Now, this house-hunting was a piece of business to be got through as
soon as possible. Nevertheless, three hours elapsed before we returned
to the hotel. We found the father and Margaret leaning their heads out
of a corridor window, and when we asked them what they were about, she
replied, "We have been wishing that the grand old mansion in yonder
village were only a _pension_, where we could obtain rooms. But have you
met with any success?"
"A _pension_! That sounds like Meran or Switzerland, instead of this
primitive Pusterthal. Only let us have tea, and we will tell you what we
have done."
"Very good! We will be patient; but you do not look dissatisfied with
your afternoon," said my father.
Nor in truth were we. Sipping our mild tea, we related our adventures.
The little girl Lina had taken us into the town, which consisted of one
narrow street in the shape of a half-moon, where houses of all ages and
ranks squeezed against each other and peeped into each other's windows
with the greatest familiarity. In one of the largest of these Frau
Sieger lived. Her husband was the royal imperial tobacco agent, and the
house was crammed full of chests of the noxious and obnoxious weed, the
passages and landing being pervaded with a sweet, sickly smell of
decomposing tobacco. In the parlor, however, where Frau Sieger sat
drinking coffee with her lady friends, the aromatic odor of the beverage
acted as a disinfectant. The hostess drew us aside, listened
complacently to our message, and then graciously volunteered to let us
rooms under her very roof.
We should have chosen chemical works in preference! There was, then,
nothing to be done but to take leave with thanks. Accompanied by the
little Lina, we passed under the town-gate, and whilst sorely perplexed
perceived a pleasant village, at the distance of about a mile, lying on
the hillside in a wealth of orchards and great barns. The way thither
led across fields of waving green corn, the point where the path
diverged from the high-road being marked by a quaint mediaeval shrine,
one of the many shrines which, sown broadcast over the Tyrol, are
intended to act as heavenly milestones to earth-weary pilgrims.
[Illustration: ADELSHEIM--OUR HOME IN THE TYROL.]
That was the village of Adelsheim, Lina said, where their own
country-house was situated, and Freieck, belonging to Frau Sieger; and
there, at the farther extremity of the village, was Schoenburg, where old
Baron Flinkenhorn lived. The biggest house of all on the hill was the
Hof, and that below, with the gables and turrets, the carpenter's.
The bare possibility of finding a resting-place in that little Arcadia
made us determine to go thither. We would try the inn, and then the
carpenter's.
The inn proved a little beer-shop, perfectly impracticable. A woman with
a bright scarlet kerchief bound round her head, who was washing outside
the carpenter's, told us in Italian that she and her husband, an
overseer on the new railway, occupied with their family every vacant
room, which was further confirmed by the carpenter popping his head out
of an upper window, and in answer to Lina's question giving utterance to
an emphatic "_Na, na, I hab koan_" ("No, no, I have none").
Lina was so sure that the Hofbauer would not let rooms, for he was a
wealthy man and owned land for miles around, that she stayed at a
respectful distance whilst we approached nearer to at least admire the
grand old mansion, even if it were closed against us as a residence. The
village was full of marvelous old houses rich in frescoes, oriel
windows, gables and turrets, but this dwelling, standing in a dignified
situation on an eminence, was a prince amongst its compeers. The
architecture, which was Renaissance, might belong to a bad style, but
the long slopes of roof, the jutting balconies, the rich iron-work on
the oblong facade, the painted sun-dial and the coats-of-arms now fading
away into oblivion, the grotesque gargoyle which in the form of a
dragon's head frowned upon the world,--each detail, that had once been
carefully studied, helped to form a complete whole which it was a
pleasure to look upon. The grand entrance, no longer used, was guarded
by a group of magnificent trees, the kings of the region. Traces of an
old pleasure-garden and the dried-up basin of a fountain were visible
within.
At this point in the narrative Margaret exclaimed, "None other than my
would-be _pension_! I have known it from the first, so pray do not keep
me on tenterhooks. Were you or were you not successful? Yet all hope has
died within me already, for such a treasure-trove we never could get."
"Well, listen," said the mother. "As we were admiring the house, a
handsome, fair-haired young man, one's perfect ideal of a peasant, came
along the road, bowed to us, and when we expressed our interest in the
mansion said that he was the son of the house, and that we might see the
rooms if we liked. Grand old rooms they are, with a great lack of
furniture, but nevertheless perfectly charming. The young man, who is
named Anton, thought his father would probably have no objection to let
us rooms. At all events, we could all go over and see the Hofbauer at
ten o'clock to-morrow morning, when he would be in: he was in his fields
this afternoon. The whole, in fact, was a pastoral poem."
The next day we were as punctual as clock-work. A pleasant, comely young
peasant woman, who looked as if she had lived on fresh air all her life,
met us in the great stone entrance-hall. She told us that her father
would soon be at liberty, and that, with our permission, she would again
show us the rooms if we wished to see them. This promised well. Fetching
a huge bunch of handsome iron-wrought keys, she conducted us into the
great hall of the first floor, hung with large unframed pictures of the
Holy Sacrament. Then unlocking a handsome door which had once been green
and gold, we entered the vast reception-room, almost bereft of
furniture, but possessing a pine floor of milky whiteness and a
remarkably fine stove of faience eight feet high. My father measured the
length of the apartment: it was forty feet, and could have seated a
hundred guests. The casements were filled with old lozenge-shaped glass
set in lead, and the fine old iron trellis-work on the outside of the
windows gave a wonderfully mediaeval look to the apartment. There was,
moreover, a magnificent bay window, which formed a little room of
itself, besides a second room much less, which, with carved wood
wainscot and ceiling, could have served as an oratory.
Margaret's delight was unbounded. The father smiled quietly, and we the
pioneers could scarcely refrain our pride and pleasure. But there was
more to be seen. Crossing the great hall once more, we entered a large
and beautiful room overlooking the main entrance. This had other
furniture besides its handsome porcelain stove and inlaid floor of dark
wood. There was not only a comfortable modern bed, but chairs, sofa and
table; a chest of drawers too, which was covered with innumerable
religious knickknacks--little sacred pictures in glass frames, miniature
saints, and artificial flowers in small china pots. Having dipped her
finger in a holy-water shell hanging on the wall, our guide drew back a
long chintz curtain which covered the end of the room, and showed us a
large and handsome chapel below. A fald-stool ran along the front of the
window which, with an additional lattice of gilt and carved wood,
separated the room from the church. This had evidently been in old times
the apartment of the lord and his lady, and here they had knelt and
listened to the holy office without mingling with their dependants
below. This room, if we had the good fortune to obtain lodgings in the
mansion, was to belong to the poetess, for it was full of inspiration
and old-world memories.
Then out again into the hall and up another flight of stone stairs,
through a second great lobby into a corridor, which communicated on
either side with two charming rooms, spotlessly clean and perfectly
empty, if I except the stoves; but still, if we chose, these two rooms
could be Margaret's and mine, and the corridor as well, with a beautiful
balcony which commanded an enchanting view of the rich Pusterthal up and
down, right and left, with a row of jagged, contorted dolomite mountains
thrown into the bargain. All this was to be ours if only the Hofbauer
would have us. So down we went, casting longing looks around us--down
into the entrance-hall, where a crowd of poor people were streaming out
of the _stube_, the parlor of the family, such as in the midland
counties of England would be called the house-place, and so into the
grassy court in front, where we awaited with anxious hearts the fiat of
the Hofbauer.
We were not long kept waiting. In another minute the master of the house
stood before us, a tall, thin, elderly man, dressed in the full costume
of the district--an embroidered cloth jacket, black leather breeches,
which displayed a broad band of naked knee, green ribbed stockings,
shoes and buckles, with a silver cord and tassel on his broad beaver
hat. Saluting us with the grace and ease of a courtier, he apologized
for keeping us waiting, but he had been entertaining the poor of the
parish at dinner, according to an old custom of his. These simple
Tyrolese dined, then, at ten o'clock in the morning!
An elderly woman, also tall and spare, now appeared in a bright blue
linen apron, that half hid her thickly-plaited black woolen petticoat,
which was short enough to give full effect to scarlet knit stockings and
low, boat-shaped shoes. She carried in her hand a plate of large hot fat
cakes, which she pressed upon us; then pitied the smallness of our
appetites, and urged two apiece at least. Two mouthfuls, however, were
sufficient, as the cakes were not only extremely greasy, but filled with
white curds, aniseed and chives. Having received in good part this
intended hospitality, we were rejoiced to hear the Hofbauer express his
perfect willingness that we should take up our abode at the mansion. We
need merely pay him a trifle, but we must furnish ourselves the extra
bedsteads. Moidel, his daughter, could cook for us, for she understood
making dishes for bettermost people, having been sent by him to Brixen
for a year to learn cooking; for what was a moidel (maiden) good for
that could not cook? He should not make any charge for her services.
Also, if we saw any bits of furniture about the house that suited us we
might take them; and lastly, we could stay until Jacobi, the 25th of
July, but on that day the best bedroom must be given up, as it belonged
to his son, the student, who would return from Innsbruck about that day.
All this was charming. We promised to procure beds and bedding in
Bruneck, and arranged to take possession of our new quarters on the
following morning.
I will not enter into the rashness of our promise respecting the
bedsteads, merely hinting at the difficulties and complications which
beset us. Some of these can be imagined when it is known that, firstly,
there proved not to be an upholsterer, nor even a seller of old
furniture, at Bruneck; and that, secondly, the officers and soldiers of
the garrison now quartered there occupied by night every available spare
bed in the township. So it seemed until in our embarrassment the
landlady of the Post arose from her bed to help us to procure some. The
interview ended again with the prudent advice, "Go to Frau Sieger." We
went, and that incomparable lady, who bore us no malice for refusing her
rooms, generously provided for a small sum three bedsteads and an
amazing, and what appeared to us superfluous, amount of bolsters,
pillows, feather beds, winter counterpanes; but she would hear no nay,
declaring, "It often turned very chilly in the Pusterthal, and at such
times a warm bed was a godsend."
We now began to dream of beds of roses, but we were mistaken: we were
crying before we were out of the wood. We arrived at the Hof the
following afternoon with our bag and baggage, and found Moidel,
otherwise Maria, busily preparing the newly-erected bed in the
state-room. She received us cordially, until my mother, laying her shawl
on the bedstead belonging to the house, remarked that she wished that
for herself.
Maria seemed suddenly thunderstruck. She turned a deep red, and with a
gesture of astonishment let drop a pillow, exclaiming, "Heavens alive!
that is the Herr Student's bed!"
She fled from the chamber, bringing back her aunt to the rescue. The
latter looked stern and aggrieved. "Never, never! no one must lay his
head on that pillow but the student," she cried. Had my mother asked to
repose on the altar of the chapel they could not have been more
dumbfoundered.
As Frau Sieger's beds were truly spare, and as she could merely provide
three, this second complication ended in the family giving up a bed of
their own--one which was adorned at the head and foot with a cross, a
bleeding heart and sacred monogram--one, in fact, which bore more marks
of sanctity about it than the sacred bed of the student. It was obvious
that this mysterious individual was consecrated to the Church, and that
even before his ordination all that he touched was holy.
The storm had again given place to sunshine, and the two quiet women
passed gently to and fro with coarse but sweet-scented linen, which they
fetched from an old chest adorned with red tulips, a crown of thorns and
the legend "K. M., 1820," on a bright blue ground. Good old Kaetana!
That chest had once been crammed full to overflowing with linen which,
like other young women, she had spun for her own dowry, but when the
Hofbauerin died Kathi became the housekeeper and mother to the little
children. Thus the contents of the chest had gradually decreased, until
the maiden aunt drew forth the four last pair of new sheets for these
passing strangers. She felt it no sacrifice. It would have grieved her
more to touch the piles of fine new linen which she and Moidel had spun
through many a long winter evening, and which were now safely hidden
away in the great mahogany wardrobe, which the Hofbauer, in harmony with
the more luxurious ideas of the age, had given to his daughter. It
occupied the place of honor in the great saloon, having three companion
chests of drawers of lesser dimensions, which the father at the same
time had presented to each of his sons. That of the eldest, Anton, was
emptied by the owner and placed by him at our disposal; that of the
second, the student, was carefully guarded from the sun by a covering
formed of newspapers; the third, belonging to Jacobi, the youngest,
appeared to us filled with books. Jacob was shy, and some days elapsed
before we became acquainted. Anton, however, appeared modestly ready to
attend to our least beck and call. The first evening, perceiving that we
had no candlesticks, we conferred with Anton.
"Freilich," he said. "We have none of our own, but I am sure that, as
you will take care of them, there can be no great harm in lending you
some of the Virgin's." We demurred at first, but with a smile on his
open, ingenuous face he added, "The Herrschaft may be quite sure that I
would not sin against my conscience." He then brought half a dozen
plated candlesticks from the little sacristy, which he committed to our
care.
The reader must not suppose that this was a disused chapel: far from it.
In the dusk of the summer evening a murmuring chant like the musical hum
of bees pervaded the vast old mansion, which was otherwise hushed in
perfect silence. It was the Rosenkranz (or rosary) repeated by the
household in the chapel. The Hofbauer knelt on one side near the altar,
and led the service, his two sons, the four men-servants, the aunt and
Moidel, with the three maid-servants, reciting the responses on their
respective sides. The even-song over, the household quietly retired to
rest.
Chance had graciously brought us to the Hof in the midst of preparations
for the festival of the Holy Father. On Sunday, June 18, the whole
Catholic world was to celebrate the astounding fact of Pio Nono having
exceeded the days of Saint Peter. We, who had come from Rome, where
thirty upstart papers were denouncing time-honored usages and formulas,
where many of the people had begun to sneer at the Papacy and to take
gloomy views of the Church, were not prepared for the religious fervor
and devotion to the Papal See which greeted us in the Tyrol, especially
at Bruneck, where from time immemorial a race of the staunchest
adherents to Rome had flourished. The mere fact that we came from the
Eternal City clothed us with brilliant but false colors. Endless were
the questions put to us about the health and looks of the Holy Father,
whom they believed to be kept in a dungeon and fed on bread and water--a
diet, however, turned into heavenly food by the angels. Perhaps the most
perplexing question of all was, whether the Herr Baron Flinkenhorn, who
had been born in exactly the same year as the Holy Father, bore the
faintest resemblance to that saintly martyr. We could but shake our
heads as the old nobleman was pointed out to us on the morning of the
festival. Decrepit and bent with age, he shuffled along by the side of
his old tottering sister, an antiquated couple dressed in the French
fashions of 1810. They hardly perceived, so blind and old were they, the
bows and greetings which they received. They knew, however, that it was
Pio's festival, and they made great offerings to the Church and to the
poor.
Deafness even has its compensations. Thus this old couple had not been
kept awake all night by the ringing of bells and the firing of small
cannon, which had continued incessantly since the setting of the sun had
ushered in the festival on the previous evening. The firing lasted all
day--a popular but very startling and disturbing mode of expressing joy
and satisfaction. Bruneck wreathed and flagged its houses: there were
processions, the prettiest being considered that of the female pupils of
the convent of the Sacred Heart, who walked in white, bearing lilies. At
night the good Sisters made a grand display of sacred transparencies in
their convent windows--rhymes about the age of Saint Peter and the Pope;
the Virgin rescuing the sinking vessel of the Church; Saint Peter seated
on his emblematic rock, with his present successor at his side; and so
forth--all wondered, gaped at and admired by the people, until the great
spectacle of the evening commenced. As soon as night had fairly set in a
hundred fires blazed upon the mountains--far as the eye could reach, for
miles and many miles, one dazzling gigantic illumination. Papal
monograms, crosses, tiaras shone forth in startling proportions. High
up, far from any human habitation, on the verge of the snow, in
clearings of the mountain forests, on Alpine pastures, these fiery
letters had been patiently traced by toiling men and lads. Anton and
Jacobi were not behind-hand, and by means of two hundred little bonfires
had devised the papal initials on the upland common behind the house.
The illumination, however, had not begun to reach its full splendor when
one quick flash of lightning succeeded another, followed by a rolling
artillery of thunder, the precursors of heavy down-pouring rain. In five
minutes the storm had extinguished every bright emblem, and plunged the
illuminated mountains into impenetrable blackness. The weather, grimly
triumphant, drove lads and lasses drenched to their homes. So ended the
festival, but in the morning, in dry clothes, every one had the pleasure
of imagining how beautiful the spectacle would have been but for the
rain.
MARGARET HOWITT.
[TO BE CONTINUED.]
WILMINGTON AND ITS INDUSTRIES.
CONCLUDING PAPER.
[Illustration: OLD SWEDES' CHURCH.]
We have pointed out the metropolis of Delaware as being a distinctly
Northern city, planted in the distinct South. Among other things, this
complication has led to some singularities in its settlement. As a
community regulated by the most liberal traditions of Penn, but placed
under the legal conditions of a slave State, it has held a position
perfectly anomalous. No other spot could be indicated where the
contrasts of North and South came to so sharp an edge; and there are few
where a skilled pen could set down so many curiosities of folk-lore and
confusions of race. The Dutch, the Swedes and the English Quakers formed
the substratum, upon which were poured the _emigres_ of the French
Revolution and the fugitives from Santo Domingo. The latter sometimes
brought slaves who had continued faithful, and who retained their
serfdom under the laws of Delaware. The French _bonnes_ stood on
washing-benches in the Brandywine, and taught the amazed Quaker wives
that laundry-work could be done in cold water. The names of grand old
French families, prefaced by the proprietarial forms of _le_ and _du_,
became mixed by marriage with such Swedish names as Svensson and such
Dutch names as Staelkappe. (The first Staelkappe was a ship's cook,
nicknamed from his oily and glossy bonnet.) As for the refugees from
Santo Domingo, they absolutely invaded Wilmington, so that the price of
butter and eggs was just doubled in 1791, and house-rents rose in
proportion. They found themselves with rapture where the hills were rosy
with peach-blossoms, and where every summer was simply an extract from
Paradise.
We cannot linger, as we fain would do, over the quaint and amusing
_Paris en Amerique_ which reigned here for a period following the events
of '93. At Sixth and French streets lived a marchioness in a cot, which
she adorned with the manners of Versailles, the temper of the Faubourg
St. Germain and the pride of Lucifer. This Marquise de Sourci was
maintained by her son, who made pretty boxes of gourds, and afterward
boats, in one of which he was subsequently wrecked on the Delaware,
before the young marquis was of age to claim his title. In a farm-house,
whose rooms he lined with painted canvas, lived Colonel de Tousard. On
Long Hook Farm resided, in honor and comfort, Major Pierre Jaquette, son
of a Huguenot refugee who married a Swedish girl, and became a Methodist
after one of Whitefield's orations: as for the son, he served in
thirty-two pitched battles during our Revolution. Good Joseph Isambrie,
the blacksmith, used to tell in provincial French the story of his
service with Bonaparte in Egypt, while his wife blew the forge-bellows.
_Le Docteur_ Bayard, a rich physician, cured his compatriots for
nothing, and Doctor Capelle, one of Louis XVI.'s army-surgeons, set
their poor homesick old bones for them when necessary. Monsieur
Bergerac, afterward professor in St. Mary's College, Baltimore, was a
teacher: another preceptor, M. Michel Martel, an _emigre_ of 1780, was
proficient in fifteen languages, five of which he had imparted to the
lovely and talented Theodosia Burr. Aaron Burr happened to visit
Wilmington when the man who had trained his daughter's intellect was
lying in the almshouse, wrecked and paralytic, with the memory of all
his many tongues gone, except the French. Some benevolent Wilmingtonians
approached Burr in his behalf, showing the colonel's own letter which
had introduced him to the town.
[Illustration: GRACE CHURCH.]
"I wrote that letter when I _knew_ him," said the diplomatic Colonel
Burr, "but I know him no more."
The day quickly came when Burr's speech of denial was reflected upon
himself, and those who then honored him "knew him no more."
Another French teacher, by the by, was not of Gallic race, but that of
Albion _le perfide_: this was none other than William Cobbett, with his
reputation all before him, known only to the Wilmington millers for the
French lessons he gave their daughters and the French grammar he had
published. He lived on "Quaker Hill" from 1794 to 1796. He then went to
Philadelphia, and began to publish _Peter Porcupine's Gazette_. "I mean
to shoot my quills," said Cobbett, "wherever I can catch game." With the
sinews of Wilmington money he soon made his way back to England, became
a philosopher, and sat in the House of Commons. Another British exile
was Archibald Hamilton Rowan, an Irish patriot, and one of the "United
Irishmen" of 1797. Escaping from a Dublin jail in woman's clothes, he
found his way to Wilmington after adventures like those of Boucicault's
heroes; lived here several years in garrets and cottages, carrying
fascination and laughter wherever he went among his staid neighbors; and
after some years flew back to Ireland, glorious as a phoenix, resuming
the habits proper to his income of thirty thousand pounds a year.
[Illustration: WEST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH.]
A familiar figure on the wharves of Wilmington was the gigantic one of
Captain Paul Cuffee, looking like a character in a masquerade. His
athletic limbs forced into the narrow garments of the Quakers, and a
brim of superior development shading his dark negro face, he talked
sea-lingo among the trading captains, mixed with phrases from Robert
Barclay and gutturals picked up on the coast of Sierra Leone. Captain
Cuffee owned several vessels, manned by sailors as black as shoemaker's
wax, and he conducted one of his ships habitually to the African ports.
Coming back rich from Africa, this figure of darkness has often led its
crew of shadows into port at the Brandywine mouth, passing modestly
amongst the whalers and wheat-shallops, dim as the Flying Dutchman and
mum as Friends' meeting. It is possible that from some visit of his
arose the legend that Blackbeard, the terrible pirate, who always hid
his booty on the margins of streams, had used the Brandywine for this
purpose. At any rate, some clairvoyants, in their dreams, saw in 1812
the glittering pots of Blackbeard's gold lying beneath the rocks of
Harvey's waste-land, next to Vincent Gilpin's mill. They paid forty
thousand dollars for a small tract, and searched and found nothing; but
Job Harvey hugged his purchase money.
[Illustration: ST. JOHN'S PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CHURCH.]
Latrobe the architect lived here in the first quarter of the century,
midway between Philadelphia (where he was building waterworks and banks)
and Washington (where he was seating a young nation in legislative halls
worthy of its greatness); using Wilmington meanwhile as a pleasant
retirement, where he could wear his thinking-cap, educate his beautiful
young daughter, and mix with the French and other cultured society of
the place. Here, too, about fifty years ago, a pretty French girl used
to play and eat peaches, maintained by funds mysteriously supplied from
Louisiana, and ignorant of all connections except a peculating guardian.
It was little Myra Clark (now Mrs. Gaines), who woke up one day to find
herself the heroine of the greatest of modern lawsuits, and the credited
possessor of a large part of New Orleans--the same who has recently
gained a million, while she expects to gain a million more, and to be
richer than Lady Burdett-Coutts.
Thus has the pretty city ever played its part as a storing-house where
things and people and ideas might be set by to ripen. It is not
wonderful that it now and then found itself, quite unintentionally, a
museum, where the far-brought rarities were living souls. In a heavenly
climate, just where the winged songsters of the South held tryst with
those of the North, and where the plants of both latitudes embowered the
gardens together, Nature arranged a new garden wherein were brought
together almost all the races that had diverged from Babel.
The antiquities we have been examining, however, yield in age to the
venerable walls which were built to shelter a worship no longer
promulgated among us. The Swedes' churches of Philadelphia and
Wilmington are among the oldest civilized fabrics to be found in this
new country of ours. That of Wilmington was built in 1698, and that at
Wicaco in Philadelphia in 1700. Rudman, a missionary from Sweden,
preached the first sermon to the Wilmingtonians in May, 1699; and after
him a succession of Swedish apostles arrived, trembling at their own
courage, and feeling as our preachers would do if assigned to posts in
Nova Zembla or Patagonia. The salary offered was a hundred rixdollars,
with house and glebe, and the creed was the Lutheran doctrines according
to "the Augsburg Confession of Faith, free from all human superstition
and tradition." Dutch ministers alternated peaceably with the Swedish
ones, who bore such Latinized names as Torkillus, Lokenius, Fabricius,
Hesselius, Acrelius. The last wrote in his own language an excellent
history of the Swedish settlements on the Delaware, only a part of which
has been rendered into English by the New York Historical Society.
William Penn proved his tolerance by giving the little church a folio
Bible and a shelf of pious books, together with a bill of fifty pounds
sterling. The building was planted half a mile away from the then city,
in the village of Christinaham. Its site was on the banks of the
Christine, and its congregation, in the comparative absence of roads,
came in boats or sleighs, according to the season. The church was well
built of hard gray stone, with fir pews and a cedar roof: iron letters
fixed in the walls spelled out such holy mottoes as "LUX L. I. TENEBR.
ORIENS EX ALTO," and "SI DE. PRO NOBIS QUIS CONTRA NOS," and
commemorated side by side the names of William III., king of England,
William Penn, proprietary, and Charles XI. of Sweden. Swedish services
were continued up to about the epoch of the Revolution, when, the
language being no longer intelligible in the colony, they were merged
into English ones: the last Swedish commissary, Girelius, returned by
order of the archbishop in 1786, and the intercourse between the
American Swedish churches and the ecclesiastical see in the fatherland
ceased for ever. The oldest headstone in the churchyard is that of
William Vandevere, who died in 1719. Service was long celebrated by
means of the chalice and plate sent over by the Swedish copper-miners to
Biorch, the first missionary at Cranehook, and the Bible given by Queen
Anne in 1712. The sexes sat separately. In our grandfathers' day the old
sanctuary used to be dressed for Christmas by the sexton, Peter Davis:
he was a Hessian deserter, with a powder-marked face and murderous
habits toward the English language. Descending from their sledges and
jumpers, the congregation would crowd toward the bed of coals raked out
in the middle of the brick floor from the old cannon stove: to do this
they must brush by the cedars which "Old Powderproof" had covered with
flour, in imitation of snow; and then Dutch Peter, as they complimented
him on his efforts, would whisper the astonishing invocation, "God be
tankful for all dish plessins and tings!"
[Illustration: CAR-BUILDING WORKS.]
[Illustration: RESIDENCE OF JOB JACKSON, ESQ.]
Modern improvement has a particular spite against the landmarks of
antiquity. The railroad to Baltimore slices off a part of the Swedish
graveyard--an institution much more ancient than the church which stands
on it. And the rock by old Fort Christina, upon which Governor
Stuyvesant--Irving's Stuyvesant--stood on his silver leg and took the
surrender of the Swedish governor-general, is now quarried out and
reconstructed into Delaware Breakwater.
Doubtless we dwell too fondly on the old memories, but it appears that
the souvenirs of this region are somewhat remarkable for their contrast
of nationalities. Perhaps the colonization of other spots would yield
better romances than any we have to offer; yet we cannot help feeling
that a better pen than ours would find brilliant matter for literary
effects in the paradise revealed to good Elizabeth Shipley by her
dream-guide.
Delawarean Wilmington is perhaps hardly known to the general public
except through two of its products. Everybody buys Wilmington matches,
and everybody knows that Du Pont's powder is made in the vicinity.
Ignoring the foundries and shipyards, the popular imagination recognizes
but these two commodities--the powder which could blow up the
obstructions to all the American harbors, and the match which could
touch off the train. A million dollars' worth of gunpowder and three
hundred thousand dollars' worth of matches are the annual product.
[Illustration: CAR-WHEEL CASTING WORKS.]
Eleuthere Irenee Du Pont, a French gentleman of honorable family,
appeared in Wilmington in 1802. The town had at that time hardly three
thousand inhabitants. He amazed all the quidnuncs by buying, for fifty
thousand dollars, Rumford Dawes' old tract of rocks on the Brandywine,
which everybody knew was perfectly useless. The stranger was pitied as
he began to blast away the stone. Out of a single rock, separated into
fragments, he built a cottage: it was a lonely spot, and the snakes from
the fissures were in the habit of sharing the contents of his
well-bucket. Such was the beginning of the Eleuthere Powder-works. M. Du
Pont, who died some forty years ago, was much beloved for his
benevolence and probity. In 1825, La Fayette, during his celebrated
visit of reminiscence, was the guest of the brave old Frenchman for
several days, during which he examined the battle-ground of Brandywine.
He here received the ball with which he got his wound in that battle,
from the hands of Bell McClosky, a kind of camp-follower and nurse, who
had extracted the bullet with her scissors and preserved it. The
general wrote in the album of Mademoiselle Du Pont the following
graceful sentiment:
"After having seen, nearly half a century ago, the bank of the
Brandywine a scene of bloody fighting, I am happy now to find
it the seat of industry, beauty and mutual friendship.
"LA FAYETTE.
"JULY 25, 1825."
While on a Revolutionary topic we may mention that among a great many
relics of '76 preserved in the town is the sword of General Wayne--"Mad
Anthony"--a straight, light blade in leather scabbard, possessed by Mr.
W. H. Naff.
[Illustration: JESSUP & MOORE'S PAPER-MILLS.]
The citizens of this pleasant town have ever been orderly and pious,
just as they have ever been loyal. Their religious institutions have
grown and flourished. Godfearing and unspeculative, they have attached
themselves to such creeds as appealed most powerfully to the heart with
the least possible admixture of form. "The words _Fear God_" says
Joubert, "have made many men pious: proofs of the existence of God have
made many men atheists." Since the day when Whitefield poured out his
eloquence among the Brandywine valleys and touched the hearts of the
French exiles, Methodism, with its almost entire absence of dogma, has
had great success in the community. This success is now indicated by a
rich congregation, and a church-building that would be called noble in
any city. Grace Church, on Ninth and West streets, is a large Gothic
temple, seating nearly eight hundred persons--warmed, frescoed and
heavily carpeted inside, and walled externally with brownstone mixed
with the delicate pea-green serpentine of Chadd's Ford. The architect
was a native Wilmingtonian--Thomas Dixon--now of Baltimore. The windows,
including a very brilliant oriel, are finely stained: the font is a
delicate piece of carving, the organ is grand, and the accommodations
for Sunday-schools and lectures are of singular perfection. Few shrines
in this country show better the modern movement of Methodism toward
luxury and elegance, as compared with the repellant humiliations of
Wesley's day.
It is to be hoped that this advance in attractiveness does not indicate
any lapse in the more solid qualities of spiritual earnestness.
"Whenever this altar," well said Bishop Simpson in dedicating
the building on the centenary anniversary of the rise of
Methodism--"whenever this altar shall be too fine for the poorest
penitent sinner to kneel here, the Spirit of God will depart, and that
of Ichabod will come in."
We have indicated the Swedish Lutheran missionaries exhorting under the
roof of their antique church in a language which their congregations
were beginning to forget, and afterward in a broken English hardly more
intelligible. Their place is largely taken now by predicators of the
faith of John Knox, with a plentiful following of pious believers. Among
the family of Presbyterian kirks in Wilmington the youngest is a large
brick edifice built in 1871, for sixty-one thousand dollars, on Eighth
and Washington streets, able to seat nearly a thousand persons, most
comfortably and invitingly furnished, and supplied with lecture-,
infant- and Sunday-school-rooms, together with a huge kitchen,
suggesting the _agapae_ or love-feasts of the primitive Christians.
Meantime, Anglicanism does not lack supporters. The descendants of
Monsieur Du Pont, cultured and influential, have done much to advance
the creed, and about fifteen years ago Mr. Alexis I. Du Pont, pulling
down a low tavern in the suburbs, prepared to erect a church upon the
site, to be built mainly through his own liberality. Unhappily, Mr. Du
Pont died from the effects of an explosion at the powder-works ten weeks
after the laying of the corner-stone; but the building was soon
completed through the pious munificence of his widow, and the Bible of
St. John's Protestant Episcopal Church now rests on its lectern upon the
site of the old liquor-bar, and the gambling-den of former days is
replaced by its pews. The rector is Mr. T. Gardiner Littell, a man of
eminent goodness and intelligence. St. John's has a beautiful open roof,
stained windows and a fine organ: it can offer seats to seven hundred
worshipers.
[Illustration: "AT THE SIGN OF SHAKESPEARE."]
These few specimen churches--and especially the last, which blots out a
grogshop--are good instances, with the large congregations they
accommodate, of the way in which a sane, flourishing manufacturing
community provides for the spiritual needs of its members. The tone and
moral well-being which Boz found, or thought he found, among the
operatives at Lowell are largely realized here. But our picture of
Wilmington as a hive of industry is not yet complete, and before we
enter upon the highly-interesting problem of its dealings with its
working family, we should enter a few more of its sample manufactories.
[Illustration: OFFICE OF THE DAILY COMMERCIAL.]
Take car-building, for an example, in which the reputation of this town
is known to the initiated of all the States and many foreign countries.
Travelers are at this moment spinning in Wilmington-made
railway-carriages over the extremest parts of North and South America,
admiring, through Wilmington-made windows, every possible variety of
winter and tropical scenery, on which they comment in English, German,
French, Spanish and all civilized languages. Such a migratory product as
a rail-car is an active messenger of fame for the place of its
fabrication. We examine, as a fair type, the Jackson and Sharp Company's
works, claimed to be the largest in the New World, and only exceeded by
a few British and Continental establishments. The buildings have
frontage upon the Brandywine and Christine streams, as well as on the
principal railroad. Here are a congeries of two-story buildings, which
are together fifteen hundred feet in length by a width of seventy feet.
Five miles of heating-pipes warm the rooms for a thousand workmen. There
is something logical and consecutive in the arrangement here, which
makes it the best spot on the face of the earth for an enthusiast who
should wish to demonstrate, what all loyal Americans believe in, the
vast superiority of our form of railway-carriage. The cars proceed, in
perfectly regular order, from raw material to completion with the
progressive march of a quadratic equation in algebra. They seem to be
arranged to demonstrate a theory. First the visitor sees lumber in
stock, a million feet of it; then, across one end of a long room, the
mere sketch or transparent diagram of a car; then, a car broadly filled
in; and so on, up to the last glorious result, upholstered with velvet
and smelling of varnish. The cars are on rails, upon which they move,
side on, as if by a principle of growth, the undeveloped ones
perpetually pushing up their more forward predecessors, until the last
perfect carriage is ejected from the fifteen-hundredth foot of the
building's length. Each one, gathering material and ornament as it rolls
steadily along in its crablike side-fashion, becomes at last a vehicle
of perfect luxury; and then, with one final plunge into the open air, it
leaves its diversely-destined neighbors, and changes for ever its
sidelong motion for the forward roll which will carry it through a long
existence. A very large proportion of this company's work is on "palace"
cars of the Pullman type, those extravagances of luxury of which Europe
is just now applying to Wilmington to learn the lesson. Narrow-gauge
cars for the West, in supplying which they are the pioneers, gaudy cars
for South America, and sturdy, solid ones for Canada, are all gently
riding forward, side to side, in this inexorable chain of destiny, and
diverging at the front door on their widely-different errands. Besides
the manufacture of cars, the company builds every sort of coasters and
steamers. The class of workmen it employs is often of a particularly
high grade. German painters quote Kotzebue and sing the songs of Uhland
as they weave their graceful harmonies of line and color over the
panels; and the sculptors who carve antique heads over the doorways of
palace cars make the place merry with studio jokes from the Berlin
Academy. It is evident that a community of artists like this, furnishing
the aesthetic department to an immense manufactory, will also elevate the
tone of the industrial society outside, if they can but be kept free
from vice and supplied with means of culture; more of which anon.
Meantime, as a kind of standard of what the manufacturers themselves
arrive at in prosecuting the amenities of life, we will quote the fine
residence of Mr. Job Jackson, a magnate of the company.
The wheel on which the car is mounted is of course another specialty,
turned off in another manufactory. We leave the rooms where the work
goes on with easy smoothness like a demonstration in a lecture-hall, and
come to raging, roaring, deafening furnaces and hammers. The
hollow-chested artists give way to cyclops. Here we are in the Lobdell
Car-wheel Company's premises. Negligently leaning up against each other,
like wafers in the tray of an ink-stand, are wheels that will presently
whiz over the landscapes of Russia, of Mexico, of England; wheels that
will behave rashly and heat their axles; wheels that will lie turned up
in the air at the bottoms of viaducts; and wheels that in various ways
will see astonishing adventures, because in railway-transit there are
telescopings and wheels within wheels. The English and the foreign trade
of the Lobdell Company is due to its manufacture of wheels in the
material or process lately known as chilled iron. This manufacture has
not yet penetrated the British intellect. Take the foreman of an English
car-manufactory, tell him that you will supply him a wheel about as
durable as a wheel with a steel tire at less than half the cost, and he
will laugh at you for an impudent idiot. But they _use_ our wheels. The
"chilling" of iron, when poured into a mould partly iron-faced, is very
singular: as the melted metal hardens against the metallic boundary, its
granulation changes to a certain depth, and the outside becomes
excessively strong: species of crystals seem to form, presenting their
ends to the surface, and meeting the wear and tear there to be
experienced. The use of this fact secures, in many manufactures, a
hardness approaching that of steel, without increase of cost. This
company employs the process both for car-wheels and for the large
cylinders (or "rolls") used in paper-mills. It is not to be supposed
that the work is all rude and rough, like ordinary iron casting. The
polishing of the large cylinders almost suggests diamond-cutting, it is
so fine. So true is the finish that a pair of these broad rolls, perhaps
five feet across, may be approached so near each other that the light
showing between them is decomposed: a blade of blue or violet light,
inexpressibly thin and of the width of the cylinders, passes through the
entire distance. As for the "chilling" of iron, it was applied first to
wheels in Baltimore, in 1833, by Mr. Ross Winans; and then, during the
same year, Mr. Bonney and his nephew, George G. Lobdell, established the
business we see, which has gradually grown to its present capacity of
three hundred wheels per day.
[Illustration: FOUNTAIN.]
[Illustration: "IN MEMORY OF THE SOLDIERS AND SAILORS OF DELAWARE WHO
FELL IN THE STRUGGLE FOR THE UNION."]
The use of such cylinders as we have just seen under the difficult
process of polishing is only understood when we explore some large
paper-mill, where they take the place of the old-fashioned frame of wire
gauze which produced the hand-made paper. We may select the splendid
works of Messrs. Jessup & Moore on the Brandywine. Our welcome is sure
to be a cordial one, for among the largest customers of the firm are the
publishers of _Lippincott's Magazine_. The process of paper-making by
the Fourdrinier machine was so fully explained in our Number for last
November that it is useless now to repeat the details. But it would
never do to leave the Brandywine without a glance at least at one of its
principal manufactures. The mill of Jessup & Moore uses the strength of
the torrent as an auxiliary to its steam-power of seven hundred and
fifty horses. The machinery is made by Pusey, Jones & Co., whose iron
ships and machine-shops we have already examined: the rolls of admirable
accuracy are from the shops of J. Morton Poole & Co. The paper-making
process--the vast revolving boiler of twelve feet by twenty-six; the
countless sacks of filthy rags, that have clothed peasants of the Black
Forest, beggars on the steps of St. Peter's and Egyptian fellahs; their
reduction to purity, and hardening from pulp to snowy continuities of
endless, marginless paper,--all this is of rare interest in the
watching, but has been told until the public is satiated. We leave the
banks of the Brandywine and the wharves of Christine, and try to lose
ourselves in the thickly-built heart of the city.
Even here the implacable business spirit exhibits itself at every turn.
In place of the placid millers and quaint refugees of the last century
at their doors, we see the shops, the storehouses of manufacturers'
supplies, the hotel and the theatre; and, pervading all, the vast throng
of artisans, providing such problems of local government and education
as the last century never dreamed of.
[Illustration: HIGH-SCHOOL.]
In almost all the industries of the city you are struck by the ancestral
aspect of the trades, the continuance of a business from father to son,
or the gradual change of firms by the absorption of partners. Boughman,
Thomas & Co., established in a handsome, modern-looking bookstore,
represent a business as old as 1793, uninterrupted since the time when
the founder, James Wilson, hung the sign of Shakespeare at his door. The
young girl of the period, who goes to their place from one of the model
seminaries of which Wilmington is so full to buy a little paper for
confidential notes or perhaps a delicate valentine, sees the old brown
advertisement framed against the wall, and behind it, in sign-painting
of her great-grandfather's time, the head of him who wrote _Romeo and
Juliet_.
While in this literary vein we would say a word of the newspapers.
These, the true finger-posts of thought in a community, are apt in
manufacturing cities to be conservative and timid, as trade is timid.
The very special attitude of Wilmington, however--a Yankee town in
perpetual protest with a Bourbon State--has inspired its press with
peculiar political energy. No more vehement Republican organ can be
found in the land, for instance, than the Wilmington _Commercial_: it is
not in its columns that you will see ingenious defences of the
whipping-post at Newcastle or of the crushing taxes levied at Dover,
whereby a lazy State feeds greedily upon a hard-working metropolis. The
_Commercial_ (Jenkins & Atkinson) is a staunch Administration sheet,
sound on the subject of industrial protection, and highly appreciated by
the manufacturers. Founded in 1866, it was, we believe, the sole daily
until eighteen months ago, when some of the sober-sided weeklies began
to understand that they must bestir themselves and put forth a diurnal
appearance. The _Gazette_ (C. P. Johnson), a paper nearly one hundred
years old, now appears daily, and expresses the opinions of the State
Assembly, where the Senate has but a single Republican member, and the
House of Representatives stands fourteen Democrats to seven Republicans.
Here the conservative thought of Kent and Sussex counties is kneaded up
into the requisite coherency and eloquence. _Every Evening_ (Croasdale &
Cameron), a smart paper without political bias, flies around the city as
the shadows begin to lengthen, selling at one cent a sheet, and liked by
everybody.
[Illustration: HOUSE OF COLONEL HENRY McCOMB.]
To be candid, however, we do not suspect that this unique old city
thinks through its newspapers. The circumstances here are so peculiar,
the neighborhood so close, activity so concentrated, and the
circumjacent neighborhood so little congenial, that an order of things
has been established unusual in modern times. Mind acts on mind by
personal contact; the strong men meet and support each other; the Board
of Trade assembles daily in beautiful rooms, and discusses every
interest as quickly as it arises. It is like the order of things of old,
ere the press and telegraph undertook to express our views before we had
formed them ourselves. We are reminded of the guilds of labor in ancient
Flanders or the _fondachi_ of Venice. The State of Delaware, meanwhile,
comes up and looks in at the windows, only half satisfied with the rapid
fortunes making by the civic trades. What the Delaware yeomen know is,
that they have broad acres of sunny land, on which they are perpetually
wanting advances of money. They therefore instruct their legislators to
fix a legal rate of interest, and to fix it low. The abuse which
naturally follows on this blind policy is, that the wealth created by
the splendid industries of Wilmington is constantly leaving the State to
seek investment where usury is not kept down by old-fashioned
legislation. Richard Burton, the Anatomist of Melancholy, saw a somewhat
similar state of things among the unproductive and ale-tippling scholars
with whom he lived at Oxford, but he was keen enough to feel an envy of
the livelier marts of commerce. "How many goodly cities could I reckon
up," says Burton, "that thrive wholly by trade, where thousands of
inhabitants live singular well by their fingers' ends! As Florence in
Italy by making cloth of gold; great Milan by silk and all curious
works; Arras in Artois by those fair hangings; many cities in Spain,
many in France, Germany, have none other maintenance, especially those
within the land.... In most of _our_ cities" (continues the mortified
Englishman), "some few excepted, we live wholly by tippling-inns and
ale-houses."
[Illustration: CLAYTON HOUSE.]
The average Delawarean of 1873 is the average Oxford gossip of 1620,
with the scholarship left out. But he has the unfortunate advantage for
mischief that he is in a position to enact laws over the producers of
"all curious works." These anomalies, however, must soon pass away with
the march of the age, leaving Wilmington less individual perhaps, but
more free.
[Illustration: OPERA-HOUSE AND MASONIC HALL.]
How deftly, by the by, Burton picks up the distinction between an inland
city, living by handicraft, and a port city, handling weighty materials
and feeding freely on commerce! His livers by their finger-ends are
especially "those within the land." Just so the great capital of France,
arbitrarily concentred amongst her provinces, and deprived of a port,
can only thrive by her exceptional genius in fine and easily-moved
_articles de Paris_. The site now under our consideration, however,
means to have no such one-sided success. If her horoscope be not cast
amiss, this American Glasgow will both make whatever human ingenuity can
make, and she will also distribute. One of the first things she intends
to do is to tap the stream of food, fuel and lumber destined for the
South, and now laid up in the winter in Philadelphia by the closing of
the Delaware, and send it to the Southern consumer by her cheap
water-transport. Connected with this enterprise will be the
multiplication of her steam colliers, ultimately scattering the crop of
breadstuffs to the South Atlantic and Gulf States (if not the Eastern),
and coming home with ballast of the varied iron ores those States abound
in. When Delaware Bay begins to be whitened with the sails of returning
coal-vessels, or lashed with the wheels of steam carriers, bringing in
the oxides and magnetite ores of North Carolina and the hematite and
other varieties of the extreme South, to mix with the rail-brought ores
of interior localities, then Wilmington proposes to be the chosen centre
of industry in cast iron. This production, it is now well understood, is
no longer carried on most advantageously in the neighborhood of any one
great natural deposit of ore. The important thing is to be at a meeting
of all varieties of the metal: chemistry then selects the proportions
for mixture, and the best stock is produced with scarcely any greater
expense than the lowest grade. The situation at the head of Delaware Bay
is one where every choice of the ores can be easily swept together by
rail or water. It also controls fuel, by both means of carriage, from
either of the great anthracite regions--a matter of special importance
in this time of "strikes," as the operatives of both districts rarely
throw up work at the same time. Wilmington thus proposes to obtain its
iron at three dollars per ton less than Pittsburg.
[Illustration: PARLOR-MATCH FACTORY.]
To properly digest these advantages, the city needs a large furnace,
centrally located, to work for all the foundries and forges of the
place. This construction is now being earnestly advocated, and will
doubtless soon take form.
Thus we see the northernmost of the slave-State cities leaping up to
catch first the advantages of perfect commercial union under the new
regime. Affiliated with the South, inspired by the North, we should
watch her as a standard and a type.
Meantime, her labor problem, as a city crammed with proletarians, she
meets with consummate tranquillity. The paternal relations between the
good old Brandywine millers and their journeymen are continued through
the immense operations of the present day. A singular harmony has thus
far subsisted between employers and employed: the prosperity and calm
which travelers used to praise among the operatives of New England mills
are perhaps now best seen here. To this result both Nature and man
contribute. The country round about is so bounteous, is such a garden,
that the pay of the workman represents a far higher grade of social life
than anywhere else in manufacturing regions. Rents so far are low, but a
beneficent system is in active operation amongst the working-classes
which helps a man to own his own house, and avoid the teasing periodical
drain of rent.
This is the associative system, here in faultless operation, by which
the fragments of a large piece of ground are paid for by degrees and
cleared of all incumbrance in eight or nine years by the profit on the
contributed moneys. This plan is assisted by the best men in the town,
who participate in the associations, receive themselves a reasonable
profit, and supply the credit and advantages necessary for the safety
of wholesale enterprises. They have thus far worked with their workmen
for the latter's profit, with perfect honor and without a stain of
scandal. The great advantage, after all, is to themselves; for a workman
owning his own home, accumulating comforts and a family, is indissolubly
tied to the city and its peaceful order.
Various plans for the improvement of the workmen are afoot, including a
"Holly-Tree Inn" for the supply of harmless refreshment and evening
relaxation, the ground for which is bought and a stock-company forming.
A public park, for which a beautiful stretch of the Brandywine, on Adams
street and north of Levering Avenue, is recommended, is already engaging
the attention of the citizens as a necessary provision. A "fountain
society" is in active operation, offering cool, wholesome drink to the
thirsty workman and the tired beast: the principal of its
fountain-structures forms a memorial monument to a young gentleman who
had distinguished himself by his liberality in preparing scientific
lectures for the free entertainment of the working public. Shut up in
the public hall among the materials of his lecture, he was found dead
from the result of some solitary experiment--slain by his own kindness.
A rich monument to the soldiers and sailors slain in the civil war was
unveiled in 1871: it is formed of a pillar from the old United States
Bank, surmounted by an eagle cast from captured cannon.
But the best thing a manufacturing town can do for her workman is to
educate his children. During the old aristocratic days of Wilmington she
was satisfied with the reputation of her private tutors and of her young
ladies' seminaries, where "sweet girl-graduates in their golden hair"
cultivated cheeks like the surrounding peaches, while they learned
Shakespeare, musical glasses and the use of the globes. It was not until
1852 that the Delaware Legislature chartered a board of education for
the town. In these twenty years fifteen schools have been put up, with
five thousand attenders. Schoolhouse No. 1, shown in the illustration,
accommodates four hundred and thirty-six pupils, and furnishes an
education, in the words of the late Bishop Potter, "good enough for the
richest and cheap enough for the poorest."
The choice streets of the city are filling up with tasteful residences.
As a specimen we present the house of Colonel McComb, an old favorite of
Wilmington, where his familiar appellation of "Harry McComb" is as often
uttered day by day as it was at Washington during the exposure by its
owner of Congressional honesty and piety--or magpiety.
A hotel of the first class has been erected, and baptized with the
commemorative name of the Clayton House. It has one hundred and five
chambers and every improvement. A very characteristic fact, showing the
spirit of integrity and goodness which here travels hand in hand with
modern enterprise, is that the owners sacrificed full _three-quarters_
of the rent they could have obtained, in order to keep it pledged as a
temperance house. Another elegant building has been put up by the
Masonic fraternity for their own purposes and those of the Board of
Trade, etc., including a handsome opera-house on the ground floor. The
auditorium is praised for its acoustic properties by Parepa-Rosa,
Wallack, Davenport and other performers, seats about fifteen hundred,
and is furnished with the inevitable drop-curtain by Russell Smith.
Faced with iron painted white, and very rich in mouldings and ornaments,
the building presents as cheery a front to enter as any similar place of
attraction known to the American tourist. The Masonic rooms above, and
those of the Board of Trade, Historical Society, etc., are provided with
every beauty and comfort.
Here are the indications of a prospering, laboring, thinking, virtuous
city of the New World. We have tried to sketch it both as a city with a
past and a city with a future. Could we have selected one for
illustration that would be a better or sharper concentration of all that
is good in American life?
MARIE FAMETTE AND HER LOVERS.
I.
Marie Famette is the prettiest girl in the market-place of Aubette. Her
eyes are of such a sweet, soft blue, deeply shaded by long black lashes:
her eyebrows are not black, but they are of a much darker tint than her
hair, which (so much of it as can be seen under her full white
cap-border) is a golden yellow. But it is not her eyes and her hair that
make Marie so attractive: she has charmed young and old alike ever since
she came, a toddling damsel of two years, and took her place beside her
mother in the market-place of Aubette.
Madame Famette's was the best fruit-stall of the market. No one else
could show such baskets of peaches and hampers of pears; and as to the
citrouilles and potirons, their reputation was so established that by
ten o'clock there was little to be seen of them among the glowing
vegetables which decked the stall. Such radishes were not to be seen
elsewhere--white and purple, as thick as carrots; and the carrots
themselves like lumps of red gold, lying nestling beneath their
feathered tops or setting off the creamy whiteness of the cauliflowers
ranged in a formal row in front of them.
But Marie had always eclipsed all other beauty in the stall, and now
that she had grown too big to be patted on the cheek and kissed by
grown-up admirers, she had a host of victims in the sturdy young
countrymen who came in to Aubette--either to bring mothers and sisters
with their produce or to purchase for themselves.
Madame Famette has weak health, and lately Marie comes often to the
market by herself, and is able to flirt to her heart's content,
unchecked by her mother's presence. She is so bright, so arch, so ready
with a sparkling answer, that it is no wonder her stall is always
thronged and that her fruit and her vegetables disappear so rapidly.
There is an extra buzz in the market to-day. It is September, the epoch
of the Mascaret, for the dreaded flood-tide seldom visits the Seine more
than twice a year, and always draws dwellers in the neighboring towns to
see its autumn fury. There is an influx of strange faces in the little
place beneath the richly-sculptured spire of Notre Dame--the cathedral
of Aubette, as strangers call it, although it is only the parish church
of the quaint little town--and a certain extra excitement is
communicated to the settlers under the canvas-covered booths and to the
humbler sellers of wares in baskets. Mademoiselle Lesage, a short, plump
young woman dressed in black, flits in and out of the chattering crowd
more busily than usual. Mademoiselle holds herself of a rank above the
country-folk who bring in their poultry and garden produce to Aubette.
In token of this she wears a round black mushroom-shaped hat, and a
holland apron with two deep pockets in virtue of her office; for
Mademoiselle Lesage has an enterprising spirit. She found herself at
thirty years old left alone in the world with an ugly face and with an
insufficient "dot." Mademoiselle Lesage is ambitious: she does not care
to marry a very poor man, and she has managed to give the town council
of Aubette such security that it allows her to farm the market yearly
for some hundreds of francs. Watch her collecting her dues. She goes
rapidly from stall to stall, jingling her pockets, laughing and chatting
with the farmers' wives, all the time keeping a hawk's eye on the
basket-carriers, not one of whom may presume to sell so much as an onion
without the weekly toll of one sou. She darts in and out among them, and
her pockets swell out in front as if they were stuffed with apples.
She has left Marie Famette's stall till the last. She crosses over to it
now as quickly as she can go, but there is no means of darting in and
out here, as there was just now among the basket-women. Old Floris
Marceau has covered a good-sized space with his heap of green and yellow
melons, and he stands behind these marchandeing, gesticulating,
brandishing the knife with which he slices his citrouilles and
inveighing against the folly of his customers. "Will mam'selle believe,"
he says, addressing her as she approaches, and wiping his knife on his
often-patched blouse, "they come to buy fruit of a respectable
vegetable-seller and they don't know the price of a melon? Ten sous for
a cantaloupe like that!" His blue eyes gleamed furiously under his
frowning gray eyebrows. "Ten sous! I told them to be off and buy
chickens." He broke into a laugh, and pointed to a tall, bent old
gentleman, who seemed covered with confusion at this public rebuke, and
sidled his way out of the throng without attempting an answer.
"Buy a turkey, m'sieur?" A smiling, dark-eyed woman in a close-setting
white cap went on with the joke and pointed to her basket, but the old
gentleman had had enough: he hurried away with a rueful glance at the
basket in which, divided only by the handle, sat two fat turkey poults
and two chickens. One of the turkeys stirred and got a wing free, but it
was remorselessly tucked in again and reduced to passive endurance, with
"Keep quiet then, ne soyez pas bete."
Mademoiselle Lesage approaches Marie's stall at a leisurely pace: she
wishes to see her ground before she speaks. By the extra sweetness of
her smile one might suppose that mademoiselle loved the gay little
beauty: "Bonjour, Marie. Madame Famette trusts you alone again, I see?"
Marie does exactly that which Mademoiselle Lesage intended to make her
do: she starts violently and she looks annoyed.
Elise Lesage glances quickly from Marie to the two young men who stand
beside her. One of these, tall, well-dressed, with a Jewish face, and a
sparkling pin in his brilliant blue scarf, is Alphonse Poiseau, the son
of Monsieur Poiseau of the large clockmaker's and jeweler's shop at the
corner of the place next the church: the other is Nicolas Marais, a
handsome, gypsy-looking fellow with no decided occupation. He is
sometimes at work on his uncle's farm at Vatteville, and when he falls
out with his uncle and tires of Vatteville he comes across the Seine and
gets employed by Leon Roussel, the chief timber-merchant of Aubette.
People say that old Marais, the miser of Vatteville, means to make
Nicolas his heir; but Nicolas takes no pains to please the old man: he
goes here and there at his pleasure, a favorite wherever he shows his
handsome dark eyes and his saucy smile. The men like him as much as the
women do, he has such a ready, amusing tongue, and he never says a
spiteful word; so that more than one of the keen, observant
poultry-sellers standing beside their baskets near Marie's stall have
commented on the scowl with which for full five minutes Leon Roussel has
regarded Nicolas. Leon Roussel is a middle-sized, in no way
remarkable-looking person, with honest brown eyes and a square, sensible
face. His father, the wealthy timber-merchant on the Yvetot road, died
when he was a boy, and Leon is one of the most prosperous citizens of
Aubette, and well thought of by all. Leon is ostensibly in consultation
with Monsieur Houlard, tailor and town councillor, but as he stands at
the worthy's shop-door he is raised above the level of the place, and is
exactly opposite the stall of Marie Famette.
"Nicolas is out of favor with Monsieur Roussel: he has worked badly in
the lumber-yard," says La Mere Robillard.
"Chut! chut!" says her gossip, Madelaine Manget, and she gives at the
same time a pat to a refractory chicken. "Nicolas looks too hard at
Marie Famette. Ma foi! there are men in the manger as well as dogs. If
Monsieur Leon wants Marie to be for his eyes only, why does he not ask
for her and marry her, the proud simpleton?"
"Ah, but look you, Madelaine, Leon is not proud: he never turns a poor
man from his door without a morsel to quiet hunger, and he must be
clever or his business would not prosper."
La Mere Manget shrugs her shoulders. "Will you then not buy turkeys at
eleven francs the couple, ma belle dame?" she cries shrilly to a
passer-by.
While Marie Famette recovers herself, Nicolas answers Mam'selle Lesage.
"Pardon, Mam'selle Lesage, but Mam'selle Marie is not alone," he says,
raising his hat with exquisite politeness--Alphonse Poiseau tries to
follow suit, but his bow is stiff and pompous--"the whole market is her
body-guard, and she permits Monsieur Poiseau and myself to act as
sentinels." He throws an insinuating glance at Marie, which deepens the
gloom on Leon Roussel's face.
Elise Lesage has taken in the whole situation, and she knows exactly
where to look for the timber-merchant. An uneasy consciousness makes
Marie follow her glance: she looks red and confused when she sees Leon's
stern, disapproving face. His eyes are fixed on her as she looks across,
but he withdraws them instantly and turns to Monsieur Houlard.
Marie bites her pretty red under-lip: she can hardly keep from crying:
"If we were alone and he scolded me, I would not mind; but he has no
right to frown at me before the whole town. It is enough to compromise
me. It will be said presently that I am a bold girl, while I only amuse
myself, and never move a step from my stall to speak to any one. It is
too bad!"
She gulps down a lump in her throat, and gives Nicolas Marais a smile
that makes the clockmaker long to knock his rival's head against the
gray buttress of the old church.
"Sentinels!" Elise Lesage laughs. "Is Marie afraid, then, that some one
will steal her?"
"Marie is afraid of nothing, Mademoiselle Lesage." The little beauty is
glad to be able to vent her vexation on some one. "What right has she to
call me Marie?" she says to Nicolas in a very audible under-tone.
Mademoiselle's black eyes close till they look like lines: Marie does
not see her face, but Nicolas Marais shivers, he hardly knows why.
A restraint has come over the merry trio, and Nicolas abhors restraint.
"Tiens!" he says carelessly, "there is a fresh bevy of basket-women,
Mam'selle Lesage."
Elise darts off like a greyhound, and Marie forgets her vexation and
laughs out merrily at Nicolas's ruse: "She is such a busybody!" The girl
glances across to see what has become of Leon: he is talking to
Mademoiselle Lesage.
Alphonse Poiseau has kept silence, but he has observed. "I should not
like to offend mam'selle," he says, "her eyes are so like a snake's."
II.
Market has come and gone again. Marie Famette was not happy as she went
home last Saturday, but to-day her heart aches sorely as she goes along
the dusty road to St. Gertrude. Last Saturday was the first market-day
this year that Leon Roussel has not helped her into her cart and taken a
friendly leave of her; but he disappeared before market was over, and
to-day he was not there at all.
"And he might have walked home with me!" Tears are in poor little
Marie's eyes. Leon Roussel has seemed her own special property, and he
has not been to her mother's house for a fortnight. "And if he had been
at market to-day, he would have been content with me: poor Nicolas must
be ill indeed to stay away from market. Ma foi! I have been dull alone.
Elise Lesage was civil, for a wonder: I hope she will give old Marais's
note safely to his nephew. I wonder why she goes to see Nicolas?"
As she says the word a strange foreboding seizes Marie: she cannot tell
what causes it, but her old dislike to Elise rises up, mingled with a
kind of fear. "I ought to have given Nicolas the note myself; and yet--"
The road is very long and very dusty to-day: it is never an interesting
way out of Aubette, except that being cut on the hillside it is raised
high, the little river meandering through the osier meadows on the left,
and also commands a fine view of the beautiful old church. But Marie
does not turn back to look at the church: her heart is too heavy to take
interest in anything out of herself. She has left the cart behind to
bring out crockery and some new chairs which she has purchased for her
mother, and she wishes she had stayed in Aubette till her cargo was
packed. All at once a new thought comes, and her eyes brighten. A wood
clothes the hilly side of the road, but on the left there is a steep
descent into the valley, and the road is bordered either by scattered
cottages or by an irregular hawthorn hedge. A little way on there is a
gap in this hedge, and looking down there is a long steep flight of
steps with wooden edges. At the foot stands a good-sized house divided
now into several cottages. The walls are half-timbered with wood set
crosswise in the plaster between two straight rows. Ladders, iron hoops
and a bird-cage hang against the wall, and over the door is a wooden
shelf with scarlet geraniums. There is a desolate garden divided into
three by a criss-cross fence and a hedge, and over the last a huge
orange citrouille has clambered and lies perched on the top.
Marie knows that Nicolas Marais sometimes lodges in one of the cottages,
but she knows too that the property belongs to Leon Roussel, and that he
lives close by. A blush comes to the girl's cheeks: she may see Leon
there. She stops and looks down: Elise Lesage is coming out of the
doorway, but she is talking over her shoulder to some one behind her.
Marie sees her put her fingers into one of the brown holland pockets,
pull out a note and give it to her companion.
Marie draws a deep breath: "How I wronged her! Ever since I gave her
that note I have felt anxious and troubled. She seems so spiteful to me
that I feared she might somehow get me into trouble with it, and yet I
don't know how."