CHAPTER XXI.

Note: The Table of Contents and the list of illustrations were added

by the transcriber.

LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE OF POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE

February, 1876.

Vol. XVII, No. 98.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

THE CENTURY--ITS FRUITS AND ITS FESTIVAL.

II.--AMERICAN PROGRESS.

UP THE THAMES.

CONCLUDING PAPER, by EDWARD C. BRUCE.

THE POET'S PEN, by F.A. HILLARD.

SKETCHES OF INDIA.

II.

FRA ALOYSIUS, by EMMA LAZARUS.

A FEW HOURS IN BOHEMIA.

PROFESSOR AND TEACHER, by JAMES MORGAN HART.

CONTRASTED MOODS, by CHARLOTTE F. BATES.

THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS, by MRS. E. LYNN LINTON

CHAPTER XXI. CHANGES.

CHAPTER XXII. EDGAR HARROWBY.

CHAPTER XXIII. ON THE MOOR.

CHAPTER XXIV. THE CHILD FINA.

LETTERS FROM SOUTH AFRICA, by LADY BARKER.

ON SANKOTA HEAD, by ETHEL C. GALE.

AT THE OLD PLANTATION.

TWO PAPERS.--II, by ROBERT WILSON.

OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.

A GERMAN AGRICULTURAL FAIR.

A PAIR OF WHEELS AND AN OLD PARASOL.

MEDICAL EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES, by R.A.F. PENROSE.

OUR EARLY NEWSPAPERS.

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

_Books Received._

ILLUSTRATIONS

POST-OFFICE DEPARTMENT BUILDING AT WASHINGTON.

THE CAPITOL AT WASHINGTON AND CARPENTERS' HALL, WHERE THE FIRST

COLONIAL CONGRESS MET.

HOE'S NEW PERFECTING PRINTING-PRESS, PRINTING 12,000 DOUBLE

IMPRESSIONS PER HOUR, AND THE OLD EPHRATA PRESS.

THE CITY OF TOKYO, THE LARGEST STEAMSHIP BUILT IN AMERICA, AND

FITCH'S STEAMBOAT, THE FIRST CONSTRUCTED.

THE COTTON GIN.

GRAIN ELEVATOR.

INTERIOR OF A POSTAL CAR.

PROF. S.F.B. MORSE, THE INVENTOR OF THE ELECTRO-MAGNETIC TELEGRAPH.

THE SCHOOL-HOUSE OF THE PAST AND THE PRESENT.

WINDSOR CASTLE, FROM ETON.

MORTON CHURCH.

MILTON'S PEAR TREE.

GRAY.

BEACONSFIELD CHURCH.

TOMB OF BURKE.

HEDSOR AND COOKHAM CHURCHES.

ETON COLLEGE AND CHAPEL.

ETON COLLEGE, FROM NORTH TERRACE, WINDSOR.

STAINES CHURCH.

NORMAN GATE AND ROUND TOWER, WINDSOR.

HERNE'S OAK.

EAST FRONT, WINDSOR CASTLE.

QUEEN ELIZABETH'S BUILDING, WINDSOR.

EARL OF SURREY.

WINDSOR CASTLE, FROM BISHOPSGATE.

LOCK AT WINDSOR.

THE THAMES EMBANKMENT.

ELMS NEAR THE HERONRY.

HINDU TEMPLES NEAR POONA.

GÓNDS.

CENOTAPHS IN THE VALLEY OF THE TONSA.

THE GAUR, OR INDIAN BISON.

BANJARIS.

LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE

OF

_POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE_.

FEBRUARY, 1876.

THE CENTURY--ITS FRUITS AND ITS FESTIVAL.

II.--AMERICAN PROGRESS.

[Illustration: POST-OFFICE DEPARTMENT BUILDING AT WASHINGTON.]

From showing the world's right to the epoch of '76, and sketching the

progress of the century in its wider aspect, a natural transition is

to the part played in illustrating the period by the people from whose

political birth it dates, and who have made the task of honoring it

their own. They have reached their first resting-place, and pardonably

enjoy the opportunity of looking back at the road they have traversed.

They pause to contemplate its gloomy beginning, the perilous

precipices along which it wound, and the sudden quagmires that often

interrupted it, all now softened by distance and by the consciousness

of success. Opening with a forest-path, it has broadened and

brightened into a highway of nations.

So numerous and various were the influences, formative and impellent,

which combined to bring the colonies up to the precise ripening-point

of their independence, as to make it difficult to assign each its

proper force. In the concentric mass, however, they stand out sharp

and clear, and the conjoint effect seems preordained. That the event

should have come when it did, and not before or after, is as obvious

as any of history's predictions after the fact. Looking through the

glasses of to-day, we find it hard to realize that the Continental

Congress renewed its expressions of loyalty to the king three weeks

after the battle of Bunker Hill, so distinct before us rises the

completed and symmetrical edifice of separation ready for its

capstone, from its foundations growing steadily through the past.

Thirteen years--one for each State--were occupied in the topping-off.

The Seven Years' War, that created the new central power of modern

Europe, had a great deal to do with creating the new American power.

It taught the colonies their strength, gave them several thousand

native soldiers, and sent them from over the water the material,

some of it completely wrought, for more in the German immigration

consequent upon it. Out of it grew the obnoxious enactments that

brought on the end. So closely simultaneous were these with the king's

proclamation of October 7, 1763, prohibiting all his subjects "from

making any purchases or settlements whatever, or taking possession of

any of the lands, beyond the sources of any of the rivers which fall

into the Atlantic Ocean from the west or north-west," as to support

the suspicion that the British ministry had a premonitory sense of the

coming struggle, and meant to prepare for it by checking the expansion

of the colonies. The pressure applied to front and rear was part of

one and the same movement; and is incompatible with the accepted

view that neither cabinet nor Parliament anticipated, in the first

instance, any American opposition to the Stamp Act and the system of

legislation to which it was the opening wedge. The England of that day

proposed to rule America after much the same fashion with Ireland,

the Alleghanies presenting themselves very conveniently for an

Indian Pale. This line of policy was in harmony with the ideas then

predominant in England, and was fully understood by the colonists.

They could not possibly have been blind to it, in view of the

continuous and repeated claims of absolute legislative supremacy

formally put forth, from the bill to that effect passed coincidently

with the repeal of the Stamp Act down to the alterations made in the

Massachusetts charter in 1774; the latter proceeding being in close

harmony, both in time and motive, with the extension of the province

of Quebec to the Ohio--one of the very rare evidences of sagacity and

foresight discernible in the course of the ministry; for, while it did

not avail to dam the westward flood, it certainly contributed, with

other concessions made at the same time to the Canadians, to save the

St. Lawrence to the Crown.

As apropos to this point, we transcribe from the original

manuscript, written in the round, clear, unhesitating but steady hand

characteristic of all Washington's letters, the following to James

Wood of Winchester, afterward governor of Virginia, but then little

more than a stripling:

"MOUNT VERNON, Feb'y 20th, 1774.

"DEAR SIR: I have to thank you, for your obliging acc't of

your trip down the Mississippi, contained in a Letter of the

18th of Octob'r from Winchester--the other Letter, therein

refer'd to, I have never yet receiv'd, nor did this come

to hand till some time in November, as I was returning from

Williamsburg.

"The contradictory acc'ts given of the Lands upon the

Mississippi are really astonishing--some speak of the Country

as a terrestrial Paradise, whilst others represent it as

scarce fit for anything but Slaves and Brutes. I am well

satisfied, however, from your description of it, that I have

no cause to regret my disappointment:--The acc't of Lord

Hillsborough's sentiments of the Proclamation of 1763, I can

view in no other light than as one, among many other proofs,

of his Lordship's malignant disposition towards us poor

Americans, formed equally in malice, absurdity, and error; as

it would have puzzled this noble Peer, I am persuaded, to have

assigned any plausible reason in support of this opinion.

"As I do not know but I may shortly see you in Frederick, and

assuredly shall before the Assembly, I shall add no more than

that, it will always give me pleasure to see you at this place

whenever it is convenient to you, and that with compliments

to your good Mother I remain, D'r Sir, Y'r most Obed't H'ble

Serv't,

"G'o WASHINGTON."

[Illustration: THE CAPITOL AT WASHINGTON AND CARPENTERS' HALL, WHERE

THE FIRST COLONIAL CONGRESS MET.]

This private note, discussing casually and curtly the great river

of the West, and the minister who endeavored to make it a _flumen

clausum_ to the colonists, nearly equidistant in date between the

Boston Tea-party and the meeting of the Assembly which called the

first Continental Congress, has some public interest. The West

always possessed a peculiar attraction for Washington. He explored

it personally and through others, and lost no occasion of procuring

detailed information in regard to its capabilities. He acquired large

bodies of land along the Ohio at different points, from its affluents

at the foot of the Alleghany to the Great Kanawha and below. Now we

see him gazing farther, over the yet unreddened battle-grounds of

Boone and Lewis, to the magnificent province France and Spain were

carefully holding in joint trusteeship for the infant state he was to

nurse. The representative in the provincial legislature of a frontier

county stretching from the Potomac to the Ohio, we may fancy him

inspired, as he looked around from his post on the vertebral range of

the continent, with "something of prophetic strain." If so, he was

not long to have leisure for indulging it. Within eighteen months his

life's work was to summon him eastward to the sea-shore. The Dark and

Bloody Ground must wait. For its tillage other guess implements than

the plough were preparing--the same that beckoned him to Cambridge and

the new century.

The slender driblet of population which at this juncture flowed

toward the Lower Mississippi was due to the anxiety of Spain to get a

home-supply of wheat, hemp and such-like indispensables of temperate

extraction for her broad tropical empire. A newspaper of August 20,

1773 gives news from New York of the arrival at that port of "the

sloop Mississippi, Capt. Goodrich, with the Connecticut Military

Adventurers from the Mississippi, but last from Pensacola, the 16th

inst." They had "laid out twenty-three townships at the Natchez,"

where lands were in process of rapid occupation, the arrivals

numbering "above four hundred families within six weeks, down the Ohio

from Virginia and the Carolinas." The Connecticut men doubtless came

back prepared, a little later, to vindicate their martial cognomen;

and to aid them in that they were met by Transatlantic recruits in

unusual force. The same journal mentions the arrival at Philadelphia

of 1050 passengers in two ships from Londonderry; this valuable

infusion of Scotch-Irish brawn, moral, mental and muscular, being

farther supplemented by three hundred passengers and servants in the

ship Walworth from the same port for South Carolina. The cash value to

the country of immigrants was ascertainable by a much less circuitous

computation then than now; many of them being indentured for a term

of years at an annual rate that left a very fair sum for interest and

sinking fund on the one thousand dollars it is the practice of our

political economist of to-day to clap on each head that files

into Castle Garden. The German came with the Celt in almost equal

force--enough to more than balance their countrymen under Donop,

Riedesel and Knyphausen. The attention drawn to the colonies by the

ministerial aggressions thus contributed to strengthen them for the

contest.

But with all these accessions in the nick of time, two millions and

a quarter of whites was a meagre outfit for stocking a virgin farm of

fifteen hundred miles square, to say nothing of its future police and

external defence against the wolves of the deep. It barely equaled the

original population, between the two oceans, of nomadic Indians, who

were, by general consent, too few to be counted or treated as owners

of the land. It fell far short of the numbers that had constituted,

two centuries earlier, the European republic from which our federation

borrowed its name. The task, too, of the occidental United States

was double. Instead of being condensed into a small, wealthy and

defensible territory, they had at once to win their independence

from a maritime power stronger than Spain, and to redeem from utter

crudeness and turn into food, clothing and the then recognized

appliances of civilized life the wilderness thus secured. The result

could not vary nor be doubted; but that the struggle, in war and in

peace, must be slow and wearing, was quite as certain. It is dreary to

look back upon its commencement now, and upon the earlier decades

of its progress; and we cannot wonder that those who had it to look

forward to half shrank from it. Among them there may have been a

handful who could scan the unshaped wilderness as the sculptor does

his block, and body forth in imagination the glory hidden within. That

which these may have faintly imagined stands before us palpable if not

yet perfected, the amorphous veil of the shapely figure hewn away,

and the long toil of drill and chisel only in too much danger of being

forgotten.

Population, the most convenient gauge of national strength and

progress, is far from being a universally reliable one. We shall find

sometimes as wide a difference between two given millions as between

two given individuals. Either may grow without doing much else. They

may direct their energies to different fields. Compared with the

United States, France and Germany, for example, have advanced but

little in population. They have, however, done wonders for themselves

and the world by activities which we have, in comparison, neglected.

The old city of London gains in wealth as it loses in inhabitants.

[Illustration: HOE'S NEW PERFECTING PRINTING-PRESS, PRINTING 12,000

DOUBLE IMPRESSIONS PER HOUR, AND THE OLD EPHRATA PRESS.]

Yet success in the multiplication of souls within their own

borders--depopulate as they may elsewhere--is eagerly coveted and

regularly measured by all the nations. Since 1790, when we set them

the example, they have one by one adopted the rule of numbering heads

every five, six or ten years, recognizing latterly as well, more and

more, the importance of numbering other things, until men, women and

children have come to be embedded in a medley of steam-engines,

pigs, newspapers, schools, churches and bolts of calico. For twenty

centuries this taking of stock by governments had been an obsolete

practice, until revived by the framers of the American Constitution

and made a vital part of that instrument. The right of the most--and

not of the richest, the best, the bravest, the cleverest, or the

oldest in blood--to rule being formally recognized and set down on

paper, it became necessary to ascertain at stated intervals who were

the most. The lords of the soil, instead of being inducted into power

on the death of their parents with great pother of ointment, Te Deum,

heraldry, drum and trumpet, were chosen every ten years by a corps of

humble knights of the pencil and schedule.

To these disposers of empire, the enhancement and complication of

whose toil has been a labor of love with each decennial Congress, we

owe the knowledge that eighty years, out of the hundred, brought the

people of the Union up from a tally of 3,929,214 in 1790 to 38,558,371

in 1870, and that down to the beginning of the last decade the rate of

increment adhered closely to 35 per cent. On that basis of growth the

latest return falls nearly four millions short. One of the causes of

this is "too obvious" (and too disagreeable) "to mention;" but it

is inadequate. The sharp demarcation of the western frontier by the

grasshopper and the hygrometer is another, which will continue to

operate until, by irrigation, tree-planting or some other device, a

new climate can be manufactured for the Plains. The teeming West, that

of old needed only to be tickled with a hoe to laugh with a harvest,

has disappeared. At least what is left of it has lost the power of

suction that was wont to reach across the ocean, pull Ballys and Dorfs

up by the roots and transplant them bodily to the Muskingum and

the Des Moines. A third cause, operating more especially within

the current decade, is attributable to another mode in which that

attractive power has been exerted--the absorption from the European

purse for the construction of railways of seven or eight times as much

as the thirty-five millions in specie it took to fight through the

Revolutionary war. For a while, Hans came with his thalers, but they

outfooted him--"fast and faster" behind came "unmerciful disaster,"

and he was fain to turn his back on the land of promise and promises.

Similar set-backs, however, are interspersed through our previous

history, and the influence of the last one may be over-rated.

In truth, the Old World's fund of humanity is not sufficiently ample

to keep up the pace; and the rate of natural increase is no longer

what it was when the country was all new, and cornfield and nursery

vied in fecundity. That the former source of augmentation is gaining

in proportion upon the latter is apparent from the last three returns.

The ratio of foreign-born inhabitants to the aggregate in 1850 was

9.68 per cent. in 1860, 13.16, and in 1870, 14.44. In the last-named

year, moreover, 10,892,015, or 28 per cent. of the entire population,

white and black, are credited with foreign parentage on one or both

sides. Excluding the colored element, ranked as all native, this

proportion rises to 32 per cent.

Judged by the test of language, three-fifths of those who are of

foreign birth disappear from the roll of foreigners, 3,119,705 out

of 5,567,229 having come from the British Isles and British America.

Germany, including Bohemia, Holland and Switzerland, sums up

1,883,285; Scandinavia, 241,685; and France and Belgium, 128,955. The

Celtic influx from Ireland, and the Teutonic and Norse together, form

two currents of almost identical volume. Compared with either,

the contribution of the Latin or the Romance races sinks into

insignificance--an insignificance, however, that shows itself chiefly

in numbers, the traces of their character and influence being,

relatively to their numerical strength, marked. The immigrants from

Northern and Southern Europe have a disposition, in choosing their

new homes, to follow latitude, or rather the isotherms; the North-men

skirting the Canadian frontier and grouping themselves on the coldest

side of Lake Michigan, while the Italians, Spaniards and French drift

toward the Gulf States. The Irish and Germans are more cosmopolitan,

each in a like degree. They disperse with less regard to climate or

surroundings, and are more rapidly and imperceptibly absorbed and

blended, thus promoting rather than marring the homogeneity of the

American people. The Germans are, however, more prone to colonizing

than the Irish--a circumstance due in great measure to their differing

in language from the mass of their new neighbors. This cause of

isolation is gradually losing its weight, the recognition of the

German tongue by State legislatures, municipalities, etc. being less

common than formerly, notwithstanding the immense immigratior so

calculated to extend it.

While assimilation has been growing more complete, and a fixed

resultant becoming more discernible, the ingredients of this ethnic

medley do not seem to have materially varied in their proportions

since the beginning of the century. They present a tolerably close

parallel to the like process in Northern France, where Celt and Teuton

combined in nearly equal numbers, with, as in our case, a limited

local infusion of the Norse. The result cannot, however, be identical,

the French lacking our Anglo-Saxon substratum, with its valuable

traditions and habitudes of political thought. The balance between

impulse and conservatism has never been, in this country, long or

seriously disturbed, and is probably as sound now as a hundred

years ago. In the discussions of the twenty years which embrace our

Revolutionary period we find abundance of theory, but they were never

carried by abstractions out of sight of the practical. Our publicists

were not misled by convictions of the "infinite perfectibility of

the human mind," the motive proclaimed by Condorcet, writing in sweet

obliviousness of the guillotine, as explaining "how much more pure,

accurate and profound are the principles upon which the constitution

and laws of France have been formed than those which directed the

Americans." The lack of this equilibrium among the pure, and, as we

may venture to term them, the untrained races, we have occasional

opportunities of noting on our own soil when for a passing cause they

resort to isolated action.

[Illustration: THE CITY OF TOKYO, THE LARGEST STEAMSHIP BUILT IN

AMERICA, AND FITCH'S STEAMBOAT, THE FIRST CONSTRUCTED.]

A race-question of a character that cannot be supplied by

differentiation within Caucasian limits haunts us as it has done from

the very birth of the colonies. Like the Wild Huntsman, we have had

the sable spectre close beside us through the whole run. But, more

fortunate than he, we see it begin to fade. At least its outlines are

contracting. The ratio of colored inhabitants to the aggregate,

in 1790 19.26 per cent., or one-fifth, fell in 1860 to 14.12, or

one-seventh, and in 1870 to 12.65, or an eighth. The next census will

beyond doubt point more strongly in the same direction. If, whilst

dwindling in magnitude, the dusky shape perplex us by assuming

suddenly a novel form, we may yet be assured that it is the same in

substance and in manageability. Its hue is whitening with the fleece

of five millions of cotton bales. The cloud has a silver lining--a

golden one in fact--for ours is pecuniarily a serviceable phantom to

the extent of adding to our annual income a sum equal to eight or ten

times the entire yearly export of the colonies. Should he lead us,

like the Land--und--Wild--Graf, into the pit of ruin, he will have

first bottomed it with an ample and soft cushion of lint whereon to

fall.

Extremes meet, and modern culture, like ancient anarchy, drives its

people into cities. Such is the tendency on both sides of the ocean.

Improvement must result from associated effort, and of that cities are

the last expression. All the European towns are outgrowing the rural

districts. With us the change states itself in an advance, since 1790,

of the city population from 3.4 to 20.9 per cent. of the aggregate.

Broadcloth has gained on homespun in the proportion of six to one,

Giles having thus six mouths to fill where he formerly had but one.

We shall show farther on how gallantly he meets this draft. New York,

with its suburbs, contains more Germans than any German city save

Vienna and Berlin, more Irish than Dublin, and more English-speaking

inhabitants than Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester, Bristol and

Leeds together. All the colonial towns in a lump would scarce add a

twentieth to her numbers, and her militia embraces nearly twice as

many men as served, first and last, in the Continental army.

[Illustration: THE COTTON GIN.]

But the column that sums the souls does not state the complete life of

the cities. Man has in our day a host of allies that work with him and

at his command--slaves of iron, steel and brass wholly unknown to our

great--grand-fathers--fed also by the farmer, through the miner as an

intermediate. Steam-engines, to the number of 40,191, and of 1,215,711

horse-power--all of the stationary variety, and exclusive of nearly

half as many that traverse the country and may be classed among the

rural population--have succeeded the websters and spinners who were

wont to clothe all the world and his wife, and who survive only in

the surnames of some of our statesmen and financiers. Not that they

confine their labors to textile fabrics. Their iron fingers are in

every pie, including that of the printer, who is answered, when he

calls the roll of his serfs of steam, by 691 whistles. And he is

one of the smallest of the slaveholders--a mere ten-bale man.

India-rubber, a product known a century ago only by some little black

lumps used by draughtsmen to erase pencil-marks, owns enough of them

to equal 4412 horses or 22,000 No. 1 field hands. Boots and shoes not

of the India-rubber variety employ 3212 horse-power or 15,000 steam

Crispins, over and above their Christian fellows who stick solitary

to the last, and who, it must be owned, produce an article more of the

Revolutionary type and more solid and durable. As a cord-wainer Steam

is a failure; but he works cheaply, and will continue to hammer on,

and disseminate his commodity of brown paper throughout the temperate

zone. Three-fourths of the population of the globe still runs unshod,

however, and it is obvious that this crying want cannot be met by

the old system. Steam will perforce keep pegging away till Cathay,

Xipangu, India and all the isles awaken to the absurdity of walking on

cotton or undressed human skin. Could one of our 299 fire-fed cobblers

have been set to work at Valley Forge, backed by one of the 1057

makers of woolen that are similarly nourished!

But we do Mr. Watt's lusty bantling injustice in assigning him

exclusively the tastes of a cit. He is not insensible to pastoral

charms, and often selects a home among the hemlocks and under the

broad-armed oaks, by bosky glen or open mead, wherever the brooklet

brawls or dreams, for he sticks to the waterside like a beaver. Here

he sits down, like an artist as he is, until he has got all the choice

bits of the grove. The large and bustling family of the sawyers, both

top and bottom, he has utterly banished from their ancient haunts.

'There would be needed a million and a half of them to take the places

of 11,199 steam-engines, of 314,774 horse-power, that are devastating

our forests. An equal number is replaced by the 16,559 water-wheels,

of 326,728 horse-power, engaged in the same field of havoc. Armed

with the handsaw, all the Revolutionary patriots and Tories together,

withdrawing their attention entirely from military affairs, as well as

from all other mundane concerns, would not have turned out one-sixth

of the quantity of lumber demanded by their descendants of a period

that boasts itself the age of iron, and has as little as possible

to do with wood. And if we place in the hands of the patriarchs the

ancestral axes, and tell them to get out charcoal for three millions

of tons of iron, to be hauled an average of a hundred miles to

market by oxen over roads whose highest type was the corduroy, the

imagination reels at the helplessness of the heroes.

[Illustration: GRAIN ELEVATOR.]

The paternal thoughtfulness of the home government employed itself in

relieving the colonist from such exhausting drafts upon his energies.

It sedulously prohibited his throwing himself away on the manufacture

of iron or anything else. In 1750 it placed him under a penalty of

£200 for erecting a rolling-mill, tilt-hammer or steel-furnace. Lest

the governor of the colony should fail to enforce this statute

and protect the pioneer from such a waste of time, it held that

functionary to a personal forfeit of £500 for failing, within thirty

days after presentment by two witnesses on oath, to abate as a

nuisance every such mill, engine, etc. As this mulct would have made a

serious inroad on the emoluments of the royal governors, even with the

addition of the inaugural douceur customarily given by the provincial

assemblies to each new incumbent--in Virginia regularly £500, doubled

in the instance of Fauquier in 1758, when it was desired to drive

the entering wedge of disestablishment and razee the parsons--we are

prepared to believe that the iron business was not flourishing. Under

a despotism tempered so very moderately by bribes, a similar blight

fell upon all other branches of manufacture. Among these, wool, flax,

paper, hats and leather are specified in a Parliamentary report as

interfering with "the trade, navigation and manufactures" of

the mother-country. An act of Parliament accordingly forbade the

exportation of hats to foreign countries, and even from one colony to

another.

That, after such a course of repression, the country found itself

wholly unprepared on the attainment of independence to make any

headway in this field, is no matter of surprise. Thirty years elapsed

before the manufacturing statistics of the Union became presentable.

In 1810 they were reckoned at $198,613,471. This embraces every fruit

of handicraft, from a barrel of flour and a bushel of lime to a silk

dress. We had 122,647 spindles and 325,392 looms, made 53,908 tons of

pig iron, and refined about one pound of sugar for each head of the

population. In 1870, after sixty years of tossing between the

Scylla and Charybdis of tariffs, "black" and white, the yield of our

factories had mounted to the respectable sum of $4,232,325,442. They

employed 2,053,996 operatives. Of these, the average wages were $377,

against $289 in 1860 and $247 in 1850, yearly. The advance in the

product of refined sugar may be cited as illustrative of the progress

of the people in comfort and luxury. It reached a value of one hundred

and nine millions, representing nearly ten times as many pounds, or

twenty-eight pounds a head. This exemplification is but one in an

endless list.

Manufactures have come to figure respectably in our exports. They

exceed in that list, by three or four to one, the entire exports of

all kinds in 1790; and they equal the average aggregate of the years

from 1815 to 1824. But the multiplication of the wants of a people

rapidly growing in numbers and refinement will, with the comparatively

high price of labor, scarcity of capital and distance of most of our

ports from the markets supplied by European manufactures, for a long

time to come make the home-supply the chief care of our artisans. They

have, for such and other reasons, in some points lost ground of

late. The revolution in the propulsion and construction of ships, for

instance, has not found them prepared to take the advantage they have

usually done of improvements. Not only do the British screw-steamers

take undisputed possession of our trade with their own country, but

they expel our once unrivaled craft from the harbors of other quarters

of the globe, and threaten to monopolize the most profitable part

of our carrying-trade with all countries. This result is more easily

explained than the inroads made on our more ordinary foreign traffic,

in sailing vessels, by the mercantile marine of second- and third-rate

powers. This is eloquently told by the annual government returns and

the daily shipping-list. While our coastwise tonnage increases, that

employed in foreign trade remains stationary or declines. The bearing

of this upon our naval future becomes an imperative question for

our merchants and legislators. The United States is benevolently and

gratuitously building up a marine for each of half a dozen European

states which possess little or no commerce of their own, and

multiplying the ships and sailors of our chief maritime rival. We have

long since ceased to import locomotives, and have, within the past two

years, almost ceased to import railroad iron. Our iron-workers obtain

coal at nearly or quite as low prices as do those of Birkenhead or the

Clyde. They have recently sent to sea some large screw-steamers that

perform well. No insurmountable difficulty appears to prevent the

launching of more until we have enough to serve at least our direct

trade with Europe and China. That determined, it may be possible

to ascertain whether we cannot assist Norway, Belgium and Sicily in

carrying our cotton, wheat and tobacco to the purchasers of it.

[Illustration: INTERIOR OF A POSTAL CAR.]

This decline in American tonnage is, it must be added, only relative,

whether the comparison be made with other countries or with our own

past. The returns show a carrying capacity in our ships more than

twentyfold that of 1789, and three times that of 1807; when, on the

other hand, it exceeded in the ratio of fourteen to twelve that of

1829, twenty-two years later. This interest is peculiarly subject to

fluctuations; some of which in the past have been less explicable than

the one it is now undergoing. Another decade may turn the tables, and

restore the flag of the old Liverpool liners to their fleeter but less

shapely supplanters. The steamer and the clipper are both American

inventions. Why not their combination ours as well? The centenary of

Rumsey's boat, not due till December 11, 1887, should not find its

descendants lording the ocean under another flag.

The monthly Falmouth packet of a century ago, sufficient till within

the past two generations for the mail communication of the two

continents, has grown into six or eight steamships weekly, each

capable of carrying a pair of the old sloops in her hold, and making

the passage westwardly in a fifth and eastwardly in a third of the

time. Can it be but ninety years ago that the latest dates at New

York (February 14, 1786) from London (December 7, 1785) brought as a

leading item from Paris (November 20) the news that Philippe Égalité

had by his father's death just come into four millions of livres a

year, that six hundred thousand livres paid by the Crown to his father

thereupon devolved to Monsieur (afterward Louis XVIII.), and that the

latter had kept up the game of shuttlecock with the treasure of the

French by "a donation of all his estates to the duke of Normandy, the

younger son of their Majesties, preserving for himself the use and

profits thereof during his life"? That was a short winter-passage,

too--more speedy than the land-trip of a letter in the same journal

"from a gentleman in the Western country to his friend in Connecticut,

dated River Muskingum, November 5, 1785," describing a voyage down the

Ohio from Fort Pitt and the wonders of the country much as Livingstone

and Du Chaillu do those of Africa. The time is less now to Japan, and

about the same to New South Wales, with both which countries we have

postal conventions-i.e., a practically consolidated service--far

cheaper and more convenient than that maintained on the adoption of

the present Constitution between our own cities. Our foreign service

with leading countries is combined, moreover, with an institution

undreamed of in that day--the money-order system. Under this admirable

contrivance the post-offices of the world will ere long be so many

banks of deposit and exchange for the benefit of the masses, effecting

transfers mutually with much greater facility, rapidity and security

than the regular banks formerly attained.

Still in its infancy, the international money-order system has already

reached importance in the magnitude of its operations. The sums sent

by means of it were, in 1874, $1,499,320 to Great Britain, $701,634 to

Germany, and to the little inland republic of Switzerland $72.287.

The dimensions to which this new method of financial intercourse

between the different peoples of the globe is destined to reach may be

inferred from the growth of the domestic money--order service. In 1874

the number of orders issued was 4,620,633, representing $74,424,854.

The erroneous payments having been but one in 59,677, it is plain that

this mode of remittance must make further inroads on the old routine

of cheque and draft, and become, among its other advantages, a

currency regulator of no trifling value.

Our post-office may almost be said to head the development of the

century. The other lines of progress in some sense converge to it. The

advance of intelligence, of settlement, of transit by land and water

and of mechanical and philosophical discovery have all fostered

the post, while its return to them has been liberal. Thus aided

and spurred, its extension has approached the rate of geometrical

progression. Its development resembles that from the Annelids to the

Vertebrata, the simple canal which constitutes the internal anatomy of

the simplest animal forms finding a counterpart in the line of mails

vouchsafed by the British postmaster-general to the colonies in 1775

from Falmouth to Savannah, "with as many cross-posts as he shall

see fit." Fifteen years of independence had caused the accretion

of wonderfully few ganglia on this primeval structure. In 1790 four

millions of inhabitants possessed but seventy-five post-offices

and 1875 miles of post-roads. The revenue of the department was

$37,935--little over a thousandth of what it is at present under rates

of postage but a fraction of the old. New York and Boston heard

from each other three times a week in summer and twice in winter.

Philadelphia and New York were more social and luxurious, and insisted

on a mail every week-day but one, hurrying it through in two days each

way, or a twentieth of the present speed. On the interior routes chaos

ruled supreme. Newspapers and business-men combined to employ riders

who meandered along the mud roads as it pleased Heaven.

When the new government machine had smoothed down its bearings matters

rapidly improved. In 1800 we had 903 post-offices and 20,817 miles of

road. In 1820 these figures changed to 4500 and 92,492, and in 1870

to 28,492 offices and 231,232 miles. Five years later 70,083 miles of

railway, 15,788 by steamboat and 192,002 of other routes represented

the web woven since the Falmouth and Savannah shuttle commenced its

weary way. Of course, neither the number of offices nor extent of

routes fully measures the change from past to present; mails having

become more frequent over the same route, and a new style of office,

the locomotive variety, having been added to the old. This innovation,

of mounting postmaster and post-office with the mailbags on wheels,

and hurling the whole through space at thirty or forty miles an hour,

already furnishes us with gigantic statistics. In 1875 there were

sixty-two lines of railway postal-cars covering 16,932 miles with

40,109 miles of daily service and 901 peripatetic clerks. These

gentlemen, under the demands of the fast mail-trains, will ere long

swell from a regiment into a brigade, and so into a division, till

poets and painters be called on to drop the theme of "waiting for the

mail."

The greater portion of the fifty-odd thousand employés of the

department do not give it their whole time, many of the country

postmasters being engaged in other business. But the undivided efforts

of them all, with an auxiliary corps, would be demanded for the

handling of eight hundred and fifty millions of letters and cards,

and a greater bulk of other mail-matter, under the old plan of

rates varying according to distance and number of sheets, and not

weight--stamps unknown. The introduction of stamps, with coincident

reduction and unification of rates, has been the chief factor in the

extraordinary increase of correspondence within the past thirty years;

the number of letters passing through the mails having within that

period multiplied twenty-fold. The number transmitted in the British

Islands, then three times greater than in the United States, is

now but little in excess, having been in 1874 nine hundred and

sixty--seven millions. The immense difference between the two

countries in extent, and consequently in the average distance of

transportation, is enough to account for the contrast between the two

balance-sheets, our department showing a heavy annual deficit, while

in Great Britain this is replaced by a profit. As regards post-office

progress in the United States, the question is rather an abstract one;

for there is not the least probability of an advance in rates. The

discrepancy between receipts and expenses will be attacked rather

by seeking to reduce the latter at the same time that the former

are enhanced by natural growth and by improvement in the details of

service and administration.

[Illustration: PROF. S.F.B. MORSE, THE INVENTOR OF THE

ELECTRO-MAGNETIC TELEGRAPH.]

Difficult as it is adequately to state or to measure the extension of

the mails within the century, it is far from telling the whole

story of the amplitude and celerity with which the people of our day

interchange intelligence.

Only to the last third of the period under review has the electric

telegraph been known. It is now a necessity of the public and private

life of every civilized spot upon the globe. It traverses all lands

and all seas. The forty miles of wire with which it started from

Washington City have become many millions. Its length of line in the

United States is about the same with that of the mail-routes, and a

similar equality probably obtains in other parts of the world. We have

nearly as much line as all Europe together, though the extent of wire

may not be so great. It is little to say that this continent, so

dim to the founders of the Union, has been by the invention of Morse

compressed within whispering distance, the same advantage having been

conferred on other countries. It is the property of mankind, and

the comparison must be between present and past, not between any two

countries of the present. Strictly, a comparison is not possible,

nothing like magnetic communication having been known forty years

ago, unless to the half imagination, half realization of one or two

scientific experimenters. Steam and stamps wrought a difference in

degree--the telegraph one of kind. Against eighteen hundred miles of

wagon-road we set seventy-three thousand of railway; but two hundred

thousand miles of telegraph are opposed by nothing, unless by

Franklin's kite-string. Looked at along the perspective of poles, the

old days disappear entirely--the patriots become pre-historic. Yet

modern self-conceit is somewhat checked by the reflection that the

career of these two great agents of intercommunication has but just

opened; that their management even yet remains a puzzle to us; and

that the next generation may wonder how we happened to get hold of

implements whose use and capabilities we so poorly comprehended.

So far as prediction can now be ventured, a force and pathway more

economical than coal and the rail will not soon be forthcoming; nor

is Canton apt to "interview" New York at the rate of more words in a

minute over a single wire than she can now. Some day dynamite may be

harnessed to the balloon, which stands, or drifts, where it did with

Montgolfier, and we may all become long-range projectiles; but even

this age of hurry will contentedly wait a little for that.

Possibly the Post-office Department would be less of a valetudinarian,

financially, had it confined itself to its legitimate occupation, the

speeding of intercourse and wafting of sighs, and not yielded to the

heavy temptation of disseminating shoes, pistols and *garden-seeds

over three millions of square miles. Newspapers are enough to test its

powers as a freight-agent. Where these and their literary kindred

of books, magazines, etc. used to be estimated by the dozen and the

ounce, the ton is becoming too small a unit.

West of the Blue Ridge, or the front line of the Alleghany, so called

in most of its length, there was not a newspaper published in

1776. Ten years later, scarcely more than one--the _Pittsburg

Gazette_--existed west of the mountains. The few in the seaboard

towns kept alive the name, and little more. In 1850, '60 and '70 the

periodicals of the Union numbered, respectively, 2526, 4051 and 5871,

with an average circulation, at the three periods, of twenty-one

hundred, thirty-four hundred and thirty-six hundred copies each. The

circulation thus outgrew the numbers in the proportion of nearly

two to one. And both are largely in excess of the increase of the

population, that being in the twenty years but 65 percent. The number

of daily papers (254 in 1850 and 574 in 1870) must now be equal to the

entire number of periodicals in France outside of Paris (796 in 1875),

with an average issue less than half that of ours. The proportion of

readers to the population, certainly in this class of literature, thus

appears to be rapidly growing: and the change is most striking if we

take, for example, that group of periodicals which are most purely

literary and most remote from the mere chronicle. The returns for

the three periods place the monthlies at, respectively, 100, 280 and

622--an advance of sixfold.

The magazine leads us to the door of the library; and here the exhibit

is still more marked, significant and gratifying. The census figures

are, for many reasons, extremely confused, but in the general result

they cannot be outrageously wrong, and they can mislead us only in

degree as to the immense multiplication of books in both public and

private libraries. The returns are manifestly far below the truth.

To give them here without the explanations accompanying them in

the census volumes would mislead; and those explanations, or a fair

synopsis of them, would occupy too much space, and would, after all,

leave the problem unsolved. That the supply of books has fully

kept pace with every other means of culture is patent enough. The

Congressional Library has risen in half the century from the shelves

of a closet to nearly four hundred thousand volumes--an accumulation

not surpassed in '76 by more than two libraries in Europe. It now

demands a separate edifice of its own, fit to stand by the side of

the fine structures which have within a generation recreated the

architectural aspect of the Federal metropolis with the most stately

government-offices in the world. Other public libraries, belonging to

colleges, schools, societies and independent endowments, show similar

progress. While none of them are equal, for reference, to some of the

great European establishments, they are generally better adapted to

the purposes of popular instruction. Their literary wealth is fresh

and available, little encumbered by lumber kept merely because old or

curious. Thus adjuncts, in some sort, of the newspaper and the common

school, their catalogues prove, as do the bookcases of private houses,

that the newest and deepest results of European thought and inquiry

are eagerly sought and used by our people.

[Illustration: THE SCHOOL-HOUSE OF THE PAST AND THE PRESENT.]

Our system of public schools, long classed among the "peculiar

institutions" of the country, is notably gaining in scope and

efficiency, be the English and Prussians right or not in their claim

of greater thoroughness and a higher curriculum. The different States

have engaged in a series of competitive experiments for the common

good, and cities and counties, in their sphere, labor to the same end.

Schools of higher grade are being multiplied, and the examination of

teachers, still lax enough, becomes more exact and faithful, as befits

the drill of an army of two hundred and forty thousand charged with

the intellectual police of eight millions of children--the number said

by the new "National Bureau of Education" to have been enrolled in

1875, against 7,209,938, 5,477,037 and 3,642,694 by the censuses of

1870, '60 and '50. Little more than half this number is estimated by

the Bureau to represent the average daily attendance, which is

quite compatible with the attendance, for the greater part of the

school-year, of nine-tenths of the whole number on the lists. A

comparison of the number enrolled and the entire supposed number

of children between six and sixteen leaves an excess of nearly two

millions and a half outside the public schools. Of these private

schools will account, and account well, for a large proportion.

These are fulfilling indispensable offices, one being that of normal

schools--a want likely to be inadequately satisfied for a long time to

come.

In one respect our public schools are beyond, though not above,

comparison with those of the most advanced European states. An annual

outlay of a trifle less than seventy-five millions of dollars, with

an investment in buildings, ground, etc. of a hundred and sixty-six

millions, implies a determination that should be rewarded with the

most unexceptionable results. It reaches eighteen dollars yearly,

leaving out the interest on the fixed stock, for each child in

daily attendance. Such an expenditure, trebling, we believe, that

of Prussia, ought to secure better teachers and a higher range

of instruction. It must be said, however, that the duties of the

school-boards are as honestly and economically discharged as those of

any other public bodies; that the cost for each pupil is highest

where common schools have been longest established and most thoroughly

studied; and that the statistics certainly show a steady advance in

their efficiency. That is the truest test. Any pecuniary means are

justifiable by the end. If common schools, themselves a means to a

higher education, mental and moral, than they can directly afford,

take some part of the wealth we accumulate to prevent our men's

decaying, it is well used. It helps to purchase for us progress

more genuine than that whereof railways and cotton-factories are the

exponents.

It is thus a guarantee of a brighter century even than the one just

closed that, in the wildest quarter of the still unkempt continent,

the school actually precedes the pioneer. Choose his homestead where

he may, the sixteenth section is staked out before it. From it the

rills of knowledge soon trickle along the first furrows, as strange

to the soil as its new products. It provides the modern settler

in advance with an equipment, mental and material, if not moral,

altogether superior to that of his colonial prototype, that enables

him in a shorter time to impart a higher stamp to his surroundings. He

attacks the prairie with a plough unimagined by his predecessor;

cuts his wheat with a cradle--or, given a neighbor or two, a

reaper--instead of a sickle; sends into the boundless pasture the

nucleus of a merino flock, and returns at evening to a home rugged

enough, in unison with its surroundings, but brightened by traits of

culture and intelligence which must adhere to any ménage of to-day

and were out of reach of any of the olden time. The civilization that

travels West now is a different thing from that which went West a

hundred years ago.

Science has done much for the farmer, though not as much as he has

done for it and its hotbeds, the towns. In one point his shortcomings

are notable. He has not learned how to eat his cake and have it. He

works the virgin soil as the miner does the coal-seam. What Nature has

placed in it he takes out, and, until forced by the pressure of

his friends and enemies, the cities, returns no nest-egg of future

fertility. So it is that many portions of the rural East have to

be resettled and started afresh in the process of agricultural

redemption. A hundred years ago England grew fifteen bushels of wheat

to the acre. Her standard is now thirty-two. Within three-quarters of

the century New York has fallen from twenty-five to twelve; and

half that period, again, has brought Ohio and Indiana from thirty to

fifteen. But this process is a natural part of the sum of American

progress. Land was the only property of the country originally, and

subsequently of different parts of it in succession. It was used like

any other commodity, and worn out like leather or cloth. The original

cuticle of the continent has disappeared for ever. The task, now is

to induce the granulation of a new one. The restorative process may

be complete by the time we have four hundred souls to the square

mile, like England and Flanders. Meanwhile, the exporting of Iowa and

California in the shape of wheat is going on at what must be esteemed

a profitable rate; for our farmers, as a class, do not seem to be

losing ground. Their glebes have risen in value from thirty-two

hundred millions in 1850 to sixty-six hundred ten years later,

and ninety-three hundred in 1870. This has been accompanied by a

diminution of their average extent, the farm of 1870 covering a

hundred and fifty-three acres. This is small enough, considering

the capital necessary for stock in these days of improved and costly

implements, when a farmer can no longer pack his entire kit in a cart.

It matches closely the size of English holdings, where agricultural

science is at its height. The French peasant-farmers, with their plats

of three and four acres, are chained to the spade and hoe, and their

steading becomes a poultry-yard--a consummation we are not yet in

sight of, as is proved by the legions of pigs and beeves, barreled

or bellowing, that roll in from the ancient realms of Pontiac and

the Prophet with a smoothness and velocity unattained by the most

luxurious coach that carried a First Congressman.

Everything that makes a nation, we are told, and the nation itself,

is the product of the soil. But the less immediate, finer and

most delicate fruits cannot usually be garnered until the soil is

thoroughly subdued. The mass of matter keeps the intellectual in

abeyance. Were Europe enlarged one-half, and her population reduced

to one-eighth what it actually is, the spectacle of culture she now

presents would be an impossibility. It is our merit that, thus brought

to American conditions, she would in no way compare with American

achievement. An offset wherewith we must at the same time be debited

is the aid we have, in so many forms, derived from her. Making every

allowance for this, it is a clear credit in our favor that one-tenth

of Christendom should have done so much more than a tenth of its

effective thinking simultaneously with taming the most savage half

of its domain. We have more than our share of laborers in the mental

vineyard, though fewer of them are master-workmen. We utilize for

Europe herself, and send back to her in its first available shape,

much of what her students produce. As between thought and substance,

the two continents interchange offices. We import the crude material

her philosophers harvest or mine, work it up and return it, just as

she takes the yield of our non-metaphorical fields and strata and

restores it manufactured. Much of the social, political and industrial

advancement of Europe within the century she may be said to owe to

the United States. Her governmental reforms certainly and confessedly

found here their germ. These gave birth to others of a social

character. In this manner, as well as more directly by our commerce,

inventions and example, we have stimulated her industry. We have

spread before her the two oceans, and taught her to traverse them with

a firm and masterful mien, no longer

As one who in a lonely road doth walk in fear and dread.

We have created cities upon her havens, Parliaments in her capitals,

and stronger hearts and quicker hands in her villages. No community on

her varied surface but is the better for America. That our people and

their labors have done it all it would be absurd to say; but the Old

World's progress in the period under review can be but very partially

accounted for by any internal force of its own. None of its rulers or

peoples adventure a reform of any kind without a preliminary, if often

only a half-conscious, glance of inquiry westward. Collectively as

members of a European republic of nations, and internally each

within itself, they have in this way learned, after many recalcitrant

struggles, to recognize and respect local independence. Municipal law

has gained new life. The commune has become an entity everywhere, and

the nations which it informs have established the right to readjust or

recast their constitutions without being hounded down as disturbers

of the peace. The contribution of the American Union to such results

would earn it honor at the hands of history were it to sink into

nothing to-morrow. Had no such tangible fruits hitherto ripened, some

portion of such honor would still accrue to it for having shown that a

people may grow from a handful to an empire without hereditary rulers,

without a privileged class, without a state Church, without a standing

army, without tumult in the largest cities and without stagnant

savagery in the remotest wilds.

UP THE THAMES.

CONCLUDING PAPER.

[Illustration: WINDSOR CASTLE, FROM ETON.]

Let our demonstration to-day be on the monarchical citadel of England,

the core and nucleus of her kingly associations, her architectural

_eikon basiliké_, Windsor. To reach the famous castle it will not do

to lounge along the river. We must cut loose from the suburbs of the

suburbs, and launch into a more extended flight. Our destination

is nearly an hour distant by rail; and though it does not take us

altogether out of sight of the city, it leads us among real farms and

genuine villages, tilled and inhabited as they have been since the

Plantagenets, instead of market-gardens and villas.

We go to Paddington and try the Great Western, the parent of the broad

gauges with no very numerous family, Erie being one of its unfortunate

children. That six-foot infant is not up to the horizontal stature of

its seven-foot progenitor, but has still sixteen inches too many

to fare well in the contest with its little, active, and above all

numerous, foes of the four-feet-eight-and-a-half-inch "persuasion."

The English and the American giants can sympathize with each other.

Both have drained the bitter cup that is tendered by a strong majority

to a weak minority. Neither the American nor the British constitution,

with their whole admirable array of checks and balances, has shielded

them from this evil. In the battle of the gauges both have gone to

the wall, and will stay there until they can muster strength enough to

reel over into the ranks of their enemies.

This relative debility is, at the same time, more apparent to the

stockholders than to their customers. The superstructure and "plant"

of the Erie has lately stood interested inspection from abroad with

great credit, and that of the Great Western is unexceptionable. The

vote of travelers may be safely allotted to the broad gauge. They

have more elbow room. The carriages attain the requisite width without

unpleasantly, not to say dangerously, overhanging the centre of

gravity; and, other things equal, the movement is steadier. Nor is the

financial aspect of the question apt to impress gloomily the tourist

as he enters the Paddington station and looks around at its blaze of

polychrome and richness of decoration generally. As the coach doors

are slammed upon you, the guard steps into his "van," the vast

drivers, taller than your head plus the regulation stove-pipe, slowly

begin their whirl, and you roll majestically forth through a long

file of liveried servants of the company, drawn up or in action on the

platform, the sensation of patronizing a poverty-stricken corporation

is by no means likely to harass you. You cease to realize that the

Napoleon of engineers, Monsieur Brunel, made a disastrous mistake in

the design of this splendid highway, and that, as some will have it,

it was his Moscow. His error, if one there was, existed only in the

selection of the width of track. Whatever the demerits of the design

in that one particular, the execution is in all above praise. The road

was his pet. Once finished, it was his delight, as with the breeder of

a fine horse, to mount it and try its mettle. Over and again would

he occupy the footboard between London and Bristol, and rejoice as a

strong man in running his race at close to seventy miles an hour. He

and Stephenson were capital types of the Gaul and Briton, striving

side by side on the same field, as it will be good for the world that

they should ever do.

[Illustration: MORTON CHURCH.]

Combats of another character--in fact, of two other characters--recur

to our reflections as we find that we have shuffled off the coil

of bricks and mortar and are rattling across Wormwood Scrubs. More

fortunate than some who have been there before us, we have no call to

alight. Calls to this ancient field of glory, whether symbolized by

the gentlemanly pistol or the plebeian fist, have ceased to be in

vogue. Dueling and boxing are both frowned down effectually, one by

public opinion and the other by the police. It is only of late years

that they finally succumbed to those twin discouragers; but it seems

altogether improbable that the ordeal by combat in either shape

will again come to the surface in a land where tilting-spear and

quarter-staff were of old so rife. In France chivalry still asserts,

in a feeble way, the privilege of winking and holding out its iron,

and refuses to be comforted with a suit for damages.

Southall, a station or two beyond, suggests sport of a less lethal

character, being an ancient meeting-place for the queen's stag-hounds.

John Leach may have collected here some of his studies of Cockney

equestrianism. The sportsmen so dear to his pencil furnished him

wealth of opportunities on their annual concourse at the cart's tail.

The unloading of the animal, his gathering himself up for a leisurely

canter across country, the various styles and degrees of horsemanship

among his lumbering followers, and the business-like replacing of

the quarry in his vehicle, to be hauled away for another day's sport,

served as the most complete travesty imaginable of the chase. It has

the compensation of placing a number of worthy men in the saddle at

least once in the year and compelling them to do some rough riding.

The English have always made it their boast that they are more at home

on horseback than any other European nation, and they claim to have

derived much military advantage from it. Lever's novels would lose

many of their best situations but for this national accomplishment and

the astounding development it reaches in his hands.

[Illustration: MILTON'S PEAR TREE.]

To the left lies the fine park of Osterley, once the seat of the

greatest of London's merchant princes, Sir Thomas Gresham. An

improvement proposed by Queen Bess, on a visit to Gresham in 1578,

does not speak highly for her taste in design. She remarked that in

her opinion the court in front of the house would look better split up

by a wall. Her host dutifully acceded to the idea, and surprised Her

Majesty next morning by pointing out the wall which he had erected

during the night, sending to London for masons and material for the

purpose. The conceit was a more ponderous one than that of Raleigh's

cloak--bricks and mortar _versus_ velvet.

A greater than Gresham succeeded, after the death of his widow, to the

occupancy of Osterley--Chief-justice Coke. His compliment to Elizabeth

on the occasion of a similar visit to the same house took the more

available and acceptable shape of ten or twelve hundred pounds

sterling in jewelry. She had more than a woman's weakness for finery,

and Coke operated upon it very successfully. His gems outlasted

Gresham's wall, which has long since disappeared with the court it

disfigured. In place of both stands a goodly Ionic portico, through

which one may pass to a staircase that bears a representation by

Rubens of the apotheosis of Mr. Motley's hero, William the Silent. The

gallery offers a collection of other old pictures. Should we, however,

take time for even a short stop in this vicinity, it would probably be

for the credit of saying that we walked over Hounslow Heath intact in

purse and person. The gentlemen of the road live only in the classic

pages of Ainsworth, Reynolds and, if we may include Sam Weller in such

worshipful company, that bard of "the bold Tur_pin_." Another class

of highwaymen had long before them been also attracted by the fine

manoeuvring facilities of the heath, beginning with the army of the

Cæsars and ending with that of James II. Jonathan Wild and his merry

men were saints to Kirke and his lambs.

Hurrying on, we skirt one of Pope's outlying manors, in his time the

seat of his friend Bathurst and the haunt of Addison, Prior, Congreve

and Gay, and leave southward, toward the Thames, Horton, the cradle of

Milton. A marble in its ivy-grown church is inscribed to the memory

of his mother, _ob_. 1637. At Horton were composed, or inspired,

_Lycidas, L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus_ and others of his nominally

minor but really sweetest and most enjoyable poems. In this retirement

the Muse paid him her earliest visits, before he had thrown himself

away on politics or Canaanitish mythology. Peeping in upon his

handsome young face in its golden setting of blonde curls,

Through the sweetbrier or the vine,

Or the twisted eglantine,

she wooed him to better work than reporting the debates of the

archangels or calling the roll of Tophet. Had he confined himself to

this tenderer field, the world would have been the gainer. He might

not have "made the word Miltonic mean sublime," but we can spare a

little of the sublime to get some more of the beautiful.

To reach Milton, however, we have run off of the track badly. His Eden

is no station on the Great Western. We shall balance this southward

divergence with a corresponding one to the north from Slough, the last

station ere reaching Windsor. We may give a go-by for the moment to

the halls of kings, do homage to him who treated them similarly, and

point, in preference, to where,

in many a mouldering heap,

The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.

They show Gray's tomb in Stoke Pogis church, and his house, West End

Cottage, half a mile distant. The ingredients of his _Elegy_--actually

the greatest, but in his judgment among the least, of his few

works--exist all around. "The rugged elm," "the ivy-mantled tower,"

and "the yew tree's shade," the most specific among the simple

"properties" of his little spectacle, are common to so many places

that there are several competitors for the honor of having furnished

them. The cocks, ploughmen, herds and owls cannot, of course, at this

late day be identified. Gray could not have done it himself. He

drew from general memory, in his closet, and not bit by bit on

his thumb-nail from chance-met objects as he went along. Had

his conception and rendering of the theme been due to the direct

impression upon his mind of its several aspects and constituents,

he would have more thoroughly appreciated his work. He could not

understand its popularity, any more than Campbell could that of _Ye

Mariners of England_, which he pronounced "d----d drum-and-trumpet

verses." Gray used to say, "with a good deal of acrimony," that the

_Elegy_ "owed its popularity entirely to the subject, and the public

would have received it as well had it been written entirely in prose."

Had it been written in prose or in the inventory style of poetry, it

would have been forgotten long ago, like so much else of that kind.

[Illustration: GRAY.]

Not far hence is Beaconsfield, which gave a home to Burke and a title

to the wife of Disraeli, the nearest approach to a peerage that the

haughty Israelite, soured by a life of struggle against peers and

their prejudices, would deign to accept. We know it will be objected

to this remark that Disraeli is, and has been for most of his career,

associated with Toryism. But that was part of his game. A man of

culture, thought and fastidious taste, he would, had he been of the

_sangre azul_, have been the steadiest and sincerest of Conservatives.

Privilege would have been his gospel. As it is, it has only been his

weapon, to use in fighting for himself. "The time will come when you

shall listen to me," were his words when he was first coughed down.

The time has come. The most cynical of premiers, he governs England,

and he scorns to take a place among those who ruled her before him.

Extending our divergence farther west toward "Cliefden's proud alcove,

the bower of wanton Shrewsbury and love," we find ourselves in a

luxuriant rolling country, rural and slumberous. Cookham parish,

which we should traverse, claims quite loudly American kinship on

the strength of its including an estate once the property of Henry

Washington, who is alleged, without sufficient ground, to have been

a relative of the general. But we are within the purlieus of Windsor.

The round tower has been looking down upon us these many miles, and we

cannot but yield to its magnetism.

[Illustration: BEACONSFIELD CHURCH.]

Eton, on the north bank, opposite Windsor, and really a continuous

town with that which nestles close to the castle walls, is on our way

from Slough. The red-brick buildings of the school, forming a fine

foil to the lighter-colored and more elegantly designed chapel, are on

our left, the principal front looking over a garden toward the river

and Windsor Home Park beyond. We become aware of a populace of boys,

the file-closers of England's nineteenth century worthies, and her

coming veterans of the twentieth. We may contemplatively view them in

that light, but it has little place in their reflections. Their ruddy

faces and somewhat cumbrous forms belong to the animal period of life

that links together boyhood, colthood and calfhood. Education of the

physique, consisting chiefly in the indulgence and employment of it in

the mere demonstration of its superabundant vitality, is a large

part of the curriculum at English schools. The playground and the

study-room form no unequal alliance. Rigid as, in some respects, the

discipline proper of the school may be, it does not compare with the

severity of that maintained by the older boys over the younger ones.

The code of the lesser, and almost independent, republic of the

dormitory and the green is as clear in its terms as that of the

unlimited monarchy of the school-room, and more potent in shaping the

character. The lads train themselves for the battle of the world,

with some help from the masters. It is a sound system on the whole, if

based, to appearance, rather too much on the principle of the weaker

to the wall. The tendency of the weaker inevitably is to the wall, and

if he is to contend against it effectively, it will be by finding

out his weakness and being made to feel it at the earliest possible

moment.

[Illustration: TOMB OF BURKE.]

Not on land only, but on the river, whereinto it so gradually blends,

does lush young England dissipate. Cricket and football order into

violent action both pairs of extremities, while the upper pair and the

organs of the thorax labor profitably at the oar. The Thames, in its

three bends from Senly Hall, the Benny Havens of Eton, down to Datchet

Mead, where Falstaff overflowed the buck-basket, belongs to the boys.

In this space it is split into an archipelago of aits. In and out of

the gleaming paths and avenues of silvery water that wind between them

glide the little boats. The young Britons take to the element like

young ducks. Many a "tall admiral" has commenced his "march over the

mountain wave" among these water-lilies and hedges of osier.

Shall we leave the boys at play, and, renewing our youth, go

ourselves to school? Entering the great gate of the western of the two

quadrangles, we are welcomed by a bronze statue of the founder of the

institution, Henry VI. He endowed it in 1440. The first organization

comprised "a provost, four clerks, ten priests, six choristers,

twenty-five poor grammar-scholars, and twenty-five poor infirm men to

pray for the king." The prayers of these invalids were sorely needed

by the unhappy scion of Lancaster, but did him little good in a

temporal sense. The provost is always rector of the parish. Laymen are

non-eligible. Thus it happens that the list does not include two

names which would have illuminated it more than those of any of the

incumbents--Boyle the philosopher, "father of chemistry and brother

of the earl of Cork," and Waller the poet. The modern establishment

consists of a provost, vice-provost, six fellows, a master,

under-master, assistants, seventy foundation scholars, seven lay

clerks and ten choristers, with a cortege of "inferior officers and

servants"--a tolerably full staff. The pay-students, as they would be

termed in this country, numbering usually five to six hundred, do not

live in the college precincts, but at boarding-houses in the town,

whence their designation of oppidans, the seventy gowns-men only

having dormitories in the college. The roll of the alumni contains

such names as the first earl of Chatham, Harley, earl of Oxford,

Bolingbroke, Fox, Gray, Canning, Wellington and Hallam. That is enough

to say for Eton. The beauties of the chapel, the treasures of the

library and the other shows of the place become trivial by the side of

the record.

[Illustration: HEDSOR AND COOKHAM CHURCHES.]

Over the "fifteen-arch" bridge, which has but three or four arches, we

pass to the town of Windsor, which crouches, on the river-side, close

up to the embattled walls of the castle--so closely that the very

irregular pile of buildings included in the latter cannot at first

glance be well distinguished from the town. High over all swells the

round tower to a height above the water of two hundred and twenty

feet--no excessive altitude, if we deduct the eminence on which it

stands, yet enough, in this level country, to give it a prospect of

a score or two of miles in all directions. The Conqueror fell in love

with the situation at first sight, and gave a stolen monastery in

exchange for it. The home so won has provided a shelter--at times very

imperfect, indeed--to British sovereigns for eight centuries. From

the modest erection of William it has been steadily growing--with the

growth of the empire, we were near saying, but its chief enlargements

occurred before the empire entered upon the expansion of the past

three centuries. It is more closely associated with Edward III. than

with any other of the ancient line. He was born at Windsor, and

almost entirely rebuilt it, William of Wykeham being superintending

architect, with "a fee of one shilling a day whilst at Windsor, and

two shillings when he went elsewhere on the duties of his office,"

three shillings a week being the pay of his clerk. It becomes at once

obvious that the margin for "rings" was but slender in those days.

The labor question gave not the least trouble. The law of supply

and demand was not consulted. "Three hundred and sixty workmen were

impressed, to be employed on the building at the king's wages; some

of whom having clandestinely left Windsor and engaged in other

employments to greater advantage, writs were issued prohibiting all

persons from employing them on pain of forfeiting all their goods and

chattels." In presence of so simple and effective a definition of the

rights of the workingman, strikes sink into nothingness. And Magna

Charta had been signed a hundred and fifty years before! That

document, however, in honor of which the free and enlightened Briton

of to-day is wont to elevate his hat and his voice, was only in the

name and on behalf of the barons. The English people derived under it

neither name, place nor right. English liberty is only incidental, a

foundling of untraced parentage, a _filius nullius_. True, its

growth was indirectly fostered by aught that checked the power of the

monarch, and the nobles builded more wisely than they knew or intended

when they brought Lackland to book, or to parchment, at Runnymede,

not far down the river and close to the edge of the royal park. The

memorable plain is still a meadow, kept ever green and inviolate of

the plough. A pleasant row it is for the Eton youngsters to this spot.

On Magna Charta island, opposite, they may take their rest and their

lunch, and refresh their minds as well with the memories of the place.

The task of reform is by no means complete. There is room and call

for further concessions in favor of the masses. These embryo statesmen

have work blocked out for them in the future, and this is a good place

for them to adjust to it the focus of their bright young optics.

[Illustration: ETON COLLEGE AND CHAPEL.]

The monarchical idea is certainly predominant in our present

surroundings. The Thames flows from the castle and the school under

two handsome erections named the Victoria and Albert bridges; and

when, turning our back upon Staines, just below Runnymede, with its

boundary-stone marking the limit of the jurisdiction of plebeian

London's fierce democracy, and inscribed "God preserve the City of

London, 1280," we strike west into the Great Park, we soon come plump

on George III, a great deal larger than life. The "best farmer that

ever brushed dew from lawn" is clad in antique costume with toga and

buskins. Bestriding a stout horse, without stirrups and with no bridle

to speak of, the old gentleman looks calmly into the distance while

his steed is in the act of stepping over a perpendicular precipice.

This preposterous effort of the glyptic art has the one merit of

serving as a finger-board. The old king points us to his palace, three

miles off, at the end of the famous Long Walk. He did not himself care

to live at the castle, but liked to make his home at an obscure lodge

in the park, the same from which, on his first attack of insanity, he

set out in charge of two of his household on that melancholy ride

to the retreat of Kew, more convenient in those days for medical

attendance from London, and to which he returned a few months later

restored for the time. Shortly after his recovery he undertook to

throw up one of the windows of the lodge, but found it nailed down. He

asked the cause, and was told, with inconsiderate bluntness, that

it had been done during his illness to prevent his doing himself an

injury. The perfect calmness and silence with which he received this

explanation was a sufficient evidence of his recovery.

[Illustration: ETON COLLEGE, FROM NORTH TERRACE, WINDSOR.]

Bidding the old man a final farewell, we accept the direction of

his brazen hand and take up the line of march, wherein all traveling

America has preceded us, to the point wherefrom we glanced off so

suddenly in obedience to the summons of Magna Charta. On either

hand, as we thread the Long Walk, open glades that serve as so many

emerald-paved courts to the monarchs of the grove, some of them older

than the whole Norman dynasty, with Saxon summers recorded in their

hearts. One of them, thirty-eight feet round, is called after the

Conqueror. Among these we shall not find the most noted of Windsor

trees. It was in the Home Park, on the farther or northern side of the

castle, that the fairies were used to perform their

--dance of custom round about the oak

Of Herne the hunter.

Whether the genuine oak was cut down at the close of the last century,

or was preserved, carefully fenced in and labeled, in an utterly

leafless and shattered state, to our generation, is a moot point.

Certain it is that the most ardent Shakespearean must abandon the hope

of securing for a bookmark to his _Merry Wives of Windsor_ one of the

leaves that rustled, while "Windsor bell struck twelve," over the head

of fat Jack. He has the satisfaction, however, of looking up at the

identical bell-tower of the sixteenth century, and may make tryst with

his imagination to await its midnight chime. Then he may cross the

graceful iron bridge--modern enough, unhappily--to Datchet, and

ascertain by actual experiment whether the temperature of the Thames

has changed since the dumping into it of Falstaff, "hissing hot."

[Illustration: STAINES CHURCH.]

Back at the castle, we must "do" it, after the set fashion. Reminders

meet us at the threshold that it is in form a real place of defence,

contemplative of wars and rumors of wars, and not a mere dwelling by

any means in original design. A roadway, crooked and raked by frowning

embrasures, leads up from the peaceful town to the particularly

inhospitable-looking twin towers of Henry VIII.'s gateway, in their

turn commanded by the round tower on the right, in full panoply of

artificial scarp and ditch. Sentinels in the scarlet livery that

has flamed on so many battlefields of all the islands and continents

assist in proving that things did not always go so easy with majesty

as they do now. But two centuries and more have elapsed since

there happened any justification for this frown of stone, steel and

feathers; Rupert's futile demonstration on it in 1642 having been

Windsor's last taste of war, its sternest office after that having

been the safe-keeping of Charles I., who here spent his "sorrowful and

last Christmas." Once inside the gate, visions of peace recur. The eye

first falls on the most beautiful of all the assembled structures,

St. George's Chapel. It, with the royal tomb house, the deanery and

Winchester tower, occupies the left or north side of the lower or

western ward. In the rear of the chapel of St. George are quartered in

cozy cloisters the canons of the college of that ilk--not great guns

in any sense, but old ecclesiastical artillery spiked after a more or

less noisy youth and laid up in varnished black for the rest of their

days. Watch and ward over these modern equipments is kept by Julius

Cæsar's tower, as one of the most ancient erections is of course

called. Still farther to our left as we enter are the quarters of

sundry other antiquated warriors, the Military Knights of Windsor.

These are a few favored veterans, mostly decayed officers of the army

and navy, who owe this shelter to royal favor and an endowment. The

Ivy tower, west of the entrance, is followed in eastward succession by

those of the gateway, Salisbury, Garter and Bell towers.

[Illustration: NORMAN GATE AND ROUND TOWER, WINDSOR.]

The fine exterior of St. George's is more than matched by the carving

and blazonry of the interior. The groined roof bears the devices of

half a dozen early kings, beginning with Edward the Confessor. Along

the choir stretch the stalls of the sovereign and knights-companions

of the order of the Garter, each hung with banner, mantle, sword and

helmet. Better than these is the hammered steel tomb of Edward IV., by

Quentin Matsys, the Flemish blacksmith. In the vaults beneath rest the

victim of Edward, Henry VI., Henry VIII., Jane Seymour and Charles I.

The account of the appearance of Charles' remains when his tomb was

examined in 1813 by Sir Henry Halford, accompanied by several of the

royal family, is worth quoting. "The complexion of the face was dark

and discolored. The forehead and temples had lost little or nothing of

their muscular substance. The cartilage of the nose was gone; but the

left eye, in the moment of first exposure, was open and full,

though it vanished almost immediately, and the pointed beard so

characteristic of the reign of King Charles was perfect. The shape

of the face was a long oval; many of the teeth remained; and the

left ear, in consequence of the interposition of some unctuous matter

between it and the cere-cloth, was found entire. The hair was thick at

the back part of the head, and in appearance nearly black. A portion

of it, which has since been cleaned and dried, is of a beautiful

dark-brown color. That of the beard was a reddish-brown. On the back

part of the head it was not more than an inch in length, and had

probably been cut so short for the convenience of the executioner,

or perhaps by the piety of friends after death in order to furnish

memorials of the unhappy king. On holding up the head to determine

the place of separation from the body, the muscles of the neck had

evidently contracted themselves considerably, and the fourth cervical

vertebra was found to be cut through its substance transversely,

leaving the face of the divided portions perfectly smooth and even--an

appearance which could have been produced only by a heavy blow

inflicted with a very sharp instrument, and which furnished the last

proof wanting to identify Charles I."

[Illustration: HERNE'S OAK.]

A highly-edifying spectacle this must have been to the prince regent

and his brother Cumberland. The certainties of the past and the

possibilities of the future were calculated to be highly suggestive.

A French sovereign had but a few years before shared the fate of

Charles, and a cloud of other kings were drifting about Europe with

no very flattering prospect of coming soon to anchor. Napoleon was

showing his banded foes a good double front in Germany and Spain.

His dethronement and the restoration of the Bourbons were not as yet

contemplated. The Spanish succession was whittled down to a girl--that

is, by Salic law, to nothing at all. The Hanoverian was in a similar

condition, or worse, none of the old sons of the crazy old king

having any legitimate children. The prince regent himself was highly

unpopular with the mass of his people; and the classes that formed

his principal support were more so, by reason of the arrogance and

exactions of the landed interest, the high price of grain and

other heavy financial burdens consequent on the war, the arbitrary

prosecutions and imprisonment of leaders of the people, and the

irregularities of his private life.

But these sinister omens proved illusory. Leigh Hunt, Wraxall and the

rest made but ineffectual martyrs; the Bourbons straggled back into

France and Spain, with such results as we see; George IV. weathered,

by no merit of his own, a fresh series of storms at home; the clouds

that lowered upon his house were made glorious summer by the advent of

a fat little lady in 1819--the fat old lady of 1875; and we step from

the tomb of Charles in St. George's Chapel to that where George and

William slumber undisturbed in the tomb-house, elaborately decorated

by Wolsey. Wolsey's fixtures were sold by the thrifty patriots of

Cromwell's Parliament, and bought in by the republican governor of the

castle as "old brass." George was able, too, to add another story to

the stature of the round tower or keep that marks the middle ward

of the castle and looks down, on the rare occasion of a sufficiently

clear atmosphere, on prosperous and no longer disloyal London. This

same keep has quite a list of royal prisoners; John of France and

David II. and James I. of Scotland enjoyed a prolonged view of its

interior; so did the young earl of Surrey, a brother-poet, a century

removed, of James.

Leaving behind us the atmosphere of shackles and dungeons, we emerge,

through the upper ward and the additions of Queen Bess, upon the ample

terrace, where nothing bounds us but the horizon. Together, the north,

east and south terraces measure some two thousand feet. The first

looks upon Eton, the lesser park of some five hundred acres which

fills a bend of the Thames and the country beyond for many miles. The

eastern platform, lying between the queen's private apartments and an

exquisite private garden, is not always free to visitors. The south

terrace presents to the eye the Great Park of thirty-eight hundred

acres, extending six miles, with a width of from half a mile to

two miles. The equestrian statue at the end of the Long Walk is a

conspicuous object. The prevailing mass of rolling woods is broken by

scattered buildings, glades and avenues, which take from it monotony

and give it life. Near the south end is an artificial pond called

Virginia Water, edged with causeless arches and ruins that never were

anything but ruins, Chinese temples and idle toys of various other

kinds, terrestrial and aquatic. The ancient trees, beeches and elms,

of enormous size, and often projected individually, are worth studying

near or from a distance. The elevation is not so great as to bring

out low-lying objects much removed. We see the summits of hills, each

having its name, as St. Leonard's, Cooper's, Highstanding, etc., and

glimpses of the river and of some country-seats. St. Anne's Hill was

the home of Fox; at St. Leonard's dwelt the father of his rival and

rival of his father, and at Binfield, Pope, of whom it is so hard

to conceive as having ever been young, "lisped in numbers, for the

numbers came," natural descriptions, ethical reflections, _vers de

societé_ and all, for around him here there was food for them all. To

descend from Pope in point of both time and romance, the view

includes the scenes of Prince Albert's agricultural experiments. Quite

successful many of them were. He was a thoroughly practical man--a

circumstance which carried him by several routes across ploughed

fields and through well-built streets, straight to the hearts of the

English people. His memory is more warmly cherished, and impressed

upon the stranger by more monuments, than that of any other of the

German strain. It might have been less so had he succeeded in the

efforts he is now known to have made soon after his marriage to attain

a higher nominal rank. He possessed, through the alliance of Leopold

and Stockmar and the devotion of Victoria, kingly power without the

name and the responsibility, and with that he became content. He used

it cautiously and well when he employed it at all. His position was a

trying one, but he steered well through its difficulties, and died

as generally trusted as he was at first universally watched. The

love-match of 1840 was every way a success.

[Illustration: EAST FRONT, WINDSOR CASTLE.]

Another figure, more rugged and less majestic, but not less

respectable, will be associated with Victoria in the memories, if not

the history proper, of her reign. This is John Brown, the canny and

impassive Scot, content, like the Rohans, to be neither prince nor

king, and, prouder than they, satisfied honestly to discharge the

office of a flunkey without the very smallest trace of the flunkey

spirit. He too has lived down envy and all uncharitableness.

Contemptuous and serene amid the hootings of the mob and the squibs

of the newspapers, he carries, as he has done for years, Her Majesty's

shawl and capacious India-rubbers, attends her tramps through the

Highlands and the Home Park, engineers her special trains and looks

after her personal comfort even to the extent of ordering her to

wear "mair claes" in a Scotch mist. The queen has embalmed him in

her books, and he will rank among the heroes of royal authors as his

namesake and countryman the Cameronian, by favor of very similar moral

qualities, does with those of more democratic proclivities.

[Illustration: QUEEN ELIZABETH'S BUILDING, WINDSOR.]

We cannot apply literally to the view from Windsor Thackeray's lines

on "the castle towers of Bareacres:"

I stood upon the donjon keep and viewed the country o'er;

I saw the lands of Bareacres for fifty miles or more.

[Illustration: EARL OF SURREY.]

We scan what was once embraced in Windsor Forest, where the Norman

laid his broad palm on a space a hundred and twenty miles round, and,

like the lion in the fable of the hunting-party, informed his subjects

that that was his share. The domain dwindled, as did other royal

appurtenances. Yet in 1807 the circuit was as much as seventy-seven

miles. In 1789 it embraced sixty thousand acres. The process of

contraction has since been accelerated, and but little remains outside

of the Great and Little Parks. Several villages of little note stand

upon it. Of these Wokingham has the distinction of an ancient hostelry

yclept the Rose; and the celebrity of the Rose is a beautiful daughter

of the landlord of a century and a half ago. This lady missed her

proper fame by the blunder of a merry party of poets who one evening

encircled the mahogany of her papa. It was as "fast" a festivity as

such names as Gay and Swift could make it. Their combined efforts

resulted in the burlesque of _Molly Mog_. These two and some others

contributed each a verse in honor of the fair waiter. But they mistook

her name, and the crown fell upon the less charming brow of her

sister, whose cognomen was depraved from Mary into Molly. Wiclif's Oak

is pointed out as a corner of the old forest, a long way east of the

park. Under its still spreading branches that forerunner of Luther

is said to have preached. Messrs. Moody and Sankey should have sought

inspiration under its shade.

In the vast assemblage of the arboreal commonwealth that carpets the

landscape the centuries are represented one with another. It is a

leafy parliament that has never been dissolved or prorogued. One hoary

member is coeval with the Confessor. Another sheltered William Rufus,

tired from the chase. Under another gathered recruits bound with

Coeur de Lion for the Holy Land. Against the bole of this was set up

a practicing butt for the clothyard shafts that won Agincourt, and

beneath that bivouacked the pickets of Cromwell. As we look down upon

their topmost leaves there floats, high above our own level, "darkly

painted on the crimson sky," a member, not so old, of another

commonwealth quite as ancient that has flourished among their branches

from time immemorial. There flaps the solitary heron to the evening

tryst of his tribe. Where is the hawk? Will he not rise from some fair

wrist among the gay troop we see cantering across yonder glade? Only

the addition of that little gray speck circling into the blue is

needed to round off our illusion. But it comes not. In place of it

comes a spirt of steam from the railway viaduct, and the whistle of

an engine. Froissart is five hundred years dead again, and we turn to

Bradshaw.

[Illustration: WINDSOR CASTLE, FROM BISHOPSGATE.]

Yet we have a "view of an interior" to contemplate before facing the

lower Thames. And first, as the day is fading, we seek the dimmest

part. We dive into the crypt of the bell-tower, or the curfew-tower,

that used to send far and wide to many a Saxon cottage the hateful

warning that told of servitude. How old the base of this tower is

nobody seems to know, nor how far back it has served as a prison.

The oldest initials of state prisoners inscribed on its cells date

to 1600. The walls are twelve feet thick, and must have begotten a

pleasant feeling of perfect security in the breasts of the involuntary

inhabitants. They did not know of a device contrived for the security

of their jailers, which has but recently been discovered. This is a

subterranean and subaqueous passage, alleged to lead under the river

to Burnham Abbey, three miles off. The visitor will not be disposed to

verify this statement or to stay long in the comparatively airy crypt.

Damp as the British climate may be above ground, it is more so below.

We emerge to the fine range of state apartments above, and submit to

the rule of guide and guide-book.

[Illustration: LOCK AT WINDSOR.]

St. George's Hall, the Waterloo gallery, the council-chamber and the

Vandyck room are the most attractive, all of them for the historical

portraits they contain, and the first, besides, for its merit as an

example of a Gothic interior and its associations with the order of

the Garter, the knights of which society are installed in it. The

specialty of the Waterloo room is the series of portraits of the

leaders, civil and military, English and continental, of the last and

successful league against Napoleon. They are nearly all by Lawrence,

and of course admirable in their delineation of character. In that

essential of a good portrait none of the English school have excelled

Lawrence. We may rely upon the truth to Nature of each of the heads

before us; for air and expression accord with what history tells us

of the individuals, its verdict eked out and assisted by instructive

minutiæ of lineament and meaning detected, in the "off-guard" of

private intercourse, by the eye of a great painter and a lifelong

student of physiognomy. We glance from the rugged Blucher to the

wily Metternich, and from the philosophic Humboldt to the semi-savage

Platoff. The dandies George IV. and Alexander are here, but Brummel

is left out. The gem of the collection is Pius VII., Lawrence's

masterpiece, widely familiar by engravings. Raphael's Julius II. seems

to have been in the artist's mind, but that work is not improved on,

unless in so far as the critical eye of our day may delight in the

more intricate tricks of chiaroscuro and effect to which Lawrence has

recourse. "Brunswick's fated chieftain" will interest the votaries of

Childe Harold. Could he have looked forward to 1870, he would perhaps

have chosen a different side at Waterloo, as his father might at Jena,

and elected to figure in oils at Versailles rather than at Windsor.

Incomparably more destructive to the small German princes have been

the Hohenzollerns than the Bonapartes.

[Illustration: THE THAMES EMBANKMENT.]

We forget these nineteenth-century people in the council-chamber,

wherein reign Guido, Rembrandt, Claude, and even Da Vinci. If

Leonardo really executed all the canvases ascribed to him in English

collections, the common impressions of his habits of painting but

little, and not often finishing that, do him great injustice. Martin

Luther is here, by Holbein, and the countess of Desmond, the merry old

lady

Who lived to the age of twice threescore and ten,

And died of a fall from a cherry tree then,

is embalmed in the bloom of one hundred and twenty and the gloom of

Rembrandt. The two dozen pictures in this room form nearly as odd an

association as any like number of portraits could do. Guercino's Sibyl

figures with a cottage interior by Teniers, and Lely's Prince Rupert

looks down with lordly scorn on Jonah pitched into the sea by the

combined efforts of the two Poussins. The link between Berghem's cows

and Del Sarto's Holy Family was doubtless supplied to the minds of

the hanging committee by recollections of the manger. Our thrifty

Pennsylvanian, West, is assigned the vestibule. Five of his "ten-acre"

pictures illustrate the wars of Edward III. and the Black Prince.

The king's closet and the queen's closet are filled mostly by the

Flemings. Vandyck's room finally finishes the list. It has, besides

a portrait of himself and several more of the first Charles and his

family in every pose, some such queer, or worse than queer, commoners

as Tom Killigrew and Sir Kenelm Digby and Venetia his hopeful spouse,

so dear to novelists of a certain school.

[Illustration: ELMS NEAR THE HERONRY.]

Vast sums have been expended on the renovation and improvement of the

castle during the past half century. With Victoria it has been more

popular as a residence than with any of her predecessors since

the fourteenth century. What, however, with its greater practical

proximity to London, due to railways, and what with the queen's liking

for solitude since the death of her consort, the more secluded

homes of Osborne and Balmoral have measurably superseded it in her

affections. Five hundred miles of distance to the Dee preclude the

possibility of the dumping on her, by means of excursion trains, of

loyal cockneydom. She is as thoroughly protected from that inundation

in the Isle of Wight, the average Londoner having a fixed horror of

sea-sickness. The running down, by her private steamer, of a few more

inquisitive yachts in the Solent would be a hazardous experiment, if

temporarily effective in keeping home invaders at bay. Holding as her

right and left bowers those two sanctuaries at the opposite ends of

her island realm, she can play a strong hand in the way of personal

independence, and cease to feel that hers is a monarchy limited by the

rights of the masses. It is well for the country that she should be

left as far as possible to consult her own comfort, ease and health

at least as freely as the humblest of her subjects. The continuance

of her life is certainly a political desideratum. It largely aids in

maintaining a wholesome balance between conservatism and reform. So

long as she lives there will be no masculine will to exaggerate the

former or obstruct the latter, as notably happened under George

III. and William IV. Her personal bearing is also in her favor. Her

popularity, temporarily obscured a few years ago, is becoming as great

as ever. It has never been weakened by any misstep in politics, and so

long as that can be said will be exposed to no serious danger.

We are far from being at the end of the upper Thames. Oxford, were

there no other namable place, is beyond us. But we have explored

the denser portion--the nucleus of the nebula of historic stars that

stretches into the western sky as seen from the metropolis. We lay

aside our little lorgnette. It has shown us as much as we can map in

these pages, and that we have endeavored to do with at least the merit

of accuracy.

EDWARD C. BRUCE.

THE POET'S PEN.

I am an idle reed;

I rustle in the whispering air;

I bear my stalk and seed

Through spring-time's glow and summer's glare.

And in the fiercer strife

Which winter brings to me amain,

Sapless, I waste my life,

And, murmuring at my fate, complain.

I am a worthless reed;

No golden top have I for crown,

No flower for beauty's meed,

No wreath for poet's high renown.

Hollow and gaunt, my wand

Shrill whistles, bending in the gale;

Leafless and sad I stand,

And, still neglected, still bewail.

O foolish reed! to wail!

A poet came, with downcast eyes,

And, wandering through the dale,

Saw thee and claimed thee for his prize.

He plucked thee from the mire;

He pruned and made of thee a pen,

And wrote in words of fire

His flaming song to listening men;

Till thou, so lowly bred,

Now wedded to a nobler state,

Utt'rest such pæans overhead

That angels listen at their gate.

F.A. HILLARD.

SKETCHES OF INDIA.

II.

I had now learned to place myself unreservedly in the hands of Bhima

Gandharva. When, therefore, on regaining the station at Khandallah, he

said, "The route by which I intend to show you India will immediately

take us quite away from this part of it; first, however, let us go and

see Poona, the old Mahratta capital, which lies but a little more than

thirty miles farther to the south-eastward by rail,"--I accepted the

proposition as a matter of course, and we were soon steaming down the

eastern declivity of the Gháts. As we moved smoothly down into the

treeless plains which surround Poona I could not resist a certain

feeling of depression.

"Yes," said Bhima Gandharva when I mentioned it to him, "I understand

exactly what you mean. On reaching an unbroken expanse of level

country, after leaving the tops of mountains, I always feel as if my

soul had come bump against a solid wall of rock in the dark. I seem

to hear a dull _thud_ of discouragement somewhere back in my soul, as

when a man's body falls dead on the earth. Nothing, indeed, could

more heighten such a sensation than the contrast between this and

the Bombay side of the Gháts. There we had the undulating waters,

the lovely harbor with its wooded and hilly islands, the ascending

terraces of the Gháts: everything was energetic, the whole invitation

of Nature was toward air, light, freedom, heaven. But here one spot

is like another spot; this level ground is just the same level ground

there was a mile back; this corn stands like that corn; there is an

oppressive sense of bread-and-butter about; one somehow finds one's

self thinking of ventilation and economics. It is the sausage-grinding

school of poetry--of which modern art, by the way, presents several

examples--as compared with that general school represented by the

geniuses who arise and fly their own flight and sing at a great

distance above the heads of men and of wheat."

Having arrived and refreshed ourselves at our hotel, whose proprietor

was, as usual, a Parsee, we sallied forth for a stroll about Poona. On

one side of us lay the English quarter, consisting of the houses and

gardens of the officers and government employés, and of the two or

three hundred other Englishmen residing here. On the other was the

town, extending itself along the banks of the little river Moota.

We dreamed ourselves along in the lovely weather through such of

the seven quarters of the town as happened to strike the fancy of my

companion. Occasionally we were compelled to turn out of our way

for the sacred cattle, which, in the enjoyment of their divine

prerogatives, would remain serenely lying across our path; but

we respected the antiquity, if not the reasonableness, of their

privileges, and murmured not.

Each of the seven quarters of Poona is named after a day of the week.

As we strolled from Monday to Tuesday, or passed with bold anachronism

from Saturday back to Wednesday, I could not help observing how

these interweavings and reversals of time appeared to take an actual

embodiment in the scenes through which we slowly moved, particularly

in respect of the houses and the costumes which went to make up

our general view. From the modern-built European houses to the

mediæval-looking buildings of the Bhoodwar quarter, with their massive

walls and loop-holes and crenellations, was a matter of four or five

centuries back in a mere turn of the eye; and from these latter to

the Hindu temples here and there, which, whether or not of actual age,

always carry one straight into antiquity, was a further retrogression

to the obscure depths of time. So, too, one's glance would often sweep

in a twinkling from a European clothed in garments of the latest mode

to a Hindu whose sole covering was his _dhotee_, or clout about the

loins, taking in between these two extremes a number of distinct

stages in the process of evolution through which our clothes have

gone. In the evening we visited the _Sangam_, where the small streams

of the Moola and the Moota come together. It is filled with cenotaphs,

but, so far from being a place of weeping, the pleasant air was full

of laughter and of gay conversation from the Hindus, who delight to

repair here for the purpose of enjoying the cool breath of the evening

as well as the pleasures of social intercourse.

[Illustration: HINDU TEMPLES NEAR POONA.]

But I did not care to linger in Poona. The atmosphere always had to me

a certain tang of the assassinations, the intrigues, the treacheries

which marked the reign of that singular line of usurping ministers

whose capital was here. In the days when the Peishwas were in the

height of their glory Poona was a city of a hundred and fifty thousand

inhabitants, and great traffic was here carried on in jewelry and

such luxuries among the Mahratta nobles. The Mahrattas once, indeed,

possessed the whole of India practically; and their name is composed

of _Mahu_, a word meaning "great," and often to be met with in the

designations of this land, where so many things really _are_ great,

and _Rachtra_, "kingdom," the propriety of the appellation seeming to

be justified by the bravery and military character of the people. They

have been called the Cossacks of India from these qualities combined

with their horsemanship. But the dynasty of the usurping ministers had

its origin in iniquity; and the corruption of its birth quickly broke

out again under the stimulus of excess and luxury, until it culminated

in the destruction of the Mahratta empire in 1818. So, when we had

seen the palace of the Peishwa, from one of whose balconies the young

Peishwa Mahadeo committed suicide by leaping to the earth in the

year 1797 through shame at having been reproved by his minister

Nana Farnavese in presence of his court, and when we had visited the

Hira-Bâgh, or Garden of Diamonds, the summer retreat of the Peishwas,

with its elegant pavilion, its balconies jutting into the masses of

foliage, its cool tank of water, reposing under the protection of the

temple-studded Hill of Pararati, we took train again for Bombay.

The Great Indian Peninsula Railway's main line leads out of Bombay

over the Gháts to Jabalpúr, six hundred miles; thence a railway of

some two hundred and twenty miles runs to Allahabad, connecting them

with the great line, known as the East Indian Railway, which extends

for more than a thousand miles north-westward from Calcutta _viâ_

Patna, Benares, Allahabad, Cawnpore, Lucknow, Agra and Delhi. Our

journey, as marked out by Bhima Gandharva, was to be from Bombay

to Jabalpúr by rail; thence by some slow and easy conveyance across

country to Bhopal, and from Bhopal northward through Jhansi to Delhi

and the northern country, thence returning by rail to Calcutta.

As one ascends the Western Gháts shortly after leaving Bombay one has

continual occasion to remark the extraordinary resources of modern

railway engineering. Perhaps the mechanical skill of our time has not

achieved any more brilliant illustrations of itself than here occur.

For many miles one is literally going up a flight of steps by rail.

The word Ghát indeed means the steps leading up from pools or rivers,

whose frequent occurrence in India attests the need of easy access

to water, arising from the important part which it plays both in the

civil and religious economies of the Hindu. The Gháts are so called

from their terraced ledges, rising one above another from the shores

of the ocean like the stairs leading up from a pool. In achieving the

ascent of these gigantic stairs all the expedients of road-makers have

been resorted to: the zigzag, the trestle, the tunnel, the curve, have

been pushed to their utmost applications; for five continuous miles

on the Thull Ghát Incline there is a grade of one in thirty-seven,

involving many trying curves, and on nineteen miles of the Bhore Ghát

Incline there are thirty tunnels.

That which gives tone and character to a general view of the interior

of a railway-car in traveling is, from the nature of things, the

head-covering of the occupants, for it is this which mostly meets the

eye; and no one who has traveled in the United States, for example,

can have failed to observe the striking difference between the aspect

of a car in the South, where the felt slouch prevails, and of one

in the North, where the silk hat is more affected. But cars full

of turbans! There were turbans of silk, of muslin, of woolen; white

turbans, red, green and yellow turbans; turbans with knots, turbans

with ends hanging; neat turbans, baggy turbans, preternatural turbans,

and that curious spotted silk inexpressible mitre which the Parsee

wears.

[Illustration: GÓNDS.]

Bhima Gandharva was good enough to explain to me the turban; and

really, when within bounds, it is not so nonsensical a headdress as

one is apt at first to imagine. It is a strip of cloth from nine to

twelve inches wide, and from fifteen to twenty-five yards long. They

are known, however, of larger dimensions, reaching to a yard in width

and sixty yards in length. The most common color is white; next,

perhaps, red, and next yellow; though green, blue, purple and black

are worn, as are also buff, shot colors and gray, these latter being

usually of silk; but this does not exhaust the varieties, for there

are many turbans made of cotton cloth printed in various devices to

suit the fancies of the wearers.

"The _puttee-dar_ (_pugri_, or turban)," continued my companion, "is

a neat compact turban, in general use by Hindus and Mohammedans; the

_joore-dar_ is like the _puttee-dar_, except that it has the addition

of a knot on the crown; the _khirkee-dar_ is the full-dress turban of

gentlemen attached to native courts; the _nustalik_ is a small turban

which fits closely to the head, and is worn for full dress at the

Mohammedan _durbars_ or royal receptions; the _mundeel_ is the

military turban, with stripes of gold and ends; the _séthi_ is

like the _nustalik_, and is worn by bankers; the _shumla_ is

a shawl-turban; and I fear you do not care to know the other

varieties--the _morassa_, the _umamu_, the _dustar_, the--"

"Thank you," I said: "life is short, my dear Bhima, and I shall know

nothing but turbans if this goes on, which will be inconvenient,

particularly when I return to my home and my neighbor Smith asks me

that ghastly question, 'What do I think of India?'"

"It is a more 'ghastly' question as to India than as to any other

country in the world," said the Hindu. "Some years ago, when Mr.

Dilke was traveling in this country, a witty officer of one of the

hill-stations remarked to him that _all general observations about

India were absurd_. This is quite true. How could it be otherwise?

Only consider, for example, the languages of India--the Assamese, with

its two branches of the Deccan-göl and the Uttar-göl; the Bengalee;

the Maithilee, Tirhutiya or Tirabhucti, spoken between the Coosy and

the Gunduck; the Orissan, of the regions around Cuttack; the Nepalese;

the Kosalese, about Almora; the Dogusee, between Almora and Cashmere;

the Cashmiran; the Panjabee; the Mooltanee, or Vuchee, on the middle

Indus; the two dialects of Sindhí, or Tatto, on the lower Indus; the

Cutché, on the west coast of the peninsula; the Guseraté, spoken

on the islands of Salsette and Bombay and the opposite coast of the

Coucan, as well as by the Parsees in the cities, where it is corrupted

with many words of other languages through the influence of commercial

relations; the Coucané, from Bombay to Goa and along the parallel

Gháts where it is called Ballagate; the Bikaneeré, the Marvaré, the

Jeyporé, the Udayaporé, of Rajpootana; the Vraja-bhasha (the cow-pen

language) of the Doab, between the Ganges and the Jumna, which is

probably the parent of Hindi (or Oordú); the Malooé, of the tableland

of Malwa; the Bundelakhandé, of the Bundelkhand; the Mogadhé, of

Behar; the Maharachtré, of the country south of the Vindhyas; the--"

"It gives me pain to interrupt you, Bhima Gandharva," I said

(fervently hoping that this portion of my remark might escape the

attention of the recording angel); "but I think we are at Jabalpúr."

_Apropos_ of Jubbulpoor, it is well enough to remark that by the rules

of Indian orthography which are now to be considered authentic, the

letter "a" without an accent has a sound equivalent to short "u," and

a vowel with an acute accent has what is usually called its long

sound in English. Accordingly, the word written "Jabalpúr" should

be pronounced as if retaining the "u" and the "oo" with which it was

formerly written, "Jubbulpoor". The termination _púr_, so common in

the designation of Indian places, is equivalent to that of _ville_

in English, and means the same. The other common termination, _abad_,

means "dwelling" or "residence": e.g., Ahmedabad, the residence of

Ahmed. Jabalpúr is but about a mile from the right bank of the Nerbadá

(_Nerbudda_) River; and as I wished to see the famous Marble Rocks

of that stream, which are found a short distance from Jabalpúr, my

companion and I here left the railway, intending to see a little of

the valley of the Nerbadá, and then to strike across the Vindhyas,

along the valley of the Tonsa, to Bhopal, making our journey by such

slow, irregular and easy stages as should be compatible with that

serene and philosophic disposition into which the Hindu's beautiful

gravity had by this time quite converted my American tendencies toward

rushing through life at the killing pace.

[Illustration: CENOTAPHS IN THE VALLEY OF THE TONSA.]

It was a little past midday when we made our first journey along the

river between the Marble Rocks. Although the weather was as nearly

perfect as weather could be, the mornings being deliciously cool and

bracing and the nights cold enough to produce often a thin layer of

ice over a pan of water left exposed till daybreak, yet the midday sun

was warm enough, especially after a walk, to make one long for leaves

and shade and the like. It would be difficult, therefore, to convey

the sensations with which we reclined at our ease in a flat-bottomed

punt while an attendant poled us up toward the "Fall of Smoke," where

the Nerbadá leaps out eagerly toward the low lands he is to fertilize,

like a young poet anxious to begin his work of grace in the world. On

each side of us rose walls of marble a hundred feet in height, whose

pure white was here and there striped with dark green or black: all

the colors which met the eye--the marmoreal whites, the bluish grays

of the recesses among the ledges, the green and black seams, the

limpid blue of the stream--were grateful, calm-toned, refreshing; we

inhaled the coolness as if it had been a mild aroma out of a distant

flower. This pleasant fragrance, which seemed to come up out of

all things, was presently intensified by a sort of spiritual

counterpart--a gentle breath that blew upon us from the mysterious

regions of death; for on a _ghát_ we saw a small company of Hindus

just launching the body of a pious relative into the waters of

Mother Nerbadá in all that freedom from grief, and even pleasant

contemplation, with which this singular people regard the transition

from present to future existence. These corpses, however, which are

thus committed to the wave, do not always chime so happily in with the

reveries of boating-parties on the Nerbadá. The Marble Rocks are often

resorted to by pic-nic parties in the moonlit evenings; and one can

easily fancy that to have a dusky dead body float against one's boat

and sway slowly round alongside in the midst of a gay jest or of a

light song of serenade, as is said to have happened not unfrequently

here, is not an occurrence likely to heighten the spirits of revelers.

Occasionally, also, the black, ugly double snout of the _magar_ (or

Nerbadá crocodile) may pop up from the surface, which may here serve

as a warning to the young lady who trails her hand in the water--and

I have yet to be in a boating-party where the young lady did not trail

her hand in the water--that on the Nerbadá it is perhaps as well to

resign an absent-minded hand to the young officer who sits by her in

the boat lest Magar should snap it off.

Leaving the Nerbadá we now struck off northward toward the Tonsa,

intending to pass round by way of Dumoh, Sangor, Bhilsa and Sanchi

to Bhopal. We might have pursued a route somewhat more direct by

following directly down the valley of the Nerbadá to Hoshangabad,

and thence straight across to Bhopal, but my companion preferred

the circuitous route indicated, as embracing a greater variety of

interesting objects. He had procured for our conveyance a vehicle

which was in all respects suitable to the placidity of his temper; and

I make bold to confess that, American as I am--born on the railroad,

so to speak--I have never enjoyed traveling as I did in this novel

carriage. It was what is called a _chapaya_. It consisted of a body

nearly ten feet in length by more than five in breadth, and was

canopied by a top supported upon sculptured pillars of wood.

The wheels were massive and low. There were no springs; but this

deficiency was atoned for by the thick cushionment of the rear portion

of the vehicle, which allowed us to lie at full length in luxurious

ease as we rolled along. Four white bullocks, with humps and horns

running nearly straight back on the prolongation of the forehead line,

drew us along in a very stately manner at the rate of something like a

mile and a half an hour.

We were now in the Góndwana, in some particulars one of the most

interesting portions of the country. Here are the Highlands of Central

India; here rise the Nerbadá and the Tapti--which flow to the westward

in a generally parallel direction, and empty into the Gulf of Cambaye,

the one at Broode and the other at Surat--as well as the Sôn, the

Keyn (or Cane) and the Tonsa, which flow northward into the Jumna. The

valley of the Keyn and that of the Tonsa here run across the Vindhyas,

which are known to the eastward of this as the Kyrmores, and afford

communication between Northern and Southern India. It is along the

depression of the latter stream that the railway has been built from

Jabalpúr to Allahabad.

The eight hundred thousand Gónds of the Góndwana are supposed to be

members of the great autochthonal family of ancient India. These hills

of the Góndwana country appear to have been considered by the incoming

Aryans for a long time as a sort of uncanny land, whose savage

recesses were filled with demons and snakes: indeed, in the epics of

the Máhábháráta and Rámáyana this evil character is attributed to that

portion of India lying south of the Vindhyas. The forest of Spenser's

Fairy Queen, in which wandering knights meet with manifold beasts and

maleficent giants, and do valorous battles against them in the rescue

of damsels and the like--such seem to have been the Góndwana woods to

the ancient Hindu imagination. It was not distressed damsels,

however, whom they figured as being assisted by the arms of the errant

protectors, but religious devotees, who dwelt in the seclusion of the

forest, and who were protected from the pranks and machinations of the

savage denizens by opportune heroes of the northern race. It appears,

however, that the native demons of the Góndwana had fascinating

daughters; for presently we find the rajahs from the north coming

down and marrying them; and finally, in the fourteenth and fifteenth

centuries, the keen urgency of the conquering Mohammedans sends great

numbers of Rajpúts down into the Góndwana, and a considerable mixture

of the two bloods takes place. With this incursion of Hindu peoples

come also the Hindu gods and tenets; and Mahadeo, the "great god,"

whose home had been the Kailas of the Himalayas, now finds himself

domesticated in the mountains of Central India. In the Mahadeo

mountain is still a shrine of Siva, which is much visited by pilgrims

and worshipers.

[Illustration: THE GAUR, OR INDIAN BISON.]

The Gónd--he who lives back in the hills, far off from the

neighborhood of the extensive planting districts, which have attracted

many of those living near them to become at least half-civilized

laborers in harvest-time--is a primitive being enough.

"Only look," said Bhima Gandharva, "at that hut if you desire to see

what is perhaps one of the most primitive houses since ever the banyan

tree gave to man (as is fabled) the idea of sheltering himself from

the elements artificially." It was simply made of stakes driven into

the ground, between which were wattled branches. This structure was

thatched with grass, and plastered with mud.

The Gónd, like the American Indian, has his little patch of grain,

which he cultivates, however, in a fashion wholly his own. His sole

instrument of agriculture seems to be the axe. Selecting a piece of

ground which presents a growth of small and easily-cut saplings--and

perhaps, by the way, thus destroying in a few hours a whole cargo

of teak trees worth more than all the crops of his agricultural

lifetime--he hews down the growth, and in the dry season sets fire to

the fallen timber. The result is a bed of ashes over a space of two or

three acres. His soil is now ready. If the patch thus prepared happens

to be level, he simply flings out a few handfuls of grain, coarse

rice, kútki (ponicum) or kódon (paspalum), and the thing is done. The

rest is in the hands of the god who sends the rains. If the patch be

on a declivity, he places the grain at the upper part, where it will

be washed down by the rains over the balance of the field. Next year

he will burn some more wood--the first burning will have left many

charred stumps and trunks, which he supplements with a little wood

dragged from other parts of the forest--on the same spot, and so

the next year, by which time it will become necessary to begin a new

clearing, or _dhya_. The _dhya_ thus abandoned does not renew the

original growth which clothed it, like the pinelands of the Southern

United States, which, if allowed to run waste after having been

cleared and cultivated, clothe themselves either with oaks or with a

wholly different species of pine from the original growth. The waste

_dhya_, which may have perhaps nourished a splendid growth of teak,

becomes now only a dense jungle.

The Gónd also raises pumpkins and beans; and this vegetable diet

he supplements with game ensnared in the _dhyas_, to which peafowl,

partridges, hares and the like resort. Many of the villages, however,

have a professional huntsman, who will display the most incredible

patience in waiting with his matchlock for the game to appear.

Besides these articles of diet, the aborigines of the Góndwana have

their mhowa tree, which stands them in much the same multifarious

stead as the palm does to its beneficiaries. The flowers of the mhowa

fall and are eaten, or are dried and pressed, being much like raisins:

they also produce a wine by fermentation and the strong liquor of the

hill-people by distillation. Of the seed cakes are made, and an oil is

expressed from them which is an article of commerce.

In addition, the poor Gónd appears to have a periodical godsend

resulting from a singular habit of one of the great Indian plants.

The bamboo is said to undergo a general seeding every thirty years: at

this period, although, in the mean time, many individual bamboos may

have passed through the process of reproduction, it is said that the

whole bamboo growth of a section will simultaneously drop its leaves

and put forth large panicles of flowers, after which come great

quantities of seeds much like rice. These are gathered for food by

the inhabitants with all the greater diligence in consequence of a

tradition--which, however, does not seem to be at all supported by

facts--that the general seeding of the bamboo portends a failure of

the regular crops. The liberal forests of the Góndwana furnish still

other edibles to their denizens. The ebony plums, the wild mango,

the seeds of the sál tree, the beans of the giant banhinia creeper, a

species of arrowroot, and a wild yam, are here found and eaten.

[Illustration: BANJARIS.]

It is not long since the Gónds had arrived at a melancholy condition

under the baleful influences of the kulars, or liquor-dealers, who

resided among them and created an extraordinary demand for their

intoxicating wares by paying for service and for produce in liquor.

The kulars have, however, been thrown into the background by wise

efforts toward their suppression, and matters have improved for the

poor autoch-thones.

We spent our first night in our chapaya, my companion having so

arranged matters that we were quite independent of the bungaloos which

the Englishmen have erected at suitable distances along the great

roads for the convenience of travelers. The night was clear; betwixt

the corner pillars which upheld our canopy a thousand friendly

salutations from the stars streamed in upon us; the tranquil

countenance of my friend seemed, as he lay beside me, like the face of

the Past purified of old errors and calm with great wisdom got through

great tribulation, insomuch that betwixt the Hindu and the stars I

felt myself to be at once in communication with antiquity and with

eternity.

Thus we pursued our ambulatory meditations through the Góndwana. If

we had been sportsmen, we should have found full as varied a field for

the bagging of game as for that more spiritual hunt after new ideas

and sensations in which we were engaged. Gray quail, gray partridges,

painted partridges (_Francolinus pictus_), snipe and many varieties

of water-fowl, the sambor, the black antelope, the Indian gazelle or

ravine deer, the gaur or Indian bison, chewing the cud in the midday

shade or drinking from a clear stream, troops of _nilgaé_ springing

out from the long grass and dwarf growth of polás and jujube trees

which covered the sites of abandoned villages and fields,--all

these revealed themselves to us in the most tempting situations. But

although I had been an ardent devotee of the double-barrel, the large

and manly tenderness which Bhima Gandharva invariably displayed toward

all animals, whether wild or tame, had wrought marvels upon me, and

I had grown fairly ashamed--nay, horrified--at the idea that anything

which a generous and brave man could call _sport_ should consist

wholly in the most keen and savage cruelties inflicted upon creatures

whom we fight at the most unknightly odds, we armed, they unarmed.

While I knew that our pleasures are by the divine order mostly

distillations from pain, I could not now help recognizing at the same

time that this circumstance was part of an enormous plan which the

slaughter of innocent creatures in the way of "sport" did in nowise

help to carry out.

The truth is, although I had been for some days wavering upon the

brink of these conclusions in a quiet way, I found the old keen ardor

of the sportsman still burning too strongly, and I had started out

with a breech-loader, intent upon doing much of the Góndwana route gun

in hand. It was not long before a thoughtless shot operated to

bring my growing convictions sharply face to face with my decreasing

practice, and thus to quite frown the latter out of existence. It

happened in this wise: One day, not far from sunset, I was walking

idly along behind the chapaya, in which Bhima Gandharva was dreamily

reclining, when suddenly a pair of great _sáras_ cranes rose from the

low banks of a small stream and sailed directly across the road. Quick

as thought--indeed, quicker than thought; for if I _had_ thought, I

would not have done it--I fired, and brought down one of the monstrous

birds. As I started to approach it, Bhima Gandharva said, in a tone

just a trifle graver than usual, "Stop! wait a moment," and at the

same time halted the chapaya. The mate of the bird I had shot, seeing

him fall, alighted on the same spot, then flew up, then returned,

flew up again, returned again, with an exhibition of sad and lingering

affection of which I had not dreamed, and which penetrated me beyond

expression; so I stood half stolid outwardly and wholly ashamed

and grieved inwardly. "The sáras," said my friend, "is the type of

conjugal affection among the Hindus. The birds nearly always go

in pairs; and when one is killed, the other invariably makes those

demonstrations of tenderness which you have just seen."

As we journeyed along in the dusk came notes from another pair of

feathered lovers, "chukwa, chukwi," "chukwa, chukwi," in a sort of

mournful alternation. They were the branning ducks, he on one side,

she on the other side of the stream, as is their habit, whence they

are fabled to be a pair of lovers who must yearn unavailingly through

the long nights from opposite banks of the river.

That night, when Bhima Gandharva was asleep, I gently arose, took my

double-barrel--thou dear Manton! how often has not Jonesville admired

thee returning from the field at late evening slanting at a jaunty

angle high above my bagful of snipe or of quail as the case might

be!--yes, I took this love of a gun, together with the cartridges,

accoutrements and all other rights, members and appurtenances

thereunto belonging or in any wise appertaining, and slid the whole

lot softly into a deep green pool of the very stream from which had

flown my sáras.

The taste of gypsy life which I was now enjoying contributed to add

a sort of personal element to that general interest which hangs about

the curious Banjaris, whom we met constantly, with their families

and their bullocks, along our road. _Banjara_ is literally

"forest-wanderer." The women were especially notable for their tall

stature, shapely figures and erect carriage; which circumstances are

all the more wonderful from the life of hardship which they lead,

attending as they do at once to the foraging of the cattle, the

culinary preparations for the men and the cares of the children. From

the profusion of ornaments which they wore, one may imagine, however,

that they were well cared for by their lords in return for their

affectionate labors; and the general bearing of the tall Banjara who

bore a long two-handed sword gave evidence of a certain inward sense

of protection over his belongings which probably found vent in many an

affectionate gift of rings and bracelets to his graceful partner. It

must be confessed that the gypsying of these Eastern Bohemians is not

so free a life as is popularly supposed. The _naik_ or sovereign of

each _tanda_, or camp, seems to be possessed of absolute power, and in

this connection the long two-handed sword suggested much less gentle

reflections. The Banjara, however, though a nomad, is a serviceable

one, for he is engaged in trade. With his bullocks he is the carrier

of Central India, and is to be met with all over that section,

bringing salt and other commodities and returning with interior

produce.

FRA ALOYSIUS

Fra Aloysius, vexed with skeptic fears,

Nigh crazed with thought to all the saints did pray

For faith in those mysterious words that say,

"One day is with the Lord a thousand years,

A thousand years with Him are as a day."

An erudite and holy monk was he,

And yet his brethren trembled lest his brain

Should lose its poise, so long he dwelt in vain

On that perplexing verse to find its key,

And strove to make its hidden meaning plain.

Racked by a sleepless night, one fresh spring morn

Forth from the cloister Aloysius strolled.

The wood was dewy-bright, clear beams of gold

Illumined it, and to his heart was borne

A sense of freedom, peace and joy untold.

Beside a laughing brook he sat to rest,

Above whose wave did long-haired willows weep;

Midmost the dense green forest, still and deep,

Lulled by the trickling waters and possessed

By tranquil thoughts, the friar fell asleep.

And, overworn, he slept the livelong day,

Nor waked until the twilight shadows fell,

That flung a brown night o'er that leafy dell.

Then up he rose refreshed and went his way,

And, half ashamed, he heard the vesper-bell.

Back to the convent fared he; at the gate

A stranger gave him entrance, but he passed

Into the chapel with meek eyes downcast,

In truant guise returning home thus late,

And toward his wonted seat made seemly haste.

Too late! a stranger filled it. Looking round,

Amazed, he could discern no face he knew.

The abbot's self had changed; his wonder grew,

When, after the familiar chant, he found

These crazy monks held him for crazy too.

They gathered round with curious, eager eyes.

"What cloister's this?" he asked. They named its name:

The one he left that morning was the same.

His name he gave; with many a wild surmise

They guessed who he might be and whence he came.

He asked them where the abbot was at last,

From whom he parted but the night before.

"He hath been dead three hundred years and more!"

They answered with a single voice, aghast.

Then spake a friar versed in monkish lore:

"Brethren, a miracle! This man I know:

'Tis Aloysius, who, as I have read,

Beset with doubts, forth from this convent fled,

And vanished, some three hundred years ago,

And all the world hath counted him as dead."

Then Aloysius felt the blessed tears

Fulfill his eyes, whence dropped the scales away.

Kneeling, he cried, "Oh, brethren, let us pray.

One day is with the Lord a thousand years,

A thousand years with Him are as a day."

EMMA LAZARUS.

A FEW HOURS IN BOHEMIA.

The beauty of this country is that no turbulent sea confines its

borders, nor are martello-towers needed to guard its coast: no jealous

neighbor threatens its frontier, no army oppresses its citizens, and

no king can usurp its throne. Its locality is hard to define: like the

Fata Morgana, it is here to-day and gone to-morrow, for its territory

is the mind of men, and in extent it is as boundless as thought.

Natives of every clime are enrolled among its freemen, and all lands

contain its representatives, but it is in the picturesque streets of

the older continental cities of Europe, where rambling lodgings and

cheap apartments are many, that the invisible mother-country founds

her colonies. I will tell you how I went and what I saw there.

Afra was a cosmopolite, and consequently knew Bohemia, its byways and

thoroughfares. If any one could fill the office of guide thereto,

Afra could, and when one evening she rushed into my room saying, "Come

along if you want to go to Bohemia," I did not hesitate a moment, but

made ready for the journey, with the simple precaution of putting on

my bonnet and shawl.

"A cab?" I asked as we moved from the door.

"Who ever heard of entering Bohemia in a cab?" laughed Afra dryly.

"People have been known to drive _out_ in their own carriages, but

they always make their first appearance there on foot, or at best in

an omnibus."

"As you please," I replied, trying to keep pace with her rapid step,

which showed constant practice.

"I wonder you did not propose a balloon," she continued pettishly.

"The gods don't give everything to one person: now, they give us

brains, and they give other people--money."

"If you would understand, I--"

"No, you wouldn't. I sha'n't ride in cabs until I can pay for them

myself; meanwhile, I have gros sous enough in my pocket for an omnibus

fare, and if you have the same we will stop here." At this she entered

a bureau, and as I followed I saw her get some tickets from a man who

sat behind a small counter, and then composedly sit down on a bench

while she said, "We shall have some time to wait for our luxury:" then

showing me the tickets, "Twelve and thirteen: it is a full night, and

all these people ahead of us."

"Is it a lottery?" I asked ignorantly.

"Very much of a lottery," Afra replied grimly--"like all the ways of

Bohemia, remarkably uncertain. You get a ticket for something in the

giving of the Muses, and you wait until your number is called. The

worst of it is, the most unlikely people are called before you, and

some get disgusted and leave: there goes one out at the door at this

moment. Well, he may be better or he may be worse off than those who

finally win: who knows if any race is worth the running? Still, if you

have courage to hold on, I believe there is no doubt that every one

ultimately gets something." Seeing my perplexity, she twisted the

round tickets between her fingers and added, "Do not be alarmed: these

are only good for a seat in the first empty 'bus that comes up. The

conductor will call out the numbers in rotation, and if ours is among

them we shall go. It is frightful that you have never ridden in a 'bus

before. I wonder where we should get ideas if we shut ourselves up in

cabs and never walked or were hungry or tired, and thought only of our

own comfort from morning till night? You don't know what you miss, you

poor deluded, unfortunate rich people. I will tell you of something

I saw the other evening; and, as it is worthy of a name, it shall be

called 'The Romance of an Omnibus.' Listen! isn't that our numbers I

heard? Yes: come quick or we shall lose our chance."

"Well," said I when we had successfully threaded the crowd and were

seated--"the romance."

"You have no idea of the fitness of things. My story is pathetic: it

will look badly to see you drowned in tears--people will stare."

"I promise not to cry."

"Oh, if you are one of those stolid, unemotional beings who are never

moved, I sha'n't waste my tale upon you. Wait until to-morrow: we

will get Monsieur C---- to recount, and you shall hear something worth

listening to. He is a regular troubadour--has the same artless vanity

they were known to possess, their charming simplicity, their

gestures, and their power of investing everything with romance. One is

transported to the Middle Ages while he speaks: no book written on the

subject could so fully give you the flavor of the times. He recalls

Froissart. If you are not affected by C----'s stories, you had better

pretend to be. But that, I am sure, will not be necessary: a great

tragedian was lost when he became a great painter."

"Might I ask how and when and where I am to meet this wonderful man?"

"At the garden-party."

"In what way am I to get there?"

"By strategy. There is a little reunion to-night of what may be called

female Bohemians. They are going to settle the preliminaries of this

party, and if you happen to be present they will invite you; not that

they particularly care for your company, but because, as I said, you

happen to be there. Only don't get yourself into a mess by tramping on

any one's toes."

"Have they corns?"

"Yes, on every inch of surface: they are dreadfully thin-skinned. But

they hate sham even more than a hard knock, and are quicker than

a police-officer in detecting it; so be careful not to talk about

anything you are ignorant of."

"Give me a few rules, and I promise to conduct myself properly."

"Well, don't be snobbish and patronize them, and don't look shocked

at any strange opinions you hear, nor act as if you were at an animal

show and were wondering what would happen next. Be sure not to assent

when you see they wish to argue, and don't argue when they expect

acquiescence. If any of them speak in broken English, and you can't

for the life of you understand, don't ask them to repeat, but answer

immediately, for you can imagine when one has taken pains to learn a

foreign language one likes it to be appreciated, and don't--But here

we are. In short, make yourself at home, as if you had been there all

your life."

"Afra," I said, laying my hand on her arm as she took to her swift

pace again, "perhaps I had better go home: I am afraid I can't--I

think--that is--"

"Nonsense! as if you could not get on after all those hints! Anyway,

you cannot return alone, and I am unable to go with you. Make up your

mind to blunder, and do it. There was an amateur visited the studio

about three months ago: her absurdities have lasted us for laughing

material ever since. As she is getting rather stale, you can take her

place. This is the house: come in."

With this doubtful prospect in view I followed my peremptory guide

from the narrow street into what appeared to be a spacious court, but

as the only light it received was from a blinking candle in the window

of the conciergerie, I could not determine. After exchanging some

cabalistic sentences with a toothless old woman, the proprietor of the

candle, Afra turned to the right, and walking a few steps came to a

door opening on a stairway, which we mounted. I can think of nothing

black enough for comparison with the darkness surrounding us. At last

a faint glimmer showed an old lamp standing in a corner of a hall bare

and carpetless. A series of doors flanked the place, looking to my

unaccustomed eyes all alike, but Afra without a moment's hesitation

went to one of them and knocked. It was opened by a lady, who smiled

and said, "Enter. You are just in time: school is over and the model

about going."

I found myself in a high-ceiled room, at one end of which was

suspended a row of perhaps a dozen lamps. Here, at least, there was-no

lack of light: it required some moments to accustom our eyes to the

sudden contrast. The yellow blaze was directed by reflectors into the

space immediately beneath the lamps, which left the rest of the room

pleasantly tempered. Some easels, a few chairs and screens, plaster

casts on shelves, sketches in all stages of progress on the wall,

a tea-kettle singing over a bright fire in a stove, and a curtain

enclosing a corner used as a bedroom, completed the list of furniture.

It was a night-school for lady artists. The class had finished for the

evening, and a number of the students were moving about or seated near

the fire, talking in an unlimited number of languages.

I was given several random introductions, and did my best to follow

Afra's directions; but there was an indescribable quaintness about the

appearance and manners of my new acquaintance that made it difficult

not to stare. I found, however, that little notice was taken of me,

as a lively discussion was being carried on over a study of an arm and

hand which one of them was holding up for inspection.

"It is a style I should call the lantern," said she. "The redness of

the flesh can only be accounted for on the supposition that a light is

shining through it."

"I should call it raw beef," remarked another.

"It is a shame, mademoiselle!" began the model in an injured tone.

She had been tying on her bonnet before a bit of looking-glass she

had taken from her pocket. "Does my arm look like that?" Here she

indignantly drew up her sleeve and held out that dimpled member,

meanwhile gazing wrathfully at the sketch. "It ought not to be

allowed. The silver tones of my flesh are entirely lost; and see how

you have caricatured the elegance of my beautiful hand. Will not some

one help mademoiselle to put it right before my reputation is ruined?"

"Jeanne, a model is not a critic," said the author of the drawing,

coming forward and grasping the canvas with no gentle hand.--"Ladies,

if you wish to find fault, turn to your own studies. That proportion

is frightful"--she pointed to different sketches as she spoke--"that

ear is too large; and, madame, if you take a crust of paint like yours

for freedom of touch, I pity you."

This dispute was by no means the last during the evening. Opinions

seemed to be plentiful in Bohemia, each individual being furnished

with a set of her own on every subject broached; and as no diffidence

was shown in putting them forth, the company quarreled with great

good-nature and evident enjoyment. A pot of tea was then brewed by the

owner of the studio, who had been English before she became Bohemian,

and the beverage was handed round in tea-cups which, like the opinions

of the guests, differed widely from each other. In the silence that

attended this diversion Afra took the floor and said, "How about the

garden-party to the country? Who is going?"

Several spoke, and one asked, "Shall we take lunch with us?"

"No, something will be provided for us there."

"So much the better. When are we to meet, and where?"

"Twelve o'clock, midday, at ----."

"What messieurs are going?"

"Quite a number--a tenor from the Grand Opera, and the leader of the

orchestra, who is a magnificent violinist; that new Spanish painter

who plays the guitar divinely; a poet--that is, he has written some

pretty songs--besides plenty more."

"That promises well."

"You will bring your friend?" and the speaker nodded her head toward

me.

"I shall be delighted: I am so curious to see those eccentric--" Here

a warning glance from Afra stopped me.

But the lady only laughed and said, "You will see eccentricity enough

to-morrow, if that is what you want. People who devote their minds to

great objects have no time to think of little things. You had better

see that Afra has on her bonnet or she will go without one."

"Nonsense!" replied Afra.--"Miss," this to the owner of the studio,

who was so called in honor of her English birth, "are you ever

troubled by the ghost of that young painter who hung himself up

there?"

"Those who have occasion to commit suicide are not likely to come

back: they have had enough of this world," said the Englishwoman.

"Did some one really die here?" I asked.

"Yes, really;" and Afra mimicked my tone of horror. "You know, a

Bohemian is at home anywhere, so a change of country don't affect him

much. If we find a place disagreeable, we travel."

"Was he insane?"

"Not more than the rest of us, but _you_ can't understand the feeling

that would induce a man to do such a thing. This young fellow painted

a picture: he put his mind, his soul, himself, into it, and sent it to

the Exhibition. It was rejected--that is, he was rejected--and he came

here and died. They found him suspended from that beam where the lamps

hang now."

"I thought your Bohemia was so gay?"

"So it is, but the brightest light makes the deepest shadows."

The conversation went on. These ladies discussed politics, literature,

art and society with absolute confidence. One of the topics was Alfred

de Musset. The Englishwoman was praising the English Alfred, when

a pale-faced girl, who up to this moment had been intently reading,

oblivious of all about her, closed her book with a snap (it was a

much-worn edition of one of the classics, bought for a few sous on the

quay) and broke out with--"Your Tennyson is childish. His King Arthur

puts me in mind of our Louis Philippe and his umbrella. Did you know

Louis carried an umbrella with him when he was obliged to fly from

Paris? One would have looked well held over Arthur's dragon helmet

that disagreeable night he left the queen to go and fight his nephew.

But perhaps Guinevere had lent it to Launcelot, and even the best

friends, alas! do not return umbrellas. Your poet writes in white

kid gloves, and thinks in them too. Imagine the magnificent rush and

struggle of those ancient days, the ecstasy of battle, the intensity

of life, and then read your Tennyson's milk-and-water tales, with

their modern English-ménage feelings. Arthur would have been much more

likely to give his wife a beating, as did the hero of the _Nibelungen

Lied_, than that high-flown lecture; and it would have done the

Guinevere of that time more good."

"And what is your Alfred, Anita?"

"He is divine."

"After the heathen pattern. He dipped his pen in mire."

"What is mire?--water and earth. What are we?--water and earth. Mire

is humanity, and holds in itself not only the roots of the tree,

but the germ of the flower. A poet who is too delicate to plant

his thought in earth must be content to give it but the life of a

parasite: it can have no separate existence of its own."

"But one need not be bad to be great."

"Nor need one be good to be great," returned Anita sarcastically.

"Alfred de Musset was a peculiar type of a peculiar time. He did not

imagine: he felt, he lived, he was himself, and was original, like a

new variety of flower or a new species of insect. Tennyson has gleaned

from everybody's fields: our Alfred gathered only from his own. The

one is made, the other is born."

"Come away," said Afra impatiently: "no one can speak while Anita

is on her hobby. Besides, I must get home early to trim a bonnet for

to-morrow;" and without more leavetaking than a "Good-evening," which

included every one, we found ourselves in the street.

"Who is Anita?" I asked.

"She is nobody just now: what she will be remains to be seen. Her

family wish her to be an artist: she wishes to adopt the stage as a

profession, and is studying for it _sub rosa_. Did you ever see a more

tragic face?"

"Poor thing!" I involuntarily exclaimed.

"Don't pity her," said Afra, more seriously than she had yet spoken.

"The best gift that can be bestowed upon a mortal is a strong natural

inclination for any particular life and the opportunity of following

it. The man or woman who has that can use the wheel of Fate for a

spinning-wheel."

The next morning at the appointed time I met Afra at the station.

"How do I look?" she asked, standing up for my inspection as soon as I

appeared in sight, at the same time regarding as much of her dress as

it was possible for her to see. But before I could reply the satisfied

expression of her face changed: an unpleasant discovery had been

made. "I have shoes on that are not mates," she exclaimed--"cloth and

leather: that looks rather queer, doesn't it? Do you think it will be

noticed? I could not decide which pair to wear, and put on one of each

to see the effect: afterward I forgot them. Now, I suppose that would

be thought eccentric, though any one might make the same mistake. It

shows I have two pairs of shoes," she added more cheerfully, "and they

are both black. How is my bonnet?"

The bonnet was black velvet, and we were in midsummer. The material,

however, was skillfully draped with a veil, and a profusion of pink

flowers gave it a seasonable air. A crimson bow was also tied at

her neck; she complacently remarked that "pink and crimson harmonize

beautifully;" and others of the party arriving at that moment, I was

saved the trouble of making a polite answer.

The ride through ripening grain-fields and moss-thatched hamlets

need not be described; suffice it to say, it was France and June. An

omnibus was waiting at the station where we dismounted: it carried us

near, but not to, our destination. After leaving it we walked through

the streets of a low-roofed village, then followed a path bordered

with wild mignonette and apple trees that wound up the side of a hill

covered with vineyards. A couple of chattering magpies ran before

us, an invisible cuckoo was heard between snatches of Italian melody

warbled by the tenor _sotto voce_ and the little company overflowed

with gayety.

The house we arrived at looked as if it might be a castle in the air

materialized--pointed windows hidden in ivy, through which you saw

the chintz-covered walls of the interior; turrets on the roof and

a stair-tower; odd nooks for pigeons and cattle; the color a

weather-toned red, met by gray roofs, green trees and blue sky. We

passed through it to the quaint garden: rows of dwarf pears bordered

its paths, and trellises and walls supported nectarines and vines,

with sunshine and shadow caressing the half-ripe fruit.

The shady spaces were occupied by guests who had arrived before us,

and we saw with pleasure that ceremony had not been invited to attend.

The host's kindly manner was sufficient to put the company at once

at ease. We wandered at will from group to group, listening or

conversing: introductions were sometimes given, but more often not.

At one table some ladies and gentlemen were playing the artistic game

of "five points." A more difficult pastime was never invented. The

materials necessary are simply a piece of paper and a pencil: it is

their use that is extraordinary. A person puts five dots on the paper

in whatever position fancy may dictate: on this slight foundation

another is expected to design a figure, the puzzle being to include

all the marks given. One that I saw had four of the dots placed

unusually close together, and the fifth in a distant corner:

this latter, in the opinion of the lookers-on, would surely prove

refractory. After some moments of consideration, with pencil suspended

and eye attentive, the artist commenced drawing. In ten minutes the

sketch was finished. It was an angel: her upturned head took in the

highest of the group of dots; one hand hanging by her side the next;

a knee the third; and the flowing hem of her robe the fourth; but the

fifth in the corner--what could reach it? With a touch of the pencil

the angel's other hand appeared flinging up a censer attached to

a long chain, which struck the solitary dot like a shot amid

acclamations. To show that he did not consider the feat a _tour de

force_, the artist turned the paper, and taking the same marks drew

a devil in an entirely different attitude, the difficult point being

reached by his pitchfork. This gave rise to a learned discussion as

to whether the devil's emblematic pitchfork was not a descendant of

Neptune's trident, which I did not stay to hear, as Afra whispered she

wanted to present me to Monsieur C----, and I was taken to a gentleman

of no great height, but of such wondrous width that Nature must have

formed him in a most generous mood.

"You are American?" said this wide man to me as I was introduced, and

without waiting for a reply went on: "I like your country-people:

they admire frankly. Show them a picture, they exclaim, 'Beautiful!

magnificent! lovely! exquisite! name your price;' and they buy it.

Here the public look and look. 'Not bad,' they say, 'but the color is

from Veronese, and that attitude is surely Raphael's. What a mine that

man's genius has been to ambitious but less gifted artists!' and so

they go on. I wish they would let the dead rest in peace. Are you

acquainted with Mr. B---- of New York?"

I was obliged to say "No."

"I wish to send a message to him," he continued grandly: "tell him

that I paint now for him alone."

"You are court-painter to Mr. B----," I remarked laughingly.

"Don't speak of courts," he exclaimed pettishly. "I was to have

painted the baptism of the prince imperial for the state: it gave me

no end of annoyance, and in the end was never finished."

"I understood that you insisted on painting the little prince nude,

after the Rubens manner, and that was one ground of objection to the

design," said Afra.

"The baby would have had on plenty of clothes: one of his dresses was

sent from the Tuileries for Monsieur C---- to paint, and I sewed a

rosette on it myself." This from the painter's wife.

"A countryman of yours sat for the head of a young priest at the

ceremony. He had a fine countenance: he was studying art with me

at the time, and has since been professor of drawing at your Naval

Academy. Teaching is a sad trade--Pegasus dragging the plough."

"At least, your other great picture brought you nothing but praise."

"The public have since repented of being so good to me. Then, they

could not say enough in my favor: now, if a person asks what I am

doing, every one repeats like a parrot, 'C---- doesn't paint, C----

doesn't paint.' I have heard it so often that I begin to believe

it myself, and when I am asked join the general cry, 'C---- doesn't

paint.'"

I laughed, thinking this a joke, but I soon found that though

C---- might be cynical, sarcastic or bitter, though he might excite

unintentional laughter by his remarks, he was too sensitive a man to

take any but a serious view of life. The imperfections of the world

excited his disgust, his anger, never his mirth.

"Ah but, monsieur," said Afra, "you should be satisfied, and leave

some little honor for the rest of us to gather. The stories one hears

of your youth are like fairy-tales."

"And they are true," replied the artist with evident enjoyment. "In

those days I was pointed out to people when I walked the street;

which, by the way, gave rise to an odd incident. A gentleman thought

he had seen me in a crowd, but he had taken an older and taller man

for the great painter. He believed big pictures were painted by big

men, and I had not then my present circumference. This gentleman sent

me an invitation to dine with him. On the day appointed I arrived at

the house, and was met at the door by my host, a look of surprise and

annoyance on his face which he tried to conceal by a low bow, at the

same time asking politely, 'How is your father?'--'Very well, thank

you,' I returned, although I could not understand why my father's

health should be a matter of interest to him.--'You have come to

tell me of some catastrophe which prevents his attendance here

to-day?'--'Not at all: I have come to dine with you, according to this

invitation.' Here I pulled out the card, which I happened to have in

my pocket.--'Are you the person here addressed?' he said, staring at

me.--'I am'.--'I beg your pardon, there is a mistake: I meant it for

your father, the painter of the "Décadence des Romains."'--'I am the

painter of the "Décadence," but I am not my father.'--'You ought to

be an older man.'--'I should have been, monsieur, had I been born

sooner.'--At that moment a friend, overhearing the conversation and

divining the cause, came and explained to my wonder-struck host that I

was really the artist in question. With many apologies I was led into

a hall adorned with floral arches in my honor, next to a beautiful

salon, likewise decorated, and finally we reached the dining-room,

which was arranged to represent my picture. Columns wreathed with

flowers supported the roof; flowers festooned the white table-linen

and adorned the antique vessels that covered it; couches of different

colored silk were laid after the Roman fashion for the guests to

recline upon; and lovely women dressed in costly Roman costumes, their

heads crowned with flowers, were placed in the attitudes that you

will see on my celebrated canvas. Was it not a graceful tribute to my

genius?"

"If a Frenchman wants to pay a compliment, he never uses one that has

done duty before, but invents something new," said Afra emphatically.

"What are you painting now, monsieur?" I asked.

"A series of pictures called 'Pierrot the Clown.' He succeeds in

tricking the world in every station of life. I am just finishing his

deathbed. All his friends are weeping about him: the doctor feels

his pulse and gives some learned name to the disease--doctors know so

much--while hidden everywhere around the room are empty bottles. The

drunken clown plays with even death for a mask."

"I thought he painted such romantic pictures," said I to Afra as we

turned from the master.

"So he does: there is one in his studio now. A girl clad in gray and

shadow--open-air shade which in his hands is so clear and luminous.

She walks along a garden-path, her head bent down, dreaming as she

goes, and unconsciously nearing a half-open gateway, through which the

sunshine is streaming. Above the rustic gate two doves are billing and

cooing. You feel sure the girl is about to pass through this typical,

sunshiny, invitingly half-open door; and--what is beyond?"

Just then we were called to lunch, a plentiful but not luxurious

repast. There was no lack of lively repartees and anecdotes, and

we had speeches and songs afterward. I wonder if I ever heard "'Tis

better to laugh than be sighing" given with more zest than on that

day? One could easily imagine that it was such an occasion as this

that had inspired it.

Lunch being over, Monsieur C---- was asked to relate one of his own

stories. I cannot give it entire, but the plot was this: A pilgrim,

whom he called poor Jacques, hearing much of heaven, set out to find

his way to the blessed abode, with only a little dog to accompany him

on the journey. As he went he met many of his contemporaries, who

had made what a walker would style but poor time. The allusions to

well-known peculiarities in the various people and their occupation in

the other life caused much amusement. For instance, Ingres the painter

was seated by the roadside playing Rossini's music on the violin, on

which instrument he was a great proficient. But he was known to detest

the Italian's music before he started heavenward: his taste must then

have grown _en route_. (Critics might object to this supposition.)

However, Jacques was anxious to push on, and spent little time

listening. But he was a good-hearted man, and, though he would

not delay for his own amusement, he could not refuse to stop when

fellow-pilgrims asked him for assistance. Little children were

continually straying from the path, and without Jacques and his little

dog would inevitably have been lost. Feeble old people were standing

looking with despair at some obstacle that without Jacques's friendly

arm they would have found it impossible to pass. Young men who never

looked where they were walking were continually calling on him for a

hand to help them out of the ditch where they had fallen; and young

girls--well, one would have supposed they had never been given feet

of their own to walk with, from the trouble they were to poor Jacques.

The worst of it was, that when all these good people were well over

their troubles they called Jacques a simpleton for his pains, and

refused to have any intercourse with him, giving him the worst side of

the road and laughing at his old-fashioned staff and scrip, and even

at his little dog, to which they gave many a sly kick. Nor was it

any wonder, for there were many in the company robed in silk, wearing

precious stones and with well-filled wallets by their sides. Jacques

was but human, and often he wished he had never set out for heaven at

all in such company; but even in their bitterest moods neither

Jacques nor the little dog could ever hear a cry of distress without

forgetting all unkindness and rushing at once to the rescue.

These labors exhausted Jacques's strength: the little dog, too, was

worn to a shadow, and so timid from ill-treatment that it was only

when some great occasion called out his mettle that you saw what a

noble little dog-heart he had. He did his best to comfort his master,

but when Jacques's sandals were worn out and his cloak in rags, and

when he looked forward and saw nothing yet of the holy city in view,

though he still tried to go forward, Nature gave way: he sank to the

ground, and the little dog licked his hands in vain to awaken him.

There is a band of angels who each night descend the holy mount

whereon is built the city, in search of such pilgrims as have failed

through fatigue to reach the gate. They are clothed in robes woven of

good deeds, which never lose their lustre, for they are renewed every

day. It was this company which found Jacques in his swoon by the

roadside. One gently touched his tired body, and more than the vigor

of youth leapt through his veins. Another whispered "Come," and he

rose and walked with them. As he moved on with eyes abashed, thinking

of the rents in his garments and regretting their poverty, he noticed

that they too were changed, and were as bright as those of his

companions. "Who has done this?" he said, venturing to address the

one that walked at his right hand. "You wore them always," he answered

with an angelic smile, "but it is this light which shows their

beauty;" and he pointed to that which streamed from the celestial

walls.

There was much applause. I saw Afra wipe a tear from her eye; only, a

thin-faced individual who sat near me whispered that it was too long.

The delicacy and pathos of expression and language it is impossible

to give, and, though old in form, the story was skillfully new in

incident; nor must I forget that the little dog slipped through the

eternal gate with his master. Some one asked the troubadour why he

did not write it out. He shook his head and threw up his hands as

he replied, "I wrote one book and gave it to a literary man for

correction. You should have seen the manuscript when he sent it home:

not a page but was scarred and cut. He called that 'style.' Now, what

did I want with style? I wanted to write as I talked."

"Certainly," said one. "What did you do?"

"I quickly put Monsieur le Rédacteur's style out of my book; then

I published it. George Sand promised to write the preface, but some

busybody told her that I was attacking the whole world, so she would

have nothing to do with it. She was misled: I blamed nothing in my

book but what deserved censure."

Having heard this excellent representation of the ancient minstrel,

we were shortly given a touch of the modern usurper of the name. A

gentleman was present who in the many turns of Fortune's wheel had

once found himself a follower of the burnt-cork persuasion. He gave us

a negro melody with a lively accompaniment on the guitar. A melancholy

Spanish song followed. The company again dispersed into congenial

groups, and in the long twilight you heard the murmur of voices broken

by occasional snatches of melody or the nightingale's song.

* * * * *

"And what do you think of Bohemia?" asked Afra as we returned that

night.

"It is different from what I expected. They are refined, and, though

frank, never rude. I think--"

Afra laughed: "You had unconsciously thought them a set of sharpers;

but there is a great difference between living by your brains and

living by your wits. My dear, you have broken bread with giants

to-day: such men live in another world that they may rule this one."

ITA ANIOL PROKOP.

PROFESSOR AND TEACHER.

The two words that recur most frequently perhaps in the discussion of

matters of education are "teacher" and "professor;" yet there are

no two that are used so carelessly and loosely. It seems as if the

thought that they may not be synonymous seldom, if ever, occurs to

those using them. If one of our writers or speakers upon education

were suddenly called upon to state exactly what he meant by a

"professor" in distinction from a "teacher," he would be at a loss for

an answer. He might reply, after some hesitation, "Why, a teacher is

a man who teaches at a school or an academy, and a professor is a man

who teaches at a college." If he were pressed still more closely, and

asked to give the precise difference between a "school or an academy"

and a "college," it is safe to assume that he would find himself

nonplussed. There are colleges in the country, some large and others

small, some old and others young, some good and others poor; but aside

from the fact that they provide a curriculum of four years and teach

a certain amount of Latin, Greek and mathematics, they do not possess

features enough in common to enable us to define with exactness "a

college." It is not in the power of language to devise a formula so

elastic as to embrace Harvard, Brown, Princeton, Trinity, Cornell

and Michigan University, without at the same time ignoring the

characteristic features of one or the other. Even if we admit that

there is a vague ideal unity underlying the so-called college system,

by virtue of which it is a system and not a mere aggregate, we shall

not make much progress in our search after the proper definition

of the term "professor." The utmost that can be said of our college

system, as a system, is that it stands on a somewhat higher plane than

the schools, that it is supposed to finish a young man's education,

and consequently that the men whom it employs for such a purpose--its

professors--are, or at least ought to be, abler men than the teachers

proper. The difference, then, between professor and teacher is one of

degree, and not of kind. Both teach, and both teach in great part the

same subjects and in substantially the same way; that is, by means

of textbook and recitation. Herein lies the explanation of the

disposition evinced by some of our best schools to call their teachers

"professors." An institution like Phillips Exeter or Andover can

scarcely be said to assume more than it is entitled to in putting

itself on an equality with Hobart College or Racine.

On turning to Germany, we observe no such laxity in the use of the

term "professor." He, and he only, is professor who "professes" to

have made himself eminent in his special branch, and whose claims have

been allowed officially by a university or by the government. He is

not even a teacher in the English or American sense. He is a scholar

and investigator who has produced results worthy of distinction, and

it is upon the strength of those results, and not because of his real

or supposed ability to impart knowledge and stimulate industry among

students, that he receives his call to a university chair.[1]

[Footnote 1: The circumstance that some of the gymnasium-teachers in

Germany have the title of "professor" does not affect the above view.

The title has been expressly conferred upon them by the government as

a mark of special distinction, either for long services or for unusual

scholarship--in most cases for the latter. Where schools of the

highest order are so numerous as they are in Germany, it is not

surprising that they should count among their teachers men of profound

scholarship. The official recognition paid to such men is only an

additional proof of the care with which the title is used. It is given

to the teacher, not so much because he is a good teacher, as because

he has done something over and above school-room work.]

The words of one who is himself a leading professor in one of the

most renowned universities are so explicit upon this point that they

deserve to be translated and carefully studied. Heinrich von Sybel, in

his academic address delivered at Bonn in 1868, says: "The excellence

of our universities is to be found in the fact that they are not

mere institutions where instruction is given, but are workshops

of science[2]--that their vital principle is unceasing scientific

productivity. Hence it is that the state assembles the best men of

all Germany as professors at its universities, so that the phenomenon,

common enough in England and France, of a distinguished savant without

a university chair is with us a very unusual exception. Hence it is

that in appointing to such a chair the first and last demand is for

published evidences of such activity. As for the so-called ability to

teach _(Lehrtalent im formellen Sinne),_ we are satisfied if it is not

utterly and notoriously wanting. The question upon which everything

turns is, Has the candidate given evidence of his capacity for

original investigation and production? Whoever has this capacity

is sufficiently qualified, according to our German notions, for

fulfilling the essential function of university instruction."

[Footnote 2: _Science_ is used here in the broad German sense to

denote any study, whether in the direction of natural phenomena,

history or philosophy, which is pursued systematically and with a view

to eliciting truth.]

In other words, a German professor is a man who has devoted himself

to special and original research--to "science" as Von Sybel uses the

term--and whose discoveries and works give strength and increase of

dignity to the university with which he is connected. He is

appointed upon his merits as a discoverer or an author. The further

consideration--namely, whether he is what we Americans style a "good

teacher"--was not so much as an afterthought in the minds of those who

gave him his call. The explanation of this disregard of the personal

element in the professorial character is obvious. The professor is not

called upon to teach. It does not constitute any part of his vocation

to spur up the sluggish, to keep the idle busy, to give each student

enough to do, and make first principles perfectly clear to all. So far

from coming down to the level of the students, the professor expects

that the students will make every possible exertion to rise to his

level, while he himself can scarcely be said to lend a helping hand.

To the sentimentalist, then, he might appear a very selfish mortal.

But by going beneath the surface of the relation between professor and

student, and examining into its essence, we shall find that it is an

eminently healthful relation, because it is based upon the recognition

of mutual rights and duties. The professor, as a man of science, has a

right to the free direction of his talents. The student has the right

to develop what there is in him without supervision or interference.

He is to make a man of himself by seeking diligently after the truth

in a manly, independent spirit. All that the professor can do for him

is to point out the road to the truth.

This view of the functions of a professor may appear obscure and

exaggerated to one who has not studied at a German university. But it

gives the clew to the entire German system of university education,

and accounts in great part for the high standard of scholarship. Only

in part, for the innate proneness of the German mind to research must

be credited with some share in the result. It is safe to say that

Germany, under any system, would be a land of erudition.

However pleasant it might be to go into the details of the

professional position and character in Germany, it will be more

profitable, and certainly more practical, to compare this fundamental

German idea, as already given, with the salient features of

professional life in America. The American professor, then, is a

teacher. Unless he is the fortunate occupant of an exceptionally

favored chair, his chief, and even his sole, function in the college

body is to teach, in the strictest sense of the term. He has to

prescribe textbooks, assign and hear lessons, grade recitations, mark

examination-papers, submit carefully prepared term and annual reports

to the faculty. When the question of conditioning or dismissing a

student on the ground of defective scholarship comes up for decision,

his opinion must be given and weighed in connection with that of

others, in order that the faculty may strike a fair general average.

The number of hours that he is compelled, by the college curriculum,

to pass per week in the recitation-room is seldom less than fifteen,

and may be as high as twenty. The classes themselves are ill-sorted

and often troublesome, and are usually unwieldy by reason of their

size. The professor's mind must be continually on the watch to prevent

disorder and enforce attention. Besides, as every one knows full well

who has tried it, there is nothing so exhausting as to supply "brains"

to those who either have not received their portion from Nature or

else have squandered it for a mess of pottage. Every professor-teacher

can bear witness to the truism that one hour in the recitation-room

is fully equal, in its drain upon the vital energy, to two passed in

private study or authorship. The sense of responsibility, we might

say, is omnipresent. It does not cease with the recitation: it follows

him to his study, and haunts him with the recollection of absurd

blunders made by young men who should have done better--the

dispiriting reflection that despite his best efforts the stupid and

indifferent will not learn. If to this normal wear and tear and these

every-day annoyances we add the participation in what is

pleasingly styled enforcement of discipline--that is, protracted

faculty-meetings, interviews with anxious or irate parents,

exhortations to the vicious to mend their ways--we shall probably come

to the conclusion that the professor's burden is anything but light.

We all have heavy burdens. But while admitting the universality of the

adage, we are nevertheless at liberty to ascertain if we cannot make

the burden of a particular man or class easier to bear by fitting it

to the back.

Editors, essayists, college presidents and reformers assure us that

we are on the verge of a change, and perhaps a great change, in our

system of higher education. They dilate upon the indisputable fact

that most of our older colleges have made rapid strides within

the past ten years, augmenting their endowments, erecting handsome

buildings, establishing new departments of study and increasing the

number of students. Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Amherst, Princeton,

Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, were never so well off, in

point of money and men, as they are at this day. The inference is, of

course, if so much has been done in ten years, what may we not expect

by the end of the century? The University of Virginia holds its own,

notwithstanding the desolation wrought by the late civil war, and Ann

Arbor and Cornell have shot up with extraordinary vigor. There can be

no doubt that our institutions of learning are full of robust life.

And it is no less certain that this growth of resources is due to

private enterprise. Our colleges have grown because graduates, and

even non-graduates, have taken an interest in them, and endowed them

with a munificence which seems incredible to a Frenchman or a German.

But in studying the aspect of higher education it behooves us not to

lose sight of the fundamental principle that education is something

spiritual in its nature, and that it cannot be gauged by buildings,

by endowments, by the trappings of wealth--in short, by anything

material. Endowments and buildings are only the means; unless the

end to which these means are subservient be clearly perceived and

persistently followed, the means themselves may prove a hindrance

rather than a help. Of this Oxford is a notable proof.

Have, then, the end and aim, the method and agencies, of college

instruction changed essentially within the past fifteen years, or are

they likely to change essentially within the coming twenty-five? In

the year 1770 the greatest genius of Germany entered the walls of the

old university-town of Strasburg, there to complete his education. He

has bequeathed to us a faithful record of his studies, his amusements,

his daily life. Connecting this Strasburg experience with the previous

experience at Leipsic, we know what it meant in the eighteenth century

to be a German student. We know that the professors in those days were

pedagogues in the Anglo-American sense, and that university-life stood

little if at all higher than our own present college-life. But when

Goethe died, in 1832, the universities of Germany had reached their

prime. Since then they have made no gain. It may be doubted if the

professors, on the whole, rank quite so high to-day for originality

and vigor of research as did their predecessors forty years ago.

Wherein lies the secret, then, of this wonderful change wrought in

the brief span of two generations, between 1770 and 1830, and amid

the dire confusion of the great Revolution and the Napoleonic era? The

change was twofold. It consisted, first, in allowing to the professor

the free play of his individuality; second, in providing him with a

properly trained body of students. From the practical recognition

of these two principles, which have nothing to do with wealth and

buildings, proceed the power and glory of the German universities.

Viewed from the English, or even the American point, some of these

universities might be pronounced poor, not to say starvelings. The

buildings are old and out of repair, the professors are scantily paid,

the students are needy, there is a general atmosphere of want and

discomfort. But the work they do is noble, and its nobility consists

in its freedom, its heartiness, its strict devotion to truth.

We are not concerned in this place with the study of the growth of the

German school system that prepares the German student. We have to do

with the professor. Although the gymnasium and the university are

not to be dissevered in actual practice, the one being the necessary

prelude to the other, still we can discuss either one of them

separately with a view to ascertaining its salient features.

The German university allows to the professor the free play of his

individuality. By this is meant that each professor has his specialty,

which he teaches as a specialty and after his own fashion. He has been

appointed because of his specialty, and to the end that he may teach

it. His salary is paid to him, not so much for what he does as for

what he is. It is in a measure the reward for having made for himself

a name. His standing in the university is based, not so much upon the

number of students that he may attract to his lectures as upon the

quality of scholarship that he exhibits and his general repute in

the world of letters. He has the satisfaction of feeling that his

researches, even the most abstruse, can be brought to bear directly

upon his official intercourse with his students. A discovery that he

makes is usually communicated to them in the first instance, before it

finds its way into print. The neglect to take account of this element

of originality in the lectures of a German professor has led to an

unfair estimate of the lecture-system. Americans and English are apt

to regard it as merely the oral inculcation of established truths.

Were that the case, we might be right in questioning its superiority

over our method of teaching by textbook. But it is not the case.

The lecture is the vehicle for conveying the latest discoveries made

either by the professor himself or gleaned by him from the labors of

his colleagues. So far from merely repeating established truths,

it rather promulgates truths in process of establishment. German

university lectures, taken all in all, represent the most advanced

stage of thought. The instances are not infrequent where a professor

refrains from publishing his lectures, lest he should lose his

hearers, who are attracted to him by reports of his originality and

thoroughness.

The evident tendency of such a system is to encourage productivity

and the highest degree of accuracy. A man who has to teach only one

subject, and teach it to such students only as are ready and anxious

to receive it, can afford to take the time for being thorough. The

tendency of the American system, on the other hand, is to beget a

spirit of routine and to check productivity. The professor falls

into a way of contenting himself with meeting the requirements of the

college curriculum. The effects of this curriculum upon the professors

are deeper and farther-reaching than is usually perceived. It is

in accordance with facts to call American professors, as a class,

unproductive. But it would be unjust and inconsiderate to ascribe this

want of productivity to the disposition called laziness. Laziness is

not a national fault of Americans. On the contrary, we are pushing,

active, restless: we yearn, Alexander-like, for something new to

overcome. Our professors are of the same stock as our business-men,

our lawyers, our doctors, our politicians. But the spirit of progress,

if we choose to call it by that name, has been repressed in them. The

spirit of emulation, of aggressive competition, which marks our trade,

our banking, our manufacturing interests, our railroads, and even our

professions, stops at the threshold of our colleges. There is rivalry,

true, between Harvard and Yale, for instance. If the former erects a

handsome dormitory, the latter must have one larger and finer. If the

former establishes a new professorship, the latter must do likewise.

The colleges compete among themselves. But we see no signs of

competition among the professors of a college, or between the

professors of different colleges--competition, be it observed, in the

sense that the individual professor regards his attainments and views

as a proper subject for comparison with the attainments and views of

another professor in the same branch. Once established in his chair,

his individuality is merged in the general character of the college.

His time, his knowledge and his energy are subordinated to the

curriculum. He can teach only so much as may be fitted into his share

of the time and may be suited to the capacities of a mixed audience.

It matters little whether the curriculum be good or bad, whether it

take in a wide or a narrow range of subjects, whether it be behind

or up to the times: so long as it is a real curriculum it tends to

prevent the full assertion of his individual excellence. He may study

for himself, but he cannot teach more than the regulations permit.

However advanced he may be in his specialty, however sincere and

earnest his wish to impart the choicest fruits of his research, he

must admit to himself that there is a point beyond which he is unable

to carry his students. They are borne off to something else; they have

no more time for him; they slip from his hold, perhaps at the very

moment when he flatters himself that he has acquired some formative

influence over them.

If this view of the necessary effect of a curriculum is correct,

it will enable us to set a more accurate value upon the so-called

improvements that have been introduced of late years in our colleges.

These improvements, stripped of the éclat with which they are

invested, will be found to amount to little more than expansions

and slight modifications of a system which remains unaltered in

its fundamental features. New studies have been introduced, such as

physics, chemistry, geology, the share of attention assigned to

modern languages has been increased, a higher standard of admission is

enforced, and the salaries of professors have been raised. But in

all this there is no radical change of the method of instruction. The

establishment of a chair of physics, for instance, can scarcely be

said to enable the professor of Greek to exhibit his attainments

more fully. The professor of Latin does not perceive that his pupils,

because they are now instructed in physical geography, can be carried

by him to a more advanced stage of Latin scholarship. In fact, so far

as the older studies are concerned, those which made up the curriculum

thirty years ago, they seem to be slightly the worse for the recent

improvements. The college course of 1840 or 1850 was a comparatively

simple thing. It covered only a few studies, and those of a

general nature; it taught more thoroughly and with less pretence to

universality; in short, it did its work more after the fashion of a

good school. At the present day the curriculum embraces a much wider

range of subjects--we need only recall to our minds the introduction

of general history, chemistry, physiology and the modern

languages--but the time has not been lengthened by a single year. The

student's time is more broken up than before: the direct influence

exerted by the professor is less. Our recognition of these and kindred

facts, however, should be something more than a vain regret for the

good old past. All these changes are concessions made to the spirit

of the age. Our generation demands--and very rightfully, too--that the

sphere of knowledge be enlarged, that the sciences of Nature receive

sufficient attention. To attempt to undo what has been done, to

restore the curriculum to the antiquated cadre of Latin and Greek,

trigonometry, mental science and rhetoric, would be a reaction as

senseless as hopeless.

Let us be just to ourselves and just to our colleges. We, the public,

clamored for new studies, and the colleges had to meet the demand,

because, by force of circumstances, they were the only places where

the changes could be effected. But in our praisworthy desire for

progress we have not considered sufficiently whether the colleges were

in truth the proper places for innovation; whether we were bringing

in our innovations in the right way and at the right time; whether

we were in a fair way of making our colleges what we seek to make

them--namely, centres of learning. To discuss all these points would

be equivalent to discussing the question of education in all its

phases, from the primary school to the university. For the present

we must limit ourselves to understanding and appreciating fairly the

position of our professors.

That position is not only a trying, but a discouraging one. The

greater part of the professor's time is spent--from the point of

view of pure science we might almost say wasted--in teaching the same

things over and over again. After a few years' practice his round of

hours becomes mechanical. Familiarity with the textbooks and with the

uniformly-recurring blunders of each successive class begets a feeling

of weariness that is not remote from aversion and contempt. So far

as his prescribed official duties are concerned, he feels that he has

nothing more to learn. There being, then, no stimulus from without, he

is open to one of two temptations--either to rest on his past labors,

or, which is far more likely, to keep on studying for himself, but

to keep the results to himself. It is not only more soothing to our

pride, it is juster to our professors, to regard them thus as men who

have hid their lights under a bushel, and also to confess that we, our

institutions and ways of thinking, have made the bushel for them

and held it down over their heads. It is not every man who has the

persistency and stamina of Professor Whitney, for instance, who can

toil for years with beginning classes in French and German, never

losing sight of his real aim, never neglecting an opportunity of

bringing it forward, until at last he achieves the success he has

especially desired, and is acknowledged to be one of the foremost

comparative philologists and Sanskrit scholars in the world. Where a

Professor Whitney may succeed in spite of untoward circumstances, a

dozen will probably fail because of circumstances. We naturally look

to our colleges for the evidences of learning, of enlightenment and

culture. We think of the capital invested in them, of the part they

play in moulding the character of our young men, and we deem it a

matter of course that they should be continually producing something

original and independent. But when we compare them with the German

universities--and the comparison is forced upon us whenever one of our

graduates goes abroad to complete his studies or whenever we look into

a recent German publication--we are forced to exclaim, "What are our

colleges about? Are they incompetent, or asleep?" Neither one nor

the other. Most of our professors do the best they can. But they are

fettered by routine: they are not stimulated and sustained by

the consciousness that their private studies may be made directly

available in the classroom. They lead two lives, as it were--one

as professor, the other as thinker and reader--and there is not the

proper action and reaction between the two.

The remedy is as easy to propose as it would be difficult to apply.

We have only to convert our colleges into universities, our college

instructors into professors after the German model. Let us relegate

all teaching, so called, to the schools, and let us give our

professors permission to expand into veritable scholars discoursing to

young men of kindred spirit. Any one can see at a glance that from

the wish to the accomplishment is a long way. Upon some of us the

consciousness is beginning to dawn that perhaps we have not even taken

the first decisive step. The best that can be said of our colleges is

that they are in a state of transition. We have increased the number

of studies, as well as the number of colleges; we have established

schools of law and schools of science, sometimes independent of,

sometimes co-ordinate with or subordinate to, the college. We have

also established post-graduate courses, in the hope of inducing our

young men to complete their studies at home. Yet every year we see a

larger number going abroad. In those days of golden memory, both for

Germany and for America, when Longfellow was gliding down the

Rhine with Freiligrath, and Bancroft and Bismarck were comrades at

Göttingen, an American in Germany was something of a rarity. In most

instances he was a man of wealth and high social standing, who

looked upon his semester or two as a romantic episode. But now every

outward-bound steamer carries with it one or more who, emerging from

obscurity and poverty, have saved up a few hundred dollars and are

bent upon plain, hard, practical business. "We go," they can be

imagined as saying, "because we can get in Germany what we cannot get

at home. Your schools of science and your post-graduate courses may be

well enough in their way, but they do not give us what we are after,

and we cannot afford to wait until they may be able to give it. Some

of the professors are first-rate men--perhaps just as good as any

we may meet in Germany--but what does their learning, their science,

avail us, so long as they are obliged to withhold from us the best

that they know? They trained themselves in Germany, and if we are ever

to rival them we must do the same."

It is not pleasant to listen to such reasonings, much less to see them

carried into effect. But the defect which they bring to light will not

be cured by closing our eyes to it and trusting to time, the sovereign

healer. Time is a negative factor: it only enables the forces of

Nature to do their positive work. But schools and colleges are not the

product of the elemental forces of Nature: they are distinctively

the work of man as a free agent. If we are free to shape any of our

institutions to suit our needs, we are certainly free to shape our

educational institutions. By having a definite result in view, and

willing its attainment, we may succeed; but if we fail either in

clearness of vision or persistency of will, we cannot expect the

result to come of itself. The present university system of Germany,

which might seem to a careless observer the natural outgrowth

of German life, is the result of hard thinking and strenuous,

well-directed effort. We should not commit much of an exaggeration

were we to call it the deliberate creation of Frederick the Great, Von

Zedlitz and Wolf, who dragged with them Prussia, and the other

German states in her wake. They and their associates and followers,

Schleiermacher and William von Humboldt, clear-headed, iron-willed

men, perceived what was needed, and bent all their energies to the

task. They emancipated the schools from the control of the clergy,

and established the principle that teaching is a distinct vocation,

requiring special training, over which the state has supervision;

furthermore, that the state should pronounce who is fit and who is

not fit for university education, thereby abolishing

entrance-examinations, and putting an end to the ignoble practice on

the part of the universities of lowering the standard for the purpose

of increasing the number of students. They abolished the last vestiges

of the scholastic system by raising the faculty of philosophy from its

position as a quasi-preparatory course to the others, and placing it

on a footing of perfect equality with law, theology and medicine.[3]

They removed all restrictions from the _Lehrfreiheit_, or professional

freedom of instruction, while at the same time they preserved the

right of the state to control indirectly the quality of university

instruction by means of state-examinations for pastors, teachers,

lawyers, physicians and officeholders. Ever since then the university

system of Germany has rested upon a secure and lasting basis.

[Footnote 3: The subordination of the philosophical faculty as a sort

of preparatory course to the others remained in force in Austria until

1850. It is not surprising, then, that Austria should have compared

so unfavorably with Germany in philology, history, philosophy and

literary criticism until within our own times.]

Is the course pursued by Prussia to be regarded as a mere incident in

history, or may it serve as an example and model for us? Prussia is a

monarchy, clothed with some constitutional forms but at bottom a

state where the personal will of the sovereign has always made,

and continues to make, itself felt in the final instance. We are

a republic, or rather a cluster of republics under an imperfectly

centralized national government. It is evident that the agencies and

mode of reform with us must differ from those that have been employed

in Prussia and in the rest of Germany. But it does not follow that

the reform itself is impossible. What has elsewhere sprung from the

autocratic will of a single man and his cabinet may be effected here

through that other force, equally great and perhaps more pervasive,

to which we give the vague name of "popular opinion." We know that

popular opinion in our country is irresistible. It makes everything

bend to it. It broke up the Tweed Ring, seemingly impregnable, in a

single campaign. But this popular opinion is not a natural product: it

is the work of a few men who devote themselves to awakening the sense

of right and wrong and guiding the understanding of their fellows.

But for popular leaders like Mr. O'Conor and Governor Tilden, the

late Tweed Ring might be in power at this day. Education is not

so different from politics but that we can regard it as subject to

similar laws of cause and effect. Our present common-school system is

an off-spring of popular opinion, as that opinion was created and led

to action by a few men. And whether our common schools are to stand

or fall is again becoming a question of the day, and will be decided

according as popular opinion may be swayed by a few zealous friends or

enemies. Our colleges, it may be said, do not occupy the same

relation to the state that our schools do. They are nearly all private

corporations, enjoying vested rights which the state is powerless to

touch. Undoubtedly true, but it is no less true that what cannot be

done directly may be done indirectly. The state need not make so much

as the attempt to lay hands upon college property or to interfere with

college studies. It has only to say, "I, the state, exact such and

such qualifications of all who seek to practice law or medicine within

my limits or to become my officeholders. I establish my own free

colleges and schools of law and medicine, and I proceed to tax

all others at their full valuation." There is not a college in the

country, not even Harvard, that could compete upon such terms. The

state need not even express its sovereign will so precisely. It

can content itself with establishing a university of its own, and

facilitating the direct influence of this university over the public

and private schools. We see the operations of such a system very

plainly in Michigan. Not only does the university at Ann Arbor

overshadow completely the private colleges, but the "union schools,"

administered under its auspices, are--to borrow the expression of one

of its graduates--"killing" the private schools. We may rest assured

that whatever the people of a State or of the United States is

earnestly bent upon having, will come.

Whether all our States are to act as Michigan has done--whether we are

indeed ripe for thorough change--whether a change is to be effected

by direct State action or indirectly by the mere pressure of public

sentiment--whether we have real need of a body of professors and a set

of universities such as Germany possesses--whether we are to make

our higher as well as our primary education non-sectarian,--are all

questions which may rest in abeyance for a long time to come. It is

also possible that one or the other of them may, in legal phraseology,

be sprung upon us at any time. Not to be taken unawares, we have

to bear steadily in mind several fixed principles and to disabuse

ourselves of one misconception.

The misconception is this: that what Germany accomplished in the

eighteenth century we cannot accomplish in the nineteenth, because

circumstances are so very different, chiefly because Germany is an old

country and we are a young country. The circumstances are not so very

different, and the difference, however great it may be estimated, is

in our favor. We are a union of thirty or forty States: in the Germany

of the eighteenth century there were three hundred. Ever since the

adoption of our Federal Constitution we have enjoyed common rights of

citizenship, common laws of commerce, common legal protection. Will

it be necessary to remind the student of history that the Germans have

acquired these blessings only within our own day? We are a nation of

forty millions, rich and prosperous, free to develop our resources.

The Germany of 1775 could count barely twenty millions, its soil was

poorly tilled, its mineral wealth undeveloped, manufactures in an

embryonic state, trade fettered in a thousand ways, the peasantry

brutally ignorant and servile, the national character--to all

appearance--ruined by cruel religious wars, the sense of national

unity blunted by the recollections of a hundred petty feuds reaching

back to the gloom of the Middle Ages, the national taste dominated by

poor French models to an extent that now seems incredible, learning

either dry pedantry or shallow cox-combry. We are indeed a young

country, but we are young in hope; Germany was old, but it was old in

weakness, in poverty, in despondency. Whoever doubts our ability to do

as much as Germany did one hundred years ago, fails to profit by the

teachings of history--overlooks the fact that Germany in 1840 was

only where she had been in 1618. That we should take Germany for our

standard of comparison, rather than England or France, is a postulate

which has one circumstance unmistakably in its favor. Although we are

connected with England by common descent, institutions and language,

although the politics and philosophy of France have exerted

considerable influence over our own, we do not observe our young

men going in numbers to England and France to receive their final

training. Their instinct leads them to Germany. For one American

graduate of Oxford or Cambridge or of the French _écoles_, it would

be easy to count ten doctors of Göttingen or Heidelberg. Our young

men are not attracted to the German universities by such factitious

considerations as cheapness of living or the acquisition of the

language, but by sympathy with German methods and academic liberty.

Some of the most important fixed principles have been already touched

upon, but only one can be developed in this place. It is, that if

we are to establish a system of higher education, we must begin by

recognizing freely and fully the distinction between teacher and

professor. We must perceive the importance of having two sets of

men--the one to teach, the other to investigate; the one engaged in

training boys to learn, the other in showing young men how to think.

When and how this distinction is to be established, in what special

form it is to be embodied, is a secondary matter. The chief thing is

to admit that it is essential and feasible. The young man who returns

after a three years' absence in Germany, exhibiting with dignified

pride his well-earned doctor's diploma, looks of course upon the

institution that conferred it as the _ne plus ultra_. But riper

experience, contact with the sharp corners of American prejudices

and peculiarities, renewed familiarity with our social, political,

commercial and literary life, will gradually convince him that a

German university is not a thing to be plucked up by the roots and

transplanted bodily to American soil. We have rather to take our

native stock as we find it, and engraft upon it a slip from the

German. One trial may fail, another may succeed. Our first efforts

will be like those of a man groping about in the dark. More than

one department in a German university will be of little avail in an

American, and conversely we shall have to create some that do not

exist elsewhere. For instance, in view of the great power exerted by

the newspaper press, it might be desirable to have a course of study

for those who think of taking up journalism as a profession. In such

a course, political economy, constitutional and international law,

English and American history, and the modern languages and literatures

should constitute a full and serious discipline. It is not probable

that the study of philology will ever attract the same attention here

that it does abroad. Our needs lie in the direction of the natural

sciences rather than in the direction of history and linguistics. But

we should be derelict to our duty were we to sacrifice these sciences

of the spirit, as the Germans call them, to the sciences of Nature.

A culture without them would be the bleakest and most repulsive

materialism.

The practical recognition of the difference between teacher and

professor would be a decided step. By the side of it those which

we have already taken would appear insignificant. The addition of

chemistry, geology, or physiology to the previous curriculum does

not change its character, so long as the professors of those branches

instruct after the fashion of the professors of Latin and Greek. The

advantage that the men of natural science have over their colleagues

is one which the nature of the subject brings with it. In order to

teach at all, they must come in close personal contact with their

pupils, and to escape falling behind in their department, where

new theories succeed one another with such rapid bounds, they must

continue a certain amount at least of original research. Supplementing

the present curriculum by post-graduate courses will hardly suffice.

Such courses are open to serious objections. If conducted by the

regular professors, they impose additional burdens upon men who have

already more than enough. If conducted by special professors, they

will tend to raise those professors at the expense of the regular

faculty. A lecturer to graduates must necessarily appear, in the eyes

of the undergraduate, superior to the man who hears recitations and

prepares term-reports. Besides, young men who have passed four years

at one college need "a change of air:" they will develop more rapidly

if brought into contact with new ideas and new instructors. Every

institution has an atmosphere of its own, which ceases after a time to

act upon the student as a stimulant.

There is one additional point that should not be overlooked. A careful

discrimination between the functions of the professor and those of the

teacher would benefit both classes of men. Such has been the effect in

Germany. The gymnasium-teacher has a high sense of the dignity of

his vocation and a keen sense of its responsibilities, because he

perceives that he must bring his labors to a well-rounded conclusion.

He knows that the university does not supplement the gymnasium--that

the university professors do not undertake to make good his

shortcomings. The gymnasial course is a completed phase of training.

It aims at giving the pupil all the general knowledge that he requires

previous to his professional studies. What is lost or overlooked in

the gymnasium cannot be acquired at the university. Hence the peculiar

conscientiousness of the German teacher, his almost painful anxiety to

make sure that his pupils master every subject, his unwillingness to

let them go before they are "ripe." With us the change from school

to college is not an abrupt transition, like that from gymnasium to

university. The college course, certainly during the two lower years

at least, is a continuation of the school course: the same or

similar subjects are taught, and taught in the same way. Hence the

school-teacher is tempted to regulate his efforts according to the

college standard of admission. If he can only "get his men into

college," as the saying is, he thinks that he is doing enough. To say

this of all schools and all teachers would be flagrant injustice.

Not a few of our older schools compare favorably with the best German

gymnasiums, and in the large cities we find schools of even recent

origin that endeavor faithfully to give a well-rounded discipline. But

it remains nevertheless true that our schools, taken as a whole, give

no more than the colleges require, and that only too many of them

give less, trusting to the colleges to be lenient and eke out the

deficiency. Moreover, when we read in the daily papers advertisements

like the following, "Mr. Smith, a graduate of Harvard (or Yale or some

other college, as the case may be), prepares young men for college,"

what inference are we to draw? Simply, that Mr. Smith, having gone

through Harvard or Yale, knows exactly what is required there, and

will undertake to "coach" any young man for admission in two or three

years. Such coaching, if the young man is dull or backward, will

consist in cramming him with required studies, to the neglect of

everything not required. Teaching is not easy work. In many respects

it is more difficult to be a good teacher than to be an original

investigator. Whatever operates to strengthen and elevate the

teacher's position, therefore, must be a gain. The highest

incentive would be the consciousness that his school is not a mere

stepping-stone to another school of larger growth, but the place where

he must in truth prepare the youthful mind for independent study.

JAMES MORGAN HART.

CONTRASTED MOODS.

WANT.

Where is the power I fancied mine?

Can I have emptied my soul of thought?

In yesterday's fullness lay no sign

That to-day would be a time of drought.

What if thought fail me for evermore?

The world that awaits a well-filled plan

Must, railing, cry at my long-closed door,

"He cannot finish what he began."

PLENTY.

Thought dashes on thought within my soul:

Time will not serve for the bounding-line.

I think it would fail to mete the whole

If old Methuselah's years were mine.

Like the famous spring that is sometimes dry,

Then flows with a river's whelming might,

The current of thought now runs so high

It covers the earthy bed from sight.

CHARLOTTE F. BATES.

THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS.

BY MRS. E. LYNN LINTON, AUTHOR OF "PATRICIA KEMBALL."

CHAPTER XXI.

CHANGES.

Four years had come and gone since Mr. Dundas had laid his second

wife in the grave beside his first, and the county had discussed

the immorality of taking cherry-water as a calmant. For it was to

an overdose of this that the verdict at the coroner's inquest had

assigned the cause of poor madame's awful and sudden death; though why

the medicine should have been found so loaded with prussic acid as

to have caused instant death on this special night, when it had been

taken so often before with impunity, was a mystery to which there was

no solution. Not a trace of poison was to be found anywhere in the

house, and no evidence was forthcoming to show how it might have been

bought or where procured. Alick Corfield, who understood it all,

was not called as a witness, and he told no one what he knew. On the

contrary, he burdened his soul with the, to him, unpardonable crime

of falsehood that he might shield Leam from detection; for when his

father, missing the sixty-minim bottle of hydrocyanic acid, asked him

what had become of it, Alick answered, with that wonderful coolness

of virtue descending to sin for the protection of the beloved which is

sometimes seen in the ingenuous, "I broke it by accident, father, and

forgot to tell you."

As the boy had never been known to tell a falsehood in his life, he

reaped the reward of good repute, and his father, saying quietly,

"That was a bad job, my boy," laid the matter aside as a _caput

mortuum_ of no value.

To be sure, he thought more than once that it was an odd coincidence,

but he could see no connection between the two circumstances

of madame's sudden death and Alick's fracture of that bottle of

hydrocyanic acid; and even if there should be any, he preferred not

to trace it. So the inquest was a mere show so far as getting at the

truth was concerned, and madame died and was buried in the mystery in

which she had lived.

Meantime, Leam had been sent to school, whence she was expected

to return a little more like other English girls than she had been

hitherto, and Mr. Dundas shut up Ford House--he went back to the

original name after madame's death--and left England to shake off in

travel the deadly despair that had fallen like a sickness on him and

taken all the flavor out of his life. He had never cared to search out

the real history of that fair beloved woman. Enough had come to his

knowledge, in the bills which had poured in from several Sherrington

tradesmen on the announcement of her marriage and then of her death,

to convince him that he had been duped in facts if not in feeling. For

among these bills was one from the local geologist for "a beginner's

cabinet of specimens," delivered just about the time when he,

Sebastian, had spent so many pleasant hours in arranging the fragments

which madame said represented both her knowledge and her lost

happiness; also one from the fancy repository, which sold everything,

for sundry water-color drawings and illuminated texts, a Table of

the Ten Commandments illustrated, and the like, which sufficiently

explained all on this side, and settled for ever the dead woman's

claims to the artistic and scientific merit with which Mr. Dundas and

the rector had credited her.

Also, certain ugly letters from a person of the name of Lowes, in

London, put him on the track, had he cared to follow it up, of a

deception even worse than that of pretended art or mock science. These

letters, written in the same handwriting as that wherein Julius de

Montfort, her brother-in-law, the present marquis, had told her of

the defalcations of the family solicitor and trustee, called Virginie,

Madame la Marquise de Montfort, plain Susan bluntly, and reminded her

of the screw that would be turned if the writer was not satisfied;

and were letters that demanded money, always money, as the price of

continued silence.

But Sebastian had loved his second wife too well to seek to know the

truth, if that truth would be to her discredit. He preferred to

be deceived; and he had what he preferred. He stifled all doubts,

darkened all chinks by which the obtrusive light might penetrate, kept

his love if not his faith unshaken, caring only to remember her as

beautiful, seductive, soothing, and mourning her as deeply, doubtful

as she had proved herself to be, as he had loved her fondly when he

believed her honest. It was a curious mental condition for a man to

cherish, but it satisfied him, and his regret was not robbed of its

pathos by knowledge.

Now that the four years were completed, the widower had to return to

his desolate home and make the best he could of the fragments of peace

and happiness left to him. Leam was nineteen: it was time for her to

be taken from school and given the protection of her father's house.

It went against the man's heart to have her, but he was compelled, if

he wished to stand well with his friends, and he hoped that the girl

would be found improved from these years of discipline and training,

and be rational and like other people. Wherefore he came home one

dry dull day in October, and the neighborhood welcomed him, if not as

their prodigal returned, yet as their lunatic restored to his right

mind.

During these four years a few changes had taken place at North Aston.

Carry Fairbairn had married--not Frank Harrowby: he had found a rich

wife, not in the least to his personal taste, but greatly to his

profit; and Carry, after having cried a good deal for a month, had

consoled herself with a young clergyman from the North, whom she loved

quite as much as if she had never fancied Frank at all, and spoilt in

the first months by such submission as caused her to repent for all

the years of her life after.

The things of the rectory were much in their old state. Little Fina,

madame's child, was there under Mrs. Birkett's motherly care; but

as the child was nearly six years old now, the good creature's

instinctive love for infants was wearing out, and she was often heard

to say how much she wished she could have kept Fina always a baby,

and, sighing, how difficult she was to manage! She was an exceedingly

pretty little girl, with fair skin, fair hair and dark eyes--willful

of course, and spoilt of course; the only one in the house who took

her in hand to correct being Adelaide. And as she took her in hand too

smartly, Mrs. Birkett generally interfered, and the servants combined

to screen her; the result being that the little one was mistress of

the situation, after the manner of willful children, and made every

one more or less anxious and uncomfortable as her return for their

care.

Alick Corfield was the rector's curate. On the whole, this was the

most important of all the North Aston events which had taken place

during the last four years. Soon after madame's death and Leam's

transfer from home to school Alick had a strange and sudden illness.

No one knew what to make of it, nor how it came, nor what it was, but

the doctor called it cerebral fever, and when the families got hold

of the word they were content. Cerebral fever does as well as anything

else for an illness of which no one knows and no one seeks to know the

cause, and to the origin of which the patient himself gives no clew.

It was a peg, and a peg was all that was wanted.

On his recovery he announced his intention of going to Oxford to read

for holy orders. His mother was piteously distressed, as might be

expected. She feared all sorts of evil for her boy, from damp sheets

and unmended linen to over-study, wine-parties and bold-faced minxes

weaving subtle webs of fascination. But for the first time in his life

Alick stood out against her insistance, and his will conquered hers.

The sequel of the struggle was, that he went to Oxford, took his

degree, read for orders, passed, and that Mr. Birkett gave him his

title as his curate.

It could hardly be said that the relations were entirely harmonious

between the military-minded rector, who held to the righteousness of

helotry and the value of ignorance in the class beneath him, and the

young curate burning with zeal and oppressed with the desire to put

all the crooked things of life straight. The one pooh-poohed the

enthusiasm of the other, derided his belief in humanity and assured

him of failure: the other felt as if he had been taken behind the

scenes and shown the blue fire of which the awful lightning of his

youth was made. Mr. Birkett could not quite forbid the greater

faith, the more loving endeavor which the young man threw into his

ministrations, but he was the Sadducee who scoffed and made the

work heavy and uphill throughout. He gave a grudging assent to the

Bible-classes, the Wednesday evening services at the Sunday-school,

the lectures on great men on the first Monday in the month, which

Alick proposed and established. He thought it all weariness to the

flesh and a waste of time and energy; but the traditions of his order

were strong, if he himself did not share them, and he had to give way

in the end. He consoled himself with the reflection that the boy would

find out his mistake before long, and that then he would know who had

been right throughout.

But even zeal and hope and diligence in his work could not lighten the

persistent sadness which was Alick's chief characteristic now. Gaunt

and silent, with the eyes of a man whose inner self is absent and

whose thoughts are not with his company, he looked as if he had passed

through the fire, and had not passed through unscathed. No one knew

what had happened to him, and, though many made conjectures, none came

near the truth. Meanwhile, he seemed as if he lived only to work, and,

the clearer-sighted might have added, to wait.

For a further local change, Lionnet was tenanted again by a strange

and solitary man, who never went to church and did not visit in

the neighborhood. He was in consequence believed to be a forger, an

escaped convict in hiding, or, by the more charitable, a maniac as yet

not dangerous. North Aston held him in deeper horror than it had held

even Pepita, and his true personality exercised its wits more keenly

than had even the true personality of madame. In point of fact, he was

a quiet, inoffensive, amiable man, who gave his mind to Sanskrit for

work and to entomology for play, and did not trouble himself about his

own portrait as drawn in the local vernacular. Nevertheless, for all

his reserved habits and quiet ways, he had learnt the whole history of

the place and people before he had been at Lionnet a month.

At the Hill things remained unchanged for the ladies, save for the

additional burden of years and the pleasant news that Edgar was

expected home daily. Adelaide, now twenty-four, took the news as a

personal grace, and blossomed into smiles and glad humor of which only

Josephine understood the source. But Josephine held her tongue, and

received the confidence of her young friend with discretion. As she

had never dispossessed her own old idol, she could feel for Adelaide,

and she was not disposed to look on her patient determination with

displeasure. The constancy of the two, however, was very different in

essential meaning. With Josephine it was the constancy that is born of

an affectionate disposition and the absence of rival Lotharios: with

Adelaide it was the result of calculation and decision. The one would

have worshiped Sebastian as she worshiped him now had he been ruined,

a cripple, a criminal even: the other would have shut out Edgar

inexorably from her very dreams had not his personality included

the Hill. With the one it was self-abasement--with the other

self-consideration; but it came to the same thing in the end, and the

men profited equally.

All these changes Sebastian Dundas found to have taken place when he

returned to North Aston with gray hair instead of brown, his smooth,

fair skin tanned and roughened, and his weak, finely-cut, effeminate

mouth hidden by a moustache of a reddish tint, mingled with white.

Still, he was Sebastian; and after the first shock of his altered

appearance had been got over, Josephine carried her incense in the old

way, and found her worship as dear and as tantalizing as ever.

Lastly, as the crowning change of all, Leam came home from school;

no longer the arrogant, embittered child, looking at life through the

false medium of pride and ignorance, saying rude things and doing odd

ones with the most perfect unconsciousness; but well-bred, graceful,

sufficiently instructed not to make patent mistakes, and more

beautiful by far than she had even promised to be. Her very eyes were

lovelier, lovely as they had always been: they had more variety of

expression, were more dewy and tender, and, if less tragic, were more

spiritual. That hard, dry, burning passion which had devoured her of

old time seemed to have gone, as also her savage Spanish pride. She

had rounded and softened in body too, as in mind. Her skin was fairer;

her lips were not so firmly closed, so rigid in line, so constricted

in motion; her brows were more flexible and not so often knit

together; and her slight, lithe figure was perfect in line and

movement. Still, she had enough of her former manner of being for

identity. Grave, quiet, laconic, direct, she was but a modification

of the former Leam as they had known her--Leam, Pepita's daughter,

and with blood in her veins that was not the ordinary blood of the

ordinary British miss.

Her father's artistic perceptions were gratified as he met her at the

station and Leam turned her cheek to him voluntarily with tears in her

eyes. Turning her cheek was apparently her idea of kissing; but if not

too intense an expression of affection, it was at least an improvement

on the old hard repulsion, and Sebastian accepted it as the concession

it was meant to be. Indeed, they met somewhat as foes reconciled, or

rather seeking to be reconciled, and Mr. Dundas did not wish to keep

open old sores. Her cheek, turned to him somewhere about the ear,

represented to his mind a peace-offering: her eyes full of tears were

as a confession of past sins and a promise of amendment. Not that he

understood why she was so much more effusive than of old, but if it

augured a happier life together, he was glad.

As they drove up to the door of the old home, crowded with memories

and associations, a shudder passed over the girl: she grasped her

father's hand in her own almost convulsively, and he heard her say

below her breath, "Poor papa!"

He wondered why she pitied him. The place must surely be full of

memories of her mother for her: why did she say "Poor papa!" to him?

He did not see what she saw--that peaceful September evening, and the

bottle of cherry-water on the table, with the little phial of thirty

deaths in her hand; and now the contents emptied into the harmless

draught; and now madame pale and dead. The whole scene transacted

itself vividly before her, and she shuddered at her memories and her

past self, as always with a kind of vague wonder how she could have

been so wicked, and where did she get the force, the courage, for such

a cruel crime?

For all these four years at school the shadow of that dreadful deed

had been ever in the background of her life; and as time went on, and

she came to a better understanding of morality, it grew clear to her

as a crime. Its consciousness of guilt had broken down her pride, and

thus had made her more malleable, more humble. She could no longer

harden herself in her belief that she was superior to every one else.

Those girls, her companions--they had not had an Andalusian mother,

truly; they did not pray to the saints, and the Holy Virgin took no

care of them; they were Protestants and English, frogs and pigs; but

they had not committed murder. If she should stand up in the middle

of the room and tell them what she had done, which of them would touch

her hand again? which of them speak to her? English and Protestants as

they were, how far superior in their innocence to her, an Andalusian

Catholic, in her guilt! But no one lives with remorse. It comes and

goes gustily, fitfully; but the things of the present are stronger

than the things of the past, else the man with a shameful secret in

his life would go mad.

One of these gusty storms broke over Leam as she passed through the

gates of the old home, and for the moment she felt as if she must

confess the truth to her father and tell him what evil thing she had

done. Yet it passed, as other such storms had passed: the things of

the present took their natural place of prominence, and those of the

past sank again into the background, shadows that never faded quite

away, but that were not actualities pressing against her.

The news of Leam's home-coming created quite a pleasurable excitement

in the neighborhood, and the families flocked to Ford House to

welcome her among them as one of themselves, all anxious to see if

the Ethiopian of North Aston had shed her skin, if the leopardess had

changed her spots. They were divided among themselves as to whether

she had or had not. Some said she was charming, and like any one else,

but others shook their heads, and, like experts in brain disease,

professed to see traces of the old lunacy, and to be doubtful as to

her cure. At the worst, however, here she was--one of themselves whom

they must receive; and common sense dictated that they should make the

best of her, and hope all things till they proved some.

There was one among them whom Leam longed yet dreaded to meet. This

was Alick Corfield. She wondered what he knew, or rather what he

suspected, and she was anxious to have her ordeal over. But,

though Mrs. Corfield came, and was just the same as ever, bustling,

inquisitive, dogmatic, before ten minutes were over having put the

girl through her scholastic facings and got from her the whole of her

curriculum, yet Alick did not appear. He waited until after Sunday,

when he should see her first in church, and so nerve himself as it

were behind the barrier of his sacred office; but after Sunday had

passed and he had seen her in her old place, he called, and found her

alone.

When they met, and she looked into his face and laid her hand in his,

she knew all. He shared her secret, and knew what she had done. It was

not that he was either distant or familiar, cold or disrespectful,

or anything but glad and reverent; nevertheless, he knew. He was no

longer the boy adorer, her slave, her dog: he was her friend, and

he wished to make her feel that she was safe with him--known, in his

power, but safe.

"You are changed," he said awkwardly.

He thought of her as Leam, heard her always called Leam, but he dared

not use the familiar name, and yet she was not "Miss Dundas" to him.

"It is four years since you saw me," she said with a grave smile. "It

was time to change."

"But you are your old self too," he returned eagerly. He would have

no disloyalty done to the queen of his boyish dreams: what worm soever

was at its root, his royal pomegranate flower should be always set

fair in the sun where he might be.

"You seem much changed too," she said after a short pause--"graver and

older. Is that because you are a clergyman?"

Alick turned his eyes away from the girl's face, and looked mournfully

out onto the autumn woods. "Partly," he said.

"And the other part?" asked Leam, pressing to know the worst.

"And the other part?" He looked at her, and his wan face grew paler.

"Well, never mind the other part. There are things which sometimes

come into a man's life and wither it for ever, as a fire passing over

a green tree, but we do not speak of them."

"To no one?"

"To no one."

Leam sighed. No proclamation could have made the thing clearer between

them. Henceforth she was in Alick's power: let him be faithful,

chivalrous, loyal, devoted, what you will, she was no longer her own

unshared property. He knew what she was, and in so far was her master.

Poor Alick! This was not the light in which he held his fatal secret.

True, he knew what she had done, and that his young queen, his ideal,

was a murderess, who, if the truth were made public, would be degraded

below the level of the poorest wretch that had kept an honest name;

but he felt himself more accursed than she, in that he had been the

means whereby she had gotten both her knowledge and the power to use

it. He was the doomed if innocent, as of old tragic times--the sinless

Cain guilty of murder, but guiltless in intent. It was for this, as

much as for the love and poetry of the boyish days, that he felt he

owed himself to Leam--that his life was hers, and all his energies

were to be devoted for her good. It was for this that he had prayed

with such intensity of earnestness it seemed to him sometimes as if

his soul had left his body, and had gone up to the Most High to pluck

by force of passionate entreaty the pardon he besought: "Pardon her, O

Lord! Turn her heart, enlighten her understanding, convince her of her

sin; but pardon her, pardon her, dear Lord! And with her, pardon me."

The man's whole life was spent in this one wild, fervid prayer. All

that he did was tinged with the sentiment of winning grace for her and

pardon for both. In his own mind they stood hand in hand together;

and if he was the intercessor, they were both to benefit, and neither

would be saved without the other. And he believed in the value of his

prayers and in the objective reality of their influence.

For the final changes in the ordering of home and society at North

Aston, the week after Leam returned Edgar Harrowby came from India,

and took up his position as the owner of the Hill estate; and the

child Fina was brought to Ford House, and formally invested with

her new name and condition as Miss Fina Dundas, Sebastian's younger

daughter. Mindful of the past, Mr. Dundas expected to have a stormy

scene with Leam when he told her his intentions respecting poor

madame's child; but Leam answered quietly, "Very well, papa," and

greeted Fina when she arrived benevolently, if not effusively. She was

not one of those born mothers who love babies from their early nursery

days, but she was kind to the child in her grave way, and seemed

anxious to do well by her.

The ladies all bestowed on her their nursery recipes and systems

in rich abundance--especially Mrs. Birkett, who, though glad to be

relieved from the hourly task of watching and contending, was still

immensely interested in the little creature, and gave daily counsel

and superintendence. So that on the whole Leam was not left unaided

with her charge. On the contrary, she ran great risk of being

bewildered by her multiplicity of counselors, and of entering in

consequence on that zigzag course which covers much ground and makes

but little progress.