw up

her dress to her knees, while the poor girl reached down her shackled

hands in the vain effort to prevent the indignity. He was about to show

off other good points, when I said: 'Never mind--I see what she is. Let

'em git down.'

They resumed their seats, and he continued: 'Thet's jest the gal ye

wants, Kirke--good at nussin', wet or dry; good at breedin', too; hed

two young 'uns, a'ready. Ye kin * * * * *' [The rest of this discourse

will not bear repeating.]

'No, thank you.'

'Well, jest as ye say. She's sound, though; sold fur no fault. Har young

massa's ben a-usin' on har--young 'uns are his'n. Old man got pious;

couldn't stand sech doin's no how--ter home--so he says ter me, 'Jake,

says he, take har ter Orleans--she's jest the sort--ye'll make money

sellin' har ter some o' them young bloods. Ha! ha! thet's religion for

ye! I doan't know, Kirke, mebbe ye b'long ter the church, and p'raps yer

one o' the screamin' sort; but any how, I say, d---- sech religion as

thet. Jake Larkin's a spec'lator, but he wouldn't do a thing like

thet--ef he would, d---- him.'

[The dealer in negroes never applies the term 'trader' to himself; he

prefers the softer word, 'speculator.' The phrase 'negro trader' is used

only by the rest of the community, who are 'holier than he.']

'I doan't b'lieve ye would, Larkin; yer a good fellow, at bottom, I

reckon.'

'Well, Kirke, yer a trump. Come, hev another drink.'

'No; excuse me; karn't stand more'n one horn a day: another'd lay me out

flatter'n a stewpan. But ter business. How much fur thet gal--cash down?

Come, talk it out.'

'Well, at a word--twelve hun'red.'

'Too much; bigger'n my pile; couldn't put so much inter one gal, nohow.

Wouldn't give thet money fur ary nig in Car'lina.'

'Oh, buy me, good massa. Mister Larkin'll take less'n dat, I reckon;

_do_ buy me,' said the girl, who had been eying me very closely during

the preceding dialogue.

'I would, my good girl, if I could; but you'll not exactly suit my

friend.'

'Buy har fur yourself, then, Kirke. She'd suit you. She's sound, I tell

ye--ye'd make money on har.'

'Not much, I reckon,' I replied, dryly.

'Why not? She'll breed like a rabbit.' * * * * *

'I wouldn't own her for the whole State: if I had her, I'd free her on

the spot!' The cool bestiality of the trader disgusted me, and I forgot

myself.

He started back surprised; then quietly remarked: 'Ye're a Nutherner, I

swar; no corncracker ever held sech doctrines as them.'

'Yes,' I replied, dropping the accent, which my blunder had rendered

useless; 'I _am_ a Northerner; but I want a nurse, notwithstanding, for

a friend.'

'Whar d'ye live?' asked the trader, in the same free, good-natured tone

as before.

'In New York.'

'In York! What! Yer not Mr. Kirke, of Randall, Kirke & Co.? But,

blamenation, ye _ar_! How them whiskers has altered ye! I _thort_ I'd

seed ye afore. Haint ye come it over me slick? Tuk in clean, swallered

hull. But thar's my hand, Mr. Kirke; I'm right glad ter see ye.'

'Where have you met me, my good fellow? I don't remember _you_.'

'Down ter Orleans. Seed ye inter Roye, Struthers & Co.'s. The ole man

thinks a heap o' you; ye give 'em a pile of business, doan't ye.'

'No, not much of our own. They buy cotton for our English

correspondents, and negotiate through us, that is all. Roye is a fine

old gentleman.'

'Yes, he ar; I'm in with him.'

'How _in_ with him?'

'Why, in this business--we go snacks; I do the buyin', and he finds the

rocks. We use a pile--sometimes a hun'red, sometimes two hun'red

thousand.'

'Is it possible! Then you do a large business?'

'Yes, right smart; I handle 'bout a thousand--big and little--ev'ry

year.'

'That _is_ large. You do not buy and sell them all, yourself, do you?'

'Oh, no? I hardly ever sells; once in a while I run agin a buyer--_like

you_--ha! ha!--and let one drap; but gin'rally I cage 'em, and when I

git 'bout a hun'red together, I take 'em ter Orleans, and auction 'em

off. Thar's no fuss and dicker 'bout thet, ye knows.'

'Yes, I know! But how do you manage so large a gang? I should think some

would get away.'

'No, they doan't. I put the ribands on 'em; and, 'sides, ye see them

boys, thar?' pointing to three splendid specimens of property, loitering

near; 'I've hed them boys nigh on ter ten year, and I haint lost nary a

nig sense I had 'em. They're cuter and smarter nor I am, any day.'

'Then you pick the negroes up round the country, and send them to a

rendezvous, where you put them in jail till you make up your number?'

'Yes, the boys takes 'em down ter the pen. I'm pickin' sum up round har,

now, ye see, and I send 'em ter Goldsboro'. When I've toted these down

thar, the boys and I'll go up ter Virginny.'

'Why don't you send them on by stage? I should think it would hurt them

to camp out at this season.'

'Hurt 'em! Lord bless ye, fresh air never hurt a nig; they're never so

happy as sleepin' on the groun', with nothin' over 'em, and thar heels

close ter a light-wood fire.'

'But the delicate house women and the children, can they bear it?'

'It do come a trifle hard on them, but it doan't last long. I allers

takes ter the railroad when I gets a gang together.'

'Well, come; I want a woman. Show me all you have.'

'Do ye mean so, raally, Mr. Kirke? I thort ye wus a comin' it on me, and

I swar ye does do the Suthern like a native. I'm blamed ef I didn't

s'pose ye b'longed round har. Ha! ha! How the ole man would larf ter

hear it!'

'But I _am_ a native, Larkin; born within sight of Bunker Hill.'

'Yes, thet kind o' native; and them's the sort, too. They make all-fired

smart spec'lators. I knows a dozen on 'em, thet hev made thar pile, and

haint older'n I am, nother.'

'Is it possible! Yankees in this business?'

'Yes, lots on 'em. Some on yer big folks up ter York and Bostin are in

it deep; but they go the 'portin' line, gin'rally, and thet--d--d if

_I'd_ do it, anyhow.'

'Well, about the woman. None of these will do; are they all you have?'

'No, I've got one more, but I've sort o' 'lotted har ter a young feller

down ter Orleans. He told me ter git him jest sech a gal. She's 'most

white, and brought up tender like, and them kind is high prized, ye

knows.'

'Yes, I know; but where is she--let me see her?'

'She's in the store;' and rising, he led the way to the shanty.

When we arrived at the part of the ground where the marksmen were

stationed, we found an altercation going on between Tom and a young

planter. It appeared that the young man had paid for a shot, and

insisted on his body servant taking his place in the lists. To that Tom,

and the stout yeomen who had entered for the turkey, objected, on

account of the yellow man's station and complexion.

The young gentleman was dressed in the highest style of fashion, and,

though not more than nineteen, was evidently a 'blood' of 'the very

first water.' The body servant was a good-looking quadroon, and sported

an enormous diamond pin and a heavy gold watch chain. In his sleek

beaver hat, and nicely-brushed suit of black broadcloth, he looked a

much better-dressed gentleman than any one on the ground.

As we approached, Tom, every pimple on his red face swelling with

virtuous indignation, was delivering himself of the following harangue:

'We doan't put ourselfs on a futtin' with niggers, Mr. Gaston. We doan't

keer if they do b'long ter kid-gloved 'ristocrats like ye is; they

karn't come in har, no how! Ye'd better go home. Ye orter be in better

business then prowlin' round shootin' matches, with yer scented,

bedevilled-up buck niggers. Go home, and wash the smell out o' yer

cloes. Yer d----d muskmelon (Tom's word for musk) makes ye smell jest

like hurt skunks; and ye ar skunks, clar through ter the innards. Whew!

Clar eöut, I tell ye!'

The young man's face reddened. The blood of the chivalry was rising. He

replied:

'Keep a civil tongue in your head, you thieving scoundrel; if you don't,

the next time I catch you trading with my nigs, I'll see you get a

hundred lashes; d----d if I don't.'

Tom bade him go to a very warm latitude, and denied trading with

negroes.

'You lie, you sneaking whelp; you've got the marks on your back now, for

dealing with Pritchett's.'

Tom returned the lie, when the young man's face grew a trifle redder,

and his whip rising in the air, it fell across Tom's nose in a very

uncomfortable manner--for Tom. The liquor vender reeled, but, recovering

himself in a moment, he aimed a heavy blow at the young gentleman's

frontispiece. That 'parlor ornament' would have been sadly disfigured,

had not the darky caught the stroke on his left arm, and at the same

moment planted what the 'profession' call a 'wiper,' just behind Tom's

left ear. Tom's private dram shop went down--'caved in'--was 'laid out

sprawling;' and two or three minutes elapsed before it got on its legs

again. When it did, it frothed at the mouth like a mug of ale with too

much head on it.

They were not more than six paces apart, when Tom rose, and drawing a

double-barrelled pistol from his pocket, aimed it at the planter. The

latter was in readiness for him. His six-shooter was level with Tom's

breast, and his hand on the trigger, when, just as he seemed ready to

fire, the negro trader coolly stepped before him, and twisted the weapon

from his hand. Turning then to Tom, Larkin said, 'Now, you clar out.

Make tracks, or I'll lamm ye like blamenation. Be off, I tell ye,' he

added as Tom showed an unwillingness to move. 'A sensible man like ye

arn't a gwine ter waste good powder on sech a muskrat sort of a thing as

this is, is ye? Come, clar!' and he placed his hand on Tom's shoulder,

and accelerated his rather slow movements toward the groggery. Returning

then to the young man, he said:

'And now you, Mr. Gustavus Adolphus Pocahontas Powhatan Gaston, s'pose

_you_ clar out, too?'

'I shall go when I please--not before,' said Mr. Gaston.

'You'll please mighty sudden, then, _I_ reckon. A young man of your

edication should be 'bout better business than gittin' inter brawls with

low groggery keepers, and 'sultin' decent white folks with your

scented-up niggers. Yer a disgrace ter yer good ole father, and them as

was afore him. With yer larnin' and money ye moight be doin' suthin' fur

them as is below ye; but instead o' thet, yer doin' nothin' but hangin'

round bar rooms, gittin' drunk, playin' cards, drivin' fast hosses, and

keepin' nigger wimmin. I'm ashamed o' ye. Yer gwine straight ter hell,

ye is; and the hull country's gwine thar, too, 'cause it's raisin' a

crap of jest sech idle, no-account, blusterin', riproaring young fools

as you is. Now, go home. Make tracks ter onst, or I'll hev thet d----d

nigger's neck o' your'n stretched fur strikin' a white man, I will! Ye

knows me, and I'll do it, as sure's my name's Jake Larkin.'

The young planter listened rather impatiently to this harangue, but said

nothing. When it was concluded, he told his servant to bring up the

horses; and then turning to the trader, said:

'Well, Right Reverend Mr. Larkin, you'll please to make yourself scarce

around the plantation in future. If you come near it, just remember that

we _keep dogs_, and that we use them for chasing--_niggers_.' The last

word was emphasized in a way that showed he classed Larkin with the

wares he dealt in.

'Yer father, young man, is a honest man, and a gentleman. He knows I'm

one, if I _do_ trade in niggers; and he'll want ter see me when I want

ter come.'

The negro by this time had brought up the horses. 'Good evening, Mr.

Larkin,' said young Hopeful, as he mounted and rode off.

'Good evenin', replied the trader, coolly, but respectfully.

'Good evenin', _Mister_ Larkin,' said the gentleman's gentleman, as he

also mounted to ride off. The emphasis on the 'Mister' was too much for

the trader, and taking one spring toward the darky, he laid his stout

whip across his face. The scented ebony roared, and just then his horse,

a high-blooded animal, reared and threw him. When he had gathered

himself up, Larkin made several warm applications of his thick boot to

the inexpressible part of the darky's person, and, roaring with pain,

that personage made off at a gait faster than that of his runaway horse.

During the affray the occupants of the ground gathered around the

belligerents; but as soon as it was over, they went quietly back to

'old-sledge' 'seven-up,' 'pitch-and-toss,' 'chuck-a-luck,' and the

'turkey match.'

As we walked toward the shanty, the trader said: 'Thet feller's a fool.

What a chance he's throwin' away! He arn't of no more use than a rotten

coon skin or a dead herrin', he arn't. All on our young bucks is jest

like him. The country's going to the devil, sure;' and with this choice

bit of moralizing, he entered the cabin.