"How in the world did you get here, Helen?" I asked.

"I came after Beppo," she returned, her lip trembling.

"How did Beppo get here?"

"Georgy flung him down," cried the child, bursting into tears.

"Perhaps she did not mean to, but she was angry that he would not go

by himself after the stone she flung."

I had looked to the top by this time, and saw at once that the worst

part of the ascent was before me. It had been sheer rock beneath: here

the strata were crumbled, and the interstices filled with earth and

dried vegetation. The angle was much greater than it had been below,

and it was easy to see that even Helen's light footstep had loosened

every fragment it had touched. I gained a foothold above her;

stretched out my hand and drew her up; then another and another. Once

she lost her footing, but I caught the slim figure in my arms and went

on, with her half fainting against my shoulder, her puny strength

quite worn out.

When we were within a few feet of the top I told her to look up. "You

see that we are almost there," I said gently. "Can you do what I tell

you to do? When I raise you place one foot on my shoulder: ... now,

then, take hold of something firmly and clamber up."

My footing was precarious, and in order to lift her up I was obliged

to unfasten my hold of the few scant wisps of withered grass. If she

could but reach the top, I believed I could make a supreme effort to

save myself; and I risked everything.

In an instant she was on the brow of the cliff. She gave a convulsive

cry of joy and relief, and reached out her little hand to me. I almost

stretched out to grasp it; then, remembering that with her slight

weight I might easily drag her back into danger, I took hold of a

little bush: it was dried to the roots, and came out in my hand. My

footing gave way: I slipped down, with nothing to break my fall--not a

shrub, not a fissure in the rocks. The blue sky had been above me, but

that blessed glimpse of azure vanished, and I could see nothing

but the frowning sides of the precipice as I went down, my pace

accelerating every moment. I believed I could gain a hold or footing

on the shelving rock where I had found Helen, but it gave way as I

touched it and slid suddenly down the ravine. I was dizzy and bruised,

but was wondering if Helen would give the alarm--if Georgy would be

sorry. I thought with pity of my mother, who would surely weep for

me. Then I heard Beppo barking joyfully, and I knew that I was at the

bottom of the abyss. I suffered a few seconds of such terrible pain

that I was glad when a sickening sort of quietude settled over me, and

I felt that I must be dying.

ELLEN W. OLNEY.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

A SEA-SOUND.

Hush! hush!

'Tis the voice of the sea to the land,

As it breaks on the desolate strand,

With a chime to the strenuous wave of life

That throbs in the quivering sand.

Hush! hush!

Each requiem tone as it dies,

With a soul that is parting, sighs;

For the tide rolls back from the pulseless clay

As the foam in the tempest flies.

Hush! hush!

O throb of the restless sea!

All hearts are attuned to thee--

All pulses beat with thine ebb and flow

To the rhyme of Eternity!

JOHN B. TABB.

THE BRITISH SOLDIER.

I allude to the British soldier, more especially, as I lately

observed and admired him at Aldershot, where, just now, he appears

to particular advantage; but at any time during the past

twelvemonth--since England and Russia have stood glaring at each other

across the prostrate body of the expiring yet reviving Turk--this

actually ornamental and potentially useful personage has been

picturesquely, agreeably conspicuous. I say "agreeably," speaking from

my own humble point of view, because I confess to a lively admiration

of the military class. I exclaim, cordially, with Offenbach's Grand

Duchess, "Ah, oui, j'aime les militaires!" Mr. Ruskin has said

somewhere, very naturally, that he could never resign himself to

living in a country in which, as in the United States, there should be

no old castles. Putting aside the old castles, I should say, like Mr.

Ruskin, that life loses a certain indispensable charm in a country

destitute of an apparent standing army. Certainly, the army may be too

apparent, too importunate, too terrible a burden to the state and to

the conscience of the philosophic observer. This is the case, without

a doubt, just now in the bristling empires of the Continent. In

Germany and France, in Russia and Italy, there are many more soldiers

than are needed to make the taxpayer thrifty or the lover of the

picturesque happy. The huge armaments of continental Europe are an

oppressive and sinister spectacle, and I have rarely derived a high

order of entertainment from the sight of even the largest masses of

homesick conscripts. The _chair a canon_--the cannon-meat--as they

aptly term it in French, has always seemed to me dumbly,

appealingly conscious of its destiny. I have seen it in course of

preparation--seen it salted and dressed and packed and labelled, as it

were, for consumption. In that marvellous France, indeed, which bears

all burdens lightly, and whose good spirits and absence of the tragic

_pose_ alone prevent us from calling her constantly heroic, the army

scarcely seems to be the heavy charge that it must be in fact. The

little red-legged soldiers, always present and always moving, are

as thick as the field-flowers in an abundant harvest, and amid the

general brightness and mobility of French life they strike one at

times simply as cheerful tokens of the national exuberance and

fecundity. But in Germany and Italy the national levies impart a

lopsided aspect to society: they seem to drag it under water. They

hang like a millstone round its neck, so that it can't move: it has

to sit still, looking wistfully at the long, forward road which it is

unable to measure.

England, which is fortunate in so many things, is fortunate in her

well-fed mercenaries, who suggest none of the dismal reflections

provoked by the great foreign armies. It is true, of course, that they

fail to suggest some of the inspiring ones. If Germany and France are

burdened, at least they are defended--at least they are armed for

conflict and victory. There seems to be a good deal of doubt as to how

far this is true of the nation which has hitherto been known as the

pre-eminently pugnacious one. Where France and Germany and Russia

count by hundreds, England counts by tens; and it is only, strictly

speaking, on the good old principle that one Englishman can buffet

a dozen foreigners that a very hopeful view of an Anglo-continental

collision can be maintained. This good old principle is far from

having gone out of fashion: you may hear it proclaimed to an inspiring

tune any night in the week in the London music-halls. One summer

evening, in the country, an English gentleman was telling me about his

little boy, a rosy, sturdy, manly child whom I had already admired,

and whom he depicted as an infant Hercules. The surrounding influences

at the moment were picturesque. An ancient lamp was suspended from the

ceiling of the hall; the large door stood open upon a terrace;

and outside the big, dense treetops were faintly stirring in the

starlight. My companion dilated upon the pluck and muscle, the latent

pugnacity, of his dear little son, and told me how bravely already he

doubled his infant fist. There was a kind of Homeric simplicity about

it. From this he proceeded to wider considerations, and observed that

the English child was of necessity the bravest and sturdiest in the

world, for the plain reason that he was the germ of the English man.

What the English man was we of course both knew, but, as I was a

stranger, my friend explained the matter in detail. He was a person

whom, in the ordinary course of human irritation, every one else was

afraid of. Nowhere but in England were such men made--men who could

hit out as soon as think, and knock over persons of inferior race as

you would brush away flies. They were afraid of nothing: the sentiment

of hesitation to inflict a blow under rigidly proper circumstances

was unknown to them. English soldiers and sailors in a row carried

everything before them: foreigners didn't know what to make of such

fellows, and were afraid to touch them. A couple of Englishmen were

a match for a foreign mob. My friend's little boy was made like a

statue: his little arms and legs were quite of the right sort. This

was the greatness of England, and of this there was an infinite

supply. The light, as I say, was dim in the great hall, and the rustle

of the oaks in the park was almost audible. Their murmur seemed

to offer a sympathetic undertone to the honest conversation of my

companion, and I sat there as humble a ministrant to the simple and

beautiful idea of British valor as the occasion could require. I made

the reflection--by which I must justify my anecdote--that the ancient

tradition as to the personal fighting-value of the individual

Englishman flourishes in high as well as in low life, and forms a

common ground of contact between them; with the simple difference

that at the music-halls it is more poetically expressed than in the

country-houses.

I am grossly ignorant of military matters, and hardly know the names

of regiments or the designations of their officers; yet, as I said at

the beginning of these remarks, I am always very much struck by the

sight of a uniform. War is a detestable thing, and I would willingly

see the sword dropped into its scabbard for ever. Only I should plead

that in its sheathed condition the sword should still be allowed to

play a certain part. Actual war is detestable, but there is something

agreeable in possible war; and I have been thankful that I should have

found myself on British soil at a moment when it was resounding to the

tread of regiments. If the British army is small, it has during the

last six months been making the most of itself. The rather dusky

spectacle of British life has been lighted up by the presence in the

foreground of considerable masses of that vivid color which is more

particularly associated with the protection of British interests. The

sunshine has appeared to rest upon scattered clusters of red-coats,

while the background has been enveloped in a sort of chaotic and

fuliginous dimness. The red-coats, according to their number, have

been palpable and definite, though a great many other things have been

inconveniently vague. At the beginning of the year, when Parliament

was opened in the queen's name, the royal speech contained a phrase

which that boisterous organ of the war-party, the _Pall Mall Gazette_,

pronounced "sickening" in its pusillanimity. Her Majesty alluded to

the necessity, in view of the complications in the East, of the

government taking into consideration the making of "preparations for

precaution." This was certainly an ineffective way of expressing a

thirst for Russian blood, but the royal phraseology is never very

felicitous; and the "preparations for precaution" have been extremely

interesting. Indeed, for a person conscious of a desire to look into

what may be called the psychology of politics, I can imagine nothing

more interesting than the general spectacle of the public conduct of

England during the last two years. I have watched it with a good deal

of the same sort of entertainment with which one watches a five-act

drama from a comfortable place in the stalls. There are moments of

discomfort in the course of such a performance: the theatre is hot and

crowded, the situations are too prolonged, the play seems to drag,

some of the actors have no great talent. But the piece, as a whole, is

intensely dramatic, the argument is striking, and you would not for

the world leave your place before the denouement is reached. My own

pleasure all winter, I confess, has been partly marred by a bad

conscience: I have felt a kind of shame at my inability to profit by a

brilliant opportunity to make up my mind. This inability, however, was

extreme, and my regret was not lightened by seeing every one about me

set an admirable example of decision, and even of precision. Every one

about me was either a Russian or a Turk, the Turks, however, being

greatly the more numerous. It appeared necessary to one's self-respect

to assume some foreign personality, and I felt keenly, for a while,

the embarrassment of choice. At last it occurred to me simply that as

an American I might be an Englishman; and the reflection became

afterward very profitable.

When once I had undertaken the part, I played it with what the French

call _conviction_. There are many obvious reasons why the role,

at such a time as this, should accommodate itself to the American

capacity. The feeling of race is strong, and a good American could not

but desire that, with the eyes of Europe fixed upon it, the English

race should make a passable figure. There would be much fatuity in his

saying that at such a moment he deemed it of importance to give it the

support of his own striking attitude, but there is at least a kind of

filial piety in this feeling moved to draw closer to it. To see how

the English race would behave, and to hope devoutly it would behave

well,--this was the occupation of my thoughts. Old England was in a

difficult pass, and all the world was watching her. The good American

feels in all sorts of ways about Old England: the better American he

is, the more acute are his moods, the more lively his variations. He

can be, I think, everything but indifferent; and, for myself, I never

hesitated to let my emotions play all along the scale. In the morning,

over the _Times_, it was extremely difficult to make up one's mind.

The _Times_ seemed very mealy-mouthed--that impression, indeed, it

took no great cleverness to gather--but the dilemma lay between one's

sense of the brutality and cynicism of the usual utterances of the

Turkish party and one's perception of the direful ills which Russian

conquest was so liberally scattering abroad. The brutality of the

Turkish tone, as I sometimes caught an echo of it in the talk of

chance interlocutors, was not such as to quicken that race-feeling

to which I just now alluded. English society is a tremendously

comfortable affair, and the crudity of the sarcasm that I frequently

heard levelled by its fortunate members at the victims of the

fashionable Turk was such as to produce a good deal of resentful

meditation. It was provoking to hear a rosy English gentleman, who

had just been into Leicestershire for a week's hunting, deliver the

opinion that the vulgar Bulgarians had really not been massacred half

enough; and this in spite of the fact that one had long since made the

observation that for a good plain absence of mawkish sentimentality a

certain type of rosy English gentleman is nowhere to be matched.

On the other hand, it was not very comfortable to think of the

measureless misery in which these interesting populations were

actually steeped, and one had to admit that the deliberate invasion of

a country which professed the strongest desire to live in peace with

its invaders was at least a rather striking anomaly. Such a course

could only be justified by the most gratifying results, and brilliant

consequences as yet had not begun to bloom upon the blood-drenched

fields of Bulgaria.

To see this heavy-burdened, slow-moving Old England making up her mind

was an edifying spectacle. It was not over-fanciful to say to one's

self, in spite of the difficulties of the problem and the (in a

certain sense) evenly-balanced scales, that this was a great crisis

in her history, that she stood at the crossing of the ways, and that

according as she put forth her right hand or her left would her

greatness stand or wane. It was possible to imagine that in her huge,

dim, collective consciousness she felt an oppressive sense of moral

responsibility, that she too murmured to herself that she was on

trial, and that, through the mists of bewilderment and the tumult of

party cries, she begged to be enlightened. The sympathetic American

to whom I have alluded may be represented at such an hour as making

a hundred irresponsible reflections and indulging in all sorts of

fantastic visions. If I had not already wandered so far from my theme,

I should like to offer a few instances here. Very often it seemed

natural to care very little whether England went to war with Russia or

not: the interest lay in the moral struggle that was going on within

her own limits. Awkward as this moral struggle made her appear,

perilously as it seemed to have exposed her to the sarcasm of some of

her neighbors--of that compact, cohesive France, for instance, which

even yet cannot easily imagine a great country sacrificing the

substance of "glory" to the shadow of wisdom--this was the most

striking element in the drama into which, as I said just now, the

situation had resolved itself. The Liberal party at the present hour

is broken, disfigured, demoralized, the mere ghost of its former self.

The opposition to the government has been, in many ways, factious and

hypercritical: it has been opposition for opposition's sake, and it

has met, in part, the fate of such immoralities. But a good part of

the cause that it represented appeared at times to be the highest

conscience of a civilized country. The aversion to war, the absence

of defiance, the disposition to treat the emperor of Russia like a

gentleman and a man of his word, the readiness to make concessions, to

be conciliatory, even credulous, to try a great many expedients

before resorting to the showy argument of the sword,--these various

attributes of the peace party offered, of course, ample opportunity to

those scoffers at home and abroad who are always prepared to cry out

that England has sold herself, body and soul, to "Manchester." It was

interesting to attempt to feel what there might be of justice in such

cries, and at the same time feel that this looking at war in the face

and pronouncing it very vile was the mark of a high civilization. It

is but fair to add, though it takes some courage, that I found myself

very frequently of the opinion of the last speaker. If British

interests were in fact endangered by Russian aggression--though, on

the whole, I did not at all believe it--it would be a fine thing to

see the ancient might of this great country reaffirm itself. I did

not at all believe it, as I say; yet at times, I confess, I tried to

believe it, pretended I believed it, for the sake of this inspiring

idea of England's making, like the lady in _Dombey & Son_, "an

effort." There were those who, if one would listen to them, would

persuade one that that sort of thing was quite out of the question;

that England was no longer a fighting power; that her day was over;

and that she was quite incapable of striking a blow for the great

empire she had built up--with a good deal less fighting, really, than

had been given out--by taking happy advantage of weaker states. (These

hollow reasoners were of course invidious foreigners.) To such talk as

this I paid little attention--only just enough to feel it quicken my

desire that this fine nation, so full of private pugnacity and of

public deliberation, might find in circumstances a sudden pretext for

doing something gallant and striking.

Meanwhile I watched the soldiers whenever an opportunity offered.

My opportunities, I confess, were moderate, for it was not often my

fortune to encounter an imposing military array. In London there are a

great many red-coats, but they rarely march about the streets in large

masses. The most impressive military body that engages the attention

of the contemplative pedestrian is the troop of Life Guards or of

Blues which every morning, about eleven o'clock, makes its way down to

Whitehall from the Regent's Park barracks. (Shortly afterward another

troop passes up from Whitehall, where, at the Horse Guards, the guard

has been changed.) The Life Guards are one of the most brilliant

ornaments of the metropolis, and I never see two or three of them

pass without feeling shorter by several inches. When, of a summer

afternoon, they scatter themselves abroad in undress uniform--with

their tight red jackets and tight blue trousers following the swelling

lines of their manly shapes, and their little visorless caps perched

neatly askew on the summit of their six feet two of stature--it is

impossible not to be impressed, and almost abashed, by the sight of

such a consciousness of neatly-displayed physical advantages and by

such an air of superior valor. It is true that I found the other

day in an amusing French book (a little book entitled _Londres

pittoresque_, by M. Henri Bellenger) a description of these majestic

warriors which took a humorous view of their grandeur. A Frenchman

arriving in London, says M. Bellenger, stops short in the middle of

the pavement and stares aghast at this strange apparition--"this

tall lean fellow, with his wide, short torso perched upon a pair of

grasshopper's legs and squeezed into an adhesive jacket of scarlet

cloth, who dawdles himself along with a little cane in his hand,

swinging forward his enormous feet, curving his arms, throwing back

his shoulders, arching his chest, with a mixture of awkwardness,

fatuity and stiffness the most curious and the most exhilarating....

In his general aspect," adds this merciless critic, "he recalls the

circus-rider, minus the latter's flexibility: skin-tight garments,

simpering mouth, smile of a dancing-girl, attempt to be impertinent

and irresistible which culminates only in being ridiculous."

This is a very heavy-handed picture of those exaggerated proportions

and that conquering gait which, as I say, render the tall Life

Guardsman one of the most familiar ornaments of the London

streets. But it is when he is armed and mounted that he is most

picturesque--when he sits, monumentally, astride of his black charger

in one of the big niches on either side of the gate of the Horse

Guards, cuirassed and helmeted, booted and spurred. I never fail to

admire him as I pass through the adjacent archway, as well as his

companions, equally helmeted and booted, who march up and down beside

him, and, as Taine says, alluding in his _Notes sur l'Angleterre_ to

the scene, "posent avec majeste devant les gamins." If I chance to be

in St. James's street when a semi-squadron of these elegant warriors

are returning from attendance upon royalty after a Drawing-Room or

a Levee, I am sure to make one of the gamins who stand upon the

curbstone to see them pass. If the day be a fine one at the height of

the season, and London happen to be wearing otherwise the brilliancy

of supreme fashion--with beautiful dandies at the club-windows, and

chariots ascending the sunny slope freighted with wigged and flowered

coachmen, great armorial hammercloths, powdered, appended footmen,

dowagers and debutantes--then the rattling, flashing, prancing

cavalcade of the long detachment of the Household troops strikes one

as the official expression of a thoroughly well-equipped society. It

must be added, however, that it is many a year since the Life Guards

or the Blues have had harder work than this. To escort their sovereign

to the railway-stations at London and Windsor has long been their most

arduous duty. They were present to very good purpose at Waterloo, but

since their return from that immortal field they have not been out of

England. Heavy cavalry, in modern warfare, has gone out of fashion,

and in case of a conflict in the East those nimble, pretty fellows the

Hussars, with their tight, dark-blue tunics so brilliantly embroidered

with yellow braid, would take precedence of their majestic comrades.

The Hussars are indeed the prettiest fellows of all, and if I were

fired with a martial ambition I should certainly enlist in their

ranks. I know of no military personage more agreeable to the civil eye

than a blue-and-yellow hussar, unless indeed it be a young officer in

the Rifle Brigade. The latter is perhaps, to a refined and chastened

taste, the most graceful, the most truly elegant, of all military

types. The little riflemen, the common soldiers, have an extremely

useful and durable aspect: with their plain black uniforms, little

black Scotch bonnets, black gloves, total absence of color, they

suggest the rigidly practical and business-like phase of their

profession--the restriction of the attention to the simple specialty

of "picking off" one's enemy. The officers are of course more elegant,

but their elegance is sober and subdued. They are dressed all in

black, save for a broad, dark crimson sash which they wear across the

shoulder and chest, and for a very slight hint of gold lace upon their

small, round, short-visored caps. They are furthermore adorned with a

small quantity of broad black braid discreetly applied to their tight,

long-skirted surtouts. There is a kind of severe gentlemanliness about

this costume which, when it is worn by a tall, slim, neat-waisted

young Englishman with a fresh complexion, a candid eye and a yellow

moustache, is of quite irresistible effect. There is no such triumph

of taste as to look rich without high colors and picturesque without

accessories. The imagination is always struck by the figure of a

soberly-dressed gentleman with a sword.

The little riflemen, the Hussars, the Life Guards, the Foot Guards,

the artillerymen (whose garments always look stiffer and more

awkwardly fitted than those of their _confreres_) have all, however,

one quality in common--the appearance of extreme, of even excessive,

youth. It is hardly too much to say that the British army, as a

stranger observes it now-a-days, is an army of boys. All the regiments

are boyish: they are made up of lads who range from seventeen to

five-and-twenty. You look almost in vain for the old-fashioned

specimen of the British soldier--the large, well-seasoned man of

thirty, bronzed and whiskered beneath his terrible bearskin and with

shoulders fashioned for the heaviest knapsack. This was the ancient

English grenadier. But the modern grenadier, as he perambulates the

London pavement, is for the most part a fresh-colored lad of moderate

stature, who hardly strikes one as offering the elements of a very

solid national defence. He enlists, as a general thing, for six years,

and if he leave the army at the end of this term his service in the

ranks will have been hardly more than a juvenile escapade. I often

wonder, however, that the unemployed Englishman of humble origin

should not be more often disposed to take up his residence in Her

Majesty's barracks. There is a certain street-corner at Westminster

where the recruiting-sergeants stand all day at the receipt of custom.

The place is well chosen, and I suppose they drive a tolerably lively

business: all London sooner or later passes that way, and whenever

I have passed I have always observed one of these smart apostles of

military glory trying to catch the ear of one of the dingy London

_lazzaroni_. Occasionally, if the hook has been skilfully baited,

they appear to be conscious of a bite, but as a general thing the

unfashionable object of their blandishments turns away, after an

unillumined stare at the brilliant fancy dress of his interlocutor,

with a more or less concise declaration of incredulity. In front

of him stretches, across the misty Thames, the large commotion of

Westminster Bridge, crowned by the huge, towered mass of the Houses of

Parliament. To the right of this, a little _effaced_, as the French

say, is the vague black mass of the Abbey; close at hand are half

a dozen public-houses, convenient for drinking a glass to the

encouragement of military aspiration; in the background are the

squalid and populous slums of Westminster. It is a characteristic

congregation of objects, and I have often wondered that among so many

eloquent mementos of the life of the English people the possible

recruit should not be prompted by the sentiment of social solidarity

to throw himself into the arms of the agent of patriotism. Speaking

less vaguely, one would suppose that to the great majority of the

unwashed and unfed the condition of a private in one of the queen's

regiments would offer much that might be supremely enviable. It is

a chance to become, relatively speaking, a gentleman--more than a

gentleman, a "swell"--to have the grim problem of existence settled

at a stroke. The British soldier always presents the appearance of

scrupulous cleanliness: he is scoured, scrubbed, brushed beyond

reproach. His hair is enriched with pomatum and his shoes are

radiantly polished. His little cap is worn in a manner determined by

considerations purely aesthetic. He carries a little cane in one hand,

and, like a gentleman at a party, a pair of white gloves in the

other. He holds up his head and expands his chest, and bears himself

generally like a person who has reason to invite rather than to evade

the fierce light of modern criticism. He enjoys, moreover, an abundant

leisure, and appears to have ample time and means for participating in

the advantages of a residence in London--for frequenting gin-palaces

and music-halls, for observing the beauties of the West End and

cultivating the society of appreciative housemaids. To a ragged and

simple-minded rustic or to a young Cockney of vague resources all

this ought to be a brilliant picture. That the picture should seem to

contain any shadows is a proof of the deep-seated relish in the human

mind for our personal independence. The fear of "too many masters"

weighs heavily against the assured comforts and the opportunity of

cutting a figure. On the other hand, I remember once being told by a

communicative young trooper with whom I had some conversation that

the desire to "see life" had been his own motive for enlisting. He

appeared to be seeing it with some indistinctness: he was a little

tipsy at the time.

I spoke at the beginning of these remarks of the brilliant impressions

to be gathered during a couple of days' stay at Aldershot, and I have

delayed much too long to attempt a rapid and grateful report of them.

But I reflect that such a report, however friendly, coming from a

visitor profoundly uninitiated into the military mystery, can have but

a relative value. I may lay myself open to contempt, for instance,

in making the simple remark that the big parade held in honor of the

queen's birthday, and which I went down more particularly to see,

struck me, as the young ladies say, as perfectly lovely. I will

nevertheless hazard this confession, for I should otherwise seem

to myself to be grossly irresponsive to a delightful hospitality.

Aldershot is a very charming place--an example the more, to my sense,

if examples were needed, of the happy variety of this wonderful little

island, its adaptability to every form of human convenience. Some

twenty years ago it occurred to the late prince consort, to whom so

many things occurred, that it would be a good thing to establish a

great camp. He cast his eyes about him, and instantly they rested upon

a spot as perfectly adapted to his purpose as if Nature from the first

had had an eye to pleasing him. It was a matter of course that the

prince should find exactly what he looked for. Aldershot is at but

little more than an hour from London--a high, sunny, breezy expanse

surrounded by heathery hills. It offers all the required conditions

of liberal space, of quick accessibility, of extreme salubrity, of

contiguity to a charming little tumbled country in which the troops

may indulge in ingenious imitations of difficult man[oe]uvres; to

which it behooves me to add the advantage of enchanting drives and

walks for the entertainment of the impressible visitor. In winter,

possibly, the great circle of the camp is rather a prey to the

elements, but nothing can be more agreeable than I found it toward

the end of May, with the light fresh breezes hanging about, and the

sun-rifts from a magnificently cloudy sky lighting up all around the

big yellow patches of gorse.

At Aldershot the military class lives in huts, a generic name given to

certain low wooden structures of small dimensions and a single story,

covering, however, a good many specific variations. The oblong shanty

in which thirty or forty common soldiers are stowed away is naturally

a very different affair from the neat little bungalow of an officer.

The buildings are distributed in chessboard fashion over a very large

area, and form two distinct camps. There is also a substantial little

town, chiefly composed of barracks and public-houses; in addition to

which, at crowded seasons, far and near over the plain there is the

glitter of white tents. "The neat little bungalow of an officer," as I

said just now: I learned, among other things, what a charming form of

habitation this may be. The ceilings are very low, the partitions are

thin, the rooms are all next door to each other; the place is a good

deal like an American "cottage" by the seaside. But even in these

narrow conditions that homogeneous English luxury which is the

admiration of the stranger blooms with its usual amplitude. The

specimen which suggests these observations was cushioned and curtained

like a pretty house in Mayfair, and yet its pretensions were tempered

by a kind of rustic humility. I entered it first in the dark, but the

next morning, when I stepped outside to have a look at it by daylight,

I burst into pardonable laughter. The walls were of plain planks

painted a dark red: the roof, on which I could almost rest my elbow,

was neatly endued with a coating of tar. But, after all, the thing was

very pretty. There was a matting of ivy all over the front of the hut,

thriving as I had never known ivy to thrive upon a wooden surface:

there was a tangle of creepers about all the windows. The place looked

like a "side-scene" in a comic opera. But there was a serious little

English lawn in front of it, over which a couple of industrious

red-coats were pulling up and down a garden-roller; and in the centre

of the drive before the door was a tremendous clump of rhododendrons

of more than operatic brilliancy. I leaned on the garden-gate and

looked out at the camp: it was twinkling and bustling in the morning

light, which drizzled down upon it in patches from a somewhat agitated

sky. An hour later the camp got itself together and spread itself, in

close battalions and glittering cohorts, over a big green level, where

it marched and cantered about most effectively in honor of a lady

living at a quiet Scotch country-house. One of this lady's generals

stood in a corner, and the regiments marched past and saluted. This

simple spectacle was in reality very brilliant. I know nothing about

soldiers, as the reader must long since have discovered, but I had,

nevertheless, no hesitation in saying to myself that these were the

handsomest troops in the world. Everything in such a spectacle is

highly picturesque, and if the observer is one of the profane he

has no perception of weakness of detail. He sees the long squadrons

shining and shifting, uncurling themselves over the undulations of

the ground like great serpents with metallic scales, and he remembers

Milton's description of the celestial hosts. The British soldier

is doubtless not celestial, but the extreme perfection of his

appointments makes him look very well on parade. On this occasion at

Aldershot I felt as if I were at the Hippodrome. There was a great

deal of cavalry and artillery, and the dragoons, hussars and lancers,

the beautiful horses, the capital riders, the wonderful wagons and

guns, seemed even more theatrical than military. This came, in a great

measure, from the freshness and tidiness of their accessories--the

brightness and tightness of uniforms, the polish of boots and buckles,

the newness of leather and paint. None of these things were the worse

for wear: they had the bloom of peace still upon them. As I looked at

the show, and then afterward, in charming company, went winding back

to camp, passing detachments of the great cavalcade, returning also in

narrow file, balancing on their handsome horses along the paths in

the gorse-brightened heather, I allowed myself to wish that since, as

matters stood, the British soldier was clearly such a fine fellow and

a review at Aldershot was such a delightful entertainment, the bloom of

peace might long remain.

H. JAMES, JR.

A SAXON GOD.

In the year of grace 1854, Ernest Philip King, a young attache of the

English embassy at Athens, married Haidee Amic, the most beautiful

woman in that city. Neither of the pair possessed a fortune, and their

united means afforded a not abundantly luxurious style of living; but

they loved each other, and the fact that he was the portionless son

of a Church of England divine, and she the daughter of an impecunious

Greek of noble family and royal lineage, was no drawback to the early

happiness of their wooing and wedding. They had two children, a boy

and a girl, born within two years of each other in Athens: the girl,

the elder of the two, they named Hyacinthe; the boy was called

Tancredi.

Five years after this marriage had taken place King lost his position

at the embassy, and only received in exchange for it a mean government

clerkship in Rome at a meagre salary. Thither he removed, and after

dragging out a miserable and disappointed existence five years longer,

he died in the arms of his beautiful and still young wife. Thereafter

the youthful widow managed to keep life in herself and her two little

ones by dint of pinching, management and contrivance on the pittance

that had come to her from the estate of her impecunious father. They

lived in a palace, it is true--but who does not live in a palace in

Rome?--high up, where the cooing doves built their nests under the

leaden eaves, and where the cold winds whistled shrilly in their

season.

Such accomplishments as the mother was mistress of she imparted to

her children. What other education they received was derived from

intercourse with many foreigners, English, French, Russians, and from

familiarity with the sights and wonders of Rome, its galleries, ruins,

palaces, studios.

At eighteen Tancredi had obtained a situation as amanuensis to an

English historian resident in Italy; and Hyacinthe already brooded

over some active and unusual future that spread itself as yet but

dimly before her. She inherited from her mother her unparalleled

beauty--the clear, colorless, flawless skin, the straight features,

the lustrous eyes with their luxuriant lashes and long level brows,

her lithe and gracious figure and slender feet and hands: of the

English father her only physical trace was the large, full, mobile

mouth with its firm white teeth. She had from him the modern spirit

of unrest and the modern impetus and energy: from the Greek mother, a

counteracting languor of temperament and an antique cast of mind.

Such, in a measure, was Hyacinthe King at twenty--a curious compound

of beauty, unspent _verve_, irritated longings, half-superstitious

imaginings, and half-developed impulses, ideas and mental powers;

practically, an assistant to the worn mother in her household duties,

a haunter of the beautiful places in the city of her adoption, an

occasional mingler in the scant festivities of artists, a good

linguist, knowing English thoroughly and speaking French and German

with fluent accuracy. Watch her, with me, as she walks one spring day

along the narrow Via Robbia, down which a slip of sunlight glints

scantily on her young head, and, emerging into a wider thoroughfare,

ascends at last the Scala Regia of the Vatican. The girl is known

there, and the usually not over-courteous officials allow her to pass

on at her will through hall after hall of splendor and priceless

treasure. She is neither an English tourist with Baedeker, Murray and

a note-book, nor an American traveller with pencil, loose leaves and

a possible photographic apparatus in her pocket: therefore to the

vigilant eye of the guardian of the pope's palace she is an innocuous

being. Hyacinthe glides quietly through the Clementino Museum, with

never a glance for the lovely, blooming Mercury of the Belvedere, or

even one peep in at the cabinet where the sad Laocooen for ever writhes

in impotent struggles, or a look of love for rare and radiant Apollo,

or one of surprise for Hercules with the Nemean lion. She has reached

the Hall of Statues--that superb gallery with its subtly-tesselated

pavement, its grand marble columns with their Ionic capitals, its

arches and walls of wondrous marbles--and here she stops with a little

sigh before the Cupid of Praxiteles, shorn of his wings by ruthless

Time or some still more ruthless human destroyer. But oh the

lovesomeness of that wingless Love, the sensuous psalmody that seems

about to part the young lips, and the glad eyes one may fancy glancing

under that careless infant brow! Hyacinthe stands before it a long,

long time while many parties come in and go out, and only moves on a

little when an insolent young Frenchman offers a surmise as to her

being a statue herself. She moves only as far as Ariadne: the _jeune

Francais_ has made a progressive movement also, and notes behind his

Paris hat to his companion that the girl looks something like the

marble. She does. Though the grief of the face of the daughter of

Minos as she lies deserted by her lover on the rocky shore of Naxos be

a poignant and a present woe, there is the shadow of its mate on

the brow and lips of the girl who gazes at its pure and pallid and

all-unavailing loveliness.

The Frenchmen have gone with their guide, and there is a great

stillness falling on the place, and no more tourists come that way.

The light is fading, but Hyacinthe turns back to the mutilated Cupid,

and ere long sits down at the base of the statue, and her head rests

well on the cold marble while the darkness grows, and the guardians of

the Vatican either forget or do not distinguish the white of her gown

from the blurred blanchedness of the Greek Love.

So, while the mother waits at home, and wails and prays and wonders

and seeks comfort among her neighbors, the daughter sleeps and dreams;

and her dream is this: The wingless Love looks up and laughs as in

welcome, and Hyacinthe looks up too, and they both see a new marble

standing there in front of them: nay, not a marble, though white as

Parian, for the eyes that laugh back at Love's and hers are blue as

the blue Italian summer skies, and the curling locks of hair on the

brow are of shining gold, and the palms of the beautiful hands are

rosy with the bright blood of life.

And Love asks, "What would you?"

And the strange comer answers, "They say I need nothing."

And Hyacinthe in her dream says, "Is what they say the truth?" But

even while she speaks the stranger sinks farther and farther from her

sight, his glad blue eyes still laughing back at Love and her as he

fades into one with the darkness afar off where Ariadne slumbers in

sorrow. And the wingless Love smiles sadly as he speaks: "Seek your

art, O daughter of a Greek mother! and you will find in it the answer

to your question." And Hyacinthe, sighing, wakes in the dreary dusk of

the first dawn.

She was affrighted at first, and then slowly there came upon her, with

the fast-increasing daylight, a great peace.

"'Seek your art!'" the girl murmured to herself, pushing back her dark

locks and gazing away toward the spot where the hero of her dream had

vanished. "So will I, Cupid, and there I shall find the answer to my

question, to all questions; for I shall find him whom my soul loveth.

Who was he, what was he, so resplendent and shining among all these

old Greeks? Where shall I seek? Say, Cupid? But you are a silent god,

and will not answer me. I know, I know," she cried, clasping her

slender hands together. "I will go to my father's country, where, he

used to tell me, all the men are fair and all the women good. There I

shall find my art and you, my Saxon god."

When the mother heard of the dream and the resolution she was sad

at first, but decided finally to write to the two maiden sisters of

Ernest King, who had idolized their young, handsome brother, and who

answered promptly that they would gladly receive his only daughter.

Hyacinthe took a brave and smiling leave of the _madre_ and Tancredi,

after having gone to look her farewell at the wingless Love and the

sleeping stricken Ariadne. "Ah, dear Cupid," she whispered, "I am

going to-day to find my art and the Saxon whom my soul loveth.

_Addio_, you and Ariadne!"

From the old into the new, from the tried to the untried, from

inertness to action, from the Greek marbles to Saxon men and women,

from Rome to Britain, from breathing to living. Down the Strand, past

Villiers, Essex, Salisbury, Northumberland and many more streets

whose names tell of vanished splendors, whose dingy lengths are

smoke-blackened, and far enough off from the whole aroma of Belgravia,

is Craven street. The houses are all of a pattern--prim, dingy,

small-windowed habitations, but within this one there must be comfort,

for the fire-flames dance on the meek minute panes and a heavy curl

of smoke is cutting the air above its square, business-like little

chimney-pot. Drawing-room there is none to this mansion, but there is

a pleasant square substitute that the Misses King call "the library"

in the mornings, and "the parlor" after their early, unfashionable

dinner. It is full of old-time furniture, such as connoisseurs are

searching after now--dark polished tables with great claws and little

claws; high presses and cupboards brass bound and with numberless

narrow drawers; spindle-legged chairs, with their worn embroidered

backs and seats; a tall thin bookcase; a haircloth sofa with a griffin

at either end mounting savage guard over an erect pillow; a thick

hearth-rug; and two easy-chairs with cushioned arms and two little old

ladies, the one quaint and frigid--she had once loved and had had a

successful rival; the other quaint and sweet--she had loved too, and

had lost her lover in the depths of the sea.

The rattle of a cab down the still street, a pull-up, a short, sharp

knock, and in two minutes more Hyacinthe King had been welcomed kindly

by one aunt and tenderly pressed to the heart of the other. A sober

housemaid had taken her wraps, and was even now unpacking her boxes in

the chamber above. She was sitting in Miss Juliet's own armchair, and

had greatly surprised Ponto, the ancient cat, by taking him into her

lap.

"Will you ring for tea and candles, sister?" asked Miss King

primly.--"We have had tea of course, Hyacinthe, but we will have some

infused for you at once."

"Perhaps Hyacinthe doesn't like tea," suggested Miss Juliet with her

thin, once-pretty hand on the rope.

"Not like tea? Absurd! Was not her father an Englishman, I should like

to know? Our niece is not a heathen, Juliet."

"But, aunt," smiled Hyacinthe, "I do not like tea, after all. You are

both so kind to me," sighed she: "I hope you will not ever regret my

coming to England and to you."

"It is not likely that our niece--"

"That Ernest's daughter--" said Miss Juliet softly.

"Should ever do aught to give us cause to blush--"

"Save with pride and pleasure," added the younger old lady, laying her

fingers on the girl's soft, dark, abundant hair.

"I hope not, aunts." Hyacinthe looked at Miss King a bit wistfully as

she spoke. "You know I am not come to be a burden to you--the madre

wrote: I am come to England to pursue my art."

"My sister-in-law did--"

"Your dear mother did--" Miss Juliet chimed in gently.

"Write something of the kind, but, Hyacinthe, ladies do not go out

into the world seeking their fortunes. I believe I have heard"--Miss

King speaks austerely and as from some pinnacle of pride--"that

there are _women_ who write and lecture and paint, and, in short,

do anything that is disgraceful; but you, my dear, are not of that

blood."

"Yes, aunt, I am. I would do any of those things--must do one of them

or something--to help me find my Saxon god."

"Your what?" cries Miss King, staring over her spectacles at the

serene, heroic young face.

"Your what, dear child?" murmurs Miss Juliet protectively, looking

down into her niece's dark, fathomless eyes.

"Saxon god," says she quite low, for the first time in all her life

experiencing a conscious shyness.

"Are you a pagan, Hyacinthe King?" shrieks the elder aunt.

"Tell us all about it, my dear," says Miss Juliet soothingly.

And Hyacinthe tells them her dream and her resolve.

"So much for an honest English gentleman wedding with a--"

"Lovely Greek girl," finishes Miss Juliet quietly, glancing for the

first time at her sister. "They say your mother was very beautiful,

Hyacinthe."

"Yes the madre is beautiful: she is like the Venus of the Capitol."

Miss King utters a woeful "Ah!" which her sister endeavors to smother

in some kind inquiry.

When Hyacinthe has been shown to her room by the sober housemaid,

the two old ladies discuss the situation in full, and Miss Juliet's

gentleness so far prevails over Miss King's frigid despair as to wring

from the latter a tardy promise to let the young niece pursue the

frightful tenor of her way, at least for a time.

A week after her arrival in London, the girl, having informed herself

with a marvellous quickness of intelligence on various practical

points, calmly laid her plans before her aunts, the elder of whom

listened in frigid silence, the younger with assurances of assistance

and counsel. She then proceeded to put her projects into action with a

curious matter-of-factness that, considering the purely ideal nature

of her aim, is to be accounted for in no other way than by the

recollection of her parentage--the Greek soul and the British brain.

On a Wednesday morning Hyacinthe and Miss Juliet repaired to the

studio of a great sculptor: the niece had previously written to him

stating her desire, and the aunt, nervous and excited, clung to the

girl's firm arm in a kind of terror.

"You wish to know if you have a talent for my art?" he asked kindly,

looking into the pallid young face with its earnest uplifted look. "I

think that had you the least gift that way, having lived in Rome, you

would know it without my assistance. However, here is a bit of clay:

we shall soon see. Try what your fingers can make of it--if a cup like

this one." He turned off, but watched her, nevertheless, with fixed

curiosity as she handled the lump of damp earth.

Hyacinthe could make nothing of it save twist it from one shapeless

mass into another.

"I had hoped it would be sculpture," she said a bit regretfully as she

left the great man's workroom. "In my dream _he_ was a statue."

On Thursday the two went to the atelier of a renowned painter. He too

bent curious interested eyes upon the absorbed and searching face of

his strange applicant as he placed pencils, canvas and brushes before

her, and directed her to look for a model to the simple vase that

stood opposite or to the bust of Clyte that was beside her. But

Hyacinthe had no power over these things, and the two turned their

faces back toward the small house in Craven street.

On Friday they sought out a celebrated musician, but the long, supple

hands--veritable "piano-hands" he noted from the first--availed the

girl in no way here. The maestro said she "might spend years in study,

but the soul was not attuned to it."

When Saturday came they went to a famous teacher for the voice. But,

alas! Hyacinthe, he said frankly, had "no divine possibilities shrined

in her mellow tones." Perhaps she was a little, just a little,

disheartened on Saturday night. If so, none knew it.

On Sunday the old ladies took her to St. Martin-le-Grand's church, but

all she said over the early cold dinner was, "Women cannot preach in

the churches. I could not find him there."

And Miss King said grace after that meat in a loud and aggressive

voice, but Miss Juliet whispered a soft and sweet "Amen."

On Monday morning Hyacinthe slipped from the house unseen. There was

a vein of subtlety and finesse in her that came to the surface on

occasion: it had been in Haidee Amic and in her ancestors. She

repaired to a _maitre de ballet_, an old man who lived in an old house

in the East End.

"Can you learn to dance, mademoiselle--learn to dance 'superbly'?"

repeated the danseur after his applicant. "Well, I should say no, most

decidedly--never. You have not a particle of _chic_, coquetry: you

were made for tragedy, mademoiselle, and not for the airy, indefinable

graces of my art. You should devote yourself to the drama."

Hyacinthe looked up, and the old Italian repeated his assertion,

adding a recommendation to seek an interview with Mr. Arbuthnot,

the proprietor and manager of one of the principal theatres. Before

Hyacinthe returned to the little domicile in Craven street she had

been enrolled as a member of the company of this temple of the

dramatic art.

Arbuthnot was speculative, and withal lucky: he had never brought out

even a "successful failure," and a something in this odd young woman's

beauty, earnestness, frankness, pleased him. He gave her the "balcony

scene," of course, to read to him; noted her poses, which were

singularly felicitous; knew at once that she was not cast for the

lovesick Veronese maiden; was surprised to discover that she was quite

willing to follow his advice--to begin in small parts and work her way

up if possible. The shrewd London manager foresaw triumphs ahead

when the insignificant "Miss H. Leroy" should pass into the actress

Hyacinthe King.

"Aunts, I went out by myself," the girl says as she dawdles shyly over

her newly-acquired habit of tea-drinking that evening, "because I

knew--I fancied--that you, Aunt Juliet, would not care to go with me

where I was going."

"Yes, dear," says Miss Juliet, glad to have the curious child of her

favorite brother back with her in safety.

"A foolish and an unwarrantable step, Hyacinthe, which I trust--I

trust--you will never repeat." Thus Miss King, adding with severity,

"May I inquire, Hyacinthe, where you went?"

"To Bozati the ballet-master first."

"To whom?" Miss King draws forth an old-fashioned salts-bottle, and

Miss Juliet glances nervously at the tea-tray. "To whom? Can it be

possible that my niece, your father's daughter--No, no! my ears

deceive me."

"He said I never could learn to be anything more than a coryphee,

aunt, and I knew that that would not be accounted an art," she says

quite low. "But I then went to Mr. Arbuthnot. You know him, aunt?"

"I have heard of such a person," answers Miss King, peering austerely

over her spectacles at Hyacinthe.

"He has engaged me at a salary of two pounds a week, and he says that

some day I shall be great." Her eyes dilate and look out afar, through

the tiny window-panes, into a limitless and superb future. "I have

found my art; and I am so happy!"

Miss Juliet's glance intercepts her sister's speech. There is silence

in the quaint, small parlor that night; and for the first time in many

a year the memory of her lost lover's first kiss rests softly on Miss

King's wan, wrinkled cheek: for the first time in many a year she has

remembered the perfection of him and forgotten the perfidy.

That was October.

This is June.

"For thirty-seven consecutive nights the girl has held the public of

this great capital spellbound by the magical power of her art. She

has great beauty--Greek features lighted up by Northern vividness and

intellectuality; but transcendent beauty falls to the lot of very many

actresses, yet it is not to be said of any one of them that they have

what this unheralded, unknown girl possesses--tragic genius such as

thrilled through the Hebrew veins of dead Rachel, and flew from her, a

magnetic current, straight to the hearts and brains of her auditors.

Of such metal is made this new star. She has as yet appeared but in

one _role_, that of Adrienne in Scribe's play, but within the compass

of its five acts she runs the wild and weary gamut from crowned love

to crowned despair. It is a new interpretation, and a remarkable

one--an interpretation that is tinged with the blight of our

inquisitive and mournful age: self-consciousness, that terrible

tormentor in her soul, sits for ever in judgment upon every impulse

of the heart of Adrienne, and makes of pain a stinging poison, and

of pleasure but a poor potentiality. Her death-scene is singular and

awful--awful in its physical adherence to realism, and singular in

that it does not disgust, or even horrify, but leaves a memory of

peace with the listener, who has not failed to catch the last strain

for sight of the divine and dying eyes." So the critic of the London

oracle wrote of Hyacinthe King.

That night the people had crowned her with a wreath of gold

laurel-leaves, and she was walking to her dressing-room, when, as she

passed the green-room door, a merry laugh made her glance in. There

were fifty people there--actors, journalists, swells and hangers-on

of the playhouse. A little to the right of the group, and talking

and laughing with two or three others, stood a man both young and

handsome.

Hyacinthe went toward him, and the people, unused to seeing her there

for a long time past, hushed their talk, and one of them marked the

newness of the light that shone in her eyes and the happiness that

smiled on her lips as she came. He was a poet, and he went home and

made verses on her: he had never thought of such a thing before. She

raised the wreath of laurel from her brows and lifted it up to the

golden head of the man whose laugh she had caught. "My Saxon god!" she

murmured, so low that none heard her save him, and then, leaving the

crown on his head, she turned and walked away. She went home to the

shabby house in Craven street, which was still her home, and before

she slept she whispered to Miss Juliet, "I have found him."

In less than twenty-four hours the scene enacted in the green-room of

the theatre had been reported everywhere--first in the clubs, then

in all the salons--not last in the pretty boudoir of Lady Florence

Ffolliott.

Every night thereafter Hyacinthe saw her hero sitting in his stall: he

never missed once, but generally came in well on toward the end of the

performance. At the close of a fortnight, as she was making her way to

her room after the curtain had come down for the last time, she met

him face to face: he had planned it so.

"What would you?" she asked in the odd foreign fashion that clung to

her still, and showed itself when she was taken unawares.

"They say I need nothing;" and the blue eyes laugh down into hers.

"They say I need nothing now that I have been crowned by a King with

laurel-leaves." But even as he speaks the smile fades from his lips:

he sees no answering flash on hers.

"That is what you said in the Vatican that night," she says. "Is it

true?"

He begins to fear that she is losing her mind, but he speaks gently to

her: "Have we met before, then?"

Hyacinthe, standing between two dusty flies while the mirth of the

farce rings out from the stage, tells her dream, for the third time,

to-night to him. "Is it true that you need nothing?" she asks again,

raising anxious eyes to his.

For a moment the man wavers. Last night he would have laughed to scorn

the idea of _his_ not being ready with a pretty speech for a beautiful

actress: just now he is puzzled for a reply, and he knows full well

that some strange new jarring hand is sweeping the strings of his

life. "It is true," he sighs, remembering a true heart that loves

him. "I have wealth, position--these things first, for they breed the

rest," he says with a small sneer--"troops of friends and the promised

hand of a woman whom I have asked to marry me."

"I am sorry," she says at last with a child's sad, unconscious

inflection, "but all the same, I have found you. Cupid said I should."

He surveys her calculatingly: he is a very keen man of the world, and

he has recovered sufficiently from the peculiarity of the situation to

speculate upon it with true British acumen. Shall he, or shall he not,

put a certain question to her, or leave the matter at rest for ever?

Being a person well used to gratifying himself, he asks his question:

"Supposing that it had not been true, what would you have had to say

to me then?" And, strange to say, his face flushes as he finishes--not

hers.

"Nothing." The word comes coldly forth without a fellow. He knows then

that she has only looked at Love, and that the thoughtless harmony of

his life is done for him.

"May I see you sometimes?" he cries as she makes a step onward.

"When you will," she replies, going farther along the narrow passage,

and then looking back at him clearly. "I have found you: I am very

content. And if you thought I loved you--Well, Love, you know, was a

blind god, and so must ever be content to look at happiness through

another's eyes."

He went away, and he said to himself, "She does not know what love

means."

Night after night found him at the theatre, and night after night saw

him seek at least a few moments' talk with her; and always he came

away thinking her a colder woman than any of the statues she was so

fond of speaking about. In her conversation there was no personality;

and although her intellect pleased him, the lack of anything else

annoyed him in equal proportion. And yet he loved the woman whom he

was going to marry. She was a sweet woman--"God never made a sweeter,"

he told himself a hundred times a day. He had wooed her and won her,

and wished to make her his wife.

She _was_ a sweet woman. For weeks now she had heard harsh rumors and

evil things of him that made her heart ache, but she had given no

sign, nor would she have ever done so had not her friends goaded her

to the point. She hears the light footstep coming along the corridor

toward her, and she knows that it comes this morning at her especial

call. She sees the bonny face and feels the light kiss on her cheek.

Heaven forgive her if she inwardly wonder if these lips she loves have

last rested on another woman's face!

"Roy," she says, stealing up to him and laying one of her lovely round

arms about his neck, "tell me, dear, if you have ceased to love me--if

you would rather--rather break our engagement? Because, dear, better a

parting now, before it is too late, than a lifelong misery afterward."

There are tears in the blue bewitching eyes, and tears in the gentle

voice that he is not slow to feel.

"Florence"--the young man catches her in his arms--"who has--What do

you mean? I have not ceased to love you." All the fair fascination

that has made her so dear to him in the past rushes over him now to

her rescue.

"Then, Roy, why, why--Oh, I cannot say it!" Her pretty head, gold like

his own, falls on his shoulder.

"Look up, love." He is not a coward, whatever else. "You mean to say,

'Why do I, a man professing to love one woman, constantly seek the

society of another?' Do not you?"

She bows her head, her white lids droop. There is a pause so long that

the ticking of the little clock on the mantel seems a noise in the

stillness. He puts her out of his arms, rises, picks up a newspaper,

throws it down, and says, "God help me! I don't know." Then another

pause; and now the ticking of the little clock is fairly riotous.

"Florence, love," kneeling by her, "bear with me. It's a fascination,

an infatuation--an intellectual disloyalty to you, if you will--but it

is nothing more, and it must die out soon."

Lady Dering was a charming woman: all her friends agreed upon that

point, and also upon another--that an invitation to visit Stokeham

Park was equivalent to a guarantee for so many days of unalloyed

pleasure. It was a grand old place, not quite three hours from town,

with winding broad avenues and glimpses of sweeping smooth lawns

between the oaks and beeches. And the company which the mistress of

Stokeham had gathered about her this autumn was, if possible, a more

congenial and yet varied one than usual. Having no children of her

own, Lady Dering enjoyed especially the society of young people, and

generally contrived to have a goodly number of them about her--Mildred

and Mabel Masham, Lady Isobel French, Lady Florence Ffolliott, her

cousin the little Viscount Harleigh--who was very far gone in love

with his uncle's daughter, by the by--the Hon. Hugh Leroy Chandoce and

a host of others.

Her ladyship, telegram in hand, has just knocked at Florence

Ffolliott's door. Florence is a special favorite with the old lady:

she approves thoroughly of her engagement, which was formally

announced at Stokeham last year, and of the man of her choice, who at

the present moment is lighting a cigar and cogitating in a somewhat

ruffled frame of mind over the piece of news he has just been made

acquainted with by his hostess.

"Florence, my dear," says her ladyship, "I am the most fortunate

woman in the world. I have been longing for a new star in my domestic

firmament, and, behold! it dawns. I expected to have her here some

time, but not so early as this; and the charming creature sends me a

telegram that she arrives by the eleven-o'clock express this morning:

I have just sent to the station for her. I met Roy on my way to you,

and conveyed the intelligence to him, but of course he only looked

immensely bored: these absurd men! they never can take an interest in

but one woman at a time." Lady Florence's quick color came naturally

enough. "Now, my child, guess the name of the new luminary."

"I'm quite sure I can't," says the girl, her roses paling to their

usual pink. "Tell me, dear Lady Dering: suspense is terrible;" and she

laughs merrily.

"Hyacinthe King, the great actress, my dear: could anything be more

delicious?" Lady Dering has been absent on the Continent during the

season, and is utterly ignorant of all the _on dits_ of the day.

"Charming!" murmurs Florence Ffolliott with the interested inflection

of thorough good breeding; but her hands, lying clasped together on

her lap, clasp each other cruelly.

"Yes," continues her ladyship. "I knew her father in my young

days--Ernest King--the Kings of Essex, you know?" Florence nods

assent. "He was the handsomest fellow imaginable, married a lovely

Greek girl; and here comes his daughter startling the world with her

genius twenty odd years after my little flirtation with him. It makes

one feel old, child--old. I called on her the last day I was in

London, but she was out; so then I wrote and begged her to come to

Stokeham when she could. Now I must leave you, dear. What are you

reading? Poetry, of course. I never read anything else either when I

was your age and was engaged to Sir Harry." The bright, stately lady

laughs gayly as she goes, and Florence Ffolliott sits before her

fire until luncheon-time, turning over a dozen wild fancies in her

brain--fancies that do no honor either to the man she loves or the

woman whom she cannot help disliking heartily. But her just, and

withal generous, soul dismisses them at last, and she bows her head to

the blow and acknowledges it to be what it is--an accident.

That the advent of Hyacinthe King in their midst should have created

no sensation among the party assembled at Stokeham would scarcely be a

reasonable proposition: it did, and not only the excitement that the

coming of a renowned meteor of the theatrical firmament might be

expected to occasion in a house full of British subjects, but

an undertone of surmise, and some sarcasms, between those--the

majority--who were well enough aware of Roy Chandoce's peculiar

infatuation for the beautiful young player. The pair were watched

keenly, it must be confessed, but with a courtesy and _savoir faire_

that admitted no betrayal of this absolutely human curiosity--by

none more keenly and more guardedly than by Lady Florence Ffolliott.

Neither she nor they discovered aught in the conduct of either the man

or the woman to find fault with or cavil at.

Hyacinthe was quickly voted a "man's woman" by the women, and as

quickly pronounced a "thorough enigma" by the men, not one of whom had

succeeded, even after the lapse of fourteen days, in arousing in her

that which is most dear to the masculine soul, a preference--although

it be a mild, a shamming or an evanescent preference--for one of them

above another. Sir Vane Masham set her down over his third dinner's

sherry as "an iceberg," in which kind opinion the little viscount

joined, with the amendment of "polar refrigerator." Young Arthur

French, who was very hard hit indeed, said she was like a "beautiful,

heartless marble statue," but the poet, who had made verses on her,

called her a "white lily with a heart of flame."

Not one of them all, however, could dispute the perfect quality of her

beauty to-night. In a robe of violet satin, with pale jealous topazes

shining on her neck and arms and in the sleek braids of her dark hair,

Hyacinthe was fit for the regards of emperors had they been there to

see. They were not. In the conservatory at Stokeham, where she stood

amid the tropical trees and flowers and breathing the warm close scent

of rich blossoms foreign to English soil, there was only one man to

look at her, and he was no potentate, but a blond young fellow, with

blue blood in his veins and a sad riot in his heart.

For the first time since they have been in the house together he has

left his betrothed wife's side and sought hers: in the face of this

little watching world about him he has, at last, quietly risen from

the seat at Florence Ffolliott's side and followed that trail of

sheeny satin into the conservatory. "Not one word for me?" he says in

a low voice that has in it a sort of desperation.

She turns startled and looks at him: "Who wants me? Who sent you to

fetch me?"

"No one 'sent' me," he replies bitterly: "I 'want' you. Hyacinthe!

Hyacinthe!" He stretches two arms out toward her, and when he dies

Roy Chandoce remembers the look that leaps then into the eyes of this

girl.

"Do not touch me!" She shrinks away with the expression of awakened

womanhood on her fair face. "If you do, you will make me mad." For he

has followed and is close to her.

"No, no, no! Not 'mad'--happy! Ah, Hyacinthe!" His arms are no more

outstretched or empty: they enfold all the beauty and all the

bliss that now and then give mortality fresh faith in heaven. "Ah,

Hyacinthe!" That is all that he says, and she is silent while his

kisses fall upon her mouth and cheeks and brow and hands.

And when, ten minutes later, he goes back where he came from, he knows

that it is no "intellectual disloyalty" that lured him from his seat:

he knows that the poet was right, and Vane and the viscount and Arthur

all wrong.

There is to be a meet at Stokeham Park the next morning, and

Hyacinthe, for the first time in her life, witnesses the pretty sight.

Two or three only of the ladies are going to ride to cover, among them

Lady Florence Ffolliott, who looks superbly on her horse and in her

habit, and feels superbly too--in a transient physical fashion--as she

glances down at Hyacinthe, who in her clinging creamy gown, with a

furred cloak thrown about her, stands in the porch to see them off.

She knows nothing of horses or riding, and is therefore debarred from

the exhilarating pleasure, and has also declined Lady Dering's offer

to drive with her to the first cover that is to be drawn. But the

pretty and, to her, novel picture of the various vehicles with their

freight of merry matrons, girls and children, the scarlet coats of the

sportsmen and the servants, the hounds drawn up a good piece off, the

four ladies who are going to ride, and stately, cheery Lady Dering

exchanging cordial and courteous greetings with her friends and

neighbors, while good-hearted Sir Harry gives some last instructions

to his whip, is sufficiently charming.

"You have eaten no breakfast, Mr. Chandoce," cries the hostess, "and

you are quite as white as Lady Florence's glove there. I insist upon

your taking a glass of something before you are off.--Patrick!" But

before Patrick has even started on my lady's errand Hyacinthe has

fetched from the hall a glass of claret-cup, and holds it up to him

where he sits on his lithe and mettlesome hunter.

He takes it, drains it to the last drop and hands it back to her.

Their eyes meet, and his lips murmur very softly a Saxon's sweetest

word of endearment--"My darling!"

"Quarter-past eleven!" calls Sir Harry; and the gay cavalcade moves

off, and Hyacinthe, waving adieu to Lady Dering, watches it fade away

among the windings of the avenue.

"Mr. Chandoce has a green mount," mutters one of the footmen to

another.

"Yes, he have, but he's not a green horseman."

"No," admits the other.

Hyacinthe remembers their talk later in the day--that day that she

passes in such a restless wandering from one room to another--from the

conservatory to the library, and from music-room to hall. Finally, at

four o'clock she has composed herself with a book in the library, and

before the fire sits half lost in reading, half in wondering. Without,

the early gloom of the short day is gathering, and the bare trees cast

murk shadows all across the frostbitten lawns, and late birds twitter

their good-night notes, and a few sleepy rooks caw coldly to each

other.

She hears none of this, is as self-absorbed a being as ever lived--one

whose whole solitude is full to overflowing with the thought of

another. But at last there breaks in upon Hyacinthe's still dream a

shriek, and then wild tumult, noises and excited speech, and the girl

springs to her feet, and in a flash is out in the wide hall in the

very midst of it all.

He lies there quite, quite dead. For ever flown the breath that made

of this beautiful clay a living man. Lady Florence has him halfway in

her arms as she kneels on the floor beside the body of her lover, and

between her sobs cries out to them to "Go for the surgeons!" for whom

long since Sir Harry sent. Hyacinthe put her hands behind her and

leaned heavily against the column that by good chance she found there.

When the crowd parted from him a little she leaned over a bit and

stared: that was all.

"Do not _you_ touch him!" cried the English maiden, maddened by her

grief, as she glanced up at the fair face.

"No, I will not: I do not wish to," returns the other softly,

straightening herself; and leaning there in her close gown, she is as

tearless as some caryatid.

When the surgeons have come on their useless mission, and gone, when

Florence Ffolliott stands weeping and wringing her hands, Hyacinthe

ventures over a pace nearer to the two.

"You see, Lady Florence," she says very gently, and with that curious

sorrowful look on her face that made it so like to the Ariadne's--"you

see, he was not meant for any woman: he was a Saxon god."

A year later Lady Florence Ffolliott's engagement to her cousin, the

little lovelorn viscount, was announced.

Sir Henry Leighton told me last week that he had been called in

consultation with regard to Hyacinthe King, and that there were not

three months of life in her. "She cannot act," said the great medical

man: "she plays her parts, it is true, but the power to portray has

gone out of her. She is going back to Rome for a while, and, I can

assure you, she will never return."

MARGUERITE F. AYMAR.

MUSICAL NOTATION.

Why is it that the knowledge of music is not more common?--that is,

why is it that there are so few people in this and every other country

who are able to read and write music as they read and write their

mother-tongue? Is it that the musical ear is a rare gift? Evidently

not, for music is composed of a small number of elements, which are

found for the most part in any popular air, and almost every person

can sing one or more of these airs correctly. It is not, then, the

musical ear nor the sense of time which is wanting. Neither is the

cause to be attributed to the fact that few study music; for, although

the teaching of music is by no means so general as it should be, still

it is taught in our schools, public and private, singing-schools are

common even in our small villages, and there is no lack of teachers

both of vocal and instrumental music. And yet out of every hundred

who take up the study of music, it is safe to say that about

ninety abandon it after a short time, discouraged by the almost

insurmountable difficulties presented at every turn. Only those

succeed who are endowed with rare natural aptitude, an indomitable

will, and time--four or five years at least--to devote to an art which

is as yet a luxury to the masses of the people.

M. Galin, his pupil M. Cheve and other advocates of reform in musical

notation declare that the people are deprived of this grand source of

culture because of the blind, inconsistent and wholly unscientific

nature of the ordinary musical notation. At first this seems

incredible, but one has only to compare this notation with that

elaborated by Emile Cheve after Galin's theory to become convinced

that the statement is true. People are apt to say, "Why, it cannot

be that our system of writing music is so defective: in this age of

improvements and scientific precision gross inconsistencies would have

been eliminated long ago." And so, indeed, they would have been but

for the fact that the very basis of the system is altogether at

fault. How are the Chinese, for example, to "improve" their system of

writing? It is simply impossible. They have some thousands of abstract

characters, hieroglyphs standing for things or thoughts. All these

must be swept away, and in their place must come an alphabet where

each letter stands for an elementary sound. These elementary sounds

are few in number in any language. So of our musical notation. It is

doubtful if it can be materially improved; it must be discarded for a

system of fewer elements and a more clear and precise combination of

them.

No, it is not strange that we have not adopted a better method of

musical notation before this. Think how long a struggle it required to

abandon the cumbersome Roman notation for the short, clear and

precise Arabic--how many centuries of feeble infancy the science of

mathematics passed before the invention of logarithms rendered the

most tedious calculations rapid and easy. Most people take things as

they seem, giving but little thought to their meanings and relations

to each other; and so an awkward method may be followed a long time

without protest. People are blamed for their devotion to routine, but

devotion to routine is perfectly natural. It is mental inertia, and

corresponds to that property in physics--the inability of a body of

itself to start when at rest, or stop or change its course when in

motion. And then the general distrust of new things--"new-fangled

notions," as contempt terms them--retards the examination and adoption

of improved and labor-saving methods.

It is more than fifty years since Pierre Galin, professor of

mathematics in the institute for deaf mutes at Bordeaux, published his

_Exposition d'une nouvelle Methode pour l'Enseignement de la Musique_,

and more than thirty since his distinguished disciple, Emile Cheve,

demonstrated practically, in the military gymnasium at Lyons,

the immeasurable superiority of that method; and yet such is the

repugnance of teachers of music to any change in their routine that

they have paid little or no attention to the work of Galin and his

followers. The _Methode elementaire de la Musique vocale_, by M. and

Mme. Emile Cheve, has never been translated into English. It was

published in Paris by the authors in 1851--a work of over five hundred

pages in royal octavo, and a most clear and exhaustive exposition of

the method which they followed with such success.

In proof of the superiority of that method, an account of M. Cheve's

test-experiment at the military gymnasium at Lyons in 1843 will be

interesting. The gymnasium was at that time under the direction of two

officers of the French army, Captain d'Argy and Lieutenant Grenier.

The facts are taken from their official report of the experiment.

By order of Lieutenant-General Lascours the soldiers of the gymnasium

were placed at the disposition of M. Cheve, that he might make a trial

of his method. General Lascours further ordered that the officers in

charge of the gymnasium should be present at every lesson, and report

carefully the progress of the pupils and the final results of the

course.

The members of the class were taken at large from the twelfth,

sixteenth and twenty-ninth regiments of the line, fifty from each.

M. Cheve accepted all as they came, and agreed formally to bring

eight-tenths of the class of one hundred and fifty in one year to the

following results: (1) To understand the theory of music analytically;

(2) To sing alone and without any instrument any piece of music within

the compass of ordinary voices; (3) To write improvised airs from

dictation.

"Candor compels us to admit," says the report, "that nearly all of the

soldiers showed the greatest repugnance to attending the course, and

did so only because they were ordered to do so. Several months elapsed

before this bad spirit could be conquered, and before the majority

of them could be brought to practise the vocal exercises. Some even

refused to try to sing, on the ground that they were old, that they

had no voice, that they could not read, etc."

The first lesson took place October 1, 1842. There were five a week,

of an hour and a half each. At the end of the month the professor

wished to classify the voices, and required each pupil to sing alone.

The experiment was rather discouraging. _More than two-thirds were

unable to sing the scale_: twelve refused to utter a sound, and

declared that nothing would induce them to try. These twelve were

immediately dismissed. The rest remained, though some confessed that

they had not sung a note since the beginning of the course. These,

however, now promised to practise all the exercises in future. Under

these unfavorable circumstances the professor engaged anew to fulfil

his contract, on condition that the pupils would submit to practise

the exercises conscientiously and attend regularly. From this time,

with the exception of three or four rebellious spirits, none were

rejected.

The month of October was not very profitable to the pupils, on account

of continual absences necessitated by military reviews. April and May

of the following year (1843) also brought many interruptions through

the various demands of the service. Sickness, promotions, punishments,

mutations, and the disbanding of the class of 1836, which took away

several under-officers, gradually reduced the class, so that in July

only a little over fifty were left. This falling off greatly troubled

Professor Cheve, especially when the army at Lyons went into camp and

left him with only twenty-eight pupils. This reduction of the class

could not have been foreseen or prevented. M. Cheve could not be held

responsible for the fulfilment of his promise, except to eight-tenths

of those that remained.

Two months after the opening of the course M. Cheve printed at his own

expense a collection of one hundred and forty pieces of music from the

best composers, and gave a copy to each of his pupils, that they might

read from the printed page instead of the blackboard. Three months

after the opening of the course General Lascours visited the gymnasium

and was present during one of the lessons. He was struck, as were all

the visitors on that occasion, by the progress obtained. The pupils

were already far advanced in intonation and in time: they read easily

in all the keys, and sung pieces together with great spirit and

correctness.

On April 25, 1843, the general returned, accompanied by Madame

Lascours and all the officers of his staff. The following was the

programme of the occasion: (1) A quartette from Webbe; (2) A Languedoc

air in three parts, from Desrues; (3) A trio from the opera of

_[OE]dipus in Colonna_, by Sacchini; (4) Singing at sight intervals of

all kinds, major and minor; (5) Singing at sight in eight different

keys; (6) Two rounds in three voices from Siller; (7) A quartette from

the _Clemenza di Tito_ of Mozart; (8) A quartette from the _Iphigenia_

of Gluck; (9) A trio from the _Corysander_, or the _Magic Rose_ of

Berton; (10) Exercise upon the tonic in all the keys, major and minor;

(11) Exercise in naming notes vocalized; (12) Singing at sight a trio

from the _Magic Flute_ of Mozart; (13) _Ave Regina_, by Choron--three

voices; (14) The _Gondolier_, a round in three parts, by Desrues; (15)

A quartette from the _Magic Flute_; (16) Chorus from the _Tancredi_ of

Rossini; (17) The "Prayer" from _Joseph_, by Mehul.

This is certainly a remarkable programme to be filled by illiterate

soldiers with only six months' training. "It would be difficult," says

the official report, "to paint the astonishment of the spectators

upon this occasion. The confidence and readiness with which

these soldier-students of music sang at sight the most difficult

intonations, major and minor, the facility with which they read in all

the keys, and, finally, the certainty and spontaneity with which

they _all, without exception_, recognized and named various sounds

vocalized, showed clearly that they possessed a very superior

knowledge of intonation. All the pieces which they sung were rendered

with irreproachable correctness, though the professor did not beat the

time, except through the first bar to indicate the movement.

"With the consent of General Lascours, all the teachers and professors

in the city, including the members of the Royal College, were on one

occasion admitted to a private rehearsal of M. Cheve's class. The

result was the same--admiration and astonishment. The professor

received on all sides well-merited praise for a success gained in so

short a time and with such unfavorable conditions.

"These soldiers have at this moment (September 1, 1843) reached a

degree of power in intonation and in reading music at sight which is

fairly wonderful. They can sing together at sight any new piece in

three or four parts, the music being written, after the new method, in

figures. If the piece be written in the ordinary musical character,

no matter what the key, they can also sing it at sight together after

they have together sung each part by itself. All the members of the

class understand thoroughly the theory of music, and are able to write

from dictation a vocalized air never heard before, no matter what the

modulations may be.

"Such are the results obtained by Professor Cheve from a mass of men

taken at hazard and against their will. The experiment to-day has had

eleven months of duration, seventeen or eighteen lessons being given

every month. The pupils have never studied at all between the lessons,

and those who remain at the present time have lost many lessons from

punishments, illness, leave of absence, etc.

"As to the method pursued by M. Cheve, it is as follows: In theory he

demonstrates _de facto_ the inequality of major and minor seconds, and

from this he deduces the theory of the gamut. Here he follows in the

footsteps of his master, Galin. The theory of time he takes from

the same source. In practice, he employs the Arabic figures for the

musical notes, as proposed by J. J. Rousseau and modified by Galin,

using a series of exercises created by Madame Cheve. To these

exercises especially does M. Cheve owe his ability to make his pupils

masters of intonation in an incredibly short time. He teaches time by

itself, using a language of durations invented by the father of Madame

Cheve, M. Aime Paris, and tables of exercises in time made by Madame

Cheve. Transposition is also taught separately, and never does M.

Cheve require his pupils to execute two things simultaneously until

they understand perfectly how to do them separately.

"In this way M. Cheve leads his pupils through every step of the

theory of music until they are able to read _in the ordinary notation_

every kind of music, and to execute during any piece all the possible

changes of mode or key."

The report--which is duly signed by the officers having charge of the

gymnasium--ends with the expression of their "profound conviction that

the method of teaching music employed by Professor Cheve is faultless,

if it may be judged by its practical results."

There is a very common impression, in this country at least, that the

best new method of writing music has been tried and abandoned, weighed

in the balance and found wanting. This is far from the fact. It is

doubtful if there is one person in a hundred in this country who ever

heard even the name of Galin or Cheve. Some twenty years ago there was

a little interest excited in a new method of musical notation. A class

was formed in Lowell, Massachusetts, and a "singing-book" was used

there with the notes written with numerals on the staff instead of the

usual characters. But it could not have been the Cheve method that

the Lowell professor used, for he employed no new system of teaching

time--a prime characteristic of that method.

Those who examine the subject fairly will be compelled to take the

position held by Galin, Cheve and their school, that a new method of

writing music is imperatively needed, because that now in use lacks

the essential elements of a scientific system: it is neither simple,

clear nor concise. There are certain elementary principles which must

be observed in the exposition of any science, and especially in that

of music, which is addressed to all classes of intelligence. Among

these principles are the following, as stated by M. Cheve: _1st_.

Every idea should be presented to the mind by a clear and precise

symbol. _2d_. The same idea should always be presented by the same

sign: the same sign should always represent the same idea. _3d_.

Elementary textbooks or methods should never present two difficulties

to the mind at the same time; and such textbooks or methods should be

an assemblage of means adapted to aid ordinary intelligences to gain

the object proposed. _4th_. The memory should never be drawn upon

except where reasoning is impossible.

Let us test the exposition of the ordinary musical notation, and also

that of the school of Galin, by these principles and compare the

results.

_First_. Is every idea presented by a clear and precise symbol?

In the ordinary method, certainly not. The musical sounds or notes are

represented by elliptical curves with or without stems; by spots

or dots with plain stems, or with stems having from one to four

appendages, or with these appendages united, forming bars across the

stems. These curves and dots are placed on the five parallel lines of

a staff, as it is called, or between the lines of this staff, or on or

between added or "ledger" lines above and below the staff. Certainly,

these cannot be called precise symbols, especially when we reflect

that _any one of them placed upon any given line or space may

represent successively do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si_, or the flats or

sharps of these notes. The notes, indeed, have no names, being all

alike for the various notes; but names are given to the lines and

spaces of the staff; and, alas! the names of these lines and spaces

change continually with the change of key or pitch. For example: if

we commence a scale with C, our _do_ will be on the first added line

below the staff, and its octave, _do_, on the third space counting

from the lowest. If we commence a scale with G, our _do_ will be on

the second line from the bottom, and the octave on the first space

above the staff; and so on for all the other scales except those which

commence a semitone below or above. For example: the scales of the key

of G and of G flat would be placed exactly the same upon the staff,

though the signature of G would be one sharp upon the staff at the

beginning, and that of G flat would be six flats. The same may be said

of the keys of D and D flat, F and F sharp, etc.

Again: the scales of the keys of G flat and of F sharp are the

same--are played on precisely the same keys of the organ or piano--yet

they are placed on different lines and spaces of the staff, and the

signature of the first is six flats, and of the second six sharps.

Think of the disheartened state of the victim of this notation when

he has learned to read comfortably in one key, and then, taking up a

piece of music written in another key, finds that he has all the lines

and spaces to relearn! The wonder is that he does not lose his wits

altogether.

Compare this maze of notes and lines and spaces, for ever changing

like a will-o'-the wisp, with the following:

Low Octave. Middle Octave. High Octave.

=.......=

=1234567= =1234567= =1234567=

=.......=

Here everything is as clear as day. Take any note--as =5=, for

example. This is _sol_--always _sol_, and never by any chance anything

else. If it has a dot under, it is _sol_ of the octave below the

middle; if it has no dot, it belongs to the middle octave; and if it

has a dot above, it belongs to the octave above the middle. These

three octaves are amply sufficient for all the purposes of vocal

music, which alone is considered here. For instrumental music, where

many octaves are used, the system is modified without losing its

simplicity and conciseness. To represent the flats, Galin crosses the

numerals with a line like the grave accent, and marks the sharps by a

line like the acute accent. For example, =\1\2\3\4\5\6\7=[*] represent

_do_ flat, _re_ flat, _mi_ flat, etc.: =/1 /2 /3 /4 /5 /6 /7=[*]

represent _do_ sharp, _re_ sharp, _mi_ sharp, etc.

[*: the slash goes _through_ the number (transcriber)]

A score of music in the new style of notation has no signature--that

is, no flats or sharps at the beginning. Above the line of numerals is

written simply "Key of G," "Key of A flat," etc. The pitch, of course,

must be taken from the tuning-fork or a musical instrument, as it is

in all cases.

_Second_. The same idea should always be presented by the same sign:

the same sign should always represent the same idea.

It has already been shown how this principle is disregarded; but take,

for further illustration, the symbols indicating silence. There are

seven different kinds of rests, and there is no need of more than one.

These signs are:

[Illustration of music rest symbols]

Again: these rests may be followed by one or two dots, which increase

their duration. For example: an eighth-note rest dotted equals an

eighth note and a sixteenth; and followed by two dots it equals an

eighth, a sixteenth and a thirty-second note in time. That is, the

first dot prolongs the rest one-half or a sixteenth, and the second

dot prolongs the value of the first dot one-half or a thirty-second.

To a disciple of Galin it is really amazing that such a bungling,

unscientific way of expressing silence should have been tolerated

so long. Compare these "pot-hooks and trammels," dotted and

double-dotted, with Galin's symbol of silence, the cipher (0)! This

is all, and yet it expresses every length of rest, as will be shown

presently.

Let us now examine the symbols representing the prolongation of a

sound. There are three ways by the common notation, where there should

be but one. First, by the form of the note itself, as--

[Illustration of musical note symbols]

Second, by one or more dots after a note, the first dot prolonging the

note one-half, and the second dot prolonging the first in the same

ratio. Third, by the repetition of the note with a vinculum or tie,

the second note not being sung or played. Galin uses simply a dot. It

may be repeated, as a rest or a note may, but then _its value is not

changed_, any more than in the case of notes or rests repeated. For

example:

KEY OF E.

1|3556|5.31|[7.]143|3.21|

Here are the first measures of a well-known hymn in common time,

four beats to the measure. As all isolated signs, whether notes,

prolongations or rests, fill a unit of time, or beat, it follows that

the dots following _sol_ and _mi_ prolong these through an entire

beat, for the dots are isolated signs. Whatever the time, _each unit

of it appears separate and distinct to the eye at a glance_; and all

the notes, rests or prolongations that fill a beat are always united

in a special way. This will be more fully shown hereafter.

_Third_. Elementary textbooks or methods should never present two

difficulties to the mind at the same time; and such textbooks or

methods should be an assemblage of means adapted to aid ordinary

intelligences to gain the object proposed.

The first thing that the student of music encounters is a staff of

five lines, armed with flats or sharps, the signature of the key, or

with no signature, which shows that the music upon it is in the key

of C. On this staff he sees notes which are of different pitch, and

probably of different length. In any case, there are at least three

difficulties presented in a breath--to find the name of the note,

give it its proper sound, and then its proper length; and these

difficulties are still greater because the ideas, as we have seen, are

hidden under defective symbols.

Take all the teachers of vocal music, says M. Cheve, place them upon

their honor, and let them answer the following question: "How many

readers of music can you guarantee by your method, out of a hundred

pupils taken at random and entirely ignorant of music, by one hour

of study a day during one year?" The reply, he thinks, will be: "Not

many." And if you tell them that by another method you will agree in

the same time to teach eighty in a hundred to read music currently,

and also to write music, new to them, dictated by an instrument placed

out of sight or from the voice "vocalizing," they will all declare

that the thing is impossible.

The great composers and renowned performers are cited as examples of

what the ordinary methods have accomplished. No, replies Cheve: they

are exceptional organizations. The methods have not produced them.

They have, on the contrary, arrived at their proficiency despite

the methods, while thousands fail who might reach a high degree of

excellence but for the obstacles presented by a false system to a

clear understanding of the theory of music, which in itself is so

simple and precise. In the study of harmony especially, says the same

authority, does the want of a clear presentation of the theory produce

the most deplorable results. It has made the science of harmony

wellnigh unintelligible even to those called musicians. Ask them why

flats and sharps are introduced into the scales; why there is one

sharp in the key of G major and five in B major; why you spoil the

minor scale by making it one thing in ascending and another in

descending--that is, by robbing it of its modal superior in ascending

and of its sensible in descending. They will in most cases be unable

to answer, for neither teachers nor textbooks explain. The catechisms

found in most of the elementary works upon music are replete with

stumbling-blocks to the young musician. Mr. R. H. Palmer, author of

_Elements of Musical Composition, Rudimental Class-Teaching_ and

several other works, says in one of his catechisms that "there are

two ways of representing each intermediate tone. If its tendency is

upward, it is represented upon the lower of two degrees, and is called

sharp; if its tendency is downward, it is represented upon the higher

of two degrees, and is called flat. There are exceptions to this, as

to all rules." This is deplorable. Music is a mathematical science,

and in mathematics there is no such thing as an exception to a rule.

But to quote further from the same catechism: "A natural is used to

cancel the effect of a previous sharp or flat. If the tendency from

the restored tone is upward, the natural has the capacity of a sharp;

if downward, the capacity of a flat. A tone is said to resolve when

it is followed by a tone to which it naturally tends." How long would

novices in the science of music rack their brains before they would

comprehend what the teacher meant by a tone tending somewhere

"naturally," or by the tendency of a restored tone being destroyed by

the "capacity of a flat"? The same writer, speaking of the scale of

G flat, says it is a "remarkable feature of this scale that it is

produced upon the organ and piano by pressing the same keys which

are required to produce the scale of F sharp." This is precisely

equivalent to saying that it is a remarkable feature that the notes C,

D, E, F are produced by pressing the same keys which are required to

produce _do_, _re_, _mi_, _fa_.

One more citation from the same author. Speaking of the formation of

scales, he says: "Thus we have another perfectly natural scale by

making use of two sharps." This vicious use of the term "natural" is

deplorable, because it is apt to give the pupil the notion that some

scales are more natural than others. A certain note is called "C

natural," and it is not uncommon for learners to suppose that it is

easier or more natural to sing in that key, as it is easier on the

piano to play anything in it because only the white keys are used,

while in any other at least one black key is required. Indeed, a pupil

may study music a long time before he finds out that there is no

difference between flats and sharps, as such, and other notes--that

all notes are flats and sharps of the notes a semitone above and

below. Seeing the staff of a piece of music armed with half a dozen

sharps or flats, the first thought of the pupil is that it will be

rather hard to sing. And many really suppose that flats and sharps

in themselves are different from other notes--a little "flatter" or

"sharper" in sound perhaps--and secretly wonder why their ear cannot

detect it. Of course it may be said that there is no necessity for

pupils to have such absurd notions, but it is inevitable where the

theory of music is made so difficult for the beginner. No doubt the

ambitious and naturally studious will delve and dig among the rubbish

of imperfect textbooks, analyzing and comparing the explanations

of different teachers, until order takes the place of chaos; but

textbooks should be adapted to ordinary capacities, and thereby they

will better serve the needs of the most brilliant.

_Fourth._ The memory should never be drawn upon except where reasoning

is impossible.

In science you have general laws, and from these deduce particular

facts depending upon them, but collections of facts and phenomena

without connection you must learn by heart. The extensive and involved

nomenclature of music, added to the complicated and inconsistent

system of notation, is a continual and exhausting strain upon the

memory. Teachers commence their drill in vocalization, as a rule, with

the scale of the key of C, and the pupils, fired with a noble ambition

to become musicians, make a strenuous effort to remember where _do_,

_re_, _mi_ and the other notes are placed on the lines and spaces of

the staff. Presently the "key is changed," and with that change comes

chaos. All the notes are now on a different series of lines and

spaces. The confusion continues until the series of seven notes is

exhausted. Then come scales with new names, commencing upon different

notes (flats and sharps), but with places on the staff identically the

same as others having different names!

Long before this point is reached by the pupil his courage flags,

his ambition cools, and in the greater number of cases dies out

altogether. To be sure, if he has the rare courage to persist he will

come to recognize the notes of any key, not by the number of lines

or spaces intervening between them and some landmark, but by their

relative distances from each other measured by the eye. But this

requires long practice. At first he must remember if he can, and when

he cannot he must count up to his unknown note from some remembered

one. It is, at best, a labor of Sisyphus. With many people--bright and

intelligent people, too--it requires years of practice to read new

music at sight even tolerably readily; for it is not simply a question

of learning the notes, difficult as that may be: there is a further

difficulty, and to many even a greater difficulty--that of the

measure. Not the number of beats in a measure or bar and their proper

accentuation--this is but the alphabet of time--but to group correctly

and rapidly the fractional notes, rests and prolongations in their

proper place in time. In very rapid music this becomes an herculean

task, requiring long-continued and arduous practice. It is not simply

a question of nice appreciation of rhythm, but of mathematical

calculation, to know instantly and unhesitatingly, for example, that

one-sixteenth, one half of one-sixteenth and one thirty-second added

together equal one-eighth--that is, one-third of the unit of time or

beat in six-eighths time.

Any one can see that such mental feats, ever varying as they are in

music, and demanding instant solution at the same time the attention

is given to the intonation, style, etc., must require an exceptional

temperament and natural capacity. The fact is, it is beyond the power

of most musicians. They must practise their instrumental and vocal

music, and learn it nearly "by heart," before they attempt to perform

it for others.

The writer of this has attended a class taught by one of Cheve's

pupils, and can testify to the efficiency of the method, though the

lessons were a very modest attempt to exemplify the perfection of

the system. The lessons of M. and Mme. Cheve were divided into three

parts: first, a drill in the principles of the theory of music;

second, singing scales and exercises; third, drills in "reading time,"

beating time, analyzing time, etc., ending with some diverting "round"

or "catch" or some exercise in vocal harmonies. On their method of

teaching time, more than on any other part of their system perhaps,

did the grand success of the Cheves depend. Rhythm was always taught

separately from intonation, it being contrary to their principle to

present two difficulties together before each had been mastered alone.

The first grand law of Galin's system is that _every isolated symbol

represents a unit of time_ or beat, whatever the measure. For example:

5, unit of sound articulated.

., unit of sound prolonged.

0, unit of silence.

The second law is that _the various divisions of the unit of time are

always united in a group under a principal bar, and such a bar always

contains the unit of time--never more, never less_. To illustrate:

H | __ T | ___

A | 55 H | 555

L | __ I | ___

V | .. R | ...

E | __ D | ___

S | 00 S | 000

. | . |