III

[The Professor talks with the Reader. He tells a Young Girl's Story.]

When the elements that went to the making of the first man, father of

mankind, had been withdrawn from the world of unconscious matter, the

balance of creation was disturbed. The materials that go to the making

of one woman were set free by the abstraction from inanimate nature of

one man's-worth of masculine constituents. These combined to make our

first mother, by a logical necessity involved in the previous creation

of our common father. All this, mythically, illustratively, and by no

means doctrinally or polemically.

The man implies the woman, you will understand. The excellent gentleman

whom I had the pleasure of setting right in a trifling matter a few

weeks ago believes in the frequent occurrence of miracles at the present

day. So do I. I believe, if you could find an uninhabited coral-reef

island, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, with plenty of cocoa-palms

and bread-fruit on it, and put a handsome young fellow, like our

Marylander, ashore upon it, if you touched there a year afterwards, you

would find him walking under the palm-trees arm in arm with a pretty

woman.

Where would she come from?

Oh, that 's the miracle!

--I was just as certain, when I saw that fine, high-colored youth at

the upper right-hand corner of our table, that there would appear some

fitting feminine counterpart to him, as if I had been a clairvoyant,

seeing it all beforehand.

--I have a fancy that those Marylanders are just about near enough to

the sun to ripen well.--How some of us fellows remember Joe and Harry,

Baltimoreans, both! Joe, with his cheeks like lady-apples, and his eyes

like black-heart cherries, and his teeth like the whiteness of the

flesh of cocoanuts, and his laugh that set the chandelier-drops rattling

overhead, as we sat at our sparkling banquets in those gay times!

Harry, champion, by acclamation, of the college heavy-weights,

broad-shouldered, bull-necked, square-jawed, six feet and trimmings,

a little science, lots of pluck, good-natured as a steer in peace,

formidable as a red-eyed bison in the crack of hand-to-hand battle! Who

forgets the great muster-day, and the collision of the classic with the

democratic forces? The huge butcher, fifteen stone,--two hundred and ten

pounds,--good weight,--steps out like Telamonian Ajax, defiant. No words

from Harry, the Baltimorean,--one of the quiet sort, who strike first;

and do the talking, if there is any, afterwards. No words, but, in the

place thereof, a clean, straight, hard hit, which took effect with a

spank like the explosion of a percussion-cap, knocking the slayer of

beeves down a sand-bank,--followed, alas! by the too impetuous youth,

so that both rolled down together, and the conflict terminated in one of

those inglorious and inevitable Yankee clinches, followed by a general

melee, which make our native fistic encounters so different from such

admirably-ordered contests as that which I once saw at an English fair,

where everything was done decently and in order; and the fight began and

ended with such grave propriety, that a sporting parson need hardly have

hesitated to open it with a devout petition, and, after it was over,

dismiss the ring with a benediction.

I can't help telling one more story about this great field-day, though

it is the most wanton and irrelevant digression. But all of us have a

little speck of fight underneath our peace and good-will to men, just

a speck, for revolutions and great emergencies, you know,--so that we

should not submit to be trodden quite flat by the first heavy-heeled

aggressor that came along. You can tell a portrait from an ideal head,

I suppose, and a true story from one spun out of the writer's invention.

See whether this sounds true or not.

Admiral Sir Isaac Coffin sent out two fine blood-horses, Barefoot and

Serab by name, to Massachusetts, something before the time I am talking

of. With them came a Yorkshire groom, a stocky little fellow, in velvet

breeches, who made that mysterious hissing noise, traditionary in

English stables, when he rubbed down the silken-skinned racers, in great

perfection. After the soldiers had come from the muster-field, and

some of the companies were on the village-common, there was still some

skirmishing between a few individuals who had not had the fight taken

out of them. The little Yorkshire groom thought he must serve out

somebody. So he threw himself into an approved scientific attitude, and,

in brief, emphatic language, expressed his urgent anxiety to accommodate

any classical young gentleman who chose to consider himself a candidate

for his attentions. I don't suppose there were many of the college boys

that would have been a match for him in the art which Englishmen know

so much more of than Americans, for the most part. However, one of the

Sophomores, a very quiet, peaceable fellow, just stepped out of the

crowd, and, running straight at the groom, as he stood there, sparring

away, struck him with the sole of his foot, a straight blow, as if it

had been with his fist, and knocked him heels over head and senseless,

so that he had to be carried off from the field. This ugly way of

hitting is the great trick of the French gavate, which is not commonly

thought able to stand its ground against English pugilistic science.

These are old recollections, with not much to recommend them, except,

perhaps, a dash of life, which may be worth a little something.

The young Marylander brought them all up, you may remember. He recalled

to my mind those two splendid pieces of vitality I told you of. Both

have been long dead. How often we see these great red-flaring flambeaux

of life blown out, as it were, by a puff of wind,--and the little,

single-wicked night-lamp of being, which some white-faced and attenuated

invalid shades with trembling fingers, flickering on while they go out

one after another, until its glimmer is all that is left to us of the

generation to which it belonged!

I told you that I was perfectly sure, beforehand, we should find some

pleasing girlish or womanly shape to fill the blank at our table and

match the dark-haired youth at the upper corner.

There she sits, at the very opposite corner, just as far off as accident

could put her from this handsome fellow, by whose side she ought, of

course, to be sitting. One of the “positive” blondes, as my friend,

you may remember, used to call them. Tawny-haired, amber-eyed,

full-throated, skin as white as a blanched almond. Looks dreamy to me,

not self-conscious, though a black ribbon round her neck sets it off

as a Marie-Antoinette's diamond-necklace could not do. So in her dress,

there is a harmony of tints that looks as if an artist had run his eye

over her and given a hint or two like the finishing touch to a picture.

I can't help being struck with her, for she is at once rounded and fine

in feature, looks calm, as blondes are apt to, and as if she might run

wild, if she were trifled with. It is just as I knew it would be,--and

anybody can see that our young Marylander will be dead in love with her

in a week.

Then if that little man would only turn out immensely rich and have the

good-nature to die and leave them all his money, it would be as nice as

a three-volume novel.

The Little Gentleman is in a flurry, I suspect, with the excitement

of having such a charming neighbor next him. I judge so mainly by his

silence and by a certain rapt and serious look on his face, as if he

were thinking of something that had happened, or that might happen, or

that ought to happen,--or how beautiful her young life looked, or how

hardly Nature had dealt with him, or something which struck him silent,

at any rate. I made several conversational openings for him, but he did

not fire up as he often does. I even went so far as to indulge in, a

fling at the State House, which, as we all know, is in truth a very

imposing structure, covering less ground than St. Peter's, but of

similar general effect. The little man looked up, but did not reply to

my taunt. He said to the young lady, however, that the State House was

the Parthenon of our Acropolis, which seemed to please her, for she

smiled, and he reddened a little,--so I thought. I don't think it right

to watch persons who are the subjects of special infirmity,--but we all

do it.

I see that they have crowded the chairs a little at that end of

the table, to make room for another newcomer of the lady sort. A

well-mounted, middle-aged preparation, wearing her hair without a

cap, --pretty wide in the parting, though,--contours vaguely hinted,

--features very quiet,--says little as yet, but seems to keep her eye on

the young lady, as if having some responsibility for her My record is

a blank for some days after this. In the mean time I have contrived to

make out the person and the story of our young lady, who, according to

appearances, ought to furnish us a heroine for a boarding-house romance

before a year is out. It is very curious that she should prove connected

with a person many of us have heard of. Yet, curious as it is, I have

been a hundred times struck with the circumstance that the most remote

facts are constantly striking each other; just as vessels starting from

ports thousands of miles apart pass close to each other in the naked

breadth of the ocean, nay, sometimes even touch, in the dark, with a

crack of timbers, a gurgling of water, a cry of startled sleepers,--a

cry mysteriously echoed in warning dreams, as the wife of some

Gloucester fisherman, some coasting skipper, wakes with a shriek, calls

the name of her husband, and sinks back to uneasy slumbers upon her

lonely pillow,--a widow.

Oh, these mysterious meetings! Leaving all the vague, waste, endless

spaces of the washing desert, the ocean-steamer and the fishing-smack

sail straight towards each other as if they ran in grooves ploughed for

them in the waters from the beginning of creation! Not only things and

events, but our own thoughts, are so full of these surprises, that,

if there were a reader in my parish who did not recognize the familiar

occurrence of what I am now going to mention, I should think it a case

for the missionaries of the Society for the Propagation of Intelligence

among the Comfortable Classes. There are about as many twins in the

births of thought as of children. For the first time in your lives you

learn some fact or come across some idea. Within an hour, a day, a week,

that same fact or idea strikes you from another quarter. It seems as if

it had passed into space and bounded back upon you as an echo from

the blank wall that shuts in the world of thought. Yet no possible

connection exists between the two channels by which the thought or the

fact arrived. Let me give an infinitesimal illustration.

One of the Boys mentioned, the other evening, in the course of a very

pleasant poem he read us, a little trick of the Commons-table boarders,

which I, nourished at the parental board, had never heard of. Young

fellows being always hungry--Allow me to stop dead-short, in order to

utter an aphorism which has been forming itself in one of the blank

interior spaces of my intelligence, like a crystal in the cavity of a

geode.

Aphorism by the Professor.

In order to know whether a human being is young or old, offer it food

of different kinds at short intervals. If young, it will eat anything

at any hour of the day or night. If old, it observes stated periods, and

you might as well attempt to regulate the time of highwater to suit

a fishing-party as to change these periods. The crucial experiment is

this. Offer a bulky and boggy bun to the suspected individual just ten

minutes before dinner. If this is eagerly accepted and devoured, the

fact of youth is established. If the subject of the question starts back

and expresses surprise and incredulity, as if you could not possibly be

in earnest, the fact of maturity is no less clear.

--Excuse me,--I return to my story of the Commons-table.--Young fellows

being always hungry, and tea and dry toast being the meagre fare of the

evening meal, it was a trick of some of the Boys to impale a slice of

meat upon a fork, at dinner-time, and stick the fork holding it beneath

the table, so that they could get it at tea-time. The dragons that

guarded this table of the Hesperides found out the trick at last, and

kept a sharp look-out for missing forks;--they knew where to find one,

if it was not in its place.--Now the odd thing was, that, after waiting

so many years to hear of this college trick, I should hear it mentioned

a second time within the same twenty-four hours by a college youth of

the present generation. Strange, but true. And so it has happened to me

and to every person, often and often, to be hit in rapid succession by

these twinned facts or thoughts, as if they were linked like chain-shot.

I was going to leave the simple reader to wonder over this, taking it

as an unexplained marvel. I think, however, I will turn over a furrow

of subsoil in it.--The explanation is, of course, that in a great many

thoughts there must be a few coincidences, and these instantly arrest

our attention. Now we shall probably never have the least idea of the

enormous number of impressions which pass through our consciousness,

until in some future life we see the photographic record of our thoughts

and the stereoscopic picture of our actions. There go more pieces to

make up a conscious life or a living body than you think for. Why,

some of you were surprised when a friend of mine told you there

were fifty-eight separate pieces in a fiddle. How many “swimming

glands”--solid, organized, regularly formed, rounded disks taking an

active part in all your vital processes, part and parcel, each one of

them, of your corporeal being--do you suppose are whirled along, like

pebbles in a stream, with the blood which warms your frame and colors

your cheeks?--A noted German physiologist spread out a minute drop

of blood, under the microscope, in narrow streaks, and counted the

globules, and then made a calculation. The counting by the micrometer

took him a week.--You have, my full-grown friend, of these little

couriers in crimson or scarlet livery, running on your vital errands

day and night as long as you live, sixty-five billions, five hundred and

seventy thousand millions. Errors excepted.--Did I hear some gentleman

say, “Doubted? “--I am the Professor. I sit in my chair with a petard

under it that will blow me through the skylight of my lecture-room, if I

do not know what I am talking about and whom I am quoting.

Now, my dear friends, who are putting your hands to your foreheads, and

saying to yourselves that you feel a little confused, as if you had been

waltzing until things began to whirl slightly round you, is it possible

that you do not clearly apprehend the exact connection of all that I

have been saying, and its bearing on what is now to come? Listen,

then. The number of these living elements in our bodies illustrates

the incalculable multitude of our thoughts; the number of our thoughts

accounts for those frequent coincidences spoken of; these coincidences

in the world of thought illustrate those which we constantly observe in

the world of outward events, of which the presence of the young girl now

at our table, and proving to be the daughter of an old acquaintance some

of us may remember, is the special example which led me through this

labyrinth of reflections, and finally lands me at the commencement of

this young girl's story, which, as I said, I have found the time and

felt the interest to learn something of, and which I think I can tell

without wronging the unconscious subject of my brief delineation. IRIS.

You remember, perhaps, in some papers published awhile ago, an odd poem

written by an old Latin tutor? He brought up at the verb amo, I love,

as all of us do, and by and by Nature opened her great living dictionary

for him at the word filia, a daughter. The poor man was greatly

perplexed in choosing a name for her. Lucretia and Virginia were the

first that he thought of; but then came up those pictured stories of

Titus Livius, which he could never read without crying, though he had

read them a hundred times.

--Lucretia sending for her husband and her father, each to bring one

friend with him, and awaiting them in her chamber. To them her wrongs

briefly. Let them see to the wretch,--she will take care of herself.

Then the hidden knife flashes out and sinks into her heart. She

slides from her seat, and falls dying. “Her husband and her father cry

aloud.”--No, not Lucretia.

-Virginius,--a brown old soldier, father of a nice girl. She engaged

to a very promising young man. Decemvir Appius takes a violent fancy to

her,--must have her at any rate. Hires a lawyer to present the arguments

in favor of the view that she was another man's daughter. There used to

be lawyers in Rome that would do such things.--All right. There are two

sides to everything. Audi alteram partem. The legal gentleman has no

opinion,--he only states the evidence.--A doubtful case. Let the young

lady be under the protection of the Honorable Decemvir until it can be

looked up thoroughly.--Father thinks it best, on the whole, to give in.

Will explain the matter, if the young lady and her maid will step this

way. That is the explanation,--a stab with a butcher's knife, snatched

from a stall, meant for other lambs than this poor bleeding Virginia.

The old man thought over the story. Then he must have one look at the

original. So he took down the first volume and read it over. When he

came to that part where it tells how the young gentleman she was engaged

to and a friend of his took up the poor girl's bloodless shape and

carried it through the street, and how all the women followed, wailing,

and asking if that was what their daughters were coming to,--if that

was what they were to get for being good girls,--he melted down into his

accustomed tears of pity and grief, and, through them all, of delight at

the charming Latin of the narrative. But it was impossible to call his

child Virginia. He could never look at her without thinking she had a

knife sticking in her bosom.

Dido would be a good name, and a fresh one. She was a queen, and the

founder of a great city. Her story had been immortalized by the greatest

of poets,--for the old Latin tutor clove to “Virgilius Maro,” as he

called him, as closely as ever Dante did in his memorable journey. So he

took down his Virgil, it was the smooth-leafed, open-lettered quarto of

Baskerville,--and began reading the loves and mishaps of Dido. It would

n't do. A lady who had not learned discretion by experience, and came to

an evil end. He shook his head, as he sadly repeated,

“--misera ante diem, subitoque accensa furore;”

but when he came to the lines,

“Ergo Iris croceis per coelum roscida pennis

Mille trahens varios adverso Sole colores,”

he jumped up with a great exclamation, which the particular recording

angel who heard it pretended not to understand, or it might have gone

hard with the Latin tutor some time or other.

“Iris shall be her name!”--he said. So her name was Iris.

--The natural end of a tutor is to perish by starvation. It is only a

question of time, just as with the burning of college libraries. These

all burn up sooner or later, provided they are not housed in brick or

stone and iron. I don't mean that you will see in the registry of deaths

that this or that particular tutor died of well-marked, uncomplicated

starvation. They may, even, in extreme cases, be carried off by a thin,

watery kind of apoplexy, which sounds very well in the returns, but

means little to those who know that it is only debility settling on

the head. Generally, however, they fade and waste away under various

pretexts,--calling it dyspepsia, consumption, and so on, to put a decent

appearance upon the case and keep up the credit of the family and the

institution where they have passed through the successive stages of

inanition.

In some cases it takes a great many years to kill a tutor by the

process in question. You see they do get food and clothes and fuel, in

appreciable quantities, such as they are. You will even notice rows of

books in their rooms, and a picture or two,--things that look as if

they had surplus money; but these superfluities are the water of

crystallization to scholars, and you can never get them away till

the poor fellows effloresce into dust. Do not be deceived. The tutor

breakfasts on coffee made of beans, edulcorated with milk watered to the

verge of transparency; his mutton is tough and elastic, up to the

moment when it becomes tired out and tasteless; his coal is a sullen,

sulphurous anthracite, which rusts into ashes, rather than burns, in

the shallow grate; his flimsy broadcloth is too thin for winter and too

thick for summer. The greedy lungs of fifty hot-blooded boys suck the

oxygen from the air he breathes in his recitation-room. In short, he

undergoes a process of gentle and gradual starvation.

--The mother of little Iris was not called Electra, like hers of the old

story, neither was her grandfather Oceanus. Her blood-name, which she

gave away with her heart to the Latin tutor, was a plain old English

one, and her water-name was Hannah, beautiful as recalling the mother

of Samuel, and admirable as reading equally well from the initial letter

forwards and from the terminal letter backwards. The poor lady, seated

with her companion at the chessboard of matrimony, had but just pushed

forward her one little white pawn upon an empty square, when the Black

Knight, that cares nothing for castles or kings or queens, swooped down

upon her and swept her from the larger board of life.

The old Latin tutor put a modest blue stone at the head of his late

companion, with her name and age and Eheu! upon it,--a smaller one

at her feet, with initials; and left her by herself, to be rained and

snowed on,--which is a hard thing to do for those whom we have cherished

tenderly.

About the time that the lichens, falling on the stone, like drops of

water, had spread into fair, round rosettes, the tutor had starved into

a slight cough. Then he began to draw the buckle of his black trousers

a little tighter, and took in another reef in his never-ample waistcoat.

His temples got a little hollow, and the contrasts of color in his

cheeks more vivid than of old. After a while his walks fatigued him,

and he was tired, and breathed hard after going up a flight or two of

stairs. Then came on other marks of inward trouble and general waste,

which he spoke of to his physician as peculiar, and doubtless owing to

accidental causes; to all which the doctor listened with deference, as

if it had not been the old story that one in five or six of mankind in

temperate climates tells, or has told for him, as if it were something

new. As the doctor went out, he said to himself,--“On the rail at last.

Accommodation train. A good many stops, but will get to the station

by and by.” So the doctor wrote a recipe with the astrological sign of

Jupiter before it, (just as your own physician does, inestimable reader,

as you will see, if you look at his next prescription,) and departed,

saying he would look in occasionally. After this, the Latin tutor began

the usual course of “getting better,” until he got so much better that

his face was very sharp, and when he smiled, three crescent lines

showed at each side of his lips, and when he spoke; it was in a muffled

whisper, and the white of his eye glistened as pearly as the purest

porcelain, --so much better, that he hoped--by spring--he--might be

able--to--attend------to his class again.--But he was recommended not

to expose himself, and so kept his chamber, and occasionally, not having

anything to do, his bed. The unmarried sister with whom he lived took

care of him; and the child, now old enough to be manageable and even

useful in trifling offices, sat in the chamber, or played, about.

Things could not go on so forever, of course. One morning his face

was sunken and his hands were very, very cold. He was “better,” he

whispered, but sadly and faintly. After a while he grew restless and

seemed a little wandering. His mind ran on his classics, and fell back

on the Latin grammar.

“Iris!” he said,--“filiola mea!”--The child knew this meant my dear

little daughter as well as if it had been English.--“Rainbow!” for he

would translate her name at times,--“come to me,--veni”--and his lips

went on automatically, and murmured, “vel venito!”--The child came and

sat by his bedside and took his hand, which she could not warm, but

which shot its rays of cold all through her slender frame. But there she

sat, looking steadily at him. Presently he opened his lips feebly, and

whispered, “Moribundus.” She did not know what that meant, but she saw

that there was something new and sad. So she began to cry; but presently

remembering an old book that seemed to comfort him at times, got up and

brought a Bible in the Latin version, called the Vulgate. “Open it,” he

said,--“I will read, segnius irritant,--don't put the light out,--ah!

hoeret lateri,--I am going,--vale, vale, vale, goodbye, good-bye,--the

Lord take care of my child! Domine, audi--vel audito!” His face whitened

suddenly, and he lay still, with open eyes and mouth. He had taken his

last degree.

--Little Miss Iris could not be said to begin life with a very brilliant

rainbow over her, in a worldly point of view. A limited wardrobe of

man's attire, such as poor tutors wear,--a few good books, principally

classics,--a print or two, and a plaster model of the Pantheon, with

some pieces of furniture which had seen service,--these, and a child's

heart full of tearful recollections and strange doubts and questions,

alternating with the cheap pleasures which are the anodynes of childish

grief; such were the treasures she inherited.--No,--I forgot. With

that kindly sentiment which all of us feel for old men's first

children,--frost-flowers of the early winter season, the old tutor's

students had remembered him at a time when he was laughing and crying

with his new parental emotions, and running to the side of the plain

crib in which his alter egg, as he used to say, was swinging, to hang

over the little heap of stirring clothes, from which looked the minute,

red, downy, still, round face, with unfixed eyes and working lips,--in

that unearthly gravity which has never yet been broken by a smile, and

which gives to the earliest moon-year or two of an infant's life the

character of a first old age, to counterpoise that second childhood

which there is one chance in a dozen it may reach by and by. The boys

had remembered the old man and young father at that tender period of his

hard, dry life. There came to him a fair, silver goblet, embossed with

classical figures, and bearing on a shield the graver words, Ex dono

pupillorum. The handle on its side showed what use the boys had meant it

for; and a kind letter in it, written with the best of feeling, in

the worst of Latin, pointed delicately to its destination. Out of this

silver vessel, after a long, desperate, strangling cry, which marked

her first great lesson in the realities of life, the child took the blue

milk, such as poor tutors and their children get, tempered with

water, and sweetened a little, so as to bring it nearer the standard

established by the touching indulgence and partiality of Nature,--who

had mingled an extra allowance of sugar in the blameless food of the

child at its mother's breast, as compared with that of its infant

brothers and sisters of the bovine race.

But a willow will grow in baked sand wet with rainwater. An air-plant

will grow by feeding on the winds. Nay, those huge forests that

overspread great continents have built themselves up mainly from the

air-currents with which they are always battling. The oak is but a

foliated atmospheric crystal deposited from the aerial ocean that holds

the future vegetable world in solution. The storm that tears its leaves

has paid tribute to its strength, and it breasts the tornado clad in the

spoils of a hundred hurricanes.

Poor little Iris! What had she in common with the great oak in the

shadow of which we are losing sight of her?--She lived and grew like

that,--this was all. The blue milk ran into her veins and filled them

with thin, pure blood. Her skin was fair, with a faint tinge, such as

the white rosebud shows before it opens. The doctor who had attended

her father was afraid her aunt would hardly be able to “raise”

her,--“delicate child,”--hoped she was not consumptive,--thought there

was a fair chance she would take after her father.

A very forlorn-looking person, dressed in black, with a white neckcloth,

sent her a memoir of a child who died at the age of two years and eleven

months, after having fully indorsed all the doctrines of the particular

persuasion to which he not only belonged himself, but thought it very

shameful that everybody else did not belong. What with foreboding looks

and dreary death-bed stories, it was a wonder the child made out to live

through it. It saddened her early years, of course,--it distressed

her tender soul with thoughts which, as they cannot be fully taken in,

should be sparingly used as instruments of torture to break down the

natural cheerfulness of a healthy child, or, what is infinitely worse,

to cheat a dying one out of the kind illusions with which the Father of

All has strewed its downward path.

The child would have died, no doubt, and, if properly managed, might

have added another to the long catalogue of wasting children who have

been as cruelly played upon by spiritual physiologists, often with the

best intentions, as ever the subject of a rare disease by the curious

students of science.

Fortunately for her, however, a wise instinct had guided the late Latin

tutor in the selection of the partner of his life, and the future mother

of his child. The deceased tutoress was a tranquil, smooth woman, easily

nourished, as such people are,--a quality which is inestimable in a

tutor's wife,--and so it happened that the daughter inherited enough

vitality from the mother to live through childhood and infancy and fight

her way towards womanhood, in spite of the tendencies she derived from

her other parent.

--Two and two do not always make four, in this matter of hereditary

descent of qualities. Sometimes they make three, and sometimes five. It

seems as if the parental traits at one time showed separate, at another

blended,--that occasionally, the force of two natures is represented in

the derivative one by a diagonal of greater value than either original

line of living movement,--that sometimes there is a loss of vitality

hardly to be accounted for, and again a forward impulse of variable

intensity in some new and unforeseen direction.

So it was with this child. She had glanced off from her parental

probabilities at an unexpected angle. Instead of taking to classical

learning like her father, or sliding quietly into household duties like

her mother, she broke out early in efforts that pointed in the direction

of Art. As soon as she could hold a pencil she began to sketch outlines

of objects round her with a certain air and spirit. Very extraordinary

horses, but their legs looked as if they could move. Birds unknown to

Audubon, yet flying, as it were, with a rush. Men with impossible legs,

which did yet seem to have a vital connection with their most improbable

bodies. By-and-by the doctor, on his beast,--an old man with a face

looking as if Time had kneaded it like dough with his knuckles, with a

rhubarb tint and flavor pervading himself and his sorrel horse and all

their appurtenances. A dreadful old man! Be sure she did not forget

those saddle-bags that held the detestable bottles out of which he used

to shake those loathsome powders which, to virgin childish palates that

find heaven in strawberries and peaches, are--Well, I suppose I had

better stop. Only she wished she was dead sometimes when she heard him

coming. On the next leaf would figure the gentleman with the black coat

and white cravat, as he looked when he came and entertained her with

stories concerning the death of various little children about her age,

to encourage her, as that wicked Mr. Arouet said about shooting Admiral

Byng. Then she would take her pencil, and with a few scratches there

would be the outline of a child, in which you might notice how one

sudden sweep gave the chubby cheek, and two dots darted at the paper

looked like real eyes.

By-and-by she went to school, and caricatured the schoolmaster on

the leaves of her grammars and geographies, and drew the faces of her

companions, and, from time to time, heads and figures from her fancy,

with large eyes, far apart, like those of Raffaelle's mothers and

children, sometimes with wild floating hair, and then with wings and

heads thrown back in ecstasy. This was at about twelve years old, as the

dates of these drawings show, and, therefore, three or four years before

she came among us. Soon after this time, the ideal figures began to take

the place of portraits and caricatures, and a new feature appeared in

her drawing-books in the form of fragments of verse and short poems.

It was dull work, of course, for such a young girl to live with an old

spinster and go to a village school. Her books bore testimony to this;

for there was a look of sadness in the faces she drew, and a sense of

weariness and longing for some imaginary conditions of blessedness

or other, which began to be painful. She might have gone through this

flowering of the soul, and, casting her petals, subsided into a sober,

human berry, but for the intervention of friendly assistance and

counsel.

In the town where she lived was a lady of honorable condition, somewhat

past middle age, who was possessed of pretty ample means, of cultivated

tastes, of excellent principles, of exemplary character, and of more

than common accomplishments. The gentleman in black broadcloth and white

neckerchief only echoed the common voice about her, when he called her,

after enjoying, beneath her hospitable roof, an excellent cup of tea,

with certain elegancies and luxuries he was unaccustomed to, “The Model

of all the Virtues.”

She deserved this title as well as almost any woman. She did really

bristle with moral excellences. Mention any good thing she had not done;

I should like to see you try! There was no handle of weakness to take

hold of her by; she was as unseizable, except in her totality, as a

billiard-ball; and on the broad, green, terrestrial table, where she had

been knocked about, like all of us, by the cue of Fortune, she glanced

from every human contact, and “caromed” from one relation to another,

and rebounded from the stuffed cushion of temptation, with such exact

and perfect angular movements, that the Enemy's corps of Reporters had

long given up taking notes of her conduct, as there was no chance for

their master.

What an admirable person for the patroness and directress of a slightly

self-willed child, with the lightning zigzag line of genius running like

a glittering vein through the marble whiteness of her virgin nature! One

of the lady-patroness's peculiar virtues was calmness. She was resolute

and strenuous, but still. You could depend on her for every duty; she

was as true as steel. She was kind-hearted and serviceable in all

the relations of life. She had more sense, more knowledge, more

conversation, as well as more goodness, than all the partners you have

waltzed with this winter put together.

Yet no man was known to have loved her, or even to have offered

himself to her in marriage. It was a great wonder. I am very anxious

to vindicate my character as a philosopher and an observer of Nature by

accounting for this apparently extraordinary fact.

You may remember certain persons who have the misfortune of presenting

to the friends whom they meet a cold, damp hand. There are states of

mind in which a contact of this kind has a depressing effect on the

vital powers that makes us insensible to all the virtues and graces of

the proprietor of one of these life-absorbing organs. When they touch

us, virtue passes out of us, and we feel as if our electricity had been

drained by a powerful negative battery, carried about by an overgrown

human torpedo.

“The Model of all the Virtues” had a pair of searching eyes as clear as

Wenham ice; but they were slower to melt than that fickle jewelry. Her

features disordered themselves slightly at times in a surface-smile, but

never broke loose from their corners and indulged in the riotous tumult

of a laugh,--which, I take it, is the mob-law of the features;--and

propriety the magistrate who reads the riot-act. She carried the

brimming cup of her inestimable virtues with a cautious, steady hand,

and an eye always on them, to see that they did not spill. Then she was

an admirable judge of character. Her mind was a perfect laboratory of

tests and reagents; every syllable you put into breath went into

her intellectual eudiometer, and all your thoughts were recorded on

litmus-paper. I think there has rarely been a more admirable woman.

Of course, Miss Iris was immensely and passionately attached

to her.--Well,--these are two highly oxygenated adverbs,

--grateful,--suppose we say,--yes,--grateful, dutiful, obedient to her

wishes for the most part,--perhaps not quite up to the concert pitch of

such a perfect orchestra of the virtues.

We must have a weak spot or two in a character before we can love it

much. People that do not laugh or cry, or take more of anything than

is good for them, or use anything but dictionary-words, are admirable

subjects for biographies. But we don't always care most for those

flat-pattern flowers that press best in the herbarium.

This immaculate woman,--why could n't she have a fault or two? Is n't

there any old whisper which will tarnish that wearisome aureole of

saintly perfection? Does n't she carry a lump of opium in her pocket? Is

n't her cologne-bottle replenished oftener than its legitimate use would

require? It would be such a comfort!

Not for the world would a young creature like Iris have let such words

escape her, or such thoughts pass through her mind. Whether at the

bottom of her soul lies any uneasy consciousness of an oppressive

presence, it is hard to say, until we know more about her. Iris sits

between the Little Gentleman and the “Model of all the Virtues,” as the

black-coated personage called her.--I will watch them all.

--Here I stop for the present. What the Professor said has had to make

way this time for what he saw and heard.

-And now you may read these lines, which were written for gentle souls

who love music, and read in even tones, and, perhaps, with something

like a smile upon the reader's lips, at a meeting where these musical

friends had gathered. Whether they were written with smiles or not, you

can guess better after you have read them.