"Is it 'live'? Thin I could hardly say. It's mate an' petatys an' tea,

an' Pat will have his glass. He's sober enough--not like Mike, that's

off on his sprees every month; but now we don't be gettin' the same as

we used. Pat says there's that cravin' in him that only the whiskey 'll

stop. It's tin dollars a month for the rooms, an' that's two an' a half

a week steady; an' there's only seven an' a half left for the five

mouths that must be fed, an' the fire an' all, for I can't get more'n

the four dollars for me washin'. It's the mate you must have to put

strength in ye, an' Pat would be havin' it three times a day, an' now

it's but once he can; an' that's why he's after the whiskey. The

children an' meself has tay, an' it's all that keeps us up."

"How do you cook your meat, Norah?"

Norah looked at me suspiciously: "Shure, the bit we get don't take

long. I puts it in the pan an' lets it fry till we're ready. Poor folks

can't have much roastin' nor fine doin's. An' by that token it's time

it was on now, if you won't mind, ma'am. The children 'll be in from

school, an' they must eat an' get back."

"I am going in a few moments, Norah. Go right on."

Norah moved aside her boiler, drew a frying-pan from her closet, put in

a lump of fat and laid in a piece of coarse beef some two pounds in

weight. A loaf of bread came next, and was cut up, the peculiar white

indicating plainly what share alum had had in making the lightness to

which she called my attention. A handful of tea went into the tall tin

teapot, which was filled from the kettle at the back of the stove.

"That isn't boiling water, is it?" I ventured.

"It'll boil fast enough," Norah answered indifferently as she pulled

open the draughts, and soon had the top of the stove red hot. The steak

lay in its bed of fat, scorching peacefully, while the tea boiled,

giving off a rank and herby smell.

"Pat doesn't get home to dinner, then, Norah?"

"There's times he does, but mostly not. They'd like a hot bite an' sup,

but it's too far off. There's five goes from here together, an' a

pailful for each--bread an' coffee mostly, an' a bit o' bacon for some.

It's a hot supper I used to be gettin' him, but the times is too hard,

an' we're lucky if we can have our tea an' bread, an' molasses maybe

for the children. Many's the day I wish myself back in old Ireland."

As she talked the children came rushing up the stairs, Norah the

second, pale-faced and slender, leading the way; and I took my leave,

burning to speak, yet knowing it useless. Fried boot-heel would have

been as nourishing and as tooth-some as that steak, and boiled

boot-heel as desirable and far less harmful a drink, yet any word of

suggestion would have roused the quick Irish temper to fever-heat.

"It's Norah can cook equal to myself," Norah had said with pride as she

emptied the black and smoking mass into a dish; and these methods

certainly cannot be said to be difficult to follow.

There is no conservatism like the conservatism of ignorance, yet in

this case want of knowledge there certainly was not. Norah had lived

for two years before her marriage with a family the mistress of which

had taught her patiently and indefatigably till she became able to set

a fairly-cooked meal upon the table, but the knowledge acquired then

seemed to have been laid aside as having no connection with her own

life. I have seen the same thing--though, happily, only in exceptional

cases--among educated Indians, girls who had spent years in the schools

at Faribault or under the direct training of missionaries reverting on

marriage to old wigwam habits, and content to eat the parched corn and

boiled dog of their early experience. The same law holds in full force

among many of the Irish, who, no matter how well trained or how

exacting in their demand for varied food while servants, quickly lose

the desire, and allow only a certain fixed order from which it is

wellnigh impossible to move them.

In this case, tolerably well-to-do at first, hard times had brought

them to this swarming tenement-house, from the various rooms of which,

as I passed down the stairs, came the same odor of burning fat and the

rank steam of long-boiled coffee or tea. My errand had been to find the

address of a little shop-girl, a niece of Norah's, a child who had been

educated at one of the ward schools, and whom no power could induce to

take a place as waitress or chambermaid. To stand twelve or fourteen

hours behind the counter of a Grand street store met her ideas of

gentility and of personal freedom far better than yielding to the

requirements of a mistress; and the six dollars a week went in cheap

finery till the hard times forced her to make it part of the family

fund. Then sore trouble came. The father had died, the mother was in

hospital, from which she was never likely to come out, and Katy, thrown

utterly on her own resources, had found her six dollars all inadequate

to the demands her habits made, and, frightened and perplexed, went

from one cheap boarding-house to another, four or five girls clubbing

together to pay for the wretched room they called home, and still

striving to keep up the appearance necessary for their position. Cheap

jewelry, banged hair and a dress modelled after the latest extremity of

fashion were the ambition of each and all, but neither jewelry nor

puffs and ruffles had been sufficient to keep off the attack of

pneumonia through which these same girls had nursed her, sitting up

turn by turn at night, and taking her duty by day that the place might

still be kept open for her.

Katy's cheeks were flushed and an ominous cough still lingered, but she

spoke cheerfully: "It's my last day in: I can go to-morrow. It's the

beef-tea has done it, I do believe. Did you know Maria brought it to me

every day? I don't know what I'll do without it."

"Learn to make it yourself, Katy."

"Me?" and Katy laughed incredulously. "When would I get time? and what

would I make it on? We don't have a fire but Sundays, and only a show

of one then. And I don't want it, either: I ain't used to it."

"What do you live on, Katy?"

"Why, we did have breakfast and tea here--coffee and meat for

breakfast, and bread and butter and tea for supper. I get a cream-cake

or some drop-cakes for dinner, but for a good while I've just paid a

dollar a week for my share of the room, and bought something for

breakfast--'most always a pie. You can get a splendid pie for five

cents, and a pretty good one for three; and it's plenty too. That's the

way the girls in the bag-factory do. They don't get but three dollars a

week, and it takes seventy-five cents for their room, so they haven't

got anything for board. Mary Jones says she's settled on pie, because

it stays by better'n anything, and once in a while she goes down to

Fulton Market and has some coffee. I do too, but it spoils you for next

day. You keep thinking how'd you'd like a cup when the chills go

crawling all over you, but it's no use."

"Couldn't it be made in the store? The girls could club together, and

it would cost much less than your pies and candy. The gas is always

burning, and you could have a little water-boiler."

"You don't know much about stores to think that. Why, Mr. Levy watches

like a cat to see we don't eat peanuts or candy: we're fined if he

catches us. I've a good mind to take board at the 'Home,' only I should

hate to be bossed 'round, and you can't get in very often, either, it's

so crowded. But I don't mind so much now, for you see"--Katy's pale

cheeks grew pink--"Jim and I don't mean to wait long. He has ten

dollars a week, and we can manage on that. He says he's 'most poisoned

with the stuff his boarding-house keeper gives him, and he wants me to

keep house. I just laugh. That's a servant-girl's work: 'tain't mine."

The old story. I had seen "Jim," and knew him as rather a

sensible-looking young fellow for an East Side clerk in a cheap store.

What sort of future could lie before them? What help could come from

this untrained child, herself helpless and with too limited

intelligence to understand what demand the new life made upon her? and

could any way be found to open her eyes and make her desire better

knowledge?

Busy with this always fresh problem, I had come to a side street

leading to the market from which two or three small groceries draw

their supplies, and stopped for a moment to look at the flabby,

half-decayed vegetables, the coarse beef and measly-looking pork from

which comes the sickly, heavy smell preceding positive putrefaction.

"Look away! Get the sense of it all," said a brisk voice behind me--a

voice I knew well as that of one who gave days, and often nights, to

work in these very streets. "Did you see that tall woman with the big

basket and a face like a chimney-swallow? She runs a boarding-house

'round on Madison street, and this is the stuff she feeds them on. Poor

wretch! She has a drunken husband and three drinking sons. She means

well, would like to do better by her boarders, but there is rent and

gas and wear and tear of all sorts, and she buys bob veal and stale

fish and rotten vegetables and alum bread, trying to make the ends

meet. I've been there and tasted the messes that come to her table, and

I would drink too if forced to live on them. She's got sense, a

little--enough not to fly in a rage when I told her the food was enough

to make a drunkard of every man in the house. 'I can't help it,' she

said, crying. 'I've only just so much money, and the girl spoils most

of what I do get.'--'Cook yourself,' I said.--'I can't,' she answered:

'I don't know any better than the girl. I'll do anything you say.' I am

not a cook: I could not tell her anything. 'Go to cooking-school,' I

said: 'it'll pay you.'--'I've neither time nor money,' she said; and

there it ended. What's to be done? I've just come round the market. It

is dinner-time, and I think every other man was eating pie. The same

money might have bought him a bowl of strong soup or a plate of savory

and nourishing stew, if there had been anybody with sense enough to

provide it. Up and down, in and out, wherever I go, I see that cooks

are the missionaries needed. Come in here a moment."

I followed up the steps of a "Home" for sailors, planned to give them a

refuge from the traps known as "sailors' boarding-houses." The long

dining-room we entered was spotlessly clean, and some thirty men were

dining. I looked for a moment as my friend spoke with some one sitting

at the head of the table, then passed out.

"You saw," he said, "plenty of food, and all clean as a whistle, but

what sort? Steak fried to a crisp, soggy potatoes, underdone cabbage

and pork, bread rank with alum, and coffee whose only merit is warmth.

Those men are filled, but not fed. The bread alone is condensed

dyspepsia. In an hour the weaker stomachs will have what they call 'a

goneness.' They will crave something, and poor R---- will have half a

dozen of them half drunk or wholly so on his hands by night. He will

pray and exhort, and bundle them up to the Mission if he can, and cry

as he tells me how they will give way and yield to the devil whether or

no. And so it goes. Women must get hold of this thing. It's the first

item in your temperance crusade, and till the people have better food

there is no law or influence that can make them give up drinking. I

wouldn't if I were they."

Here the talk ended. My impetuous friend disappeared around a corner,

and I went my way, a little surer than before of the fact which was

already so distinct a belief it needed no new foundations, that better

food will and must mean better living. Hard times are passing, but none

the less is there still the imperative demand for wider knowledge of

what food those hard-earned dollars shall buy. Philanthropists may urge

what reforms they will--less crowding, purer air, better sanitary

regulations--but this question of food underlies all. The knowledge

that is broad enough to ensure good food is broad enough to mean better

living in all ways; and not till such knowledge is the property of all

women can we look for the "emancipation" from some of the deepest evils

that curse the life of woman in the slums and out. Toward that end all

women who long to help, yet see no outlook, may work, and with its full

recognition will come the day for which we wait--a day whose faint dawn

even now flushes the east and gives promise, dim yet sure, of the

slowly-nearing light, holding even when most clouded the certainty of

Purer manners, nobler laws.

--HELEN CAMPBELL.

DELECTATIO PISCATORIA.

THE UPPER KENNEBEC.

From the great mere set round with sunbright mountains

Full born the river leaps,

Dashing the crystal of a thousand fountains

Down its romantic steeps.

'Tis now a torrent whose untamed endeavor

Is eager for the sea,

Angry that rock or reef should hinder ever

Its frantic liberty.

Then, for a space, a lake and river blended,

It sleeps with tranquil breast,

As if its haste and rage at last were ended,

And all it sought was rest.

In spicy woodpaths by its rapids straying,

I hear, with lingering feet,

Its liquid organ and the treetops playing

Te Deums strangely sweet.

I break the covert: pictured far emerges

On the enraptured sight

The arrowy flow, green isles, a cascade's surges,

Foam-flaked in rosy light,

Still pools, and purples of the sleepy sedges,

The skyward forest-wall,

Old sorrowing pines and hazy mountain-ledges,

And soft blue over all.

O golden hours of summer's precious leisure!

From care and toil apart

Fresh drawn, I taste the angler's gentle pleasure

With friend of equal heart.

Trout leap and glitter, and the wild duck flutters

Where beds of lilies blow:

A loon his long, weird lamentation utters,

And Echo feels his woe.

We see in hemlock shade the reedy shallow,

Where, screened by dusky leaves,

The guileless moose comes down to browse and wallow

On still balsamic eves.

The great blue heron starts as if we sought her,

On pinions of surprise,

And to our lure the darlings of the water

In pink and crimson rise.

Still gliding on, how throng the sweet romances

Of Youth's enchanted land!

A lordly eagle, as our bark advances,

Glares on us, sad and grand.

Onward we float where mellow sunset glory

Streams o'er the lakelet's breast,

And every ripple tells a golden story

Of the transfigured west.

Onward, into the evening's calm and beauty,

To camp and sleep we go:

Thrice bless'd are lives, in tasks of love and duty,

That end in such a glow!

--HORATIO NELSON POWERS.

THE RUIN OF ME.

(TOLD BY A YOUNG MARRIED MAN.)

I am Poverty scuffing about in old shoes and rubbers. I _was_ one of

those who, at a good salary, think up smart things to put around in the

corners of the Chicago _Times_. When every newspaper, from the London

_Punch_ down, was making jokes about Elihu Burritt's _Sanskrit for the

Fireside_, it was I who beat them all by saying in solid nonpareil,

"The best way to learn Sanskrit is to board in a family of

Sanskritters." It was I who said, "Let the Communists carry pistols:

they may shoot each other;" and, "Sara Bernhardt's children are

articles of _virtu_."

_O quam me delectat_ Sara Bernhardt! I love such diversified, such

picturesque gifts. Sculpture, painting, acting, writing! This is why I

loved Lydia, who was an adept at numberless arts and accomplishments.

She was a brunette with a clear, cream-tinged skin, red cheeks, rolling

black eyes, ripe velvety lips, and hair of a beautiful hue and rich

lustre--raven black, yet purple as the pigeon's wing in the sun. I

believe it is true that dark people belong to the pre-historic races:

centuries of sunlight are fused in their glowing complexion. Blondes

are beautiful--both the rosy ones with pinkish eyelids and warm golden

locks, and the pale ones with ash-colored hair, gray eyes and dark

brows and lashes--but a florid brunette excels them all.

In seeing Lydia you would make the mistake that you usually make in

judging girls: entering among them, you think their attitudes proclaim

their traits. For instance, you take the most giggling one for a

simpleton, but afterward learn that she is a good scholar and has

accepted the Greek chair in a Western college, and looking again you

see she has a strong frame, a capable head and large bright eyes. Lydia

dressed in the mode, wore the high-heeled shoes that give such a dainty

look to the foot and gait, and came into a room with a great effusion

of fashionableness; yet she was not in the least what she seemed. She

had a great deal of what is more pleasing than mere appearance, and

that is character. She was ambitious and energetic. She did tatting

when she did nothing else--said it concealed her lack of repose and

liability to fidget. She was able to draw _la quintessence de tout_:

she could make a mountain-spring of a mole-hill. She also had a touch

of temper: those who are perfectly amiable are nothing else.

I was a youth blue-eyed and fair of face, tall, thin and having a

complying spirit that has been--But let me not anticipate. The race

after fashion ever wearied me--I shall stop early at some

standing-collar or heavy-neckcloth period--and I never cared much for

money--could live with it or without it, desiring "this man's art or

that man's scope" rather than his cash. There is such a great majority

of poor folks, I expected to be one of them; still, I had a taste for

honesty, asked favors of nobody, considered the least debt a

degradation, and thought myself better than most rich people. I was of

the family and the religion of Plato, who peddled oil to pay his

expenses while travelling in Egypt.

We discover in others what they most wish to hide: therefore I early

discovered that Lydia's mother, who had a large girl-family, and who

knew that the supply of some one to love greatly exceeds the demand,

was anxious to secure me as a son-in-law. I was glad of it, for, let

poets and novelists say what they will, the young fellow who marries

with the approval of friends drifts happily on, while the rash boy who

weds against the good sense of his elders is dragged bleeding along a

rough way. So I married Lydia, and began life in gladness and content.

I liked her family and they liked me. It puzzles me to see how the

English mother-in-law, who is a grum-voiced, dogmatic and belligerent

person with a jointure to bequeath, came to be engrafted on our

literature. The inoffensive delicacy of an American elderly woman

forbids her the rôle of her British sister. Our mother-in-law troubles

are mostly confined to our low foreign population. Neither have we a

character similar to the silly, spiteful, dried-up old maid of English

literature and its American imitations, our spinsters being generally

stout and jolly personages and rather over-fond of children. My

mother-in-law was very nice, and we were the best of friends.

Rich relations, as a general thing, are abominable: the mere possession

of one sometimes makes a person disagreeable. Show the person with a

rich cousin the most secluded cot among mountains, and, "Oh, you should

see my cousin's house on Michigan Avenue!" is the reply; or a beautiful

room speaking the noble quality of its occupant, and, "Call that nice?

You should see my cousin's house on Michigan Avenue!" is remarked. But

Lydia's rich relations, the Stenes of Chicago, appeared to be

exceptions. They were very clannish people, fond of their own kin to

the last degree. They came from Michigan, and were of the old colony

stock, regular Yankee-Doodle folks, the older ones and many of the

younger ones still using New England idioms and quaint phrases that

came long ago from the East--yes, from the holts of old England's

Suffolk perhaps. You could not persuade one of them to call jelly

anything but "jell" or a repast anything but a "meal of victuals," and

they said "dooty" and "roomor" and "noos" and "clawg," and sometimes

would pop out "his'n" and "her'n." Several of the Stenes had been in

business thirty years in metropolitan Chicago, yet they spoke in the

twang of a Yankee hill-country. The women of the family were famous

housekeepers--too neat to keep a cat lest there might be a cat hair on

the carpet, and never liking visitors unless there was a dreadful note

of preparation, and then they received grandly. To show Lydia their

good-will, they gave her profuse wedding-presents and a splendid

trousseau. On my side I bought a neat cottage, paying cash down--all

the money I had. It was one of a square of cottages principally

occupied by young married people having plenty of children, and a

joyous crew they were. Our street had a broad roadway and flagged

sidewalks edged with neat turf in which fine trees were growing, and

was lined with beautiful homes of varied architecture, suggesting

charming interiors. A row of tall, "high-stoop" New York houses with

dark stone trimmings stood next to a row of English basements of

tuck-pointed brick, and next to them was a range of houses of light,

cheerful Joliet stone, with awnings at the windows and carriage-steps

as clean as gravestones. Then came an old cottage fixed up nobby, then

a comfortable old wooden mansion, then a splendid dwelling in the style

of the fifteenth century, and after that the palace of a railway

grandee. Here and there on a corner stood a Gothic church. All day

well-dressed people trod our pavements and beautiful carriages rolled

by our windows. Our cottage was my ideal of perfection: it had few

rooms, but those spacious. We had no sitting-room. Let me see: what

does that word suggest to my mind? A table heaped with stale

newspapers, a stand piled with sewing, a darned carpet, scratched

furniture and fly-specked wall-paper.

Lydia's presents filled our house. All were Eastlake and in good taste,

the colors sage-green, pumpkin-yellow and ginger-brown, dashed with

splashes of peacock feathers and Japanese fans. The vases were

straddle-legged and pot-bellied Asiatic shapes. Dragons in bronze and

ivory, sticky-looking faïence and glittering majolica, stood in the

corners. Silk embroideries representing the stork--a scrawny bird with

a scalp-lock at the back of its neck, looking like a mosquito when

flying--and porcelain landscapes out of drawing, like a child's first

attempts, peopled by individuals with the expression of having their

hair pulled, hung 'twixt our dados and friezes. Lydia's young-lady

friends gave her their works in oil or water-colors done in a fine,

free-hand style that may one day form a school of its own. Our Chicago

girls are people of _nous_. Their talk is "fluent as the flight of a

swallow:" their manners are delightful--American manners must be

excellent, so many Englishmen marry American girls. Their playing makes

us glad the seven poor strings of the old musicians have been

multiplied to seven times seven: no Chicago girl is a musician unless

she has the masters at her finger-tips. And they are readers too. You

would suppose, judging from the papers, that our Chicagoans are

inordinately fond of reading about the indiscretions of rustic wives,

and are given to a perusal of the news in startling headlines: but such

is not the fact. We are great readers of the distinguished magazines

and of first-rate books, and our taste for art is keen. When we go

abroad we don't care so much for mountains and rivers--they are like

potatoes and pork to a man who is visiting: we have them at home--but

we _are_ after art. Ruskin says no people can be great in art unless it

lives among beautiful natural objects; which is hard on us Chicago

folks. If we had any mountainous or rocky tracts we should not live in

them. If we possessed a Mount Vesuvius we should use it for getting up

bogus eruptions to draw tourists to our hotels, and we should tap the

foot of the mountain to draw off the lava for our streets.

Lydia's finery had a subduing effect upon me, who had bounded my

aspirations to what was distinctly within my grasp--namely, things

Plain, but not sordid--though not splendid, clean.

Lydia was an expert housekeeper. "I love a little house that I can

clean all over," said she. She would have liked a Roman villa made of

polished marble, that could be scrubbed from top to bottom, or a house

of the melted and dyed cobble-stones that some genius has promised to

give us. Her china-closet was a picture, with platters in rows and cups

hanging on little brass hooks under the shelves. Our whole house was

exquisite, and became quite renowned for its elegance and charm.

Lydia's exuberant vitality was attractive: her relations and friends

liked to come there. Some of our friends were of the high, haughty,

tone-y sort, which would have been well enough if we had not incurred

debts in our housekeeping.

What and how great the merit and the art

To live on little with a thankful heart!

Lydia's rich uncle, Nathan Stene, gave us a bookcase that caused my

heart to sink with an appalling premonition at its first appearance, it

was so huge and high. How we got it into our parlor without cutting off

the top and bottom words cannot explain. That bookcase was my first

step toward ruin. I had a good many books--not of scientific but of

delightful literature, the best works of the best authors--and my books

were as shabby as Charles Lamb's library. There never were such

dilapidated volumes as my De Quinceys. Lydia had _Young Mrs. Jardine_

and lots of other

Stickjaw pudding that tires the chin,

With the marmalade spread ever so thin;

and her books were new-looking. She said mine looked disgustingly dirty

in our new bookcase, so I had them rebound; and this was my next step

toward ruin. Lydia wanted a long peacock-feather duster to dust the top

of the bookcase. I bought that. Our only long tablecloth was a damask,

engarlanded and diapered and resplendent with a colored border

warranted to wash. I had to buy napkins to go with it. I bought a

butter-knife to match a solid silver butter-dish, and a set of

individual salt-spoons to match salt-cellars, and nut-picks and

crackers to match something else. Moreover, there was a magnificent

opera-glass that required to be matched with theatre-going--_not_ as I

was wont to go, in an old overcoat having its pockets stuffed with old

playbills. But why enumerate?

On the strength of her wedding-presents Lydia became a gladiatrix in

the arena of society. She already belonged to three clubs: she joined

four more--Private Theatrical, a History of Art, a Conversation and a

Suffrage Club. I myself belong to but one, the Cremation Club--am an

officer in that: I split kindlings. As the bordered tablecloth was

suitable for lunch-parties, Lydia entertained her friends at an hour

when I was about town looking up paragraphs, but I have no doubt she

carried it off bravely, and their discussions were as important as

those of a poultry convention on the question of feathers or no

feathers on chickens' legs.

At this time I found that great feasts make small comforts scarce.

Often, on coming home and finding Lydia out, I had Ionic hours alone,

when I refreshed myself with the great shouting, cheering and laughter

of the Greek armies and people that gladden our dull hearts even now,

and for want of anything better I regaled myself on the feasts offered

by Machaon (first Scotchman) in the _Iliad_, and by Nestor, on the

table with azure feet and in the goblet with four handles and four

feet, with gold turtles drinking at the brim from the handles. Or I

supped with Achilles while Patroclus turned the meat on the bed of

wide, glowing embers and the tent brightened in the blaze. Once, when I

was seeking something for that newspaper bore, Woman's Sphere, I

lunched with the Suffragists. Each character of the Suffrage Club was

as clear as a figure cut on a sapphire. The president, a matron of

sixty wearing waving gray hair and dressed in black, with plenty of

white lace under her chin, had the air of a woman used to command a

large family and accustomed to plenty of money and to good society. Her

voice was the agreeable barytone of her years, its thin tones entirely

gone, and her good English was like gentle music: nevertheless, an

occasional strong tone or gesture revealed her determined will. The

Suffragists were handsomely dressed, were self-possessed and

appreciative of each other's company, and were of all ages, one being a

plain young girl quietly looking on and enjoying the world more than a

self-wrapped belle is capable of doing.

But to my tale, which is to me more absorbing than _Rob Roy, Robinson

Crusoe_ and _Boots at the Swan_ combined. Of all our visitors I

preferred Uncle Nathan Stene. Not that I liked him personally. He was

the typical rich man: I should know he was rich wherever I met him.

There are thousands like him: they despise me utterly. Uncle Nathan had

a scorn for poor people. He disdained whole States that gave him a bad

market, and regarded young fellows who smoke and go to the theatre as

beggars' dogs. He was of middle height, with reddish complexion, sandy

hair and eyebrows, quick, sharp gray eyes, and features of a short,

clean, close aquiline cut, with thin, dry lips--a man of iron, pig

iron. When young he might have been facetious, but he had concentrated

his energies entirely on money, till there was nothing left to go in

other directions, and his humor was now as sombre as the grin of a

hanged man. He had self-conceit, which is a talent when combined with

some other qualities. Doctor Johnson's observation, that to make money

requires talents, is true: a dull man cannot do it. Uncle Nate had to

remember thirty thousand articles in his business of wholesale

druggist. He was a perfect devil-fish for sucking the goodness from

every business he was concerned in--banking, railroading, and so on. He

belonged to the Chicago Board of Trade, and was particularly useful in

getting those fellows in Indianapolis on a string, sending the wheat

up, up, until the Hoosiers had made a few hundred thousands, and then,

when they thought they were going to make millions, letting it down and

scooping them. My habit of listening intently to Uncle Nate's

telegrammatic style of talk caused him to like me. I resembled King

Lear: I talked with those who were wise, and said little, and Nathan's

aphorisms about trade and politics made good paragraphs when boiled

down to the crisp cracklins.

While I worked and Lydia entertained we were waltzing like the wind

down to ruin. No use to cry, "Ho! great gods! Hilloa! you're wanted

here!" On we went.

Worrying over pecuniary affairs gradually sapped my mind. To lose one's

eyes or all one's relations, or to be bitten by a mad dog, will not

unhinge the brain so completely as pecuniary anxiety. My paragraphs,

spite of Nate's verbum saps., lost their originality. I resigned my

post on the _Times_. I became the collector on commission of certain

rents of Uncle Nathan's. Whoso collects rents in Chicago tenements

should know how to box or else to run: I could do neither. I got little

or nothing out of the devils and devillets, my respected uncle's

tenants. He had a genius for the despatch of business: I had none;

therefore he concluded I was an ass, and wondered how he came to be

pleased with me. Oh, 'tis a good thing to know what you can do, and to

do that, and know what you cannot do, and leave that alone. Dull as

weeds of Lethe was my task. 'Twas terrible! I thought it would never

end. No greater misery could be imagined than what I endured in

Nathan's service.

One morning of those days I picked up a note in Lydia's writing hastily

scrawled as follows: "I have discovered your retreat: I must see you.

At seven o'clock wave the lamp three times across the window if all is

well."

In my undecided way I pinned the note to the blue silk pincushion on

Lydia's dressing-case. I had a sudden jealous suspicion of an

acquaintance of ours, a furiously-striking English

traveller--"Bone-Boiler to the Queen" or something--who had a long,

silky, sweeping moustache blowing about in the wind, and parted his

hair "sissy." But I went to work all the same.

That day Uncle Nate was a worse screw than ever. "How is it you never

hit a clam?" asked he.

"Your tenants have nothing, so I get nothing," I replied.

"Nonsense! They must have something. Drunken loafers are driving about

in livery-rigs everywhere--sure sign of prosperity."

"Your people are not out," I said.

"They sit around the house reading yesterday's newspapers."

"They can't get work," said I.

"Everybody that wants to work is in the ditch now-a-days: _that_ I

_know_" said the old man.

"Some are sick."

"They are well enough to walk three miles to a brewery after a free

drink."

"Some are too young to work."

"Hah! what's the use of having a parcel of young ones to be poor

relations to the rest of the world?" asked he.

"Some are positively starving," said I.

"What of that? You have to let them starve. Five hundred thousand

starved in India last year, a country overrun with sacred snakes and

animals of all sorts that they might have eaten. Three millions starved

in China, and they tore up their English railway, the only thing that

could save them. What are you going to do about it? Starving! Bet they

are wallowing in the theatre every night," said Nathan.

"The theatre with Lawrence Barrett! I wish they might see anything so

elevating. Perhaps _Othello_ might make some impression on them, such a

stupendous temperance lecture it is!" I groaned.

"If _you_ would leave the theatre alone you wouldn't be quite so short

as you are now," asserted Uncle Nate, almost popping open with

contempt.

"'Short,' man! 'Short' in your throat!" shouted I, forgetting myself.

"Yes, short; and it's my opinion you've shorted me in this business."

I could not kick our uncle out of his premises, so I got out myself,

not to return; and I left in debt to him as well as to the rest of the

world. I went homeward. Though it was August, a cold wind blew from the

lake, whipping the large, flapping leaves of the castor-bean plants in

the front yards to rags. I quaffed the lake in the wet wind. "No

wonder," I thought, "we're three parts water: our world is." A young

fellow on the street-car platform smoked a cigar that smelled like

pigweed, cabbage-stalks and other garden rubbish burning, and made me

sick. He enjoyed it, though: in fact, all, including the street-car

driver himself, were on that day more than usually engaged in the

intense enjoyment of being Chicagoans. All but me, miserable. The very

windows and pavements of our streets, being clean and cold, sent a

chill to my bones.

When I reached home Lydia was pinning on her habergeon, her neck-armor

of ribbons and lace, before the mirror. "What is this?" I asked,

pointing to the suspicious note, still pinned to the cushion.

"That's the note that has to be found in my room in the play of _Lost

in London_," she answered, turning the great lamps of her eyes on mine.

As I had nothing to say to this, I went and lay down on the sofa before

the parlor-fire. Though a grate in January is a poor affair--I never

knew any human being who really depended on one in winter to speak in

praise of it--on a cool August day it is delicious. I fell into a warm

doze before the fire, then into a series of agreeable naps. When Lydia

said supper was ready I did not want any, and at bedtime I was too

stiff to move easily.

After this, during several weeks, my bedchamber became to me a place

full of sweet dreams and rest and quiet breathing. Luxurious

indifference, a pleasure in hearing the crickets in the grass of the

midsummer gardens, and voices talking afar--a satisfaction in seeing

the polished walnut, marble and china and plenteous linen towels of my

washstand, my altar to Hebe, and in seeing through a window,

While day sank or mounted higher,

The light, aërial gallery, golden railed,

Burn like a fringe of fire

on some remote palace of the city. These and other sensations of

malarial fever occupied me for a while. In half dreams I then enjoyed

the minutest details of life in an old farm-house that had been my

home, or walked through a picture-gallery I had once frequented, seeing

each picture strangely perfect and splendidly limned. Light diet and

keeping quiet--which every Westerner knows to be the cure of this

fever--cured me. I came forth looking like a _swairth_, one of those

words marked "obs." in the dictionary--means phantom of a person about

to die. It ought to be revived; so here goes--_swairth_.

Leaden before, my eyes were dross of lead.

I was pale and lank, but things had settled themselves in my mind: I

had gone back to my old ideas of honor and freedom; my mind was made

up.

"Well, Lydia," said I, "you wanted to manage: you were bound to wear

the breeches. As you make your pants, so you must sit in them."

"You awful man!" said she.

"Now I will manage," said I.

"Indeed! Nothing would please me better," said she.

"I will sell our house and all that's in it, and get out of debt," said

I.

"You mean to be one of the lower classes and wear old rags," she

exclaimed.

"We have no class-distinctions but the Saving Class and the Wasting

Class. I shall be of the first class. As to clothes, they are

despicable," I replied.

"People who despise clothes can't get any."

"Well, I've done all I'm going to do toward developing the West, which

consists in getting into debt, as far as I can see."

When an able woman submits she submits completely. Lydia put our house

in order. I filled the streets with dodgers advertising our sale. I

have not been a paragraphist for nothing: the sale was a success. I

paid a part of my debts, and gave notes for the rest that will keep my

future poor. I started in again on the _Times'_ city force. To board I

hate: it's a chicken's life--roosting on a perch, coming down to eat

and then going back to roost. So I got a little domicile in "The

Patch." When the teakettle has begun to spend the evening the new cheap

wallpaper, the whitewash and the soapsuds with which the floor has been

scrubbed emit peculiar odors.

"It smells poor-folksy here," says Lydia.

"All the better!" say I.

--MARY DEAN.

SHORT STUDIES IN THE PICTURESQUE.

Although our American climate, with its fierce and pitiless extremes of

temperature, will never give the lush meadows and lawns of moist

England, yet in the splendid and fiery lustres of its autumn forests,

in its gorgeous sunsets and sunrises and in the wild beauty of its

hills and mountains there is that which makes an English Midland

landscape seem tame in comparison. The rapid changes of temperature in

summer and the sudden rising of vast masses of heated air produce

cloud-structures of the most imposing description, especially huge,

irregular cumulus clouds that float in equilibrium above us like

colossal icebergs, airy mountain-ranges or tottering battlemented

towers and "looming bastions fringed with fire."

Yon clouds are big with flame, and not with rain,

Massed on the marvellous heaven in splendid pyres,

Whereon ethereal genii, half in pain

And half in triumph, light their mystic fires.

The brilliant deep-blue Italian skies of the Middle and Southern States

are full of poetry, and will repay the most careful and prolonged

study. I have seen, far up in the zenith, silvery fringes of cirrus

clouds forming and melting away at the same moment and in the same

place, ethereal and evanescent as a dream, easel-studies of Nature.

Sometimes the clouds take the form of most airily-delicate brown crape,

"hatchelled" on the sky in minute lines and limnings. Now the sky looks

like a sweet silver-azure ceiling, the blue peeping here and there

through tender masses of silver frosting. The skies of the New England

coast States are filled, during a large part of spring, summer and

autumn, with a white and dreamy haze, and do not produce

cloud-phenomena on such an imposing scale as the more brilliant skies

of the interior. I shall never forget a vast and glowing sunset-scene I

once witnessed in the Ohio Valley. It lasted but a few moments, but

what a spectacle! The setting sun was throwing his golden light over

the intensely green earth, and suffusing the irregular masses of clouds

now with a tender rosy light and now with delicate saffron. All along

the eastern horizon extended a black-blue cloud-curtain of about twenty

degrees in height, across which played the zigzag gold of the

lightning. Overhead hung the gigantic ring of a complete rainbow (a

rare phenomenon), looking like the iridescent rim of some vast sun that

had shot from its orbit and was rapidly nearing our earth. In the north

the while slept the sweet blue sky in peace. What a phantasmagoria of

splendor, "the magic-lantern of Nature"! What a rich contrast of

color!--the black and the gold, the green, saffron, rose and azure, and

the whole crowned with a rainbow garland of glowing flowers. I felt

assured that no sunset of Italy or Greece could fling upon the sky more

costly pictures than these.

The delicacy and accuracy of touch exhibited in _The Scarlet Letter_

and in _Oldport Days_ can hardly be appreciated to the full by those

who are unacquainted with certain mellow and crumbling towns and

hamlets of the New England coast, especially of the warm south coast.

Soft mists rise in summer like "rich distilled perfumes" from the warm

Gulf Stream off Long Island Sound and drift landward in invisible airy

volumes. Suddenly, as at a given signal, the sky becomes troubled,

grows dun: trembling dew-specks glister upon the leaves, and in a few

moments the gray fog starts out of the air on every side and clings to

tree, crag and house like shroud to corpse. It is this warm moisture

that gives to the south-coast hamlets their mellow tint. I have

especially in mind at this moment one romantic village whose stout old

yeoman elms hold their protecting foliage-shields over many a gray

mansion as rich in tradition as the House of the Seven Gables, and only

awaiting the touch of some wizard hand to become immortalized. The

prevailing tint of these old houses, and of everything that a lichen

can take hold of, is a sage-gray. There seems to be something in the

sea-breezes unusually favorable to the growth of lichens, and they hold

high carnival everywhere, growing in riotous exuberance on every tree

and rock and fence. I saw whole board fences so thickly tufted and

bearded with a rich, particolored mosaic of lichens that from

base-board to cope-board there was scarcely a square foot of the

original wood to be seen. On any hazy Indian-summer afternoon, if you

look down the wide, irregular main street, lined with its mighty elms

and gambrel-roofed houses, all seems wrapped in a dim gray atmosphere

of antiquity, like that surrounding Poe's House of Usher, only not

ghostly as that is. It is a strange _je ne sais quoi_ that eludes

description, as if houses and trees stood at the bottom of a sea of

visible heat.

Whatever of picturesqueness an English hamlet has, this American one

has. It has its wealthy hereditary aristocracy, its small farmers or

squires and its peasants, its ruins and haunted houses, its traditions

of savages and of the great men who have honored it with their

presence. The town, moreover, is set off by a framework of the most

enchanting and varied scenery--river, streamlet, ocean, lighthouse,

hills with flower-and-grass-tufted crags, and forests, while on any

summer's day one may see, far away and "sown in a wrinkle of the

monstrous hill," some neighboring village with its graceful spire of

purest white gleaming and flaming in the hot sunshine, like marble set

in a foil of malachite.

A window of my room looked out upon a crystal stream that wound down

through the salt-meadows to the sea, and twice a day, under the

influence of the seemingly-mysterious systole and diastole of the

tides, spread out into a wide-glittering lake and anon crept back again

into its sinuous bed. This water was as fickle and wanton and

many-mooded as a coquettish girl. Now its translucent glassy surface is

unruffled by a single wrinkle, and in its brilliant depths every

minutest feature of yonder drifting hay-barge is weirdly mirrored. I

look out again, and the face of the water is working with rage under

the lashing of the wind: at the same time its face seems white with

fear, and its ghostly arms are tossing, now in defiance and now in

piteous appeal. But now, as I gaze, the winds in their uncouth gambols

tear a huge rent in the cloud-tent they had raised over the earth, and

in the sweet blue beyond appears the calm and smiling face of the sun.

Before its glance the wind-phantoms slink away in fear and the now

quiet streamlet smiles through its tears.

The stiff formality and the ridiculous solemnity of the old Puritan

times still linger about these secluded New England hamlets. But each

winter a huge Christmas tree is set up in the church of the village I

have mentioned, and loaded with presents. The winter I was there I went

to see the distribution. Recollecting the delightful Christmas days of

my own childhood, I was anticipating great pleasure. Of course I was

going to look in on a scene of childish joy, of shouting and laughing,

and eating of candy and pop-corn in unlimited quantities. Memories of

the stories of Hans Andersen and the Grimm brothers were floating

through my mind as I crunched the crisp snow under my feet on my way to

the church. I remembered the rapture of those Christmas mornings at

home, when we children stole down stairs by candlelight to the warm

room filled with the aromatic perfume of the Christmas tree, that stood

there resplendent with presents from old Santa Claus--Noah's arks,

mimic landscapes, dolls, sleds, colored cornucopias bursting with

bonbons, and especially those books of fairy-tales from whose rich

creamy pages exhaled a most divine and musty fragrance. Ah, the memory

of our childhood's hours! what is it but that enchanted lake of the

Arabian tale, from whose quiet depths we are ever and anon drawing up

in our nets some magic colored fish? Well, I reached the church. The

children, dressed in their Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes, were sitting

in the high-backed pews in solemn silence, while a reverend gentleman

was delivering a solemn exhortation to gratitude and goodness. Another

followed. "Very well, gentlemen," thought I, "but now please to retire

and give up the field to these children." But no. The superintendent of

the Sunday-school now advanced: the children marched up one by one, as

their names were called, and received their presents from him. Some of

them came very near grinning (poor things!), but in general they looked

as if they were going to their execution. When all was done _the

meeting was dismissed_!

Sauntering through the streets of this village, and making note of the

quaint idiosyncrasies and irregularities of character and manner

displayed by its humbler folk, I thought of the sentiment which Thoreau

so exquisitely expresses in his _Week_: "The forms of beauty fall

naturally around him who is in the performance of his proper work, as

the curled shavings drop from the plane and borings cluster round the

auger." Picturesqueness characterizes the New England white laborer, as

it does the Southern black laborer: especially is this true of those

who have emigrated from Europe when of adult age, and have been unable

to lay aside the picturesque features of their Old-World life.

One winter evening I discovered, a few miles from the village, one of

this class: he was, on the whole, the strangest human being whom it has

ever been my fortune to meet. About dusk I found myself some distance

away from the village, near the great bridge that spans the river where

it debouches into the sea. The water was heaving in long, slow swells.

A deep silence had fallen over the earth. The evening red was reflected

in the sea in rich blood dye, while the colored lights of the bridge

and the lighthouse glowed and burned in the deep, here writhing along

the waves like long golden and crimson sea-serpents, and there shooting

down long streamers of light into the waves, to serve, I fancied, as

hanging lamps for that vast black, star-bespangled abyss of the sky,

that weird sunken dome, that inverted world, over which the water lay

stretched out like thin, translucent red glass, and to look down into

whose immeasurable and dizzy depths thrilled me both with pleasure and

a kind of terror--that vague feeling of pain which the sublime always

excites in the mind.

I crossed the bridge and wandered along the opposite side of the river

by a lonely path. Suddenly I saw smoke curling up from a small recess

of the beach. It was a full mile from any human habitation known to me,

and I hesitated for a moment about advancing upon such a place at dusk,

especially as the winter was one of the gloomiest in the period of our

long financial depression. However, I decided to go on. Several

overturned fishing-boats lay upon the beach, with a net drying upon one

of them. A few clamshells were scattered about, and near the door of a

small cabin lay a pile of split kindlings. The cabin was considerably

smaller in size than an English railway-carriage, and nestled under the

overhanging bank of the river. No human being was visible at first. But

presently I detected by the red glow of his pipe a man in the interior

of the cabin. I sat down on a boat, not venturing to approach nearer

and beard the old lion in his lair. But on his inviting me to come in I

went up to the door. It was, however, only a meaningless form of speech

that led him to say "Come in," for it would hardly have been possible

to get into a cabin only five feet wide, with the man himself sitting

by a large rusty stove right over against the door. He placed a

bootjack in the doorway for me to sit down upon. There was no window in

the cabin. Firkins of fish were piled up along the sides of the

interior, and in the dim background I saw a rude framework covered with

straw which served as a bed.

And now for the human being there. The most noticeable peculiarity

about the strange old hermit was an enormous wen which hung down from

the front part of his neck. This wen was fully as large as a man's

head. Long yellow hair hung over his shoulders, and a huge red beard

reached to the middle of his breast--

His beard a foot before him, and his hair

A yard behind.

His moustache alone showed signs of the scissors: he had there cleared

a path through the russet jungle of his beard, that an entrance might

be had to the inner man. The eyes that looked out from this thicket of

hair had not that hard, dangerous, angry look that experience of such

persons had taught me to expect, but they expressed loneliness. He told

of the high tides of the month of January in a certain year, when the

water rose so as to enter his cabin and ponderous cakes of ice were

knocking and grinding against its sides in the night. We talked of

fish. He spoke of fyke-nets and drag-nets and warp-lines, and of

eel-spearing through the ice. He took especial delight in telling me

how the snow in winter was swept away from his door in a clean circle

by the broom of some friendly wind. "It is the wind that does it," said

he with touching naïveté. It almost seemed to the poor old man's lonely

heart like a special favor on the part of the wind, like a tender

feeling and relenting on the part of the icy-hearted winter wind for

him in his solitude and sadness as he lay there cast out on the

desolate shore of the world, deformed and shattered in health--

Gleich einer Leiche

Die grollend ausgeworfen das Meer--

"Like a corpse which the bellowing sea

has cast out."

Strange life! O utter barrenness of existence! A pipe, a fire, fish,

rags and a bed of straw. God pity thee! God pity thee, thou poor

stricken deer! Take heart, man, take heart! Be brave, and dash away the

bitter tear. Look up from the lowly cabin-door into the solemn night

with its golden-burning stars, and even the loosened harp-strings of

thy shattered old frame will vibrate and tremble to the eternal

melodies that thrill through the mystic All: "God is in his heaven."

Dickens and Hawthorne have each written of canal-life in America, the

one in a satirico-humorous way, the other sympathetically. People side

with one or the other according as their disposition is active and

restless or indolent and epicurean. I fight under the banner of

Hawthorne in defence of the canal. The following sketch of one of the

old picturesque Pennsylvania canals may be called a vignette, for it is

a fragment without definite border or setting. But admirers of Dickens

are respectfully requested to note that it is no mere fancy sketch of a

poetic mind, but was drawn from Nature, every bit of it.

The first and most novel sensation I experienced was that of the quiet

and seemingly mysterious gliding movement of the boat. Ever and anon we

passed through a lock. How strange and thrilling the feeling, to stand

on the deck and see yourself slowly sinking into the great mossy box,

and then to see the great valves of the lock slowly open, disclosing

what seemed a new land and fresh vistas of green landscape! It was like

the opening of the gates of the future (I pleased myself with fancying)

to my triumphant progress. Gate after gate swung back its ponderous

valves: I was Habib advancing from isle to isle of the enchanted sea. I

uttered the word of power, and the huge unwieldy gates of opposition

swung back with sullen and unwilling deference, compelled to respect

the talisman I held. But hark! Hear the sweet notes of the supper-horn

floating through the cool gloom of twilight as the tired reapers trudge

home with their grain-cradles swung over their shoulders. Listen to the

tinkling mule-bells on the tow-path, see the bright crimson tassels of

the bridles, and the gayly-decorated boats, their cabin-roofs adorned

with pots of herbs and flowers.

As we glide down the canal, ever and anon we see some empty returning

boat (called "light boat" in the technical canal phrase) rounding a

curve before us, It comes nearer: the horses walk the same tow-path:

how _are_ the boats to pass without confusion? Ah, the riddle is

solved. Our captain (who holds the helm while the boy, his assistant,

is down in the cabin preparing supper) calls out suddenly, at the last

moment, "Whoa!" The well-trained horses instantly stop; the momentum of

the boat carries it on; the rope slackens, disappears in the water,

except at the two ends; the approaching horses step over it, and the

approaching boat glides over it. When the approaching "light boat" has

passed nearly or entirely over the rope our captain shouts to his

horses to go on: the rope tightens, and all is as before.

The parts of the canal lying between the locks are called "levels." On

long levels we could often see one or two boats far ahead of us and

going in the same direction. Nothing could be prettier than the thin

blue streamer of wood-smoke trailing out from the stovepipe of the

cabin-roof against the bright green of the foliage along the banks. It

told us the cheery news that the fragrant coffee or tea was a-making in

the cozy little cabin below. And now, when supper is done, the captain

brings up his guitar and plays sweet plaintive airs as we glide through

the quiet evening shadows. Night deepens: the stars come out one by

one, and are reflected in the smooth dark water below in dreamy, dusky

splendor. We brush the dew from the heavy foliage as we pass along.

Lithe alders and heavy vines trail in the cool flood, and the fresh

evening air is filled with grateful harvest-scents and the perfume of

unseen flowers. And now our pretty painted lamp-board is fixed in its

place in the bow. The bright lamp throws its rich golden splendor

before us. The lamp is hid from us by the board which holds it. We

stand behind in the dark, and watch the overhanging sprays of foliage

making strange, grotesque shadows that move fantastically and sport and

clutch and writhe like wanton fiends, while the solid banks of foliage

themselves, reflected in the water below, look, one fancies, like

hanging gardens in the weird world to which the water is but a window,

and far, far down upon whose dusky floor the flowers are golden stars.

The canal over which I am now conducting my readers is one of the

oldest in the country. For many miles it is cut out of the solid rock,

following the windings of the river and clinging close to the contours

of the hills. The particolored rocks jut out in great square blocks,

which, in summer, are usually tufted with grass or flowers. There is an

indescribable air of coziness and safety about the amphibious life one

leads on such a canal. You can here snap your fingers at the terrors of

the cruel water. Here the mocking waves cannot "curl their monstrous

heads" as on the sea, when with blind fury they dash against the

helpless ship their ponderous and shapeless forms, while sailors and

passengers alike are every moment expecting the final stroke that shall

sink them beneath the waves. On the canal you cannot be drowned, on the

canal you cannot be wrecked. The shore is so delightfully near! You

exult in the friendly companionship of the rocky wall that towers above

you, and in the assuring presence of the flowers and shrubs that cling

there or reach out to you their thin elvish hands. You feel that here

untamed Nature (that great wolf) cannot get her claws upon you. Upon

this thread of water you are soothed by the thought that you are under

the friendly and beneficent protection of man.

About nine or ten o'clock each evening the boats tie up at some lock.

At all of these locks there are refreshment-stands and neat taverns of

which the traveller must avail himself, since there are no

accommodations for visitors on the boats. On the fourth day, wishing to

vary my experience, I boarded another boat. Her deck was the very model

of neatness. Verily the spirit of either a Yankee housewife or a Dutch

vrow must have presided over that boat and tyrannized over the poor

wretches who managed it. Black Care seemed to sit continually upon

their brows. They were living scrubbing-brushes. They were scrub-mad.

From morn to dewy eve they scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed, and

doubtless in their dreams they still scrubbed on. The crew consisted of

a man and his wife, their boy and an old uncle of the boy. I found, to

my delight, that the boy was a very communicative young gentleman,

flowing freely in talk without any pumping on my part. The various

quaint technical phrases which I learned from him shall now be imparted

to the reader. The _berme_, or _heel-path_, is the side of the canal

opposite the tow-path; _basins_ are small coves in the canal where

boats may lie over; _stop-lock_, a sort of quay; the _bit_, a

timber-head at the bow of the boat. _Snub her!_ is a phrase of command,

meaning, "Tie the boat to a post on the bank." _Pipe-poles_ are

steering-poles. The _stern pile_ (of coal on this canal) is in a large

crib near the stern and just in front of the cabin, and is placed in

this particular part of the long and unwieldy boat in order to make her

obey the helm better. _Timber-heads_ project above the deck to "snub"

lines on. _Tow-posts_ are short upright posts near the bow, to which

the tow-line is fastened. The _combings_ are the pieces the hatches

rest on and surround the hold in an oval form. The _wale-plank_ is the

edge of the deck, projecting out over the water like a welt around the

entire circumference of the boat.

It may surprise many persons to learn that on the tablelands of the

Alleghany Mountains there are still thousands of square miles of virgin

forests of hemlock and pine through which roam bears and deer in

considerable numbers. The hemlock trees are rapidly succumbing,

however, to the axe of the lumberman and the bark-peeler. Bark-peeling

is the great industry there, almost every mountain-hollow along the

lines of the few railways that have penetrated the region in

Pennsylvania having its tannery in active operation. This tanning

business, by the way, is in a very prosperous condition, owing to the

foreign demand for the liquor extracted from the bark as well as to the

steadiness of the leather market. There is a primitive freshness in the

life of the mountaineers and lumbermen of the Alleghanies like that of

the mining regions of the far West. There is a sprinkling of Canadians

among the lumbermen, and as a whole they are the most honest,

good-natured, childlike set of men in existence. They are the true

priests of those high and dim-green temple-aisles--priests of Nature

one might call them. The cabins of the bark-peelers are made of rough,

sweet-smelling hemlock planks. The smell of the hemlock bark is fresh

and tonical, and appetizing in the highest degree. The men eat fabulous

quantities of food: some require five meals a day. I well remember my

first meal in a mountain hemlock shanty. Imagine a long table of

unpainted boards with X-shaped legs, and along each side of the table

benches for seats. Let there be upon the table three large bowls of

black sugar, here and there towering stacks of white bread (the slices

an inch thick at least), and beside each cover a teacup and saucer, a

huge bowl filled to the brim with steaming-hot apple-sauce, together

with a bowl of the same dimensions containing beans. Now blow the

supper-horn, and hearken to the far halloo from the mountain-side.

Twenty blowzed and bearded men, ravenous and wild-eyed with hunger,

presently file into the room. They sit down: there is an awful and

solemn silence--they are evidently impressed with the momentous

importance of the occasion. You find your face growing long; you think

of funerals; make a timid and humble remark which you hope will be

acceptable and within the range of their comprehension. No answer: you

evidently have their pity. No word breaks the sullen silence, except an

occasional request to pass something, uttered with an effort as if the

speaker had the lockjaw. The meal is bolted with frightful rapidity,

generally in five or six minutes. I remember that I was considerably

scared and dazed, on my first acquaintance with these mountain-fauns,

at seeing such a systematic snatching and grabbing, such a ferocious

plying of knives and forks and rattling of cups, by those huge-limbed,

brawny, whiskered fellows.

It is difficult to describe the perennial beauty of the hemlock trees,

with their dark, rich foliage-masses and aromatic odor. It seems a

sacrilege to destroy them so ruthlessly. When stripped of their bark

and stained with the dark-red sap, they look like fallen giants spoiled

of their armor, lying there prone and white-naked, as if there had been

a battle of the giants and the gods. These giants were perfumed, it

seems. Their huge green plumes are now withered and torn, and their red

blood oozes slowly from their bodies in thin and trickling streams. You

think of Ossian's heroes, of Thor and his hammer, of the Anakim or of

the steeple-high Brobdignagian cavalry, and almost expect to hear

groans issuing from the colossal trunks that cumber the ground on every

side.

Everything is on a large scale in these mighty forests. The horizon of

your life noiselessly widens, rolls gradually back into immeasurable

distances, and "deepens on and up." There is elasticity and stretch in

your thoughts. If you have read Richter, his towering, godlike dreams

of time and eternity here find their fit interpretation. He had his

Fichtelgebirge, and you have your hemlock mountains. Life seems heroic

once more: you exult in existence, and fondly think that here you could

be happy for ever. To live far away from the cruel, hurrying world in a

sweet little hamlet you wot of, sunk in the heart of the mountains at

the bottom of a deep, mossy mountain-chalice--a chalice of richest

chasing and filled with the pure wine of God, the mountain-air; to live

there during the long summer days; to stand in the flush of dawn with

bared head and inhale the fragrance of the dew-drenched grass and the

scarlet balsams; to walk with hushed step through the wide forests,

communing with the powerful sylvan spirits that labor there, watching

with what miraculous delicacy of touch their unseen fingers weave the

rich fantastic shrouds of fern and moss that deck the dead and fallen

trees or anon give to the living their faint and mottled tints of green

and gray;--to live thus through the summer hours, and through autumn,

winter, spring watch the unrolling of the gorgeous scroll of

Time,--this, you think, were living to some purpose!--WILLIAM SLOANE

KENNEDY.

OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.

THE PARIS SALON OF 1880.

The Salon (official) catalogue contains this year 696 pages. There are

3957 paintings exhibited; 2085 designs, sketches in charcoal and

watercolors; 30 engravings on stone, etc.; 111 designs for

architecture; 46 specimens of lithography; 701 pieces of sculpture; 305

eaux-fortes; and 54 specimens of monumental art--in all 7280 objects.

Though we all thought last year that the number of paintings exhibited

was immense, this year the number is 917 more. Alas for the poor

critics! How many an additional ache that implies for them! Still, as

we have a cozy reading-room at the Palais de l'Industrie--an innovation

of this season for the benefit of those who get tired of looking at the

pictures and wish to "take a rest"--the weary critic may enter and take

a seat (if he can find one unoccupied, which is highly improbable), and

there write out his "notes," as I am doing at this moment.

While standing in front of a charming picture by Dagnan-Bouveret (_Un

Accident_), I felt a soft arm brush gently against mine, and glancing

down recognized the capricious Sara Bernhardt. Yes, Sara was there,

leaning on the arm of Mr. Stevens, the Belgian painter who is credited

with finishing Sara's paintings, and followed by her son Maurice and a

little retinue of admirers, mostly young men--artists and actors--and

stared at with persistency by all who saw her pass. "There goes

Bernhardt!" "Did you see Bernhardt?" were the remarks on all sides. Her

head, which bore itself as if quite unaware that a suit for three

hundred and fifty thousand francs damages was suspended over it like

the sword of Damocles, was covered with a mass of rich auburn-colored

hair. She is as changeable as a chameleon in the matter of her hair: I

never see her twice with the same colored _chevelure_.

The Salon this year contains at least four _good_--one might almost say

_great_--pictures. Of these four, the one to which popular opinion

seems to award the _grande médaille d'honneur_, is Bastien-Lepage's

_Jeanne d'Arc_. This large painting (3-15/100 mètres by 3-45/100

mètres) represents the Maid at the moment when, seeing the vision of

the Virgin, she is inspired to go forth and save her country. A

peasant-girl, strong and muscular, she leans against a tree, her face

uplifted to heaven and aglow with a noble inspiration. The cottage in

the background, the trees and weeds in the middle distance, the

distribution of light and the subdued tones of this impressive picture,

are all excellent. Some critics object to the artist's perspective, but

I fancy that is a bit of hypercriticism.

Then comes Fernand Cormon's _Flight of Cain_, suggested by Victor

Hugo's lines:

Lorsqu' avec ses enfants couverts de peaux de bêtes,

Échevelé, livide au milieu des tempêtes,

Caïn se fut enfui de devant Jéhovah.

This canvas is one of the largest in the Salon--4 by 7 mètres. The

chief figures are grandly painted and the whole picture is very

impressive.

Alphonse Alexis Morot's _Good Samaritan_ is an exceedingly strong

picture. The Samaritan is represented holding upon his own beast the

poor maltreated Jew and walking by his side. The figure-painting is

wonderful in its vigor and _verve_.

The fourth picture is Alexandre Cabanel's _Phèdre_. The source of the

artist's inspiration was the well-known passage from Euripides:

"Consumed upon a bed of grief, Phèdre shuts herself up in her palace,

and with a thin veil envelops her blonde head. It is now the third day

that her body has partaken of no nourishment: attacked by a concealed

ill, she longs to put an end to her sad fate." Phèdre, as she lies

wishing only for death as a surcease of sorrow, gazed upon with

solicitude by her pitying attendants, is a vivid picture of

all-consuming grief. The decorative work of the bed and the wall is

chaste and classic.

Of the minor pictures, that of Dagnan-Bouveret, _Un Accident_, is one

of the best. It is indeed a rare picture in the excellence of its

execution in every detail. A boy has been badly wounded in the wrist by

some accident, and the surgeon is engaged in dressing the injured part.

The dirty foot of the boy as it peeps out beneath the chair, shod in a

rough sabot which fails to conceal its grime, the bowl standing on the

table half full of blood and water while the wrist is now being

skilfully bandaged by the surgeon, whose operations are watched with

great solicitude by the group of sympathetic relatives,--all these

features give a living interest to this painting which is unusual. The

red, grimy hands of the old mother of the boy are very faithfully

painted. The expression on the lad's face of heroic endurance and a

determination not to cry in any case is touching.

As for Mademoiselle Sara Bernhardt's _La Jeune Fille et la Mort_--a

veiled skeleton coming up behind a young girl and touching her on the

shoulder--it would attract little attention if it had not been signed

by the flighty (and lately _fleeing_) actress. The verses underneath

the picture are the best part of it:

La Mort glisse en son rêve, et tout bas:

"Viens," dit elle,

"L'Amour c'est l'éphémère, et je suis l'immortelle."

The great names--Meissonier, Gérôme, Munkacsy, Madrazo,

Berne-Bellecour, Détaille, De Neuville, Rosa Bonheur, Flameng,

etc.--are conspicuous this year by their absence from the catalogue of

the Salon. It is whispered that the reason Munkacsy does not exhibit is

because the administration of the Beaux-Arts saw fit to place the

pictures by foreign artists separately in the Galérie des Étrangers. An

"impressionist" artist-friend of mine--Miss Cassatt, the sister of

Vice-President Cassatt of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company--says that

the reason these distinguished artists do not exhibit any more is that

they are disgusted with the way in which the Salon is conducted by

Edmond Turquet, the present sous-secrétaire aux Beaux-Arts, and the

very unfair acts committed in the awarding of medals, admission of

pictures, etc.

M. Jean Jacques Henner's _La Fontaine_ is a true Correggio in delicacy

and clearness of tone. His treatment of the flesh is peculiar, and much

envied by many a Paris artist. In this picture the nymph, leaning over

the fountain, is dressed in a very inexpensive costume--in fact, the

same fashion that Mother Eve introduced into Eden. There in the placid

water the beautiful creature contemplates the reflection of her face,

and seems to breathe, with all her being, those charming lines of

Lafenestre:

Heure silencieuse, où la nymphe se penche

Sur la source des bois qui lui sert de miroir,

Et rêve en regardant mourir sa forme blanche

Dans l'eau pâle où descend le mystère du soir.

Gustave Jacquet's _Le Minuet_ is one of those pictures which fascinate

and draw us back again and again. A rarely-beautiful girl is dancing

the minuet, surrounded by a group of her friends, beautiful blonde

girls and a fair-haired young man. The costumes are perfectly

exquisite, yet there is not too much _chiffonnerie_ in the picture.

There is a remarkable effect of depth in the painting of the figure of

the dancing girl, especially at the feet and at the bottom of her

skirt. Perhaps the only criticism that could fairly be passed upon M.

Jacquet's picture is that there is too much of mere "prettiness" about

his principal figures.

A curious feature in this year's exhibition is that there are three

pictures of the assassination of Marat by Charlotte Corday, two of

which are hung in the same room. There are also three paintings

representing a scene from Victor Hugo's _Histoire d'un Crime_,

"L'enfant avait reçu deux balles dans la tête." The child is

represented in Henry Gervex's picture as being lifted up by his

friends, who are examining the poor little wounded, bleeding head. It

is powerful in composition and a very thrilling, realistic picture. The

other two representations of this subject are by Paul Langlois and Paul

Robert.

Gustave Courtois's _Dante and Virgil in Hell: The Circle of the

Traitors to their Country_, is a picture very much studied by all the

artists who visit the Salon because of its strange landscape, its

wonderful effect of the glacial formations and its marvellous effects

of color. Benjamin Constant's _Les Derniers Rebelles_ is one of the

best efforts of this artist, so fruitful in scenes drawn from Morocco

and Egyptian life. He has depicted the sultan going forth in great

splendor from the gates of the city of Morocco, surrounded by his army

and courtiers, and before him are brought, either dead or alive, all

the principal chiefs of the revolted tribes. There is much that is

noble in the composition, and the coloring is perfect.

The arrangement of the pictures this year is not altogether

satisfactory to the artists. A radical change has been made--grouping

all the _hors-concours_ men by themselves, and all the foreigners by

themselves, and crowding about one thousand pictures out of doors into

the corridors which run around the garden of the Palais de l'Industrie.

A friend of mine saw a French artist mount a stepladder and

deliberately cut out of the frame his picture and carry it away with

him, because it was so badly hung.

The _Illustrated Catalogue_ of the Salon is a somewhat remarkable work.

It is specially noticeable for the very curious English translations of

the titles of some of the paintings. For instance, the title of Gabriel

Boutel's picture, _Bonne à tout faire_--a soldier seated with a baby in

his arms--is rendered, _Maid for anything_(!). _Prière à Saint Janvier_

is rendered _Prayer_ AT _Saint Januarious_. _Le Cabaret du Pot d'Étain_

is translated _The Tavern of the Brass_ POT (instead of _Pewter Mug_).

Ed. Morin's _Promenade en Marne_ is _A_ F_rip on the Marne!_ Our friend

from Boston, Edwin Lord Weeks, is mentioned as "LORD" Edwin Weeks! But

the best of all is _La Cruche cassée_, translated _The Broken_ PIG! The

title of another picture is (in the catalogue) _Good-bye, Swee_L

_hart!_

Out of the 3957 oil paintings exhibited, our country is represented by

113 pictures, the productions of 83 Americans. Then we claim 13 of the

aquarelle painters, and there are in addition 11 natives of the United

States who exhibit designs in charcoal, _sanguine_, _gouache_, and

paintings on either porcelain or faïence; also 7 sculptors--in all, 114

of our compatriots whose works are in the present Salon. New York

claims the lion's share of these artists, 40 being accredited to that

State. Of the remainder, 18 are from Boston, 13 from Philadelphia, 6

from New Orleans, 3 from Chicago, 2 from Toledo, 2 from San Francisco,

etc. etc.

I think it will be generally admitted that the only really strong

pictures exhibited by the American artists are John S. Sargent's

portrait of Madame Pailleron (wife of the author of _L'Étincelle_) and

his _Fumée d'Ambre Gris_; Henry Mosler's _Toilette de Noce_; D.R.

Knight's _Une Halte_; Miss Gardner's _Priscilla the Puritan_; F.A.

Bridgman's _Habitation Arabe à Biskra_; Charles E. DuBois's _Autumn

Evening on Lake Neuchâtel_; and Edwin L. Weeks's _Embarkment of the

Camels_ and _Gateway of an Old Fondak in the Holy City of Sallée_

(Morocco)--both of which were sold immediately after the opening. Of

course there are several other good pictures by our compatriots, and

some that possess great merit. But the ones indicated above are the

only ones which (excepting Picknell's two landscapes, _Sur le Bord du

Marais_ and _La Route de Concarneau_) have called forth any special

notice from French critics or in any way attracted much of the public

attention thus far. Mr. Sargent is a surprise and a wonder to even his

master, Carolus Duran, whose portrait, painted by Sargent, attracted

great attention in the Salon of last year and received an "honorable

mention." He has painted this year a full-length in the open air,

producing a very sunny, strong out-door effect. The hands attract much

praise, but opinions vary as to the face. His _Fumée d'Ambre Gris_

represents a woman of Tangiers engaged in perfuming her clothing with

the fumes from a lamp in which ambergris is burning. The white robes of

the woman set off against a pearly-gray background, the rising smoke,

the curiously-tinted finger-nails of the woman, and the rich rug on

which the lamp stands, combine to make a very notable and curious

picture.

Miss Elizabeth J. Gardner of New Hampshire has two excellent pictures

in the Salon--_Priscilla the Puritan_ and _The Water's Edge_. They are

both well hung, as indeed are most of our American artists'

contributions to this exhibition. Out of the 111 pictures in oils sent

in by the Americans, I can recall 46 which are hung "on the line," and

there may be even more. This is certainly treating our countrymen very

fairly. Miss Gardner's _Au Bord de l'Eau_ represents two young girls

standing at the edge of a pond, the one reaching down to pluck a

water-lily, and the other supporting her by clasping her waist. There

is great purity in the tones of this picture, and, though lacking

somewhat in action, the coloring and drawing are both admirable.

The most notable piece of statuary in the Salon, the work of an

American, is Saint-Gaudens's statue of Admiral Farragut. Mr.

Saint-Gaudens, who is a native of New York, received about two years

ago from one hundred gentlemen of that city, who had subscribed the

necessary funds, a commission to make a statue of the great sailor. It

is to be placed in Madison Square, New York. The pedestal is to be of

granite, having at its base a large seat, on the back of which will be

an inscription mentioning the important events in the life of the hero.

The statue, of bronze, represents Farragut in a standing posture, a

little larger than life-size. It is now being cast, and will be ready

to be placed in position within two months. Mr. Saint-Gaudens is now at

work on a statue of Richard Robert Randall, the founder of the Sailors'

Snug Harbor on Staten Island, in front of which institution this statue

is to be placed. This sculptor has also nearly completed his cast of

the figures intended to ornament the mausoleum of Ex-Senator E.D.

Morgan (of New York), about to be erected at Hartford, Connecticut. Mr.

Saint-Gaudens intends removing his atelier from Paris to New York in

June, and will hereafter be permanently located in that city, where he

will be an important addition to the art-movement in our own country.

The catalogue numbers, names and birthplaces of the Americans who

exhibit this year are here given:

OIL PAINTINGS.

103. Audra, Rosémond Casimir, New Orleans, La.

127. Bacon, Henry, Boston, Mass.

139. Baird, William, Chicago.

142, 143. Baker, Miss Ellen K., Buffalo.

193. Bayard, Miss Kate, New York.

220, 221. Beckwith, Arthur, New York.

329. Bierstadt, Albert, New York.

344. Bispham, Henry C., Philadelphia, Pa.

355, 356. Blackman, Walter, Chicago.

362. Blashfield, Edwin H., New York.

380. Boggs, Frank Myers, New York.

490, 491. Bridgman, Frederic D., Alabama.

519, 520. Brown, Walter Francis, Rhode Island.

742. Cheret-Lauchaume de Gavarmy, J.L., New Orleans.

823, 824. Coffin, Wm. Anderson, Allegheny City.

841. Collins, Alfred Q., Boston, Mass.

844. Comans, Mrs. Charlotte B., New York.

855. Conant, Miss Cornelia, New York.

866. Copeland, Alfred Bryant, Boston.

890. Correja, Henry, New York.

893, 894. Corson, Miss Helen, Philadelphia.

933, 934. Cox, Kenyon, Warren, O.

965, 966. Daniel, George, New York.

1009. Davis, John Steeple, New York.

1089. Delport, J.S., New York.

1132, 1133. Deschamps, Mme. Camille, New York.

2096. DeLancey, William, New York.

1155. Dessommes, Edmond, New Orleans.

1161. Desvarreux-Larpenteur, Jas., St. Paul, Minn.

1199. Dillon, Henry, San Francisco, Cal.

1234, 1235. Dubois, Charles Edward, New York.

1381. Faller, Miss Emily, New York.

1426. Flagg, Charles Noël, Brooklyn, N.Y.

1537, 1538. Gardner, Miss Elizabeth J., New Hampshire.

1559. Gault, Alfred de, New Orleans, La.

1569, 1570. Gay, Walter, Boston.

1614. Gilman, Ben Ferris, Salem, Mass.

1693, 1694. Gregory, J. Eliot, New York.

1796. Harrison, Thomas Alexander, Philadelphia.

1799, 1800. Healy, George P.A., Boston.

1801, 1802. Heaton, Augustus G., Philadelphia.

1835, 1836. Herpin-Masseras, Madame Marguerite, Boston, Mass.

1851, 1852. Hilliard, William H., Boston.

1853. Hinckley, Robert, Boston.

1859. Hlasko, Miss Annie, Philadelphia.

387. Jones, Bolton, Baltimore, Md.

2011. Knight, Daniel Ridgeway, Philadelphia.

2337. Lippincott, William H., Philadelphia.

2364. Loomis, Chester, Syracuse, N.Y.

2513. Mason, Louis Gage, Boston.

2556, 2557. May, Edward Harrison, New York.

2666. Mitchell, John Ames, New York.

2730. Morgan, Charles W., Philadelphia.

2738. Mortimer, Stanley, New York.

2739, 2740. Mosler, Henry, Cincinnati, O.

2741. Moss, Charles E., Charloe, Kansas(?).

2742, 2743. Moss, Frank, Philadelphia.

2760. Mowbray, Henry S., Alexandria, Egypt (of American parentage).

2780. Neal, David, Lowell, Mass.

2789. Nicholls, Burr H., Buffalo, N.Y.

2823. Obermiller, Miss Louisa, Toledo, O.

2878, 2879. Parker, Stephen Hills, New York.

2895. Pattison, James William, Boston. (Mr. Pattison exhibits also an

aquarelle.)

2944. Perkins, Miss Fanny A., New York.

3014, 3015. Picknell, W.L., Boston, Mass.

3147, 3148. Ramsey, Milne, Philadelphia.

3177. Reilly, John Louis, New York.

3284. Robinson, Theodore, Irasburg.

3428, 3429. Sargent, John S., Philadelphia.

3525. Shonborn, Lewis, Nemora.

3578. Stone, Miss Marie L., New York.

3579. Strain, Daniel, Cincinnati, O.

3584. Swift, Clement.

3606. Teka, Madame E., Boston, Mass.

3695. Tuckerman, Ernest, New York.

3697. Tuttle, C.F., Ohio.

5850. Vogel, Miss Christine, New Orleans.

3879. Walker, Henry, Boston.

3891, 3892. Weeks, Edwin Lord, Boston.

3900, 3901. Welch, Thaddeus, Laporte, Ind.

3908, 3909. Williams, Frederic D., Boston.

3921. Woodward, Wilbur W., Indiana.

3923. Wright, Marian Loïs.

DESIGNS, AQUARELLES, PORCELAINS, ETC.

4101. Berend, Edward, New York.

4182, 4183. Boker, Miss Orleana V., New York.

4187, 4188. Boni, Mrs. Marie Louise.

4370. Chauncey, Mrs. Lucy, New York.

4399, 4400. Clark, George, New York.

4462. Crocker, Miss Sallie S., Portland, Me.

4474, 4475. Dana, Charles E., Wilkes-Barre, Pa.

4578. Dixey, Mrs. Ellen S., Boston.

4586. Donohoe, Eliza, Buffalo, N.Y.

4686. Faquani, Miss Nina, New York.

4688. Faller, Miss Emily, New York.

4855. Goodridge, Miss S.M.

4867. Greatorex, Miss Eleanor E., New York.

4868, 4869. Greatorex, Miss Kathleen, New York.

4927. Hardie, Robert G.

4953. Heuston, Miss Emma L., Sacramento, Cal.

5384. Merrill, Mrs. Emma F.R., New York.

5396. Mezzara, Mrs. Rosine, New York.

5562. Pering, Miss Cornelia.

5914. Tompkins, Miss Clementina, Washington.

6008, 6009. Volkmar, Charles, Baltimore.

6015. Walker, Miss Sophia A.

6028. Wheeler, Miss Mary, Concord.

6029, 6030. Whidden, W.M., Boston.

SCULPTURE.

6081. Bartlett, Paul, New Haven.

6136. Boyle, John, Philadelphia.

6276. Donoghue, John, Chicago.

6312, 6313. Ezekiel, Moses, Richmond.

6371. Gould, Thomas Ridgway, Boston.

6534. Mezzara, Joseph, New York.

6661, 6662. Saint-Gaudens, Augustus, New York

--J.J.R.

A PLOT FOR AN HISTORICAL NOVEL.

In Hawthorne's _American Note-Book_, among his memoranda, into which he

conscientiously put every scrap and detail which might be useful in his

writings, is an allusion to the "Grey Property Case," a lawsuit which

held the Pennsylvania courts for more than half a century, and turned

upon a curious story which will be new to some readers and may have

slipped from the recollection of others. It belongs to the history of

Mifflin, Juniata county, first settled by Scotch-Irish colonists in

1749. Two of the four men who claimed some land and built a fort had

the name of Grey, and the narrative concerns the younger of these two

brothers, John Grey. One morning in August, 1756, he left his wife and

children at the fort and set out on an expedition to Carlisle. He was

returning when he had an encounter with a bear, and was detained on the

mountain-road for several hours. This probably preserved his life, for

when he reached the settlement he found that the fort had just been

burned by the Indians, and that every person in it had either been

killed or taken prisoner. Among the latter were Grey's wife and his

child, a beautiful little girl of three years old. Grey was an

affectionate husband and father, and he was almost heartbroken by this

catastrophe. Fired with longing for revenge, he joined Colonel

Armstrong's expedition in September against the Indian settlement at

Kittanning on the Ohio, with some hope that his wife and child might be

found among the captives whom, it was rumored, the Indians had carried

there. Colonel Armstrong's onslaught was successful: he succeeded in

burning the village, killed about fifty savages and rescued eleven

white prisoners. Grey gained no information, however, about his family,

and, sick and exhausted by the disappointment and the fatigues of the

campaign, went home to die. He left a will bequeathing one-half of his

farm to his wife and one-half to his child if they returned from

captivity. In case his child should never be given up or should not

survive him, he gave her half of the estate to his sister, who had a

claim against him, having lent him money.

The rumor was true that the Indians had first carried Mrs. Grey and her

little daughter to Kittanning, but afterward, for greater security,

they were given over to the French commander at Fort Duquesne. They

were confined there for a time, then carried into Canada. About a year

later Mrs. Grey had a chance to escape. She concealed herself among the

skins in the sledge of a fur-trader, and was thus able to elude

pursuit. She left her child behind her in captivity, and after passing

through a variety of adventures returned to Tuscarora Valley, and,

finding her husband dead, proved his will and took possession of her

half of his property. Grey's sister was disposed to assert her claim to

the other portion, but Mrs. Grey always maintained that her little

daughter Jane was alive, and would sooner or later, after the French

and Indian wars were ended, be released and sent back. In 1764 a treaty

was made with the Indians enforcing a general surrender of all their

white captives. A number of stolen children were brought to

Philadelphia to be identified by their friends and relations, and Mrs.

Grey (who in the mean time had married a Mr. Williams) made the journey

to this city in the hope of claiming her little daughter Jane. Seven

years had passed since Mrs. Williams had seen the child, who might be

expected to have grown out of her remembrance. But, even taking this

into consideration, there seemed at first to be none of the children

who in the least respect answered the description of the lost girl.

Mrs. Grey probably longed to find her daughter for affection's sake.

But there was besides a powerful motive to induce her, inasmuch as she

wished to get possession of the other half of her husband's property,

which must otherwise be forfeited to his sister, Mrs. James Grey. One

of the captive children, apparently about the same age as the lost

Jane, had found no one to recognize her. Mrs. Williams determined to

take this girl and substitute her for her own, and put an end to Mrs.

James Grey's claim. She did so, and brought up the stranger for her own

child. The Grey property thus passed wholly into the possession of Mrs.

Williams. The girl grew up rough, awkward and ugly, incapable of

refinement and even gross in her morals. She finally married a minister

by the name of Gillespie.

Meanwhile, the heirs of Mrs. James Grey had gained some sort of

information which led them to suspect that the returned girl was no

relation of their uncle John Grey, and in 1789 they brought a lawsuit

to recover their mother's half of the property. By this time endless

complications had arisen. Mrs. Williams was dead: her half of her first

husband's farm had been bequeathed to her second husband's kindred, and

was now in part held by them and in part had been bought by half a

dozen others. The supposed daughter, Mrs. Gillespie, had died, as had

her husband, and their share had passed to his relations. It had become

almost impossible for the most astute lawyers to find beginning, middle

or end to the claims which were set forth. Plenty of evidence was

collected to show that Mrs. Williams had substituted a stranger for her

own child, and the decision finally rested on this, and the property

was given up to the heirs of Mrs. James Grey. This did not happen,

however, until 1834, when few or none of the original litigants

remained.

The real little Jane Grey, so it was said, was brought up in a good

family who adopted her, and afterward married well and had children,

residing near Sir William Johnson's place in Central New York.--L.W.

THE MISERIES OF CAMPING OUT.

My dear cousin Laura: So you are thinking about camping out, and want

my opinion as to whether the spot we chose for our trout-fishing in

June is a suitable place for ladies to go? I should give a decided

negative. My brother takes his wife and his sister usually, although he

fortunately left them at home last time. I think they must have to

"make believe" a good deal to think it fun. I am certain that had they

been with us they would have been forced to exercise their largest

powers of imagination. We set out in fine weather, but entered the

woods in a driving snowstorm, and enjoyed a forty-six-mile drive over a

road that has, I must say this for it, not been known to be so bad for

years. We came back in a pelting rain. We made our camp in a snowstorm,

and the wood was wet and would not burn, and our tent was damp and

would not dry. We fished in a boat on the lake, swept by cold winds

until we were chilled to the bone and our hands were so stiff we could

not hold the rods. My brother had a "chill" the first night in camp. I

had indigestion from eating things fried in pork fat from the first

meal until I got a civilized repast at Frank's house in New York. I was

bounced sore. My nose was peeled by sun and cold. My lips were

decorated by three large cold-sores. My hands bled constantly from a

combination of chap and sunburn. I made up my mind if I ever got safely

out of those woods it would be several years at least before I could be

persuaded to enter them again. The scenery _is_ lovely, but one cannot

enjoy it. The fishing _is_ good, but it is hard work, and my own

opinion is that there is altogether "too much pork for a shilling" in

the whole business. Talk about being "ten miles from a lemon"! Try

forty-six miles from a lemon over a corduroy road. At first we had cold

weather, hence no black flies or mosquitos. When warm weather came on

again we had both of them, and our experience was that the snowstorm

was preferable. The black flies made the day unendurable, and the

mosquitos made the night as well as the day a wasting misery. We had

them everywhere--in the hut, in the tent, at the table, on the lake, in

the woods. No smudge or lotion discourages them; oil of tar is their

delight, camphor they revel in; buzzing, singing, biting continually

are their pastime. They are a galling curse--a nuisance which no words

can describe. A lady _might_ go through all this if she had perfect

health and the endurance under punishment of a prize-fighter. Your

party may travel all those weary miles and strike a fortunate week of

pleasant weather, but you may, and more likely will, have a week when

it will rain dismally straight through without stopping. We found, on

looking up the statistics, that in an average season out of every

twenty-two days eighteen will always be stormy, lowering and dismal.

No, don't camp out unless you can make up your mind beforehand to every

kind of discomfort and inconvenience to mar all that is beautiful and

all that is pleasing. I speak of course of the localities I have known

in my three several attempts. _They say_ it is different in other parts

of the region. But when you have plank roads and first-class hotels and

all the modern conveniences, I don't call that going into the woods and

camping out. The real thing is not very much fun except in the

retrospect, when you can thank your stars that you got out alive. For

the greater part it is a snare and a delusion. But if you still pine

for the forests and streams and the free out-of-door life, I don't wish

to discourage you, and you know I never give advice.

Your affectionate cousin, F.G.

UNREFORMED SPELLING.

A little note has come to me which gives an entertaining glimpse of the

average ability of a class. "John Stubbs × his mark" is obviously

"low-watermark," but there are levels between that and high-school

possibilities which we cannot often measure. The note is written on

fair white paper and had a white envelope. The writer is American, the

wife of a fisherman, and about thirty years old, though the handwriting

is like that of the old ladies of our grandmothers' time. It is given

of course, in the full sense, _literatim_, and is offered for the

encouragement--or the despair--of the Spelling Reform Association. The

little touch of pathos makes one read with respect:

June the 2.

Dear Madam

Will you pleas to enclose the 100 dollars in an envelope, so that the

little boy wont loose it: the little dog was too years old the first of

May: and my babey too the 24 of April, they have always ben together

and he is verey intelegent indead and you can learn him eneything you

would wish to fealing asuared he will receve everey kindness you have

the best wishes of

Mrs. Hattie ----.

Perhaps it is well to add, the "100" means ten. The hero is a black

Skye, long-haired, plume-tailed and soft-eyed. What his views were upon

removal from the back alley of his youth to a well-appointed though by

no means luxurious home he never said, but his investigation was

comically thorough, winding up in dumb amaze at the discovery of

himself in a long mirror. His experience of feminine humanity being

limited to the variety that rolls its sleeves above its elbows and

comports itself accordingly, he bitterly resented good clothes,

transferred his affections to the housemaids, and only much coaxing and

much sugar could win his heart for his new mistress.

"The little boy" had dubbed him "Penny," which hardly suited his silken

attire and his little haughty, imperious ways; so, though the children

will still call him "Penny-wise" and "Four Farthings," the mistress

finds nothing less than "Pendennis" due to his dignity.--C.B.M.

OUR NEW VISITORS.

I should like to have Mr. Burroughs or some of our naturalists write

one of their pleasant papers and explain the mystery of the

wood-thrush's advent in our gardens and upon our lawns. Until a year

ago the wood-thrush was not one of the birds which ever raised its note

in our pleasure-grounds. We heard them in the woods, and looked at

them, when we intruded upon their privacy, with that sort of shyness

with which we watch strangers. We knew their "wood-notes wild," and

admired their plumage, but they did not inspire the same feeling as

their cousin the robin. But a year ago all at once here was the thrush.

Nobody could tell when he came, how he came or why he came. It seemed

an accident, for there was but one pair: it was as if through innocence

or ignorance, instead of building their nests in their old chosen

haunts, they had wandered away and lost themselves in the spacious

grounds of a gentleman's country-seat. They had no dismay, no doubts,

however: they took possession of the lawn with the utmost boldness.

They were rarely out of sight, hopping from morning until night about

the turf, flying from tree to tree with their impulsive movements, more

graceful than the robins. They were never silent, uttering perpetually

their mellow flute-like cry and singing their simple but ecstatic

melody.

That was last year; and this year, 1880, the thrushes are everywhere in

this Connecticut village by the Sound. Their orange-and-tawny backs

gleam in the sunshine from morning until night. There are numbers of

them. Their manners are very marked. They have quite the air of

conquerors. All the other birds yield them precedence, and they

positively domineer over the pugnacious little English sparrow, who is

content to keep in the background and watch his chance when

feeding-time comes.

And of all the curious things about them, what seems most inexplicable

is their tameness. They have no mistrust, but eye you with an

intelligent, knowing look while bringing their young to feed within

half a dozen feet of you. They perch on the croquet-arches in the midst

of a noisy game. They sing directly over your head with the utmost

spirit and vivacity, hardly ceasing all the forenoon, and again

bursting out toward evening and maintaining their song until every

other bird's lay is hushed in the twilight. White of Selborne would

have delighted in such a freak on the part of these pretty gay

strangers, who have left secluded swampy haunts, the deep dells where

the blackberries twine and the daisies and clover blossom, for our

close-cut lawns and elm- and willow-shaded nooks.--A.T.

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

Alexander Pope. By Leslie Stephen. (English Men-of-Letters Series.) New

York: Harper & Brothers.

The interest of this series, which increases rather than diminishes--as

one might have feared would be the case--with each succeeding volume,

lies very much in the fact that the list of writers, almost as long and

varied as that of the subjects, is a representative one. It comprises

men who have won distinction in different departments--as novelists,

historians, scholars, scientific expounders--but who here meet in the

common field of biographical criticism and work together under the same

limitations and conditions. Hence their performances give us not so

much a measure of their individual powers as of the tone of thought and

intellectual depth of the class to which they belong. However diverse

their abilities and special fields of observation or research, their

general range of knowledge, methods of study and ideas of life are very

much the same. They are collectively "men of culture," as the writers

of Queen Anne's time were "wits," and it is the qualities associated

with that term, rather than any distinct gifts or characteristics, that

are here called into play. Mr. Trollope's _Thackeray_ was perhaps an

exception--a black spot on the otherwise immaculate whiteness. In a

different way the general effect would have been still more seriously

impaired if Mr. Ruskin's co-operation had been invited. The

outcroppings of a vulgar egotism might indicate a substratum necessary

to be taken into account, but it would have been a clear loss of labor

to follow the leadings of any eccentric vein. One might wonder at the

absence of Mr. Matthew Arnold, the high priest of culture; but we have

to remember that Mr. Arnold is solicitous to stand apart, that he holds

up ideals which he is careful to inform us are not those of his time,

and that he is fastidious in selecting a point of view where he cannot

be jostled, with perspectives to which no vision but his own can

accommodate itself. His culture may represent that of the future, but

certainly does not typify that of the present.

Mr. Leslie Stephen, on the contrary, might very well stand as a type of

his class both in its positive and negative qualities. He, more than

any of his confrères, is a product of culture. Unlike the greater

number of them, he has no special talent, or pet object of enthusiasm,

or erratic tendencies. He is a trained critic, and is "nothing if not

critical." His coolness is a real coolness, not the effect of any

"toning down" for the occasion, as we may suspect to have been the case

with Mr. Froude and Mr. Goldwin Smith. His knowledge is accurate, his

judgments are sound, his taste is seldom at fault, his style is

faultless and colorless, he never attempts what he is unable to do well

and without any appearance of strain. Though he may have given more

attention to the literature of the eighteenth century than to that of

any other period, one feels that he might safely have been entrusted

with the preparation of any volume of this series. It was probably from

a sense of fitness, not by mere chance, that he was selected to write

the initial volume, which pitched the key for those that were to

follow, and that so far he is the only writer who has been called upon

for a second contribution.

His task in the present instance has been much less easy and simple

than that which he before undertook. In the case of Johnson he had only

to select and condense from material so copious and authentic as left

no question of fact or problem of criticism unsettled. Pope's career,

on the other hand, after all the research that has been spent upon it,

is full of obscurities; his character, while it invites, seems to

evade, analysis; even his rank and exact position in literature cannot

be said to be conclusively determined. It is needless to say that Mr.

Stephen has been diligent and skilful in examining and summarizing

whatever facts relating to his subject have been brought to light by

recent or early investigation; that he weighs all the evidence with

strict impartiality, and, when it is insufficient, is content to

suspend judgment without resorting to conjecture; or that his views

both on points of conduct and literary questions, if not marked by any

striking originality, show clear and vigorous thinking and are stated

in a way that provokes no impatience or captious dissent. The interest

of the narrative is well sustained, and the general impression left by

it that of a report made by an expert on documents that needed to be

thoroughly sifted in order that the issues which had been raised might

be succinctly set forth and fully apprehended. Further than this Mr.

Stephen does not pretend to go. His report is preliminary, not final.

No matter previously left uncertain is here determined. Instead of an

added knowledge, we are only made more sensible of our former

ignorance. Pope's figure, far from coming more distinctly into view,

seems to have receded and grown more vague. Certain traits have perhaps

been made more noticeable than before, but those essential elements of

character which would define, explain, reconcile, and enable us to

conceive the combination as a unit, have eluded observation.

This is, of course, a natural result of the gaps and contradictions in

the evidence, the lack especially of those minute details which are not

only necessary links, but often the most suggestive features, in a

record of facts or delineation of character. And if it be urged that a

deeper insight would have in some measure supplied this deficiency, the

answer can only be that we have no right to expect from any man the

exercise of powers which he does not possess or affect to

possess--powers which, in a case like this, would need to be of the

finest and rarest kind. We may, however, fairly regret that Mr. Stephen

has not availed himself of a resource that lay within his reach for

making the accessories of his picture more brilliant and effective,

with the possible incidental result of throwing a stronger light on the

principal figure. Whatever else may be debated about Pope, no one would

deny that he was pre-eminently the man of his time--not only its most

conspicuous figure, but the very embodiment of its ideals. He suited it

and it suited him. Hence the fulness and in a certain sense perfection

of his work, the fact that he has given his name to an epoch as well as

a school, and consequently the important place which he still retains

in the history of literature. Men who were certainly not his inferiors

in intellectual power lived in the same age, partook of its influence

and contributed to its achievements; but they were not so thoroughly at

home in it: their best qualities were stunted, rather than developed,

by its soil and atmosphere. Dryden, one may safely say, would have been

greater had he lived earlier, Fielding had he lived later. But one

cannot imagine Pope thriving in any other air or producing equal work

under different influences. The qualities most esteemed by his

contemporaries he possessed in a superlative degree; his limitations

were common to the society in which he moved, and neither he nor it was

conscious of them as such; consequently, what would have been

impediments to a different nature were to his means of free and

spontaneous action. And not only does he represent the ideas of his

age, but he depicted its types and manners. In this respect he is the

link between the comic dramatists and the novelists, between Congreve

and Fielding. The wits, the beaux, the fine ladies, the Grub Street

drudges of the reign of Anne, whatever be the fidelity or other merits

of the portraitures, are more familiar to us in the satires of Pope

than as reflected in any other mirror. For these reasons Pope is one of

the last men who can be studied to advantage from a single point of

view or in a detached position. We need to understand not only his

personal relations but his general affinities with the men and events

of his time--of that world, at least, of which he was the centre. True,

the period is better known to readers generally than almost any other.

But it is not a copious accumulation of facts or a labored

analysis--for which there would have been no space--that we miss in Mr.

Stephen's book, but such groupings and irradiating touches as might

have given us a vivid glimpse, if only a glimpse, of the whole field.

Yet in lamenting that this much is not given us we are perhaps making

the mistake before noticed, of demanding from a given source what it

could not supply. We are driven back, therefore, on the reflection how

much the slightest things in art depend on inspiration, on original

power--how immeasurable the distance is between the man of culture and

the man of genius.

Samuel Lover: A Biographical Sketch. With Selections from his Writings

and Correspondence. By Andrew James Symington. New York: Harper &

Brothers.

The memory of so genial and popular a writer as Lover ought to be kept

as green as possible, and Mr. Symington has done well to embody his

Loveriana in a short life of the Irish humorist. The new material

brought forth is slender, consisting simply of a few letters and ten

short poems, not of his best; but it was worth publishing, and Mr.

Symington has the advantage, in treating of Lover, of writing from

personal knowledge. He has rather slurred over the earlier part of

Lover's career, apparently from a fear of trespassing on the preserves

of a longer biography previously published; which is a pity, as his

sketch will have most interest for readers who come fresh to the

subject. Even those whose curiosity in regard to the writer has not

been stirred by reading his works may get a very good idea of them from

the selections printed here. The book is not a critical study: it

enters into no details or analysis of Lover's character. It is simply a

hurried outline of his life, interspersed with songs and stories which

go a good way to make up for the meagreness of personal anecdote, and

ending with some friendly letters and short notes written by Lover

during the last few years of his life and addressed to Mr. Symington.

Most of these letters were written in poor health from the Isle of

Wight or Jersey, to which places he was sent by the doctors. They are

not of the brilliant or gossipy order, but they are admirable in their

good colloquial English and cheerful, unaffected style. Lover was a man

of great activity of mind, combined with warm affections. His

life-story was not very romantic, but it was a wholesome and pleasant

one. When young he was deeply attached to an English girl, with whom,

though they were separated (Mr. Symington does not say from what

cause), he maintained through life a warm friendship. The young lady

married, and Lover consoled himself and was married twice, each time,

it appears, very happily. His letters contain many little domestic

allusions, reporting his own occupations and those of "the good little

wife" at their fireside in Kent or away at the shore, where they look

back with regret to their own country-house. Lover had a warm

attachment to home, the house as well as the inmates. "I cannot tell

you," he writes from the Isle of Wight, "how much I have been put off

my balance by my exile from my own house. For a time one is willing to

make, for health's sake, a sacrifice of domestic comfort and give up

the pleasant habits one can indulge in in one's own home; but to lead

for months and months a lodging-house life is very miserable: it

benumbs the best of our faculties; the edge of enjoyment is blunted.

Music is sweeter within the compass of your own walls; the book is

pleasanter taken from the familiar shelf of your own library; in one's

own studio the habit of happy occupation has made an atmosphere that

has a charm in it."

Gifted with a rare variety of talents, Lover heartily enjoyed the

exercise of each, and found his chief pleasure in their development. He

worked incessantly at painting, writing or musical composition--worked

for love of the work, not from uneasy effort or outside pressure. In

this respect he presents a happy contrast to his fellow-countryman and

brother-humorist Charles Lever, whose biography, published some months

ago, left a painful impression on the mind in its view of a man of

genuine talent and attractive qualities living in a feverish way and

writing constantly against his inclination, too often below his powers.

As writers the two stand side by side. Lover had more versatility of

talent, taking him partly outside the field of literature. He made the

most of his powers: nothing which he has written gives the idea that he

might have done it better. He was a poet, which Lever was not, and had

an easy command of versification and language. His songs, while they

show no high poetic qualities, are excellent of their kind, and his

facility in turning an impromptu verse is shown in this scrap from the

book before us in praise of a friend and physician:

Whene'er your vitality

Is feeble in quality,

And you fear a fatality

May end the strife,

Then Dr. Joe Dickson

Is the man I would fix on

For putting new wicks on

The lamp of life.

In his stories Lover relied less on drollery of incident and indulged

more in play upon words than Lever, but the humor of both is

essentially of the same kind and drawn from the same source. Compared

with much of our American humor, it has a spontaneousness, and above

all a lovable quality, that ours lacks. The boy who has laughed over

_Lorrequer_ and _Handy Andy_ is apt to look back at them not merely

with amusement, but with a feeling of _camaraderie_ and even

tenderness. He has laughed with them as well as at them--has somehow

gained through the laughter a glimpse of the writer which inspires

liking and respect.

New England Bygones. By E.H. Arr. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co.

E.H. Arr has produced a very pleasant book by a simple effort of

memory. By letting the mind's eye travel back carefully and vigilantly

over the scenes of a youth passed in a rural part of New England, and

taking notes of its journey, she has made a graphic picture of life in

that corner of the country forty years ago. Not a few men and women who

were "raised" there have carried away, bit for bit, the same

reminiscences, so exactly does one New England landscape resemble

another, in details of foreground at least. The same description of

orchard, stone walls or old well will fit any farm in Maine or

Massachusetts, and fond recollection sniffs the same odor of sputtering

doughnuts through the kitchen-door, whether it carries one back to the

Green hills or the White. Recollections are alike, but impressions

differ, one class of minds retaining the sense of bareness and gloom

which is so continually insisted upon in some New England books, and

others, as in the book before us, dwelling lovingly upon the wholesome

flavor, pungent yet mellow, which gives New England country life a

distinctive charm unlike anything else either in this or the

mother-country. Even the Sunday is pleasant to look back upon to E.H.

Arr; which is probably one instance of the fact that retrospective

pleasure is sometimes totally disproportionate to present enjoyment.

The author is more successful in her treatment of landscape than of

figures. Her village people are shown too much under one aspect: she

possesses none of the humor which dares to take the most opposite

traits, the grotesque and the beautiful alike, and blend them in a

sound, artistic whole. Her characters are evidently drawn from life,

but we miss the many little touches which would make them alive. An

essay on "Old Trees" contains some of the best work in the book, with

its charming sketch of an old orchard, bringing to view the twisted

trees and even the irregularities of the ground, and to the palate a

sharp after-taste of yellowing apples picked up from tufts of matted

grass. After all, the New England of the writer's bygones does not

differ essentially from the New England of to-day, though a more vivid

study of life would perhaps have brought out more contrasts between the

two.

_Books Received_.

Homo Sum: A Novel. By Georg Ebers. From the German by Clara Bell. New

York: William S. Gottsberger.

Unto the Third and Fourth Generation: A Study. By Helen Campbell. New

York: Fords, Howard & Hulbert.

Allaooddeen, a Tragedy, and Other Poems. By the author of "Constance,"

etc. London: Smith, Elder & Co.

Third-Term Politics: A Lecture. By Horace White. New York: Independent

Republican Association.

The American Bicycler. By Charles E. Pratt. Illustrated. Boston: Press

of Rockwell & Churchill.

Alva Vine; or, Art _versus_ Duty. By Henri Gordon. New York: American

News Company.