CHAPTER XV.

It was a long time before he came. Months afterward, one evening when

the express-train rushed into the dépôt, Catharine went down through

the walnut trees into the garden. She stopped in the shadow as a man's

figure crossed the fields. The air was cool--it was early spring. The

clouds in the west threw the Book--house into shadow. Hugh Guinness,

coming home, could see the narrow-paned windows twinkling behind the

walnut boughs. It was just as he had left it when he was a boy. There

was the cow thrusting her head through a break in the fence he had

made himself; the yellow-billed ducks quacked about the pond he had

dug in the barnyard; the row of lilacs by the orchard fence were just

in blossom: they were always the latest on the farm, he remembered. He

saw Kitty, like the heart of his old home, waiting for him. Her white

dress and the hair pushed back from her face gave her an appearance of

curious gentleness and delicacy.

When he came to her he took both her hands in his.

"You will come to your father now?" she said, frightened and pale.

They walked side by side down the thick rows of young saplings. There

was a cool bank overgrown with trumpet-creeper. Inside, he caught

sight of a little recess or cave, and a gray old bench on which was

just room for two.

"Will you stop here and sit down one moment?" she said.

It was nothing to him but a deserted spring-house. It was the one

enchanted spot of Kitty's life.

Half an hour afterward they found old Peter playing on his violin at

the doorstep. Kitty had often planned an effective bringing back of

Hugh to him, but she forgot it all, and creeping up put her hands

about his neck. "Father! look there, father!" she whispered.

The Book-house still stands among its walnuts in Berrytown. But a

shrewd young fellow from New York has charge of it now, who deals

principally in school-books and publications relative to Reforms

and raspberries. Old Peter Guinness still holds an interest in it,

although his chief business is that of special agent for libraries in

buying rare books and pamphlets. He comes down for two or three weeks

in winter to look into matters. But since his wife died he makes his

home in Delaware with his son, who married, as all Berrytown knows,

Kitty Vogdes after she behaved so shamefully to Mr. Muller.

Mrs. Guinness died in high good-humor with her son-in-law. "Doctor

McCall," she assured her neighbors, "was exactly the man she should

have chosen for Catharine. She had known him from a boy, and knew

that his high social position and wealth were only his deserts. A

member--vestryman indeed--of St. Luke's Church, the largest in Sussex

county."

The farm-people in the sleepy, sunny Delaware neighborhood have

elected Kitty a chief favorite. "A gentle, good-natured little woman,

with no opinions of her own. A bit too fond of dress perhaps, and a

silly, doting mother, but the most neighborly, lovable creature alive,

after all."

Miss Muller was down in St. George's lecturing last fall, and made

her mark, as she always does. But the Guinness men were now hopelessly

conservative. She made her home with Kitty.

"A fine woman," old Peter said the morning after she was gone.

"Never knew a woman with a finer mind," said Hugh. "Nor many men."

"She nurses that dog as if it were a baby," said Kitty sharply. "It's

silly! It's disgusting!"

Peter twanged his bow on the porch, looking down over the great

farm-slopes stretching away in the morning light.

"We have everything to make life good to us, Hugh," he said after

Kitty had gone. "And the best thing, to my notion, is an old-fashioned

woman in the house, with no notion of ruling, like that Muller girl

and her set."

Hugh was romping with his boy: "Do you know your first business in

this world, sir? To take care of your mother," glancing at the garden,

where Kitty, in her pretty white dress, was clipping chrysanthemums.

She rules him and the house and their lives absolutely, with but

little regard for justice. But he has never suspected it. She hardly

knows herself that she does it.

REBECCA HARDING DAVIS.

STRANGE SEA INDUSTRIES AND ADVENTURES.

The wrecker on the Florida reefs, who steps from the Peninsula into

the marine world, will tell you there is nothing so like the land as

the water. The crystal atmosphere of this land of meridional spring,

the masses of tawny green in forests of the pine, and the deeper

foliage of the live-oak and wild-orange, even that fire of flower in

phaenogamous plants peculiar to the Peninsula, have their fellowship

and counterparts in the lustrous scenery of the submarine world. Even

the beauty of moon-like lakes and river springs is realized in the

salt envelope of the under-world. Washing the keel of the submerged

vessel, or bursting with a sudden chill through the tepid waters of

the Gulf, with a sensible difference to feeling and to sight, the

diver recognizes a river in the strata, a wayside spring in the

mid-sea fountain.

As the huge volume of many Florida springs, and their peculiar

characteristic of sudden sinking, give them a distinguishable quality,

so the like may be recognized in the fresh-water outbursts of the

neighboring seas. Silver Spring in Marion county tosses out three

hundred million gallons per day; Manatee Spring discharges a less

volume, but is noted for the presence of the sea-cow (_Trichecus

muriatus_); Santa Fé, Econfinna, Chipola and Oscilla are rivers which,

like classic Acheron, descend and disappear with a full head--lost

rivers, as they are aptly named. Pass to the marine world, and

south-west of Bataban, in the Gulf of Xagua (Cuba), a river-fountain

throws up a broad white disk like a flower of water on a liquid

stem, visible on the violet phosphorescence of the Caribbean Sea. Its

impetuous force makes it dangerous to unwary crafts; and, to add to

its recognizable characteristics, in its pure waters is to be found

the sea-cow--found there and in Manatee Bay and Spring alone. To

the geologist such rivers are not mysteries. The lower strata of the

limestone formation are hollowed out into vast cavernous channels

and chambers, through which rolls for ever the hoarse murmur of

multitudinous waters. It would require the conception of a Milton or

the stern Florentine who pictured Malebolge to depict those hollow

passages and lofty galleries, wrought into fantastic shapes by carbon

chisels, and all pure snow-white, yet unrecognizable in the sublime

horror of great darkness.

It is to the animal and vegetable coral the sea owes its arborescent

and floriform scenery, the counterpart of the forest and phaenogamous

beauty that adorns the land. The home of these wonderful creatures

must be visited to realize the beauty of their dwellings and the

wonderful structures they produce. A diver who explored the serene sea

about the Hayti banks gives a beautiful description of the splendors

of the under-world. The white, chalky bottom is visible from the

surface at a depth of one hundred feet. Over that brilliant floor the

filtered sunshine spreads a cloth of gold continually flecked with

sailing shadows and fluctuating tints. The singular clearness of

the medium removes that lovely violet drapery which surrounds like a

pavilion the submarine palace, and allows a wider scope of vision. But

the scene here is not the play of sunbeams or the magic glory of the

prismal waters. Form adds its grace to the loveliness of color and

the play of light and shadow. The structures, the work of astraea,

madrepores, andreas and meandrinas, bear a singular resemblance to

fabrications of the architect. One massive dome or archway, a hundred

feet in diameter, rises to the surface. Its front is carved in

elaborate tracery and crusted with serpulae, looking like the fret-and

flower-work that covers Saracenic architecture. Looking through

this into the violet ambuscade, the eye falls upon colonnades,

light slender shafts a foot in diameter, that seem to support the

paly-golden, lustrous roof. It is curiously like a vast temple,

spreading every way in vault and colonnade, on which religious

enthusiasm or barbaric royalty has worked with a reckless waste of

art and labor. Nor is it the cold and shapely beauty of the stone: it

seems to be a temple built of many-colored glass. To understand the

magnificence of the wonderful structure, the reader must have in

mind the laws affecting light in transmission through water--the

frangibility of the rays, the frequent alternations in dispersion,

reflection, interference and accidental and complementary color. He

must recollect that every indentation, every twist of stony serpulae

or fluting of the zoophyte catches the light and divides and splinters

it into radiance, burning with a fringe of silver fire or flashing

steel. When the mind has conceived of that, there is to add the vivid

beauty of the living coral, its hue of molten colored glass spreading

a radiant mucus over the stony skeleton.

But he has not yet entered into an entire conception of its

loveliness. The arborescent and phaenogamous forms of the coral are to

be noticed. Here is a plant: it has a pale, gray-blue stalk, and all

over it are delicate green leaves, fronds or tentacles, as you please

to call them. There is a fan-shaped shrub whose starry fronds recall

the _Chaemerops serrulata_ of the adjacent shore. The ament, so to

speak, of the _Parasmilia centralis_, the catkin of the sea, recalls

its terrene counterpart. There are other flowers in fascicles and

corymbs. The rose is not lacking, but glows with the radiant beauty of

its petaliferous sister; the columnar trunks of stony trees, covered

with green, flossy mosses, are scattered about; and fresh fountains

gush from the rocks, the white water as clearly distinguishable from

the ultramarine as in the upper atmosphere.[1]

But some varieties of beauty in the coral belong to calmer seas: among

others, the Red Sea is noticed for the exquisite loveliness of its

coralline formations. An American explorer, well known in submarine

diving, once visited that gulf sacred in history, and for a purpose

certainly as singular as anything he found there. It was, to use his

own words, "to fish for Pharaoh's golden chariot-wheels," lost in that

famous pursuit. Is it possible, in the nature of things, for such an

expedition to be made by any but an American? It takes a strong Bible

faith, allied to a simple but strong self-confidence, to start a man

on such an adventure. The curious transforming magic of the sea had

its effect on the Arab dragoman he had engaged to assist him. Having

settled on the exact spot, the swart Arabian descended, but signaled

to return almost immediately, and was brought to the surface in

open-eyed wonder. With all the hyperbole of Oriental imagination he

swore positively to the finding of the chariot-wheels, and added the

jewelry of Pharaoh's household. He was so earnest and so exact in the

matter of the golden wheel, set with precious stones, that, though the

captain dryly asked if he did not meet King Pharaoh himself, taking a

moist throne and keeping court with the fishes, he none the less

had the line attached and drew up--the rude wheel of a Tartar wagon,

transformed under water, but plain and ugly enough above.

"The djin did it," explained the Arab. "It is a palace of the djins,

howadji."

Though the adventurous explorer failed in his design on the defunct

Egyptian, he was rewarded by some compensating views and discoveries.

He saw there the _Xenia elongata_, a shrub-like coral distinguished

for the beauty of its colors, having stellar tentacles, rose-colored,

blue and lilac, an inch in diameter, and looking like flowers of

living jewelry; another with a long cue, like a tress of hair, and

others of allied beauty.

The coral-stone is seen and admired on centre-tables and in jewelry,

but this is really the least pleasing beauty in the organism. The

animal, subjected to exposure, is a brown mucus that dissipates in

the sun and air, but clothed in its native element this glutinous

substance is instinct with radiant life, the bodies being rose-color

and the arms a pure white. Sometimes they grow in clusters and

corymbs, gleaming with a pure, translucent color that fluctuates and

changes in the light

Like colors of a shell,

That keep the hue and polish of the wave.

Our searcher found one unexpected verification of the story in Exodus.

The passage in the Bible does not leave altogether in mystery the

natural means by which the transit was effected. We are told of the

strong east wind and the wall of waters. At the point near Suez a

shoal extends quite across the sea. For several days this wind had

borne back the shallow waters, descending as it did from the rugged

mountain-slopes, and opening or sweeping back the deep as it were.

Then the tide came, thrust forward in accumulated volume, until it

made a real wall of waters that stood up in a huge crested, angry

foam. It was sufficiently like to cause the explorer to apprehend

the possibility of finding Pharaoh by traveling the same watery road.

Another question that has puzzled scholars found a solution in the

American's observation. Smith's _Bible Dictionary_ discusses learnedly

the name of this curious gulf, written [Greek: ae eruthra thalassa]

in the Septuagint. The _Dictionary_ surmises that the name was derived

from the red western mountains, red coral zoophytes, etc., and appears

to give little weight to the real and natural reason which came under

our American's notice. On one occasion the diver observed, while

under sea, that the curious wavering shadows, which cross the lustrous

golden floor like Frauenhofer's lines on the spectrum, began to change

and lose themselves. A purple glory of intermingled colors darkened

the violet curtains of the sea-chambers, reddening all glints and

tinges with an angry fire. Instead of that lustrous, golden firmament,

the thallassphere darkened to crimson and opal. The walls grew purple,

the floor as red as blood: the deep itself was purpled with the venous

hue of deoxidized life-currents.

The view on the surface was even more magnificent. The sea at first

assumed the light tawny or yellowish red of sherry wine. Anon this

wine-color grew instinct with richer radiance: as far as eye could

see, and flashing in the crystalline splendor of the Arabian sun, was

a glorious sea of rose. The dusky red sandstone hills, with a border

of white sand and green and flowered foliage, like an elaborately

wrought cup of Bohemian glass enameled with brilliant flowers,

held the sparkling liquid petals of that rosy sea. The surface, on

examination, proved to be covered with a thin brickdust layer of

infusoriae slightly tinged with orange. Placed in a white glass

bottle, this changed to a deep violet, but the wide surface of the

external sea was of that magnificent and brilliant rose-color. It was

a new and pleasing example of the lustrous, ever-varying beauty of the

ocean world. It was caused by diatomaceae, minute algae, which under

the microscope revealed delicate threads gathered in tiny bundles, and

containing rings, like blood-disks, of that curious coloring-matter in

tiny tubes.

This miracle of beauty is not without its analogies in other seas.

The medusae of the Arctic seas, an allied existence, people the

ultramarine blue of the cold, pure sea with vivid patches of living

green thirty miles in diameter. These minute organisms are doubly

curious from their power of astonishing reproduction and the strange

electric fire they display. Minute as these microscopic creatures

are, every motion and flash is the result of volition, and not a mere

chemic or mechanic phosphorescence. The _Photocaris_ lights a flashing

cirrus, on being irritated, in brilliant kindling sparks, increasing

in intensity until the whole organism is illuminated. The living

fire washes over its back, and pencils in greenish-yellow light its

microscopic outline. Nor do these little creatures lack a beauty

of their own. Their minute shields of pure translucent silex are

elaborately wrought in microscopic symbols of mimic heraldry. They are

the chivalry of the deep, the tiny knights with lance and cuirass, and

oval bossy shield carved in quaint conceits and ornamental fashion.

Nor must we despise them when we reflect upon their power of

accretion. The _Gallionellae_, invisible to the naked eye, can, of

their heraldic shields and flinty armor, make two cubic feet of

Bilin polishing slate in four days. By straining sea-water, a web of

greenish cloth of gold, illuminated by their play of self-generated

electric light, has been collected. Humboldt and Ehrenberg speak of

their voracity, their power of discharging electricity at will, and

their sporting about, exhibiting an intelligent enjoyment of the life

God has given to them. Man and his works perish, but the monuments of

the infusoriae are the flinty ribs of the sea, the giant bones of huge

continents, heaped into mountain-ranges over which the granite and

porphyry have set their stony seal for ever. Man thrives in his little

zone: the populous infusoriae crowd every nook of earth from the

remote poles to the burning equatorial belt.

As the coral, in its soft, milky chalk, gives a name to tropical seas,

so also it is a question to my simplicity if the Yellow Sea, Black Sea

and White Sea do not owe their color and name, in part at least, to

microscopic infusoriae. One of these, the Yellow Sea, is very similar

in many characteristics to our beautiful southern gulf, and there

is connected with it an incident or two illustrative of submarine

adventure which is the partial purpose of this desultory sketch.

About the time our American was investing in Pharaoh's golden

chariot-wheels an East Indiaman was trading its way from the English

docks, eighteen weary weeks' sail by seamen's law, and more tedious by

delays. They exchanged for bullion on the Gold Coast; for bullion

and bad Cape brandy at Good Hope to sell to the Mohammedans, who are

forbidden to drink it. At Bombay and Calcutta they exchanged bullion

and brandy for opium to sell to the Chinese, who are forbidden to buy

or use it. Whether the coolie trade was included in its iniquities

or not, I cannot say. Very possibly that was the return cargo. From

Ceylon they proceed to Siam, and thence to Hong-Kong, where they drop

anchor in the offing, and by a special custom the cargo is sold and

paid for in sycee silver before disfreighting, and the bullion is in

the safe of the huge smuggler, although the opium has not yet been

removed. The Chinese restrictive laws are very severe; but when we

note that ninety thousand gallons of confiscated whisky were seized in

godly Massachusetts in one year, we can infer the difficulties in the

Maine law of the Celestials. The custom is for a hong, a smuggler in a

Chinese junk, to draw up beside the English contrabandist and transfer

the cargo in the outer harbor.

It is afternoon, and the great slumbering ocean breathes, but not with

the quick, palpitating tide of the Atlantic. The smuggler sits on the

oleaginous sea, tinged to ochreous yellow, waiting for evening and the

confederate junk. The tropic twilight comes on swift red-golden wings

that fan the vivid stars to brightness, and the rising tide breaks the

surface into wrinkles of phosphorescent fire. High over head is the

wide, unbroken canopy of the Pacific sky, and the gush of a larger

moon than ours fills all the sphere with splendor as the huge ship

stirs lazily in its Narcissus poise over its own reflection. There

is a reddish glow in the western horizon over Hong-Kong, a fainter

glimmer west by south over Macao, and farther west and north the

reflected glories of the sacred city of Canton. The three make a

semicircular crescent, like a great floating moon, on the horizon. A

coral islet juts out between the cities under which the huge smuggler

affects to play "I spy"--only affects, for she does not care for the

authorities she bribes nor the laws she despises.

But the wind draws up the curtain of cloud by strands of rainy

cordage, and men aloft are loosing the reefed topsail, bracing the

after-yards and setting them for a run in on the larboard tack. They

handle gaskets, bunt-lines, leech-lines, fix her best bib and spencer,

like a country girl for a run up to town. Men are swarming about the

yards and rigging. That is not all: Lascars, stevedores, supercargoes,

the hong merchants, agents, are all busy breaking bulk. The India

opium is covered with petals of the plant and stowed in chests lined

with hides and covered with gunny; and these cases are locked in by

stays, spars and bulkheads to prevent jamming. Helter-skelter and

confusion alow and aloft, on the yards, rigging, deck, between decks

and under hatches. The captain and purser are gloating over the sycee

silver, for the Chinese government is as jealous of its exportation

as of the importation of opium; and the sky and the sea are dark and

angry. In a slovenly way the sails are trimmed, and she edges clumsily

around the point with the bullion and opium, the full freight and

gains of a year's voyaging and trading. Half an hour or an hour hence

she will be free, and the junk dropping down to sea with the drugs in

her. All at once a shriek or yell of "Hard aport!" and a great

iron outward-bound steamer from Hong-Kong bursts into the unwieldy

Chinaman, goes crunching through her like ripping pasteboard; tears

her open; snarls through steamy nostrils and cindery fiery mouth, and

growls over her wreck. And the sodden, stupefied merchantman, as if

drunk with opium, goes yelling and staggering with her sleepy drugs to

the bottom, and stays there, sycee silver and all.

From pricking his way across the Tartar plains, and probing in the

Dead Sea and eating its fruits, just to know that living crustaceae

could be found in one and pulpy flesh in the other, our Launfal,

looking for the Sangreal in chariot-wheels, wound his devious way to

the Flowery Kingdom, having tried a stroke or two at pearl-diving, and

given some valuable hints, that were wasted, in Red Sea fishing and

the Suez Canal. The sleepy Celestial seasons had gone flowering their

way to paradise, and the opium-smuggler and her sycee silver lay safe

and swallowed in ribs and jowl of quicksand. Our American proposed to

have it up by the locks. Two things said Nay--the coral insect, which

was using it in its architectural designs, and the hungry quicksand.

Worst of all, the American could not find it. They hid the bulky

vessel in hills of sand, and after two months' labor in submarine

armor the speculator was beaten. "Get a coolie," said a resident China

merchant, and he did.

Every seaport city of China is a twin. It is two cities--one inland,

narrow-streeted, paved with rubble stones; the other at sea, floating

on bamboo reeds. The amphibious inmates of the marine town never

go ashore, but are a species of otter or seal. Besides, they are

first-class thieves, as well as cowardly, cruel pirates and wreckers.

They will steal the sheathing from a copper-bottomed vessel in broad

daylight, and at night a guard-boat is necessary for protection. They

will defy a sentry on shipboard--steal his ship from under him while

he is wondering what he is set to guard. They are all expert divers,

as familiar with the sea-bottom as with their own ugly little hovels.

Such a native was found, and for a dollar spotted the submerged vessel

in her matrix of sand and coral.

"Now set a guard-boat," said the Englishman, "or he will steal the

line, to get another dollar for finding the smuggler again."

But the want of experts defeated the plan, after all. It was necessary

to use a petard to lay bare the treasure, and no one had the necessary

skill. When the American consented to lost time and defeat the cyclone

threw another spoil in his way. The East like the West Indies is the

brooding-place of storms, which in gyratory coils, like a lasso thrown

wide and large, go twisting north by west. It caught a French frigate

in the loop, and flung her poor bones on the coral reefs, and the

hungry sand absorbed her. It is a peculiarity of those seas. But she

was found, and the petard, like a huge axe wielded by a giant's arms,

cut into her treasure-house and rescued it. The American's expenses

for a journey round the world were paid.

I have heard a sufficiently incredible story of a man submerged in

a Chinese junk and under water twelve hours, yet taken out alive. A

Chinese junk is the nightmare of marine architecture. It is owned

in partnership by a company, but there is this difference from an

ordinary charter-party. Each man owns his share or allotment of the

vessel, and it is divided off into actual compartments or boxes made

water-proof; and each one of these pigeon-holes the hong or merchant

owns and stocks to suit himself. All open out upon the upper deck,

and are battened down--sometimes with a glass skylight if used as a

chamber. The structure in junk form is the thing's proper registry,

since any departure from the ancient model would subject her to heavy

taxation as an alien vessel. [2] It is a very effectual mode of

preventing any improvement in shipbuilding among the Chinese.

One of these clumsy arks went on the rocks in a typhoon, and was

covered over her deck, leaving, however, the projecting skylight on

or near a level with the surface. The hong was in this cuddy-hole,

frantic between personal loss and personal peril. Suddenly there was a

jar and a crash, and the sea beat over her. Fortunately, the skylight

was closed water-tight, but, unfortunately, some of the spars and

rigging blocked up the exit, even if he had dared the venture. The

bolts of the sea barred him in.

But Chinese wreckers and Chinese thieves are on the alert. Wattai, or

some such queer piratical Celestial with devilish propensities, went

for the spoil, settling the salvage by arithmetic of his own. The

wreck was removed from the skylight, and under the water, in that

dense chamber, stagnant with mephitic air, the bruised, stupefied hong

was found.

As is apparent from a previous example, the tendency of the sea-sand

to absorb and conceal a sunken vessel is one of those difficulties

that beset the explorer. But for that the recovery of treasure would

be more frequent, the profession or business more lucrative. The

number of vessels sunk annually, we learn from Lloyd's statistics, is

one hundred thousand tons to the English commercial marine; and out of

551 vessels lost to the royal navy, 391 were sunk. Sir Charles Lyell

estimates that there might be collected in the sea more evidences of

man's art and industry than exist at any one time on the surface of

the earth. But while the sea preserves, it hides. An example of the

kind occurred in the wreck of the Golden Gate, a California steamer

heavy with bullion. It occurred during the war, and the only expert

diver within reach was an expatriated rebel. He had been a man of

fortune, but, venturing too rashly in the Confederacy, he lost by

confiscation and perhaps persecution. However, he was the man for the

insurance companies, and a treaty was concluded, allowing him sixty

per cent. salvage.

The vessel had gone down in tide water. The persistent sea had rocked

and rocked it, and washed the tenacious quicksands about it, and

finally concealed it. The search for it was long and tedious, and

once given up or nearly given up. But as the disappointed diver was

preparing to ascend his foot touched something firm, which proved to

be a part of the wooden frame of the ship.

But even when found the difficulties had only begun. The tenacious,

elastic sand defied all tools or leverage: no petard could blast so

fickle and treacherous a substance. Wit and ingenuity can devise where

ordinary art or engineering has failed. The diver took a lesson from

the neighboring gold-miner, whose hydrostatic pump chisels away the

mountain-side to lay bare the mother quartz. Fitted with such an

engine, he swept the silted sand from the deck of the prize, and dug

it out of the elastic matrix after the fashion of Macduff's birth.

By a great misfortune, incipient jealousies and the eager spirit of

covetousness now showed themselves. It was at first whispered, and

then asseverated, that if the bullion was once recovered the rebel

might whistle for his sixty per cent. salvage. It was a bitter, bad

time--a time of mistrust and suspicion--and the plan of defrauding

the diver was only too feasible. He would be involved in a suit with

a wealthy company at a time when prejudice, if not the form of law,

regarded him as having forfeited a citizen's right. It placed him in

a difficult position--more difficult because he could get no safe

assurance, and was evidently suspected and watched. The diver

concluded that his only way to secure his sixty per cent. salvage was

to take it.

So it was that, with something of the feelings of the

resurrectionists, a bold, dark party went to rob the charnel-house of

the sea, to spoil it of its golden bones and wedgy ingots of silver.

They chose a mirky night, when the thick air seemed too clotted and

moist to break into hurly-burly of storm, and yet too heavy and

dank to throw off the black envelope of fog and cloud. The black,

oleaginous water seemed to slope from the muffled oar in a gluey,

shining wave, and the heavy ripple at the bow of their boat parted in

a long, adhesive roll, sloping away, but not breaking into froth or

glisten of electric fire. The air and the sea seemed brooding in a

heavy, hopeless misery, and the strange sense of plundering, not the

living, but the dead, as if the sunken vessel was a huge coffin, was

upon them. With that cautious sense of superstitious dread choking

their muttered whispers, they reached the spot and prepared to

descend. The task of sinking through that pitchy consistence, into the

intricacy of that black, coffin-like hold, among the drowned corpses,

to do a deed of doubtful right, must have intensified the horror of

great darkness and that sublimity of silence that in the under-sea

peoples the void shadows with horrible existences and fills the

concave with voices. But it was done; and with trembling eagerness the

weighty ingots, the unalloyed bars, were safely shipped, loading down

the boat. Then louder and louder came the dash of oars. For a few

moments they felt the way with muffled stroke into the shrouding

shadows. But practiced ears caught the softened roll in the rollocks,

and keen eyes marked the shadowy boat in the deepening gloom. It must

be the skilled oar and adroit steering that saves them now, but

not far away lie the long shadows of the shelving coast and its

black-bearded forest. The swing of the oars became bold, open and

exciting, and angry challenges passed. But the burden of the heavy

gold fought against them, like the giant's harp calling Master!

Master! on the shoulders of flying Jack of the Bean-stalk. The light,

trim craft of the pursuers edged upon them, and the shadow of an angry

struggle in the pitchy, reeking night gloomed over them. "No, no,"

said the leader: "no bloodshed for the cursed stuff! Here, give me a

lift;" and with a heave and plunge the massy rouleaux splashed into

the water, and the boat rose lighter with an easier conscience. The

sea shut close-fisted over its own, while the pursuing boat paused and

eddied about it, as if held to the treasure by invisible, impalpable

strands. The pursuit was abandoned, and the betrayed or treacherous

diver escaped. But busy rumor reports that he returned at leisure to

the spot, and that the bullion of the Golden Gate went to replenish

the forfeited fortune of the bold ex-rebel. Believe as you like, good

reader.

The sea-sand, in its industrious zeal in covering up memorials of

man's art and industry, is often curiously assisted by the zoophytes

and vegetation of the ocean, as well as guarded in its labor by

abnormal monsters of piscine creation. An example of this occurred

in an amusing venture after Lafitte's gold. While the Gulf coast of

Western Louisiana is fortified, in its immature _terre tremblante_, by

the coral reefs and islets, it has the appearance of having been torn

into ragged edges by the hydrostatic pressure of the Gulf Stream. On

one of these little islets or keys, hard by Caillon Bay, the rumor

went that the buccaneer had sunk a Spanish galleon laden with pieces

of eight and ingots of despoiled Mexico. The people thereabout are

a simple, credulous race of Spanish Creoles, speaking no English,

keeping the saints' days, and watching the salt-pans of the more

energetic but scarcely more thrifty Americans with curious wonder.

They chanced in their broken tongue to commit the story of the

treasure to a diver of an equally simple faith, who set about

putting it to more practical use than to gild an hour with an old

legend. They told how the spook of the Spanish captain haunted the

wreck, and that the gold was guarded by a dragon in the shape of a

monstrous horned and mottled frog, or some other devil of the sea,

to which the diver did seriously incline, but not to make him give

up the undertaking. He prudently, however, consulted with an old

Indian witch, and so received the devil's good word, and piously

got a bottle of holy water from the priest, and thus was well fenced

in above and below.

But his coadjutors were inexperienced, and perhaps his own courage

was of that saccharine character that gets oozy and slushy in moist

perils. When descending with his leaded boots on the dark green

outline of sea mosses that in the clear Gulf invested the vessel in a

verdurous coat, by some mistake he was let down with a slip, and went

hurtling through the rotten planks, losing his holy water and sending

his witch's wand--well, to its original owner. He crushed through,

and the infinite dust of infusoriae and diatomaceae choked his vision.

The _Teredo navalis_, whose labors are so destructive in southern

seas, had perforated the old hulk, and converted the vessel into a

spongy mass of wood, clay and lime. Innumerable algae and curious

fungi of the sea, hydroids, delicate-frost formed emerald plumuluria

and campanuluna, bryozoa, mollusks, barnacles and varieties of coral

had used it as a builder's quarry and granary. As the geologist finds

atom by atom of an organism converted into a stony counterfeit, these

busy existences had preserved the vessel's shape, but converted the

woody fibre to their own uses. He could see nothing at first but a

mixture of green and ochreous dust, through which tiny electric fires

went quivering and shaking. In the confusion he lost the signal line,

and had no way of making his condition known. Plunging about as the

sea dust began to settle, and already more intent on finding the

life-line and getting out of that than of securing Lafitte's gold,

he observed some spectators not pleasant to look upon. A lobster or a

crab is much pleasanter upon the table than in the sea, and there were

other things he knew, and some he believed, might not take his hasty

visit pleasantly. There was the horseshoe-fish with ugly strings

hanging from his base, disagreeable arachnides, strange star fish and

their parasites, and, curiously, a large wolfish fish that had built

a nest and was watching it and him--watching him with no agreeable

or timid expression in its angry eyes. He was just expecting Victor

Hugo's devil fish to complete his horror when a sudden, sharp,

bone-breaking shock struck him from an electrical eel or marine

torpedo. This was a real and sensible danger, and as he struggled to

ascend the hulk to the rotten half-deck, the spongy substance

gave way, the treacherous quicksand, with its smooth, tenacious

throat-clutch, slid down and caught him. The danger was real and

imminent, when his companions above, observing the slide, drew him

up. And that, I believe, was the first and last attempt to levv on

Lafitte's gold.

But the experience of Pharaoh and the danger of our rambling wrecker

are not the only instances of the wall of waters or the destruction it

causes. Nine days after a storm in the Gulf, a traveler, finding

his way from the salt-pans of Western Louisiana, took a little

fishing-craft. There was that fresh purity in the air and the sea

which follows the bursting of the elements. The numerous "bays" and

keys that indent the shore looked fresher and brighter, and there

was that repentant beauty in Nature which aims to soothe us into

forgetfulness of its recent angry passions. The white-winged sea-birds

flew about, and tall water-fowl stood silently over their shadows like

a picture above and below. The water sparkled with salt freshness, and

the roving winds sat in the shoulder of the sail, resting and riding

to port.

The little bark slipped along the shores and shallows, and in and out

by key and inlet, seeing its shadow on the pure white sand that seemed

so near its keel. The last vestige of the storm was gone, and the

little Gulf-world seemed fresher and gladder for it. The tropical

green grasses and water-plants hung their long, linear, hairlike

sheaths in graceful curves, and patches of willow-palm and palmetto,

in many an intricate curve and involution, made a labyrinth of

verdure. The wild loveliness of the numerous slips and channels, where

never a boat seemed to have sailed since the Indian's water-logged

canoe was tossed on the shadowy banks, was enhanced by the vision of

distant ships, their sails even with the water, or broken by the white

buildings of a sleepy plantation in its bower of fig and olive and

tall moss-clustered pines.

Suddenly the traveler fancied he heard a cry, but the fishermen said

No--it was the scream of water-fowl or the shrill call of an eagle far

above dropping down from the blue zenith; and they sailed on. Again

he heard the distant cry, and was told of the panther in the bush and

wild birds that drummed and called with almost human intonation; and

they sailed on again. But again the mysterious, troubled cry arose

from the labyrinth of green, and the traveler entreated them to go in

quest of it. The fishers had their freight for the market—-delay would

deteriorate its value; but the anxious traveler bade them put about

and he would bear the loss.

It was well they did. There, in the dense coverts of the sea-swamps,

amid the brackish water-growths and grasses, they found a man and

woman, ragged, torn, starved. For nine days they had had no food but

the soft pith of the palmetto, coarse mussels or scant poison-berries,

their bed the damp morass, and their drink the brackish water; and

they told the wild and terrible story of Last Island.

Last Island was the Saratoga and Long Branch of the South, the

southern-most watering-place in the Gulf. Situated on a fertile coral

island enriched by innumerable flocks of wild-fowl, art had brought

its wealth of fruit and flower to perfection. The cocoanut-palm,

date-palm and orange orchards contrasted their rich foliage in the

sunshine with the pineapple, banana and the rich soft turf of the

mesquit-grass. The air was fragrant with magnolia and orange bloom,

the gardens glittering with the burning beauty of tropical flower,

jessamine thickets and voluptuous grape arbors, the golden wine-like

sun pouring an intoxicating balm over it; graceful white cottages

festooned with vines, with curving chalet or Chinese roofs colored

red; pinnacled arbors and shadowy retreats of espaliers pretty as a

coral grove; and a fair shining hotel in the midst, with arcades and

porches and galleries--the very dream of ease and luxury, as delicate

and trim as if made of cut paper in many forms of prettiness. Here was

the nabob's retreat; in this balmy garden of delight all that luxury,

art and voluptuous desire could hint or hope for was collected; and

nothing harsh or poor or rugged jarred the fullness of its luxurious

ease.

Ten nights before its fragrant atmosphere was broken into beautiful

ripples by the clang and harmony of dancing music. It was the night of

the "hop." The hotel was crowded. Yachts and pleasure-vessels pretty

as the petals of a flower tossed on the water, or as graceful shells

banked the shores; and the steamer at twilight came breathing short,

excited breaths with the last relay, for it was the height of the

summer season. In their light, airy dresses, as the music swam

and sung, bright-eyed girls floated in graceful waltzes down the

voluptuous waves of sound, and the gleam of light and color was like a

butterflies' ball. The queenly, luscious night sank deeper, and lovers

strolled in lamp-lighted arcades, and dreamed and hoped of life like

that, the fairy existence of love and peace; and so till, tired of

play, sleep and rest came in the small hours.

Hush! All at once came the storm, not, as in northern latitudes, with

premonitory murmur and fretting, lashing itself by slow degrees into

white heat and rain, but the storm of the tropics, carrying the sea

on its broad, angry shoulders, till, reaching the verdurous,

love-clustered little isle, it flung the bulk of waters with all its

huge, brawny force right upon the cut-paper prettinesses, and broke

them into sand and splinters. Of all those pretty children with blue

and with opalescent eyes, arrayed like flowers of the field; of all

those lovers dreaming of love in summer dalliance, and of cottages

among figs and olives; of all the vigorous manhood and ripe

womanhood, with all the skill and courage of successful life in

them,--not a tithe was saved. The ghastly maw of the waters covered

them and swallowed them. A few sprang, among crashing timbers, on a

floor laden with impetuous water--the many perhaps never waked at

all, or woke to but one short prayer. The few who were saved hardly

knew how they were saved--the many who died never knew how they were

slain or drowned.

It has twice been my fortune in life to see such a storm, and to know

its sudden destruction: once, to see a low, broad, shelving farm-house

disappear to the ground timbers before my eyes, as if its substance

had vanished into air, while great globes of electric fire burst down

and sunk into the ground; once, to see a pine forest of centuries'

growth cut down as grass by the mower's scythe. I do not think it

possible to see a third and survive, and I do not wish my soul to be

whirled away in the vortex of such a storm.

At noon or later, after the ruin of Last Island, a gentleman of a name

renowned in South-western story found himself clinging to a bush in

the wild waters, lashed by the long whips of branches, half dead

with fatigue and fear. For a time the hurly-burly blinded and hid

everything, and the long roll rocked and tore at him in desperate

endeavor to wrench loose his bleeding fingers. The impulse of the wind

and storm at such a time is as of a solid body, and there is a look

of solidity in the very appearance of the magnificent force. But as

it abated he thought he heard a faint cry, and looking around he saw a

poor girl in the ribbons of her night-dress clinging to a branch, and

slipping from her feeble hold. Tired as he was, and wild and dangerous

as the attempt might be, he did not dare to leave her to perish.

Choosing his time in a lull, he struck out to the bush, and reached it

just as her ebbing strength gave way. He took her in his sturdy arms,

and, clinging with tooth and nail, stayed them both to their strange

anchorage. Faint, half conscious, disrobed as she was, in the sweet,

delicate features, the curve of the lip, and the raven tresses clothed

in seaweed, he recognized the Creole belle of last night's hop. He

cheered and encouraged her, pointing out that the storm was abating,

had abated. It could not be long until search-boats came, and while he

had strength to live she should share it. It proved true. Generous and

hardy fishers and ships had come at once to the scene of disaster, and

were busy picking up the few spared by wind and wave. They found the

two clinging together and to that slight bush, and took them off,

wrapping them in ready, rough fishermen's coats. The reader can see

the end of that story. A meeting so appointed had its predestined

end in a love-match. So we leave it and them: the rest of their lives

belongs to them, not to us.

The pair found by our fishing-smack were a wealthy planter and his

wife. For nine days of starvation and danger they had clung together.

When I think of the husband's manly care in thus abiding by the wife,

I find it hard to reconcile it with the fact that he only valued his

life and hers at a few dollars--not enough to compensate the traveler

for the loss incurred as demurrage to the fishermen.

Now Last Island is but a low sandy reef, on which a few straggling

fruit trees try to keep the remembrance of its bygone beauty. It is

as bare and desolate as the bones of those who filled its halls in the

cataclysm of that dreadful night--bones which now waste to whiteness

on sterile shores or are wrought into coral in the under-sea.

WILL WALLACE HARNEY.

[Footnote 1: The difficulty, I am aware, in venturing on a description

is, that it will appear rather a fever of fancy than an accurate

chromoscope. I can only point to the fact that the revelation of the

intense beauty of the sea has in recent years fallen rather to the

naturalist than the poet, the accurate and scientific prose of the

former surpassing the idealization of the latter.]

[Footnote 2: By recent provision the Chinese are

allowed to buy foreign vessels.]

POSEY'S NUGGET.

When the California "gold fever" broke out in the spring of 1849,

Doctor Hanchett was living at Clarksville in Southern Indiana. Doctor

Hanchett, it should be stated, had received his professional title not

by the favor of any medical college or other learned institution, but

through the simpler and less formal method that obtains among the free

and generous people amongst whom his lines were cast. The process may

be explained in a few words. In the fall of 1846 a recruiting station

was established at Vicksburg to enlist volunteers for the war with

Mexico, and Hanchett, at that time a resident of Vicksburg, and

laboring in a profession--the saltatorial, to wit--a shade less

illustrious than that to which he was so soon to attain, was the first

man in the city to enlist. This momentous circumstance procured

for him not only the prompt recognition of a patriotic press, which

blazoned his name abroad with so many eccentricities of spelling

that he came near losing his identity, but also gave him a claim in

courtesy to such a position in the organization of his company, within

the grasp of the mere high private, as he might select. After due

deliberation he chose that of company commissary--an office unknown,

I think, to the _United States Army Regulations_, but none the less

familiar to our volunteer service. To this post he was promptly

appointed by his captain; and, thus placed in the line of promotion,

he rose rapidly till he attained the rank of hospital steward. The

thing was done. Hanchett was Doctor Hanchett from that day, and the

title was very much the larger part of the man ever after. How he had

lived for forty years or more without it is still a mystery.

When the war was over, Doctor Hanchett stranded upon the northern bank

of the Ohio, in the State of Indiana. As a returning brave he was,

naturally, quite warmly received. As a veteran not unwilling to

recount his adventures by flood and field, he speedily became famous

as the hero of many deeds of valor and of blood. He had been assistant

surgeon of his regiment, it appeared, but nevertheless had fought in

the ranks in every important engagement of the war from Monterey to

Churubusco, and the number of men who had fallen by his own hand from

first to last he could not undertake to estimate. Though traces of a

somewhat lively imagination might be detected in most of the doctor's

stories, there is really no good reason to doubt that he spoke the

simple truth when he averred that with his red right hand he had mowed

down men like grass, for he actually retained the position of hospital

steward throughout the whole term of his service.

Finding himself after the lapse of a few weeks not without honor in

this Indiana town, he struck out suddenly one day a brilliant idea:

he would devote his remaining years to the practice of the profession

into which Fortune had so kindly inducted him. He hired a house, hung

out his banner, and wrote to his wife and daughter, who had remained

at Vicksburg, to come on immediately to his new home, as his fortune

was now made.

Hanchett had married, at an early stage in his original career, the

only daughter of a bankrupt Vicksburg storekeeper. This young woman,

who had doubtless found ample opportunity for the practice of domestic

economy in the paternal home, soon proved herself to be a most

excellent housekeeper on her own account. She was a jewel indeed to

her improvident husband, who, finding that she made shift by one means

or another to keep the family larder supplied, whether he kept her

purse supplied or not, dismissed a great care from his mind at once

and for ever, and thenceforth to the end of his days never exerted

himself beyond his natural bent. As the daughter, Dora Hanchett,

grew to womanhood, she divided her mother's burden with her, and

ultimately, as the mother's health failed, relieved her of it almost

entirely.

The family once reunited and domiciled in their new home, it soon

became evident to the most casual observer that Dora exercised the

functions of commander-in-chief of that force, and that the

doctor, notwithstanding his brilliant record in the field, had been

incontinently reduced to the ranks, and subjected to a rather rigid

discipline. Let it not be inferred, however, that Dora ruled with a

high hand or with a rod of iron. Far from it. She was the quietest and

meekest of tyrants, controlling not by conscious will or effort, but

by divine commission, as many a woman does.

Not only was Dora the head of the household in the sense of directing

its internal affairs, but she likewise soon proved herself to be

its mainstay as bread-winner. The doctor under her hands became a

dignified and not unornamental figure-head to the concern, in whom she

took a certain filial pride. His banner was still allowed to hang upon

the outer wall, and, as some slight justification of the legend borne

upon it, the semblance of an office was maintained for him, where

he spent many solitary and irksome hours daily in the semblance of

professional study and work. But his income did not amount even to a

semblance, and upon Dora, therefore, devolved the task of maintaining

the cuisine as well as the character of the establishment. She had

been accustomed to this duty indeed ever since, upon becoming a

schoolteacher at the age of sixteen, she had proved her capacity

to perform it. She early found her place in the public schools of

Clarksville, and so the pot was soon boiling merrily, and the demands

of the doctor's magnificent appetite were duly honored at sight.

Thus, Doctor Hanchett was enabled to live a life of elegant leisure,

devoid of care and fruitful of enjoyment to a man of his temperament,

for some fourteen months. Then he was suddenly smitten with the

"gold fever," and went raging through the town, seeking whom he might

infect. It was one of the curiosities of this singular epidemic that

it claimed not only those youthful and adventurous spirits who were by

common consent held to be its legitimate victims, but carried off

also old and infirm men, chronic invalids, and, stranger still, such

shiftless, incompetent and altogether worthless cumberers of the

ground as this Doctor Hanchett; thus proving itself to be, like most

other contagions, a not entirely unmixed evil.

Not wholly through the efforts of Doctor Hanchett, it is safe to

say, but in due process of time and events, a company was mustered in

Clarksville to go overland to California, as so many other companies

were mustered in hundreds of other towns all over the country in that

memorable spring of '49. This company, composed principally of

men from the surrounding country, and containing only two or three

residents of the village proper, regarded itself as peculiarly

fortunate in being able to count among its members a gentleman

like Doctor Hanchett, who, besides being a physician, was an old

campaigner, and thus likely to prove doubly desirable as a comrade in

an expedition like that upon which they were embarked.

It being definitely settled that the doctor was to march with his

company upon a certain day not far distant, it devolved upon his

chancellor of the exchequer to provide the sinews of war. Whether Dora

found this duty an agreeable one or not, she performed it promptly and

cheerfully. The little hoard that by the sharpest economy the frugal

girl had contrived to save from her earnings was placed in the

doctor's hands without reserve, to be appropriated, first to the

purchase of an outfit, and next to the defrayment of the general

expenses of the campaign.

Proverbially careful and judicious in the expenditure of money, as may

be supposed, in the purchase of his supplies on this occasion Doctor

Hanchett quite outshone himself. Besides the indispensable pans

and shovels and picks with which every man provided himself, Doctor

Hanchett laid in an assortment of miscellaneous drugs and surgical

instruments, that added a new lustre to his distinction in the eyes

of his comrades. But it was in the compilation of his wardrobe and his

deadly weapons that he displayed an individuality of taste altogether

unique. It being now the month of May, and the journey across the

Plains being expected to occupy about three months, the doctor, who

was a small man, bought first a great--uncommonly great--coat, that

fitted him about as snugly as a sentry-box might have done; secondly,

a pair of cavalry boots, the tops of which towered almost to his

eyebrows; and thirdly, a silk hat of the very finest and very tallest

description to be found in the market. Then he purchased a pair of

large Colt's revolvers, handsomely mounted in silver, and had his name

engraved on the plate in bold letters--"ELIAS HANCHETT, M.D.;" and his

armory was completed by the addition of numerous and various knives of

vast length and breadth of blade, into the hasp of each of which was

let a neat silver plate, upon which was engraved his name--"ELIAS

HANCHETT, M.D." Thus clad and thus arsenaled, he bore down upon Dora

with much elation as she was returning home from her school, and

proudly challenged her admiration. Of course the loving girl responded

heartily, notwithstanding her thrifty and methodical soul was racked

to see such few of her hardly-earned coins as remained unexpended

falling to the ground and rolling away in all directions as the doctor

turned pocket after pocket inside out in search of yet another and

another knife to surprise her withal.

At last the company got off, going by river to Council Bluffs, and

thence striking out upon the almost interminable trail, that, however

surely it might lead to fortune, was far from being a royal road

thereto. It was two months later when a member of the party, compelled

by ill-health to abandon the tedious journey and return home, brought

to Clarksville the first intelligence of the achievements of Doctor

Hanchett in the capacity of a physician and surgeon in actual

practice. These achievements cannot be recorded here, but a single

incident may be mentioned as indicating the estimation in which the

doctor's skill speedily came to be held by his companions. Before the

expedition had been three weeks upon the march his surviving comrades,

taking alarm at the rapidly augmenting number of lonely graves with

which they were dotting the dreary trail, hastily formed a conspiracy

to despoil him of his enginery of death. Under the silent stars,

what time the doctor was sleeping the deep sleep of the overworked

practitioner, his medicine-case and his miscellaneous assortment of

cutlery were quietly spirited away, and were never seen again. The

doctor proclaimed his loss upon waking in the morning, and felt it

keenly. He declared, however, that he deplored the casualty chiefly

in the interest of his companions, who were thus deprived, at one fell

blow, of his further services; and he cursed very heartily, in the

same interest, the "dastardly red-skins," whom he assumed to be guilty

of the theft.

Dora and her mother waited long and anxiously for a letter from the

doctor's own hand, and after many months it came. It was dated from

"the Heart of the Gold Region," and, after asking them to join him in

due ascriptions of thanks to the Almighty Powers for his deliverance

from many perils and his safe arrival in the promised land, and after

passing lightly over the invaluable services he had been able to

render to his companions in his professional capacity--it was not

for a modest man to dwell upon these--the doctor proceeded to state

frankly that his success in the gold fields had far exceeded his

most sanguine hopes; that, indeed, he might even then call himself an

opulent man, inasmuch as nothing but the necessary papers were wanting

to confirm him in the possession of a half interest in the Big Grizzly

Claim--a claim that promised an enormously rich yield as soon as

arrangements could be perfected for developing it. He advised his

daughter to give up her school at once, and to begin to prepare

herself for that happy change in her circumstances which was now so

near at hand; and he closed by requesting her to send him by return of

mail fifty dollars, and more if she could possibly spare more, as he

urgently required a little money for "present needs."

Is it necessary to say how this clear-headed and conscientious girl

acted upon reading this transparent balderdash? She knew, as well as

you and I know, that the whole thing was a clumsy game of her worthy

sire to deplete once more the little hoard that had been slowly

growing during his absence. She knew that her mother, who had worn her

life out trying to support an ornamental husband, was fast failing

in health, and might very soon require such attendance as nothing but

money could procure. And of course she went directly to the bank,

drew out her entire deposit, and sped it on its way to Elias Hanchett,

M.D., before the sun went down.

It was nearly a year after the arrival of his first letter when

another epistle was received from the absent doctor. Bad news this

time--the worst of bad news. He had been stricken down by a terrible

malady at a most critical moment in his affairs, and the consequence

was that his interests had suffered irretrievably. He might call

himself, in short, a ruined man. He felt that his distress of mind,

together with the physical anguish of his disease, was more than he

could bear up against for many hours longer. It was hard for an old

man to die thus among strangers, far from his own hearthstone and the

gentle influences that clustered round it. But he should be consoled

in his last hour by the reflection that he had always maintained his

family liberally, and had tried to be a kind and indulgent husband and

father; and he hoped that his daughter, thus left alone in the world

without any earthly protector, would not wholly despair, but would

strive for his sake to bear up against adversity, and prove herself

worthy of the father who had lost his life in trying to serve her in

his old age. And so farewell! His eyes were now about to close for the

last time upon the scenes of this earth. Signed ELIAS HANCHETT, M.D.,

with the customary flourish beneath the name, as bravely executed as

if the writer might have twenty years of life ahead of him yet. But

stay! P.S. Would not his dear daughter, for whom he had sacrificed so

much, grant him one last little favor? He had not means enough left

out of the sad wreck of his fortune to procure him decent burial.

Would she not send him a small sum for that purpose? She might direct

it to his own address, for if he were gone it would be received by a

friend, who would apply it faithfully according to the directions he

should leave. "And now again farewell! And may we meet above!" Signed

ELIAS HANCHETT, M.D. Flourish as usual.

I do not believe that Dora Hanchett's honest estimate of this letter

was very far different from our own. I am persuaded that she was

mentally incapable of being seriously deceived by it. But the heart

of woman is the mystery of the universe. In the face of her honest

judgment, in the truth of that clear common sense that constituted

the strongest trait in her character, this absurd girl went about

bemoaning in dead earnest and in the bitterest grief the death of

her father. This lasted a week; by which time she had succeeded in

convincing her mother, at least, that the affliction was a real one;

and that good lady, being finally, as she believed, released from her

responsibility, and having no occasion to live longer, quietly and

peacefully passed away. And Dora, by the light of this actual sorrow,

came after a while to acknowledge to herself that she had been

breaking her heart over a fictitious one.

Of course the money had gone on before this time, and she was far from

wishing to recall it now. If her father was alive, he was welcome to

it, she said, for he could not possibly put it to a worse use than

that to which it had been dedicated.

A girl as good as Dora could not be left friendless, whatever domestic

affliction she might suffer; and so with all her trouble she had no

opportunity to become absorbed in her sorrow. It would have pained her

unspeakably if she had been aware that her friends generally, however,

so far from inclining to grieve with her grief at the possibility

of her father's death, were quite unanimous in the view that such a

dispensation would be "the best thing for Dory that ever turned

up." For her part, she could not, after all, rid her mind of the

apprehension that her father might possibly have been in as serious

extremity as his letter represented. And if so, and she neglected to

do her utmost to succor him in his need, what peace could she ever

find in this world again? In this way she dwelt upon the subject,

until at last she convinced herself that her whole duty lay in nothing

less than an immediate effort to go to him. If, fortunately, she

should find him alive and well, she would gladly share his fortune,

however hard it might be, and would never leave him so long as he

lived. But if, as she feared, he should prove to be indeed sick

and near his end in that wild region, where, she asked, should his

daughter be but at his side?

This is the ridiculous way in which such headstrong creatures as this

Dora Hanchett are accustomed to meet you when you seek to point out to

them the unreasonableness of a line of conduct on which they have set

their hearts.

Deaf to all arguments, therefore, Dora shut up her house and set about

making preparations for her journey. In the adjoining county, as she

had learned, a company of gold-hunters had been organized, and was

then on the point of starting for the Sacramento Valley, in which was

situated the little town from which her father had last written. Of

this company of sixty men she knew but one, and he was a mere boy in

years, the youngest of the party. This was Hiram Bridge, familiarly

termed Posey in honor of his native county, who four years before had

been one of Dora's first pupils in her Clarksville school. She was

little more than a girl herself at that time, and Hiram was her

biggest boy; and her recollection now of the bond of good-fellowship

that soon grew up between herself and the shy, overgrown but not

overbright lad relieved her of any hesitation she might otherwise have

felt in applying to him to obtain permission for her to accompany his

party to its destination.

"Yes, you can go, Miss Hanchett," Posey quietly replied to her appeal.

"But will the rest of the men be willing?" she suggested.

"Doesn't signify," said Posey.

She did prevail on him, however, as a matter of form, to mention the

subject to his comrades; but as he never took the trouble to report to

her what action, if any, they took in the matter, she started at last,

relying altogether on his single friendship for protection. That was

no mean reliance, though, as she soon began to realize. He was an

immense fellow, six feet two in height, and broad in proportion; and

he soon proved to Dora that, however readily he had undertaken

her safe conduct, he did not lightly esteem that charge, but was

determined to aid and befriend her in every way possible. Thus at the

outset she found herself relieved of much of the embarrassment and

annoyance she had believed to be inseparable from such a journey in

such companionship. Posey himself she did not find to be companionable

in the ordinary sense of that word, notwithstanding his constant

kindness. He was of a quiet turn, reserved; of speech, rather

forbidding of countenance, and did not wear his excellent heart upon

his sleeve. There were few surface indications of the gold that was in

him. Dora was not long, however, in finding the auriferous vein; and,

to drop metaphor, she soon became conscious of a very warm sentiment

of gratitude growing up in her heart toward her uncouth guide,

philosopher and friend.

Posey's outfit consisted of a pair of powerful mules and a covered

wagon, with the usual mining and cooking utensils, and the provisions

necessary for the journey. In the forward part of this wagon, while

the expedition was on the march, Dora sat enthroned; and in its dusky

recesses she made her couch at night. Not only did the loyal Posey

devote himself to her guardianship by day, but he kept watch and

ward by night, sitting bolt upright within a couple of yards of

his precious charge until the stars grew pale in the dawn. Then,

if opportunity offered, he would snatch a surreptitious nap, still

disdaining to lie down, however; and it frequently occurred that the

earlier risers in the camp would discover Posey sitting on the ground,

embracing his nether limbs with his long arms, while his head, with

its close-cut, sandy hair, sank slumberous between his towering knees,

like the sun going down between two mountain-peaks. To such a length

did he carry these romantic vigils that he shortly came to look as

gaunt and hollow-eyed as Famine. In addition to which he had to

endure no end of raillery from his not too considerate or fastidious

companions, who, so far from inclining to harm a hair of Dora's head,

were generally wholly indifferent to her presence, and could not enter

into Posey's solicitude on her behalf.

Just here, also, Jake Savage, who had spent a year in the mines and

was piloting the present expedition, was reminded of a story, which he

obligingly related to Posey, apropos.

"You see, Posey," said Jake, "me and Hooker--Hooker was my chum--had

been scratchin' and washin' for about seven or eight dollars a day

down there to McCracken's Bend, till we got disgusted, and we made up

our minds that if we couldn't make more'n that we might as well give

up and strike for the States. But just then who should come along but

little Bill Skinner, bound all so fast for up the gulch? Bill had

been prospectin' around all summer on his own hook, but hadn't struck

nothin' yet, and was so much worse off than we was that Hooker and me

concluded to stay by a while longer. A day or two afore, we found out,

little Bill had run across a Digger somewhere that had told him--the

Lord knows how, for I never see a Digger that, could talk English

more'n a mule,--but this Digger told little Bill that up the gulch

there was rich diggin's. And so Bill was on the rampage to get there.

Of course me and Hooker we didn't take no stock in that yarn, and

little Bill went off alone.

"A couple of months after that me and Hooker see we'd got to do

something pretty quick or starve, and so we made up our minds to

prospect a little. We headed up the gulch, but without ever thinkin'

of little Bill, and as indications was good, we kept on in the same

direction for a couple of days. It was on the third day out, and we'd

got about twenty miles from the Bend, and hadn't struck nothin' yet

to bet on, when all of a sudden Hooker yells out, 'Holy Moses, Jake!

look-a there!' and what do you s'pose we see?

"About as fur as from here to that mule there, leanin' ag'in a tree,

sot little Bill Skinner--what was left of him, I mean, for he was

as dead as a dornick. And what do you s'pose he was a-settin' on? A

nugget of the pure metal worth forty thousand dollars! Yes, sir! We

could see in a minute how it was. Bill had found this nugget, and

bein' weak for want of grub, of course he couldn't carry it. So he had

sot down on it to guard it. And there he sot and sot. He dassent go to

sleep for fear somebody'd hook it, and he couldn't leave it to get

any grub for the same reason. We could see he'd browsed 'round on

the bushes as fur as he could reach, but that couldn't keep him alive

long, and so there he'd sot and sot till finally he'd pegged out.

"And that's what's the matter with Posey. I wakes up in the night and

sees him a-settin' thar by that wagon, and says I to myself, 'Thar

sets Posey on his nugget!' And one of these fine mornin's we'll find

nothin' but Posey's bones a-settin' there, and his buttons and such

like."

About this time, as they were now nearing the region where danger

from Indian raids was apprehended, Savage's company and another party

hailing from Illinois joined forces for mutual protection, and all

proceeded thenceforward under Savage's direction. Accompanying this

Illinois party was a woman going out to the diggings to join her

husband, who was prospering, and had sent for her to come on. The

two women thereafter keeping constantly together, Posey felt his

responsibility so far lightened that he occasionally indulged himself

in a "square" night's sleep, while Dora and her new-found friend

slumbered beneath his ample wagon-cover.

His partial separation from Dora, occasioned by the advent of this

other woman on the scene, soon opened Posey's eyes to the fact that

a total separation from her would take the ground entirely from under

his feet, and leave him in a condition that he felt disinclined

to contemplate so long as there might be a chance to avert such a

calamity. He accordingly improved the first opportunity that offered,

and cast himself at the feet of Dora--literally, mind you, on the lee

side of a sage bush--and lisped his love. On this sacred ground let

us tread as lightly as may be. Suffice it that Posey's suit prospered,

and that presently a little programme came to be agreed upon between

the contracting parties to this effect: They would go on for the

present precisely as if nothing had happened--Dora to seek her father

and Posey to seek his fortune. As soon, however, as Dora should have

succeeded in restoring the doctor to health, or had haply buried him,

Posey should be notified, and they would thereupon be married. Then

Dora would open a school somewhere, wherever she might chance to

find the indispensable children, while Posey, accompanied by his

newly-fledged father-in-law, if perchance that worthy individual

should be spared, would launch into the mines and conquer Fortune at

the point of the pick.

Time flew fast with the lovers after this, and they were quite

startled one day when Savage informed them that they were upon the

very borders of the promised land.

That evening, an hour before sunset, the train was halted for the

night at a point whence the travel-worn adventurers could look down

for the first time into the Sacramento Valley, and render thanks in

their various ways that the end of their tedious pilgrimage was almost

reached. As Dora Hanchett and Posey stood together upon a green knoll,

following with their eyes the winding trail that their feet were to

descend on the morrow, they descried, toiling slowly toward them, one

of those returning bands of unsuccessful and discouraged veterans--the

reflux of the great wave of immigration constantly pouring into the

golden valley--which they had frequently met in the course of their

long journey. As the cavalcade drew nearer, Dora's attention fixed

itself upon a curious figure that brought up the rear. Mounted upon a

loose aggregation of bones and ears that purported to be a mule, this

mysterious figure gradually approached, while Dora watched it as

if fascinated. On and on it came, and still she gazed, spell-bound.

Opposite her it paused. There was no longer any doubt: it was He.

Clad in the mangled remains of the original great-coat, the original

boot-tops yet towering in the region of his ears, and the upper half

of the original beaver crowning his well-developed brain, there He

was. Slowly and carefully he descended from the back of his shambling

steed, settled himself well in his boots, pulled up the collar of his

great-coat--and there was little but collar left of it--tipped the

curtailed and weatherbeaten stovepipe to the proper angle, opened his

paternal arms and feebly embraced his daughter. He announced himself

to all concerned as a broken man--a poor unfortunate going home to

die, where his bones might rest with those of his ancestors, and where

his humble name and his honorable record in the service of his country

would be cherished by his fellow-citizens after he should be gone.

Providence had surely, in his extremity, drawn his daughter to his

succor. Now he was relieved of all anxiety, and might turn his mind

to things above. His daughter would fan the spark of life, and keep

it burning, God willing, till the old home should be reached. Then he

would release her from her labor of love. Then he would be at peace

with all the world, and would cheerfully die in the midst of his

weeping friends. He had up to this hour been haunted with the

apprehension that his poor old frame might be left to moulder

somewhere in the wide, inhospitable desert that stretched between him

and his roof-tree. Now that dreadful apprehension was banished. The

Lord had remembered his own. Dora would walk beside his beast and

protect him, and the knowledge that she had thus been instrumental in

prolonging her father's life would be her exceeding great reward.

A most enchanting prospect for Dora, was it not? Even she did not put

her neck under the yoke until she had first informed her father of her

momentous secret, and invited him to assume his rôle in the programme

already mentioned as arranged by her lover and herself. But, as a

matter of course, he scorned the suggestion. Posey begged and raved,

but without avail. The girl never had a question in her mind as to her

duty from the moment she saw her father approaching. She must do as he

said--go back with him as his slave. There was no help for it.

And so the lovers held a hurried consultation, pledged eternal

fidelity and all that, agreed that Posey should go on and make his

fortune, and that when Dora should be released by death from her duty

to her father he should either come back for her or she should go to

him, and then they would be married. Meantime, he engaged to write to

her frequently, and she promised to write to him faithfully once every

week. And then farewell!

By this time the doctor's party had left him far behind, and

naturally, considering the capabilities of his steed, he was growing

impatient to move on. The early stars were already coming out, and

he testily reminded Dora, as she lingered over her leavetaking, that

there was no more time to lose. And so, without a murmur, the devoted

soul turned her back upon all her new-born hope and joy, and dutifully

took up the long and dreadful homeward march on foot. And Posey,

his heart in his mouth and his tongue charged with unutterable

execrations, gazed gloomily down into the darkening valley, that half

an hour before had been filled with a radiance "that never shone on

land or sea." And as he gazed all the bad in him persistently rose

up to curse the despicable author of his woe, while all the good in

him--about an even balance--rose up to bless the fast-disappearing

idol of his heart.

Slowly and painfully, day after day, the little company of stragglers

toiled on toward their distant homes, the redoubtable doctor, with his

unwilling beast and his willing bond-woman, ever bringing up the rear.

No one but Dora herself could know how grievously she suffered in

her chains--how her very heart's blood was gradually consumed by

the vampire whom she chose to cherish and obey because it was her

misfortune to be his daughter.

The old home was reached at last. On the whole, the doctor had rather

enjoyed the journey, and brought to the family board, as of yore, a

tremendous appetite. He "resumed practice at the old stand" without

delay, publishing a card to that effect in the village newspaper. He

seemed scarcely to note the absence of his wife, who for a quarter of

a century had been wearing her life out in a vain endeavor to justify

his existence on this globe. In short, he speedily settled back into

his old habit of life, and appeared to have totally forgotten that he

had come home to die. And Dora, too, soon lapsed into her old routine

of schoolkeeping, and so once more the pot boiled merrily. Once a

week, with scrupulous regularity, she wrote her promised letter to

Posey, and she waited long and anxiously for some word from him, but

in vain. Weary weeks lost themselves in months, and month after

month crept slowly away till almost a year had passed, and still the

faithful soul famished for some token that she was not forgotten. Then

one evening she went home from her school to find that the heavens had

fallen. Her father, whom she had left four hours before apparently

in the highest health and spirits, was dead. The village physician

attributed his sudden death to apoplexy, which seems illogical. But

he was dead, whatever the cause, and his orphaned daughter mourned him

with as genuine a grief as ever wrung a human heart.

When in process of time the first transports of grief had subsided

there seemed to be nothing left for Dora to do but to concentrate all

the overflowing tenderness and devotion of her heart upon her lover,

and to brood and pine over his long-continued silence. She never

doubted that he had written to her, for the mail-service to and from

the gold regions was notoriously unreliable in those days, and she

was by no means the only one who looked in vain for letters thence.

At last she could bear the suspense no longer. The spring had opened

early, and a party in a neighboring town was to start for the diggings

by the middle of April. This party, in which were already included

two women, Dora resolved to join. Once let her reach that indefinite

region denominated "the mines," and she felt the most unquestioning

faith in her ability to find her lover.

And so once more the dauntless girl set out upon that long and tedious

journey of three thousand miles. Not many weeks passed before the

inevitable homeward-bound stragglers began to be encountered, and of

these Dora eagerly sought information concerning the object of her

quest.

"Bridge? No, marm," was almost uniformly the reply to her first

question in that direction.

"He was sometimes called Posey," she would then suggest; and at last

she found a man who acknowledged that he knew Posey. "He was at

the Buny Visty in Carter's Gulch at last accounts," this individual

informed her, but he omitted to commit himself as to the nature of

Posey's occupation. "Wife, p'r'aps?" he observed, incidentally.

"No, sir," said Dora.

"Sister?"

"No."

"Ah! Well, he's a stocky chap, that Posey, and ought to make his

fortune in the mines, if anybody could. But nobody can't--take my word

for't. Look at me!"

He was a spectacle indeed. The retrogressive Doctor Hanchett had

been quite an exquisite in the matter of apparel compared with this

tatterdemalion. With Dora's companions he was less reticent concerning

the character and calling of Posey than he had been with Dora herself.

By his account it appeared that Posey had spent about a month in the

mines without striking a single streak of luck to hearten him. At

the end of that time, completely discouraged, he went to the nearest

village and advertised himself as willing to work for his board at

anything that might offer. The thing that offered was a situation as

assistant bar-tender at the Buena Vista gambling-house. Posey

accepted this situation with ardor, and discharged the delicate duties

pertaining to the place so satisfactorily that he very soon found

himself promoted to the distinguished position of "stool pigeon."

In this capacity he developed shining talents, and the Buena Vista's

gaming-tables soon became the most famous resort in all that region

for those confiding birds whose favorite amusement appears to lie in

being plucked. And thus Posey went on prospering until he achieved a

partnership in the concern; and his partner soon after being suddenly

called to that bourne whence no traveler returns, Posey found himself

sole proprietor and manager of an uncommonly flourishing concern in an

uncommonly lively line of business.

All this information was carefully kept by her companions from the

ears of Dora, of course; and she, having obtained the long-coveted

trace by means of which she felt sure that she could not fail to find

her lover, was quite cheerful and happy throughout the remainder of

the seemingly endless journey.

The end neared at last, however, and as Dora recognized the familiar

landmarks that told her she had almost reached the fruition of her

hope deferred, her eyes brightened daily, a new flush came into

her thin cheeks; and though she grew more quiet and abstracted than

formerly, it was plain that her reveries had no tinge of darkness, her

hope no shadow of fear, her faith no alloy of doubt. And when the time

came for her to part with the good people in whose company she had

traveled so far, she bade them adieu with a light heart, and at once

set out alone by stage for Carter's Gulch.

Reaching the straggling, ill-conditioned village at nightfall, she

asked the driver, as she alighted in front of the stage-office, to

direct her to the Buena Vista.

"The Buny Visty! The Buny Visty's not a hotel, ma'am," that individual

explained. "It's the Golden Gate that you want, I reckon."

"No, sir," she replied confidently. "I have a friend at the Buena

Vista--Mr.--Mr. Posey. Perhaps," she went on, with a little tremor in

her voice, "you can tell me if he is well?"

"Posey!" He stopped some moments at the word and looked in blank

amazement at the delicate, tender, unmistakably honest face that

confronted him. Then he continued hastily: "Never better. Saw him

yesterday morning. You see that green lantern? That's the Buny Visty.

Good-night, ma'am. _I_ stay here--if you should want a friend, you

know. Good-night."

Dora thanked him for his kindness, returned his salutation, and

tripped away with unruffled spirits. She had been so much concerned to

conceal her own agitation as she mentioned the name of her lover that

she had quite overlooked the astonishment with which that name had

seemed to transfix the driver.

As she picked her way along the dark and muddy sidewalk she could

not help complaining a little petulantly to herself because the

stage-office had not been located nearer to that distant green

lantern. But she was not the girl to lose heart now. Bravely she

plodded on, and when at last she was able to discern the words "Buena

Vista" upon the beacon toward which she was toiling, suddenly her

heart gave a great bound, the tears rushed to her eyes, her knees

quaked beneath her, and from her pious soul there went up an earnest

thanksgiving to the dear Father of us all for His great mercy in

bringing her safely to the end of her momentous journey.

It was some minutes before she could so far compose herself as to be

able to proceed; and when she did move forward again, I think a vague

notion of the true character of the Buena Vista began to cast a shadow

upon her ardor. As she came within a couple of rods of the isolated

wooden building in front of which the green lantern was suspended she

was suddenly startled at hearing several shots discharged in quick

succession within, and a minute later three or four men rushed hastily

into the street and hurried away, evidently without noticing her,

though they passed within a few feet of her as she stood, almost

paralyzed with alarm, just outside the door. Her fright was gone in a

moment, however--soon enough, indeed, to enable her to satisfy herself

that none of these fugitives was the man she sought. As the door stood

wide open, there seemed nothing for her to do but enter, which she did

at once. The front apartment of the saloon, though lighted, she found

to be a mere ante-room, bare of all furniture save a few chairs; and

without pausing here the resolute girl, who must have had a foreboding

of the awful truth by this time, passed on into the gambling-room in

the rear. There, stretched upon the floor, shot through the heart, lay

the stark form of the man she had journeyed so far and so patiently

and hopefully to find. He had grown muscular and brawny since she

parted with him. His face, too, had changed, and not for the better:

it was flushed, sodden and bearded, and the beard was dyed black. She

knelt down beside the corpse and took one of the great hands in her

own. It was still warm! But the chill of death crept over it as she

held it to her heart, and thus her last ray of hope expired.

She sat still by her dead till the man's former companions came to

prepare the body for burial. As it was borne to the lonely grave upon

the hillside she walked beside the rough coffin. And when the grave

was reached she dropped upon her knees beside it, and poured forth in

a clear voice a fervent petition to the Most High to receive, for the

sake of the dear Saviour who died for all the world, the soul of this

poor sinner.

They had said that she might bear up till the funeral was over, but

that then she would break down. She did not. The next morning she set

her face to the East, and began again, for the fourth time, that

awful journey across the Plains. We need not follow her throughout its

length. She reached her home worn and sick, but nevertheless at once

took up her old school and went on with it a few weeks. And then the

end came.

LOUIS A. ROBERTS.

* * * * *

FRANCESCA'S WORSHIP.

In the deep afternoon, when westering calms

Brooded above the streets of Rome, and hushed

Their noisier clamor, at her orisons,

In San Domenico, Francesca knelt.

All day her charities had overflowed

For others. Husband, children, friends had claimed

Service ungrudged; the poor had gotten their dole,

Doubled by reason of her soothing hands;

Sick eyes had lifted at her coming, as lifts

The parcht Campagna grass at the cool kisses

Of winds that have been dallying with the snows

Of Alban mountain-tops. And now, released

From outward ministries, and free to turn

Inward, and up the solemn aisle of thought

Conduct her soul, she bowed with open page

Before the altar: "_Tenuisti manum

Dexteram meam_."

On her lips she held

The words caressingly, as she would taste

Each syllable and drain its separate sweetness,

When, breaking on her still seclusion, came

A messenger: "Sweet mistress, grace I pray!

But unaware our lord hath come again,

Bringing his gossips; and he bade me fetch

My lady, if only for a one half hour,

Saying the wine was flavorless without

Her hand to pour it."

At the word she rose,

And unreluctant followed. No undertow

Of hidden regret disturbed the azure calm

Of those clear eyes that still reflected heaven.

Then, when they all had drunk and been refreshed,

And forth had ridden, Francesca sought her place,

And pored again above the Psalter's leaf:

"_In voluntate tua deduxisti_,"

Conning it over with a tender joy,

As if she verily felt her human hand

Close claspt in God's, and heard Him guiding her

With audible counsel; when there fell a touch

Upon her arm: "The Sister Barbara

Comes seeking wherewithal to dress some wounds

Got in a brawl upon the Esquiline."

And now athwart the western windows streamed

Rainbows of shafted light, as thither again

Francesca came to read her "Offices."

A beam, that seemed a golden pencil held

Within the fingers of the Christ that glowed

In the great oriel, pointed to the words

Where she had paused to do the Sister's hest:

"_Cum gloria suscepisti me_." She kissed

The blazoned leaf, thanks nestling at her heart,

That now, at last, no duty disallowing,

Her loosened soul out through the sunset bars

Might float, and catch heaven's crystal shimmer. But scarce

Had meditation smoothed the wing of thought

Before the hangings of the door were parted

With yet a further summoning. From a Triton

That spouted in the court her three-year boy,

Who thither had climbed, had fallen, and naught would soothe

The bruised brow save the sweet mother-kiss.

"I come," she said, her forehead half divine

With saintly patience. "For Thou wouldst teach me, Lord,

That Thou art just as near me ministering

At home as in these consecrated aisles;

And 'tis true worship, pouring of the wine

For him I love, or holding 'twixt my hands

The little throbbing head; since where my duty

Calls is the altar where I serve Thee best."

When under the Campagna's purple rim

The sun had sunken so long that all was gray,

Softly across the dusky sacristy

Francesca glided back. The Psalter lay

Scarcely discernible amid the gloom;

But lo the marvel! On the darken'd page

The verse which thrice she had essayed to read

Now shone illuminate, silver-clear, as though

God's hand had written it with the flash of stars.

MARGARET J. PRESTON.

OUR HOME IN THE TYROL.

CHAPTER V.

We had not gone many yards when we noticed a grand old mansion with

gray slopes of roof and stone galleries on arched pillars, and, asking

its history, learned that it was a deserted seat of the counts of

Arlberg, inhabited now by our guide in quality of forester, and where

he had his sister Nanni and brother Hansel to live with him.

We kept gradually ascending by the side of deep, turfy meadows,

passing many a rich brown wooden chalet, with views ever and anon of

our distant village and its stately Hof. Soon we turned into a woody

gorge and began climbing the steep saddle of the Scharst; and as we

slowly toiled upward in the pleasant summer air, amongst the aromatic

fir trees, some verses came into my head out of a little German book,

_Jakob Stainer_, by Herr Reif, which we had given as a parting present

to Schuster Alois:

The fiddle-maker Stainer

Goes whistling on his way:

A master like to Stainer

Is not found every day.

He passes lofty beech trees,

And old oaks stout and good,

Because that which he seeks for

Grows not in every wood.

But yonder in the sunshine,

Above the dark green shade,

Behold a hazel-fir tree--

"Jörgel," said I, "as you are a forester and know all the trees in the

wood, I wish you would show me a hazel-fir tree."

"_Wohl gut_," he replied. "Higher up the chances are small but what we

pass one. I only pray the gracious Fräulein to say those verses over

again."

When I had done so he wished to know whether the fiddle-maker Stainer

were a real man or no.

"Why, good Jörgel," I replied, "he was a real Tyroler like yourself,

only you are not likely to have met with him, seeing that he died and

was buried some two hundred years ago. Yes, a very real man, who did

his work well, but to little profit. He was a peasant lad of Absam,

who, probably going to Innspruck whilst the archduke Leopold and

his Italian consort, Claudia dei Medici, kept their gay court there,

thought Italian violins were harsh and unsatisfactory in tone, and so

quietly worked out one of a different make from his own principles;

which has since gained for him the name of 'the father of the German

violin.' He never expected to earn such a title. He had begun making

violins when he was twenty: he worked very slowly, only made a few,

and sold them at a moderate price to the foreign dealers who came to

the fairs at Hall. They soon became asked after, for they excelled as

instruments from the first moment that they were touched, and retain

to this day the clearest and the fullest notes, like the middle

tones of the flute, wonderfully sympathetic and rich. The peculiar

excellency is probably owing to the extreme care which he showed in

the selection of the wood. He used the hazel-fir tree, it is said. He

selected the wood himself, striking the trunk with his hammer to hear

its tones before he felled it. He would wander for days through the

mountain forests searching suitable trees. He studied each one, and

only chose that which exactly answered his purpose--generally those of

which the topmost boughs were already dead.

"When wood was being precipitated down the mountain-slides, he

would seat himself in some safe spot near at hand, and listen to the

different tones which the trunks uttered as they struck against the

rocks in their fall. He chose from these 'singing trees' those which

pleased his ear the most. He was also particular about the rings on

the stems of the felled trees. They must be harmonious and regular,

neither too near nor too far apart. For those portions of the violin

which were made in separate pieces he used very old wood, preferring

old inner doors and wainscoting.

"Although one of the most celebrated violin-makers that ever lived,

this peasant always remained poor. It is true that one grand duke

favored him, but then his patron died, and whilst the emperor

permitted him to be the court fiddle-maker, he was scandalized, like

the rest of the world, by his reading Lutheran books, picked up in the

market at Hall. These books caused him to be thrown into prison as a

heretic, and although in time released, debts and poverty embittering

his life, he became introverted and melancholy, until finally the

humble, patient worker, who had sent forth so much melody into the

world, was strapped to the wooden bench of his cottage at Absam, a

heart-broken maniac. The merciful messenger Death released him after

several years, but the bench and the hole in the wood by means of

which he was bound may still be seen.

"When the artist was forgotten his works increased greatly in value.

This occasioned other makers to endeavor to multiply their number,

introducing many spurious Stainer violins, which gradually brought

down the market value. Nevertheless, genuine Stainer violins are

recognizable, and still retain a fancy price. Mozart possessed one

which he greatly prized, using it as his solo quartette instrument.

It belongs now to a professor in the Mozarteum at Salzburg, and was

played upon at the Mozart festival in 1856.

"But a violin with a still more remarkable history figured during the

festivities attending the marriage of the present emperor of Austria.

During the visit of the emperor Charles VI., King Friedrich Wilhelm

of Prussia and other princes to the great nobleman Count Wenzel von

Trautmannsdorf, the generous and lavish host became sorely perplexed

how to provide George Stezitzky, a splendid violinist, with a suitable

instrument. At this point he opportunely heard that there was an old

fiddler in the court who begged permission to play before the august

company. The request being granted, the musician commenced playing,

and immediately sent princes and nobles into raptures over the tones

of his violin. The count therefore stopped him, and offered to buy it.

This quite threw the old man into despair. 'It was a Stainer violin,'

he replied, 'and his whole livelihood was bound up in it.' The count,

however, was not to be thwarted: he gave him fifty ducats for the

piece he had played, and then concluded the bargain on the following

conditions: three hundred gulden for the violin, besides a house

to live in, food and a quart of wine daily; ten gulden monthly, two

barrels of beer and one suit of clothes yearly, fruit and as many

hares as he needed for his kitchen. The agreement having been

concluded, George Stezitzky played a solo on the violin: then received

it as a present from the count. The man who had parted with it lived

sixteen years more, thus costing the count in actual money 8733

florins 20 kreuzers, equal to 10,380 florins 24 kreuzers of the

present currency. A large sum to give for a violin."

"Yes," replied Jörgel, who appeared to have been much interested

by the whole history; "but what puzzles me is, how a poor devil who

worked so slow could be a genius. I thought sharp people took more

after the Almighty, and hurried up their work in the twinkling of an

eye."

"Do the trees which you look after shoot up in the twinkling of an

eye?"

"Why, no. Good, stout wood, with strength enough to resist storms and

to cleave to the rocks of these mountainsides, takes a lifetime. I

often warn the peasants against cutting their trees down. It is easy

to destroy, but not to build up, I tell them; and the trees as they

stand are the best preventatives against land-slips."

"Have you always been a forester?" we asked.

Not he. It was true that in fine weather he often wandered for thirty

miles a day, his district reaching as far, but he had seen more of the

world than these fir woods. He had been in the habit, as a young

man, of taking horses for sale into Italy, where he had seen Milan

cathedral and the town-hall in Bergamo. He, however, gave up his trade

in 1831, as his father died in that year of dropsy, and his mother ten

days after of sorrow, and he thought it only right to stay with his

sister Nanni. Franz had gone off and married a rich widow against his

advice, for he knew she would treat a second husband as a day-laborer;

and what he had predicted proved true. However, she and her money

were gone out of the family now. Her body lay in the graveyard, and

he supposed that the priest who said masses for her soul knew where it

was by this time. As for Hansel, he was still at liberty, and had well

played his part in the world. He had protected the emperor Ferdinand

when he fled with his consort to Innspruck in 1848, standing as

sentinel at the gate of the faithful city. Later on he had marched

with the Tyrolese imperial Jäger corps into Hungary, and fought

for the same master there. Again in 1866 he was righting under the

archduke Albert, until, on the feast of Johanni, he was disabled at

the battle of Custozza by a wound in his foot. The victory over the

Italians made him for a time forget the pain, but afterward it grew

dreadful, lasting for seventeen months, and not an army surgeon could

help him. Then, however, he determined to try a cow-doctor, who in two

weeks set him on his pins again.

"And you might not believe it," continued Jörgel, who grew animated in

his narration, "but I too have seen service. In the last war between

Italy and Austria the students of Innspruck formed a corps, and young

Count Arlberg, being an active volunteer, proposed that I should go

as cook. The motion was carried, and I marched with one hundred

and ninety-three young gentlemen to Bira. Sometimes with help and

sometimes with none, I cooked for them all. I fed them on meat

dumplings and plenten, until in a few weeks the cook and the

_soldaten_--or the cook and the _salaten_, which you will--had to pull

up stakes and beat an honorable retreat through the Breimer. At Brixen

I bade farewell to my regiment, and have since, under Count Arlberg

the father, looked after stocks and stones, and not soldiers. Well,

well! Austria has lost Italy, but the Tyrol can hold up its head, for

it stands now as a great natural rampart between the two countries."

We had been resting during Jörgel's narration: the long rays of the

declining sun now warned us to hasten on. Margaret, full of energy and

desirous of pushing forward up the almost vertical path, soon began

to lag behind. Thus I, looking back and waiting for her, saw a comely

peasant-woman who, quickly climbing the hill behind, offered her the

assistance of her arm. Although this was gratefully declined, the

stranger, apparently troubled at the sight of the tired lady, tarried

at her side, trying to be of service. She had a melodious voice and

a restful air, which made us, though she was but a poor illiterate

woman, feel better for her presence. Thus she was allowed to carry

our shawls, and whenever we rested she strayed into wayside glens,

returning with offerings of mellow bilberries; and finally she cheered

our lagging energies with the assurance that we should soon see blue

sky peeping through the trees, and that then there would be no more

climbing. At this point, Jörgel, who had been carefully examining each

tree as we passed, expressed his fear that no actual hazel-fir tree

grew along this path. He, however, pointed out a well grown fir

tree, saying that a _hazelfichte_ merely possessed a straighter and a

smoother stem.

We had begun truly to descend, and our friendly woman, seeing that

"Shank's mare" required no further encouragement, bade us a friendly

good-evening, with a cheerful "May you live long and well!" She

had almost dipped out of sight when our Jörgel, with praiseworthy

forethought, called after her to apprise the bath people, as she

passed, of our advent.

The path had become broader and more beaten. There was a gradual sense

of some human being, either from personal or unselfish interests,

having once been at work to make the woods still more attractive

and enjoyable. Benches of flat stones were raised at points where

snow-fields, fantastic and stern dolomite peaks and wooded slopes

formed exquisite pictures set in frames of stately, well-grown fir

trees--here a smooth lawn with its little shrine and wooden seat for

the wayfarer to meditate on the Flight into Egypt, which Jörgel called

the "witches' ground;" there, under a spreading tree, a rural table

and seats--proofs that we must be approaching the bath-house; and no

little were we pleased by these signs of care and judgment, especially

as none of the rural bowers were either bran-new or in a state

of decay, but harmonizing with the tidy negligence of the woods

themselves.

"These paths promise well for the baths," we remarked to Jörgel.

"Might have done so once," he replied, "but it was the old Frau

Wirthin who put them up. She was a woman with a head and a will, and

she took a pride in the place, seeing that the baths are as old as

the mountains, and they had been in her family since the Lord made

the Tyrol. Now they are in the hands of her son Seppl and his sister

Moidel. However, I never mix myself up in what does not concern me.

The master is at liberty, and so is she, and it is not for me or my

old Nanni to speak against unmarried people. Both they and we are

bound for _Herzing_ when we die, the spinsters to howl in the moor and

we men in the wood. That is what the lads and lasses say of us;" and

he gave a dry little laugh. "Ask my opinion of the water, and I'll

answer you straightforward. It's an elixir, a perfect elixir;" and

he repeated the sentence with the proud consciousness of using a

dictionary word. "As for the house, the master and the old maid, judge

for yourselves, or ask them that sent you here."

So saying, he sturdily marched on ahead, as if fearing to be

compromised. We did not feel encouraged, especially with night

steadily falling down upon us. Still less was the future hopeful when

Jörgel pointed with his stick in advance, exclaiming, "Arrived at

last!"

Yes, arrived at an old weatherbeaten chalet, with a crazy barn to keep

it company, dilapidated and tottering as if in the bankruptcy court,

standing abruptly on the borders of the black fir wood, the air filled

with the odor of concentrated pigstye; dark male figures playing at

skittles on the path, and having to stop the game to enable us to

reach the door; black male figures playing at cards and drinking wine

in the dusky, close old parlor or _stube_, made still more gloomy by

the large, projecting brick stove, unlighted at this season of the

year.

We should never have proceeded on a voyage of discovery had not the

thick folds of a woman's yellow petticoat flickered before us on the

steps of a smoke-stained ladder.

Jörgel, who, with the utmost determination, resolved to fulfill his

duty as guide, marshaled us up this old creaking ladder, then up a

second, until we stopped in an open gallery sheltered by the wooden

eaves, where a feeble old woman nursed an idiot child in the

gloaming. And yet what a landscape to relieve this desolate

foreground!--slumbrous mountains, dewy meadows, peaceful villages,

over which the calm of Sunday lay. We stood drinking in the tranquil

scene, when a woman in blue apron and of rapid motion quickly touched

my elbow with a large key; and bidding us follow she hastily flung

open the door of a narrow wainscoted closet, smelling of hay. "She had

no other room," she blurted forth, and then, without word of apology,

disappeared as speedily as she had come. We found ourselves the owners

of two large bedsteads and two dilapidated chairs: everywhere in the

house we had caught glimpses of broken-backed chairs, witnesses either

of poverty or riot.

A modest tap at the door announced worthy Jörgel. He tried to comfort

us in his rough and honest way, with "They that sent you here are to

blame."

We interrupted him, saying that the fault lay with ourselves.

"Well, well! how could you tell? But have no fears. This house is

disorderly for the want of a head, but remember, there's an elixir of

life in the water. I'm very much satisfied with what you have paid

me, and the next time we meet we shall regard each other as old

acquaintance."

He lifted his empty _kraxe_ upon his shoulders, and went out. We

waited to see his square figure appear in the path below, like those

who were parting not only from a friend, but a protector. It was some

minutes before he was visible. We discovered shortly afterward that

not wishing to leave us in our desolation, and perceiving that some

"Herrschaft" must be in the house, as the best room had not been

given us, he had boldly introduced himself to them, and thus we found

ourselves committed by Jörgel to a fresh Good Samaritan in the shape

of a well-to-do draper's wife, Frau T----. We knew her by name, but

did not deal at her shop. Still, she was ruled by no selfish thoughts,

and out of the genuine kindliness of her heart she joyfully fulfilled

Jörgel's commission. It was she who insisted on preparing our supper;

it was her cloth that was spread on the table in the gallery as the

quietest, most suitable spot in the riotous house, she smoothing our

scruples by declaring it her pleasure, only regretting that we should

have arrived on such a noisy night, for the house was usually very

still. It was her servant who showed the deaf old woman, the one help

of the establishment, how to make our beds.

The aged crone, Nanni--half the female population of the Tyrol are

called either after the Virgin Mary or her traditionary mother, Saint

Ann--gazed in intense astonishment when we screamed to her our simple

requirements. We asked for a light, and she brought us a tallow candle

stuck in a bottle. We asked for a pitcher of water, and she muttered

something about the spout.

Worn-out, weary, very grateful to the good Frau T----, we went to bed,

but not to sleep. That would have been a vain endeavor, for shrill

laughter, loud words and boisterous songs, in which the high tones

of wild female voices rose painfully above the gruff singing of

half-besotted men, penetrated the room, whilst the old rafters groaned

and creaked from the heavy tramp of dancers below. All our belief in

the sobriety and goodness of the Tyrolese seemed swept away, and a

sense of their coarseness and dissipation to have taken its place.

We were in a very pandemonium, which never ceased until the sun was

rising.

Nor was the evil mitigated when we learned from the landlord's sister

a few hours later that the guests were only returning from Scapulary

Sunday in Reischach. Most of them belonged to the next village, and

had rested here on their way. After prayers it was right to sing and

dance: why should they not? And, look you, when wine got into people's

head, what could she do? She could not turn them out.

"Yes, but the master, her brother, might."

She shook her head ominously, and hurried into the kitchen--a smoky

old kitchen, but quaint from the little windows with the old ox-eyed

panes of thick glass.

It impressed itself forcibly on our minds that Seppl had compromised

himself on the preceding night. He was to be seen nowhere; only the

bustling sister Moidel, who had already swept out and cleaned the

scene of the late dissipation, and was now busy over our coffee, and

the old Nanni, who with bare feet and wet petticoats intimated that

she had scrubbed the female bath-room and placed two freshly scoured

tubs there at our disposition.

Both women meant kindly by us: the pleasant fir woods and the fresh

air seemed to whisper to us to stay. So we gave up the plan which we

had resolutely made in the night of leaving that very morning, and by

so doing found Bad Scharst not only endurable, but really, in a very

rough and ready way, enjoyable. The remembrance of the wild,

riotous night even became enveloped with a certain interest when we

recollected that this grim attempt at pleasure was in sober reality

one of those Tyrolese peasant balls which are represented in such fair

and attractive colors on the stage, in pictures or in novels. It was

well to be undeceived, and to see the deep shadows as well as the

bright side of Tyrolese life.

And what matter if for one night we had lost our sleep, whilst we

breathed exhilarating ozone and drank water which, to quote Jörgel,

was truly an elixir of life? For all our temporary and trifling

inconveniences we found rich compensation when after an easy ascent

of two hours we reached the topmost platform of the mountain, the

Kronplatz. To the north, reaching from east to west, a long, unbroken

chain of glaciers, from the Furtschläg to the Gross Venediger Spitze

with its untrodden snows. Below us, at some four thousand feet, the

broad, rich Pusterthal, with its comfortable villages and its pastoral

tributary valleys. To the south, the stern limestone peaks of the

dolomite region; the Vedretta Marmolata, with its breastplate of ice,

king of these barbaric giants, the splintered pinnacles of the Drei

Zinnen, the pyramidal Antalao, and many another jagged, appalling

mountain, stern as the bewildering doctrines of election and

reprobation, whilst the pure glistening snow, green meadows and

pleasant woods opposite seemed to breathe forth the gentle, winning

truths of the glad tidings of peace.