CHAPTER III.

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LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE

OF

_POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE._

AUGUST, 1877.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1877, by J. B.

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

Washington.

VOL. XX.

DOWN THE RHINE.

CONCLUDING PAPER.

[Illustration: CASTLE OF ELTZ.]

Coblenz is the place which many years ago gave me my first associations

with the Rhine. From a neighboring town we often drove to Coblenz, and the

wide, calm flow of the river, the low, massive bridge of boats and the

commonplace outskirts of a busy city contributed to make up a very

different picture from that of the poetic "castled" Rhine of German song

and English ballad. The old town has, however, many beauties, though its

military character looks out through most of them, and reminds us that the

Mosel city (for it originally stood only on that river, and then crept up

to the Rhine), though a point of union in Nature, has been for ages, so

far as mankind was concerned, a point of defence and watching. The great

fortress, a German Gibraltar, hangs over the river and sets its teeth in

the face of the opposite shore: all the foreign element in the town is due

to the deposits made there by troubles in other countries, revolution and

war sending their exiles, _emigres_ and prisoners. The history of the town

is only a long military record, from the days of the archbishops of

Treves, to whom it was subject, to those of the last war. It has, however,

some pleasanter points: it has long been a favorite summer residence of

the empress of Germany, who not long before I was there had by her tact

and toleration reconciled sundry religious differences that threatened a

political storm. Such toleration has gone out of fashion now, and the

peacemaking queen would have a harder task to perform now that the two

parties have come to an open collision. There is the old "German house" by

the bank of the Mosel, a building little altered outwardly since the

fourteenth century, now used as a food-magazine for the troops. The church

of St. Castor commemorates a holy hermit who lived and preached to the

heathen in the eighth century, and also covers the grave and monument of

the founder of the "Mouse" at Wellmich, the warlike Kuno of Falkenstein,

archbishop of Treves. The Exchange, once a court of justice, has changed

less startlingly, and its proportions are much the same as of old; and

besides these there are other buildings worth noticing, though not so old,

and rather distinguished by the men who lived and died there, or were born

there, such as Metternich, than by architectural beauties. Such houses

there are in every old city. They do not invite you to go in and admire

them: every tourist you meet does not ask you how you liked them or

whether you saw them. They are _homes_, and sealed to you as such, but

they are the shell of the real life of the country; and they have somehow

a charm and a fascination that no public building or show-place can have.

Goethe, who turned his life-experiences into poetry, has told us something

of one such house not far from Coblenz, in the village of Ehrenbreitstein,

beneath the fortress, and which in familiar Coblenz parlance goes by the

name of "The Valley"--the house of Sophie de Laroche. The village is also

Clement Brentano's birthplace.

The oldest of German cities, Treves (or in German _Trier_), is not too far

to visit on our way up the Mosel Valley, whose Celtic inhabitants of old

gave the Roman legions so much trouble. But Rome ended by conquering, by

means of her civilization as well as by her arms, and _Augusta

Trevirorum_, though claiming a far higher antiquity than Rome herself, and

still bearing an inscription to that effect on the old council-house--now

called the Red House and used as a hotel--became, as Ausonius

condescendingly remarked, a second Rome, adorned with baths, gardens,

temples, theatres and all that went to make up an imperial capital. As in

Venice everything precious seems to have come from Constantinople, so in

Trier most things worthy of note date from the days of the Romans; though,

to tell the truth, few of the actual buildings do, no matter how classic

is their look. The style of the Empire outlived its sway, and doubtless

symbolized to the inhabitants their traditions of a higher standard of

civilization. The Porta Nigra, for instance--called Simeon's Gate at

present--dates really from the days of the first Merovingian kings, but it

_looks_ like a piece of the Coliseum, with its rows of arches in massive

red sandstone, the stones held together by iron clamps, and its low,

immensely strong double gateway, reminding one of the triumphal arches in

the Forum at Rome. The history of the transformations of this gateway is

curious. First a fortified city gate, standing in a correspondingly

fortified wall, it became a dilapidated granary and storehouse in the

Middle Ages, when one of the archbishops gave leave to Simeon, a wandering

hermit from Syracuse in Sicily, to take up his abode there; and another

turned it into a church dedicated to this saint, though of this change few

traces remain. Finally, it has become a national museum of antiquities.

The amphitheatre is a genuine Roman work, wonderfully well preserved; and

genuine enough were the Roman games it has witnessed, for, if we are to

believe tradition, a thousand Frankish prisoners of war were here given in

one day to the wild beasts by the emperor Constantine. Christian emperors

beautified the basilica that stood where the cathedral now is, and the

latter itself has some basilica-like points about it, though, being the

work of fifteen centuries, it bears the stamp of successive styles upon

its face. To the neighborhood, and also to strangers, one of its great

attractions lies in its treasury of relics, the gift of Constantine's

mother, Saint Helena, for many hundred years objects of pilgrimage, and

even to the incredulous objects of curiosity and interest, for the robe of

a yellowish brown--supposed to have been once purple--which is shown as

Our Lord's seamless garment, has been pronounced by learned men to be of

very high antiquity. But what possesses the Rhine tourist to moralize? He

is a restless creature in general, more occupied in staring than in

seeing--a gregarious creature too, who enjoys the evening table d'hote,

the day-old _Times_ and the British or American gossip as a reward for his

having conscientiously _done_ whatever Murray or Baedeker bade him. Cook

has only transformed the tourist's mental docility into a bodily one: the

guidebook had long drilled his mind before the tour-contractor thought of

drilling his body and driving willing gangs of his species all over the

world.

[Illustration: RUINS OF THE CASTLE OF AUERBACH.]

There is a funny, not over-reverent, legend afloat in Trier to account

for the queer dwarf bottles of Mosel wine used there: it refers to a trick

of Saint Peter, who is supposed to have been travelling in these parts

with the Saviour, and when sent to bring wine to the latter drank half of

it on his way back, and then, to conceal his act, cut the cup down to the

level of the wine that remained. These measures are still called

_Miseraebelchen_, or "wretched little remainders."

The Mosel has but few tributary streams of importance: its own course is

as winding, as wild and as romantic as that of the Rhine itself. The most

interesting part of the very varied scenery of this river is not the

castles, the antique towns, the dense woods or the teeming vineyards

lining rocks where a chamois could hardly stand--all this it has in common

with the Rhine--but the volcanic region of the Eifel, the lakes in ancient

craters, the tossed masses of lava and tufa, the great wastes strewn with

dark boulders, the rifts that are called valleys and are like the Iceland

gorges, the poor, starved villages and the extraordinary rusticity, not to

say coarseness, of the inhabitants. This grotesque, interesting

country--unique, I believe, on the continent of Europe--lies in a small

triangle between the Mosel, the Belgian frontier and the Schiefer hills of

the Lower Rhine: it goes by the names of the High Eifel, with the High

Acht, the Kellberg and the Nuerburg; the Upper (_Vorder_) Eifel, with

Gerolstein, a ruined castle, and Daun, a pretty village; and the

Snow-Eifel (_Schnee Eifel_), contracted by the speech of the country into

Schneifel. The last is the most curious, the most dreary, the least

visited. Walls of sharp rock rise up over eight hundred feet high round

some of its sunken lakes--one is called the Powder Lake--and the level

above this abyss stretches out in moors and desolate downs, peopled with

herds of lean sheep, and marked here and there by sepulchral,

gibbet-looking signposts, shaped like a rough [Symbol: T] and set in a

heap of loose stones. It is a great contrast to turn aside from this

landscape and look on the smiling villages and pretty wooded scenery of

the valley of the Mosel proper; the long lines of handsome, healthy women

washing their linen on the banks; the old ferryboats crossing by the help

of antique chain-and-rope contrivances; the groves of old trees, with

broken walls and rude shrines, reminding one of Southern Italy and her

olives and ilexes; and the picturesque houses in Kochem, in Daun, in

Trarbach, in Bernkastel, which, however untiring one may be as a

sightseer, hardly warrant one as a writer to describe and re-describe

their beauties. Kluesserath, however, we must mention, because its

straggling figure has given rise to a local proverb--"As long as

Kluesserath;" and Neumagen, because of the legend of Constantine, who is

said to have seen the cross of victory in the heavens at this place, as

well as at Sinzig on the Rhine, and, as the more famous legend tells us,

at the Pons Milvium over the Tiber.

The Mosel wine-industry has much the same features as that of the Rhine,

but there is a great difference between the French wines, which are mostly

red, and the German, which are mostly white. Among the latter hundreds of

spurious, horrible concoctions for the foreign market usurp the name of

Mosel wine. It is hardly necessary even to mention the pretty names by

which the real wines are known, and which may be found on any wine-card at

the good, unpretending inns that make Mosel travelling a special delight.

The Saar wines are included among the Mosel, and the difference is not

very perceptible.

The last glance we take at the beauties of this neighborhood is from the

mouth of the torrent-river Eltz as it dashes into the Eifel, washing the

rock on which stands the castle of Eltz. The building and the family are

an exception in the history of these lands: both exist to this day, and

are prosperous and undaunted, notwithstanding all the efforts of enemies,

time and circumstances to the contrary. The strongly-turreted wall runs

from the castle till it loses itself in the rock, and the building has a

home-like, inhabited, complete look; which, in virtue of the quaint

irregularity and magnificent natural position of the castle, standing

guard over the foaming Eltz, does not take from its romantic appearance,

as preservation or restoration too often does.

[Illustration: VIEW OF COBLENZ FROM PFAFFENDORF.]

Not far from Coblenz, and past the island of Nonnenwerth, is the old

tenth-century castle of Sayn, which stood until the Thirty Years' War, and

below it, quiet, comfortable, large, but unpretending, lies the new house

of the family of Sayn-Wittgenstein, built in 1848, where, during a stay at

Ems, we paid a visit of two days. The family were great Italian

travellers, and we had met in Rome more than twenty years before, when the

writer and the boys, whom I met again--the one as an officer of the

Prussian army, and the other as a Bonn student--were children together. At

dinner one evening at this new Sayn house, as we were tasting some Russian

dish of soured milk (the mother was a Russian), we reminded each other of

our ball on Twelfth Night at Rome, when the youngest of these boys

happened to become king "by the grace of the bean," and spent some hours

seated in state with gilt-paper crown and red-velvet mantle till he was

too sleepy to oversee his subjects' revels any longer; of a day when the

pope was to "create" several cardinals, and of the young "king's" unshaken

belief that _he_ would have the scarlet hat sent him if he only waited

long enough at the window to look out for the messengers, and of his

consequent watch all day, seeing the carriages pass and repass and the

bustle of a _festa_ go on, till the sunset flushed over St. Peter's in the

distance, and the disappointment became certain at last. Of not much more

manly pastimes did the Bonn student have to tell, for the slitting of

noses was then in high favor, and a bit of advice was gravely recounted as

having come from a doctor to an obstinate duellist, "not to get his nose

cut off a _fifth_ time, as the sewing had got so shaky by repetition that

he could not answer for the nose sticking on if touched once more." The

house was really beautiful, and furnished with a taste which had something

Parisian, and yet also something individual, about it. The parquet floors

of inlaid and polished wood used in Germany were here seen to their

greatest perfection in some of the rooms; but what most struck me was a

Moorish chamber lighted from above--a small, octagon room, with low divans

round the walls and an ottoman in the centre, with flowers in concealed

pots cunningly introduced into the middle of the cushions, while glass

doors, half screened by Oriental-looking drapery, led into a small grotto

conservatory with a fountain plashing softly among the tropical plants.

There was also a good collection of pictures in a gallery, besides the

paintings scattered through the living rooms; but the garden was perhaps

as much a gem to its owner's mind as anything in the house, as an

"English" garden always is to a foreigner. There, in the late afternoon of

that day, came one of the Prussian royal family and paid the mistress of

the house an informal friendly visit, taking "five-o'clock tea" in the

English fashion, and with a retinue of two or three attendants making the

tour of the close-shaven lawns, the firm gravelled walks and the broad and

frequent flights of steps that led from one terraced flower-garden to

another. These were courtly and educated descendants of terrible scourges

of mankind in old days--of Sayns who were simply robbers and highwaymen,

levying bloody toll on the Coblenz merchants' caravans, and of

Brandenburgs who were famous for their ravages and raids. Times have

changed no less than buildings, and the houseful of pictures and treasures

is no more unlike the robber-nest destroyed in war by other robbers than

the young Bonn student is unlike his rough-and-ready forefathers.

As we push our way down the Rhine we soon come to another such contrast,

the little peaceful town of Neuwied, a sanctuary for persecuted Flemings

and others of the Low Countries, gathered here by the local sovereign,

Count Frederick III. He gave them each a plot of land, built their houses

and exempted them from all dues and imposts, besides granting them full

freedom of worship; but not for them alone was this boon, for as other

wars made other exiles, so were all and every welcome to Neuwied, and the

place even now contains Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, Mennonites and

Quakers, all living in peace together. The United Brethren (or Moravians)

founded a colony here in 1750. The honesty of these people is proverbial,

their simplicity of life is patriarchal, and the artist at least will not

object to their manners, for the sake of the pleasing costume of their

women, whose white caps look akin to the peaceful, rural background of

their life, red and blue bands on these caps respectively distinguishing

the married from the unmarried women. The little brook that gives its name

to the village runs softly into the Rhine under a rustic bridge and amid

murmuring rushes, while beyond it the valley gets narrower, rocks begin to

rise over the Rhine-banks, and the scenery after Andernach becomes again

what we so admired at Bingen and Bornhofen.

[Illustration: ORTENSTEIN.]

Andernach is the Rocky Gate of the Rhine, and if its scenery were not

enough, its history, dating from Roman times, would make it interesting.

However, of its relics we can only mention, _en passant_, the parish

church with its four towers, all of tufa, the dungeons under the

council-house, significantly called the "Jews' bath," and the old

sixteenth-century contrivances for loading Rhine-boats with the millstones

in which the town still drives a fair trade. At the mouth of the Brohl we

meet the volcanic region again, and farther up the valley through which

this stream winds come upon the retired little watering-place of

Toennistein, a favorite goal of the Dutch, with its steel waters; and

Wassenach, with what we may well call its dust-baths, stretching for miles

inland, up hills full of old craters, and leaving us only at the entrance

of the beech-woods that have grown up in these cauldron-like valleys and

fringe the blue Laachersee, the lake of legends and of fairies. One of

these Schlegel has versified, the "Lay of the Sunken Castle," with the

piteous tale of the spirits imprisoned; and Simrock tells us in rhyme of

the merman who sits waiting for a mortal bride; while Wolfgang Mueller

sings of the "Castle under the Lake," where at night ghostly torches are

lighted and ghostly revels held, the story of which so fascinates the

fisherman's boy who has heard of these doings from his grandmother that as

he watches the enchanted waters one night his fancy plays him a cruel

trick, and he plunges in to join the revellers and learn the truth. Local

tradition says that Count Henry II. and his wife Adelaide, walking here by

night, saw the whole lake lighted up from within in uncanny fashion, and

founded a monastery in order to counteract the spell. This deserted but

scarcely-ruined building still exists, and contains the grave of the

founder: the twelfth-century decoration, rich and detailed, is almost

whole in the oldest part of the monastery. The far-famed German tale of

Genovefa of Brabant is here localized, and Henry's son Siegfried assigned

to the princess as a husband, while the neighboring grotto of Hochstein is

shown as her place of refuge. On our way back to the Rocky Gate we pass

through the singular little town of Niedermendig, an hour's distance from

the lake--a place built wholly of dark gray lava, standing in a region

where lava-ridges seam the earth like the bones of antediluvian monsters,

but are made more profitable by being quarried into millstones. There is

something here that brings part of Wales to the remembrance of the few who

have seen those dreary slate-villages--dark, damp, but naked, for moss and

weeds do not thrive on this dampness as they do on the decay of other

stones--which dot the moorlands of Wales. The fences are slate; the

gateposts are slate; the stiles are of slate; the very "sticks" up which

the climbing roses are trained are of slate; churches, schools, houses,

stables, are all of one dark iron-blue shade; floors and roofs are alike;

hearth-stones and threshold-stones and grave-stones, all of the same

material. It is curious and depressing. This volcanic region of the Rhine,

however, has so many unexpected beauties strewn pell-mell in the midst of

stony barrenness that it also bears some likeness to Naples and Ischia,

where beauty of color, and even of vegetation, alternate surprisingly with

tracts of parched and rocky wilderness pierced with holes whence gas and

steam are always rising.

Sinzig, on the left bank of the last gorge of the Rhine, besides its

legend of Constantine has a convent said to have been built by the empress

Helena; and in this convent a mummied body of a long-dead monk, canonized

by popular tradition, and remarkable for the journey to Paris which his

body took and returned from unharmed in the days of Napoleon I. On the

opposite shore, not much lower down, is another of the numberless

pilgrimage-chapels with which the Rhine abounds, and the old city of

Linz, with an authentic history dating from the ninth century, telling of

an independence of any but nominal authority for some time, and at last of

a transfer of the lordship of the old town from the Sayns to the

archbishops of Cologne. This supremacy had to be kept up by the "strong

hand," of which the ruined fortress is now the only reminder; but there is

a more beautiful monument of old days and usages in the thirteenth-century

church of St. Martin, not badly restored, where the stained-glass windows

are genuinely mediaeval, as well as the fresco on gold ground representing

the "Seven Joys of Mary," painted in 1463. Just above Remagen lies the

Victoria-berg, named after the crown-princess of Prussia, the

princess-royal of England, and this is the evening resort of weary

Remageners--a lovely public garden, with skilfully-managed vistas, and a

"Victoria temple," placed so as to command the five prettiest views up and

down the stream, as well as over the woodland behind the town. Let not the

classic name of "temple" deceive us, however, for this is a genuine German

arbor, picturesque and comfortable, with a conical roof of stately and

rustic pillars, seats and balustrade rising from the steep bank on which

the "lookout" is perched. The winding Ahr, coming from the tufa-plateau of

the Eifel and watering a pretty valley full of old castles and churches,

rolls its waters into the Rhine in this neighborhood, and in summer no

trip is so pleasant to the citizens of Bonn and Cologne, and indeed to

many tourists if they have time to breathe. But in winter the scenery is

worthy of the New World. The dark rocks and narrow slits of valleys piled

with snow and crusted with ice, the locked waterfalls and caves with

portcullises of icicles let down across their mouths, make a pendant for

the splendid and little-known scenery of American mountains in January. By

one of the castles, a ruin belonging to the Steins of Nassau, poetically

called _Landskroene_, or the "Land's Crown," from its beautiful situation

on a basalt hill, is a perfectly-preserved chapel perched on the top of

the rock, where, says the legend, the daughter of the besieged lord of the

castle once took refuge during a local war. The sacristy has an unusual

shape, and is hewn out of the rock itself; and here it was that the maiden

sat in safety, the rock closing over the cleft by which she had crept in,

and a dove finding its way in every day with a loaf to feed her, while a

spring within the cave supplied her with water. Legends have grown over

every stone of this poetic land like moss and lichen and rock-fern; and at

Beul, a small bathing-place with a real geyser and a very tolerable circle

of society, we come across the universal story of a golden treasure sunk

in a castle-well and guarded by a giant. The old, world-forgotten town has

its hall of justice and all the shell of its antique civic paraphernalia,

while at present it is a sleepy, contented, rural place, with country

carts and country riders by families crowding it on market-days, and

making every yard of the old street a picture such as delights the

traveller from cities whose plan is conveniently but not picturesquely

that of a chess-board. The baths, like those of Schlangenbad, are in great

favor with nervous women, and like that neighborhood too, so has this its

miniature Olivet and Calvary, the devout legacy of some unknown crusader,

who also founded at Ahrweiler the Franciscan monastery called Calvary

Hill. These "calvaries," in many shapes and degrees, are not uncommon in

Catholic Germany; "stations of the cross"--sometimes groups of painted

figures, life-size, sometimes only small shrines with a framed picture

within--mark the distances up the hill, at the top of which is a

representation of the crucifixion; and as the agony in the garden is not

included in the "stations," there is generally at the foot of the hill an

additional shrine in a natural cave or surrounded by artificial rock-work.

The prettiest part of the Ahr valley is at and about Walporzheim, which

the Duesseldorf artists have, by reason of its famous wine quite as much as

of its romantic scenery, chosen for the place of their frequent feasts,

half picnic, half masque, when their get-up rivals that of any carnival,

not even excepting that of the "Krewe of Komus" or those other displays

peculiar to Belgium and Holland of which the late celebration of the

"Pacification of Ghent" was an example.

[Illustration: COURT OF JUSTICE, AHRWEILER.]

The Rhine once more! and now indeed we shall hardly leave it again, but

this is the last part in which we can enjoy the peculiar beauties that

make it different from any other river in the world. The Swiss Rhine is a

mountain-torrent, the Dutch Rhine a sluggish mud puddle, but the German

Rhine is an historic river. Quite as legendary as historic, however; and

perhaps that has made its charm in the eyes of foreigners even more than

its national associations, dear to the native mind; and here, between

Rolandseck, Nonnenwerth and Drachenfels, poetry takes precedence of

history, and we do not want the antiquary to come and shatter the legend

of Roland of Roncesval's fidelity to the Lady of Drachenfels, even after

her vows in Nonnenwerth convent, with his pitiless array of dates and

parade of obvious impossibilities. But I pass over the legendary details

that make this region so interesting. What will better bear repetition is

some description of the scenery lying inland from the shores, the natural

Quadrilateral, containing minor mountains, such as the Siebengebirge (or

the Seven Hills) and the Bonner Alps, and encircling also the volcanic

region between Honnef and Dollendorf. These hills with their

step-and-terrace formation were once fortified by Valentinian against the

formidable Frankish hordes, and German poetry early began to find scenery

in them worthy of its national epic, and so laid the scene of the Saga of

Wilkina among these mountains and valleys. Here, above the legends of

Roland and Siegfried and the Christian captive, who, exposed to the dragon

of the rock, vanquished him by the cross, so that he fell backward and

broke his neck, is the solid remembrance of castles built on many of these

Rhine-hills, defences and bulwarks of the archbishops of Cologne against

the emperors of Germany. But Drachenfels keeps another token of its legend

in its dark-red wine, called "dragon's blood." (Could any teetotaller have

invented a more significant name?) One has often heard of the unbelieving

monk who stumbled at the passage in Scripture which declares that a

thousand years are but as one day to the Lord, and the consequent taste of

eternity which he was miraculously allowed to enjoy while he wandered off

for a quarter of an hour, as he thought, but in reality for three hundred

years, following the song of a nightingale. The abbey of Heisterbach

claims this as an event recorded in its books, and its beautiful ruins and

wide naves with old trees for columns are, so says popular rumor, haunted

by another wanderer, an abbot with snow-white beard, who walks the

cloisters at night counting the graves of his brethren, and vainly seeking

his own, which if he once find his penance will be over. This part of the

Rhine was the favorite home of many of the poets who have best sung of the

national river: a cluster of townlets recalls no less than five of them to

our mind--Unkel, where Freiligrath chose his home; Menzerberg, where

Simrock lived; Herresberg, Pfarrins's home; Koenigswinter, Wolfgang

Mueller's birthplace; and Oberkassel, that of Gottfried Kinkel. Rhondorf

shows us a monument of one of the last robber-lords of Drachenfels, and

Honnef a smiling modern settlement, a very Nice of the North, where the

climate draws together people of means and leisure, _litterateurs_,

retired merchants and collectors of art-treasures, as well as

health-seekers. These little colonies, of which most of the large cities

on the Rhine have a copy in miniature, even if it be not a bathing-place,

are the places in which to seek for that domestic taste and refinement

which some hasty and prejudiced critics have thought fit to deny to the

Fatherland.

[Illustration: DRACHENFELS.]

The scenery of the Rhine begins to lose its distinctive features as we

near Bonn: plains replace rocks, and the waters flow more sluggishly. Bonn

is alive enough: its antiquities of Roman date are forgotten in its

essentially modern bustle, for the heart of its prosperity is of very

recent date, the university having been founded only in 1777, and after

the troubles of the Revolution reorganized in 1818. It has grown with a

giant growth, and has reckoned among its professors Niebuhr, Schlegel,

Arndt, Dahlmann, Johann Mueller, Ritschl, Kinkel, Simrock and other less

world-famous but marvellous specialists. Then there is the memory of

Beethoven, the honor of the town, which is his birthplace and has put up a

monument to him, and the last modern element that has effaced the old

recollections--the numerous English colony--not to mention the rich

foreigners whom perhaps the university, perhaps the scenery, and perhaps

the heedless fashion that sets in a tide now toward this place, now toward

that, have drawn to the new Bonn. Poppelsdorf Castle, now the museum of

natural history, and the fine groves and gardens attached to it, now a

public promenade, have the brisk, business-like look of a "live" place:

the building, it is true, is modern, having been built in 1715. But if we

are obstinate enough to search for signs of the days when archbishops

ruled instead of dukes and kings, we shall find old remains, the cathedral

of course included, and nowhere a more curious one than the Kreuzberg, a

place of pilgrimage, where the church of 1627 has replaced an old

wood-shrine: its rich gateway was intended to represent the front of

Pontius Pilate's palace at Jerusalem, and on it are frescoes of the

various scenes of the Passion. Within this thirty marble steps lead up

into a vestibule in imitation of the _Scala Santa_ in Rome, and pilgrims

went up these stairs only on their knees. The vaults used until lately to

contain a quantity of dried or mummied bodies of Servite monks (that order

once had a convent here), reminding one of the ghastly Capuchin crypts in

Rome, in Syracuse and in Malta. This neighborhood is rich in

pilgrimage-shrines and legends, and Simrock has preserved a tale of the

Devil which is a little out of the common run. He and the Wind, it is

said, once went by a certain Jesuit church in company, and the former

begged the latter to wait a moment for him, as he had some business

within. The Devil never reappeared, and the Wind is still blowing

perpetually round the building, waiting and calling in vain. The old myth

of Barbarossa waiting in his cave, his beard grown round and round the

stone table on which he leans his sleepy head, which in another form meets

us in the Mosel Valley, repeats itself in Wolfsberg, not far from

Siegburg, near Bonn. I wonder whether the English anglers and oarsmen, and

the pretty girls ready to flirt with the students and give away the prizes

at an archery-meeting or a regatta, ever think of these musty old legends

looked up by scholars out of convent chronicles and peasants' fireside

talk? The difference between past and present is not greater or more

startling than is their likeness, the groundwork of human nature being the

same for ever. Especially in these old lands, how like the life of to-day

to that of hundreds of years ago in all that makes life real and intense!

The same thing in a mould of other shape, the same thoughts in a speech a

little varied, the same motives under a dress a little less natural and

crude--even the same pleasures in a great degree, for the wine-flask

played fully as great a part in old German times as it does now.

[Illustration: MARKET-PLACE AT WORMS.]

"Holy Cologne" seems at first an impersonation of the olden time, but its

busy wharves, crowded shipping and tall warehouses tell us another tale.

Indeed, Cologne is more rich than holy, and its commercial reputation is

quite as old as its religious one. The country around is flat and

uninteresting, but Cologne merchants have made Bruehl a little paradise in

spite of this; and their country-houses of all styles, with balconies,

verandas, porches, piazzas, English shrubbery and flower-gardens,

conservatories and gay boats, lawns and statues, make even the monotonous

banks of the sluggish Rhine beautiful in spite of Nature. Then comes a

reminder of old times--the towers and fortifications, which are still

standing, though now turned into public gardens and drives that stretch

out both on the river and the land side; but the former, _Am Thuermchen_,

forming a sort of parapeted quay, crossed by massive battlemented

gateways, is the most fashionable and commands the best views. The trees

almost hide the shipping, as their predecessors no doubt did eighteen

hundred years ago and more, when the Ubier tribe of barbarians, a

commercial as well as warlike people, undertook to ferry over the whole of

Caesar's army to the right bank of the Rhine in their own boats. The quays

swarm now with hotels, and these in summer swarm with strangers from all

countries--pilgrims of Art and Nature, if no longer of religion--and the

old town becomes in their eyes less a solid, real city with a long history

than a museum opened for their special behoof. And indeed these German

places seem to take kindly to this part, for they rival each other in

modern amusements and gauds set out to lure the light-minded. Music-halls

and beer-gardens, theatres and cafes, illuminated promenades and stalls

full of tempting flagons labeled "genuine eau de Cologne," are cunningly

arrayed to turn away the mind from the stately antique churches and houses

of Cologne. Every one has heard of the cathedral, many have seen it, and

more have seen at least photographs of great accuracy, and pictures of it

which, if less strict in detail, give it a more lifelike look and include

some of its surroundings. The church of St. Gereon, a martyr of the Theban

Legion massacred at Cologne to a man for refusing to worship the imperial

ensigns, under which no one denied that they had fought like lions, is a

massive Romanesque building older than the cathedral, dating from the days

of Constantine and Saint Helena. The church of the Holy Apostles is a

basilica with rounded apse and four octagon towers, one at each corner of

the nave. St. Peter's church, the interior terribly modernized by the

Renaissance, has for an altar-piece Rubens's picture of the _Crucifixion

of Saint Peter_. The Guerzenich House, now used for public balls and

imperial receptions, is a magnificent fifteenth-century building, adorned

with dwarf towers at each corner, a high, carved and stone-roofed niche

with statue over the round-arched door, transom windows filled with

stained glass, and carvings of shields, animal heads, colonnettes and

other devices between and above these windows. The council-house or

town-hall has a beautiful colonnade supporting arches, and a quaint

nondescript creature whose abyss-like maw opens wide and gapes horribly at

the beholder each time the clock strikes. A bas-relief in the hall

represents a curious incident in the civic history of the town, the

successful struggle of Burgomaster Gryn with a lion, the show and pet of

some treacherous nobles who invited Gryn to dinner, and under pretence of

showing him their very unusual acquisition, pushed him into the stone

recess and closed the gate upon him. The burgomaster thrust his hand and

arm, wrapped in his thick cloak, down the animal's throat, while he

pierced him through and through with the sword in his other hand. The

struggles between Cologne and her archbishops were hot and incessant, much

as they were in other ecclesiastical sovereignties. Of these there is no

longer a trace in the present, though the might of the burghers exists

still, and the city that was once called the kernel of the Hanseatic

League, and boasted of its Lorenzo de' Medici in the person of the good

and enlightened Matthias Overstolz, has now almost as proud a place among

merchants as Hamburg or Frankfort. Before we pass to more modern things

let us not forget the shrine of the Three Kings in the cathedral, which is

simply a mass of gold and jewelry, in such profusion as to remind one of

nothing less than the golden screen studded with uncut gems called the

_Palla d'Oro_ at San Marco, directly behind the high altar, and the Golden

Frontal of St. Ambrose at Milan--golden altar it might more fitly be

named, as each side of the altar is a slab of solid gold, almost hidden by

its breastplate of precious stones. The same warrior-archbishop, Conrad of

Hochstaden, who, driven from Cologne, transferred his see to Bonn, was the

first founder of the cathedral, though in those days of slow and solid

building to found was not to finish. The cathedral is not _finished_ even

yet. The present scenes in which Cologne shines are many--for instance,

its lively market on the Neumarkt, and the country costumes one sees there

each week as the stalls and carts, easily drawn by dogs and donkeys, are

set up in the square; the parade of the old guard, called the "Sparks of

Cologne" from their scarlet uniforms; and the Carnival, a high opportunity

for fun and display, and specially seized upon to reproduce historic

figures and incidents, such as the half-comic _Gecker-Berndchen_, a

typical figure in red and white, the colors of the town, with a shield in

one hand and a wooden sabre in the other, shouting the traditional warning

cry, "_Geck los Geck elans!_" the antique procession of burgher youths and

maidens, the latter with large white caps and aprons, and the former in

three-cornered hats, black breeches and stockings and thick low shoes.

Then follows a fancy ball in the Guerzenich House, in which the lineal

descendants of the burgomasters and councillors of old come out in ancient

family trappings of black cloth or velvet, stiff white ruff and heavy gold

chain from shoulder to shoulder, which their forefathers once wore in

earnest. Among the museums and other additions of modern taste is the

beautiful botanical garden and large conservatory, where flourish tropical

plants in profusion--a thing we find in many even of the secondary German

towns.

[Illustration: RHEINFELS.]

The Rhine itself is becoming so uninteresting that it is hardly worth

while lingering on its banks, and as we get near thrifty Holland the river

seems to give itself up wholly to business, for between Cologne and Aachen

(Aix-la-Chapelle) are miles upon miles of manufactories, workshops and

mills; warehouses connected with coal-mines; dirty barges blackening the

water; iron-works and carpet-mills; cloth and paper-mills and

glass-works--a busy region, the modern translation of the myth of gnomes

making gold out of dross in the bowels of the earth.

Aachen has a double life also, like many Rhine towns: it is the old

imperial coronation city, the city of Charlemagne, with a corona of

legends about it; and it is also the modern spa, the basket of tempting

figs with a concealed asp somewhere within, a centre of fashion, gossip

and gambling. How is it that people who profess to fly from the great

capitals for the sake of a "little Nature" are so unable to take Nature at

her word and confess her delights to be enough for them? They want a

change, they say; yet where is the change? The table is the same,

high-priced, choice and varied; the society is the same, the gossip is the

same, the amusements are the same, the intrigues the same; the costume

equally elaborate and expensive; the restless idleness as great and as

hungry for excitement: all the artificiality of life is transported bodily

into another place, and the only difference lies in the frame of the

picture. Exquisites from the capital bring their own world with them, and

their humbler imitators scrape together their hard winter's earnings and

spend them in making an attempt cavalierly to equal for a short time the

tired-out "man of the world" and "woman of fashion." Some come to find

matches for sons and daughters; others to put in the thin end of the wedge

that is to open a way for them "into society;" others come to flirt;

others to increase their business relations; others to out-dress and

out-drive social rivals; others to while away the time which it is

unfashionable to spend cheaply in the city; others for--shall we say

higher? because--political causes: few indeed for health, fewer still for

rest. You see the same old wheel go round year after year, with the same

faces growing more and more tired and more and more hopeless.

[Illustration: "AM THUeRMCHEN," COLOGNE.]

Of Aachen's legendary, historical, romantic side who has not heard?--of

the castle of Frankenburg on the outskirts, where Charlemagne's daughter

carried her lover Eginhardt through the snow, that their love might not be

betrayed by a double track of footsteps; of Charlemagne's palace, where

his school, the Palatine, presided over by English Alcuin, was held; and

the baths where a hundred men could swim at ease at one time; and

Charlemagne's cathedral, of which the present one has preserved only the

octagonal apse; of his tomb, where he sat upright after death in imperial

robes and on a marble throne (the latter is still shown); of the columns

brought from Rome and Ravenna; of the marvellous and colossal corona of

wax-lights which hangs by a huge iron chain from the vaulted roof; of the

bronze doors of the western gateway, now closed, but whose legend of the

Devil is commemorated by the iron figure of a she-wolf with a hole in her

breast, and that of a pineapple, supposed to represent her spirit, of

which she mourns the loss with open jaws and hanging tongue? The Devil is

always cheated in these legends, and one wonders how it was that he did

not show more cleverness in making his bargains. The cathedral still

claims to possess precious relics--of the Passion, the Holy Winding-sheet,

the robe of the Blessed Virgin and the blood-stained cloth in which the

body of Saint John the Baptist was wrapped. These involve a yearly

pilgrimage from the nearer places, and a great feast every seventh year,

when a holy fair is kept up for weeks round the cathedral. There is no

better living specimen of the Middle Ages than such gatherings, and no

doubt then, as now, there was some undercurrent of worldly excitement

mingling with the flow of genuine devotion. Aachen's old cornhouse, the

bridge gate and the many houses full of unobtrusive beauties of carving

and metal-work lead us by hook and by crook--for the streets are very

winding--out on the road to Burtschied, the hot-water town, whose every

house has a spring of its own, besides the very gutters running mineral

water, and the cooking spring in the open street boiling eggs almost

faster than they can be got out again in eatable condition. This is

another of the merchant _villeggiaturas_ of Germany; and a good many

foreigners also own pretty, fantastic new houses, planted among others of

every age from one to eight hundred years.

It is so strange to come upon a purely modern town in this neighborhood

that Exefeld strikes us as an anachronism. It is wholly a business place,

created by the "dry-goods" manufactures that have grown up there, and are

worth twenty million thalers a year to the enterprising owners, who rival

French designs and have made a market for their wares in England and

America. This is a great foil to old Roman Neuss, with its massive gates,

its tower attributed to Drusus--after whom so many bridges and towers on

the Rhine are named--and even to Duesseldorf, which, notwithstanding its

modern part, twice as large as its old river front, has some beautiful

antique pictures to show us, both in the costumes of its market-women, who

wear red petticoats with white aprons and flapping caps, and stand

laughing and scolding in a high key by their dog-drawn carts, and in its

council-house, an early Renaissance building with square, high-roofed

turrets overlooking the market-place. In that little house, in a narrow

street leading to the market, Heine was born; in that wretched little

architectural abortion, the theatre, a critical audience listened to

Immermann's works; and in the Kurzenstrasse was born Peter von Cornelius,

the restorer of German art. Schadow succeeded him at the head of the

Academy, and a new school of painting was firmly established in the old

city, which had energy enough left in it to mark out another successful

path for itself in trade. The new town is handsome, monotonous, rich and

populous, but the galleries and museums somewhat make up for the lack of

taste in private architecture. One of the most beautiful of the town's

possessions is the old Jacobi house and garden, rescued from sale and

disturbance by the patriotic artist-guild, who bought it and gave the

garden to the public, while the house where Goethe visited his friend

Jacobi became a museum of pictures, panelling, tapestry, native and

foreign art-relics, etc., all open to the public. The gardens, with their

hidden pools and marble statues, their water-lilies and overarching trees,

their glades and lawns, have an Italian look, like some parts of the Villa

Borghese near Rome, whose groves of ilexes are famous; but these northern

trees are less monumental and more feathery, though the marble gods and

goddesses seem quite as much at home among them as among the laurel and

the olive.

LADY BLANCHE MURPHY.

VERONA

It was a matter of debate in our party whether we should stop at Verona.

The ayes had it, and twenty-four hours afterward the noes indignantly

denied that there had been any opposition, so completely had the dignity

and attraction of the place driven away the very recollection of their

contumacy. Yet if they had had their way when we left Milan we should have

gone straight through to Venice, as the great majority of travellers do.

We could not remember that any of our friends had ever told us to go

thither or had gone themselves. At the hotel, the Due Torri, there were

but two parties besides our own--both, like ours, composed of but two

members. We had gone to this inn on Murray's emphatic recommendation.

"Very comfortable, excellent in every respect," said that red liar: we

found it wretched, and the charges exceeded those at the Hotel Cavour in

Milan, which we had just left--one of the finest houses in Europe. There

is only one other in the place, which has the forbidding name of the Tower

of London; so, in view of our discomfort and the small public, we agreed

that we had come to the wrong house. On the day when we went away,

however, we fell in with some old acquaintance, fellow-country folk, at

the railway station, who had been at the Torre di Londra, and they too

thought they had gone to the wrong house. They said it was almost empty;

which confirmed us in the belief that the greater proportion of the people

who fill the trains and crowd the hotels within a day's journey in every

direction pass by this incomparable city. Yet as we paced the broad marble

slabs of its pavement, looking right and left, we asked each other, "Why

does not everybody talk and write about Verona, rush to it, rave about

it?"

[Illustration: COURTYARD OF HOUSE IN VERONA]

The view from the railway, unlike that of many beautiful Italian cities,

is striking enough to make any traveller change his route, jump from the

train and forego all his plans. The situation is singularly fine. The town

sits in state, backed by the outposts of the Alps, fronting the Apennines

and looking over the plains of Lombardy spread out between: the rushing

Adige curves deeply inward, forming the city's western boundary, and then,

doubling on itself, flows through the heart and south-eastward to the

Adriatic. The surrounding hills are seamed and crested with fortifications

of every age, beginning with those of the Romans of the Later Empire,

followed by those of Theodoric the Goth, of Charlemagne the Frank, of the

mediaeval Scaligeri, lords of Verona, of the Venetians in the sixteenth

century, and of the Austrians of our own day, when Verona was a point of

the once famous Quadrilateral. Within the walls are monuments of all these

dynasties. The housewives and tradesfolk pass on their daily errands along

the streets spanned by two noble arches which date from the days of the

emperor Galienus. Almost in the centre of the town is the grand Roman

amphitheatre; the petty, prosaic, middle-class life of an Italian

provincial town creeps, noisy yet sluggish, to its base; modern houses

abut against all that is left of its outer wall, which was thrown down by

an earthquake in 1184; small shops are kept in some of the lower cells. On

that side it has none of the silent emphasis of its greater contemporary,

the Coliseum. We found afterward that we might have approached from

another direction across an open space, the Piazza Bra, but I think the

contrast and effect would have been less. The surprise is more

overwhelming to emerge from the narrow street into the arena, and see the

seats which sustained the amusement of fifty thousand people rising tier

above tier in perfect preservation, forty-three vast ellipses, to the very

top. It is only two-thirds as large as the Coliseum, but when one has

clambered to the upper-most row and looks down from a height of sixty or

seventy feet upon an area of nearly a quarter of a mile, the mind takes no

cognizance of anything but the actual immensity before the eyes. Looking

outward, we beheld a splendid panorama: first, the irregular surface of

the city, broken by steep roofs, arcaded galleries on the housetops,

battlemented towers square or slim, lofty belfries, black conical skyward

cypresses; then the blue hills--blue as cobalt, although so near--striped

in zigzags with the ruddy bands of the serrate feudal fortifications,

marked at intervals by curious three- and five-sided bastions, which the

architect Sanmicheli put up for the conquering Venetian republic; farther

off more peaceful slopes, on which white villas cluster and bask like

pigeons on a gable; more distant still, sublimer peaks of pale azure

brushed with snow; on the other side, the olive-dun plain irregularly

mapped out by the windings of the two rivers, the Adige and Po, yellow as

gravel-walks, sprinkled thick with towns and villages like tufts of

daisies, and hedged by the purple Apennines.

It is easy enough to fix the different events and periods of the local

history by the monuments they have created or destroyed, but the

influence of an Italian city is wholly against a systematic study of

chronology: the relics of various ages are thrown together, sandwiched and

dovetailed, on every side, and it is the impression, the collective

impression, of the entire place which is pleasantest to get, and worth

most: the rest can be learned from books. There is a sort of epic chain

which runs through the associations of Verona, and binds them together in

heroic series by all sorts of strange, unexpected suggestions and hints.

After the ancient epic, represented by the fragments from Roman history,

itself one long epic, come the vestiges of Theodoric, one of the heroes of

the _Niebelungen Lied_, in which he is known as Dietrich of Bern

(otherwise Verona). His palace, adopted and used for centuries as the

device of the municipal seal, survived the violent vicissitudes of the

city's history, and remained, after repeated alterations and additions

which made it a sort of architectural chronicle, until the present

century. This magnificent memorial of earlier times, which had been

respected in turn by the mad fury of Gian Galeazzo of Milan and the

implacable rivalry of Venice, was blown up by the French in 1801: large

barracks now stand upon its site, so that the stones of its warlike

builder are not subverted to purposes unbefitting his memory. Then follows

Charlemagne--putative founder, more probably first restorer, of the

cathedral--in his most mythic and heroic aspect, fresh out of the _Chanson

de Roland_, while Roland and Oliver keep guard on each side of the porch,

the latter bearing a mace with a ball and chain, the former his famous

sword Durindal, the stone counterpart of the weapon preserved for nearly a

thousand years in the monastery of Roncesvalles. The great heroic satire

of the twelfth century, _Reineke Fuchs_, is suggested by figures and

groups such as are to be found in all old Gothic churches north of the

Alps, but seldom south of them--a hog, dressed as a monk, standing on his

hind legs and holding a breviary, on the portal of the cathedral, and in

the church of San Zenone two cocks marching off with a fox dangling from

a pole. All the associations of the place centre in and radiate from Dante

and his unearthly poem, so much of which was written here or hereabouts.

It is extraordinary how he has appropriated the memories of the place,

even down to Romeo and Juliet--who by virtue of their immortalized loves

belong as much to our times as to their own--by the single well-known

line:

Vieni a veder Montecchi e Capelletti.

[Illustration: THE AMPHITHEATRE.]

There is a colossal statue of him by a modern Veronese sculptor, not

unworthy of the subject or place, standing in the quiet Piazza dei Signori

amid the deserted homes of the Della Scale, looking toward the palace of

Can Grande, whose generous hospitality could not sweeten the bread of

charity nor ease the steps of a patron's court to the proud exile. Dante

could not have been easy to live with upon any terms. "Eh, puir fellow! he

looks like a verra ill-tempered mon," quoth Carlyle once after a long

contemplation of the poet's portrait. He played the part of Mentor, and a

very morose one, to the splendid, gallant, good-natured prince and his gay

court, and Can Grande seems to have derived the same sort of diversion

from his diatribes as from the quips and cranks of his jesters. At last

Dante wore out his welcome, as he did everywhere until the patient earth

gave him an abiding-place at Ravenna. His whole life of disappointed

ambition, unrecognized patriotism, unspoken love, baffled hatred, lonely

rangings in awful spheres, banishment, poverty, mortification, unrest,

inspiration, conscious immortality, passes before one in this spot, which

he must have crossed and recrossed innumerable times, and his presence

even in the marble makes it all his own. Yet if the statue could wake to

life, the man would not know the familiar place, which has been wholly

transformed since his days. The principal ornament of the square is the

Palazzo del Consiglio, a beautiful example of _cinque-cento_ architecture,

its exuberant decoration still subordinate to the harmony and proportion

of the general design. This has been converted into a pantheon for the

celebrated men of Verona, whose statues surmount the building, and among

whom we recognize many old acquaintances--Cornelius Nepos, Catullus, Pliny

the Younger and others of later date and less renown.

[Illustration: JULIET'S HOUSE.]

The palaces of the Scaligeri, now assigned to the drowsy courts of law,

have been altered so often that an inalienable dignity of front is all

that marks them for having once been princely habitations. We must look a

few steps farther for the pomp of the Scaligers, where a small graveyard

before the church of Santa Maria l'Antica contains the tombs of the

dynasty. The whole space, as well as each separate grave, is enclosed by

an iron trellis of the rarest delicacy: it is, in fact, a flexible network

which shakes at a touch, but which has withstood the rough handling of

five centuries, composed of open quatrefoils and the ladder (_scala_),

the family bearing, and a few other fanciful patterns, constantly

repeated: it is the lace of an iron age. Within this precinct rest ten

princes of the line, who from being nobles of Verona were elected in 1261

by unanimous popular choice to succeed the atrocious Eccelin da Romano,

the tyrant of Padua, who also held Verona under his execrable rule. There

is every variety of tomb, from the plain, heavy sarcophagus of Mastino I.

to the magnificent four-storied monument of Can Signorio surmounted by his

equestrian statue, a rising succession of small columns, arches, niches,

statuettes, canopies, pinnacles, embowered in leafage, bud and flower, as

if the splendid art of the fourteenth century were blossoming before one's

eyes. The tomb of Can Grande is fine, although much simpler: it has three

stories. He lies on the lowest floor, in robes of state, composed to his

last sleep, while on the summit he looks down from his horse, a full-armed

warrior. Four big dogs, from whom he took his enigmatic cognomen (although

the canine proclivity did not begin with him, as his ancestor was

Mastino), support the tomb, each bearing a shield with the arms of the

family.

Verona is rich in tombs. From our windows in the Due Torri we looked

across to the monument of Guglielmo del Castelbarco, a friend of the Delle

Scale, whose massive sarcophagus stands beneath a high Gothic canopy over

the gateway of a building which once formed part of the convent of Sta.

Anastasia. As we gazed down into the square, with its fountain and groups

of old women drawing water, and sometimes setting down their ewers to go

and say a short prayer in the beautiful old church of Sta. Anastasia, we

used to think that if this outlook were included in the charge for our

rooms, we were not paying too much. Another fine monument, by the

architect Sanmicheli, to two brothers who rejoiced in the surname of

Verita encrusts the front of the church of Sta. Eufemia; and in the

cemetery of San Zenone are a tomb and sepulchral urn which claim that they

contain the mortal remains of Pepin, king of Italy, the son of

Charlemagne. Besides these, altar-tombs, pillared and canopied monuments

and mortuary chapels meet the eye everywhere inside and outside of the

churches. That which attracts most attention now-a-days is decidedly the

least ornamental--the doubly-doubtful tomb of Juliet. It is so

acknowledged a lion that the street-boys of the quarter beset you with

offers to show you the way. This is no new celebrity: Murray assures us

that in the last century, before readers of Shakespeare, native or

foreign, were common in Italy, a sarcophagus was regularly exhibited as

this sentimental relic. That no longer exists: the present one, which was

formerly used as a washing-trough, looks so much like that or a

horse-trough of the commonest sort that, even without knowing its claims

to be apocryphal, the most credulous sentimental tourist would suspect

that it had come up rather than gone down in the world. No matter: we were

not dupes, but perhaps the full sweetness and sadness of the story never

came home to us with such enfolding charm as on the gray autumn afternoon

when we stood beside the pseudo relic in the forlorn little garden of the

orphan asylum on the bank of the turbid Adige. The house which is pointed

out as Juliet's is less palatial than we expected, though it is a lofty

old brick edifice with rounded windows, a stone balcony and a large

courtyard: on the keystone of the arched entrance, on the inner side of

the court, is the cap (_cappello_) which gives its name to the street, and

is supposed to be the heraldic badge of the family, _armoiries parlantes_,

or punning devices, being a favorite fashion in old times all over Europe.

If the balcony which remains was Juliet's, Romeo must have had a long

ladder and a cooler head than he showed under other circumstances. There

is a stone projection at the window of a lower story which once may have

supported a small balcony. The Casa de' Cappelletti is now a livery-stable

and inn, the Osteria del Cappello.

[Illustration: PIAZZA DELLE ERBE.]

The street leads straight to the Piazza delle Erbe, the vegetable-market

(literally, "grass-market"), the forum in ancient times, the most

picturesque spot in all Verona, which seems to collect and concentrate in

itself all the reminiscences and characteristics of the town. It

communicates on one side with the Piazza dei Signori; and the imposing

campanile, or bell-tower, of the latter, a shaft of brickwork nearly three

hundred feet high, springing above the intervening palace-roofs, makes a

companion to the tall, slender clock-tower at the farther end of the

Piazza delle Erbe, one of the many munificent gifts of the Della Scala

princes. In the centre of the square is a fountain, originally of great

antiquity; near by it the market-cross; close to that a marble column on

which once stood the lion of St. Mark, set up by the Venetians when they

seized the city, and thrown down when the republic of Venice fell in 1799.

Not far from these two pillars is a sort of stone dais beneath a stone

canopy, which was the very focus of the historic and municipal life of the

place in mediaeval days. Here, when Verona was a free city, the _capitano

del popolo_ was inaugurated; proclamations were read from it; criminals

heard their sentences pronounced from it. Here people who did not pay

their debts were compelled to undergo the grotesque penalty common in the

Italian republics for that offence, of sitting for a stated time on the

pavement--_in puris naturalibus_ as to the sitting portion of the person:

flagstones are to be seen worn to a comfortable concavity by the

delinquent convexity.

The buildings which enclose the square are of the utmost diversity of

style and period--rich palaces of the Late Renaissance, cumbered with

ornament; modern houses of light-colored stucco, with striped awnings and

Venetian shutters; solemn old bits of architecture of sterner times;

frescoed facades, arcades, balconies. And what balconies! Not the poor

railing to which we give that name, but projecting parapets of stone,

pierced into trefoils, quatrefoils, rosaces, cusps, brackets,

balustrades--sometimes running across the whole house-front, more often

guarding a single window, itself lofty, arched, mullioned and rich with

tracery. It is here that, for the traveller coming from the North,

Venetian architecture begins--not Byzantine of course, but the purest,

noblest Cisalpine Gothic. It imparts a highly patrician air to the streets

with their long lines of deserted palaces, which keep their caste through

every change of fortune. Verona has not the fallen look of some old

Italian capitals, nor the forsaken air of others, but suggests the idea

that once her aristocracy closed their houses and withdrew to some retreat

where they maintain their traditions, waiting for better times to return

to their former homes. Many of the vaulted carriage-ways frame a glimpse

of the rushing river which washes the massive foundations of the

courtyards, the blue hills and lines of forked battlement.

In Verona one first sees Venetian painting too, on canvases which are to

Titian and Tintoretto as the colors of dawn are to those of sunrise, but

the glory is in them. The radiant pencil of Paul Veronese was early lost

by his birthplace and given to Venice, in illustration of the parable, but

even without her most glorious son native art makes a fair show in the

picture-gallery and churches. The picture which struck me most was a

fresco by Brusasorci in San Stefano, whither I had been drawn by the

report of its antiquity, which is said to be greater than that of any

other church in the town, going back to the seventh century. As on many

other occasions, I found that a building may be too old, the pristine

venerableness having been overbuilt by subsequent ages; but I was consoled

for my disappointment by this beautiful fresco--Saint Stephen surrounded

by the Holy Innocents. In the church calendar Saint Stephen is the first

martyr, and the Innocents are commemorated two days later: in the picture

the youthful deacon looks down with an air of paternal pride and affection

upon the lovely babes trooping before him with palms in their little hands

as he presents them to our Saviour, above in glory. There is a tenderness

in the expression of the martyr's face and attitude, as well as in the

conception of the group, which appeals to the simplest human feeling. The

juxtaposition of the protomartyr and the children is a perfect instance of

true ecclesiastical sentiment: it was not until long afterward that I knew

it to be a fine work of art.

San Stefano is on the left bank of the river, in the smaller and

less-frequented part of the town, and it was in further exploring the same

quarter that I wandered into a curious church which had somehow the look

of a cast-off garment, owing perhaps to the frequent patching it had

evidently undergone, and its appearance of being owned by nobody. It stood

open, empty of worshippers, with not even a beggar on the steps in

receipt of charitable custom--alone on a little island. It is the church

of San Tomaso Cantuariense, otherwise Thomas a Becket, whom it was odd to

meet so far from home: he was revered all over Europe for a long time

after his canonization, as this church proves, since he was adopted as its

patron in 1316, nearly a hundred and fifty years after his so-called

martyrdom; but to judge by its desertion he must be pretty well forgotten

now. It is hereabouts that, on emerging from a cat's-cradle of little

narrow cross streets, a very fine view of Sta. Anastasia from the rear

breaks upon one, the pentagonal apse, the chapels, transepts, nave, and

towers rising one above another, a beautiful specimen of early Italian

Gothic, still strongly impressed with the Lombard spirit.

[Illustration: SANTA ANASTASIA.]

This Romanesque character is what gives the particular stamp to most of

the sacred buildings in Verona, making them a study as distinct in their

way as the Norman churches at Caen. They belong to one period and one

style, although this is a transitional one: the slender pillars of the

porches resting on crouching lions, the round-headed arches, the plain,

square, soaring _campanili_, a majestic boldness and simplicity in general

effect, an unconscious quaintness in detail, the line of the prevailing

red marble contrasting gratefully with the layers of many-toned gray

spread by time over the walls, produce a combination of form and color

delightful to the eye. The older, original edifice is seldom visible from

without: what remains of it is completely built in and over, and is

generally to be found in the crypt. Notwithstanding the stateliness and

interest of the cathedral, San Zenone was the church to which our steps

returned most persistently. It is composed of three churches of very

different date, the first having been erected soon after the year 800, the

second in 1138, the third three hundred years later. The main building,

which is of the twelfth century, is sunk far below the level of the

ground: one descends into it from the main portal by ten steps; and this

unusual mode of entrance, the depth, the great height, the rigid absence

of ornament, the grave colors, the long unbroken lines of the nave, give

the interior a remarkable solemnity, and create an impression and emotion

as different as possible from those excited by churches of a later

construction, with their florid architecture, their opulence of sculpture

and carving, their statues and ornate monuments, their gorgeous paintings,

their stained-glass windows--temples

Where the awe of worship mingles with the throbbing of delight.

The austere grandeur of San Zenone turns the soul inward upon a range of

meditations which a Puritan need not disclaim. The nave terminates in one

double flight of steps leading up to the second, most modern church, which

is raised above the first and terminates in a pointed tribune; and another

double flight which leads down to the vast vaulted crypt, with its pillars

and recesses, which is the oldest part of the structure. This place

breathes of the earliest Christian antiquity, and somehow reminds one of

the Catacombs. The altars are older than the foundations: on one of them

are groups of pillars fastened together by a species of Runic knot, such

as are to be found in the rudest carving of the Hebrides; ancient

sarcophagi and bassirilievi line the walls; yet round one of the recesses

of this primitive-seeming sanctuary I found a branch of the _Ampelopsis

quinquefolia_, our Virginia creeper, which I had fondly believed a native

of America, painted with the utmost fidelity five hundred years before

America was heard of, its five dentated leaves and jointed sprays in

colors as rich as the masses we had seen trailing over the marble

banisters of the villas on Lake Como, dyeing the pellucid water with their

scarlet shadows. Throughout the church everything speaks of early times:

the few frescoes are of the twelfth or thirteenth century: the only

noteworthy picture is by the serious Mantegna. In the upper church Saint

Zeno sits in his episcopal chair with a long fishing-rod in his hand,

whence the Veronese, ignorant of sacred symbolism, infer that he was fond

of the sport, and have invented an appropriate legend. He was an African

by birth, became bishop of Verona A. D. 362, and is said to have suffered

martyrdom twenty years afterward under the emperor Julian: his swarthy

wooden effigy, of archaic stiffness, reminds one of the idol of some

barbarous tribe. One of the most curious bits of the past is a group among

the rude sculptures of the porch called _The Chase of Theodoric_: the dogs

have caught the stag, and a fiend is about to seize upon the rider.

Orthodox tradition has given the name, because Theodoric, like all the

Goths, was a heretic, an Arian, but probably it points to some very early

version of the story of the Wild Huntsman, an old German legend. One sees

the trace of German ideas--at any rate, of Northern thought--everywhere in

the mediaeval monuments of Verona: it is the meeting of the genius of the

North and South which Ruskin finds in the architecture and sculpture, and

which imparts a peculiar and original physiognomy to the whole place. One

of its most striking features is the Castel Vecchio ("old castle") and

adjacent Ponte del Castello ("castle bridge"), for they seem but parts of

one great fortification, turreted and battlemented, built by Can Grande

II. in 1355. The bridge is an extraordinary structure, the arches being

extremely unequal in size: the span of the largest is about a hundred and

sixty feet. The mass, the irregularity, the strength of these piles, the

dark river hurrying below, give the spot a grimness not often found on the

sunny side of the Alps. The castle has been altered by many successive

hands of course, for the history of Verona, like that of most Italian

principalities, is the old story of the house out of which one devil was

driven by seven worse ones: to Eccelino succeeded the Delle Scale, soon to

become as bad as he, and be driven forth by the Visconti of Milan, who in

their turn were expelled by the envious, despotic Venetians; and each as

they came and went added and took away something of the beauty and might

of the town.

[Illustration: VERONA, FROM THE GIARDINO GIUSTI.]

But there is a gayer side to Verona than any which we have yet recalled.

It was here that we first made acquaintance with many lively humors of

Italian street-life which we had not met with in the more northern cities.

Here we first noticed the eternal cooking in the open air, the roasting,

frying, frizzling which are for ever going on, the people stopping at

every few yards to eat macaroni, chestnuts, and Goodness knows what other

nameless messes, until we began to wonder whether anything were cooked and

eaten at home. Here too I saw the drollest and most charming bit of

harlequinade between a rascal boy and an old woman carrying a heavy vessel

of water. He popped out from under an archway and struck her a light tap

on the shoulder with a bit of hollow cane: she turned round, but he had

flown through an open window. On she trudged, and out he came as lightly

as he had gone, and following her on tiptoe tickled the back of her neck

with his wand: round she turned again, but he was gone too quickly for my

eyes this time. She set down her ewer and stared in every direction,

muttering curses: he came running swiftly down an alley, seized the ewer,

and with every respectful demonstration of relieving her of the burden

darted off with it in another direction. She hobbled after him, raining

maledictions: back he came with a pantomime of courteous surprise--What!

she did not wish to be assisted?--and set the vessel on a high ledge,

whence she had much ado to lift it down. As she did so, splash! half the

water was spilled: then her tormentor went through a dumb show of sympathy

and sorrow until the crone seemed like to burst with fury. At last he

broke into a fit of shrill laughter, the first sound he had uttered, made

a macaronic gesture, and capered off with the airiest gambols and antics,

like a very devil's kid. A street-urchin teasing an old woman is no new

sight, but the nimbleness, spirit, grace and gentleness of this young

Pickle, the impossibility of guessing what he would do or where he would

be next, and the fine dramatic rage of the beldame, who looked like one of

Michael Angelo's Fates, kept us standing and staring at the two until the

fun was over as if we had been at a play.

In one respect we must have seen Verona under a disadvantage: there was no

sunshine during our short stay. The beautiful, lordly gardens of the

Palazzo Giusti on the declivity of a hillside on the left bank of the

Adige were dank and dripping; there was no temptation to linger near their

chilly statues and gloomy cypresses; even the view from their noble

terraces, formed partly by the wall of the town, was cold and colorless

under the November sky. Out-of-door life is so large a part of the

pleasure of being in Italy, fine weather adds so indescribably there to

the beauty of even the most glorious works of man, that to have seen them

only under a dull sky is like having seen a human countenance without its

smile. Perhaps at another season we should not have thought the streets so

melancholy: perhaps even in our admiration we did not pay full justice to

L'eccelsa, graziosa, alma Verona.[A]

SARAH B. WISTER.

[A] The lofty, gracious, kindly Verona.

A LAW UNTO HERSELF.

CHAPTER III.

Captain Swendon, with the majority of his sex, was never less a hero than

when at home. Brute force, _od_, backbone, whatever you call the resistant

power which keeps a man erect among other men, weakens under the coddling

of feminine fingers and the smoke of conjugal incense. The aching tooth,

the gnawing passion or the religious problem that strikes across his life

like a blank wall, all of which he pooh-poohs out of sight in the street,

master him indoors. A woman puts on her noblest virtues with the fireside

slippers, but to a man they are a chance for remorse, for repining, for

turning God's mighty judgments on himself into a small drizzling shower of

miseries for his wife and the children. Give the same man his boots and

the fresh air, and he will go to the stake gallantly.

The captain, pacing up and down the garden-alleys that night, thinking of

the blow which would fall on his daughter in Laidley's threatened disposal

of his property, was not altogether unheroic. There was nothing mean in

the big gaunt figure with its uncertain strides, or in the high-featured,

mild-eyed face: neither was there anything mean in his wrath. It was all

directed against himself. His Swedish blood had infused a gentle laziness

into his temper, and he had forgiven Laidley long ago for his lifelong

swindle, as no American with English grandfathers would have done.

"It's Will's nature," he said now. "Will's a coward and desperately ill.

He wants to pay his way into heaven, and I can't blame him. But _I_--I'm

an incompetent fool! I can't even pay my girl's way on earth!" The

captain's life, in fact, was a long ague of feverish conceit and chills of

humility. Yesterday he was an inventor who would benefit the world: to-day

he was fit for nothing but to dig clams. Going up and down the lonely

walk, he summed up all the capital he had had to make his fortune in the

world's market--the education, the opportunities, the great inventions

that all fell just short of their aim. For himself, he did not want money.

His work-bench, his iron bed, a bowl of Jane's soup, a fishing-rod and a

tramp into the hills now and then with the girl,--if he had millions they

could buy him nothing better. But she--Why should she not be as other

women? Why could he not work for her as other fathers--?

He raised his right arm, and the empty sleeve fell back from the stump,

which burned and throbbed impotently. There was will enough in it to

conquer the whole world for her. There was that aching love which mothers

feel in his breast for her, as though his heart were physically wrenched.

But at breakfast the next morning, while quite as ready to die for her, he

nagged and scolded incessantly, and threw the blame of their ill-luck on

her, his voice sounding like the clatter of a brass kettle: "Omelette?

No--no omelette for me. I am quite content to breakfast on dry bread and

coffee. It is time we practiced economy. I'll make out a system for you,

Jane. A system, and I desire you to follow it."

Jane laughed and helped him to cherries, and then devoted herself in

earnest to her own breakfast. She never argued with anybody, and had that

impregnable good-humor which so often passes for lack of feeling. Little

griefs, either her own or those of other people, dwindled out of notice in

the atmosphere about her, like mosquitoes buzzing in a large sun-lighted

room.

"We certainly must practice economy. God knows where to-morrow's meals may

come from!"

"Jane's hens are in good laying condition, and there are the cherries on

the tree," said Miss Fleming tartly. She did not like Jane nor any other

woman, but she usually fought for her sex against men in a mannish

way--for the pleasure of fighting for the weaker party.

"Hens? Yes, and but for the whim of renting this tumble-down house with

its great gardens out on the suburb, we could have had snug rooms in some

business street, where I could have earned our bread and butter."

"It was your whim, captain. Why, she has kept up the table out of the

garden, and you know it. Don't interfere with the child. She can turn a

penny to the best advantage. Her ability is of the most practical kind."

The captain did not like her tone. He glanced uneasily at Jane, who ate

her cherries in calm unconsciousness.

"I might as well stick pins in the divine cow Audhumbla!" Miss Fleming

said to herself every day. This child, as she called her, irritated her,

just as a machine did, or an animal, or any other creature whose

motive-power she could by no means comprehend. She was herself a mass of

vitalized nerves, all of which centred in that secret I, Cornelia Fleming,

over whose hopes, nature and chances she brooded night and day. This other

woman, who simply grew in her place, concerning herself no more about her

own mind, body or future than the larch yonder did about its roots or

leaves, and who took praise and blame as indifferently as the tree, the

sun or rain, roused in her a feeling of active dislike. She called Jane

stolid to other people, but she was by no means satisfied that she was

stolid. She was often sorry that she had brought herself measurably under

the protection of Captain Swendon and his daughter by renting two of the

rooms in their house, though she had planned and manoeuvred a long time

to accomplish that end. When Miss Fleming came up to town to join the

art-class at the Academy, she was exceedingly careful not to join also the

emancipated lonely sisterhood, who set social laws at defiance. She might

live alone, but it must be under the roof of conventionally correct

people. She abjured the whole tribe of literary and artistic adventurers

who haunted the studios and lecture-halls. She wrote home to her old

mother that the Swendons, descended from the leaders of the first Swedish

settlers, that family of Svens from whom Penn bought the land for his

village of Philadelphia, had possessed culture and social rank, if no

money, for centuries. Miss Fleming found for herself a lodging-place under

their roof, with very much the motive of the low-born blackbird burrowing

in the high, bare nest of the osprey.

She was on her way to the Academy now, and touched her hat jauntily and

shook loose her flowing-sleeve as she said good-bye with a lingering look

at the captain, to which he did not reply.

The cold ague of despair was on him: he combed his grizzled beard with his

fingers, stared at the carpet and saw nobody. "Yes, I ought to have rented

two small rooms up town, and found work that would pay. I'll do it now,"

he grumbled.

Jane had uncovered a long table heaped with tools, glue-pots,

drawing-materials, models in wood, in paper, in clay, with others finely

draughted on large sheets of Bristol board. The captain preserved his

failures as sacredly as a Chinese the dead bodies of his ancestors. She

took up one of these models and studied it thoughtfully: "Very well,

father. I could go on with the business, I suppose."

The captain burst into a laugh: "Absurd! Though," relapsing into anxiety,

"this is, as you say, really my business. But I could easily find a place

as professor of Latin and Greek in some Western college which would

support us."

"Now, I don't quite understand the action of this screw, A, B,"

meditatively. "It interferes with the force of the piston, in my

judgment."

"Impossible!" hurrying over to the table. "I'll explain that in a moment,

Jane. Why, that screw is the finest idea in the machine. It's the meaning,

in fact. It all hinges on that."

In five minutes his smoking-cap was pushed back, his spectacles on his

hooked nose, and he was lost in the depths of valves, gauges and levers.

Jane took the place of a dozen lost hands. She made the models, she

draughted them, she worked with carpenter's tools, needles, pencils,

clay, by turns, and was both swift and skillful. She had been at this

daily work, indeed, since the time her father had lost his arm. Now and

then, being really nothing but a child in years, she clasped her hands

over her head and yawned when he was not looking, or, when she was sent to

the fire for the glue, sat down on the floor and began a rough-and-tumble

romp with the dog, or while she was at work, sang scraps of songs into

which the captain threw a fine rolling bass.

The morning was warm: the fire had burned down low in the grate, and both

windows were wide open. The wind which entered, though raw, had a breath

of spring in it. The scraggy plum trees outside were covered with deep

pink blossoms, yellow dandelions blazed up out of the grass, and even in

the muddy walks: a half-frozen bee buzzed among them feebly for a while,

and then lost his way into the room and fell with a thump on the table.

Jane dropped her tools, and put out her finger for him to crawl upon. "Now

you are too early afoot: you're greedy, you fellow," she said. "You are in

too great a hurry to be rich. Haven't you a comfortable house? And plenty

of honey?" She carried him to the window and set him in the sun on the

sill. "He'll fall in some puddle and be frozen to death; and serve him

right! I hate your early birds and ants and bees, always at work."

"It is work you hate, Jenny. Now tack this strip in place, child, and then

paste on the muslin. We must finish this before night, and there is more

than a day's work on it."

Jane tacked and measured diligently a while, and then dropped her elbows

on the table and rested her chin on her palms. Her face was just in front

of her father's. "I was thinking--"

"Yes."

"I mean that I saw in the paper this morning that there was a school of

black-fish on the coast, the largest for years. I suppose the Lantrims

will be out for them?"

"No doubt. The old captain wrote to me that he had bought Sutphen's

Tuckerton skiff."

"Aha? You did not tell me that. What else did he say?"

"Oh, nothing. 'Crabs would be scarce this season; and couldn't we come

down?' The larks were beginning to rise in the marshes."

Jane nodded thoughtfully: "A Tuckerton skiff? Now, I'm surprised at that,

father. I should prefer something heavier--a yawl, say--for coming in on

that beach. Well--The wind must be dead sou'-west to-day. It would bring

the spray right up into your face if you were lying on the sand."

She was silent for some time, looking steadily out of doors.

The captain glanced uneasily once or twice at the dark blue eyes and at a

ray of sunlight glistening in the loose yellow hair. "It _is_ sou'-west.

It really does begin to feel like summer," he said, dropping his pencil

and fumbling for his tobacco.

Jane brought his pipe and lighted it for him. "I am dreadfully tired!"

stretching her arm out, pushing up the sleeve, and looking at it as if it

had done a day's ploughing. "Now, I suppose the men are all out in their

boats by this time, but a person could easily rig Lantrim's little sloop

and join them; or we could camp on the marshes all day. The scent of the

pines would be heavy in this damp wind."

The captain nodded gravely and puffed in silence a while: "It's no use,

Jane," taking the pipe from his mouth. "I haven't a penny."

She sprang up, ran to a writing-desk and took out a glove-box. In it were

a pair of well-darned kid gloves and two tiny paper packages. She laid

them before him: "It's all in silver: this is for your summer hat, and

that for my shoes. What do you say, father? We are in time for the

eight-o'clock train. We should have nearly the whole day on the beach."

"Hat? What do I want with a hat? But your shoes are broken."

"They can be patched," with a gasp of delight. "Here! clear away the

work, father, while I put up a basket of dinner." She stopped by the

window, looking out: "Somebody is coming through the apple trees: I smell

a cigar. Now, remember, nothing must detain you. We can't break our

engagement."

The visitor came in sight from under the apple trees--a sombre, heavy man

in gray, the editor Neckart, to whom Mr. Waring had criticised the

Swendons with such freedom the night before. Mr. Neckart had known the

captain years ago. When he was a boy, too poor to pay for schooling, he

used to go to the captain at night for help in his Greek or mathematics.

Swendon had always preferred the companionship of younger men than

himself, and was never without a "following" of clever, unruly schoolboys,

whom he was as ready to help when they were lazy, as to tip with silver

half-dollars--when he had them. Some of them had brought young Neckart to

the captain, knowing nothing about him, except that he was miserably poor,

with a desire for knowledge which they thought insane enough. Now that

Neckart was a man, living in New York, and with very different problems to

work from those of Euclid, he had but little intercourse with the slow,

easy-going captain. They met occasionally, when Neckart came to

Philadelphia, at the club or at dinner somewhere, when there would be a

few minutes' hasty gossip about the old pranks of the boys--White, who

died in California, or Porter, who was now in the Senate--and then a shake

of the hand and good-bye, Neckart usually wondering to himself, as they

parted, how soon that fellow Laidley would cease to cumber the earth and

the captain would have his own and wear a decent coat again and the bits

of gaudy jewelry in which he used so to delight.

The old man hurried down the garden-walk now to meet him, and wrung his

hand heartily: "Bruce! is it possible? You have not crossed my threshold

since the old Epictetus days."

"No, and I interrupt you now? You are going out? I only called for a few

words on business."

"Plenty of time, plenty of time! My little girl and I were going to run

down to the shore to vagabondize for a day.--Jane, this is my old friend

Mr. Neckart.--We have plenty of time in which to catch the train. Sit

down, Bruce."

Mr. Neckart did not sit down, however. He found some difficulty now in

putting his business into a few concise words. He had heard Laidley's

avowal the night before that he proposed to leave the captain penniless.

All his boyish regard for the old man woke in force. His boyish feelings

were apt to waken and clog Mr. Neckart's strait-lined path to success. He

did not sentimentalize about his old teacher, but he set aside half an

hour in which to look in on him and see what could be done for him.

Anything could be done in half an hour by a man who chose to work hard

enough.

He expected to find the captain totally disheartened by this blow, but

here he was making ready for a day's fooling on the beach; for the

captain, finding that his visitor did not promptly broach the subject of

his errand, went on with his preparations.

So it happened that they fell into a brief silence. The old man by the

fire screwed his rod as though rods were the business of life: the young

girl sat by the window, a white-covered lunch-basket on the floor beside

her, sewing strings on a wide-rimmed hat which she meant to wear. Her

yellow hair was bound loosely about her head, fastened by a band of black

velvet: it made a faint shadow about the calm, delicate face. The dog sat

at her feet, his head on her knee, watching her intently. She took her

stitches slowly and with care, stopping now and then to put her hand on

Bruno's muzzle and nod at him significantly about the fun they were going

to have presently. It was a quiet, pretty picture.

Now, silence or leisurely calm of any kind was rare in Mr. Neckart's daily

life. He was the controller of a great journal: he was a leading

politician. He had been making his own way, and dragging and goading

slower men along, since he had left his cradle. Even his own party found

the indomitable energy of this dwarfish giant intolerable sometimes. But

his own action did not satisfy him. He had held his finger so long on the

world's pulse that affairs in New York or Washington seemed but small

matters. He liked to feel that they and he were linked by a thousand

sympathies to the chances and changes of every country on the globe. A

famine in India or an insurrection in Turkey were not mere newspaper items

to him, but significant movements of the outer levers and pulleys of the

great machine, part of which he was.

It is the straining horse that is always loaded, and there was no man in

the party from whom such work was exacted as from Neckart. The night

before he had received a deputation of French Communists proposing

emigration: this morning he was to meet in secret caucus the leaders who

would decide on the next candidate for the Presidency. So it went on day

after day. To fall suddenly into this little room, among people to whom a

day's fishing or sauntering with a dog through salt marshes was the object

of life, startled him.

For years, too, people who talked to Neckart, though in but a street

greeting, invariably recognized his power to help or harm them. If they

had no favors to ask, they bore themselves deferentially, as to a power

that could grant favors. To the captain he was still the boy Bruce, a good

fellow, though dull in Greek: to the girl, intent on her holiday, he saw

that he was an unwelcome guest, who would interfere with her journey. The

jar of falling to the common level was sudden, yet oddly pleasant.

The captain, to fill up the time, began to discuss the different makes of

fishing-rods. Mr. Neckart was used to give ten minutes each to men seeking

interviews: their words had to be sharp as arrows, and driven straight

home to the bull's eye of the matter to command his attention. Yet he

listened to this lazy talk. The damp wind drove the perfume of the

apple-blossoms in at the open window: the sunlight touched the glistening

rings of hair on Jane's throat. How slow-moving and calm the girl was! He

was quite sure that the blood had flowed leisurely in the veins under that

pearly skin ever since she was born. None of that true American vim,

sparkle, pushing energy here which he admired in his countrywomen.

"I really don't understand the new kinds of tackle," he said to Captain

Swendon: "I have not had a rod in my hand for fifteen years."

"No. Of course not. You have other work to do. But Jane and I run down to

the shore whenever we have money--I mean whenever we can manage to leave

home. She knows every fisherman's hut from Henlopen to Barnegat. No better

place to go for a breath of salt air than Sutphen's Point. You can troll

with him all day, or dig for roots in the pine woods, or sleep on the

beach in the sun."

Neckart smiled and glanced at his watch. At nine the committee would meet.

Sun? Sleeping on the beach? He was a stout, strongly-built man, with

muscles like steel, but, like most Americans who have urged their way

relentlessly up, his brain before middle age gave signs of disease. As any

other creature would, when overdriven for years it revolted, and failed in

its work now and then. Night after night he lay sleepless, conscious only

of a dull vacuity at the base of the brain; and by day, when some crisis

demanded his most vigilant, keenest thought, thought suddenly blurred into

momentary stupor. Any man who overworks his brain will understand how it

was with him, and why, for physical reasons, this glimpse of absolute

quiet and rest should touch his nerves as the taste of cordial would a

fainting man. A sudden vision opened before him of yellow, silent sands,

and dusky stretches of solemn pines, and the monotonous dash of the green

sea all day, all night long. No doubt there were "old Sutphens" there,

whole generations of people, outside of the living world, sleeping and

sunning themselves. It was like a glimpse into some newly-discovered,

silent, sunlit Hades.

Mr. Neckart put back his watch in his pocket, and looked irresolutely at

the captain. The foolish, kindly old face belonged to his boyhood--to the

time when his shoes were patched and his feet chilblained, but all the

world was waiting for him to be a man to do him honor. If he could sit for

an hour with the old man on the beach, would it bring the boyish feeling

back again? He was conscious of a purposeless temptation--unreasonable as

that which he had felt at the edge of a precipice to throw himself over.

Nonsense! The committee would be waiting; there were appointments for

every hour of his stay in Philadelphia; there was the leading article on

the situation which nobody but he could write, that must go to his paper

by the next mail.

He took up his hat: "It is time for you to catch the train, captain. Will

you take me with you?"

Captain Swendon looked at him hastily: "The very best thing you can do,

Bruce! Just what I should advise.--Jane, go on before with Bruno. Mr.

Neckart and I will follow."

Mr. Neckart was annoyed. He had forgotten that the girl was to go, and had

thought of the captain as his only companion. But she walked far in front

of them, through the apple trees, and down the quiet street, engrossed

with the dog. She probably would not be in his way.