CHAPTER I.

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LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE

OF

_POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE._

MARCH, 1873.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1873, by J. B.

LIPPINCOTT & Co., in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at

Washington.

Transcriber's Note: Minor typos have been corrected and footnotes moved

to the end of the article.

THE ROUMI IN KABYLIA.

[Illustration: ALGIERS FROM THE SEA.]

A fact need not be a fixed fact to be a very positive one; and Kabylia,

a region to whose outline no geographer could give precision, has long

existed as the most uncomfortable reality in colonial France.

Irreconcilable Kabylia, hovering as a sort of thunderous cloudland among

the peaks of the Atlas Mountains, is respected for a capacity it has of

rolling out storms of desperate warriors. These troops disgust and

confound the French by making every hut and house a fortress: like the

clansmen of Roderick Dhu, they lurk behind the bushes, animating each

tree or shrub with a preposterous gun charged with a badly-moulded

bullet. The Kabyle, when excited to battle, goes to his death as

carelessly as to his breakfast: his saint or marabout has promised him

an immediate heaven, without the critical formality of a judgment-day.

He fights with more than feudal faithfulness and with undiverted

tenacity. He is in his nature unconquerable. So that the French, though

they have riddled this thunder-cloud of a Kabylia with their shot,

seamed it through and through with military roads, and established a

beautiful _fort national_ right in the middle of it, on the plateau of

Souk-el-Arba, possess it to-day about as thoroughly as we Americans

might possess a desirable thunder-storm which should be observed hanging

over Washington, and which we should annex by means of electrical

communications transpiercing it in every direction, and a resident

governor fixed at the centre in a balloon. France has gorged Kabylia,

with the rest of Algeria, but she has never digested it.

[Illustration: "IMPREGNABLE KABYLIA."]

A trip through Algeria, such as we now propose, belongs, as a

pleasure-excursion, only to the present age. In the last it was made

involuntarily. Only sixty years ago the English spinster or spectacled

lady's-companion, as she crossed over from the mouth of the Tagus to the

mouth of the Tiber, or from Marseilles to Naples, looked out for capture

by "the Algerines" as quite a reasonable eventuality. (Who can forget

Toepfer's mad etchings for _Bachelor Butterfly_, of which this little

episode forms the incident?) Her respectable mind was filled with

speculations as to how many servants "a dey's lady" was furnished with,

and what was the amount of her pin-money. A stout, sound-winded

Christian gentleman, without vices and kind in fetters, sold much

cheaper than a lady, being worth thirty pounds, or only about one-tenth

the value of Uncle Tom.

[Illustration: BOUGIE, AND HILL OF GOURAYA.]

The opening up of Algeria to the modern tourist and Murray's guide-books

is in fact due to the American nation. So late as 1815 the Americans,

along with the other trading nations, were actually paying to the dey

his preposterous tribute for exemption from piratical seizure. In this

year, however, we changed our mind and sent Decatur over. On the 28th of

June he made his appearance at Algiers, having picked up and disposed of

some Algerine craft, the frigate Mashouda and the brig Estido. The

Algerines gave up all discussion with a messenger so positive in his

manners, and in two days Decatur introduced our consul-general Shaler,

who attended to the release of American captives and the positive

stoppage of tribute.

The example was followed by other nations. Lord Exmouth bombarded

Algiers in 1816, and reduced most of it to ashes. In 1827 the dey opened

war with France by hitting the French consul with his fan. Charles X.

retorted upon the fan with thirty thousand troops and a fleet. The fort

of Algiers was exploded by the last survivor of its garrison, a negro of

the deserts, who rushed down with a torch into the powder-cellar.

Algeria collapsed. The dey went to Naples, the janizaries went to

Turkey, and Algeria became French.

From this time the country became more or less open, according as France

could keep it quiet, to the inroads of that modern beast of ravin, the

tourist. The Kabyle calls the tourist _Roumi_ (Christian), a form,

evidently, of our word Roman, and referable to the times when the bishop

of Hippo and such as he identified the Christian with the Romanist in

the Moorish mind.

Modern Algiers, viewed from the sea, wears upon its luminous walls small

trace of its long history of blood. As we contemplate its mosques and

houses flashing their white profiles into the sky, it is impossible not

to muse upon the contrast between its radiant and picturesque aspect

and its veritable character as the accomplice of every crime and every

baseness known to the Oriental mind. To see that sunny city basking

between its green hills, you would hardly think of it as the abode of

bandits; yet two powerful tribes still exist, now living in huts which

crown the heights of Boudjareah overlooking the sea, who formerly

furnished the boldest of the pitiless corsairs. To the iron hooks of the

Bab (or gate) of Azoun were hung by the loins our Christian brothers who

would not accept the Koran; at the Bab-el-Oued, the Arab rebels, not

confounded even in their deaths with the dogs of Christians, were

beheaded by the yataghan; and in the blue depths we sail over, whose

foam washes the bases of the temples, hapless women have sunk for ever,

tied in a leather bag between a cat and a serpent.

The history, in truth, is the history--always a cruel one--of an

overridden nation compelled to bear a part in the wickedness of its

oppressors. This rubric of blood may be read in many a dismal page.

Algeria was a slave before England was Christian. The greatest African

known to the Church, Augustine, has left a pathetic description of the

conquest of his country by the Vandals in the fifth century: it was

attended with horrible atrocities, the enemy leaving the slain in

unburied heaps, so as to drive out the garrisons by pestilence. When

Spain overthrew the Moors she took the coast-cities of Morocco and

Algeria. Afterward, when Aruch Barbarossa, the "Friend of the Sea," had

seized the Algerian strongholds as a prize for the Turks, and his system

of piracy was devastating the Mediterranean, Spain with other countries

suffered, and we have a vivid picture of an Algerine bagnio and

bagnio-keeper from the pen of the illustrious prisoner Cervantes. "Our

spirits failed" (he writes) "in witnessing the unheard-of cruelties that

Hassan exercised. Every day were new punishments, accompanied with cries

of cursing and vengeance. Almost daily a captive was thrown upon the

hooks, impaled or deprived of sight, and that without any other motive

than to gratify the thirst of human blood natural to this monster, and

which inspired even the executioners with horror."

While our fancy traces the figure of the author of _Don Quixote_, a

plotting captive, behind the walls of Algiers, the steamer is

withdrawing, and the view of the city becomes more beautiful at every

turn of the paddles. We pass through a whole squadron of fishing-boats,

hovering on their long lateen sails, and seeming like butterflies

balanced upon the waves, which are blue as the petal of the iris.

Algiers gradually becomes a mere impression of light. The details have

been effaced little by little, and melted into a general hue of gold and

warmth: the windowless houses and the walls extending in terraces

confuse interchangeably their blank masses. The dark green hills of

Boudjareah and Mustapha seem to have opened their sombre flanks to

disclose a marble-quarry: the city, piled up with pale and blocklike

forms, appears to sink into the mountains again as the boat retires,

although the picturesque buildings of the Casbah, cropping out upon the

summit, linger long in sight, like rocks of lime. As we pass Cape

Matifou we see rising over its shoulder the summits of the Atlas range,

among whose peaks we hope to be in a fortnight, after passing Bona,

Philippeville and Constantina.

Sailing along this coast of the Mediterranean resembles an excursion on

one of the Swiss lakes. Four hours after passing Algiers, in going

eastwardly toward the port of Philippeville, we come in sight of Dellys,

a little town of poor appearance, where the hussars of France first

learned the peculiarities of Kabyle fighting. This warfare was something

novel. In place of the old gusty sweeps of cavaliers on horseback,

falling on the French battalions or glancing around them in whirlwinds,

the soldiers had to extirpate the Kabyles hidden in the houses. It was

not fighting--it was ferreting. Each house in Dellys was a fort which

had to be taken by siege. Each garden concealed behind its palings the

"flower" of Kabyle chivalry, only to be uprooted by the bayonet. The

women fought with fury.

We follow our course along these exquisite blue waters, and soon have a

glimpse, at three miles distance, of an isolated, abrupt cone, trimmed

at the summit into the proportions of a pyramid. It is the hill of

Gouraya, an enormous mass of granite which lifts its scarped summit over

the port of Bougie, called Salda by Strabo. We approach and watch the

enormous rock seeming to grow taller and taller as we nestle beneath it

in the beautiful harbor. Bougie lies on a narrow and stony beach in the

embrace of the mountain, white and coquettish, spreading up the rocky

wall as far as it can, and looking aloft to the protecting summit two

thousand feet above it. We abstain from dismounting, but sweep the city

with field-glasses from the deck of the ship, recollecting that Bougie

was bombarded in the reign of the Merrie Monarch by Sir Edward Spragg.

We trace the ravine of Sidi-Touati, which breaks the town in half as it

splits its way into the sea. Here, in 1836, the French commandant,

Salomon de Mussis, was treacherously shot while at a friendly conference

with the sheikh Amzian, the pretext being the murder of a marabout by

the French sentinels. The incident is worth mentioning, because it

brought into light some of the nobler traits of Kabyle character. The

sheikh, for killing a guest with whom he had just taken coffee, was

reproached by the natives as "the man who murdered with one hand and

took gifts with the other," and was forced by mere popular contempt from

his sheikhship, to perish in utter obscurity.

[Illustration: ROMAN RELICS AT PHILIPPEVILLE.]

Putting on steam again, we recede from Bougie, and passing Djigelly,

with its overpoweringly large barracks and hospital, doubling Cape

Bougarone and sighting the fishing-village of Stora, we arrive at the

new port-city of Philippeville. This colony, a plantation of Louis

Philippe's upon the site of the Roman Russicada, has only thirty-four

years of existence, and contains twenty Frenchmen for every Arab found

within it. It differs, however, from our American thirty-year-old towns

in the interesting respect of showing the traces of an older

civilization. French savants here examine the ruins of the theatre and

the immense Roman reservoirs in the hillside, and take "squeezes" of

inscriptions marked upon the antique altar, column or cippus. On an

ancient pillar was found an amusing grafita, the sketch of some Roman

schoolboy, showing an _aquarius_ (or water-carrier) loaded with his twin

buckets. Philippeville, nursed among these glowing African hills, has

the look of some bad melodramatic joke. Its European houses, streets

laid out with the surveyor's chain, pompous church, and arcades like a

Rue de Rivoli in miniature, make a foolish show indeed, in place of the

walls, white, unwinking and mysterious, which ordinarily enclose the

Eastern home or protect the Arab's wife behind their blinded windows.

[Illustration: LION-SHAPED ROCK, HARBOR OF BONA.]

If we leave Philippeville in the evening, we find ourselves next morning

in the handsome roadstead of Bona. This, for the present, will terminate

our examination of the coast, for, however fond we may be of level

traveling, we cannot reasonably expect to get over the Atlas Mountains

by hugging the shore. The harbor of Bona, though broad and beautiful, is

somewhat dangerous, concealing numbers of rocks which lurk at about the

surface of the water. Other rocks, standing boldly out at the entrance

of the port, offer a singular aspect, being sculptured into strange

forms by the sea. One makes a very good statue of a lion, lying before

the city as its guard, and looking across the waves for an enemy as the

foam caresses its monstrous feet.

Dismounting from shipboard, we become landsmen for the remainder of our

journey, and wave adieu to the steamboat which has brought us as we

linger a moment on the mole of Bona. This city is named from the ancient

Hippo, out of whose ruins, a mile to the southward, it was largely

built. The Arabs call it "the city of jujube trees"--Beled-el-Huneb. To

the Roumi (or Christian) traveler the interest of the spot concentrates

in one historic figure, that of Saint Augustine. In the basilica of

Hippo, of which the remains are believed to have been identified in some

recent excavations, the sainted bishop shook the air with his learned

and penetrating eloquence. Here he exhorted the faithful to defend their

religious liberty and their lives, uncertain if the Vandal hordes of

Genseric were not about to sweep away the faith and the language of

Rome. Here, where the forest of El Edoug spreads a shadow like that of

memory over the scene of his walks and labors, he brought his grand life

of expiation to a holy close, praying with his last breath for his

disciples oppressed by the invaders. We reach the site of Hippo (or

Hippone) by a Roman bridge, restored to its former solidity by the

French, over whose arches the bishop must have often walked, meditating

on his youth of profligacy and vain scholarship, and over the abounding

Divine grace which had saved him for the edification of all futurity.

[Illustration: SHOPKEEPER AT BONA.]

Bona has a street named Saint Augustine, but it is, by one of the

strange paradoxes which history is constantly playing us, owned entirely

by Jews, and those of one sole family. This fact indicates how the

thrifty race has prospered since the French occupancy. Formerly

oppressed and ill-treated, taxed and murdered by the Turks, and only

permitted to dress in the mournfulest colors, the Jew of Algeria hid

himself as if life were something he had stolen, and for which he must

apologize all his days. Now, treated with the same liberality as any

other colonist, the Jew indulges in every ostentation of dress except as

to the color of the turban, which, in small towns like Bona, still

preserves the black hue of former days of oppression. On Saturdays the

children of Jacob fairly blaze with gold and gay colors. On their

working days they line the principal streets, eyeing the passers-by with

a cool, easy indifference, but never losing a chance of business. In

Algeria this race is generally thought to present a picture of

arrogance, knavery and rank cowardice not equaled on the face of the

globe. An English traveler saw an Arab, after maddening himself with

opium and absinthe, run a-mok among the shopkeepers who lined the

principal street of Algiers. Selecting the Hebrews, he drove before him

a throng of twenty, dressed in all the colors of the rainbow, who

allowed themselves to be knocked down with the obedience of ninepins. A

Frenchman stopped the maniac after he had killed one Jew and wounded

several, none of them making any effort at defence.

A few narrow streets, bordered with Moorish architecture, contain the

native industry of Bona. It is about equally divided between the Jews

and the M'zabites, who, like the Kabyles, are a remnant of the

stiff-necked old Berber tribe. The M'zabites preserve the pure Arab

dress--the haik, or small bornouse without hood, the broad breeches

coming to the knee, the bare legs, and the turban rolled up into a coil

of ropes. Thus accoutred, and squatting in the ledges of their small

booths, the jewelers, blacksmiths and tailors of Bona are found at their

work.

Returning to Philippeville by land, and remaining as short a time as

possible in this unedifying city, which is a bad and overheated

imitation of a French provincial town, we concede only so much to its

modern character as to hire a fine open carriage in which to proceed

inland toward Constantina. This city is reached after a calm, meditative

ride through sunny hills and groves. After so quiet a preparation the

first view of Constantina is fairly astounding. Encircled by a grand

curve of mountainous precipices, rises a gigantic rock, washed by a moat

formed of the roaring cascades of the river Rummel. On the flat top of

this naked rock, like the Stylites on his pillar, stands Constantina.

The Arabs used to say that Constantina was a stone in the midst of a

flood, and that, according to their Prophet, it would require as many

Franks to raise that stone as it would of ants to lift an egg at the

bottom of a milk-pot.

[Illustration: CONSTANTINA.]

This city, under its old Roman name of Cirta, was one of the principal

strongholds of Numidia. In 1837 it was one of the most hotly-defended

strongholds of the Kabyles. The French have renamed, as "Gate of the

Breach," the old Bab-el-Djedid, where Colonel Lamoriciere entered at the

head of his Zouaves. The city had to be conquered in detail, house by

house. Lamoriciere himself was wounded: the Kabyles, driven to their

last extremity, evacuated the Casbah on the summit of the rock, and let

down their women by ropes into the abyss; the ropes, overweighted by

these human clusters, broke, piling the bodies and fragments of bodies

in heaps beneath the precipice, while some of the natives descended the

steep rock safely with the agility of goats.

Of all the large Algerian cities, Constantina is that which has best

preserved its primitive signet. In most quarters it remains what it was

under the Turks. These quarters are still undermined, rather than laid

out, with close and crooked streets, where the rough white houses are

pierced with narrow windows, closed to the inquisitive eye of the Roumi.

The roofs are of tile, for the winters on the hills are too severe to

permit the flat, terraced roofs of Algiers or Bona. These white houses,

roofed with brown, give a perfectly original aspect to the city as seen

from any of the neighboring eminences. The plateau of Mansourah is

connected with the town by a magnificent Roman bridge, two stories in

height, restored by the French.

[Illustration: ROMAN BRIDGE AT CONSTANTINA.]

From this bridge, which is three hundred feet high by three hundred and

fifteen feet in length, and has five arches, you look down into the bed

of the Rummel, while the vultures and eagles scream around you, and you

recite the words of the poet El Abdery, who called this river a bracelet

which encircles an arm. The gorge opens out into a beautiful plain rich

with pomegranates, figs and orange trees. The sea is forty-eight miles

away.

The last bey of Constantina, not knowing that he was merely building for

the occupancy of the French governors who were to come after him,

decreed himself, some fifty years ago, a stately pleasure-dome, after

the fashion of Kubla Khan. From the ruins of Constantina, Bona and

Tunis, Ahmed Bey picked up whatever was most beautiful in the way of

Roman marbles and carving. With these he built his halls, while the

Rummel, through caverns measureless to man, ran on below. Some

Frenchman of importance will now-a-days give you the freedom of this

curious piece of Turkish construction, where, among storks and ibises

gravely perched on one stilt, you examine the relics of Roman history,

preserved by its very destroyers, according to the grotesque providence

that watches over the study of archaeology.

[Illustration: BEY'S PALACE, CONSTANTINA.]

You are told how Ahmed, wishing to adorn the walls of his gallery or

loggia with frescoes, of which he had heard, but which he had no artist

capable of executing, whether Arab, Moor or Jew, applied to a prisoner.

The man was a French shoemaker, who had never touched a brush: he vainly

tried to decline the honor, but the bey was inflexible: "You are a vile

liar: all the Christians can paint. Liberty if you succeed, death if you

disobey me."

[Illustration: SHAMPOOING THE ROUMI.]

Extremely nervous was the hand which the painter _malgre lui_ applied to

the unlooked-for task. From the laborious travail of his brain issued at

length an odd mass of arabesques with which the walls were somehow

covered. His invention exhausted, he awaited in an agony of fear the

inspection of his Turkish master. He came, and was enchanted. The

painter was free, and the bey observed: "The dog wanted to deceive me: I

knew that all the Christians could paint."

You are amazed to find, in this nest of Islamite savagery and among

these wild rocks, the uttermost accent of modern French politeness. Your

presence is a windfall in quarters so retired, and you sit among orange

plants and straying gazelles, while the military band throws softly out

against the inaccessible crags the famous tower-scene from the fourth

act of _Il Trovatore_. As night draws on, tired of your explorations,

you seek a Moorish bath.

Let no tourist, experienced only in the effeminate imitations of the

hummum to be found in New York or London, expect similar considerate

treatment in Algeria. He will be more likely to receive the attention of

the M'zabite bather after the fashion narrated in the following

paragraph, which is a quotation from an English journalist in the land

of the Kabyles:

"We were told to sit down upon a marble seat in the middle of the hall,

which we had no sooner done than we became sensible of a great increase

of heat: after this each of us was taken into a closet of milder

temperature, where, after placing a white cloth on the floor and taking

off our napkins, they laid us down, leaving us to the further operations

of two naked, robust negroes. These men, newly brought from the interior

of Africa, were ignorant of Arabic; so I could not tell them in what way

I wished to be treated, and they handled me as roughly as if I had been

a Moor inured to hardship. Kneeling with one knee upon the ground, each

took me by a leg and began rubbing the soles of my feet with a pumice

stone. After this operation on my feet, they put their hands into a

small bag and rubbed me all over with it as hard as they could. The

distortions of my countenance must have told them what I endured, but

they rubbed on, smiling at each other, and sometimes giving me an

encouraging look, indicating by their gestures the good it would do me.

While they were thus currying me they almost drowned me by throwing warm

water upon me with large silver vessels, which were in the basin under a

cock fastened in the wall. When this was over they raised me up, putting

my head under the cock, by which means the water flowed all over my

body; and, as if this was not sufficient, my attendants continued plying

their vessels. Then, having dried me with very fine napkins, they each

of them very respectfully kissed my hand. I considered this as a sign

that my torment was over, and was going to dress myself, when one of the

negroes, grimly smiling, stopped me till the other returned with a kind

of earth, which they began to rub all over my body without consulting my

inclination. I was as much surprised to see it take off all the hair as

I was pained in the operation; for this earth is so quick in its effect

that it burns the skin if left upon the body. This being finished, I

went through a second ablution, after which one of them seized me behind

by the shoulders, and setting his two knees against the lower part of my

back, made my bones crack, so that for a time I thought they were

entirely dislocated. Nor was this all, for after whirling me about like

a top to the right and left, he delivered me to his comrade, who used me

in the same manner: and then, to my no small satisfaction, opened the

closet door."

[Illustration: HAMMO-EL-ZOUAOUI.]

This is the true Moorish bath. Meantime, the M'zabite or negro, as he

dislocates your legs, cracks your spinal column or dances over you on

his knees, drones forth a kind of native psalmody, which, melting into

the steamy atmosphere of the place, seems to be the litany of happiness

and of the pure in heart. Clean in body and soul as you never were

before, skinned, depilated, dissected, you emerge for a new life of

ideal perfection, feeling as if you were suddenly relieved of your body.

[Illustration: "BALEK!"]

[Illustration: A STREET IN CONSTANTINA.]

There is held every Friday at Constantina a grand assembly of the

fire-eating marabouts, the fanatics who have given so much trouble to

their French rulers. Every revolution among the Kabyles is a religious

movement, set in motion by the wild enthusiasm of the "saints." The

religious orders of Kabylia, all of them differing in various degrees

from Turkish Mohammedanism, are of some half dozen varieties, adapted to

minds of various cultivation. Some, as that of Sidi-Yusef-Hansali, are

mild in their rites and of a purely didactic or religious nature. This

latter sect originated in Constantina, comprises two thousand brothers

or khouans, and was in 1865 under the authority of Hammo-el-Zouaoui, a

direct descendant of Yusef-Hansali. An hour passed in the college of

this order, where the whole formula of worship consists in saying a

hundred times "God forgive!" then, a hundred other times, "Allah ill'

Allah: Mohammed ressoul Allah!" may be monotonous, but it is not

revolutionary. From this tautological brotherhood, through various

degrees of emotional activity, you arrive at the wild doings of the

fire-eaters, or followers of Mohammed-ben-Aissa. This Aissa was a native

of Meknes in Morocco, where he died full of years and piety three

hundred years ago. His legend states that being originally very poor, he

attempted to support his family in the truly Oriental manner, not by

working for them, but by spending his whole time at the mosque in prayer

for their miraculous sustenance. His inertia and his faith were

acceptable to Mohammed, who appeared to Aissa's wife with baskets of

food, and to Aissa with the order to found a sect. The allegory

expressed by the disgusting actions of the order would seem to be that

anything is nourishment to the true believer. They therefore exhibit

themselves as eating red-hot iron, scorpions and prickly cactus. Various

travelers, some of them cool hands and accurate observers, have seen

these khouans at their horrible feasts without being able to explain

the imposture. A British soldier, an experienced Indian officer,

happened to be in Kabylia just before the breaking out of the great

Sepoy rebellion in India, and was introduced to one of the fire-eating

orgies by Major Deval at Tizi-ouzou, where our journey into Kabylia is

to terminate. With his own eyes he saw a khouan, excited by half an

hour's chanting and beating the tom-tom, drive a sword four inches deep

into his chest by hitting it with a tile. The man marched around and

exhibited it to the congregation as it quivered in his naked body.

Another seared his face and hands with a large red-hot iron, holding it

finally with his mouth without other support. Another chewed up an

entire leaf of a cactus with its dangerous spikes, which sting one's

hands severely and remain rankling in the flesh. Another filled his

mouth with live coals from a brazier, and walked around blowing out

sparks. Another swallowed a living scorpion, a small snake, broken glass

and nails. The spectator was in the midst of these enthusiasts, being

touched by them in their antics, yet he could detect no foul play,

except that he imagined the sword in the first-named experiment to have

been driven into an old wound or between the skin and the flesh. It was

to counteract the influence of the fire-eating marabouts that the French

government sent over Robert Houdin, the ingenious mechanician, but

though he eclipsed their wonders by tricks of electricity and sleight,

he has left but a lame explanation of the "juggleries" of the Algerine

saints.

[Illustration: THE GREAT MOSQUE, CONSTANTINA.]

The worst attribute of these khouans is, that after having excited the

ignorant Kabyles to many a losing war by their magnetism, they remain

themselves behind the curtain, safe and sarcastic.

In the Moorish quarter of Constantina, where the streets are about five

feet wide, you sit down to watch the perpetual come-and-go of the

inhabitants. Taking a cup of fragrant coffee--which, as the reader

knows, is in Eastern countries eaten at the same time that it is

drunk--you sit on a stone bench of the coffee-house and contemplate

mules, horses, asses, passengers, buyers, sellers, loungers, Arabs,

Turks, Kabyles, Jews, Moors and spahis. On every side you hear the cry

of "Balek! balek!" This means "Look out!" and the word is closely

followed by the causative fact. The street is unpaved, the horse is

unshod, the hoofs cannot be heard, and you have hardly time to efface

yourself against a wall when a cavalier passes by like a careless

torrent, scattering the white bornouses centrifugally from his pathway

as he advances. The streets, as we observed, are very narrow. Each has

its own manufacture. Here are the tailors; here, in this deafening

alley, are the blacksmiths; farther on are the shoemakers, and you are

driven mad with wonder at the quantities of slippers made for a people

which goes eternally barefoot. Springing out of this daedal intricacy of

booths and workshops rise the slender minarets of prayer, of which the

principal one belongs to a mosque said to be the most beautiful in

Algeria. The interior of this chief mosque is not deprived of ornament,

having its columns of pink marble, its elliptical Moorish arches, and

its tiles of painted fayence set in the walls. In the centre is the

pulpit, coarsely painted red and blue, where the imaum recites his

prayers. Three small, lofty windows are filled with carved lacework. The

floor is spread with carpets for the knees of the rich, with matting for

the poor. Over all rises the square, crescent-crowned minaret--no

_belfry_, but a steeple where the chimes are rung by the human voice.

Night and day, from the heights of their slender towers, the muezzins

toll out their vibrating notes like a bell, inviting the faithful to

prayers with the often-heard signal: "Allah ill' Allah: Mohammed resoul

Allah!"

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

THE NATIONAL TRANS-ALLEGHANY WATER-WAY.

[Illustration: VIEW OF NEW RIVER.]

The offices of running water have afforded a fertile theme for the poet

and the philosopher. In the ruder ages of the world the water-ways which

carve their course over the face of the globe were regarded only in the

light of natural barriers against hostile invasion; and thus arose the

historic principle--

Lands intersected by a narrow frith

Abhor each other.

But civilization has demonstrated that they subserve a much higher

purpose, that the rivers of a country are its great arteries and

highways of trade, and that they fulfill functions as numerous and

benign in the political economy as in the physical geography of the

regions they furrow. In the Old World, the advancing streams of culture,

science and commerce, and even the migrations of nations, have ebbed and

flowed along the classic valleys of the Rhine, the Rhone and the Danube;

and the banks of the Tigris, the Euphrates and the Nile are rich in

memories of the world's mightiest and most splendid empires. In America

the fertile watersheds of the Ohio, the Mississippi and the Missouri are

fast becoming what their antitypes of the great continent have been in

the past. The outspreading wave of civilization and population has

already reached westward to the foot of the Rocky Mountains from the

Gulf of Mexico to Montana and Idaho, while even the basin of the

Columbia River is rapidly filling up with an active, thriving and busy

people, who can smile at the poet's vision:

Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound

Save its own dashings.

The water-courses of a country are not less valuable to it than the

little Pactolus was to the ancient city of Sardis, through whose streets

it ran freighted with gold. But these natural highways of human

intercourse, like most of Nature's provisions, are capable of indefinite

artificial extension and multiplication. Our finest modern canals are

scarcely smaller, and certainly capable of more uninterrupted, safe and

heavy navigation, than many of the rivers which have figured in history,

and which Pascal so graphically described as "_moving roads_ that carry

us whither we wish to go."

Such considerations as these have a profound bearing on many of the

great economic problems of the age, but on none more than upon the grand

problem which is now agitating the national mind in the United States:

_How to connect its seaboard and central regions by water_. A glance at

the map of the Union shows that its vast interior lies ensconced between

the two mountain-walls of the Rocky chain on its western side and the

Appalachian chain on its eastern side. Hemmed in by these barriers is

the immense expanse of the most prolific, populous and prosperous

section on the continent, which, taking its name from "the Father of

Waters," is geographically designated as the _Mississippi Valley_,

estimated by Professor J. W. Foster of the Chicago University to contain

an area of two million four hundred and fifty-five thousand square

miles, equal to that of all Europe excepting Russia, Norway and Sweden.

Unlike the inland basin of Asia, in which the vast, mountain-girt Desert

of Gobi stretches out its seas of sand, stony, sterile and desolate, the

inland basin of America is its garden-spot and granary. Swept by the

vapor-bearing winds and rain-distilling clouds from the Gulf of Mexico,

and blessed with an excellent climate, it contains all the physical

elements of an empire within itself. Its position makes it the national

strong-hold, so that with military men it has grown into an adage,

"Whoever is master of the Mississippi is lord of the continent." It is

yet but half developed, but no far-seeing mind can form any estimate of

its future growth and opulence. "With a varied and splendid

entourage--an imperial cordon of States--nothing," says Dr. John W.

Draper of New York, "can prevent the Mississippi Valley from becoming in

less than three centuries the centre of human power." The only wall of

partition that shuts it off from the great marts of the world is formed

by the chain of the Alleghanies, which stretch along the Atlantic

seaboard, from south-west to north-east, for twelve hundred miles. This

natural barrier, with a mean altitude of two thousand feet, is destitute

of a central axis, and consists, as the two Rogerses, who have most

fully explored its ridges, showed, of a series of convex and concave

flexures, "giving them the appearance of so many colossal

entrenchments." With a broad artificial channel cut through its sunken

defiles and picturesque gorges, there would at once be opened a gateway

for the flow and reflow of the heavy commerce of the Western World.

In 1781 the practical and philosophic eye of Thomas Jefferson perceived

the national necessity for a great trans-Alleghany water-line, and early

in the year 1786, though still tossed on the wave of the Revolution, and

not yet recovered from the shock of British invasion, the State which

gave birth to the author of the "Declaration of Independence" declared

for the enterprise. With all the means and energy at its command it

pushed forward the work from year to year, and directed it, as Mr.

Jefferson had proposed, so as to connect the head-waters of the James

River, flowing from the Alleghany summits to the ocean, with the

mountain-river known as the Great Kanawha, which rises near the

fountains of the upper James and descends into the broad bosom of the

Ohio. Although this undertaking was prosecuted slowly at first, it was

permanently recognized as one that must go on; in 1832 and 1835 it

received new impulses; and in 1840 it had reached the piedmont

districts. In 1847 a powerful impetus was given to the work, and it was

thenceforth, till 1856, forced rapidly westward up the eastern slopes of

the Alleghanies, as a complete and working structure, above a point

three hundred miles from the Atlantic capes, and two hundred miles from

Richmond, leaving an unfinished gap to the upper or navigable part of

Kanawha River of a little over one hundred and fifty miles. This

enormous work was more than half finished at an outlay of $10,436,869--a

sum which, during the economic period of its expenditure, went as far as

nearly twice that amount would go now.

By recent legislation the State of Virginia proposes to turn over the

entire property of the canal to the United States, on the sole condition

of its being finished by the government and converted into a national

water-highway for the good of the common country--in other words, upon

the one condition of its _nationalization_.

It is sometimes contended that the day of canals has passed, and

henceforward the railway must take their place. But this notion is

opposed to the present economic necessities of the world, as well as to

the provisions of Nature, which evidently point to the utilization of

the hydraulic systems of the globe. The lavish and prodigal use of the

coal-deposit of the earth, and the deforesting of vast tracts of soil to

supply fuel for the locomotive and the stationary engine, have already

wrought incalculable and almost irremediable evils. The past year has

seen the prices of all English coals go up at least eighty per cent.,

and the coal-famine of Great Britain, foreseen some years ago, has

already threatened to sap the vigor of her industrial systems and

destroy her manufacturing supremacy, or, at any rate, place her at the

mercy of the United States for the fuel with which to operate them. The

denudation of the vast territories of the United States by the axe of

emigration has already told in a marked degree upon the condition of its

climate, and greatly affected its meteorology and rainfall; while the

railroads, which have spread their Briarean arms over the whole country,

by their immense consumption of wood for cross-ties, sills, fuel,

snow-sheds, bridges, etc., have wellnigh stripped the land of its

timber, leaving its bosom exposed to the biting blasts of winter and to

the fiery blaze of the summer sun.

The problem of more rapid canal navigation is speedily approaching

solution, and to give up the water-lines of the larger sections would be

fatal to their commercial development. "The Erie Canal," said a

distinguished citizen of New York a short time ago, "now conveys

one-fourth of the whole export of that vast interior region I have

described (the Mississippi drainage), and as much of it during its six

months of uninterrupted navigation as all of the trunk railways together

during the same time." "Every canal-boat," he added, "which comes to

Albany with an average cargo is more than the average of the New York

Central Railroad trains. In the busy canal season more than one hundred

and fifty such boats come daily to tide-water, and the New York Central

Railroad traffic never reaches thirty trains a day." Such a canal

traffic would make more than twenty miles of uninterrupted

railroad-cars, which could not, by any possibility, be handled by the

largest force of railroad employes with expedition or convenience. The

_furore_ which the steam-engine has excited and so long maintained in

the mechanical world is decidedly abating. Engineers are everywhere at

work studying the practicability of employing new forces. The solar

heat, the wind-power, the water-power of rivers, and even the tidal

energy of the sea, have been and are now being harnessed to the

machineries of Europe. These reservoirs of force are kept perennially

full by the sun and the moon, to whose action they are due, and at a

future period, when men have prodigally squandered their heritage of

coal and wood wealth, they will be invoked by the mechanic and

manufacturer to furnish their chief motive-power. As an economist of the

force-_capital_ deposited by the sun's influence in the bowels of the

earth during its carboniferous epoch, and as using, instead of it, the

force-_interest_ received annually from the sun through the medium of

rain and wind, the water-way will and must become one of the most

generally employed engines of the higher civilizations yet to be.

So long as the subject of trans-Alleghany water-communication was viewed

as one merely affecting individual States, it possessed no national

interest. But in its present aspect it is of vast moment, both national

and international. While many overcrowded portions of the Old World are

often confronted with both the spectre and the reality of gaunt famine,

and their breadless thousands are looking wistfully to the fresh and

prolific fields of the New, for relief, there are annually lost to the

country and the world vast stores of corn, which the Western farmers

cannot afford to send by railroad to the seaboard for foreign shipment,

and freely use as a substitute for fuel. This fact is suggestive and

significant. To understand its import we have only to look at the

geographical position of the West and the Mississippi Valley, isolated

in the heart of a continent.

There are three outlets for the commerce of these sections seeking New

York, the emporium of the New World, and the chief trans-Atlantic

markets: 1. By the Mississippi River to New Orleans, and thence by

transhipment to New York and Europe. 2. By the northern lakes to the St.

Lawrence Valley, or by the former to the Erie Canal. 3. By the costly

transportation of railroads over the Alleghanies or along the

lake-shores eastward.

[Illustration: THE CANAL BASIN AT LEXINGTON, VIRGINIA.]

The first of these routes is of course the longest, both in time and

distance. It takes the merchandise by an extensive detour, which, from

the mouth of the Ohio River, _via_ the Gulf, to New York, exceeds three

thousand miles. Although lying in the powerful current of the Gulf

Stream, which is a propelling force speeding forward the vessel that

trusts its warm, blue waters, this route is exposed to the most violent

cyclonic storms, and navigators shun and evade it during the equinoctial

or hurricane season. But, barring danger and distance, no country with

such an outlet to the sea as the Mississippi River affords can be

considered dependent upon any artificial communication. Notwithstanding

the objections which exist to this long route (which is both expensive

and long), its trade is rapidly increasing from the very exigencies of

the case. The introduction of the barge-system on the great Western

rivers has greatly facilitated and cheapened transportation. Steam-tugs,

carrying neither passengers nor freight, are substituted for the

steamboat. These tugs never stop except to coal and attach the barges,

already loaded before their arrival at a city, and proceed with great

despatch. Steaming steadily on, night and day, they make the trip from

St. Louis to New Orleans almost as quickly as the oft-detained

steamboat. The distance has been made between these cities by a tug,

with ten heavily-freighted barges, in six days. The tugs plying on the

Minnesota River carry with good speed barges containing thirty thousand

bushels of wheat, and the freight of a single trip would fill more than

eighty railroad-cars. This transportation is cheap, because the tugs

require less than one-fourth the expense for running and management

required by the steamboats. The carriage of grain from Minnesota to New

Orleans by this method costs no more than the freightage from the same

point to Chicago by rail. A boatload of wheat from St. Paul, taking the

river route, is not once handled until it is put aboard ship at the

Crescent City. The mighty energy of the North-west--"the Germany of

America," as it has been well called by Dr. Draper--has long since

discovered that the Mississippi is the best existing route to European

markets. Grain can be shipped by way of St. Louis and New Orleans to New

York and Europe twenty cents a bushel cheaper than it can be carried by

the other existing routes. As long ago as 1868 the Illinois Central

Railroad took hold of the West India and Southern trade through the

river route, and offered such commercial inducements to Western

importers that "Havana sends her products by this route to the

North-west, instead of by New York."[A] As the North-west expands and

multiplies in resources and population, it will be compelled to transact

its foreign and seaboard commerce through the noble navigable waters of

the Mississippi, unless it can obtain a short and cheap transportation

to New York by some trans-Alleghany water-line. In the event of the

North-western trade being diverted southward along the great natural

artery of the continent, where no tolls, no tariffs and no transhipments

are required, the loss will fall most heavily upon New York and the

seaboard marts. The increasing stream of South American commerce, in the

same event, must inevitably take the short, speedy and entirely

inexpensive route to the North-west (through the broad and free highway

of the "Father of Waters"), rather than encounter the delay, danger and

expense of the Gulf-Stream route to New York, and thence by rail or the

Lakes to its destination. The longer the present trade-status continues,

and the mammoth corporations of the railroads force the transportation

of the North-west, the West and the Mississippi Valley to take the river

and Gulf route to the sea, the greater and more fixed becomes the

diversion of this incalculable commerce from the great markets of the

Middle and Eastern States. So far, therefore, from the far West being at

the mercy of the East in this matter, the former has the advantage. The

East, rather than allow the present tendency of the commercial current

to set well in toward the Gulf, and wear a channel for itself, should

strain every nerve to keep it steadily moving toward its own maritime

cities. The great cities of the Atlantic seaboard can better afford to

construct a water-line over the mountains at their own cost than to run

the risk of the Mississippi River becoming the commercial avenue for its

vast valley and drainage, and thus bearing the golden stream away from

their harbors and streets.

The Utopian idea that Norfolk may become the rival of the great seaports

and centres of capital, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and Boston, is

without the field of discussion. It is not more possible than that a

magnetized knife-blade should exert a more powerful attraction than the

largest lodestone or the mightiest electro-magnet.

The Lake route from the Mississippi Valley to the East was made

continuous and complete by the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825. The

day of the old flat-boats had not then closed, and the application of

steam to river navigation was still in its infancy. The growth of the

West--which has always outstripped its internal improvements--like an

immense river long dammed up, bursting the barriers that confined it,

forced its way toward the sea. Although it was said at first that the

canal would never pay, "the opening of this work," as the Superintendent

of the Census says, "was an announcement of a new era in the internal

grain-trade of the United States. To the pioneer, the agriculturist and

the merchant the grand avenue developed a new world. From that period do

we date the rise and progress of the North-west." This splendid

structure is to-day the great artery of Eastern wealth; and but for the

fact that for six months in the year, when the vast sea of Western

commerce would seek an outlet through its banks to the East, it is

locked by ice, it would be widened into a ship-canal. It lies in the

very track of the great north-westerly winds, which descend with

torrential rush and polar cold over the Lakes, and thence through

Northern New York. Last year, as late as the third of March, when the

vegetation of the Middle States was beginning to spring forth in vernal

beauty, the whole of the lower Lake region and Western and Northern New

York were swept by these Arctic tempests; and this is the climatic rule

rather than an exceptional case. Even in the season of open water the

Lakes are exposed to the most violent storms, and within their narrow

shores hundreds of vessels are annually lost. The mariner overtaken by

what would be a moderate gale in a broad sea is in imminent peril for

want of sea-room; and in a snow-storm, however light--whose winds

elsewhere he would court to fill his sails and propel his craft--his

course is beset with danger and difficulty. For more than half the year

navigation is suspended by the thickening terrors of the tempest and the

accumulated obstacles of ice.[B] And yet, with all the obstacles which

impair the utility of the Lake route while it is in operation, the

volume of Western produce prefers it, or rather is forced by the

necessities of the case to employ it. And these necessities will

continue to increase. With the aid of all the railroads now or to be

constructed, the rapid expansion of Western commerce has distanced the

facilities of transport. The iron horse, as has been well said, has

always stimulated industry and production beyond his power to carry it.

It was the forcible remark of the English traveler Sir Morton Peto that

the American railroads from West to East were "choked with traffic." So

great is the inadequacy of all existing outlets for conveying the more

than Amazonian streams of trans-Alleghany merchandise that it has long

since become the interest of every great corporation, as well as of

every citizen of the country, to open for them new and national

highways.

From this digression, embracing facts and views which seemed essential

to an intelligent discussion of the main subject, we pass on to examine

the Appalachian outlet by which the great Western empire of America may

find its way to the sea. The bird's-eye view here presented will show

the Appalachian mountain-chain, and the waters which thread their way

along its gentle slopes eastward to the Atlantic basin and westward to

the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys. The Alleghanies bear a striking

geographic resemblance to the Highlands of Scotland, so famed in song

and story. Like the central Grampian Hills--those majestic buttresses in

whose recesses the old Caledonians found secure and impregnable asylums

from the Roman legions--except that they are richer in verdure and less

lofty, they form the grand natural rampart of the American Union. To use

the words of Lavallee, the French military historian and statistician,

"Mountains play the principal part in military operations: true ramparts

of states, they interrupt the development of strategic movements, and

render the greatest efforts necessary for their passage and possession.

They are the poetical part of the theatre of the art of war." If the day

ever comes, as come it may, when the kingly powers of the world combine

to crush the republican institutions of the United States, and swarm the

harbors and bays of our Atlantic seaboard with their allied navies, the

defiles of the Alleghanies will prove the Thermopylaes of the Union; and

against their eastern base the surging wave of invasion must be stayed,

if stayed at all. Like the Scottish peaks,

The grisly champions that guard

The infant rills of Highland Dee,

or the Spanish wall of the Pyrenean chain, on whose Sierras, in 1808,

Wellington's blazing lines of Torres Vedras arrested Massena's march,

the mountains that look out on our Atlantic sea-front must ever be of

the highest military importance.

To throw across their central ridges a great aqueduct is no mean

undertaking of merely local significance, but may take rank with the old

Roman aqueducts, with the magnificent roads constructed by Napoleon over

the Alps, and with the more modern and now triumphant tunnels through

Mont Cenis and the Hoosac Mountains, and the rapidly-progressing railway

over the Andes from Callao to the Amazon Valley.

The broad and national features of the proposed trans-Alleghany

water-way have so strongly commended themselves to President Grant that

in his last message he recommends preliminary Congressional action, and

in a more recent address to a number of distinguished visitors at the

Executive Mansion he used much stronger and bolder language in assuring

them that "he hoped Congress would give such encouragement to the

measure as to secure the completion of the canal." He has in these words

only repeated the sentiments of his illustrious predecessors, George

Washington and Thomas Jefferson, in behalf of the value of the work. We

have already alluded to Mr. Jefferson's early advocacy of a water-line

by the James and Kanawha Rivers. The first idea of this enterprise seems

to have been suggested to Washington as early as the year 1753, after

his celebrated trip from Jamestown to Fort Duquesne as an envoy of

Governor Dinwiddie. At the close of the Revolutionary war he made an

arduous and personal exploration of the country for many hundred miles.

He kept a journal in which were minutely recorded his conversations with

all intelligent persons he met respecting the facilities for internal

navigation afforded by the rivers rising in the Alleghany Mountains and

flowing either east or west. Returning to Mount Vernon October 4, 1784,

he wrote, as the result of his observations, to the then governor of

Virginia, the father of William Henry Harrison: "I shall take the

liberty now, my dear sir, to suggest a matter which would (if I am not

too short-sighted a politician) mark your administration as an important

era in the annals of this country. It has been my decided opinion that

the _shortest_, _easiest_ and _least expensive_ communication with the

invaluable and extensive country back of us would be by one or both of

the rivers of this State which have their sources in the Appalachian

Mountains." General Washington, on the 26th of August, 1785, became the

first president of the company authorized by the legislation which he

had suggested previously to Governor Harrison. It is well known that the

same views entertained by Washington and Jefferson were held and

advocated by Mr. Madison, long before the most prescient statesman could

descry the faintest image of that colossal empire of population, wealth

and rapid development now lying west of the Alleghanies.

For the great future water-ways which are needed for the Western, the

North-western and the Mississippi Valley trade there are several routes

that have been demonstrated to be practicable. One of these is by a

projected canal to connect the Coosa River with the Alabama River, and

thence following that stream to the Gulf of Mexico. This, if ever

carried out, as eventually it is probable will be the case, would avoid

the bars and dangers of the navigation of the lower Mississippi, and in

a measure obviate the necessity of the proposed sub-canals in Louisiana

and other engineering expedients to remove or turn the very serious

river-obstacles to an outlet south of New Orleans. Another proposal is

to connect the Ohio and Tennessee Rivers, and to run a canal from the

latter to the Ocmulgee or Savannah River, and thence by the use of slack

water to reach the harbors of Savannah and Charleston. This scheme has

been clearly proved to be feasible, although the distance seems

objectionable. The third (or central) water-line proposed is that so

long agitated since the beginning of the present century, so often

surveyed and re-surveyed by the most eminent engineers, and not long

since by the United States Engineer Corps under the direction of General

A. A. Humphreys, the chief engineer of the United States army. It is the

shortest and most direct line, and has the advantage that it is, as we

have seen, already nearly half completed, from the head of tide-water on

the James River, above Lexington, to Buchanan, near the summit-level of

the mountains. The engineers who have reported upon it--among whom are

the late Colonel E. Lorraine, Benjamin H. Latrobe, Esq., and other

eminent engineers--estimate that the largest sum required for its

completion to the Kanawha River is $37,364,000, and the length of time

required four years. "Of this large sum, however," they say, "it can be

clearly shown that there will be no need of any other advance by

government than the interest which will accumulate while the work is in

progress, which, by issuing the bonds every six months, as required,

will not reach the sum of _six million dollars. And this is every cent

that will ever be required to be advanced_. Should the government

undertake to make the work a fine one, it will of course cost the whole

amount estimated, but this would be more than made up by its increased

benefits to the whole country.

"The work when completed, even at a low rate of tolls--not over about

half the rate charged on the Erie Canal--will return the advance, pay

the interest and redeem the principal in less than twenty years.

[Illustration: BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF THE TRANS-ALLEGHANY WATER-LINE.]

"In considering this question we are not left to mere conjecture. The

wonderful history of the Erie Canal, and a comparison of the

circumstances connected with the operations of that great work with

those under which this enterprise will be inaugurated and accompanied,

furnish sufficient data for reliable conclusions."

When we consider that the Erie Canal, though frozen up and useless for

half the year, has not only long since paid for its construction out of

its tolls, but makes a present of itself to the State, with _about

thirty millions of dollars_ of net profit, and that it does more than

five times the business of the great New York Central Railroad,

transporting annually over five million tons of cargo (which exceeds the

total foreign commerce of New York City), and yet is "choked" and gorged

with freight, the close figuring of the engineers does not appear to be

questionable.

The immense saving in the cost of water-carriage as compared with that

of railway-transportation is hardly conceived by the public mind. Many

of the railroads carry produce at very low and reasonable rates, but

they cannot afford to take it at much if any less than _three times the

amount_ charged by the canals. It appears from the report of the New

York State Engineer for 1868 that the average receipts per ton per mile

on the New York Central Railroad and the Erie Railway was 2.92 cents and

2.42 cents respectively; while on the New York State canals it was 1

cent only, tolls included. But a trans-Alleghany canal would, after

getting fully into operation, be able to transport produce more cheaply

than the New York canals, which are frozen over about five months of the

year, and during the very period when the great tide of Western

freightage and the ingathered crops is pressing most heavily for an

outlet to the East.[C] There are many products of the West and the

Mississippi Valley that will not bear the cost of transportation to the

Eastern cities, either by rail, Gulf or Lake route, because they would

consume _in transitu_ for freight between sixty and seventy per cent. of

their market value in Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore.

These views have been ably and earnestly pressed time and again upon

Congress by Eastern and Western statesmen, merchants and citizens of all

classes, by the press of all parties, and by the boards of trade and

commercial conventions. The surveys cover every foot of the proposed

James River Canal extension to the Ohio Valley, which, by general

consent, seems to be regarded as the most eligible because it is the

most direct central route, and because the State of Virginia has most

munificently offered to remand the half-completed work to the general

government on the sole condition of its _nationalization_.

If, as history has always testified, it be true that

Mountains interposed

Make enemies of nations, which had else,

Like kindred drops, been mingled into one,

it would be difficult, as it is unnecessary, even to attempt to form an

adequate estimate of this great trans-Alleghany highway as a benign and

powerful agent in the political reconstruction and moral unification of

the American States.

After leaving Buchanan, the proposed route for the extension of the

James River and Kanawha Canal runs westward to the mouth of Fork Run, a

small mountain-river, and ascends that stream to the summit-level,

seventeen hundred feet above tide-water. It then pierces the main range

of the Alleghanies, passing under Tuckahoe and Katis Mountains by a

tunnel nearly eight miles long, and emerges into the valley of the

Greenbrier River on the western mountain-slope. Its water-line pursues

its course by slack-water navigation down the Greenbrier to New River,

and down New River to Lyken's Shoals on the Kanawha, eighty-five miles

above its mouth. The last distance of eighty-five miles will be

traversed by open navigation, as the Kanawha Valley permits it. Major W.

B. Craighill of the Engineer Corps, in his able report to General A. A.

Humphreys on this central water-line, says: "The recent completion of

the Mont Cenis Tunnel in Europe, and the rapid progress made with the

Hoosac Tunnel in this country, with the experience gained in these

works, and the improved facilities daily coming into use for carrying on

such operations, induce us to approach such an undertaking as the

Lorraine tunnel not only without apprehension of failure, but with a

feeling of assured certainty of success. It is no longer an

extraordinary, but an ordinary, undertaking."

The practical capacity of the water-line when completed will be of

almost unlimited extent, while the canal proper with its locks will have

a capacity of from fifteen to twenty millions of tons annually. In the

fall and early winter, after the harvests are over, and during the very

season that the highway is most needed, and when the northern routes are

blocked by ice, this trans-Alleghany water-way will be open.

The local trade in its path would alone justify its construction. It

will penetrate the finest mineral lands of Virginia and West Virginia,

which have been so long locked up from the world. The great Kanawha

coal-fields and iron- and salt-mines are unsurpassed by any now known in

any part of the globe. In the large demand from England and Europe for

coal, which is finding expression in the large orders sent to

Philadelphia and Baltimore for Pennsylvania and Maryland coal,[D] there

is the best possible evidence that the local trade of the national canal

would be enormous. So highly thought of is the Kanawha cannel coal that

it is now shipped down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans,

and sent thence by sea to New York, where it brings per ton about three

times the price of anthracite in that market. It is equal to the best

English and Nova Scotia cannel, while the Kanawha bituminous and splint

coals are unsurpassed by any others. The veins lie horizontally, and

vary from three to fifteen feet in thickness, the aggregate thickness of

the various strata amounting in some localities to forty or fifty feet

of the solid carbon.

But, great as are the local interests and the trade of the water-line,

they are entirely lost sight of in the national aspect of the question.

The population now demanding a direct and central highway for its great

inland commerce, according to the best estimates (those of Poor), cannot

fall short of fifteen millions, and most probably exceeds that number.

It is now conclusively established that the centre of gravity of our

national population has crossed the Appalachian chain. Professor Hilgard

of the Coast Survey prepared a year ago, at the request of the Hon. J.

A. Garfield of Ohio, a series of calculations to ascertain this centre

of gravity by the four last censuses. Supposing a plane of the exact

shape and size of the United States, exclusive of Alaska, loaded with

the actual population, he determined the points on which it would

balance. In the recently-published words[E] of Mr. Garfield we give the

following results of Professor Hilgard's calculations: By this process

he found that in 1840 the centre of gravity of the population was at a

point in Virginia near the eastern foot of the Appalachian chain, and

near the parallel of 39 deg. N. latitude. In 1850 this centre had moved

westward fifty-seven miles across the mountains, to a point nearly south

of Parkersburg, Virginia. In 1860 it had moved westward eighty-two

miles, to a point nearly south of Chillicothe, Ohio. In 1870 it had

reached a point near Wilmington, Clinton county, Ohio, about forty-five

miles north-east of Cincinnati. In no case had it widely departed from

the thirty-ninth parallel. If the same rate be maintained during the

next three decades, which I doubt, it will fall in the neighborhood of

Bloomington, Indiana, by 1900. Professor Hilgard also found that a line

drawn from Lake Erie, at the north-eastern corner of Ohio, to Pensacola

in Florida, would divide the population of the United States, as it

stood in 1870, into two equal parts. This line is nearly parallel to the

line of the Atlantic coast. From these calculations it will appear that

both the "centre of gravity" and the line that divides the population in

half are more than one hundred and fifty miles west of the Appalachian

chain.

If these computations be correct, Poor's figures are too low by two or

three millions at least. But, apart from the demand for an

inter-continental canal by the population on the west of the Appalachian

chain, the seaboard States and cities east of the Appalachians are, as

we have already shown, as profoundly interested in such a national cheap

thoroughfare as is the former section. Careful estimates have shown that

the surplus produce[F] of the trans-Alleghany sections and the

Mississippi Valley cannot be less than twenty-five million tons; and

this would immediately seek an outlet through the Virginia water-line

to the sea. The saving that would result to the West and to the whole

country would be enormous; and at a very moderate calculation the amount

would be an average of two dollars per ton on the river route, _via_ New

Orleans, and ten dollars per ton over the railroad routes. The

completion of a comparatively short canal of eighty miles, to cover the

gap from Buchanan to the upper Kanawha, would without the shadow of

exaggeration save the West forty millions of dollars a year; and the

central water-line would yield an interest of ten to fifteen per cent.

on the capital invested, while opening a continuous water-road from

Liverpool to Omaha, running nearly due west, fifty-nine hundred miles in

length! By reducing the freights on the other present thoroughfares

through the influence of wholesome competition, it would perhaps at once

lessen the cost of inland transportation by nearly one hundred millions

of dollars annually!

These considerations, and the added fact that for many years the

chambers of commerce of the great Western cities, the many commercial

conventions that have met, and the legislatures of the States bordering

on the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, have earnestly and unanimously

memorialized Congress in behalf of the completion of this great

inter-continental highway, fully establish the _national_ character of

the measure now pending in the national councils.

THOMPSON B. MAURY.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] New York _Times_.

[B] From the 3d to the 6th of March, last year, the thermometer at

Rochester was several degrees _below zero_; at Troy, New York, on the

5th it stood at -14 deg. (_below zero_); at Ogdensburg, New York, at -32 deg.

(_below zero_); at Watertown, New York, -34 deg. (_below zero_)! These

intense colds recur as late as April.

[C] The average of twenty years shows that the James River and Kanawha

Canal was closed annually by ice only fifteen days; the longest period

in any one year was fifty-six days.

[D] A single English order for Cumberland coal, to be shipped by a

Baltimore dealer last December, was for three hundred thousand tons.

[E] New York _Nation_, December 19, 1872.

[F] Last year's grain-yield in the Mississippi Valley was one billion

and thirty-six millions of bushels. In many parts of the West, for want

of transportation, corn is now sold for as little as eighteen and twenty

cents per bushel, and the husks are worth, for fuel, nearly as much as

the grain. One of the great newspapers of the West, the Chicago

_Inter-Ocean_ (January 8th) in discussing editorially "The Reason

Farming does not Pay" in that country, forcibly says: "A charge of

thirty cents per bushel for the carriage of corn, when the freight

should be only fifteen cents, absorbs _one-half the value of the crop_;

and this process, repeated from year to year during the whole period of

a decade, exhausts what would otherwise become the surplus of the

farmer, and finally impoverishes the entire agricultural community."

A PRINCESS OF THULE.

BY WILLIAM BLACK, AUTHOR OF "THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF A PHAETON."

CHAPTER I.

"LOCHABER NO MORE."

On a small headland of the distant island of Lewis an old man stood

looking out on a desolate waste of rain-beaten sea. It was a wild and a

wet day. From out of the louring south-west fierce gusts of wind were

driving up volumes and flying rags of clouds, and sweeping onward at the

same time the gathering waves that fell hissing and thundering on the

shore. Far as the eye could reach the sea and the air and the sky seemed

to be one indistinguishable mass of whirling and hurrying vapor, as if

beyond this point there were no more land, but only wind and water, and

the confused and awful voices of their strife.

The short, thick-set, powerfully-built man who stood on this solitary

point paid little attention to the rain that ran off the peak of his

sailor's cap or to the gusts of wind that blew about his bushy gray

beard. He was still following, with an eye accustomed to pick out

objects far at sea, one speck of purple that was now fading into the

gray mist of the rain; and the longer he looked the less it became,

until the mingled sea and sky showed only the smoke that the great

steamer left in its wake. As he stood there, motionless and regardless

of everything around him, did he cling to the fancy that he could still

trace out the path of the vanished ship? A little while before it had

passed almost close to him. He had watched it steam out of Stornoway

harbor. As the sound of the engines came nearer and the big boat went

by, so that he could have almost called to it, there was no sign of

emotion on the hard and stern face, except, perhaps, that the lips were

held firm and a sort of frown appeared over the eyes. He saw a tiny

white handkerchief being waved to him from the deck of the vessel; and

he said, almost as though he were addressing some one there, "My good

little girl!"

But in the midst of that roaring of the sea and the wind how could any

such message be delivered? And already the steamer was away from the

land, standing out to the lonely plain of waters, and the sound of the

engines had ceased, and the figures on the deck had grown faint and

visionary. But still there was that one speck of white visible; and the

man knew that a pair of eyes that had many a time looked into his

own--as if with a faith that such intercommunion could never be

broken--were now trying, through overflowing and blinding tears, to send

him a last look of farewell.

The gray mists of the rain gathered within their folds the big vessel

and all the beating hearts it contained, and the fluttering of that

little token disappeared with it. All that remained was the sea,

whitened by the rushing of the wind and the thunder of waves on the

beach. The man, who had been gazing so long down into the south-east,

turned his face landward, and set out to walk over a tract of wet grass

and sand toward a road that ran near by. There was a large wagonette of

varnished oak and a pair of small, powerful horses waiting for him

there; and having dismissed the boy who had been in charge, he took the

reins and got up. But even yet the fascination of the sea and of that

sad farewell was upon him, and he turned once more, as if, now that

sight could yield him no further tidings, he would send her one more

word of good-bye. "My poor little Sheila!" That was all he said; and

then he turned to the horses and sent them on, with his head down to

escape the rain, and a look on his face like that of a dead man.

As he drove through the town of Stornoway the children playing within

the shelter of the cottage doors called to each other in a whisper, and

said, "That is the King of Borva."

But the elderly people said to each other, with a shake of the head, "It

iss a bad day, this day, for Mr. Mackenzie, that he will be going home

to an empty house. And it will be a ferry bad thing for the poor folk of

Borva, and they will know a great difference, now that Miss Sheila iss

gone away, and there iss nobody--not anybody at all--left in the island

to tek the side o' the poor folk."

He looked neither to the right nor to the left, though he was known to

many of the people, as he drove away from the town into the heart of the

lonely and desolate land. The wind had so far died down, and the rain

had considerably lessened, but the gloom of the sky was deepened by the

drawing on of the afternoon, and lay heavily over the deary wastes of

moor and hill. What a wild and dismal country was this which lay before

and all around him, now that the last traces of human occupation were

passed! There was not a cottage, not a stone wall, not a fence, to break

the monotony of the long undulations of moorland, which in the distance

rose into a series of hills that were black under the darkened sky. Down

from those mountains, ages ago, glaciers had slowly crept to eat out

hollows in the plains below; and now in those hollows were lonely lakes,

with not a tree to break the line of their melancholy shores. Everywhere

around were the traces of the glacier-drift--great gray boulders of

gneiss fixed fast into the black peat-moss or set amid the browns and

greens of the heather. The only sound to be heard in this wilderness of

rock and morass was the rushing of various streams, rain-swollen and

turbid, that plunged down their narrow channels to the sea.

The rain now ceased altogether, but the mountains in the far south had

grown still darker, and to the fisherman passing by the coast it must

have seemed as though the black peaks were holding converse with the

louring clouds, and that the silent moorland beneath was waiting for the

first roll of the thunder. The man who was driving along this lonely

route sometimes cast a glance down toward this threatening of a storm,

but he paid little heed to it. The reins lay loose on the backs of the

horses, and at their own pace they followed, hour after hour, the rising

and falling road that led through the moorland and past the gloomy

lakes. He may have recalled mechanically the names of those stretches of

water--the Lake of the Sheiling, the Lake of the Oars, the Lake of the

Fine Sand, and so forth--to measure the distance he had traversed; but

he seemed to pay little attention to the objects around him, and it was

with a glance of something like surprise that he suddenly found himself

overlooking that great sea-loch on the western side of the island in

which was his home.

He drove down the hill to the solitary little inn of Garra-na-hina. At

the door, muffled up in a warm woolen plaid, stood a young girl,

fair-haired, blue-eyed, and diffident in look.

"Mr. Mackenzie," she said, with that peculiar and pleasant intonation

that marks the speech of the Hebridean who has been taught English in

the schools, "it wass Miss Sheila wrote to me to Suainabost, and she

said I might come down from Suainabost and see if I can be of any help

to you in the house."

The girl was crying, although the blue eyes looked bravely through the

tears as if to disprove the fact.

"Ay, my good lass," he said, putting his hand gently on her head, "and

it wass Sheila wrote to you?"

"Yes, sir, and I hef come down from Suainabost."

"It is a lonely house you will be going to," he said absently.

"But Miss Sheila said I wass--I wass to--" But here the young girl

failed in her effort to explain that Miss Sheila had asked her to go

down to make the house less lonely. The elderly man in the wagonette

seemed scarcely to notice that she was crying: he bade her come up

beside him; and when he had got her into the wagonette he left some

message with the innkeeper, who had come to the door, and drove off

again.

They drove along the high land that overlooks a portion of Loch Roag,

with its wonderful network of islands and straits, and then they stopped

on the lofty plateau of Callernish, where there was a man waiting to

take the wagonette and horses.

"And you would be seeing Miss Sheila away, sir?" said the man; "and it

wass Duncan Macdonald will say that she will not come back no more to

Borva."

The old man with the big gray beard only frowned and passed on. He and

the girl made their way down the side of the rocky hill to the shore,

and here there was an open boat awaiting them. When they approached, a

man considerably over six feet in height, keen-faced, gray-eyed,

straight-limbed and sinewy in frame, jumped into the big and rough boat

and began to get ready for their departure. There was just enough wind

to catch the brown mainsail, and the King of Borva took the tiller, his

henchman sitting down by the mast. And no sooner had they left the shore

and stood out toward one of the channels of this arm of the sea, than

the tall, spare keeper began to talk of that which made his master's eye

grow dark. "Ah, well," he said, in the plaintive drawling of his race,

"and it iss an empty house you will be going to, Mr. Mackenzie; and it

iss a bad thing for us all that Miss Sheila hass gone away; and it iss

many's ta time she will hef been wis me in this very boat--"

"---- ---- ---- ---- you, Duncan Macdonald!" cried Mackenzie, in an

access of fury, "what will you talk of like that? It iss every man,

woman and child on the island will talk of nothing but Sheila! I will

drive my foot through the bottom of the boat if you do not hold your

peace!"

The tall gillie patiently waited until his master had exhausted his

passion, and then he said, as if nothing had occurred, "And it will not

do much good, Mr. Mackenzie, to tek ta name o' God in vain; and there

will be ferry much more of that now since Miss Sheila iss gone away, and

there will be much more of trinking in ta island, and it will be a great

difference, mirover. And she will be so far away that no one will see

her no more--far away beyond ta Sound of Sleat, and far away beyond

Oban, as I hef heard people say. And what will she do in London, when

she has no boat at all, and she will never go out to ta fishing? And I

will hear people say that you will walk a whole day and never come to ta

sea, and what will Miss Sheila do for that? And she will tame no more o'

ta wild-ducks' young things, and she will find out no more o' ta nests

in the rocks, and she will hef no more horns when the deer is killed,

and she will go out no more to see ta cattle swim across Loch Roag when

they go to ta sheilings. It will be all different, all different, now;

and she will never see us no more. And it iss as bad as if you wass a

poor man, Mr. Mackenzie, and had to let your sons and your daughters go

away to America, and never come back no more. And she ta only one in

your house! And it wass the son o' Mr. Macintyre of Sutherland he would

hef married her, and come to live on ta island, and not hef Miss Sheila

go away among strangers that doesna ken her family, and will put no

store by her, no more than if she wass a fisherman's lass. It wass Miss

Sheila herself had a sore heart tis morning when she went away; and she

turned and she looked at Borva as the boat came away, and I said, Tis

iss the last time Miss Sheila will be in her boat, and she will not come

no more again to Borva."

Mr. Mackenzie heard not one word or syllable of all this. The dead,

passionless look had fallen over the powerful features, and the deep-set

eyes were gazing, not on the actual Loch Roag before them, but on the

stormy sea that lies between Lewis and Skye, and on a vessel

disappearing in the midst of the rain. It was by a sort of instinct that

he guided this open boat through the channels, which were now getting

broader as they neared the sea, and the tall and grave-faced keeper

might have kept up his garrulous talk for hours without attracting a

look or a word.

It was now the dusk of the evening, and wild and strange indeed was the

scene around the solitary boat as it slowly moved along. Large

islands--so large that any one of them might have been mistaken for the

mainland--lay over the dark waters of the sea, remote, untenanted and

silent. There were no white cottages along these rocky shores; only a

succession of rugged cliffs and sandy bays, but half mirrored in the

sombre water below. Down in the south the mighty shoulders and peaks of

Suainabhal and its sister mountains were still darker than the darkening

sky; and when at length the boat had got well out from the network of

islands and fronted the broad waters of the Atlantic, the great plain of

the western sea seemed already to have drawn around it the solemn mantle

of the night.

"Will you go to Borvabost, Mr. Mackenzie, or will we run her into your

own house?" asked Duncan--Borvabost being the name of the chief village

on the island.

"I will not go on to Borvabost," said the old man peevishly. "Will they

not have plenty to talk about at Borvabost?"

"And it iss no harm tat ta folk will speak of Miss Sheila," said the

gillie with some show of resentment: "it iss no harm tey will be sorry

she is gone away--no harm at all, for it wass many things tey had to

thank Miss Sheila for; and now it will be all ferry different--"

"I tell you, Duncan Macdonald, to hold your peace!" said the old man,

with a savage glare of the deep-set eyes; and then Duncan relapsed into

a sulky silence and the boat held on its way.

In the gathering twilight a long gray curve of sand became visible, and

into the bay thus indicated Mackenzie turned his small craft. This

indentation of the island seemed as blank of human occupation as the

various points and bays they had passed, but as they neared the shore a

house came into sight, about half-way up the slope rising from the sea

to the pasture-land above. There was a small stone pier jutting out at

one portion of the bay, where a mass of rocks was imbedded in the white

sand; and here at length the boat was run in, and Mackenzie helped the

young girl ashore.

The two of them, leaving the gillie to moor the little vessel that had

brought them from Callernish, went silently toward the shore, and up the

narrow road leading to the house. It was a square, two-storied

substantial building of stone, but the stone had been liberally oiled to

keep out the wet, and the blackness thus produced had not a very

cheerful look. Then, on this particular evening the scant bushes

surrounding the house hung limp and dark in the rain, and amid the

prevailing hues of purple, blue-green and blue the bit of scarlet coping

running round the black house was wholly ineffective in relieving the

general impression of dreariness and desolation.

The King of Borva walked into a large room, which was but partially lit

by two candles on the table and by the blaze of a mass of peats in the

stone fireplace, and threw himself into a big easy-chair. Then he

suddenly seemed to recollect his companion, who was timidly standing

near the door, with her shawl still round her head.

"Mairi," he said, "go and ask them to give you some dry clothes. Your

box it will not be here for half an hour yet." Then he turned to the

fire.

"But you yourself, Mr. Mackenzie, you will be ferry wet--"

"Never mind me, my lass: go and get yourself dried."

"But it wass Miss Sheila," began the girl diffidently--"it wass Miss

Sheila asked me--she asked me to look after you, sir--"

With that he rose abruptly, and advanced to her and caught her by the

wrist. He spoke quite quietly to her, but the girl's eyes, looking up at

the stern face, were a trifle frightened.

"You are a ferry good little girl, Mairi," he said slowly, "and you will

mind what I say to you. You will do what you like in the house, you will

take Sheila's place as much as you like, but you will mind this--not to

mention her name, not once. Now go away, Mairi, and find Scarlett

Macdonald, and she will give you some dry clothes; and you will tell her

to send Duncan down to Borvabost, and bring up John the Piper and

Alister-nan-Each, and the lads of the _Nighean dubh_, if they are not

gone home to Habost yet. But it iss John the Piper must come directly."

The girl went away to seek counsel of Scarlett Macdonald, Duncan's wife,

and Mr. Mackenzie proceeded to walk up and down the big and half-lit

chamber. Then he went to a cupboard, and put out on the table a number

of tumblers and glasses, with two or three odd-looking bottles of

Norwegian make, consisting of four semicircular tubes of glass meeting

at top and bottom, leaving the centre of the vessel thus formed open. He

stirred up the blazing peats in the fireplace. He brought down from a

shelf a box filled with coarse tobacco, and put it on the table. But he

was evidently growing impatient, and at last he put on his cap again and

went out into the night.

The air blew cold in from the sea, and whistled through the bushes that

Sheila had trained about the porch. There was no rain now, but a great

and heavy darkness brooded overhead, and in the silence he could hear

the breaking of the waves along the hard coast. But what was this other

sound he heard, wild and strange in the stillness of the night--a shrill

and plaintive cry that the distance softened until it almost seemed to

be the calling of a human voice? Surely those were words that he heard,

or was it only that the old, sad air spoke to him?--

For Lochaber no more, Lochaber no more,

Maybe to return to Lochaber no more.

That was the message that came to him out of the darkness, and it seemed

to him as if the sea and the night and the sky were wailing over the

loss of his Sheila. He walked away from the house and up the hill

behind. Led by the sound of the pipes, that grew louder and more

unearthly as he approached, he found himself at length on a bit of high

table-land overlooking the sea, where Sheila had had a rude bench of

iron and wood fixed into the rock. On this bench sat a little old man,

humpbacked and bent, and with long white hair falling down to his

shoulders. He was playing the pipes--not wildly and fiercely, as if he

were at a drinking-bout of the lads come home from the Caithness

fishing, nor yet gayly and proudly, as if he were marching at the head

of a bridal-procession, but slowly, mournfully, monotonously, as though

he were having the pipes talk to him.

Mackenzie touched him on the shoulder, and the old man started. "Is it

you, Mr. Mackenzie?" he said in Gaelic. "It is a great fright you have

given me."

"Come down to the house, John. The lads from Habost and Alister, and

some more will be coming; and you will get a ferry good dram, John, to

put wind in the pipes."

"It is no dram I am thinking of, Mr. Mackenzie," said the old man. "And

you will have plenty of company without me. But I will come down to the

house, Mr. Mackenzie--oh yes, I will come down to the house--but _in a

little while_ I will come to the house."

Mackenzie turned from him with a petulant exclamation, and went along

and down the hill rapidly, as he could hear voices in the darkness. He

had just got into the house when his visitors arrived. The door of the

room was opened, and there appeared some six or eight tall and stalwart

men, mostly with profuse brown beards and weatherbeaten faces, who

advanced into the chamber with some show of shyness. Mackenzie offered

them a rough and hearty welcome, and as soon as their eyes had got

accustomed to the light bade them help themselves to the whisky on the

table. With a certain solemnity each poured out a glass and drank

"_Shlainte!_" to his host as if it were some funeral rite. But when he

bade them replenish their glasses, and got them seated with their faces

to the blaze of the peats, then the flood of Gaelic broke loose. Had the

wise little girl from Suainabost warned these big men? There was not a

word about Sheila uttered. All their talk was of the reports that had

come from Caithness, and of the improvements of the small harbor near

the Butt, and of the black sea-horse that had been seen in Loch

Suainabhal, and of some more sheep having been found dead on the Pladda

Isles, shot by the men of the English smacks. Pipes were lit, the peats

stirred up anew, another glass or two of whisky drunk, and then, through

the haze of the smoke, the browned faces of the men could be seen in

eager controversy, each talking faster than the other, and comparing

facts and fancies that had been brooded over through solitary nights of

waiting on the sea. Mackenzie did not sit down with them: he did not

even join them in their attention to the curious whisky-flasks. He paced

up and down the opposite side of the room, occasionally being appealed

to with a story or a question, and showing by his answers that he was

but vaguely hearing the vociferous talk of his companions. At last he

said, "Why the teffle does not John the Piper come? Here, you men--you

sing a song, quick! None of your funeral songs, but a good brisk one of

trinking and fighting."

But were not nearly all their songs--like those of all dwellers on a

rocky and dangerous coast--of a sad and sombre hue, telling of maidens

whose lovers were drowned, and of wives bidding farewell to husbands

they were never to see again? Slow and mournful are the songs that the

northern fishermen sing as they set out in the evening, with the

creaking of their long oars keeping time to the music, until they get

out beyond the shore to hoist the red mainsail and catch the breeze

blowing over from the regions of the sunset. Not one of these Habost

fishermen could sing a brisk song, but the nearest approach to it was a

ballad in praise of a dark-haired girl, which they, owning the _Nighean

dubh_, were bound to know. And so one young fellow began to sing, "Mo

Nighean dubh d'fhas boidheach dubh, mo Nighean dubh na treig mi,"[G] in

a slow and doleful fashion, and the others joined in the chorus with a

like solemnity. In order to keep time, four of the men followed the

common custom of taking a pocket handkerchief (in this case an immense

piece of brilliant red silk, which was evidently the pride of its owner)

and holding it by the four corners, letting it slowly rise and fall as

they sang. The other three men laid hold of a bit of rope, which they

used for the same purpose. "Mo Nighean dubh," unlike most of the Gaelic

songs, has but a few verses; and as soon as they were finished the young

fellow, who seemed pleased with his performances, started another

ballad. Perhaps he had forgotten his host's injunction, perhaps he knew

no merrier song, but at any rate he began to sing the "Lament of

Monaltrie." It was one of Sheila's songs. She had sung it the night

before in this very room, and her father had listened to her describing

the fate of young Monaltrie as if she had been foretelling her own, and

scarcely dared to ask himself if ever again he should hear the voice

that he loved so well. He could not listen to the song. He abruptly left

the room, and went out once more into the cool night-air and the

darkness. But even here he was not allowed to forget the sorrow he had

been vainly endeavoring to banish, for in the far distance the pipes

still played the melancholy wail of Lochaber.

Lochaber no more! Lochaber no more!

--that was the only solace brought him by the winds from the sea; and

there were tears running down the hard gray face as he said to himself,

in a broken voice, "Sheila, my little girl, why did you go away from

Borva?"