CHAPTER I.

Transcriber's Note: The following Table of Contents was not

present in the original and has been added for the convenience

of readers.

Remaining transcriber's notes are at the end of the text.

WEALTH AND ITS CONSEQUENCES.

A YOUNG GIRL'S IDEAL.

THISTLE-DOWN.

NOVELISTS ON NOVELS.

A QUEEN'S EPITAPH.

THE COST OF THINGS.

ASLEEP.

A COUPLE OF VAGABONDS.

A MEMORY.

THE NIGHT OF THE FRENCH BALL.

DOES THE HIGH TARIFF AFFECT OUR EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM?

MARCH 4th, 1889.

EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT.

THE PASSING SHOW.

REVIEWS.

THE APPEAL.

A COVENANT WITH DEATH.

BELFORD'S MAGAZINE.

VOL. II. MARCH, 1889. NO. 10.

_WEALTH AND ITS CONSEQUENCES._

When the government established by our forefathers became a recognized

fact both at home and abroad, and for three-quarters of a century

thereafter, no one dreamed that the greatest danger which threatened

its existence was the wealth which might accumulate within its realm;

indeed, no one ever dreamed of the possibilities which lay in that

direction.

It is only during the past twenty years that the accumulation of

wealth has entered into the problem. Down to the period of 1861, the

only disturbing element of any magnitude was slavery. It was the

slavery problem which weighed so heavily upon the "godlike" Webster.

It was an ever-present, ghastly, and hideous form, appealing to his

patriotic soul. It is certain that it cast a shadow of melancholy over

his whole life. But Mr. Webster did not live to witness the dreadful

loss of life and treasure, and the awful gloom, of its going out.

There is a question now of far greater magnitude than that which was

settled by the sword, and that is the question of the enormous wealth,

and its increase in the hands of the few. No reference is now made to

the owners of the thousands or the hundreds of thousands--to the

industrious and prosperous people scattered all over the land; for

moderate wealth, universally diffused, is the prime safeguard of a

nation: but I refer to the millions, the tens of millions, and the

hundreds of millions owned and controlled by the few.

The ignorant poor and the no less ignorant rich may ridicule or sneer

at the expression of fear that harm may come to the Republic on

account of great wealth; but ridicule never settled any question.

Ridicule is always the weapon of the ignorant and the vicious. None

but the ignorant will ridicule the subject, for the history of the

world reveals the destruction of nations on account of wealth--never

from poverty.

What if a man does have millions--is it any of the people's business?

is the query of the ignorant. This is the question that is to be

solved. This is, in fact, the supreme question. If the government is a

government of the people and for the people, under the people's

Constitution the people have the right to protect themselves. If the

possession of millions by any person is a menace to the liberties of

the people and to the permanence of their government, the people have

the right to legislate upon the matter and to protect themselves. That

this Republic belongs to the people, no one can doubt. That it was

established, by their blood and treasure, as an asylum for the

oppressed of all nations and the perpetual abode of free men, every

page of American history attests. The protest of our forefathers to

British tyranny, the Declaration of Independence, the war which

followed, the steps taken for the adoption of a Constitution, the Bill

of Rights, and the Constitution all declare, in terms not to be

mistaken, the right of the people to protection against foes from

within and foes from without. How this menace will be met I have no

means of knowing; but that it must be met, or sooner or later the

Republic will be destroyed, no intelligent man can doubt.

As matters now stand, bad as they are, it might perhaps be endurable;

but wealth accumulates, and the man with ten millions to-day may have

a hundred millions in ten years, and the man with a hundred millions

may have a thousand. There is not a king or an emperor on a throne

to-day that would be safe a single moment with a subject possessing a

thousand million dollars; and can it be expected that a Republic would

be safer? The wealth of the Rothschilds was for a long time the wonder

of the world. They held the purse-strings of nearly all Europe; kings,

emperors, and principalities were and are yet at their mercy. But the

wealth of the Rothschilds, the accumulations of generations, pales

into insignificance before the wealth of the Vanderbilts, the Goulds,

the Astors, the Lelands, the Carnegies, and the Spreckels, when the

period of acquisition is taken into account. History fails to record

any accumulation of wealth so rapid and so colossal as that which has

taken place in this country, and during a period of from five to

twenty-five years.

The wealth of the Rothschilds has been the marvel of generations until

within the past decade; but their wealth ceases to dazzle and

bewilder even the youths of America in this generation. Their wealth,

however, has been the accumulation of a hundred and twenty-five years,

with all Europe for their field of operations. Their accumulations do

not represent the robbery of the masses. They never levied a tax upon

or demanded a toll upon the necessaries of life. Their operations were

mainly confined to the negotiation of loans, the placing of

investments for the wealthy men of Europe, and to the legitimate

sphere of banking. They had a bank in the capitals of France, Austria,

Italy, England, and Prussia; but neither of those nations ever gave

them the authority to issue money. The toiling millions of Europe are

taxed to maintain armies and support dynasties; but they were never

the subjects of a moneyed aristocracy, or victims to their cupidity,

in the sense that American toilers are. Emperors and kings did indeed

make their burdens heavy, and oft-times intolerable, but they taxed to

maintain their governments. They were the sole despots or robbers; and

there is this difference between the robbers of Europe and those of

America: that European despots maintained a government, while the

American despots rob the people, by the aid of the government, for

purely personal profit. True, the Rothschilds' power was great. They

could probably make or unmake kings; but their power was never used to

build up towns and cities in one section of country and tear them down

in another; to build up manufacturing establishments and great

commercial monopolies in one kingdom or state, and destroy them

elsewhere. They never attempted to control lines of transportation,

corner the price of meat, bread, coffee, sugar, light, fuel, and other

necessaries of life. No such operations were ever attempted by them,

and no king or emperor would have been safe a day upon his throne who

would have permitted such crimes as have been and are openly

perpetrated by the millionaires of our country in their operations

with beef, pork, coffee, oil, coal, sugar, wheat, and almost every

other necessary of life. Under an absolute, or even a limited

monarchy, these evils can be prevented or remedied; but as yet no

means have been discovered to remedy or prevent them under our form of

government.

Events of great magnitude crowd fast upon each other in our rapidly

growing country. New questions of great importance and new phases of

old questions have arisen and assumed huge proportions in a brief

period, requiring the highest virtue, intelligence, and patriotism to

deal with; and, while yet there may appear no constitutional means for

protection against the illegitimate use of wealth under the operation

of trusts and syndicates, without infringing upon the constitutional

rights of citizens, it is absolutely certain that a way must be found

to do so, or this great Republic, which promised so much for humanity,

will cease to exist, and the hope of a "government of the people, for

the people, and by the people" will be crushed from out the hearts of

men.

N. G. PARKER.

_A YOUNG GIRL'S IDEAL._

There are people one meets with now and then who seem so perfectly

fitted to their age and condition that it is difficult and almost

painful to imagine them in any other--some old ladies, for instance,

so sweet-faced, cheery-hearted, and placid-minded that one rebels

against the reflection that they were ever crude, impulsive girls or

busy matrons; and some busy matrons there are whose supply of energy

and capacity seems so admirably to equal the demands made upon it

that, for them, girlhood and old age appear to be alike--states of

lacking opportunity; and, in the third place, there are crude,

impulsive girls who wear these attributes so blithely that one does

not want to think of them developed and matured.

Of these was Kate Severn, aged eighteen--a tall, brown-skinned,

brown-eyed, brown-haired creature, so richly and freshly tinted that

these three shades blended, in a beautiful harmony, in a face of

rounded lines and gracious curves such as belong alone to the lovely

time of youth. She was an affectionate and dutiful daughter to her

widowed mother, whose only child she was, and yet almost everyone who

heard Kate Severn talked about at all heard her called cold, the basis

of this appellation being a disinclination to the society and

attentions of young gentlemen, which, in a girl of her age and

appearance, seemed a positive eccentricity. She had had this trait

from a child, when she would fly into sudden rages and fight and

scratch the little boys who called her their sweetheart; and it had

grown with her growth. Every summer, when she and her mother would

come back to the old country-place, near the dull little town of

Marston, where all the summers of her life had been spent, this

determination to avoid the society of young men was more resolutely

set forth by her looks and tones. It was not so aggressive as

formerly, for she had acquired a fine dignity with her advancing

girlhood, and was too proud not to avoid the danger of being called

ridiculous. Therefore, her resentment of all masculine approaches was

now quiet and severe, where it had once been angry and vehement; but

it was as positive as ever, as the youth of Marston had reason to

know. They said they didn't mind it, but they did immensely. A

favorite remark among them was that, if she could stand it, they

could--and stand it she did, magnificently. Who that saw her, driving

her smart trap and strong bay horse along the country roads of

Marston, with rein taut and whip alert, her erect and beautiful figure

strikingly contrasted with her little mother's bent and fragile one,

could suppose for one instant that it mattered an atom to her whether

those were men or wooden images that walked the streets of Marston or

drove about its suburbs, having their salutes to the tall cart

returned by a swift, cool bow from its driver, who disdained to rest

her handsome eyes upon them long enough to discern the half-indignant,

half-admiring gazes with which they looked after her.

She was not, at heart, an unsocial creature, and in her childhood had

been rather a favorite with the girls who came in contact with her,

but she always was unlike them; and this dissimilarity now constituted

a distinct isolation for her, since the fact that she had herself no

beaux,--to use the term in vogue in Marston society,--and took no

interest in hearing of those of her girl friends, left the latter much

at a loss for topics, and forced upon Kate herself the conviction that

she had not the power of interesting them. Dr. Brett, the country

doctor who was her mother's physician and chief friend when she came

to her country home, used to try to adjust matters for Kate, and made

many praiseworthy efforts to promote a spirit of sociability between

her and the young people of Marston, each and every one of which was a

flat failure. At last he had given up in despair and let the matter

drop, for Kate, in this her eighteenth summer, was more difficult, as

well as taller, straighter, and handsomer, than ever. So reflected Dr.

Brett as he drove homeward from his first visit to the Severns,

feeling a good deal cheered by the recurrence into his humdrum life of

this attractive mother and daughter, who received him into their home

with a cordiality and friendliness enjoyed by a few people only. Mrs.

Severn was an invalid, and unequal to seeing much company; and Kate,

though the very opposite of an invalid, had contrived, as I have

shown, to cut herself off from society--in Marston, at least--rather

effectually. She liked Dr. Brett, and seemed always glad to see him--a

departure in his favor which he was not old enough to relish

altogether. Still, the gods had provided him a pleasant spot of

refreshment in the midst of a rather dull professional routine, and

he gladly made the most of it. Kate, who was extremely fastidious,

criticized him severely to her mother, and regretted very often that a

man who had some capabilities should neglect his appearance as he

did--allowing his face and hands to get so sunburned, his hair to grow

so long, and his clothes to look so shabby and old-fashioned.

Perhaps the reason that she was so hard upon good Dr. Brett was

accounted for by the fact that this man-repudiating young lady carried

about in her mind a beautiful ideal of her own, of whose existence,

even in this immaterial form, no being in the world besides herself

had a suspicion. His appearance, in truth, was wholly and entirely

ideal, but he was founded on fact, and that fact was a certain

manuscript which five years ago she had fished up from an old box in

the garret. This garret had been for generations the receptacle for

all the old, disused belongings of the Severns; and it had been Kate's

delight, from childhood up, to explore its old chests and trunks, and

invent for herself vivid stories of the old-time ladies and gentlemen

to whom had belonged these queer old gowns and uniforms--these scant

petticoats and meagre waists, and these knee-breeches and lace-trimmed

coats. There were spinning-wheels and guitars to suggest poses for the

women, and cocked hats and swords for the men. As she grew older,

these childish games lost part of their charm for her, and these mere

suits and trappings of the creatures of her imagination gave her such

a sense of lack that she turned to some old papers in one of the

boxes, in the hope that she might get some light upon the spirits and

souls that had animated them. In her own fair young body there had

arisen certain insistent demands which there was nothing in the life

she led to supply. The tortures of the Inquisition would not have

drawn this confession from her; but so indeed it was, and I must have

sketched the personality of this young lady very clumsily indeed if it

has not appeared that, beneath this independent, self-sufficing

surface, there was a heart full of romance and sentiment, a feeling

all the stronger for being denied a vent.

It was an era in Kate Severn's life--that rainy day in late

summertime, when she found in the garret the old roll of manuscript

from which was formulated the ideal that afterward so wholly took

possession of her. It was a budget of closely written sheets, on blue

paper turned white at the edges with age. The ink used must have been

of exceptionally good quality, for it was still dark and distinct. The

writing was clear, and done with a very fine pen--but there were

evidences of haste. This, however, was not to be wondered at, for the

subject was an exciting one, and Kate pictured to herself, with

enthusiasm, the exquisite young gentleman (whom she promptly invested

with the blue-velvet, lace-ruffled coat, and the handsome hat and

sword which were among the paraphernalia of the attic) bending his

ardent, impassioned gaze over the sheets on which were written such

beautiful, fervent, reverential love-words. It was not in the form of

a letter, though it was a direct appeal, or, rather, a sort of

aspiration, from the heart of a man for the love of a woman. There was

not a name in it from beginning to end, and there was a sort of

impersonal tone in it that made Kate believe that it was addressed to

an imagined woman instead of a known one. This thought occurred to her

even in that first breathless perusal, and all the subsequent ones

(which were countless, for she was subject to certain moods in which

this old manuscript was her only balm) confirmed it. In consequence of

this conviction, she did a most un-Kate-like thing. It required only a

slight effort of that powerful imagination of hers to put herself in

the place of this loved and importuned lady; and she actually went so

far as to compose and indite answer after answer to this fond

appeal--impassioned outpourings of a heart which was full and had to

be emptied. These she would lock away in her desk, along with the

precious blue manuscript--and read and amplify from time to time.

She had never told anyone about the finding of this manuscript, though

she had questioned her mother frequently and closely about the various

contents of the attic boxes, only to hear repeated the statement that

they were all belongings of the Severns, and had been in the house

long before her occupancy. So this precious manuscript, it must

appear, was written by some by-gone relative of her father, who, it

pleased her to believe, had died with all these beautiful aspirations

unfulfilled. That was a thought that smiled upon far more than the

picture of her ideal hero comfortably settled as a commonplace husband

and father, with degenerate modern descendants. So Kate, who had no

lovers in reality, made the most of this impalpable essence of one.

And really he suited her much better. She could endow him with all the

attributes that she admired, and even alter these at will, as her

state of mind changed or her tastes developed, and a real lover could

never have kept pace with her so well. Then, too, she could imagine

him as beautiful and elegant as she desired--and she loved beauty and

elegance in a man so much that she had never seen one yet who came up

to her standard. She invested him with the most gorgeous changes of

apparel--the blue velvet coat in the old trunk being one of his

commonest costumes. It is true that it did not occur to her that, to

fit the wishes of the manuscript to the time of the knee-breeches and

lace ruffles, etc., suggested the propriety of his expressing himself

in old English, while that of the blue manuscript was quite modern;

but an anachronism or two of this sort was a trifling matter in so

broad a scheme as hers. One effect of the finding of the paper was to

make Miss Kate far more than ever scrupulous in her person, and gentle

and courteous in her ways, for, although she had no superstitious idea

that he really saw her out of the spirit-world, still it was her pride

and pleasure to be what she knew he would have her to be. So she

dressed herself in very charming gowns, with a slight expression of

old-timeness about them that was not unnatural, and wore her severe,

scant coifs and little folded kerchief with a prim grace that was a

matter of contemporaneous benefit. Her mother and Dr. Brett got the

most of it, for out-of-doors her dress was necessarily conventional,

and out-of-doors, also, she encountered so many antagonistic elements

that she was often made to feel that her bearing and state of mind

were not such as her loyal knight would have approved. That he was a

person of the gentlest heart, the kindest nature, the most loving

spirit, no one who read those heartfelt words of his could doubt. Very

often he would interrupt his rhapsodies to his lady-love to prostrate

himself before himself, at the thought of his unworthiness to ask the

love of so divine and perfect a being as her whom he addressed. How

great, then, was the necessity laid upon her who had appropriated

these addresses to be circumspect in thought and act!

So Kate grew every day more sweet and winning, until Dr. Brett began

to wonder how he could ever have thought her hard and conceited--as he

confessed to himself, with abasement, that he had. She felt that her

knight and lover would have wished her to be kind to this poor, lonely

old doctor, who was so good to the sick and humble about him, and led

such a cheerless, companionless, bachelor existence; and she used to

make his cup of tea in the evenings when he would drop in to see her

mother at the close of a hard day's work, and minister to his comfort

in a manner that was certainly new to her. Before the finding of that

manuscript, it was little enough that she had cared about his comfort;

but now it seemed of real importance to her. The more his country-made

clothes, and sun-burned hands, and awkward, heavy shoes grated on her,

the more it came home to her how she would be pleasing some one who

wore velvet coats, with rich lace ruffles that bordered tapering white

hands, and with shapely feet encased in fine silk stockings and fine

diamond-buckled slippers--if he could see her! Hers was quite a happy

love affair, and she had no occasion to mourn her lover dead, as she

had not known him living--so, as yet, he had brought only pleasure

into her life.

It was at the age of sixteen that Kate had found the blue manuscript,

and so her _affaire_ was a matter of two years' date when she returned

to Marston on the occasion of her eighteenth summer. The blue-coated

knight had held his own with inviolate security during those two

years, and Kate was as indifferent as ever to the approaches of the

youth and valor of Marston. So she and her mother settled quickly down

into the routine of the old dull life. The usual visitors called, but

they, too, were dull, and therefore undisturbing, and life flowed

monotonously on. It was only a little less quiet existence than the

one she led in winter in the city, for she never went to parties, and

not often to the theatre unless there happened to be some unusual

musical attraction; and her friends and relatives, of whom there were

quite a number, gave her up as an incorrigibly queer girl, whom no one

need try and do anything for. It is true she had her music and

painting lessons there, which were some variety and diversion, but she

practised both here in the country; and the life, on the whole,

pleased her better. Her eccentricity, as it was called, was commented

on by fewer people, and she had more time for those delicious reveries

over the old blue manuscript. She loved, on rainy days, when it was

not too warm up there, to steal off to the garret and look at the blue

coat, and the sword, and hat, etc., and feel herself a little nearer,

in that way, to her knight. It seemed a very lonely time indeed, when

she looked back to the years and days before the finding of the

manuscript. It had introduced an element into her life almost as

strong as reality. And yet there were times--and they came oftener,

now that womanhood was ripening--when a great emptiness and longing

got hold of her, and the blue manuscript, which had once been so

sufficient, would not satisfy her. She hugged it closer to her heart

than ever, though, and all it represented to her. She often told

herself it suited her a great deal better than marriage, which she had

always looked upon as a grinding and grovelling existence for a woman,

and expressed and felt a fine superiority to. It was quite too

commonplace and humdrum an affair for her, and she told herself, with

emphasis and distinctness, that she was quite content with an ideal

love. And yet, to mock her, came the thought of the pictured domestic

life which the blue manuscript had so tenderly described--with such

longings for the fireside, the home circle, the family love that she

held in scorn. She got the old blue paper and read it over, and those

words of winning tenderness brought the tears to her eyes. She found

herself half wishing, for his sake, while a numb pain seized her heart

for herself, that he had lived to realize these sweet dreams of home

and domestic love. If that was so, her ideal was gone, and how could

she do without it, seeing she had nothing else? The tears became too

thick, the pain in her throat was unsupportable, she felt the great

sobs rising, and, springing up, she rushed down the stairs, flew to

her room, bathed her face and adjusted her toilet, and then went down

to make tea for her mother and Dr. Brett, after which she played away

the spirit of sadness and unrest with all the gay and brilliant music

she knew. By bed-time she was her own calm self, and the next day she

regarded her strange mood with wonder, but she could not forget that

it had been, and she was horribly afraid of its recurrence.

One morning she was driving herself alone in her pretty cart along a

shady road that ran outside the town, when she recognized Dr. Brett's

buggy and horse fastened to a tree near a small shady house. This was

nothing to surprise her, for he was always working away on poor and

helpless people who couldn't pay him, and she would have passed on

without giving the matter a second thought, but that, just as she got

to the dilapidated little gate, a woman rushed out of the house, with

a girl of about fourteen after her, both of them screaming and

throwing their hands about in a way that caused Kate's horse to take

fright and gave her all she could do to control him for the next few

minutes. He ran for a little way straight down the road, but she soon

got him in hand and turned back to inquire into the cause of the

trouble. The two females were still whooping and gesticulating in the

yard, and the scene had been furthermore enlivened by the addition of

three or four dirty and half-clothed children, who were also crying.

Just as Kate came up, Dr. Brett appeared in the doorway, with his coat

off and a very angry expression on his face. He caught hold of the

woman and gave her an energetic shake, telling her to hold her tongue

and control her children; and just at this point he looked up and

caught sight of Kate, gazing down upon the scene from the top of her

pretty cart, whose horse was now as quiet as a lamb.

"What is the matter?" asked Kate, while the whole party suspended

their screams a moment to gaze at her.

"I wish to goodness you could help me," said Dr. Brett, half

desperately. "I was about to perform a very simple operation on this

woman's child and had everything in readiness, supposing I could trust

her to assist me, when she began to bawl like an idiot, and

demoralized this child who was helping me, too, and simply upset the

whole thing. I came out to see if there was anyone in sight who could

give me some assistance; but of course--"

"I'll help you," said Kate at once, beginning to get down from the

cart. "I suppose if these people could do it I could--at least I won't

lose my head."

"Oh, if you only would help!" said Dr. Brett. "I can't stop to tie

your horse even. I must see about the child. Here, somebody come tie

this horse, and keep out of the way, every one of you! If I hear any

more howling out here, I'll box the ears of the whole party!" And with

these words he disappeared into the house.

A small boy came up and took the horse's rein, and the woman promised

eagerly that they would take care of everything. She was still half

sobbing, and began to make excuses for herself, saying she couldn't a

stayed to see it done, not if she'd die for it.

Kate did not stop to listen to her, but ran up the rickety steps,

drawing off her long gloves as she did so, and entered the wretched

little room. She had only time to take in its expression of squalor

and destitution, when she paused abruptly, affrighted, in spite of

herself, at the sight before her. On a table in the middle of the room

was stretched a little child, dressed in a clean white frock, and with

a fair little face, above which gleamed a mass of rich auburn curls.

She glanced at the pretty face in its statuesque repose, and then saw

that the little legs, bare from the knees, were horribly deformed, the

feet being curled inward in a frightfully distorted manner.

"Is it dead?" said Kate, in a hushed whisper.

"Dead? My dear young lady, you don't suppose I've asked you to assist

at a post-mortem," said the doctor cheerily, as he chose an instrument

out of his case. "It's bad enough as it is. I don't know what I'll say

of myself when this thing's over. But tell me! do you think you can

stand it? There'll be only a few drops of blood. But I can put it off,

if you say so. Tell the truth!"

"I don't want you to put it off," said Kate. "I am perfectly ready to

help you. Tell me what to do."

She smelt the strong fumes of chloroform now, and realized that the

child was under its influence and would feel no pain, and the

knowledge strengthened her. She watched the doctor as he bent over and

lifted one little hand, letting it drop back heavily, and then raised

up one eyelid, for a second, and examined the pupil.

"All right," he said. "Now, are you frightened or nervous?"

"Not in the least," she answered, calmly, feeling a wonderful strength

come into her as she met his steady, confident, reassuring gaze. It

was strange, but it was the first time she had noticed how fine his

eyes were.

"That's right," he said; "I knew you were not a coward. Now you must

watch the child's face carefully, and at the first movement or sign of

returning consciousness you must douse some chloroform out of that

bottle inside that towel, and hold it cone-shaped, as it is, over the

baby's nose and mouth; I'll tell you how long. Don't be frightened;

there's not the least danger of giving too much, and the operation is

extremely simple and short."

As he spoke the baby contracted its face a little and turned its head.

"See--I'll show you," he said. And wetting the towel from the bottle

he put it over the baby's face and held it there a little while,

looking up at Kate, into whose face a sweet compassion had gathered,

softening and beautifying it wonderfully. She was not looking at him,

but down at the baby; and with a wonderful movement of tenderness she

laid her fair hand on the poor deformed feet and gave them a little

gentle pressure. She was utterly unconscious of herself or she

couldn't have done it. Theoretically, she hated children.

The doctor now took his position at the foot of the table, and holding

one of the child's feet in his hand, felt with his thumb and

forefinger for a second and then made a slight incision. Kate saw one

big drop of blood come out and then turned her eyes to the face of the

child, as she had been instructed. The little creature was sleeping as

sweetly as if in a noonday nap, and looked so unconscious and placid

that it seemed all the more pitiful. She bent over and smoothed the

bright curls, and then kissed the soft cheek.

"Poor little man!" she murmured, softly. She thought no one heard.

Suddenly, behind her, there was a little snap.

"Hear that?" said the doctor, cheerfully. "_That's_ all right."

She looked around and saw he was holding his thumb over the little cut

he had made, and looking across at her with an encouraging smile.

"You're first-rate," he said, heartily. "I wish that screaming idiot

could see how a brave woman behaves."

"Ah, but she is its mother!" said Kate, in a tender voice, "and it's

such a little dear. I don't wonder she loves it!"

Was this really Kate Severn? He didn't have time to think whether it

was or not, for the blood had stopped, and he now took up the other

foot. At the same time the baby moved again and gave a little whimper.

Kate promptly doused the towel and put it over the child's face, who,

at its next breath, relapsed into unconsciousness.

"First-rate!" said the doctor again. "That will do for this time," and

then proceeded with the other foot. Again Kate heard the little

snapping sound, as the tendon was cut, though her eyes were fixed upon

the placid face of the child.

"Now look, if you want to see a pair of straight little feet," said

the doctor. And she turned around and saw, as he had said, instead of

that curled deformity, two natural childish feet.

"Wonderful!" said the girl. "Oh, how thankful you must be that you are

capable of such a thing as this!"

The doctor laughed his cheery, pleasant laugh.

"Why next to nobody could do that," he said. But it was plain that her

commendation pleased him.

He then rapidly explained to her how into the vessel of warm water

standing by she was to dip the little rolls of plaster spread between

long strips of gauze, and rolled up like bolts of ribbon, and squeeze

them out and hand them to him very promptly as he needed them.

"Never mind watching the baby," he said. "If it cries you must clap

the towel over its face. You've got enough to do to watch me, and hand

me the plaster as I need it."

Kate obeyed implicitly, and in a little while both feet had been

deftly and neatly bandaged, from the toes to the knees, with the

plaster bandages, and the little creature, appearing suddenly

unnaturally long from this transformation, was pronounced intact.

"That's all," said the doctor. "As soon as I wash my hands I'll lay it

on the bed."

"Let me," said Kate, hastily drying her own hands. And while he

pretended to be engrossed in his ablutions he watched her curiously,

as she lifted the baby tenderly and laid it on the bed. As she put it

down she bent over and kissed it, murmuring sweet words, as a mother

might have done.

"You must have the legs very straight," he said, coming over and

standing at the bed's foot that he might the more accurately see them.

"In an hour the plaster will be perfectly hard, and then they can move

it anywhere. That's a good job, if we did do it ourselves," he said,

with a bright smile.

"Oh, may I go and tell the mother?" said Kate, eagerly. "How happy

she'll be to see those straight little legs!"

She went out and called the mother in. The woman's excitement had

changed into stolidness, and she showed far less feeling in the matter

than Kate had done. She looked at the child, without speaking, and

then said she guessed she'd better clean up all this muss, and

proceeded to set things to rights. Kate was indignant, and showed it

in the look she cast at Dr. Brett, who smiled indulgently in reply,

and said in a low tone, coming near her, "That manner is half

embarrassment. I'm sure she really cares."

While he was wiping and putting up his instruments, Kate went back to

the bed, a little whimper having warned her that baby was coming to.

"Don't let him move if you can help it," said the doctor, and she

dropped on her knees by the bed, and began to talk to the child in the

prettiest way, taking out her watch and showing it to him, holding it

to his ear that he might hear it tick, and occupying his attention so

successfully that he lay quite still, gazing up at her with great

earnest brown eyes, and giving a simultaneous little grin and grunt

now and then. Dr. Brett came up and stood behind her for a few moments

unnoticed, observing her with a strange scrutiny. "Who would have

expected a thing like this from this queer girl?" he said to himself.

Then, aloud, he informed Miss Severn that the baby might safely be

left to its mother now; and she got up at once, and, seeing he was

ready to go, followed him out of the house.

He unfastened her horse and brought the cart to the gate, and, as she

mounted to her seat and took the reins, she looked down at him and

said impulsively:

"I'm so glad you let me help you. Is this your life--going about all

the time doing good and curing evil? I never thought how beautiful it

was. If I can ever give you help again, let me do it; won't you?"

"That you shall," he said, and seemed about to add more, but something

stopped the words in his throat, and she drove off, wondering what

they would have been. The mingled surprise and delight in his eyes

made her long to know them. As she turned a bend in the road, she

looked back and saw Dr. Brett standing in the door among the children,

with a hand on the head of one of the untidy little boys, looking down

at him kindly. His figure was certainly both handsome and impressive,

and his head and profile fine. She wondered she had never noticed this

before--but then she had never before been really interested in him.

She wondered suddenly how old he was.

All the way home she was thinking about him, and how good, and

cheerful, and strong, and clever he was; how everyone loved him, and

what a power he had of making people feel better and brighter as soon

as he came into the room. She began to recall accounts she had heard,

with rather a listless interest, of difficult and successful surgical

operations he had performed, and inducements offered him to go to big

cities and make money, of which he had refused to avail himself simply

because he loved his own people and had his hands full of work where

he was. This was a fine and uncommon feeling, the girl reflected. Why

had she never appreciated Dr. Brett before? By the time she reached

home she had worked herself into quite a fever of appreciation, and

she had a glowing account of the operation to give to her mother, who

listened with great interest.

"How old is he, mamma?" she said, as she concluded.

"I really don't know. I never thought," said her mother. "He can't be

much over thirty."

"Do ask him his age--I'd really like to know. It's wonderful for such

a young man to be so much as he is. I never thought of his being young

before--but thirty is young, of course."

After that morning's experience Kate and Dr. Brett became fast

friends--on a very different footing from the old one. He told her

about his patients, and took her with him sometimes to see them,

tempering the wind to her with tender thoughtfulness, and refraining

her eyes from seeing some of the forms of want and wretchedness that

were common things to him; but in what she did see there was

opportunity for much loving ministration; and her visits to those poor

dwellings with him were in most cases followed by visits alone, when

she would carry little gifts for the children and delicacies for the

sick, along with the sweeter benefit of a sympathetic presence that

knew, by a singular tact, how to be helpful without obtrusiveness.

In the midst of all these new interests it was not remarkable that the

Ideal fell into the background. Sometimes for days he would be

forgotten. He didn't harmonize with these practical pursuits; and,

even when old habit sometimes conjured up his image in Kate's mind, it

always made a sort of discord, and, what was worse, made her feel

foolish in a way that she hated. She hadn't been to the garret for a

long time. There was something that gave her a painful sense of

absurdity in the mere thought of the blue velvet coat, and the cocked

hat and sword. What could a man do with those things in this day and

generation? She thought of Dr. Brett's brown hands encumbered with

lace ruffles in the sort of work he had to do, and in her heart of

hearts she knew that she preferred the work to the ruffles.

But the more the exterior belongings of her Ideal grated on her now,

the more she hugged to her heart his soul and spirit, as expressed in

the old blue manuscript. She read it more eagerly and more

persistently than ever, and, every time, its lovely words and loving

thoughts sank deeper in her heart, carrying a strange unrest there

that was yet sweeter than anything had ever been to her before. All

those longings for a beautiful and perfect love seemed now to come

from herself--from the sacredest depth of her soul--rather than to be

addressed to her.

One afternoon (it was rainy, and she could not go to drive as usual,

and she no longer cared for her garret _séances_, which would once

have seemed so appropriate to a day like this) she was sitting at the

piano, playing to her mother, when Dr. Brett came in. He had not been

to see them for many days--a most unusual thing--and she had felt

neglected and hurt by it. Perhaps it was this feeling that made her

very quiet in her greeting of him, or perhaps it was the melancholy,

wilful strain of music into which she had wandered--plaintive minor

things that seemed made to touch the founts of tears. At all events

she did not feel like talking, and she drew away, after a few formal

words, and left him to talk to her mother. He explained at once,

however, that he had not come to stay, but to ask Mrs. Severn's

permission to go up into the garret and look for something in an old

box which she had permitted him to store there before he had built the

house he was now occupying. Mrs. Severn remembered the fact that he

had once sent a box there, and of course gave him the permission he

desired.

"Kate will go with you," she said; "the garret is a favorite resort of

hers, and she can help you to find your box."

So bidden, Kate was compelled to go; but she felt a strange reluctance

possessing her as she mounted the stairs ahead of Dr. Brett. When

they were in the great, wide-reaching, low-ceilinged room so familiar

to her, she thought of the paraphernalia of her Ideal, and felt more

foolish than she had ever felt yet. What an idiot Dr. Brett would

think her if he knew of the impalpable object on which she had

lavished so much feeling! She thought of the Ideal that had once been

so much to her, and then looked at Dr. Brett. How real he was! how

strong, capable, living! What a powerful, warm-impulsed actuality,

compared to that unresponsive void! She surprised the good doctor by

turning to him a face suffused by a vivid blush. He looked at her

intently for a second, as if he would give a great deal to find out

the meaning of that blush, but he recollected himself, and said

suddenly:

"There is the old box. It had no lock on it, but that precaution was

not necessary, for no one would ever care to possess themselves of

that old plunder. It was mostly papers, and servants are not apt to

tamper with them."

He walked over and opened the box, without looking at Kate, who had

turned pale as a ghost and was standing like one transfixed, with her

eyes riveted to him. He knelt down and began to turn over, one by one,

the parcels of papers, which were labelled on the outside and were

principally old deeds and account-books. When he had gone to the

bottom of the trunk, he said, without turning:

"I cannot find what I want, and yet I know it was in this box. It was

a--a--certain paper of mine, that I put in here years ago. I should

know it in an instant, because it was written on some old blue paper,

bleached white at the edges with age, that I happened to have at hand,

and used for the purpose. I thought I should never want it again, but

now I am anxious to reclaim it. It's too bad," he went on, putting the

parcels back in the box; "every piece of this old trumpery seems to be

here but that."

He got up and closed the lid, and, taking out his handkerchief, wiped

his hands, and then began to flick the dust from the knees of his

trousers. Kate still stood motionless, and, when at last he looked at

her, his countenance showed him so startled by her expression that she

was obliged to speak.

"I know where it is," she said; "I've got it. I didn't know it was

yours. Oh, how could it be yours? I thought it was--"

"You've got it?" he said; "and you've read it?" And now it was his

turn to blush. "Have you really read it?"

"Oh, yes," she said. "I've read it--and over, and over, and over. How

could I know? I thought it belonged to us. I thought all these old

boxes were ours, and I thought of course that old faded paper was

written by some one years and years ago--some one long dead and

buried."

"And so it was," he said--"at least, it was written some years ago

indeed, and by a rash fellow, full of the impulsiveness and fire of

youth, whom I thought dead and buried too, until these last few weeks

have brought him to life again. He's come back--for what, I don't

know; but I could get no rest until I tried to find that old, romantic

outpouring of my passionate, hungry thoughts, written one night in

red-hot haste and excitement, and addressed to a shadowy ideal of my

own fancying, and proved to myself how absolutely they were realized

at last--" he paused an instant, and then went on impulsively "--by

you, Kate!--by you, in all your loveliness and goodness. If you have

read those pages, you know how big my expectations were, how

tremendous my desires. Then, let me tell you that you realize them all

beyond my fondest dreams. I know you don't love me, Kate," he said,

coming near and taking both her hands. "I know a rough old fellow like

me could never win your love. I didn't mean to tell you about it. I

never would have, but for this. I know that you don't love me; but I

love you, all the same."

Kate would not give him her eyes to read, but he felt her hands shake

in his, and he could see that her lips were trembling. What did it

mean? Perhaps, after all--He was on fire with a sudden hope.

"Kate," he whispered, drawing her toward him by the two hands he still

held fast, "perhaps you do--it seems too wonderful--but perhaps you do

a little--just a little bit--enough to make me hope the rest might

come. Oh, if you do, my Kate, my beautiful, my darling, tell me!"

She drew her hands away from him and buried her face.

"Oh, I don't love you a little at all," she said, half-chokingly. "I

love you a great, great deal. I know the truth now."

Then he took her in his arms and drew her tight against his heart.

When her lips were close to his ear, she spoke again:

"I knew it the moment you said you had written that paper. I loved

whoever wrote that, already--but it wasn't that. I knew I loved _you_

because it made me so unhappy, so wretched, for that minute when I

thought maybe you had written those words to some one else you

loved--and then you _couldn't_ love me."

"Let me tell you," he whispered back: "'Some one else' never existed.

There never was anyone that could command the first emotion of love

from me until you came. But, like many a foolish creature, I have

loved an ideal, tenderly, faithfully, abidingly, and to her these

passionate words were written. Now do you think me irretrievably

silly? Can you ever respect me again?"

For answer, she told him her own little story, and even got out the

cocked hat and sword and blue velvet coat, and showed them to him, in

a happy glee. He made an effort to take them from her and put them on;

but she prevented him, indignantly.

"You shall not!" she exclaimed; "I should be ashamed of you! A fine

time you'd have wrapping plaster bandages, with those ridiculous lace

ruffles! Oh, I like you a thousand times better as you are."

He caught her in his arms and kissed her--a fervent, passionate, happy

kiss.

"Go and get the paper," he said, as he released her, "and let us read

it together, or, rather, let me read it to you--to whom it was written

in the beginning. My ideal is realized."

"And so is mine," she said. "How silly we are!"

"But aren't we happy?" he answered. And then they both laughed like

children.

She broke away from him and ran noiselessly down stairs, and get the

dear blue paper and brought it to him, and then, seated beside him on

a rickety bench, with his arm around her waist, she listened while he

read. There were many interruptions; many loving looks and tender

pressures; many fervent, happy kisses. As he read the last words the

paper fell from his hands, and they looked at each other, with smiling

lips and brimming eyes. For one brief instant they rested so, and then

both pairs of arms reached out and they were locked in a close

embrace. No words were spoken--that silence was too sweet.

And this was their betrothal.

JULIA MAGRUDER.

_THISTLE-DOWN._

All silver-shod within a weed's

Dark heart, a thousand tiny steeds

Were tethered in one stall. Each wee heart

Panted for flight, and longed to start

Upon the race-course just beyond their walls;

And, while they waited, down the silent stalls

The wind swept softly, and, with fingers light,

Bridled the thistle horses for their flight.

ANNIE BRONSON KING.

_NOVELISTS ON NOVELS._

It has sometimes been a matter of pious speculation with literary and

dramatic circles what Shakespeare's personal views on art and

literature would have been had the enterprise and liberality of "Great

Eliza's Golden Days" induced him to formulate them. A simple and

credulous few have been disposed to regret the absence of any

authentic enunciation beyond the curt maxims and, as it were,

fractions of canons scattered throughout his dramas.

These ardent hero-worshippers dream fondly of the light the master

might have cast on many important points, which can now only be dimly

descried in twilight or guessed at by mere inference, and sigh at the

thought of what the world has lost. Others, rationally and soberly

agnostic, have been saved the heartache and intranquillity of their

brethren, by the very natural and not too profound reflection that it

is entirely problematic whether the actor-lessee of the Blackfriar's

playhouse could have expressed an opinion worth a pinch of salt on any

vital æsthetic question, even supposing him as eager to give as we to

receive. Assumption is dangerous; and the possession of the creative

faculty by no means implies the possession of the critical.

True, for--

"No two virtues, whatever relation they claim,

Nor even two different shades of the same,

Though like as was ever twin brother to brother,

Possessing the one shall imply you've the other."

Nevertheless, in certain circumstances, "the high priori road is

permissible to the adventurous traveller." With those happily

constituted persons who can imagine Shakespeare writing anything quite

worthless even in the abstruse and difficult domain of scientific

criticism--where so many high qualities are required which are not

held to be essential to the mere creative--I disclaim the remotest

desire to provoke a quarrel. Rather let me frankly congratulate them

on their force of imagination. But those of a simpler faith and a

scantier imaginative endowment will probably incline to the belief

that the brain which fashioned "Lear" and "Othello" could, under the

golden stimulus so potent to-day, have given us pertinent, perhaps

even canotic comments on--say, "Every Man in his Humor," or "A Mad

World my Masters," or "The White Devil." Would it be heretical to

suppose the author of "Macbeth" capable of dissecting an ancient play

in as keen and true a scientific spirit as that in which the _Saturday

Review_ dissects a modern novel? The encumbrance of a conscience

might, indeed, be a serious detriment, inasmuch as it would impair the

pungency of his remarks. His fantastic notions of the quality of mercy

might lead him to exaggerate merits, his lack of a sustaining sense of

self-omniscience to a fatal diffidence in pronouncing on defects; so

that his judgments would lack that fine Jeffreys-like flavor of

judicial rigor which makes _Saturday Review_ a synonym for sterling

Jedburgh justice wherever the beloved and venerable name is known. He

might prove a honey-bee without a sting; a grave defect at a time when

the sting is esteemed more than the honey-bag. Yet, it is not

improbable that, with a little judicious training and proper

enlightenment on the foolishness of sentiment, he would have made a

tolerable critic, for, as has been discriminatingly observed of

Sophocles, the man is not without indications of genius. At any rate,

in later and better appointed times, we have seen the German

Shakespeare, and others of the lawless tribe of creators, enter the

field of criticism and win approbation. It is true that Scott and

Byron, if not exactly categorically related to Mr. Thomas Rymer, were

still but indifferent critics; but we could readily tilt the scale by

throwing Pope, Wordsworth, and Shelley into the other, and yet have

Mr. Arnold, Mr. Swinburne, Mr. Lowell, and Mr. Lang in reserve.

And, in truth, as there are obvious reasons why lawyers make the best

judges, _ci devant_ thieves the best detectives, reformed drunkards

the best temperance advocates, and the scared sinners (like John

Bunyan) the best preachers, so there are obvious reasons why an

artist's opinions of the productions of creative art, especially of

the productions of that branch of it wherein he labors himself, should

have peculiar value. His intimate acquaintance with the principles of

art should not be detrimental to his perspicacity as a critic.

Fielding's success with Parson Adams would not, I conceive, be any

hindrance to his success in a criticism of the character of Lieutenant

Lismahago, nor would the packed essences of "Esmond" prove Thackeray

incapable of passing a competent judgment on "David Copperfield."

The fact is, practice has its advantages over theory. To the

intelligent, experience is something more than mere empiricism, and

some value must be conceded to personal experience. Theory is a wench

of great personal attractions, with the coquette's knack of making

the most of them; but she bears the same relation to her plainer,

plodding elder sister Practice that Mark Twain bore to the invaluable

Dan, when that doughty henchman was deputed to take exercise for the

languid humorist. Mark might have the liveliest idea of the rugged

grandeur of the Alps, but Dan knew the toils of the ascent and the

glories of the higher prospects; and though Mark was an invincible

theoretical mountain-climber, Dan would be apt to prove the more

trustworthy guide.

It was with the view of securing the directions of practical guides

for the reader, in another field of exploration, that the present

paper was written. I may say at once that my object in seeking the

notes--so kindly and courteously placed at my disposition--was not to

gratify idle curiosity with any pungent mess of personal gossip. That

dignified office I gladly leave to the accomplished purveyors of the

Society papers. But I conceived that the curtest expression of the

genuine artist concerning the productions of his own art could not

fail to be valuable as well as interesting. The critics, like our

creditors, we have always with us, to remind us we are still far from

Zion, and the former are just as indispensable to us, in the present

state of the world, as the latter. Unfortunately, neither enjoy

immunity from the universal law of human imperfection. Creditors are

not always generous nor critics always just. One grave difficulty with

the latter is the insidiousness of personal predilection, which cannot

be wholly excluded from the catholic judgment. Different judges have

different tastes. One may have a preference for Burgandy and the other

for champagne, while a third may prefer old port to either. The moral

is obvious, and points to the prudence of occasionally bringing

producers and consumers face to face; having done which I will

withdraw for the present.

_From Mr. Robert Buchanan._

DEAR SIR: It is difficult to say off-hand what novel I consider

my prime favorite. So much depends upon the mood of the moment

and point of view. I should say, generally, that the "Vicar of

Wakefield" surpassed all English tales, if I did not remember

that Fielding had created Parson Adams; but again, I have got

more pleasure out of Dickens' masterpiece, "David Copperfield,"

than all the others put together. Yes, I fix on "David

Copperfield"--from which, you will gather that I do not solicit

in fiction the kind of romance I have myself tried to weave.

Again, in all the region of foreign fiction, I see no such

figure as Balzac, and no such pathetic creation as "Cousin

Pons." That to me is a divine story, far deeper and truer, of

course, than anything in Dickens, but alas! so sad. While I

tremble at Balzac's insight, I have the childish faith of

Dickens; he at least made the world brighter than he found it,

and after all, there are worse things than his gospel of

plum-pudding. When I am well and strong and full of life, I can

bear the great tragedians, like the Elizabethan group, like

Balzac; but when I am ill and wearied out with the world, I

turn again to our great humorist to gain happiness and help.

ROBERT BUCHANAN.

_From Mr. Hall Caine._

MY DEAR SIR: I am not a great reader of novels. My favorite

reading is dramatic poetry and old ballads. Few novelists can

have read fewer novels. During the last five years I have

certainly not read a score of new ones. But I am constantly

reading _in_ the old ones. Portions of chapters that live

vividly in my memory, scenes, passages of dialogue, scraps of

description--these I read and re-read. I could give you a list

of fifty favorite passages, but I would find it hard to say

which is my favorite novel. The mood of the moment would have

much to do with any judgment made on that head. When I am out

of heart Scott suits me well, for his sky is always serene.

When I am in high spirits I enjoy Thackeray, for it is only

then that I find any humor in the odd and the ugly. Dickens

suits me in many moods; there was not a touch of uncharity in

that true soul. There are moments when the tenderness of

Richardson is not maudlin, and when his morality is more

wholesome than that of Goldsmith. Sometimes I find the humor of

Sterne the most delicious thing out of Cervantes, and sometimes

I am readier to cry than to laugh over "The Life and Deeds of

Don Quixote." So that if I were to tell you that in my judgment

this last book is on the whole the most moving piece of

imaginative writing known to me,--strongest in epic spirit,

fullest of inner meaning, the book that touches whatever is

deepest and highest in me,--I should merely be saying that it

is the last romance in which I have been reading with all the

faculties of mind and heart.

I like, at all times and in all moods, the kind of fiction that

gets closest to human life, and I value it in proportion as I

think it is likely to do the world some good. Thus (to cite

examples without method) I care very little for a book like

"Vathek," and I loathe a book like "Madame Bovary," because the

one is false to the real and the other is false to the ideal. I

see little imagination and much inexperience in "Wuthering

Heights," and great scenic genius and profound ignorance of

human character in "Notre Dame." In Gogol's little story of the

overcoat, and in Turgeneff's little story of the dumb porter I

find tenderness, humor, and true humanity. I miss essential

atmosphere in Godwin's masterpiece, and the best kind of

artistic conviction almost throughout Charles Reade. It makes

some deduction from my pleasure in Hawthorne that his best

characters stand too obviously not for human beings only, but

also for abstract ideas. I like George Eliot best in the first

part of "Silas Marner," and least in the last part of "The

Mill on the Floss." Perhaps I set the highest value on my

friend Blackmore among English novelists now living. I find

Tolstoï a great novelist in the sense in which his

fellow-countryman, Verestchagin, is a great painter--a great

delineator of various life, not a great creator. Björnson, the

Norwegian novelist, in his "Arne" seems to me a more

imaginative artist than Doré in his "Vale of Tears." I do not

worship "Manon Lescaut," and I would rather read "Les

Miserables" than "Germinal." In short, to sum it up in a word,

I suppose I am an English idealist in the sense in which (if I

may say so without presumption) George Sand was a French

idealist. I think it is the best part of the business of art to

lighten the load of life. To do this by writing mere "light

literature," the companion of an idle hour, a panacea for

toothache, a possible soporific, would seem to me so poor an

aim that, if it were the only thing before me I think I would

even yet look about for another profession. Fiction may lighten

life by sterner means--by showing the baffled man the meanness

of much success, and the unsuccessful man the truer triumphs of

failure. To break down the superstitions that separate class

from class, to show that the rule of the world is right, and

that though evil chance plays a part in life, yet that life is

worth living--these are among the functions of the novelist. In

reaching such ends there are few or no materials that I would

deny to him. He should be as free as the Elizabethan dramatists

were, or even the writers of our early ballads. His work would

be various in kind, and not all suited to all readers; but he

would touch no filth for the distinction of being defiled. It

would not trouble him a brass farthing whether his subject led

him to a "good" or a "bad" ending, for he would have a better

ambition than to earn the poor wages of a literary jester, and

his endings would always be good in the best sense where his

direction was good.

And so in some indirect way I have answered your question; and

I would like to add that I foresee that the dominion of the

novel must be extended. Fiction is now followed by appalling

numbers with amazing fecundity and marvellous skill, which,

though mainly imitative, is occasionally original; but its

channels are few and very narrow. Already the world seems to be

growing weary of feeble copies of feeble men and feeble

manners. It wants more grit, more aim, more thought, and more

imagination. But this is thin ice to tread, and I would not

disparage by a word or a wink the few novelists now living who

will assuredly rank with the best in literature. Dugald Stewart

said that human invention, like the barrel organ, was limited

to a specific number of tunes. The present hurdy-gurdy business

has been going on a longish time. We are threatened with the

Minerva press over again, and the class of readers who see no

difference between Walter Scott and John Galt. But, free of the

prudery of the tabernacle and the prurience of the boulevard,

surely the novel has a great future before it. Its

possibilities seem to me nearly illimitable. Though the best of

the novel is nowhere a match for the best of the drama, yet I

verily believe that if all English fiction, from Defoe

downwards, including names conspicuous and inconspicuous,

remembered and forgotten, were matched against all English

poetry of whatever kind, from Pope to our own day, it would be

found that the English novelist is far ahead of the English

poet in every great quality--imagination, pathos, humor,

largeness of conception, and general intellect. And I will not

hesitate to go further and say that, the art of the novel is

immeasurably greater than the art of the drama itself--more

natural as a vehicle and less limited in its uses, more various

in subject and less trammelled in its mechanism, capable of

everything that the drama (short of the stage) can do, and of

infinitely more resource.

HALL CAINE.

_From Mr. Wilkie Collins._

After pleading illness and arrears of literary work and correspondence

in excuse of the brevity of his note, Mr. Collins says:

Besides, the expression of my opinion in regard to writers of

fiction and their works will lose nothing by being briefly

stated. After more than thirty years' study of the art, I

consider Walter Scott to be the greatest of all novelists, and

"The Antiquary" is, as I think, the most perfect of all

novels.

WILKIE COLLINS.

_From Mr. H. Rider Haggard._

DEAR SIR: I think that my favorite novel is Dickens's "Tale of

Two Cities." I will not trouble you with all my reasons for

this preference. I may say, however, and I do so with

humility, and merely as an individual expression of opinion,

that it seems to me that in this great book Dickens touched

his highest level. Of course, the greatness of the subject has

something to do with the effect produced upon the mind, but in

my view there is a dignity and an earnestness in the work

which lift it above the rest. Also I think it one of the most

enthralling stories in the language.

H. RIDER HAGGARD.

_From Mr. Joseph Hatton._

DEAR SIR: You ask me to name my favorite novel, and if it

should happen to be a work by a foreign author to mention my

favorite English work of fiction also. I find it impossible to

answer you. When I was a boy "The Last of the Mohicans" was my

favorite novel; a young man and in love, "David Copperfield"

became my favorite. When I grew to be a man "The Scarlet

Letter" took the place of David and the North American Indian;

but ever since I can remember I have always been reading

"Monte Cristo" with unflagging delight. One's favorite book is

a question of mood. Now and then one might be inclined to

regard "Adam Bede" as the most companionable of fiction; there

are other times when "Pickwick" appeals most to one's fancy,

or when one is even in the humor for "L'Homme qui Rit." "Don

Quixote" fits all moods, and there are moments when a page or

two of "Clarissa" are to one's taste. But with Scott,

Dickens, Thackeray, Hugo, Dumas, George Eliot, Hawthorne,

Smollett, Balzac, Erckmann-Chatrian, Lytton, Lever, Ik Marvel,

George Sand, Charles Reade, Turgeneff, and a host of other

famous writers of fiction staring me in the face, don't ask me

to say which of their works is my favorite novel.

JOSEPH HATTON.

_From "Vernon Lee."_

DEAR SIR: I hasten to acknowledge your letter. I do not think,

however, that I can answer in a satisfactory manner. I am very

little of a novel reader, and do not feel that my opinion on

the subject of novels is therefore of critical value. Of the

few novels I know (comparing my reading with that of the

average Englishman or woman) I naturally prefer some; but to

give you the titles of them--I think I should place first

Tolstoï's "War and Peace" and Stendhal's "Chartreuse de

Parme"--would not be giving your readers any valuable

information, as I could not find leisure to explain _why_ I

prefer them.

"VERNON LEE."

_From Mr. George Moore._

SIR: Waiving the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of a

complete and satisfactory answer to your question, I will come

at once to the point. You ask me to name my favorite work of

fiction, giving reasons for the preference. The interest of

such a question will be found in the amount of naïve sincerity

with which it is answered. I will therefore strive to be as

naïvely sincere as possible.

Works of romance I must pass over, not because there are none

that I appreciate and enjoy, but because I feel that my

opinion of them would not be considered as interesting as my

opinion of a work depicting life within the limits of

practical life. The names of many works answering to this

description occur to me, but in spirit and form they are too

closely and intimately allied to my own work to allow me to

select any one of them as my favorite novel. Looking away from

them my thought fixes itself at once on Miss Austen. It

therefore only remains for me to choose that one which appears

to me to be the most characteristic of that lady's novels.

Unhesitatingly I say "Emma."

The first words of praise I have for this matchless book is

the oneness of the result desired and the result attained.

Nature in producing a rose does not seem to work more

perfectly and securely than Miss Austen did. This merit, and

this merit I do not think any one will question, eternalizes

the book. "L'Education Sentimentale," "The Mill on the Floss,"

"Vanity Fair," "Bleak House," I admire as much as any one; but

I can tell how the work is done; I can trace every trick of

workmanship. But analyse "Emma" as I will, I cannot tell how

the perfect, the incomparable result is achieved. There is no

story, there are no characters, there is no philosophy, there

is nothing: and yet it is a _chef-d'oeuvre_. I have said there

are no characters; this demands a word of explanation. Miss

Austen attempts only--and thereby she holds her unique

position--the conventionalities of life. She presents to us

man in his drawing-room skin: of the serpent that gnaws his

vitals she cares nothing, and apparently knows nothing. The

drawing-room skin is her sole aim. She never wavers. The

slightest hesitation would be fatal; her system is built on a

needle's point. We know that no such mild, virtuous people as

her's ever existed or could exist; the picture is incomplete,

but there lies the charm. The veil is wonderfully woven,

figures move beneath it never fully revealed, and we derive

pleasure from contemplating it because we recognize that it is

the sham hypocritical veil that we see but feel not--the sham

hypocritical world that we see is presented to us in all its

gloss without a scratch on its admirable veneer. No writer

except Jane Austen ever had the courage to so limit himself or

herself. The strength and the weakness of art lies in its

incompleteness, and no art was ever at once so complete and

incomplete as Miss Austen's.

Every great writer invents a pattern, and the Jane Austen

pattern is as perfect as it is inimitable. It stands alone.

The pattern is a very slight one, but so is that of the rarest

and most beautiful lace. And in all sincerity I say that I

would sooner sign myself the author of "Emma" than of any

novel in the English language--the novel I am now writing of

course excepted.

GEORGE MOORE.

_From Mr. Justin McCarthy._

DEAR SIR: I have so many favorites--even in English-written

fiction alone: I am very fond of good novels. I couldn't

select _one_. Let me give you a few, only a few! The moment I

have sent off this letter I shall be sure to repent some

omissions. Fielding's "Joseph Andrews;" Scott's "Antiquary,"

"Guy Mannering," "Heart of Midlothian," and "St. Ronan's

Well;" Dickens's "Pickwick," "Barnaby Rudge," and "Tale of Two

Cities;" Thackeray's "Vanity Fair," "Pendennis," and "Esmond;"

Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre;" George Eliot's "Mill on the

Floss;" Hawthorne's "Blithedale Romance;" and George

Meredith's "Beauchamp's Career."

And I had nearly forgotten in my haste two great favorites of

mine--Miss Austen's "Pride and Prejudice," and Gerald

Griffin's "Collegians;" and, again, surely Hope's

"Anastasius."

I had better stop.

JUSTIN MCCARTHY.

_From Miss F. Mabel Robinson._

SIR: Your question is an extremely difficult one to answer.

One likes some novels for one kind of excellence, others for

another, and the favorite--the absolute favorite--is apt to

depend a little upon the good novel one has read most

recently, and a great deal more upon one's mood.

I do not think that I could name any one novel, either English

or foreign, as my first favorite; there are at least four of

Turgeneff's, the bare memory of which moves me almost to

tears; but I could not choose between "Liza," "Virgin Girl,"

"Fathers and Sons," and "Smoke;" and, of course, Tolstoï's

"War and Peace" is a masterpiece which every one will name as

a favorite (I give the titles in English, as I have read all

these in translations only, French or English), and indeed I

think I ought almost to name it as _the_ favorite among

foreign novels.

To turn to English masterpieces, there are parts of Fielding's

"Amelia," which for tenderness, sweetness, and rendering of

character and of home life I think finer than anything more

modern; but other parts of the book are so unpleasant that I

cannot place it first. I think I must plead guilty to four

equal favorites: "Amelia," "Esmond," "The Mill on the Floss,"

and "Villette;" but perhaps I might tell you to-morrow that I

place "Vanity Fair" above "Esmond," and prefer "Middlemarch"

to "The Mill on the Floss." Still I think to-day's choice is

best, so I will stick to it.

It is impossible to know all one's reasons for preferring some

books to others--the style, the diction, the subtle way in

which the writer makes you feel many things he has left unsaid

elude description; and one's own frame of mind when the book

first became known may have a great deal to do with it.

Unconsciously association has much to do with one's

preferences. It is for the character of Amelia, and the charm

of her relations with her husband, that I like this novel.

Some of the scenes and dialogues between these two are to my

mind perfect, absolutely true and beautiful and satisfying.

"Esmond" is certainly very inferior to "Amelia" in point of

illusion; one always is conscious that one is _reading_, and

the characters are like people we have heard of, or who are at

least absent from us; but Harry Esmond is, to my mind, the

finest gentleman in English fiction, none the less noble for

his little self-conscious air. I have always wondered why he

is less popular than Col. Newcome. Except perhaps Warrington

he is Thackeray's noblest male character; and "Esmond" is, I

take it, the best constructed of Thackeray's novels, and

exquisitely written. It is only because there is no woman

worthy of the name of heroine that I cannot like this novel

best of all. For the reverse reason, that there is no hero, I

cannot place "The Mill on the Floss" quite first. Maggie is a

beautiful creation, and the picture of English country-life

inimitable; the Dodsen family in all its branches is truly

masterly. But for deep insight into the heart and soul and

mind of a woman where will you find Charlotte Brontë's equal?

Her descriptive power and her style are unsurpassable, and

Lucy Snowe can teach you more about the thoughts and griefs

and unaccountable nervous miseries and heart-aches of the

average young woman than any other heroine in fiction that I

know of. There is no episode that I am aware of, of such

heartfelt truth as that wretched summer holiday she passed

alone at Madame Beck's. And every character in the book is

excellent; and as for the manner of it, it seems wrung from

the very heart of the writer.

F. MABEL ROBINSON.

_From Mr. W. Clark Russell._

DEAR SIR: I hardly know what to say in response to your

question as to my favorite work of fiction. I am afraid I must

go so far back as Defoe, of whose "Colonel Jack" and "Moll

Flanders" I never weary. Amongst modern writers I greatly

admire Blackmore, Hardy, and Besant. There is great genius and

originality, too, in Christie Murray. But with Thackeray,

Dickens, George Eliot, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mrs. Gaskell, and

the Brontë's on my shelves, the indication of any one work of

fiction as my favorite since the days of "Roxana," "Pamela,"

"Joseph Andrews," and "Humphrey Clinker," would prove an

undertaking which I fear I have not the courage to adventure.

W. CLARK RUSSELL.

_From Mr. J. Henry Shorthouse._

SIR: Your question seems to me to be a difficult, or I might

almost say, an impossible one to answer. I do not see how a

man of any carefulness of thought or decision can have one

favorite work of fiction. To answer your question as simply as

possible, I should say that of foreign books my favorites are

"Don Quixote" and the novels of Goethe and Jean Paul Richter.

As regards English fiction, I should, I think, place George

Eliot's "Silas Marner" first, both as a work of art and as

fulfilling, to me, all the needs and requirements of a work of

fiction; but I could not say this unless I may be allowed to

bracket with this book Nathaniel Hawthorne's "House of the

Seven Gables," Mrs. Gaskell's "Cranford," Jane Austen's

"Persuasion," Mrs. Ritchie's "Story of Elizabeth," and William

Black's "Daughter of Heth"--all of which books seem to me to

stand in the very first rank, and not only to fulfil the

requirements of the human spirit, but to stand the much more

difficult test of being, each of them, perfect as a whole.

J. HENRY SHORTHOUSE.

_From Mr. W. Westall._

DEAR SIR: You ask for the title of my favorite work of

fiction. I answer that I have no one favorite work of fiction.

Among the myriad novels which I have read there is none of

excellence so supreme that I prefer it before all others. On

the other hand, I have favorite novels--a dozen or so; I have

never reckoned them up. These I will enumerate as they occur

to me: "Don Quixote," "Tom Jones," "Ivanhoe," "The Heart of

Midlothian," "Jane Eyre," "David Copperfield," "Tale of Two

Cities," "Esmond," "Vanity Fair," "Adam Bede," "Lorna Doone,"

"Crime and Punishment" (Dostoieffsky), "Monte Cristo," and

"Froment Jeune et Risler Ainé."

I do not suggest that these novels are of equal literary

merit. I merely say that they are my favorites, that I have

read them all with equal pleasure more than once, and that, as

time goes on, I hope to read them again.

W. WESTALL.

J. A. STEWART.

_A QUEEN'S EPITAPH._

[IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY.]

"And her chief charm was bashfulness of face."

There lay the others: some whose names were writ

In dust--and, lo! the worm hath scattered it.

There lay the others: some whose names were cut

Deep in the stone below which Death is shut.

The plumèd courtier, with his wit and grace,

So flattered one that scarce she knew her face!

And the sad after-poet (dreaming through

The shadow of the world, as poets do)

Stops, like an angel that has lost his wings,

And leans against the tomb of one and sings

The old, old song (we hear it with a smile)

From towers of Ilium and from vales of Nile.

But she, the loveliest of them all, lies deep,

With just a rude rhyme over her fair sleep.

(Why is the abbey dark about her prest?

Her grave should wear a daisy on its breast.

Nor could an age of minster music be

Worth half a skylark's hymn for such as she.)

With one rude rhyme, I said; but that can hold

The sweetest story that was ever told.

For, though, if my Lord Christ account it meet

For us to wash, sometimes, a pilgrim's feet,

Or slip from purple raiment and sit low

In sackcloth for a while, I do not know;

Yet this I know: when sweet Queen Maud lay down,

With her bright head shorn of its charm of crown

(A hollow charm at best, aye, and a brief--

The rust can waste it, as the frost the leaf),

She left a charm that shall outwear, indeed,

All years and tears--in this one rhyme I read.

SARAH M. B. PIATT.

_THE COST OF THINGS._

"Papa, why does bread cost so much money?" asks a child, of its

father. Perhaps if the father is indifferent, indolent, or ignorant,

he may dodge the question and reply, "Because flour is so scarce." But

if he is a thinking and observant man, willing to instruct an ignorant

child asking a very natural question, he will not content himself with

such a reply, for he must have observed that bread is sometimes high

when wheat and flour are very plentiful.

By drawing on his experience he will not fail to recall the fact that,

in a season when any particular article is in much demand, the price

of that article will rise and will continue to rise until the demand

for the article induces a supply of it from outside sources.

Let him recall Christmas and Thanksgiving times, when, for instance,

turkeys are in demand. If the supply is light, up goes the price of

turkeys; and, if the demand increases, the price will continue to rise

unless some means are found of supplying the demand. If turkeys flow

into the market of a city from the surrounding country, the rise in

price is first checked, and then, as the supply increases, the price

falls, and the demand being less than the supply, the price goes to

its lowest figure. This is in accordance with the recognized law of

supply and demand, the relation between the two always establishing

the price.

If the demand is greater than the supply, the price will go up; if the

supply is greater than the demand, the price will go down. But this

state of things can exist only where the inflow of supply and the

outflow of demand are _free_ and _unrestricted_; for if, from any

cause, restriction is placed on the inflow, the outflow will be

restricted just in the same way. We may liken the operation of the law

to what happens when a bent tube with the ends up is filled with

water. If, now, more water is poured in at one end, that same amount

will flow out at the other. If the whole capacity of the tube at one

end is used to supply water, just that amount will run out at the

other; but if one-half the tube at the supply end is plugged up, then

only one-half the capacity of the tube will run out at the other.

Reverting to the question of the supply of turkeys in a market, let

us suppose that a despot, ungoverned by anything but his own will, is

in charge of the city when the turkey market is held, and of the

surrounding country, and, wishing to have a plentiful supply of

turkeys, he issues his ukase that every turkey within ten miles of the

town shall, under severe penalties, be sent into market for sale. Is

it not plain that the price of turkeys will at once fall, since the

supply will at once become greater than the demand? But suppose this

despot has turkeys of his own to sell, and hence desires to make his

poor people pay the highest price for their turkeys, so that his

coffers may be filled with gold. Now, instead of requiring all turkeys

to come in under severe penalties, he does everything he can to keep

them out, and issues his ukase that none shall come in, under penalty

of death to the importer of turkeys. Is it not as plain as it was in

the other case, that the price of turkeys will go up, up, up, until

the vast majority of men cannot buy at all?

Suppose that, instead of placing an absolute prohibition upon the

importation of turkeys, the despot, convinced that people must have

turkeys, and having already arranged to buy all he wants himself,

makes a law that every turkey coming into the market shall be taxed

one dollar for the privilege of bringing it to market. Now, turkeys

will come in if there is still a demand for them, but every one that

comes in must pay a tax of a dollar; and, if there are any turkeys

already in market, a dollar will be added to their price, as well as

to the price of those coming in. For no importer proposes to lose the

amount of the tax himself, and is bound to make the consumer pay that

much additional for his turkey; and a resident turkey-dealer, seeing

that imported turkeys are selling for a dollar above the market price,

will at once add that to the price of his turkeys, since it is

expecting too much of human nature to suppose any man is going to sell

his property for less than he can get for it. The result of the

despot's tax, therefore, is to raise the local price of turkeys by

just the amount of that tax; and, the higher the tax, the higher the

price of turkeys will be to the consumer.

In this way the price of any article in a market is established by the

relation between the supply and the demand; and this law is

inexorable. If the supply is restricted by taxing imports, the price,

whilst higher, will still be fixed by the demand made for the article;

and this applies to all articles which are salable--flesh and blood,

muscle, labor, as well as to bread, meat, etc. In slavery times, when

a great demand existed in the cotton-States for slave labor, slaves

were imported from the more northern States, where labor was not so

valuable, to the more southern ones, where it was more so; and this

gave the border States the name of being the "slave-breeding States"

of the Union. The increased demand for slaves threatened at one time

to reopen the slave trade with Africa; and it is said that some

negroes were, in fact, brought into the country. Under these

circumstances, had the States (Mississippi, Louisiana, and others)

where a demand for slaves existed possessed the power to lay a tax on

slaves imported into them, the price of slaves in those States would

have been very considerably increased.

The work of hands--labor--is a salable article, just as much as bread

or meat, and its price is determined in the same way; not only as

regards common labor, but also special kinds of labor. Reverting to

the question at the head of this paper,--the price of bread,--let us

suppose a community where all the elements of bread-making (flour,

yeast, potatoes, etc.) exist in abundance, but where there is but one

baker. If the demand for bread is so great that one baker will have to

run his bakery night and day to supply the demand, and he can fix his

own price, limited only by the number of his customers and their

ability to pay (the "demand"), although he can buy his flour and other

ingredients cheap, he must pay high wages to his assistants and work

hard himself. As the demand for bread increases, its prices will rise

until the attention of other bakers is attracted, other bakeries will

be established, the supply will more nearly equal the demand, and the

price of bread will fall, in accordance with the same law as governed

in the case of turkeys; whilst bakers' wages, from the very fact of

there being more bakers on the ground, will fall. If, notwithstanding

the establishment of more bakeries, the demand still remains greater

than the supply, the price of bread will still remain up, and an

attempt may be made to import bread from without. If the bakers have

influence enough with the law-making power, or with our supposed

despot, they will have an import tax placed upon bread to keep up

their prices, under the plea of "sustaining domestic industry;" but

the amount of this import tax will go into the pockets of the owners

of the bakeries, although the wages of their workmen will not be

increased, for their wages depend, as has been shown, not on the price

of bread, but upon the number of bread-making laborers available. If

such laborers increase in number, the wages of the bread-makers may

even go very low, though the price of bread (thanks to the import tax)

may remain very high. These points are dwelt upon at length for the

purpose of exposing the fallacy of a popular delusion--that....

It is a remarkable fact that, whilst many laboring-men are deluded

with the idea that taxing articles which they consume or aid in

producing tends to keep up their wages or to increase them, they

entirely ignore the real reason for low wages, which is nothing more

or less than the presence of plenty of labor. Once convinced of the

fact that the price of everything, labor included, depends on the

inexorable law of supply and demand, they will not be able to resist

the conclusion that _no importation tax can, by any possibility,

affect the price of labor, except an importation tax on labor itself_.

This fact seems almost to demonstrate itself; and yet there is no

greater delusion in this country, where its falsity is demonstrated

every day to anyone observant of the settlement of our vast Western

territories. Let anyone go into a Western settlement and note the high

price of labor of all kinds, and that it is almost impossible to get a

man to do a day's work for love or money; and let him visit the same

place a few years later, when perhaps a railroad is running through

the place, which in the meantime has grown immensely in population. He

will now note the decrease in wages of all kinds. And, if he will go

to the same place still later, he will not fail to note a still

further decline; for, if the demand continues, labor will, by means of

the railroad, flow in to supply it, and the price of labor will

fall--for no other reason than that there is plenty of labor to supply

the demand. And this lesson is demonstrated over and over again

wherever a new settlement is observed. If there is only one bricklayer

in the place he can demand his own price, which cannot be affected by

the presence of fifty or a hundred carpenters or blacksmiths, nor by a

tax on bricks, mortar, or sand.

X.

_ASLEEP._

She is not dead, but sleepeth. As the fair,

Sweet queen, dear Summer, laid her sceptre down

And lifted from her tirèd brows her crown,

And now lies lapped in slumber otherwhere--

As she will rise again, when smiling May,

Saying, "Thy day dawns," wakes her with a kiss,

And butterflies break from the chrysalis

And throng to welcome her upon her way,

And roses laugh out into bloom for glee

That Summer is awake again--so she

Who sleeps, snow-still and white, will waken when

The Day dawns--and will live for us again.

CHARLES PRESCOTT SHERMON.

_A COUPLE OF VAGABONDS._

Vagabonds, vagrants, tramps,--the class has never been entirely

confined to humanity,--those careless, happy-go-easy, dishonest,

unterrified beings to whom the world is an oyster, and often such a

one as is not worth the opening, sometimes possess an interest to the

observer, entirely disconnected with pity. They always lead

reprehensible lives, and usually die disgracefully. They are amusing

because of the exaggerated obliquity of their careers, and are, beasts

and men alike, droll with a drollery that is three-quarters original

sin. Among animals, at least, there are few cases of actual

misfortune, though sometimes there is that most pitiable and forlorn

creature, a dog that has lost his master, or that bit of cruelty and

crime which has its exemplification in an old horse that has been

turned out to die. Ordinarily the cases of animal depravity one

encounters are so by race and ineradicable family habit, and are

beyond the pale of charity and outside the legitimate field of

brotherly love. One does not care what becomes of them, and least of

all thinks of trying to reform them. But they usually take care of

themselves, after a fashion that excludes all thought of pity. Even

among the higher animals there are, as with humanity, occasional cases

of extraordinary depravity. I know at this moment of a beautiful

horse, with a white hind foot, and the blood of a long line of

aristocrats in his veins, who wears an iron muzzle and two

halter-chains, whose stall is the cell of a demon, who has made his

teeth meet in the flesh of two or three of his keepers, and who is yet

sufficiently sane to try to beat all his competitors on the track, and

to often succeed. I know a little gray family dog, terrier from the

end of his nose to the tip of his tail, kind to all whom he knows, who

is yet the veriest crank of his kind. He hates everything that wears

trousers, will not come when called with the kindest intentions,

attacks all other dogs, big and little, who intrude within his line of

vision, and confines his friendships exclusively to people who wear

skirts and bonnets. He wears his heavy coat all summer because he has

said to the family collectively that he will not be clipped; and, when

an attempt of that kind is made, shows his teeth, even to the little

girl who owns him. He reminds one of the incorrigible youth of an

otherwise God-fearing family, and has been let go in his ways because

he is too ugly and plucky to spend the time upon. I know a cat, now

not more than half-grown, with a handsome ash-colored coat and a

little white neck-tie, who is already as much a tiger as though born

in the wilds of Africa. His playful bites draw blood, and his

unsheathed claws are a terror, even when one is stroking his back. His

tail quivers and his eyes have a tigerish expression, even when he is

but catching a ball of yarn. He was after mice, and caught them, in

his early infancy, and he was crouching and skulking after things when

he should have been lapping milk. It is plainly foreseen that he will

never be a family cat, and will take to the alleys and back fences

before he is grown. He has in him, more than other cats have, the

vagabond and depraved instinct--not amenable to Christian influences.

But the two persons of whom I shall doubtless seem to have as full

recollection here as their characters justify belong to the extensive

family of natural vagabonds, and first dawned upon me in the days when

there was a frontier. I was in those days perfectly hardened to a bed

on the ground, and was amused with the companionship of pack-mules. I

was dependent for mental stimulus upon the stories of the camp-fire,

and for recreation upon the wild realm in which the only changes that

could come were sunrise and evening, clouds, wind, storms. There was a

lonely vastness so wide that it became second nature to live in it and

almost to love it, and a silence so dense that it became

companionship. There was then no dream of anything that was to come.

The march of empire had not touched the uttermost boundary. We

wondered why we were there. And the blindest of all the people about

this wonderful empire were those who knew it best. I really expected

then to watch and chase Indians for the remainder of my natural life;

looked upon them and their congeners as permanent institutions; made

it a part of business to know them as well as possible; and wondered

all the while at the uselessness of the government policy in

occupying, even with a few soldiers, so hopeless a territory. Very

often there was nothing else to do. All the books had been committed

to memory previous to being absolutely worn out. It was a world where

newspapers never came. When the friendship of certain animals becomes

obtrusive,--when they take the place to you of those outsiders whom

you do not really wish to know, but who are there nevertheless,--you

are likely to come to understand them very well indeed, and to find in

after years that they seem to come under the head of persons rather

than creatures--the casual wild creatures of whom one ordinarily

catches a glimpse or two in the course of a lifetime.

There was a bushy and exalted tail often seen moving leisurely along

above the taller grasses that lined the prairie trail. One might

encounter it at any hour, or might not see it for many days. I finally

came to look upon this plume with something more than the interest

attaching to a mere vagrant polecat, and even ceased to regard the end

that bore it as the one specially to be avoided, however common the

impression that it is so. In civilization and in the books nobody had

ever accused the parti-colored creature of other than a very odorous

reputation; and the tricks of his sly life--such as rearing an

interesting and deceptively pretty family under the farmer's

corn-crib, and refusing to be ejected thence; visiting, with fowl

intent, the hen-house; sucking eggs; catching young ducks; and forcing

the pedestrian to go far around him upon the occasion of a chance

meeting, were condoned as matters that could not be helped in the then

condition of human ingenuity and invention. With us, on the plains, he

had acquired another and more terrible reputation. Nobody knows how

information becomes disseminated in the wilderness, but it seemed to

be spread with a rapidity usually only known in a village of some

three hundred inhabitants, with a Dorcas Society; and we came to know,

from authentic instances, that his bite, and not his perfume, was

dangerous. In 1873, the _Medical Herald_, printed at the metropolis of

Leavenworth, stated that a young man sleeping in a plains camp was

bitten on the nose by one of the beasts. Awaking, he flung his

midnight visitor off, and it immediately bit his companion, upon whom

it unfortunately alighted. Both of these unfortunates died of

hydrophobia.

The same year a citizen came to the U. S. Army surgeon at Fort Harker,

Kansas, having been bitten through the nose by a mephitis while

asleep. He had symptoms of hydrophobia, and shortly afterwards died of

that disease. The next case of which printed record was made was that

of a young man who, while sleeping on the ground, was bitten through

the thumb. The writer states that the "animal had to be killed before

the thumb could be extracted." This man also died of hydrophobia in

the town of Russell, in western Kansas. Other cases are recorded about

this time, with less detail.

I mention these instances, substantiated in cold print in a medical

journal, merely to show that what we thought we knew was not a mere

frontier superstition. With a righteous hatred did we hate the whole

mephitis family. The little prairie rattlesnake often crept into the

blankets at night for the sake of warmth; and it is a noticeable fact

that he did not "rattle" and did not bite anybody while enjoying their

unintended hospitality, and that such things were not much thought of.

But the sneaking presence of a skunk, usually considered merely a

ridiculous and disagreeable creature, would always call out the force

for his extermination, promptly, and by some means.

Yet mephitis has the air of seeming rather to like, than to seek to

avoid, mankind. It is one of his curious traits. You cannot certainly

tell whether he really does; but, if he does not, it is strange with

what frequency he is encountered, exhibiting on such occasions a

singular confidence, not in any case reciprocated. It is certain that

he has crossed a railroad bridge to visit the bustling metropolis of

the Missouri Valley, and been seen complacently ambling the streets

there at midnight. If, in crossing a "divide" or threading a reedy

creek-bottom, there is seen before you one of those imposing plumes

before referred to, standing erect above the long grass, without any

perceptible attachment, and moving slowly along, it will be prudent

not to permit any curiosity concerning the bearer of it to tempt you

to a nearer acquaintance. Indeed, should he discover you, in turn, it

will be rather out of the usual line of his conduct if he does not at

once come amiably ambling in your direction, intent upon making your

personal acquaintance, or, as is more likely, of finding out if there

is anything about you which he considers good to eat. There is

something both amusing and fearful in this desire to make

acquaintances regardless of all the forms of introduction and the

usages of society; and no other animal possesses the trait. No one, so

far as known, has ever waited to see what special line of conduct he

would pursue after he came. The chances are that he would stay as long

as he had leisure, and then go without offence; yet no one can

foretell his possible caprices. He might conclude to spend the

afternoon with one; and, as he is known to be a pivotal animal,

reversing himself, upon suspicion arising in his mind, with a celerity

perhaps not fully appreciated until afterwards, one might find it at

least irksome to remain so long idle and quite still. I knew a soldier

once who had such a visit while walking his guard-beat. He did not

dare to fire his gun in time, for fear of the serious accusation of

wishing to kill game while on duty. He could not scare away the cat,

and dared not leave his beat. He stood stock-still for an hour or two,

and then called the corporal of the guard in a subdued and whining

voice. When that non-commissioned autocrat at last appeared, he

considered twenty yards a convenient distance for communication, and

declined to come any nearer. Mephitis was at the moment engaged in

stroking his sides against the sentinel's trousers, while his host did

not dare to either move or speak in a voice the corporal could hear.

The latter went away and obtained permission from the officer of the

day to shoot something, and returned with four more armed men. The

visitor here saw an opportunity to make new acquaintances, and started

to meet the latest arrivals half way. They all ran, while the sentinel

took the opportunity to walk off in a direction not included in his

instructions. The animal was finally partially killed by a volley at

forty paces, leaving a pungent reminiscence that did not depart during

the remainder of the summer, and necessitated some new arrangements

for the lines of defence about the post.

In more recent times an entire company of hunters, with a dog to every

man, have been driven from the field repeatedly by the persistency of

the innocent gaze, or the foolish confidence of the approach, of this

extraordinary bore; for one can't shoot him if he is looking--not

because one can't, but because, if one did, a souvenir would be left,

at least among the dogs, that would linger with them until the natural

time for the shedding of hair should come again, and deprive their

owners of the pleasure of their company for an indefinite period. And,

in addition, the people with whom one might wish to stop for the night

might make remarks accompanied by nasal contortions not usual in

ordinary conversation, and would be likely to suggest the barn, or

otherwheres out-of-doors, as being good and refreshing places to spend

the night in. Even the hunter's own family will prove inhospitable to

the verge of cruelty under such circumstances, and conduct unheard of

before will become perfectly proper on the part of one's best friends.

Such discomfitures have happened ere now to most sportsmen in Western

preserves, and for some reason a crowning misfortune of the kind is

apt to be considered a joke ever afterwards.

But an uncontrollable desire for human intimacy is only one item of

the oddities of this little beast. As a vagabond of the wilderness he

was like other vagabonds there, and got on well enough without any

human association. Carnivorous entirely, he cannot be accused of

looking for the well-filled granary of later times; he invades no

cabbage-patch, and is entirely guiltless of succulent sweet potatoes

and milky roasting-ears. His presence in increased numbers among the

fields and farms of civilization is accounted for by the fact that he

has simply declined to move on. He will not retire to the wilds of

the pan-handle or the neutral strip, driven thither by the too copious

outpour of civilization. His conduct indicates the just conclusion

that he can endure all the vicissitudes of the school-house States if

they can, in turn, endure him. Doubly armed, this autocrat of the

prairies holds in unique dignity the quality of absolute fearlessness,

and, aside from any hydrophobic endowments, is now the chiefest terror

of the free and boundless West.

A figure-head seems to be necessary in the conduct of all the larger

affairs of life. From this idea have come all the griffins, and the

sphinxes, and the St. Georges and Dragons, the hideous caryatids,

gnomes, gorgons, chimeras dire, the eyes of Chinese junks, and the

wooden cherubs that until later years looked over the waste of unknown

waters beneath the bows of every ship that sailed. On the seals of

one-half of all the Western States and territories mephitis might

figure as the chiefest animal of their natural fauna, and for him

might the buffalo and the bear be properly discarded. They are gone:

he remains and impresses himself upon the community unmistakably. But

mottoes and great seals and epitaphs are things not expected to be

governed in their making by anything like actual fact.

It will be conceded that no other beast approaches this in the

particulars of his armament. So confident of his resources is he that

the idea that he can be worsted never enters his elongated cranium.

Though he never uses his phenomenal powers except upon what he

considers an emergency, these supposed emergencies arise quite too

frequently for the general comfort and piety of his neighborhood. It

is said that the little western church never thrives greatly in a

neighborhood that is for some reason peculiarly infested by him. Yet

it is a remarkable fact that when he visits the farmer's hen-roost,

which he often does, the owner, if he came from some timbered country,

nearly always lays the blame upon the much-maligned "coon;" meaning,

of course, that pad-footed and ring-tailed creature who is credited

with a slyness verging upon intellect, but who never visited a prairie

in his life. He does this because there is no penetrating and abiding

savor left behind--except in case of accident--in any of these

maraudings. It is a mere piece of cunning. He wishes to come again

some other time. The victims of his appetite, comprising everything

smaller than himself in that region, are never subjected to his caudal

essences, and a good reason for this would be that he wishes to eat

them himself. Those who know mephitis well, and also know this trait

of his character, are impressed anew by the mercifulness of some of

nature's instincts and freaks.

And here arises the question of a certain occult power apparently

possessed by this creature alone. It seems to be established by

undisputed testimony that he is the most skilful packer of meats, with

the least trouble and expense, known in the annals of the art

preservative. His hollow logs have been repeatedly split in his

absence, and found full of dead fowls, killed in a neighboring

farm-yard, squeezed in closely side by side for future use, and all

untainted and fresh. How does he accomplish this? There are evidently

various things to learn from the field of natural history which might

be turned to the uses of man. To say nothing of the value of the

patent, this would be a very useful household recipe if known. The

inference is that there may be an occult quality in his strange and

characteristic endowment not heretofore suspected.

Our western friend has an extensive family relationship. There are at

least six varieties of him in various latitudes. No one branch of the

family is believed to have any fellowship with any other branch,

probably for weighty and sufficient family reasons; though to the

ordinary human senses there is so little difference in the sachet that

one cannot see reason for being so particular among themselves. Two of

him are very common west of the Missouri--one as big as a poodle and

variously striped, and the other of a smaller and more concentrated

variety, more active also in his habits. It is the bigger of these two

who goes about waving his plume and seeking new acquaintances, as

though he contemplated going into the Bohemian oats business among the

farmers, and who courts admiration while he spreads consternation. It

is he who lies in ambush in the corn-shocks, in the early days of the

yellow autumn, apparently for the express purpose, through the media

of the farmer's boys and the district school, of informing the whole

neighborhood, and especially the little girls, that he is still about.

It is he who is borne oftenest, in spirit and essence, through the

open windows of the settler's house, causing the mistress thereof to

wish, and to often say that she wishes, that she had never come away

from Ohio, or wherever she used to reside, and where she declares

mephitis to have been a nuisance utterly unknown. It is he who lopes

innocently along the railroad track, declining to retire, meeting

death without a murmur, knowing, perhaps, that his dire revenge will

follow the fleeting train, whose wheels have murdered him, for many a

mile, even across the plains and into mountain passes, and perhaps

return with it and add a little something, a piquant mite, to the loud

odors of the Missouri River terminus. The passengers all know he has

been killed, and know it for the remainder of the journey, or else

they wonder at the pungency of the atmosphere apparently pervading a

stretch of country as big as all New England, and which they will talk

about as one of the western drawbacks after they have returned home.

It is he who rather rejoices than otherwise at the number and ferocity

of the farmer's dogs, and who is indirectly blessed if they have the

habit of going into the house and lying under the beds. Then indeed

may he fulfil his mission. When they at first, and through

inexperience, attack him, he routs them all without excitement or

anger on his part, causes an armed domestic investigation of them, and

their banishment without extradition, and through them impresses

himself upon the unappreciative western understanding.

The little one, the other common variety, is perhaps more rarely seen,

but he is at least frequently suspected. Not much bigger than a

kitten, and almost or quite black, he lacks the look of innocence and

the appearance of docility so falsely worn by his relative. Once they

both hibernated: at least the books say so. Now, as one of the changes

wrought by the settlement of the country, this small one becomes a

frequent all-the-year tenant of the farmer's out-buildings. His

battery is quite as formidable as the other's is, and may, indeed, be

considered as an improvement in the way of rapidity and concentration,

like the Gatling gun. The barn is not always his residence; and

without inquiring if it is entirely convenient he frequently takes up

his domicile in or under the dwelling. A mephitis in the cellar is one

of the Kansas things. He does not, while there, produce any of the

mysterious noises that indicate ghosts. The house is known not to be

haunted, for everybody understands quite well who is there. But the

owner must not attempt ejectment. Peace and quiet he insists upon. You

must bar him out some time when he is absent on business, wait until

spring, or move to another house. It is the middle one of these

remedies that is usually adopted, if any. While he stays, there are no

joint occupants with him in the place he has pre-empted. He will catch

mice like a cat, and the joy of his life is the breaking of a rat's

back with one nip behind the head. He has a most formidable array of

teeth, and eschews vegetables entirely. He is the foe of all the

little animals who live in walls or basements, or in holes or under

stones. Even the weazel, that slim incarnation of predatory instinct,

declines to enter into competition with him, and goes when he comes,

or comes when the other goes. One of them is suspected, from this

fact, of eating the other, and mankind, with the only form of

disinterestedness of which we can justly boast, does not care which of

the two it is.

The biggest one of the mephitis family lives in Texas, and that empire

is not disposed to boast itself withal on that account. He came there

from Mexico, possibly on account of his being preposterously

considered a table luxury in the latter country. But it is a land of

which such eccentricities may be expected. They eat the ground-lizard

there,--a variety of the celebrated "Gila monster,"--and some other

creatures to our pampered notions not less repulsive; though they seem

to avoid, by peculiar management, that quadrennial banquet of crow

which constitutes our great national dish. Mephitis is, however,

purely American wherever he comes from. Europe knows him not in

quadrupedal form. He is one of the things got by discovery, though he

may not take rank, perhaps, with the gigantic grass we call "corn," or

with tobacco, or even with ginseng or sassafras, or the host of

acquisitions which would distinguish us as a people even if we had him

not at all. And now that we have got him, we must apparently cherish

him; and with our usual thrift we have made many attempts to utilize

him. He often appears in polite society under the name of sable, or

some such thing, and no odor betrays him. Of the strange fluid, which

is one of the most wonderful natural defences ever bestowed upon an

animal, pharmacy has concocted a medicine, and the perfumers an odor

for the toilet. Yet it must be admitted that one of his chiefest uses,

so far, is to furnish the western editor with a synonym and

comparative, and a telling epithet in time of trouble. He often caps

the climax of a controversial sentence as long as one's arm, and if

you take the county paper you need not be long in discovering that

while we scientific may call him _mephitis_, he hath another name not

often heard by ears polite, or frequently mentioned in the society in

which the reader moves.

That other vagabond who may be considered as being vaguely referred to

at the head of this chapter has no possible kinship with him who has

been desultorily sketched. Yet the two stand together in my mind in a

kind of vague relationship of character. I was not surprised at my

first sight of a coyote, but he grew greatly upon me afterwards. It

was his voice. He is but a degenerate wolf,--the weakest of his

family save in the one respect referred to,--but he is an old and

persistent acquaintance of every frontiersman, ten times as numerous

and prominent in every recollection of that far time of loneliness and

silence as any other beast.

If you visit Lincoln Park, at Chicago, you will find a special pen

devoted to the comfort and happiness of this little gray outcast of

the wilderness; and I may add that he does not appear there to any

advantage whatever. On the wide plains where there was nothing,

apparently, to eat, he was, for a coyote, usually in good condition.

His coat was tolerably smooth sometimes, and he was industrious and

alert. Here, where he is regularly fed at the public expense, he is so

shabby that one hesitates to be caught looking at him as one goes by.

There is that about an animal that expresses unhappiness as plainly as

it is expressed by men, and the Lincoln Park coyote is unquestionably

the most abject specimen of his entire disreputable family.

The reader will understand that in all I may have to say about the

little reprobate I do not refer for any particulars to that

incarcerated and unhappy vagabond just mentioned. On the contrary, he

was the first sensation of my earliest border experiences. He came the

first night, and every night thereafter, for several years. I grew to

know him well, and have had many a brief and solitary interlude of

mingled amusement and vexation on his account, when there was nothing

else on earth to laugh at or be sorry about. I often have shot at him,

usually at very long range, but never to my knowledge killed, or even

scared him. It is well understood that he always knows whether or not

you have with you a gun, and will be distant or familiar accordingly.

But finally exasperated by a wariness so constant, I have sought

revenge by a form of murder that I do not now claim, upon reflection,

was entirely in self-defence or perfectly justifiable, and which to

this day remains a red stain upon an otherwise fair reputation. I

killed twenty odd of him in a single night with insidious strychnine

and a dead mule, and in the morning was astonished not so much at the

slaughter as at the fact that he had not suspected the somewhat worn

expedient, and avoided the banquet.

The trouble with him is, that he does not avoid anything that may be

imagined to be good to eat. If there was ever an animal

preternaturally and continually hungry, it was the old-time coyote of

the plains of western Kansas and the mountains and plateaux of

southern New Mexico. Yet no one ever saw a starved coyote, or found a

dead one. The odor of the camp-fire frying-pan reached him a long way

off, and was irresistible. He crept nearer and nearer, as the evening

passed, and finally the camp was surrounded by a gray cordon who

crouched and licked their jaws, and kept still and waited. But when

the little fire was dead and the voices had ceased, and every man lay

wrapped in slumber and his blankets, the tuneful side of his nature

would get the better of him, and he began to faintly whine. He was

getting the key-note, and ascertaining the pitch. The first faint

yelp, imprudently uttered, affected his companions as yawning does

men, and now a still hungrier one gives utterance to a screech so

entirely coyotish that the example is irresistible. Then pandemonium

awakes. Each vagabond rises up, sits upon his tail, elevates his chin,

and gives utterance to a series of yelps that rise in crescendo,

regardless of time, or measure, or interval, or the lateness of the

hour. Then, when the camp was new, and the men were beginners in that

strange and lonely life that often kept its unexplained and

indescribable charm for them ever afterwards, there would be

responsive sleeplessness and profanity. The hardest ordeal was to

become finally accustomed to this nightly pandemonium, which no effort

could prevent, no vigilance avoid. The first effect was to be

slightly, though privately, frightened. The next was to intensify the

feeling of lonesomeness. One lay in torment, silent, sleepless,

wondering if it was a common thing, and if it were possible to yelp a

human creature to death in the course of time. Then one talked to his

companions, and perhaps expressed himself in a couple of languages.

The most futile of all toil would be an attempt to drive the singers

away. Silent only for a moment, they would all come back again and

make up for lost time. This is how the early wanderers in what is

destined to be the garden of the Union first made the acquaintance of

the most characteristic animal of the country, and this is why he

dwells in the memory of every man who ever slept beneath the sparkling

dome west of the Missouri the sweet sleep of toil and health--a sleep

that by-and-by was uninterrupted by all the night-sounds the

wilderness might invent except the stealthy footfall of some human

stranger.

And when the gray vagabond had become an accustomed nuisance he began

to exercise his real calling; for all his other modes of obtaining a

livelihood are mere by-play to his actual business, which is stealing.

In this line he is something preternatural. He had in those days a

remarkable liking for harness, straps, raw-hide, saddles, boots. He

chewed the lariat from the pony's neck, and would steal a saddle and

gnaw it beyond use or recognition by the owner. He would walk backward

and draw anything that had a rancid smell a mile or so from where he

found it. He was accused of deliberately drawing the cork and spilling

the horse liniment, and of then lapping the fluid from the ground

regardless of consequences. He would chew a belt of cartridges for the

sake of the tallow with which they were coated, and spit them out

again in a dilapidated pile of sheet metal. Vagabond luck saved him

from having the top of his head blown off during this meal; and I have

known a Mexican youth to be killed in trying to straighten some of

them out again. Whips and thongs were dainties, chewed, swallowed, and

digested without danger or difficulty. The owner was under the

necessity of looking after his boots more carefully when they were off

than when they were on, and axle-grease was a precious commodity

stored for safe-keeping with the teamster's spare shirt, in some

arcanum of the equipage where the utmost diligence would not reveal

it.

It was a most desolate country, whose silent leagues bore no

sustenance, and whose creatures, save him, were few. He was

everywhere, and the secret of his existence lay in his one

virtue--industry. He gathered a livelihood from the things despised of

all others, and he seasoned it with content and made it answer. Never

a beetle or a lizard crossed his path unchased. Plainsmen said that

when he encountered one of the little land-turtles or terrapins, then

common, he staid with it until it died and the shell came off. He

killed the virulent little prairie rattlesnake, also plentiful enough,

by seizing it in the middle and snapping its head off with a single

jerk, as one cracks a whip. But if he had been bitten he would always

have recovered. He chased jackass rabbits in pairs, and while one ran

straight after the rabbit the other would cut across the angle, and

thus the two would run down an animal that, when really on business,

is able to fling his heels derisively in the face of the best-bred

greyhound. And when they had caught him there was always a

controversy. No coyote ever divided honorably. That "honor among

thieves," so often mentioned, was not in his education. He sucked

eggs--all that he could find; and when anything died within ten miles

or so he knew it. He was contemporary with the bison, and was the

bison's assassin; for when age and decrepitude overtook the shaggy

bull, and three or four lame and grizzled companions went off

together, he and his companions literally nagged them to death one by

one. If the veteran lay down, they bit him. As long as he remained on

foot they followed and teased him. When he died, they fought over and

ate him, denying even a morsel to the buzzards and ravens. They

followed the Indian hunting-parties, thankful for the morsels that

fell to them, which were not many; for the noble red man was himself

no disdainer of viscera: he included the whole internal economy under

the possible head of tripe, and if in haste ate it raw; and all he

left of a dead buffalo was a hard-earned morsel even for a coyote, if

he had come far to get it.

And when the white hunter came, then was the time of feasting for

_canis latrans_ in all his squalid days. He was the only creature

benefited by a ceaseless slaughter of about twenty years; a slaughter

which meant nothing but a passion for killing, and which, leaving

every carcass where it fell, in about that time exterminated the

biggest, most imposing, and most numerous of the wild beasts of

America.

By-and-by the railroads began to stretch their lonesome lines across

the plains, and the settlers began to come. For a certain time the

coyote seemed to retire before them, and there seemed a prospect for

his final extermination. Not he. When the cattle-men and pioneers grew

too plentiful and meddlesome; when the new-comer began to lie in wait

at night for the protection of the pigs and chickens reared in hope

and toil; and when the unhesitating shot-gun was the companion of his

vigils, sir coyote began to come back east and reoccupy the region he

had left. But under changed conditions. He is an animal of mental

resource and acumen, and he changed his life. It is almost useless to

add that he became worse. Middle and eastern Kansas have him in

considerable numbers now, and it is noticeable that whereas he once

had the impudence to sit and bark at the intruder like a dog as he

passed by, he is now seldom seen or heard. Then he was merely a thief;

now he is a freebooter besides. He once burrowed in the hill-top, and

launched his family upon the world in a comparatively open and

respectable manner, equipped only with teeth, instinct, and

perseverance, confident of their future. He has now retired to the

woods that line the streams, and joined that disreputable brush

society which was never very respectable among either coyotes or men.

He is clannish. Generation after generation stick together in the same

retired locality, and sally forth at night among a population greatly

richer in eatables than any he was formerly accustomed to. He no

longer wanders to and fro through a vastness in which his personality

was in keeping, and his slanting eyes and three-cornered visage now

find furtive occupation beside fence-chinks and through cracks and

knot-holes. He knows a thousand devious ways which all in the end lead

to the barn-yard. It is a bleak time with him when he is forced to

resort to the catching of mice again; but when I see him loafing on

the sunny side of the stacks in a distant field I know what he is

there for, and wish him luck for old acquaintance' sake.

Strangest of all, he has almost lost his voice, and the era of free

concerts is over. Down at the bottom of a ravine, perhaps immensely

tickled at some toothsome find, he sometimes so far forgets himself as

to give a yelp or two. This feeble demonstration usually attracts the

attention of others than those intended, and perhaps the farmer's boy,

the inevitable mongrel dog with cock ears and phenomenal activity, and

the frequent fowling-piece harass him greatly for the time being. But

it is not to be supposed that he has lost his ancient qualifications

for the performance of characteristic exploits. He merely suppresses

them for the present because it is his interest to do so. Versatile,

persistent, and patient, he almost deserves respect for his

uncomplaining acceptance of the conditions of a changed world, his

contempt for public opinion, and the common-sense which has led him to

decline to follow all his contemporaries into the limbo of

extermination. When I see him now, the leer in his eye and the grin on

his mouth almost seem those of recognition. As of old, he wags his way

along the top of the high divide, but now fenced and full of spotted

cattle, with the same pensive, quick-turning, alert head, the same

jog-trot, the same lolling red tongue, the same plume trailing along

behind, ever mindful of a coyote's affairs, ever thinking of his next

meal. Yet he is so much like his cousin, the dog, that know him never

so well you can hardly help whistling to him. And when you have passed

by, if you will look back you will see him sitting upon his tail and

looking after you with the same expression which in the olden time

made you know that he was wondering where you were going to camp, and

whether, when he had barked you into stupidity or death, there was

anything about you rancid, portable, dragable, tough, but perchance

coming within the wide range of a coyote's menu.

JAMES W. STEELE.

_A MEMORY._

On Narragansett's storm-beat sand

We walked with slow, reluctant feet;

I held enclasped her slender hand,

With loved possession, deep and sweet.

Out on the wave the wild foam swung,

The circling sea-gulls upward sprung;

While o'er the level sand the sea

Came rolling soft and dreamily.

The sunset's glow was on her cheek,

Where love and heaven seemed to blend;

So full our hearts we could not speak,

As summer's glories found an end.

What tender lights sieved through the mist,

As waves and sunlight sparkling kissed,

While o'er the sea, to setting sun,

Swung thunder of the evening gun!

Ah! gentle form, what gift was thine

To give the sky a deeper blue,

To make the barren sands divine,

And heaving sea a rosier hue?

'Twas morn of life, and love's sweet glance

Gave dreary years their one romance,

When yielding form and tender eyes

Return to earth its paradise.

On Narragansett's dreary sand,

Now bent and old, alone I stray,

Nor see the lights, nor waves, nor land,

But one lone grave so far away.

The storm-tossed foam and gulls distraught

Return like dreams, with haunted thought--

"No more, no more, oh! never more!"

Moan the dark waves along the shore.

PAUL DAVIS.

_THE NIGHT OF THE FRENCH BALL._

A detective is well used to the unusual and to meeting as cold facts

what, when told, seems a tissue of the wildest improbabilities. During

my experience I had one case which for certain strange features I have

never had surpassed. It seemed to make itself into my hand as clear as

a first lesson in reading for a child, until almost the end, and then

came points which are hard enough to unravel.

It occurred years ago, on the evening of the French Ball. I was free,

and attended it. It was the usual thing. The Academy of Music was

filled with gay women and young fellows about town. By twelve o'clock

the wanton hilarity was beginning to get well under way. The women

were leaning heavily on their partners' arms and indulging in loud

laughter, while the steps were more vigorous than decorous. The

high-kicking had begun. My attention had been particularly drawn to

one young woman. She was not very tall, but was beautifully made. She

was dressed like a Columbine. Her short, pointed skirt of yellow silk

and blue velvet came hardly to her knees, and the waist was quite

décolleté. On her blond hair was perched a conical cap with tiny

silver bells on it. Around her face was wound a piece of white lace to

serve as a mask. I noticed her because she was such an exquisitely

graceful dancer. Her small feet, cased in gold shoes with high heels,

twinkled as prettily as possible as they lightly touched the waxed

floor. The dancing was an intense pleasure to her evidently. She could

hardly keep her feet still during any pause in which she had not to

move. They would beat impatiently upon the floor, and she would toss

one in front of the other and sway her sinuous little figure,

impatiently waiting till her turn to dance came again.

As I was standing near the door looking at her a party of several

young men came into the Academy. They stood and looked about and

passed remarks on the scene as if they had not yet become acquainted

with its features. They had been to a theatre, probably, and came to

the ball after it. The eyes and cheeks of two or three of them were

bright, as if they had been drinking. One young fellow seemed to be

the object of much attention from the others. He was a German, of

medium height, with blue eyes and exceedingly blond hair, while a rich

color mantled in his cheeks. The others would make some remark or

comment on the scene to him, and he would laugh or smile with the air

of a philosopher who had come to find a cynical enjoyment in the

insane folly of his kind. The others addressed him in German or

French, and called him "Graf." From his manner and appearance it did

not require much astuteness to conclude that he was a young German of

rank who was visiting the country.

One of his companions turned to him with a broad smile and made some

remark, pointing out one of the dancers. I looked in the direction and

saw my pretty blond Columbine pirouetting gracefully around, with her

arms stretched out to her partner, a big fellow who was a little

fuddled with wine, and who had strayed out of the orbit of the girl in

a turn in the dance. She was not going to be balked of her share in

the measure, and tripped about by herself quite contentedly till he

should come back. It was an amusing touch to see the fairy-like

creature smiling good-naturedly, while the lumbering fellow who was

dancing with her, or who should have been dancing with her, was

gyrating beyond her reach. I glanced at the group of fellows to see if

it was she they were observing.

A change had come over the German. His face was as white as death, and

his eyes were dilated and fixed. He had fallen a little back of the

others, as if he did not wish to be observed. This was interesting,

and I felt my professional instincts aroused. He answered their

remarks with a rather hard, forced smile. A moment after he made some

proposal or said something that seemed to be a surprise to them, and I

saw them shake hands with him. He left the hall in a hurried way. I

slipped after him. I wished to see what he did. He stood for a moment

in the foyer, and I saw his hands clinch fiercely. Then, in a

distraught sort of way, he walked around to one of the other entrances

to the dancing-floor and looked about among the dancers. He tried not

to get where he could be seen, and there was a fierce scowl on his

face. I lounged slowly in the neighborhood, and watched him. The

deathly paleness had not left his face.

All at once he walked in upon the dancing-floor, with an attempt at

careless ease, and addressed a masker who wore the costume of a

Franciscan friar, a roomy brown suit, with a rope knotted at his waist

for a cincture, and a large hood to it which he had pulled up over his

head. He was standing near the entrance. He was masked, so he was

pretty thoroughly disguised. The monk was not dancing.

The young German spoke to him, and then drew him out of the hall. In

the corridor he spoke more earnestly to him. The man seemed to be

declining some invitation or request. But after a few moments of

earnest speech from the German the two walked away, and, keeping them

in view, I saw the pair leave the Academy.

I was at first tempted to follow them. But having no more definite

purpose than to see what would come of their movements, I concluded to

remain and witness the fun at the ball, which always grew fast and

furious at the small hours of the morning.

So I resumed my old post and amused myself by watching the reckless

extravagance of the mob of revellers. The little Columbine, though she

had been taking her share of the champagne, for I had seen her in the

wine-room several times, was very firm on her feet. Her eyes twinkled

with a lazy sort of brightness. She had a better partner now, a little

young fellow dressed in black tights and a short velvet jacket. They

were coming down the middle of the room, his right arm around her

waist. Every few steps as they advanced, both facing forward, they

flung their legs in the air with a wild but graceful vigor. Then they

would whirl around to a sort of waltz-step, which the man in tights

would wind up by clasping the Columbine firmly around the waist and

gyrating so rapidly that her body was thrown out at right angles to

his own.

They attracted a great deal of attention, because the grace of their

movements was very great, despite the wild abandon of it. I do not

know how I came to remark it, but while they were mid-way on their

course I saw the Franciscan monk come in at one of the entrances. He

leaned against a pillar, and I saw him watching the pair.

They finished their bacchic course, and the youth in the black tights

escorted the panting, smiling girl to a seat, where he made a mock bow

of the deepest reverence and went off. I kept my eye still fixed on

the girl, who was smiling and fanning herself. Even then her little

feet beat the floor to the sound of the music.

While she was sitting thus the monk came up and seated himself on a

chair by her side. He made some remarks to her. She coquettishly

answered them. Then to another she shook her head with playful

determination. The monk pressed the point, for he bent forward, though

I noticed that when she turned towards him he seemed to shrink back.

Finally Columbine sprang to her feet, took his arm, and with a

half-regretful glance at the merry dancers left the room with him.

* * * * *

The next day the evening papers had a startling story. I have kept the

newspaper account. It was this:

"A SEQUEL TO THE FRENCH BALL.

"Those who were at the French Ball last night in the Academy

of Music may have remarked a young woman dressed as Columbine,

who excited a good deal of attention by her graceful dancing.

The giddy young thing will not dance at the next French Ball.

She was lying at the morgue this morning, stone dead, waiting

to be identified. It seems a cruel mockery, after her last

night's gayety, to behold her now, in her ball dress of black

and yellow velvet, lying till someone shall tell who she is.

Failing all identification, some doctor's scalpel will dissect

the corpse and study the muscles which worked so healthfully

in the dance.

"The young girl was strangled to death last night in a

carriage. She left the ball with some one dressed like a

Franciscan monk, at two o'clock. The monk gave a card to the

driver, after printing on it 'No. -- 120th Street.' He also

gave the driver a twenty-dollar gold piece. All this without a

word. He was closely masked. The driver had only remarked that

his hand was very white and large, and that he wore a heavy

plain gold ring.

"The two got in and he drove off. While he was driving along

the upper part of Madison Avenue he heard a sound which

attracted his attention. On looking round he saw that the door

of the carriage was open. He stopped, reached back with his

whip, and banged it to. He supposed the couple inside were

probably the worse for the wine they had taken at the ball,

and had either failed to shut the door, which had worked open,

or that the handle of the door had been fiddled with till it

opened, and they were too far gone to notice it.

"At all events the twenty-dollar gold piece had made the

driver disposed to be obliging, and he had pushed it to for

them, and driven on. When he reached 120th Street, at the

designated number, he got off the box and opened the carriage

door.

"A lamp-post in front of the house lit up the carriage. The

curtains of the carriage windows had been drawn. They were not

drawn when the couple got in. What he saw terrified him.

Columbine was lying, with her white wraps fallen about her,

between the seats, and a monk's frock and a girdle of rope,

together with a mask, were tossed on a seat. The monk had

disappeared!

"The hackman shook the girl and tried to rouse her, but could

not. He pulled her forward, and then saw that her face was

frightfully red, and that the eyes were puffed out. On the

throat were the marks of fingers where a terrible grip had

been taken of her neck.

"The story was clear enough. The monk, whoever he was, had

strangled the girl in the carriage, and had then thrown off

his disguise and let himself out at the door while the

carriage was still in motion.

"This savage crime was evidently premeditated. The masker had

printed the address, had not spoken a word, and had paid the

fare before entering the carriage. So there was not the sound

of his voice, or his handwriting, to identify him, and his

form and face had been completely hidden.

"The cabman drove at once to the nearest police-station and

told his story. The body was taken to the morgue. The

detectives are at work on the case, which promises to be a very

pretty one. _Known_: a man masked as a monk who was at the

French Ball, and who had a large white hand, on which he wears,

or wore, a plain gold ring. _Unknown_: the murderer. Who is the

detective that will run down the game?"

"Here he is," I said to myself, as I finished reading the account. I

had more points than the paper gave. The scenes at the ball came back

to me very vividly now. The sudden deathly paleness of the German

stranger, and his departure with the Franciscan friar! There was a

connection here that was too evident to be passed over.

I determined to find out who had murdered the pretty Columbine, who

had won me so by her graceful dancing and smiling good-humor. Early

the next morning I went to the morgue. There she lay, the dainty

figure stretched out so stiff and cold in the big gloomy room. What a

contrast to the scene in which I had seen her last! There was a damp

cloth over her face. When it was removed I saw a round, full face, the

features small and delicate. I gently pushed back the lids from her

eyes. They were a dark blue. Her blond hair was her own, and not a

wig. I pictured to myself the smoothly-rounded cheeks with the warm

color of life in them. I glanced regretfully at her feet, still in

their high-heeled golden shoes. They had tripped to their last dance,

the dance of Death, and were motionless forever.

I found that a beautiful emerald which I noticed pinned in her corsage

on the night of the ball was gone. It had been rudely plucked away,

for the lace about the edge of her dress was torn and hanging. But a

large ring of rubies and diamonds had been left on her finger, and was

kept at the station-house. I had remarked the emerald because it had

an old-fashioned setting in gold, and impressed me as a family jewel.

The people who lived at No. -- 120th Street were a most respectable

family, and a large one. They deprecated the publicity which the

number of their house in the story of the murdered girl had thrust

upon them. Inquiry into the character of this family satisfied me on

one point, that the monk had given that address simply because it was

a distant one, whether he had written it at random or had known the

people residing at the number.

I went to all the transatlantic steamers which were in port and got

their passenger-lists of the voyage over. In one that had arrived

three days before I found a name which I will call in this story Count

Hermann Stolzberger of Vienna. He was the only German count who had

come over in any of them.

I made a tour of the swell hotels in the city and examined their

registers. In one on Fifth Avenue I found the entry, "Hermann

Stolzberger and servant." He had arrived three days before.

I engaged a room at the hotel. I wished to be in the neighborhood. I

had first inquired if Count Stolzberger had left town, and the clerk

had told me no. Where was he to go? The clerk had heard him say to a

friend that he expected to be in New York ten days or so. Was he in

now? No. He had gone out with friends and would not be back for

dinner.

That evening I lounged around the office, sitting in the long corridor

into which the door from the street opened. I waited until twelve. No

Count! I prolonged my guard for an hour more, and he had not appeared.

I wished above all to get a look at Count Hermann Stolzberger. He

might, it was true, have gone in at the ladies' entrance, or he might

remain out all night. On the other hand, he possibly had delayed with

friends and would yet return. I waited.

My patience was rewarded. At half-past one a cab rolled up to the

door, and a young man in a large overcoat, somewhat foreign in its

mode, sprang out and walked with a quick, nervous tread into the

corridor. He walked rapidly by, but my eye had taken him in from the

moment he opened the door. My memory of faces is excellent. I

recognized the blond fairness of the Count at once, though there was

not much color in his cheeks, and his face looked worn and thin.

Count Hermann Stolzberger was the young German who had entered the

French Ball and turned pale at the sight of the Columbine!

I have said that this case almost seemed to unroll itself for me; but

there were two or three connections to be made to constitute proof,

and not leave me with a distinct suspicion only.

I visited the morgue daily in hope of some clue, but none came. No one

identified the body, and after the allotted length of time it went to

the dissecting-table. There were hundreds of visitors to see it, and a

great deal of sympathy was expressed; but that was all. Nobody claimed

it or seemed to have known the poor girl.

A costumer had claimed the Franciscan's robe. I fancy he did this more

through curiosity to find if it were the one he had let than on

account of the value of it, for it must have been very cheap. I got

the address of this man and called on him. I asked him if he

remembered the man who had hired it. He said he did. It was a

smooth-faced, dark-complexioned man of about forty. He remembered,

because he had made some joke with him about his being clean shaven

enough for a monk.

The man had given no address, and he did not know who he was. This was

a slight hitch in the proceedings. I was convinced that the murderer

in the garb of the Franciscan friar was not the man who had engaged it

of the costumer, but the German. He was of much the same size and

build as the original monk, and so he had assumed the loose brown

habit without exciting my attention. But the fact of the German's

turning so pale and calling the monk out from the dance had made me

feel that he was the one who had strangled the gay Columbine in the

carriage that night.

The Count seemed to grow visibly thinner. There was a drawn look to

his face, and during the time that the dead girl lay at the morgue he

seemed to be held by some terrible thought. I had shadowed him closely

to see if he ever went to see the remains, but he did not go near

them. His terrible secret was telling on him fearfully, however. The

color had become faint in his cheeks, and his eyes had a haggard look.

When he was with others he would affect a gayety that drove much of

this distressing expression from his face; but when he came home alone

it was very marked.

Something had to be done if I was to secure the proof that would

convict the Count. It was the third day since I had come to the hotel

and busied myself in studying him. He had gone to the reading-room,

contrary to his usual habit, after finishing his breakfast. While he

was there two of his friends came in, and they began conversing

together. I slipped across the way and hastily wrote a message, sealed

it, and charged a messenger-boy to deliver it, saying that he was to

wait and see if any answer would be given.

I hurried back to the reading-room of the hotel again. The Count and

his friends were still there. If they only remained till the messenger

arrived! I had seated myself in a corner behind some one, but with my

eyes commanding a full view of the three. The message did come before

they left. One of the hotel clerks brought it in. The Count tore open

the envelope and read the note. I could not but admire his

self-control. The nostrils expanded and hardened, and a stolid look

crept into his eyes for a moment; but that was all. What he read was

this: "You know and I know whose hands left those marks on the throat.

Why do you not wear your gold ring?"

He remained in thought for a moment. Then he lightly excused himself

to his friends and went out, having asked something of the servant. He

had gone to see the messenger-boy. I did not fear the description he

would get being of much help to him. He was not gone very long. When

he returned he talked easily to his two friends, and after a little

while they went out together.

When he came in that night a letter was waiting for him which had come

through the mail. "What good did it do to kill Columbine?" was all

there was in it.

The next morning when he awoke he found a note under his door. Its

contents were these words: "Is it harder to be choked to death by ten

fingers or by a rope?"

There was a far more guarded expression about his face after these

notes than before. He always wore a fixed, stolid calm now. He

evidently felt that some eye was on him, and he could not tell when or

where.

The evening of the following day he received another message. It ran:

"Leave New York at once if you would save your neck."

The Count was too sharp for me. He did not go. But he did not go out

so much in the daytime. He could not altogether cloak his feelings.

There was a disposition on his part to take quick, searching glances

about him.

But the strain on him was telling. It cost him more effort to keep

from looking troubled. His face got thinner and paler. I was

"shadowing" him closely; but I had to be very careful, for he was

trying to discover who it was that was on his tracks.

One morning he went out about the hour he generally left the hotel. It

was the fourth day after the note which advised him to leave New York.

He went directly to a railroad station and took the train for Chicago.

I was prepared for this emergency, and went on the same train.

When it arrived in Chicago, he went to the Palmer House and registered

as Karl Schlechter. He had not been in his room half an hour when a

note was given him. It had been sent by a messenger-boy. "Karl

Schlechter is Count Herman Stolzberger, and the halter is as near him

in Chicago as in New York," ran the note.

It seemed almost cruel to pursue him like a Nemesis; but I thought of

the gay Columbine whose young life had been mercilessly choked out of

her by his smooth white hands, and did not desist.

He left Chicago that night after sending a telegram. Probably it was

to his man in New York. He went west as far as Kansas City. A note was

handed him in the same way as soon as he had got well settled at his

hotel: "The ghost of a strangled girl does not care for place."

He remained here only a day, sending another telegram. When the train

had started which carried him away, he walked through the cars

deliberately looking at the passengers.

At Denver the old story was repeated: "Eyes sharper than your own are

still on you. You cannot escape the hold of your murdered victim."

The next step was to Salt Lake City. He went through the same tactics

on the cars, and his sharp eye took me in.

A new note reached him at the Walker House. "It may not be long before

we meet again, and then my fingers will be at your throat."

In the evening after dinner he was in the billiard-room of the hotel.

He saw me there and finally came and seated himself by my side. He

engaged me in conversation. He spoke English in a broken way which

there is no need to reproduce.

"Was I from New York?" he began.

"Yes."

"Are you travelling for pleasure or business?" he asked next.

"For pleasure," I answered.

"A foreigner is a little surprised when he sees an American travelling

in his own country. It seems as if he must be familiar with it. Where

are you going from here?"

"Oh, I am not settled. I drift where the humor takes me."

I saw I had become the subject of his suspicions. But he did not yet

know me as the author of the notes.

He did not remain long in Salt Lake City. I went from the place when

he did. He had noticed me once or twice and felt certain I was

following him. He went to San Francisco direct. When we arrived there,

he gave some order to a hackman, before stepping into the carriage. I

engaged another hackman.

"Follow that carriage until the man gets out, but only keep close

enough to know where it goes."

The hack in which the Count had got travelled around without any

definite termination apparently. He wished to know if anyone was

following him, and had told the hackman to see if another carriage was

after him. He soon found there was, and then he drove at once to the

hotel, and hurried into the office.

I got there a few moments later. I went to the register. His name was

not there at all. I looked around the place and found him sitting not

far off. He had begun to watch me. I went down stairs and gave a note

to one of the boys to take out to the message office, and have it sent

to Count Stolzberger. I had prepared it beforehand, so I was only gone

a moment. He kept me well in view all he could. When he finally went

to register, he signed his right name, Count Stolzberger, and the

clerk gave him the message which had been brought in.

He seemed puzzled. He had kept me in view ever since I arrived, and I

had had no time to write a note. So for a moment he did not know what

to think. The note had said: "The man who lent you the costume of the

friar has been found. There are not many more turns for you now. This

man will recognize you when he sees you. Other witnesses will prove

that you spoke to Columbine, drove off with her in the hack, and that

the poor girl was found dead after your disappearance. What lacks to

fit the rope to your neck?"

He engaged his room, and soon after he had gone to it a boy came to me

and asked me to go to the Count's room for a few moments.

Count Stolzberger was sitting in an easy-chair near a table, on which

there was writing-material. He rose, greeted me with dignity, and

motioned me to a chair, asking me to sit down.

"You remember that we both came from Kansas City together, and that

part of the journey was made in a sleeping-car," he said, with slow

deliberation.

"We may have done so," I answered.

"In the night I went through the pockets of your coat and vest. The

result of that investigation, and especially as regards certain notes

made by you on a sheet of paper, has shown me that you are a

detective, and that you are engaged in working up the case of the girl

who was--who died after the French Ball in New York. I am right, am I

not?" he inquired, all in the same calm, measured way.

"Yes," I replied. "I have been keeping you in sight, Count, until the

necessary proofs were obtained that would convict the murderer."

"You fancy that I am the one who did the deed?" he asked, in the same

measured tones.

"I know it," I answered quietly, but with an air of conviction.

"Granting, for the moment, that you are right, what interest have you

in bringing home the crime to me? Who has engaged you to do this?"

"The pretty girl who was strangled, and a professional desire to work

up the case."

"The several notes I have received were from you, I suppose," he

continued, in his easy, careless tones.

"Yes."

"And you have the proof that I am the murderer?" he inquired, turning

his eyes unflinchingly on me.

I smiled. "Count, I fear that everything is against you."

"You would be sadly mortified to find that you were mistaken, I

presume."

"I should be sadly surprised," I returned, again with a quiet smile.

"What time did the hackman drive off with the monk and the girl?" he

asked me.

"At ten minutes past two. The hackman noted the time to see what hour

he could hope to get back for another fare."

"Well, let me tell you something that may modify your search in this

business. I had made arrangements to go with the girl. I did not wish

in any way to be connected with her departure. So just when we were

ready to go down to the carriage, I told her to wait for me at the

entrance for five minutes. She said she would, and went down.

"I had put on the monk's garb over my evening dress. I threw it off

and left it in one of the dressing-rooms. I hurried back to the floor

and made it a point to show myself to several persons who knew me. I

feared that possibly some one had seen me talk to the monk, and would

connect the disappearance of Columbine afterward with a monk with

this. This was my reason for conspicuously showing myself after she

had gone out with me in the monk's dress.

"I was not away more than six or seven minutes, when I went back to

the dressing-room to put on the habit again. It was gone! I searched

in the neighboring rooms, thinking some one might have moved it to

some other place. I could not find it. I then hastened down to the

entrance to go with the Columbine in my dress-suit, with a mask on,

for I had slipped that in my breast.

"The girl was not there! I inquired of some of the bystanders, and

they told me that a monk had got into a carriage with her not five

minutes before. Who that monk was I am as ignorant as yourself. You

have followed a false trail. I did _not_ go with the girl, and can

prove an alibi for the next two hours after she drove off. Several of

my friends were with me from then till I went to my hotel, and my man

knows the hour when I came home with them. I was terribly shocked the

next day when I heard of her mur--her death."

I felt considerably taken back and very foolish. The Count's accents

were those of truth, and afterwards his assertions were fully borne

out by witnesses. Who it was that murdered the unfortunate girl has

remained the closest mystery ever since.

"Will you tell me your relation to the girl? Why did you turn pale

when you saw her? And why did you wish to go with her, as you admit

having wished to do?"

"That," said the Count, with intense decision, "you will never know

from me."

And I never did. There was a twofold mystery about what had seemed to

me as clear as the alphabet. Never could I learn what were Count

Stolzberger's relations with the girl, nor who had murdered her in the

carriage after the ball.

PORTLAND WENTFORTH.

_DOES THE HIGH TARIFF AFFECT OUR EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM?_

We had, before the war, the system of apprenticeship as practised to a

great extent in Europe to-day. Its almost total extinction is laid at

the door of concentrated, and still concentrating, capital, aided by

improved machinery.

Some may argue that our improved machinery has the tendency to

combine capital. This may be true in some measure; but, upon second

thought, it will become clear to an impartial thinker that the

protective tariff is the chief cause, as is evidenced by its baneful

results--the trusts.

Under this new order, the shoemaker has no need of apprentices. The

Northern shoe-factory, which employs cheap foreign labor at

labor-saving machines, takes away his trade. He has, of course, a few

customers for hand-made shoes, but his principal occupation consists

in mending the poorly made shoes of the factory. He needs no

apprentices for that, but, in order to make a comfortable living for

his family and give his children the benefits of an education, he must

charge big prices; and I venture to predict that the time is not far

off when it will be cheaper to the consumer to buy a new pair of shoes

from the factory than to have the old ones half-soled and otherwise

repaired by the shoemaker of his town. This holds good in regard to

other trades, and the question arises: What condition are we drifting

into?

The indications are that we shall have in the near future a

manufacturing class, a farming class, and a floating class. This

floating class deserves our serious consideration. It consists of a

large body of men and women, shiftlessly changing from the merchant

class to the professions, and from the professions to the merchant

class.

Our educational system helps to increase the confusion. Starting out

with the intention of making the schools of the country the foundation

of a substantial education in the elementary branches, our educators

have allowed themselves to be carried away--through sheer enthusiasm,

no doubt--from that simple and substantial basis of operation; and we

have to-day, as the necessary result, the most complicated, absurd,

and absolutely useless educational system in the world.

There is no branch of human knowledge that is not taught in the public

schools of the country; and the most remarkable fact about it is that

one solitary teacher is supposed to understand and to be able to teach

this endless variety of branches.

For whose benefit is such an education intended? For the large

floating population of the country; for the boys and girls whose

parents have no positive intentions as to their children's future

career.

In conversation with a public-school teacher I asked why he taught

geometry and trigonometry in the school. "Well," he said, "it is of

not much use, and takes valuable time from the rest of the scholars;

but some of the patrons wish to have their children study it, because

_they might have future use for it_."

When a few others wish Latin, German, or French taught, the teacher

immediately undertakes it, while the great mass of the pupils are

actually starving for the most elementary knowledge of the

common-school branches.

We have, in consequence, a class, composed principally of young men,

who have no education especially suited to any definite trade or

profession. This class is constantly growing, to the detriment of the

country. The trades are driven to the wall by combined capital, and

there is literally nothing to do for many of our young men except to

stand in a store as clerk or bookkeeper. Farmers' sons starting out in

life with a shallow education received from a shallow system look with

aversion upon the occupation of tiller of the soil, and, deluded by

the education received at the country school-house into the belief

that the world lays at their feet, go from one profession or trade to

another, never satisfied, never of any account, and never successful.

If a freer trade has a tendency to break up trusts and combinations of

capital, it will, in consequence, distribute the industries of the

country more evenly among the people, and, by giving employment to our

young men at home, will give them a definite aim in life and do away

with the silly demand for a university education in a common public

school.

EMIL LUDWIG SCHARF.

_MARCH 4th, 1889._

Hail to the new! unto the winner hail!

Hail to the rising, not the setting sun!

So runs the world: success, however won,

Dulleth, the while, his glory who doth fail.

Yet, as thou puttest off thy proven mail,

Strong soul that didst no issue ever shun,

Or at entrenched greed's resentment quail!

Hark to the swelling undertone--"Well done!"

Unto the canker which thy country's life

Yearly doth make flow more and more impure,

Thou wouldst, where needed most, have put the knife,

And from its root the pest begun to cure.

O brave chirurgeon! who shall end the strife

It matters not--thy fame remaineth sure.

ALFRED HENRY PETERS.

_EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT._

THE SALE OF THE PRESIDENCY.

No better illustration of the power wielded by the press has been

given, since the London _Times_ took up the Crimean War and remodelled

the allied armies, than that of the New York _World_ in its assault on

the corruptions of the ballot that robbed the people of the United

States of their voted will at the late presidential election.

This monstrous crime against self-government would have faded from

public memory, and lost its place in the annals of iniquity, but for

the energy and enterprise of this journal, that sent an army of

correspondents over the country and gathered the proofs of the open

market in which was sold and bought the Presidency.

This fearful exposé of a burning shame was followed by messages from

governors, and bills by legislatures, looking, not to the punishment

of the wrong-doers, but to the enactment of preventive laws tending to

the protection of the people in the future.

It is to be observed, however, that this potent power failed to bring

on any investigations, any indictments, or a single effort to punish

the guilty. This the _World_ demanded, but this the _World_ failed to

obtain.

The reason for the impotent result in this one direction is easy to

comprehend when we get at the facts underlying the corruption. Neither

party was, or is, in a condition to demand an investigation, for the

leaders of each are alike guilty. It is generally believed that money

was corruptly used by both organizations, and that the Republicans,

having the larger sum, won in the end. This is true, but it is only

true in part. Honest investigation would bring out the startling fact,

that the vast sums collected from millionaires, and the very

significant amount assessed on office-holders, were for the one

purpose of returning Benjamin Harrison to the Presidency and again

putting the moneyed power of the country in the keeping of the

Republican party.

This manner of operating by corrupt means has long been well known to

the more observant. Corruption has no conscience, no patriotism, and

no politics. All rascality rests on a purely business basis. When a

merchant seeks a partner, he does not bother himself about that

partner's religious belief or party predilections. When rogues wish to

form a trust or ring, they in like manner consider only the capacity

of their brother-rogues, and when politics is at all considered, it is

because of the safety from investigation found in having all sides

implicated. Thus, when the great Aqueduct steal of New York was

organized, the managers were made up of both Democrats and

Republicans. When, therefore, an investigation went far enough to

develop two prominent Republicans added to the responsible

commission, and one of those Republicans was called to the stand and

asked how he came to accept such a position, he responded naïvely that

he sought to secure some of the patronage of the public work for his

own party.

Now, when we remember that President Cleveland, in the last hours of

his illustrious administration, made a deadly assault on a system that

oppressed the many for the benefit of a few, we get a clue to a

mystery that has puzzled the masses. Vast sums were openly subscribed,

and almost as openly used, in the purchase of votes to perpetuate the

corruption. And we had developed two startling facts that go to show

that our experiment of self-government is well-nigh a failure.

The first of these is that we have so cheapened the suffrage that we

have an element in between the two parties large enough to decide a

presidential election of what we call "floaters"--that is, men who

stand upon the street-corners, and crop out in the rural regions, with

their votes in hand, for sale to the highest bidders. The market price

varies from five dollars to a hundred, as the demand may rule.

The second fact teaches that the election through States facilitates

this infamous abuse. We find that while President Cleveland won in the

popular vote by nearly a hundred thousand majority, he lost the

presidency. Through the electoral system we have developed two pivotal

States, and the market thus narrowed makes the corruption possible.

It is quite evident that we cannot narrow the suffrage, but it is

possible to widen the vote; and if the patriotic people of the United

States care to sustain the great republic, and give to their children

the precious possession of a constitutional government, based on an

equality of rights before the law, no time should be lost in wiping

out an electoral system that has not only failed of its purpose, but

is a source of peril to the government.

It is said of a distinguished politician of Pennsylvania that when

called on to contribute money for the purpose of carrying a State

election, he, refusing, said, "What's the use of wasting money on the

people in an election when you can purchase the legislature with

one-fourth the money?" Now, immense as are the sums gotten through

monopoly and unjust taxation, they are not sufficient to purchase

votes throughout the entire country, to say nothing of the danger

attending such an attempt.

We learn this from Col. Dudley's famous, or rather infamous, letter of

instruction to his subordinates. He wanted the floaters classed in

blocks of five. This, not because the floaters were so numerous as to

require such organized handling, but because it was a hazardous

venture, and agents willing to transact the business were scarce. That

they were found in deacons, class-leaders, bankers, and Sunday-school

teachers only shows the desperate condition to which the moneyed power

was reduced in its effort to secure again the control of our

government.

Had the Democracy planted itself firmly upon honest ground and fought

this corruption because it was corrupt and not from a fever of

excitement to win at all hazards, it might have been defeated--probably

would have been. But in that defeat it would have held a position that

would now enable it to investigate, indict, and punish. As it is, we

have a great outcry and no efficient work. Col. Dudley goes acquit of

all save public condemnation, not because of any difficulty attending a

legal condemnation, but because his accusers cannot enter court with

clean hands.

This is an ugly statement to make; but for the sake of the political

association with which we sympathize, and in whose cause, as developed

in the late election, we are deeply interested, we feel it our duty to

assert the truth in the plainest terms. The Democracy should remember

that in this corrupt game they must of necessity be the losers. The

corruption fund is and must be with their opponents. The gist of the

contention lies in the fact that the Democracy seek to arrest a

robbery that has already made their opponents rich, and the swag thus

obtained affords the means through which it may be held. To enter such

an arena is to enter it unarmed.

Senator Plumb, when he made the assertion, subsequently published by

authority, that the only class really benefited by our system of

extortion miscalled protection should have "the fat fried out of it"

to carry on the election, unintentionally uttered a truth we cannot

ignore. This again was supplemented by Senator Ingalls's instruction

to his State delegation at Chicago to nominate for the Vice-Presidency

"some fellow like Phelps who can tap Wall Street." And the evidence

closes with Col. Dudley's direction to organize "the floaters in

blocks of five."

These are noted and recognized leaders of the Republican party.

Senators Plumb and Ingalls are not only prominent as such, but are men

of brain and culture. Col. Dudley is known to the country as a

prominent worker in the cause of the moneyed power. Now, while we

might hesitate to take the word of any one of these gentlemen when

advocating any measure of importance to their party, we are bound to

accept all they assert against themselves, in accordance with

well-recognized principles of evidence.

Their admissions are fatal to their party, as their practice, if

continued, will prove fatal to the Republic. We have some twenty-two

State legislatures laboring to so amend the machinery of elections as

to make this purchase of votes difficult, if not impossible. In this

good work the Democracy should be the zealous leaders, not only

because it is reform, but because it is the salvation of the party.

If this corruption found in the mere purchase of votes ended with that

foul practice we might hope for something; but back of that, hid in

the darkness, lies the ugly, snaky form of treachery. The money

subscribed by millionaires is not always used in the camp of the party

in whose behalf it was contributed. So long as rogues are countenanced

in one direction they will be found in others. The startling fact that

we cannot have investigations for fear of uncovering our own people is

supplemented by another no less startling--that such investigation

would expose not only bribe-takers but traitors. We are not asserting

this without due consideration, and we give to print only what is

known by the more shrewd and observant in our own midst.

The proof of this is not necessary. The knowledge that corruption did

exist carries with it assurance that it extended in such directions as

the wrong-doers found most efficient. When that sturdy old

corruptionist, Oakes Ames, was called upon to account for the stock of

the _Crédit Mobilier_ with which he had been intrusted, he replied

that he had placed it "where it would do the most good," and his keen,

incisive remark has passed into a popular proverb. The wretched,

degraded creature who sells his vote parts with an infinitesimal bit

of power, and he is a saint and a gentleman by the side of the man

who, trusted by his party, betrays that trust for a moneyed

consideration. However, this carries us beyond our subject.

The truest and best reform that can be attained is the most radical,

and that is, as we have said, to elect the President by a direct vote

of the people, and do away with an electoral system that survived its

usefulness in the death of George Washington. The next best is to

secure the secrecy of the ballot. Anything short of this is vain. When

we have so arranged the machine that the bribe-taker cannot make open

delivery of the stolen goods, we have driven the bribe-giver to

accepting the word of a wretch whose oath would be worthless.

In view of the peril in which we find ourselves, with the very

foundations taken from under the tottering political fabric known as

the Great Republic, the anxiety manifested by our law-makers lest some

citizen may be deprived of his vote in this effort to purify the polls

would be ludicrous were it not that the subject is of so serious a

nature. The very ground is sliding from under us, and these Solons are

concerned as to the shoes we may be deprived of in our effort at

escape. Indeed, if to perfect the reform it became necessary not only

to deprive a few citizens of the suffrage, but to hang Messrs. Plumb,

Ingalls, and Dudley, shocking as the sacrifice would be to us, we

should say, like a Roman father, let them hang. Indeed, undying fame

hereafter would proclaim that in their deaths they had done their

country some service.

VACANT PEWS AND WORRIED PULPITS.

The homes, so called, of our larger cities are in a majority of cases

without comfort, and in nearly all instances without refinement. The

class upon which we once so prided ourselves, made up of families

possessed of a competence, and enabled through a reasonable income

from steady work to have about their homes some comfort and a few

luxuries, is rapidly disappearing. We have left us two classes only,

made up of the very rich and the poor. The merchant, the mechanic, and

even the common laborer, who once could boast of a humble home of his

own, and enough steady employment to make that home comfortable, is

rarely met with. We believe indeed that he exists only in the

imagination of Senator Edmunds. Well-authenticated statistics inform

us that we have a larger percentage of tenantry to our population than

any people on the face of the earth. This not only includes our great

commercial, mining, and manufacturing centres, but the rural regions

as well. We learn that, throughout the agricultural regions, while the

farms lessen in number, the farmers increase.

We know what this means. We recognize at a glance that the growth of

our country in national wealth, which is claimed to be amazing, is not

a healthy growth. For that is not healthy which gives prosperity to a

few and poverty to the masses.

This has been so long and so generally recognized that it has come to

be commonplace, and people weary of its reiteration. We indulge in

this weariness for the purpose of calling attention to a consequence

that is not so familiar.

It is remarked by observant lookers-on from abroad that our laboring

classes are thoroughly ignorant of art, and take no pleasure in

contemplating works of art, as do the like classes in the towns of

Europe. The reason given for this is that we have no specimens in our

highways, and few in galleries. The latter are closed against the

laboring classes on the only day a laborer can have to visit them, and

that is Sunday.

The wrong done our people by this can scarcely be overestimated. A

taste for art can generally be cultivated. It is quite impossible to

educate a people in science and literature, for this depends on

intellectual faculties that our heavenly Father, from a wise purpose

to us unknown, has been very sparing in distributing. But almost every

man is capable of being taught to admire, if not love, the beautiful

in art. What an element in the way of social improvement or progress

this cultivated taste is we all recognize, and what happens to a race

that neglects it we all know.

Now, it is possible for a people to possess the highest appreciation

of, and admiration for, art and yet be semi-barbarous, for the

Christian element is necessary to bring about real civilization; but

it is quite impossible for a race to be without some cultivation in

the way of art and be civilized at all.

It is not strange, to a thoughtful observer, to note that as a nation

we are on the down-grade. Such an observer from abroad cannot cross

Broadway, for example, without learning that life and limb are in

peril from a community that has more law and less order than any

people the world over. He is prepared to learn then that our galleries

of art--such as exist--are closed against the poor, and he is ready to

receive without wonder the further fact that our churches also are

closed against the poor.

It is this last truth that is somewhat new in the way of being

recognized, although quite old as a matter of fact.

At a convocation of Protestant ministers held at Chickering Hall last

November, on behalf of the Protestant community of New York, the

following was officially stated as to the religious condition of the

city:

"The population of New York City has for years been steadily and

rapidly increasing, while at the same time the number of churches has

been relatively decreasing. In 1840 there was one Protestant church to

every 2,400 people; in 1880, one to 3,000; and in 1887, one to 4,000."

Now, to this startling admission could have been added another, no

less deplorable, and that is that the attendance has decreased more

rapidly than the churches, and, in such as now remain open a seventh

part of the time, there is an exhibit of empty seats quite depressing

to the minister. If we consider the Protestant population only, not

one-tenth are church attendants--and not a tenth of these are true

believers.

The reason for this deplorable condition was much discussed by the

good men making up the clerical convention, and the prevailing opinion

seemed to be, as gathered from the utterances, that this disheartening

result came from the active interference of the Catholic clergy--or

papists, as our friends termed them.

There was much truth in this. These zealous "papists" are certainly

making great inroads upon our population; but, admitting that they

take large numbers from the Protestant churches, there yet remains a

vast population of non-going church people that the so-called papists

have not influenced, nor indeed as yet approached. What then is the

cause of this irreligious condition?

We believe that we can help our clerical friends to a solution of this

religious mystery. It comes from a lack of consideration for the

masses they seek to instruct. There is a want of sympathy for the

poor, that not only shuts the galleries of art from the laboring

classes, but closes the Protestant churches also.

These structures, while scarcely to be classed as works of art,--for

they are carefully divested of all that appeals to good taste,--are

yet luxurious affairs at which the rich and well-born, in purple and

fine linen, are expected to attend. They are more social than

religious affairs, and there is no place for the ragged, even if such

appeared from a public bath, duly cleansed of their offensive dirt. To

make this exclusiveness complete, the churches are filled with pews

that, like boxes at the opera, are the property of subscribers able to

pay for such luxuries. True, certain pews are reserved as free seats

for the poor; but the class sought thus to be accommodated are averse

to being put in their poverty on exhibition, as it were, even for the

luxury of hearing a solemn-toned clergyman whose theological

gymnastics are as much beyond the comprehension of the hearers as they

are beyond that of the reverend orator himself.

To realize our condition in this respect, let our reader imagine, if

he can, our blessed Saviour and his apostles entering bodily, to-day,

one of these edifices built to His worship. Weary and travel-stained,

clad in the coarsest of garments, the procession would scarcely start

along the dim-lit aisle before that austere creation of Nature in one

of her most economical moods, the sexton, would hurry forward to repel

further invasion of that most respectable sanctuary of God. Our

Saviour would be informed that somewhere in the outlying spaces of

poverty-stricken regions there was a mission-house suitable for such

as He.

We must not be understood as intimating, let alone asseverating, aught

against this form of Christianity. It is so much better than none that

we feel kindly toward it. The religious evolution that develops a

respectable sort of religious purity, that builds a marble pulpit and

velvet-cushioned pews, is all well enough if it quiets the conscience

and soothes with trust the death-bed of even a Dives. We regard a

Salvation Army, that makes a burlesque of religion as it goes shouting

with its toot-horns and stringed instruments, as to be tolerated,

because it is better than the Bob Ingersolls. We only seek to inform

the well-meaning teachers of the religion of to-day why it is they

preach to empty pews.

Few of us are aware of what we are doing when we close our galleries

and churches, and open our saloons to the poor. This last, so far, has

proved impossible. But let our hot gospellers, whose creed is based on

"_Be-it-enacted_," visit any one of the poor abodes of the laborers

denied admission to innocent places of amusement on the only holiday

they have for such recreation. Such investigator will descend to a

subterranean excavation dug in the sewer-gas-filtered earth, where the

walls sweat disease and death. These are homes for humanity. Or he

will ascend rotten stairways to crowded rooms, heated to suffocation

by pestilent air poisoned by over-used breath from men, women, and

children, packed in regardless of health, comfort, and decency. These

are the so-called homes of thousands and thousands: and the wonder is,

not that they die, but that they live. We send millions of money with

missionaries to foreign shores: to our own flesh and blood we

send--the police. Loving care and patient help are bestowed on distant

pagans: poor-houses, prisons, and wrath are the fate awarded to our

brothers at home.

A little way from these abodes of misery and crime the saloon is open,

with its gilded iniquity, warm, cheerful, and stimulated with liquid

insanity in bottles and beer-kegs. Do we wonder that the churches are

empty and the saloons crowded?

The advent of our blessed Saviour was heralded by the anthem of the

heavenly hosts, that sang "Glory to God on high, and peace and

good-will to men on earth." The few sad years of our Redeemer's life

among men were passed with the poor, the sinful, and the sorrowing. We

have to-day much glory to God on high, and no good-will to men on

earth.

Your churches decrease in numbers as the population swells, O

brethren, because of your lack of Christian sympathy!

THE TRUTH ABOUT SAMOA.

It would be interesting to know at what precise period in Prince

Bismarck's masterful career he first conceived the scheme of colonial

empire which has grown to be an absorbing passion of his declining

years. Probably it was about the time when he began to proclaim, with

suspicious energy, that nothing was farther from his designs than to

rival the achievements of Great Britain in the field which that nation

had made almost exclusively its own. No modern statesman is better

versed in the arts of diverting public attention from the enterprises

he has resolved to prosecute with his utmost strength and skill.

Events which rapidly followed the exhausting war of 1870 were

calculated to admonish him that Germany's resources were insufficient

to maintain her in the position of supremacy to which he had led her.

The steady increase of emigration to America was one of the

discomposing consequences of his splendid triumph, and the hope of

retaining under German rule the tens of thousands of fighting men who

annually deserted the fatherland may have been a powerful incentive to

colonial development in various attractive parts of the world.

Whatever the original impelling motives were, there is now no doubt

that the plan of extending the German sway indefinitely by

establishing vast settlements in regions yet uncivilized, and making

them tributary to the glory and wealth of the empire he had created,

took possession of the Chancellor's mind, a dozen or more years ago,

with a tenacity which no discouragement or dissuasion has ever

weakened. It was about that date that the unusual activity of German

ships of war in the Oriental seas excited the watchfulness of European

governments and provoked inquiries which led to singular disclosures.

The methods of diplomatic investigation in the far East are in some

respects different from those which prevail nearer home--possibly

owing to a lack of facility in employing them where official scrutiny

is close and constant; and it might be injudicious to examine too

minutely the processes by which it became known that the guardian of

Germany's destinies was engaged in maturing a plot of territorial

aggrandizement the like of which has been devised by no other European

statesmen in recent days, and which has been paralleled only by the

vivid imagination of the first Napoleon. It was soon learned that of

the numerous islands which constitute what is known as Polynesia, not

one of value had escaped visitation by carefully selected explorers,

whose errand it was to report upon the feasibility of eventually

making the German flag supreme in the Southern Pacific, and delivering

over enormous tracts of land to the domination of the German race.

A glance at a map of the world will show how immense the possibilities

of conquest in the East are to one who has fixed his resolve upon

unscrupulous annexation or absorption. The natives of these regions

are incapable of resistance, and nothing but the combined opposition

of European naval powers could ever stand in the way of the gigantic

enterprise. Such opposition Germany has--or believes she has--little

cause to fear. Some of the leading nations are bound to support her

interests by alliances which they dare not break. France can interpose

no obstacle that would be regarded with anxiety. Russia has no

immediate concern in the Asian archipelagos, and any claim put forward

by the United States would be rejected with derision. Great Britain

alone remains, and against her interference the German rulers are

confident that they have a sure safeguard in the traditional

apprehension of Russian encroachments in the north and west of Asia.

While England is straining her eyes to scan the slightest movement of

the Czar toward China and Korea, and speculating incessantly upon the

outcome of supposed intrigues which probably have no substantial

existence, Germany considers herself secure from molestation in other

quarters. It is quite as likely, however, that the rooted English

conviction of German incapacity to conduct colonial operations may

more reasonably account for the indifference to Bismarck's

proceedings. From some cause, not yet clearly divulged, the Germans

have certainly been permitted to pursue their audacious course with

singular freedom from remonstrance. It cannot be surmised that the

British authorities are ignorant of what is in progress. Even if they

were unprovided with direct sources of information, there is enough in

the avowed and unconcealed demonstrations of the past ten years to

awaken jealousy. Without anything approaching a sound commercial basis

for the undertaking, the far-seeing Chancellor has established a huge

national steamship line, exceeding in length of route the extremest

reach of the most important British maritime companies. From the

Baltic ports this line runs southward, one arm extending through the

Mediterranean and the Red Sea, and skirting the continent of Asia

until it comes to an end in Korean waters, while the other embraces

almost the entire coast of Africa, and, starting eastward, touches

Australia, penetrates the great Malay group, and finds a convenient

terminus in the Samoa Islands, concerning which so much futile

discussion has been wasted in the last few months. All along the

aforesaid African route the shores are dotted with German settlements,

often planted in direct defiance of England's claim to priority, and

maintained in spite of every form of protest. The British flag has

been affronted under circumstances far more flagrant than the world

suspects, yet the outrage has been passed over with careful avoidance

of public scandal. Unless it is believed by the English government

that Bismarck's mighty conception is destined to an ignominious

collapse,--like an ill-balanced arch whose span is too ponderous for

self-support,--it is difficult to conjecture the reasons for this

prolonged submission to an insolent and unprecedented dictation.

But no apprehension of collapse disturbs the German statesman's

undaunted soul. In his cabinet lie the maps of the reconstructed

world, upon which the future dominions of his country equal in

magnitude, if they do not surpass, those of the most extensive

territorial powers. The course of operations with respect to each

accession is plainly marked out, and to the fulfilment of the

stupendous whole he and those who bear his name are unalterably

pledged. It may be generations, even in his ambitious view, before the

great result is attained, but no doubt of the final consummation is

allowed to take shape among those who know the bent of the iron

Chancellor's will. Meanwhile, effective measures are employed to try

the temper and test the enduring faculties of the native races to be

subdued. Cruelty and barbarity mark the German range of advancement,

wherever their footsteps are imprinted. In Africa and in most parts of

Asia their name is held in terror and abhorrence. They are uniformly

represented by men of Bismarck's own stamp, who shrink from nothing

that can accelerate the completion of their plans. The episode of

Samoa affords a fair example of their intentions and their methods of

execution. What is Samoa? Simply a strategic point of departure--a

station that must be owned and held as a rallying-spot, a depot, and

an arsenal. Having been once selected, it will never be surrendered,

except under a pressure greater than the civilized world is willing or

able, in Bismarck's belief, to concentrate upon such an object. The

notion that the Washington government can exert the minutest influence

is too groundless to be entertained by any person who has studied the

situation. It is true that most of the European powers courteously

abstain from offering opinions as to the result of American

intervention, but the Chinese, who are aware of no reasons for

reserve, openly laugh at it. The Japanese, more keenly alive to

ultimate consequences, do not laugh, but are grievously concerned at

the growing feebleness and irresolution of the only country that has

ever permitted considerations of humanity to enter into its foreign

policy. Russia--strangely or not, as the observer may choose to

decide--is the sole great power that appears to cherish expectations

of a future growth of American influence in the Eastern Hemisphere.

German agents, acting under well-defined and easily comprehended

instructions, omit no opportunity to belittle and degrade the

reputation of the United States in all the districts which are

included in the scope of Bismarck's magnificent projects.

But the reputation of this Republic, for good or evil, is not the

question now under consideration. What we desire to point out is the

uselessness of attempting to controvert, by ordinary diplomatic means,

a scheme of wholesale aggrandizement to which the most resolute,

unshrinking, and pitiless mind of this age devotes all its energy and

all the instruments of material force now subject to its control. For

a considerable time a certain amount of reticence will be deemed

necessary, and the completest ignorance of the movement will be

professed, especially by those who have been most actively concerned

in the preparations. But the facts are known to so many who care

nothing for the realization of Bismarck's hopes that the secret cannot

long remain a close one. It is hardly to be supposed, however, that

the fullest possible revelation, much as it might irritate him, would

substantially modify his arrangements. It would perhaps retard them,

and doubtless cause him to noisily disavow the whole proceeding; but

the machinery would continue to move as surely and efficiently as ever

toward the required end. This being understood, and thoughtfully

considered as a firm and fixed purpose of the German rulers, to occupy

as much of the coming century as is necessary for its execution, a

sufficiently new light will be thrown upon the Samoan complication to

show that instead of being a petty incident of international debate,

it is in truth the opening scene of a great and portentous historical

drama. To imagine that the hand which has contrived this colossal

enterprise will falter at the first sound of adverse criticism is to

totally misapprehend the character of its owner and to blindly

disregard the lessons he has been teaching for a score of years.

THE INFANT MIND.

Herbert Spencer holds that while the physical body is being developed,

after birth, until puberty, the real and only education is that which

comes from common experience through the senses. The mind, like the

limbs, is reaching eagerly out to take in the wonders of the new

existence, and the only parental care is that which protects the

infant being from the abuse found in over-exertion. Now the greatest

harm that can happen to the innocent creature is the attempt to hasten

information through mental stimulants. If left to itself, the mind,

like the body, will have a healthy growth. If, however, it is

interfered with through any forcing process, there will be an abnormal

growth of some faculties at the expense of others, and disease or

deformity will result.

We note, with pleasure, how children race and play like kids or colts

the day through, and we fail to perceive that the mind keeps pace with

this active life. It is not only alive to its new existence, but

enjoys what it finds in its open-air life. To interfere with this

through the false system of training we are pleased to call education,

is injurious, and often fatal.

All England--at least all the thinking part of the territory under

government of Her Gracious Majesty--is in a high state of alarm over

the stimulants administered through school examinations and the prizes

given in consequence. Authors, scientists, and statesmen have joined

in protesting against this abuse as a process that sickens the body

and weakens the mind. It is a practice that is filling the hospitals,

poor-houses, and asylums for the insane. We call this _cramming_. It

is a forced, hot-house system, productive of more evils than good. Man

is the only animal that loses his young to an extent that makes life

exceptional. A majority of infants die before reaching the age of five

years. If we consider the matter carefully, we find that while the

young of the brutes seldom have more than one enemy to contend with,

an infant has three--the mother who pets it, the father who neglects

it, and the pedagogue who makes an idiot of it. Death indorses them

all. How common it is to meet a slender, thin-limbed girl with sombre

cheeks and lustreless eyes wending her way to school fairly loaded

with books. She is being robbed of home, innocence, and health to

satisfy the Moloch of education.

A most painful exhibit of--well, we will not say cruelty,

but--ignorance or indifference, our dramatic critic calls attention to

in the case of "Little Lord Fauntleroy." A child of tender years holds

an audience for nearly three hours night after night, nearly all the

time upon the stage, by the most extraordinary effort of memory and an

instinctive turn for acting. This is a torture that discounts a Roman

amphitheatre or the bull-fights of Spain. What is the Society for the

Prevention of Cruelty to Children about, that such an abuse should not

only continue, but spread?--for the success of the piece is such that

we shall have a hundred companies barn-storming over the land and

torturing the brains of as many unhappy children. It is on this

account that we rejoice with exceeding great joy over the death and

final burying of Uncle Tom. This impossible old negro lived on little

Eva, and that angelic child has at last been consigned to many asylums

for idiots.

From this wanton cruelty it is a comfort to turn to the innocent and

natural budding of the infant mind, and several specimens have floated

in on us from various sources. Here is one from an indignant germ of a

citizen:

"_Mr. Editor_

"DEER SIR--Last nite we had a hie old time at our house next

dore. Mr. ----, a alderman cam home and broke things and beet

his wife--the nabors called the police, and they come and

would not take him in the patrul waggon because he was a

alderman, is that rite

"Yours to command

"ROBERT"

When our little friend Robert grows to man's estate he will know

better the privileges and immunities granted the alderman. That

privilege found in his right to beat his wife is not so well

recognized and understood as his right to beat the public. When a

fellow pays from five to ten thousand dollars for the position of

city-father, it is expected that he will find a process through which

to reimburse the private coffers of the municipal corporation called

an alderman's pocket. There is nothing mean about the citizens of a

great commercial centre. All that is asked is that the father

aforesaid shall not be caught at it. As for the little luxury of

getting drunk and beating his wife, that comes under the head of

freedom to the private citizen and a constitutional opposition to

sumptuary laws.

From this sunny side of aldermanic life we turn to some verse sent to

us by a loving grandpa from the pen of Miss Elsie Rae. Our first and

only regret at not being an illustrated magazine is that we cannot

reproduce the drawings that accompanied the poem:

THE BROOK.

As I sat by the brook yesterday,

I heard a voice by me say,

"What are you doing here,

My sweet little dear?

Look around and see your mother,

Also your sweet little brother:

I brought him here because the air is so soft;

It is so hot up in the loft."

The child turned her head

And very softly said,

"Well, dear little brother,

I am glad you brought him, mother."

"Yes, dear, so am I;

But it is hard to carry him from so high."

_THE PASSING SHOW._

The month has been made notable by a high moral monument in the

Actors' Club, headed by Augustin Daly. We said moral; we mean

theological, for that was the true aspect of the commotion. It seems

that some friend of Robert Ingersoll proposed the name of that noted

pagan for membership to the club that Edwin Booth has so handsomely

housed. This came to the ears of the pious Daly, and immediately his

theological soul animated his theatrical body to an indignant

opposition. Daly polled the pious body of actors. "What!" he said,

"shall we recognize and indorse this dreadful infidel, this

unbelieving son of Illinois--have him among us as an associate, to

distil his poison of unbelief in our midst? Perish the thought! Let us

rally round our altars and our fires [of the Actors' Club], and die,

if necessary, as martyrs."

The grotesque part of this lies in the fact that while the pulpit

denounces the stage, the stage on the same ground assaults Bob

Ingersoll. It reminds one of a comic scene perpetrated in Sheridan's

"Rivals," where the master bangs the man, and the man, in turn, kicks

the many-buttoned page.

Now, the Actors' Club is the same as any other social organization,

and has the comforts and pleasures found in the intercourse of its

members, its main purpose. In London and Washington, the only two

places on earth where clubs flourish in perfect health, another and

more important object is to get the good things of life at cost. These

are clubs of a social sort. There are others that have political

purposes for an end, but these combine such objects with the more

important features of the mere social organizations. To secure the

latter, wines, cigars, and viands at cost prices are what John Bull

aims at, and persists in carrying out to the letter. Without this your

club is a delusion and a snare.

Now, if in the formation of these social centres it is necessary to

have a view to a man's respectability as well as his entertaining

qualities, the first requisite of an applicant is to be a gentleman. A

whole coat, a clean shirt, and gentlemanly views, if any, are

necessary. What the member's views may be on any abstract proposition

is of no import whatever. He may consider polygamy allowable; he may

even believe in that governmental extortion miscalled "protection," or

in mind-reading, and yet be acceptable as an associate. The most

fascinating club-man we ever knew was a little gone on _morus

multicaulus_. Another had a way of getting up the Nile, and it was

almost impossible for his friends to get him down again. When, in his

talk, he sailed up that classic river, his hearers, like the Arabs on

its banks, "stole silently away."

We have never heard that our modern pagan was anything but

respectable, and we are told that socially--if he can be got away from

Moses--he is rather entertaining. If the rule applied to Robert the

heathen were the measure used by clubs generally, there would not be

one left with a quorum in the country.

Nor will it do to apply to this noted person the rule recognized by

Mr. Booth's orphan asylum, that the heathen is not connected with the

stage. He has won fame and fortune from behind the footlights. We

never enjoyed a comedy so much as that given us by the heathen in his

lecture on "The Mistakes of Moses." We laughed an hour "by Shrewsbury

clock," not so much at what the heathen said, as at seeing a corpulent

gentleman in a dress suit prancing about the stage assailing Moses.

Now Moses has been dead some years. He has no lineal descendants that

we know of, unless Moses and Sons, dealers in antique raiment, can be

so considered; and of the two thousand people packed in that theatre

there probably were not six that had ever opened the Old Testament or

that cared a straw for the dead lawgiver. And yet the heathen seemed

animated by a personal feeling, as if Moses had, like Daly, on some

occasion blackballed him.

He tore Moses all to pieces; he attacked his knowledge of astronomy;

he doubted his correct knowledge of ark-building. He said Moses was

defective as to ventilation. The fact is, that when this corpulent,

unbelieving son of man got through there was not much left of the

eminent Hebrew. But it was a stage performance all the same, and put

Robert at the head of low comedians. Hence he is qualified for an

association with brother-actors.

No better instance of patient good-nature, backed by a woful lack of

culture, can be had than in the performances given at two New York

theatres by a couple of society women--we beg pardon: we should say

"ladies." Mrs. Potter kills Cleopatra in the first act of "Antony and

Cleopatra," by Shakespeare, Bacon, or somebody else; and Mrs. Langtry

does to Lady Macbeth what Don Cæsar de Bazan found so objectionable in

hanging. "Hanging," cried the immortal Bohemian of aristocratic

birth, "is horrible. It not only kills a man, it makes him

ridiculous." Mrs. Langtry's _Lady Macbeth_ should be relegated to

things which amuse. The audiences leave these burlesques with the

query put in the mouth of an English sailor at an exhibition of

pantomime and fireworks, who, being blown over the adjacent property,

got up and asked, "What'll the cussed fool do next?"

These are the days when there is a dearth of real dramatic art; when a

tarnished reputation, superb costumes--or lack of costume--are

considered indispensable adjuncts to the star actress; when real

water, miniature conflagrations that choke the audience with smoke, or

startling electrical novelties, are relied upon as the chief

attractions of a new play; when the stage panders to the lowest

tastes; when the spectacular supplants art. The question no longer is,

"What is the play? What are the lessons it teaches, the ideal thoughts

it presents to us?"--but rather, "Who is the actress? What is the

latest scandal concerning her? How far does she outstrip her rivals in

exhibitions of nudity?" Hence we see such alterations of plan on the

part of theatrical managers as the withdrawal of that witty play, "The

Yeomen of the Guard," to make room at the Casino for the "leg-show" of

"Nadjy."

Of course some of the blame for this state of things must rest on the

small and noisy portion of the public who manage to control access to

the ears of proprietors and playwrights, such as, in the instance

mentioned, the dudes and dudelets of the "Casino crowd," who had grown

weary of a play whose sparkling humor was above their comprehension. A

greater measure of blame rests upon the professional critics, who,

with a few very honorable exceptions, gauge praise or blame according

to the length of the paid advertisements in their respective journals,

or to the favors extended to them at the box-office. Not a score of

years ago an actor of very moderate attainments actually bought his

way into prominence by giving elaborate dinners to his critics, and

keeping open house, with free-lunch counter and bar attachments, for

the benefit of every reporter whom he could form acquaintance with.

Such methods in a short time placed him on a pedestal of notoriety,

and he no doubt hoped to stay there; but a new sensation came, and his

star declined. This is a fair statement of the condition of theatrical

art in America. We have lost the freshness of originality, and we have

not yet attained to the depth of culture and breadth of criticism of

the literary centres of England and the Continent. We are very much

inclined to pay homage to a name, no matter by what means such a name

has been acquired.

Mrs. Langtry's performance of _Lady Macbeth_ is an instance of this

tendency to hero-worship. It is said in her favor that her

characterization of the part shows deep study and hard work. But these

are the very things that, were she possessed of real dramatic genius,

would never be allowed to show. The height of art is in imitating,

refining, and subliming nature. But if you allow all the secret wheels

and springs to appear, it becomes no art at all. Mrs. Langtry's

effort is a painstaking one, but the effort is too apparent. She

attains no high ideal. When she appeared as _Lady Macbeth_ at the

Fifth Avenue Theatre, after weeks of preparation and puffery, it was

expected that she would give us something new, but the result has been

only her usual mediocrity.

The character is a combination of a great degree of unscrupulous

ambition and a share of wifely devotion. Lady Macbeth's crime is

partly due to a desire for her husband's advancement; but the chief

motive clearly is, that through his advancement she may attain power.

It is this determination to stop at nothing which may forward her

ambitious schemes that makes the character one of the most terrible of

Shakspere's creations. Charlotte Cushman probably came nearer to the

great poet's ideal than any actress before or since. Ellen Terry makes

the part ridiculous; Mrs. Langtry makes it commonplace. But there is

one scene for which she deserves great credit--the sleep-walk, where

she emerges from her room in a night-dress that looks like a shroud,

her hair entirely concealed by a nightcap that is bound around her

chin, her face pallid and expressionless. Then she begins her

soliloquy, no longer Mrs. Langtry, no longer _Lady Macbeth_, but a

remorseful somnambulist, her words all delivered in the same dull

monotone, without emphasis or expression, like the voice of a soulless

corpse. It makes one shiver to hear her. But that is the only

redeeming feature of her characterization.

The support is by no means good, but the scenery and costumes are well

brought out and historically accurate. Mr. Charles Coghlan is a fair

reader of his lines, but falls far short of the ideal _Macbeth_. In

fact, by far the best acting is that of Mr. Joseph Wheelock as

_Macduff_. He plays the character with all the vim and enthusiasm that

it demands, and he deservedly receives the largest share of applause

from the audience.

While Mrs. Langtry has been reaching out her long, voluptuous arms in

an utterly futile attempt to touch the hem of _Lady Macbeth's_

garment, Mrs. Potter, arrayed like a queen of burlesque, and behaving

like a tipsy grisette at a mask-ball, has been insulting the

traditions of Egypt's queen. The performance of "Antony and Cleopatra"

at Palmer's Theatre was, indeed, little better than a farce. It would

be hard to say which was worse, Mrs. Potter's _Cleopatra_ or Mr. Kyrle

Bellew's _Antony_. As Brutus was the noblest, so it may be said that

Mr. Bellew's _Antony_ is the most insignificant, Roman of them all. It

would be a waste of time and space to attempt a serious criticism of

either of the two impersonations. In a mere spectacular sense the

production was pleasing to the eye; but, historically, the scenery and

accessories were absurdly inaccurate. To import the archaic

architecture of ancient Thebes in Upper Egypt into a city so purely

Greek in its buildings, population, language, and customs as

Alexandria was from its very foundation, is about as ignorant a

blunder as it is possible for a scenic artist to make. And what

business Hindoo nautch-girls had in the Alexandria of Cleopatra is a

conundrum which only a New York stage-manager can answer. We give it

up. Mrs. Potter, too, seems to be unaware that Cleopatra was Greek,

not Egyptian; otherwise she would hardly mispronounce the initial

consonantal sound of the name of her Greek attendant, _Charmian_, as

she invariably does mispronounce it. Possibly her attention is so

deeply absorbed by the fascinations of Worth's millinery that she has

no time to spare for such trivial matters as elocution and orthoepy.

Outside of Mrs. Langtry's and Mrs. Potter's characterizations there

has been little of novelty. Nat Goodwin has dropped farce and

buffoonery, and essays a higher style of comedy, appearing as

_Gringoire_ in "A Royal Revenge," an adaptation of Theodore de

Banville's play. The character has recently been made familiar by

Coquelin. Mr. Goodwin becomes interesting as the starving poet, and

his personation gives promise of better things. The Grand Opera House

was filled with Nobles of the Mystic Shrine to welcome Mr. Goodwin's

reappearance. At the Fifth Avenue Theatre, in March, he will produce a

new three-act comedy called "A Gold Mine," by Brander Matthews and

George H. Jessop. The latter author, in collaboration with Horace

Townsend, has produced for W. J. Scanlan a new Irish play entitled

"Myles Aroon," brought out at the Fourteenth Street Theatre. Lady

Glover's head-gardener, _Myles Aroon_, is accused of stealing his

mistress' bracelet. He falls in love with her daughter, proves his

innocence, and exposes the thief, who happens to be his rival. This

threadbare plot is treated with Scanlan's inimitable Irish humor, and

the play receives the popular appreciation it deserves. Of a similar

character is the play "Running Wild," which was brought out at the

Star Theatre, and offers abundant opportunity to Mr. John Wild's

versatile comic talents.

Farquhar's comedy, "The Inconstant," recently played at Daly's

Theatre, is an excellent revival of a good old English comedy. Ada

Rehan was at her best as _Oriana_. At Daly's one is always sure of

finding good plays, well acted. The company is a very even one,

consisting not of one or two stars and all the rest sticks, but of

fair actors well used to each other and to the plays they bring out.

"The Runaway Wife," produced at Niblo's, is a play that is not wanting

in dramatic merit, but it is somewhat spasmodic and jerky. Its

authors, McKee Rankin and Fred G. Maeder, have aimed at creating a

series of dramatic climaxes rather than a smoothly-running play.

Daniel Bandmann has made a success as the _Comte de Maurienne_ in

"Austerlitz," a revival of Tom Taylor's drama, "Dead or Alive." Marie

Wainwright presented us with a very girlish _Rosalind_ at the Star

Theatre, Mr. Louis James playing _Orlando_ very effectively. "Said

Pacha," a three-act comic opera, composed by Richard Stahl of San

Francisco, has met with success in the few cities where it has yet

been played. The music at times is suggestive of Strauss and

Offenbach. Herr August Junkermann, who has been delighting our German

fellow-citizens at the Amberg Theatre, proved himself a character

actor of quite a superior order, and has earned a reputation which

will insure him crowded houses whenever he appears in New York.

The best all-round performance given at any theatre this season is

Pinero's comedy of "Sweet Lavender" at the Lyceum. The play is as

sweet and pure as a bunch of the fragrant old-fashioned flowers whose

name it bears. The dialogue sparkles with wit and repartee of the most

delightful sort, and the acting is as charming as the piece itself.

Miss Georgie Cayvan may have acted more important characters, but

never one in which she offered a more agreeable picture. There is a

ring of sweet womanliness through her performance, which, like the

delicate ferns and mosses that hide a violet, makes the fragrant

blossom more precious. Miss Louise Dillon is so sweet that she is a

little cloying. She clings about Mr. Henry Miller, who enacts her

lover, in a limp and boneless fashion that is somewhat irritating to

one who remembers that a spine and a few muscles go to make up the

human anatomy, as well as a heart. Mrs. Whiffen's performance is most

agreeable, being all the more admirable from the fact that in the

earlier scenes she is, by the exigencies of the piece, somewhat acid

and acrid. Now everybody knows that for Mrs. Whiffen to be either one

or the other of these things must be clever acting. Mrs. Walcot is far

less satisfactory; she does not dress to the level of her character,

and she is artificial, mincing, and sour. Lemoyne's work is simply

beyond praise. But little finer acting has ever been seen than his

portrayal of _Richard Phenyl_. Very good, too, is Mr. Kelcey's

performance of a breezy young American; and of almost equal merit is

the rendering of the manly young lover by Mr. Miller. A thoroughly

disappointing performance is that of Mr. Walcot. His get-up of a

prosperous, jovial English banker is admirable. But all cause for

admiration began and ended there; his acting never for one moment

reached his make-up. When the scene called for feeling, he had

none--he was merely feeble and flaccid; in short, Mr. and Mrs. Walcot

were the only blots upon an otherwise perfect performance.

When the long and prosperous run of "Little Lord Fauntleroy" is

considered, the conclusion is inevitable that the theatre-going public

of this city will bear anything. The three scenes that go to make up

this fatiguing representation are utterly void of a single principle

of dramatic construction, and are entirely without dramatic incident,

if we except the appearance upon the scene of a very "scarlet woman."

And that is not exactly the sort of dramatic element which is expected

or desired. The feat of memory which the child Elsie Leslie performs

is remarkable. But it is a very painful exhibition, for it will

inevitably destroy the poor little creature, mentally and physically.

To point out all the manifold inconsistencies and absurdities of this

nondescript entertainment would take up too much space, and bestow

upon it much more advertising than it is worth. To instance a few of

them: An American, a middle-aged man, a prosperous grocer, himself

brings to the house of a customer a basket of groceries. He is

ushered into the sitting-room together with a bootblack, who also

calls at the same time; they are received as guests and friends, and

are entertained by the infant hero, aged seven years! Later, this same

grocer and the bootblack, both being in correspondence with the infant

hero, learn that he is threatened with the loss of his title,

whereupon they each offer him a partnership in their business.

Ultimately, these two go together to England, where they are received

as guests by the haughty Earl who is the grandfather of the infant

hero. And these things are offered to the public in a perfectly

serious manner without any attempt at or any idea of humor. The

mounting of the piece--to call it so, for want of a more fitting

title--is as tawdry and shallow as the piece itself. The library at

Dorincourt Castle is ornamented by cheap tin toys, fastened upon

plaques and hung on the walls. These things are supposed to be the

armor and trappings of the knights of old who were the ancestry of

this great house. This library, which opens out onto a sort of terrace

that overlooks a body of water of about the dimensions of Lake

Michigan, is lighted by numbers of cheap gas-jets--a manner of

illumination unknown in any English country-house, far less an old

feudal castle. A number of good actors and actresses are brought on

the stage from time to time, but they have nothing whatever to do,

consequently they do nothing. They whirl and maunder through three

hours of false sentiment and artificial virtue, ringing the changes on

the statement that they are "bland, passionate, and deeply religious."

They also paint in water-colors, and "of such is the kingdom of

heaven." Silly women sit whimpering at it, servile men sympathize with

them, newspapers earn their "ads" by their false and fulsome praise,

and the box-office flourishes.

The season of opera at the Metropolitan Opera House has been one of

the most successful ever known. A concerted attack has been made on

German opera by those who prefer the ballet and the spectacular to the

pleasures of music. It was suggested that Italian opera be

substituted, and it was hinted that there was a company in Rome open

to an engagement. The Wagnerites grew furious, and protested. A

comparison of the box-office receipts in former seasons was

instituted, and the preponderance of popular favor was shown to be

always in favor of German opera, and especially of Wagner. That

settled it for a time, but a minor dispute arose. During the

production of Wagner's masterpieces, like "Rheingold" and "Die

Meistersinger," in the scenes which are supposed to take place at

night or in the dark, the stage-manager lowered the lights in the

house so that the glare should not mar the appropriateness of the

scene. This did not at all suit the young ladies who know nothing

about music, but simply come to talk about Mrs. Millionaire's ball or

to see each other's latest costumes. Their papas among the

stockholders were coaxed into ordering the lights to be turned on.

Again the Wagnerites protested, and after three nights the management

returned to the old way, much to the satisfaction of real lovers of

opera.

The production of Halévy's opera "La Juive" for the first time this

season was coincident with the reappearance of Frau Lilli Lehmann, who

acted and sang the part of _Rachel_ with vigor and precision. Herr

Alvary, who consented to take the part of _Prince Leopold_, with Herr

Perotti as _Eleazar_, and the excellent support of the other singers,

made the production the best that has ever been given in New York, and

one long to be remembered. Frau Schroeder-Hanfstaengl has returned

after an absence of four years, making her reappearance in the modest

part of _Bertha_ in "Le Prophète."

Manager Frohman promises us a number of new American plays for next

season, which, he says, will be as good as those now produced abroad.

Mr. Louis Aldrich, by the way, has been restrained from using the name

or the funds of the Actors' Order of Friendship in furtherance of his

ungenerous attempt to exclude foreign actors. A sad scene was that of

the sale of the late Lester Wallack's stage costumes. Scarcely a dozen

of the actor's old friends were present, and the various garments were

sold at ridiculously cheap prices, the greater part to dealers in old

clothes! _Sic transit gloria mundi._

_REVIEWS._

_The American Commonwealth_, by James Bryce (Macmillan & Co.).--The

thoughtful citizen of the United States who opens this book from any

other motive than mere curiosity will be apt to close it again greatly

disappointed. So far as information is concerned, one might as well

read a debate of the Senate. If it is from curiosity as to what an

Englishman of Professor Bryce's ability and culture may think and say

of us that the work is read, then the work will be found of interest.

It is so rare for one of Britain's citizens, cultured or uncultured,

to care for us, that the novelty alone commands attention. It was

surly old Sam Johnson who said to a feminine owner of a parrot, in

reply to her query as to whether the loquacious bird did not talk

well, "Madam, the wonder is, not that it talks well, but that it talks

at all." This great American nation is an object of utter indifference

to the people of Europe; and among the so-called upper classes we are

under contempt, when noticed, from the rising of the sun to the

setting thereof.

Professor Bryce writes of us in a flattering way, but without

information. The maze of contradiction that besets him on all sides

seems not to have even embarrassed, let alone discouraged, him. Like a

locomotive threading its way along a network of rails into a depot, he

has his own track and runs smoothly along, as if there were but one,

and quite regardless of the many others crossing and recrossing at

every rod of progress. Fixing one eye on the central government at

Washington and the other on the State governments, he treats us as a

people from these two points, and would doubtless be amazed to learn

that these political structures not only do not make our government,

but are so widely separated from our associations and interests that

they might be annihilated to-day without people being aware of their

loss, save from the relief of taxation found in their destruction.

One can comprehend the consternation of foreigners at this bold

assertion, when we recognize the fact that its avowal will bring forth

not only denial, but an expression of disgust from about sixty-five

millions of citizens born under and naturalized to this republic of

ours. Yet it is truth; and to comprehend it we must remember that a

constitution is an agreement or compact, entered into directly or

indirectly by the citizens governed, whereby all legislation,

executive control, and judicial decisions are to be under the control

of, and bound and limited by, certain rules of a general nature

clearly stated and set forth in said instrument. Now as the trouble

attending constitutional law, as that of every other sort, is not in

the law itself, but in its application, the constitution, to be at all

available, has to be as simple, general, and limited as possible. The

most perfect and practical is a mere declaration of principles that

leaves all legislation to the wants, habits, and intelligence of the

people. As statutory law is merely public opinion defined and

promulgated by a legislature, it follows that the mere declaration of

rights found in a charter is continually infringed upon by what may be

called the unwritten constitution that grows imperceptibly about us,

and is in the end the controlling constitution. Let us give a familiar

illustration. There is nothing, for example, in our Constitution that

prohibits the people from re-electing a President as often as the

people see right to indulge in that process. Yet when ex-President

Grant saw fit to demand a third term, he was treated as if he were

violating the sacred charter given us by the fathers.

We believe in our Constitution--and go on violating its plainest

provisions with utter indifference. We resemble that Southern

gentleman who had the Lord's Prayer printed on the head-board of his

bed, and who every night and morning rapped on it with his cane to

call attention to the ceremony, and said solemnly, "O Lord, them's my

sentiments."

We are a nation of phrase-eaters. As we have said before, all the

fruit of the tree of knowledge has been canned--duly labelled and

stowed away for winter use. There is no people on the face of the

earth so given to a reliance on an abiding faith in dogmas. Our safety

on earth and our salvation hereafter rest on a belief in dogmas. As a

man may be guilty of every crime known to the criminal code and yet

save his election through an avowal of belief in certain articles of

faith, so we may consider ourselves safe if we abide by certain

declarations of political principles. The theological and political

avowals of faith may be violated with impunity in practice, yet there

is a saving grace in words we fail to appreciate.

The origin of this strange condition is not difficult to find. Our

continent was settled from Europe by two classes. One of these, the

Puritans, fled from England to escape religious persecution. This

persecution consisted in forbidding the theological rebels from

openly expressing in prayer, hymn, or pulpit certain dogmas. They

braved the perils of the seas and the privations of a howling

wilderness that they might open their pious mouths and expand their

pious lungs in a vociferous announcement of what they believed of

abstract theology. The other class was made up of pirates who sought

our continent, mainly south, in search of gold-mines and mythical

riches in the hands of barbarians. And so between the two we became a

race of phrase-eaters. As the theological dogma was considered good

for the soul, a like political dogma was, and is, enough for the body

politic. And how this is acted on we learn from the beginning. The

Puritans, whose peculiar civilization dominated our nation, fled from

persecution, not to establish toleration--for they went to hanging

Quakers and Dissenters as soon as they landed in New England. Under

this sort of government the lawless spirit of the pirates had full

sway, and to-day, if we have a national characteristic, it is that we

have more law and less order than any people on earth.

This condition makes us capable of the most extraordinary

contradictions. We have, for example, a so-called republic at

Washington that is practically a despotism. It is not the despotism of

one man or of an oligarchy of men. It is a singularly contrived

despotism of office--a bureaucracy that is not only of an

irresponsible routine without brains, but enforced by fines,

penalties, and heavy taxation. It is so removed from popular control

that self-government terminates at the boundary-line of the District

of Columbia. The people living under the very shadow of the Capitol

are deprived of even the form of government; but practically they are

in no worse condition than the citizens of the States. The so-called

republic is a heavy, dull, cast-iron, unimpressive concern, slowly

moved by public opinion, but utterly insensible to popular political

control. We have a President elected every four years. After he is

inaugurated he cannot be disturbed for four years except by

office-seekers or assassination. We have a Senate representing States,

where Delaware or Rhode Island has as much power as New York or

Pennsylvania, and its members are returned every six years. The House

of Representatives is the one popular body, but its members, returned

every two years, are no match for the Senate and Executive, that hold

the political patronage which makes and unmakes members of the House.

This, in brief, is our condition politically. There is another

significant feature that escapes both native and foreign attention. It

is the theory that underlies the foundation of all, and teaches that

the sovereignty from which there is no appeal rests in the people.

This is a very loose, uncertain, and really helpless affair. The old

adage tells us that what is every man's affair is no man's business.

We have so multiplied elections that they are almost continuous. This

forms party organization, to which the business is intrusted, and

again creates a class of professional politicians whose one business

in life is politics. It is human nature that they should seek to make

their vocation profitable. Here is where money enters; and we have

seen the government pass from a mere political structure to a

commercial machine dominated by money. The taxes for the support of

the government have become enormous, but they make but a trifle to the

indirect extortion, based on a pretence of encouraging home

industries, which selects such certain unprofitable investments, and

taxes the entire population for not only their support but their

enrichment. The amount thus collected for the benefit of the few is

enormous. It would support the standing armies of all Europe.

One searches in vain through the Constitution to find in letter or

spirit any authority for such abuse.

This absurd system of government might work in a small, compact

community where all the citizens were known to each other, their

offices few, and their interests identical. But with sixty-odd

millions scattered over a continent that reaches from the Atlantic to

the Pacific, and from the Lakes to the Gulf, and with these millions

isolated from each other in agricultural pursuits, the system is

impossible of practical operation.

This is the philosophy of American politics that Professor Bryce fails

to grasp. He devotes his first volume to a consideration of the

political structure as given us by its framers, as if such were in

power and daily practice. He cannot see that it has gone out of

existence as a constitutional government. We have in its stead a

government of corporations, with the political machine as an annex and

aid.

To understand this we must remember that a government is that active

organization which directly affects the citizens' rights to life,

liberty, and the uses and benefits of their labor, called property by

some, and "the pursuit of happiness" by the Declaration of

Independence. How the corporations have come to usurp this power a few

statistical facts teach us. We have, for example, a hundred-and-sixty

thousand miles of operating railroads. These network the entire land,

and have the almost exclusive distribution of all our products. This

vast instrument, possessed of sovereignty through the franchise,

enters every man's business and pleasure. It is under the control and

virtual ownership of less than sixty families.

We have the telegraph, which science gave us as the poor man's

post-office, consisting as it does of a pole, a wire, a battery, and a

boy, made a luxury for the rich in the monopoly that gives it to one

man.

All that one eats, wears, and finds shelter under are, through this

same process of corporation monopoly, enhanced in cost for the benefit

of the few privileged men who grow rapidly into millionaires, while

the masses suffer.

This is our government.

Our readers must not charge us with exaggeration. We have statistics,

not to be disputed, as to the existence of the power, and we have high

authority for the charge regarding the despotic use of the power.

Speaking of the railroad corporations, Messrs. Conkling, Sherman, and

Windom said, years since, in their celebrated report to the Senate:

"They [the railroad companies] can tax our products at will in a way

Congress never dare attempt." Now the fiscal agency found in the power

to tax is the highest attribute of sovereignty. Because of the

usurpation in a British parliament accomplished in the attempt to tax

colonies of Americans without their consent we had the War of

Independence. Our fathers marched shoeless, tentless, and in rags

under muskets for seven years to vindicate a principle that we

surrender to the corporations. "They rise above all control, and are a

law unto themselves," said President Garfield. "They rob the producers

on one side and the stockholders on the other," cried the late

Jeremiah S. Black, "and sit on our highways of commerce as did the

robber barons on the rivers of Europe. They make members of the House,

purchase seats in the Senate, select for us candidates for the

Presidency, and own our courts."

Another attribute of sovereignty, found in furnishing a currency for

the people, has been seized on by something over two thousand

corporations, called banks, and they can contract or expand to further

their own selfish greed or that of their favorites and dependents. For

thus favoring themselves they are paid a sum that would have supported

the national government previous to the late war.

How this condition affects us every citizen can realize if he will

reflect. The writer of this lives in a quiet valley of Ohio. He never

would know that a political government exists except for the assessor

and collector. His police consists of a revolver, a shot-gun, and four

dogs. Wrong-doers may threaten his life, restrain his liberty, enter

his stables at night, or his house at any hour, and, so far as

government goes, he is his own police.

So much for our political structure. How is it with the corporations?

They are with him at all hours. He cannot sell a grain of wheat nor an

ounce of meat without their consent and toll. The fuel he burns has

its toll, that is an extortion. The clothes he wears, the food he

eats, the oil he burns by night, the glass that gives him light by

day, the walls that shelter him, the shingles or slate upon the

roof--in a word, all that he has to purchase or use, pays an

uncalled-for tribute to extortion and monopoly.

The political structure could be annihilated, and the citizen would

not know of its disappearance but for the absence of assessor and

collector, and for the fact learned from the press.

This is the condition of the dweller in a rural district. The denizen

of a town is not much better off. If he comes in contact with the

political structure at any point, it is to his injury. He is taxed

enormously to drain, pave, and light the streets. The draining is a

source of peril to health, the pavements are infamous, while the light

only makes darkness visible. So far as the police is concerned, it is

a political body, organized and used to further the ends of

professional politicians. The citizen is in more peril from the

club-inclined police than he is from thieves and ruffians.

A most startling illustration of the subserviency of the political

power to the moneyed combinations incorporated to ride, booted and

spurred, over popular rights, as Jefferson expressed it, was given by

the late tramway strikes at New York. When the conductors and drivers

threw up their employment because of the starvation wages and overwork

decreed by the combine, thereby putting a stop to all transportation,

instead of arresting the presidents and directors, and fetching them

into court to show cause why their charter should not be taken from

them for a failure to fulfil their duty to the public, the entire

police force was taken from duty to the public and put under control

of these corporations. The rebellious laborers were clubbed into

submission, while for a week New-Yorkers were forced either to walk or

to trust their necks to those artfully constructed death-traps called

the elevated roads.

We are not siding in this one way or the other. It may be that the

laborers were all in the wrong and the corporations right, or the case

may have been the reverse. To decide this is precisely what we want in

a legal tribunal commanding the respect of the public. This is not to

be had. The policeman's club is in the pay and under the control of

the corporations, and it decides.

All these comments will be decried as unpatriotic. Patriotism with us

is something akin to the love a mother has for a sick or crippled

child. We are like beggars on the highways of the world, exhibiting

our sores to excite, not pity, but--heaven save the mark!--admiration.

Of course we cannot be expected to cure cancers that we boast of.

In the space allotted us for a review it is impossible to do justice

to Professor Bryce's entertaining ignorance. His book is an amusing

one, not only because the author is clever in his way of expressing

himself, but because we take a strange delight in hearing opinions

about ourselves and our institutions. In his first introductory

sentences the author says: "'What do you think of our institutions?'

is the question addressed to the European traveller in the United

States by every chance acquaintance." The citizen who puts this

question little notes that he is making confession of the melancholy

fact that our so-called "institutions" are open to doubt. It is not

complimentary to our national character that we hang with breathless

interest upon the opinion and judgment of any chance foreigner

regarding what we are wont to assert, among ourselves, is simply

perfect.

_Kady_, by Patience Stapleton (Belford, Clarke & Co.).--The fetid

realism of recent American fiction--the realism which, fortunately for

the honor of human nature, is wholly unreal--has become fatally

tiresome from persistent reiteration of one theme. Even the most

morbid readers must in time weary of an endless sequence of

immoralities, all of the same family, and all whitened with the scales

of the same moral leprosy. When the Saxon mind descends to sensualism

it becomes merely gross and brutish; for it lacks the airy

sprightliness of Latin licentiousness which turns evil to gayety and

compels a smile at the corners of the mouth, even while the forehead

corrugates into the frown of reprobation. American blood is

essentially moral, and when overheated becomes clogged and thickened,

producing the antic vagaries of delirium in the oppressed brain. An

American cannot be _just a little_ wicked, as a Frenchman can. He must

be sound-hearted and clean-thoughted, or he must throw off all

pretence to decency and descend into the sheer obscene. This is why

American erotic fiction is hysterically immoral and not delicately

suggestive, and why, instead of the filmy _double entendre_, which you

can innocently laugh at for its wit, or, with more hardihood, enjoy

for its tingling spice, we have the bald, unclothed picture, whose

fiery coloring and sharp outline leave no chance for doubt as to its

meaning.

When this order of fiction was flung, naked and ogling, into the midst

of an astonished public, there was a gasp of surprise and a general

halt of indecision; while, like the monkey burned with hot molasses

candy, the common countenance was petrified into a curious mixture of

horror and delight. Like a hanging, a dissection, or the details of a

murder, it has presented a fascination for a large number of minds;

but if there were to be a man hanged every day in each of the city

squares, it would not be long before people passing by would say to

each other, "Pooh! only a hanging! revolting business anyway!" and

walk on without so much as a second glance. And so it is, or is

getting to be, with that class of fiction which has only the erotic

for its cause of being. When volume after volume, issuing from the

press, offers as a central point and motive a microscopic analysis of

the animal side of human nature, taking for text that all men are

libidinous and all women unchaste in various degrees, the ordinary

reader, seeking merely for amusement, at length finds himself

suffocated in the steam of moral turpitude, and craves for a breath of

purer, cleaner air. Such an atmosphere, cold, fresh, and bracing as

the winds which blow over the mountain region where its scene is

chiefly laid, surrounds this sweetest and most delightful of recent

novels, "Kady."

"Kady" is the work of a mind at once refined and vigorous. The author

labors at the exposition of no trite moral. There is not a line of

preaching in the book, and yet it would be a hardened nature which

could rise from reading it, with his heart full of the simple nobility

of Abner Clark, and commit a mean action. To recognize the reality of

such a character as that of the old pioneer, simple, uneducated, and

rude, yet, in the inborn impulses of his nature, nobly delicate,

loftily honorable, good in the best and manliest sense--to recognize

that such men have lived and do live, is to put aside into the limbo

of the vacuous all philosophies of negation and sophistries of

pessimism. Abner Clark is unquestionably one of the few grand

creations of American fiction. He is religious, but his religion is

such that an infidel might respect it. It is the broad and simple

creed of love--love, with its concomitants of charity, forgiveness,

and wide sympathy. The simple prayer which he offers up over the grave

of the artist Harrison's mother is a masterpiece. "An' we who must

keep on in the round of toil and trouble need not wish her back, who

was so weary with work and pain. The hand that reared these mount'ins,

that laid the lake, that colors the sunset sky, is reached down to

human creeturs, to the weakest or the strongest, and takes them into

His keepin'. There's a dreary life here and a happy life hereafter;

... and there's a home for us all beyond these mount'ins tall."

It is the religion of nature, the simple faith of the patriarchs of

old, the belief that finds its strongest support in a noble pantheism,

in the love of the Creator's handiwork, in a perception of the

Omnipotent in the marvellous grandeur of material beauty. And yet this

old man is neither superstitious nor weak. In order to save his young

son from moral ruin and the clutches of card-sharpers, he can drink

and gamble--aye, and play a game of poker like a bunco-steerer, and

beat roguery before its very eyes. This game of poker, by the way, is

one of the gems of the book. How the author, whose refinement of mind

and heart is visible in every line of the whole story, has been able

to study such scenes and such personages as this poker-party and these

border roughs to such wonderful purpose, it is hard to understand. The

whole incident stands out with the stern light and shadow of Salvator.

It is almost brutal in its realism, but is touchingly relieved by the

simple remorse of the misguided son and the rugged nobility of his

father.

"I come here ternight ter save my boy an' teach him a lesson.... Now

git in the boat," said Abner, "and I, a father of sixty, will row his

son, a drunkard and a gambler, home."

"Oh, father," sobbed the miserable boy, "I--I never can forgive

myself! I will never touch cards again!" At the shore his father laid

his hand on Seeley's shoulder. "Seeley, I love ye too well to be mad

with ye, but try to take the decent road, an' foller it straight."

The old man's death in the pursuit of his duty, the single word,

"Forgive," to his weak and repentant son, the wild grief of his

daughter Kady, touch the very centre of true pathos. Kady herself,

poor, loving, wild little Kady, half savage and true woman, is a

beautiful character. Greatly tempted, misunderstood, slandered, and

neglected, she never, by one weak or wilful act, loses the entire

sympathy of the reader. As truthful in her character of border heroine

as M'liss, Kady is a much more touching and lovable creation, without

the occasional repulsive traits of Bret Harte's portraiture. As her

father is a true and noble gentleman, despite the accidents of birth

and environment, so is his daughter, under her uncouth garb and rude

speech, a true and noble woman.

Clopper, with his serene optimism, Leddy, his wife, Miss Pinkham and

the cap-border, Levi Bean, Tilford Harrison the egotistical and

self-persecuting artist with his miserable family, the Dennisons,

Louisy and Emmeline, Madam Ferris, and Aunt Mary--a whole gallery of

masterly portraits, are all instinct with life, all painted from

evident sittings of originals.

If there be any marked defect in the book it is in the excess of

dialect and the thinness of the background of more cultivated life. It

is much to say that this book, whose style is chiefly dialect, rarely

ceases to charm and never tires. The author, whose pen has so long run

in the uncouth speech of this border district, occasionally forgets

her own English and drops a rude construction of sentence, or a

primitive term into her own lucid phrases. But these slips are rare,

and it is almost hypercriticism to notice them.

On all accounts "Kady" is one of the most remarkable books of the

time. Purely American, without one taint of animalism though dealing

with the most primitive humanity, true, sweet, and yet masculine in

its power, it is a work which will take its place in the literature of

the country as a model which cannot be too closely studied or too much

admired.

_'Twixt Love and Law_: A novel, by Annie Jenness Miller (Belford,

Clarke & Co.).--Literature which neither refreshes, amuses, nor

instructs has no proper place in the world of letters; and assuredly

that class of literature which enervates the mind and beckons beyond

the noon-mark of propriety has no rights which the critic or the

moralist is bound to respect. It is a marked characteristic of that

order of recent fiction which takes for text the more or less unlawful

relations of the sexes, that the style should be punctuated with

shrieks, and the movement be a series of hysterical writhings. A woman

with keen feelings does not, at every small anticlimax of her

existence, perform a hand-spring and somersault as a means of giving

vent to her emotions. Neither does she go about with a nose reddened

with weeping, exploding in vociferous adjectives as a means of

expressing her grief. "To be always and everywhere starved! starved!

starved!" wails Mrs. Miller's heroine, as a sort of footnote to a

proposal of marriage which she has just declined. "Oh, how cruel it

is!" Thereupon "she shivered in the clutch of her despair, and,

moaning, threw herself face downward upon the bosom of Mother Earth,"

very much to the amaze of the rejected suitor, who promptly picks her

up and "holds her against his breast." She is intense, superlatively

intense. "Her white bosom tossed and rose and fell; the burnished

masses of her hair escaped and rioted on the midnight air. 'Spare me!

spare me! Alex! Alex! Alex!' Out of the unyielding density of the

night a voice of ecstasy breathed her name." A meeting takes place in

this "unyielding density" with "Alex," a married man. The heroine

being in love with him and he with her, it follows as a necessary

element in this class of fiction that the wife should be all that is

mean, evil, shrewish, and generally detestable. In such a state of

affairs a wife is a difficult problem, a nuisance, and yet very

useful; for if there were no wife to interpose her uncomfortable

personality between the lovers, there would be no reason for all these

meetings in the "unyielding density," no exclamatory passages, no

daring escapades along the very verge of the questionable, and, hence,

no novel--which, all things considered, might not be so great a

misfortune after all. In the course of this story, which includes much

outcry, many combats with tempestuous passion, some sacrifices, a

trial for attempted murder, and a divorce, the unpleasant marital

impediment is comfortably put out of the way, and the lovers are

safely married.

"'Twixt Love and Law" is one of those books, "not wicked, but unwise,"

which, whatever their ostensible moral may be, add to the perplexity

and difficulty of social adjustment. Admitting that our marriage and

divorce laws are unjust and ineffectual, still, to bring contempt,

open or implied, upon the marriage relation, can only impede, not

advance, a rational solution of the question. In nine cases out of ten

vanity and loose morals are the primary causes of marital

unfaithfulness in desire or act. In writing such a book as "'Twixt

Love and Law," clever and often brilliant as it is, the author has not

used her graceful pen and clear head to the best interests of her sex.

_THE APPEAL._

Cold, bitter cold beneath the wild March moon,

The winter snow lies on my frozen breast;

And o'er my head the cypress branches croon

A sad and ceaseless dirge, and break my rest.

I hear the bell chime in the dark church tower,

The rising wind, a passer's hasty tread;

But no voice wakes the silence, hour by hour,

Among the uncompanionable dead.

Perchance they lie in deep, unconscious calm,

Regretting nothing in the world above;

Alas! for me it has not lost its charm--

There is no peace where thou art not, my love!

Oh! bid me come to thee, and I will rise

From my unquiet couch and steal to thine,

And touch thy cheek, and kiss thy sleeping eyes,

And clasp thee, as of old, till morning shine!

And I will murmur in thy drowsy ears

Sweet utterances of love and olden song,

Till thou shalt half awake in blissful tears,

And cry "My love, why hast thou staid so long?"

CHARLES LOTIN HILDRETH.

A COVENANT WITH DEATH.[1]

_A NARRATIVE._

BY THE AUTHOR OF "AN UNLAID GHOST."

To E. P. T.

"So little payment for so great a debt."

CHAPTER I.

"O Death in Life! the days that are no more."

It would have been no surprise to his friends had Loyd Morton speedily

followed his young wife to the grave. Their brief union had been a

very communion of souls--one of those rare experiences in wedlock for

jealousy of which Destiny may almost be pardoned. Small wonder,

therefore, that his grief was of that speechless description which

"whispers the o'er-fraught heart, and bids it break." For a time it

was thought he could not survive his dumb despair; or, if he did, that

melancholia would claim him an easy victim. It is needless to affirm

that he escaped the wreck of both life and reason, since the existence

of this chronicle attests so much.

The manner of his escape does not appear; though it was astutely

surmised, and perhaps with some show of probability, that, being an

expert and practitioner in disorders of the nervous system, he healed

himself, albeit physicians of experience may entertain contrary views

concerning the feasibility of the feat. At all events, he came forth

to face his world again, a sad, pallid being indued with indomitable

perseverance and fortitude; more than ever zealous in the discharge of

his engagements; as never before devoted to his profession. But a

sympathetic eye could not fail to detect the feverish abandonment of

self, the positively voracious hungering for constant activity, which

were in themselves a pathetic commentary upon the frame of mind in

which his bereavement had left him.

He had become the wraith-like semblance of the original young Doctor

Morton, once so buoyant, so pampered by favoring Fate--in a word, so

worthy of righteous envy. Alas! what eternities to him were those

hours of lonely seclusion when there were no visits to pay and no

clients to awaken the sepulchral echoes of his house with summons at

the bell--dark hours of nothingness, blank eras of forlorn distress!

Yet, let there be no suspicion that Loyd Morton's was an unmanly

grief; it was no more a lachrymose distemper than it was a stubborn

setting of his face against his lot. His sorrow was far too genuine to

be self-conscious, and, if he brooded in his despair, it was simply

because something had gone out of his life infinitely more precious

than life itself; something that he would have given his life to

recover, since absolute annihilation seemed to him preferable to this

existing condition of death in life.

His love had been a first, all-absorbing passion; it had introduced

into his hitherto prosaic existence a light and genial warmth that had

set the soft glow of the rose upon its humblest attributes; it had

afforded him an object to live for, a goal worthy his ambition, and

had filled the void of indefinable longing with that sense of

completeness which is ever the result of a perfect alliance between

sympathy and sincerity of purpose.

He had met his affinity during his student-days; had wooed, and won,

and married her in the first flush of that youthful affection.

Possibly the old-time shades of Stuttgart lent a quaint and

fascinating glamour to the courtship; but, if glamour there were, it

became the permanent atmosphere that hallowed their marital relations

when the work of life began at home, stripped of all romantic

association. Indeed, their honeymoon never waned to setting; it simply

suffered total eclipse.

It was fortunate that, at the period of his overwhelming bereavement,

the young physician chanced to be in vogue. American nervous systems

are notoriously more subject to disorder than any on the face of the

earth; and he who ministers successfully to, or rather deciphers

cleverly, these occult riddles of the human anatomy of the West, is

not only an exceedingly busy, but an eminently fortunate, man. Day and

night he is at the beck and call of those whose unstrung nerves

require tuning; while, if his patience is forced to pay the penalty of

his devotion, the shade of Midas, by way of recompense, seems

indefatigable in its superintendence of the filling of his coffers.

To repute and popularity had Loyd Morton attained in an exceptional

degree; and, for the reason that a host of wayward nervous systems

could not be induced to respect the season of his grief, he was fairly

dragged out of his seclusion, and made to identify himself with the

real or imaginary woes of his patients. And it was fortunate that it

was so, since on this account, only in the solitude of those chambers,

about which clung the memory of his lost one like a benison, had he

opportunity to listen to the lament of his anguished heart. And the

monotonous cry of that heart was ever, "Paula, Paula, Paula! My wife!"

Surely there could have been no rest for her soul if that wail of

affliction penetrated the celestial sphere to the enjoyment of which

her blameless life entitled her. Far from contributing to her repose,

such grieving emphasis must have fettered her spirit to earth.

"I feel," he told himself at the close of his first year of widowhood,

"as though I was environed by a sere wilderness, over whose trackless

wastes I must trudge until I meet the ashy horizon and find the end.

No ray of light, no star to twinkle hope; always these weeping clouds

of grizzled pallor! Only one comfort is vouchsafed me--fatigue.

Fortunately, fatigue means sleep, and sleep oblivion!"

Lost in dreary revery, he sat by the window of his study one April

evening, with the melancholy spring-tide gloaming about him. A

nesting-bird twittered, and the scent of the sodden earth filtered in

at the half-open casement.

Two years ago that day he had watched a German mother raise the bridal

wreath from her daughter's brow, the happy ceremonial over, and had

listened, as in a rapturous dream, to the words: "She is thine. Take

her; but, oh! my son, guard, guide, and cherish her, for the sake of

her fond mother, when the boundless sea shall roll between us!"

One year agone to an hour, and in the dismal after-glow of a rainy

sunset, he had stood beside the open grave, his agonized heart-throbs

echoing the wet clods as they fell upon the casket that contained the

last fragment of his shattered hopes--his broken idol screened from

his yearning gaze by hideous glint of plate and polished wood.

Nuptial and burial rites celebrated with the self-same ghastly flowers

within a twelve-month! A wreath for a bride, a chaplet for a corpse,

fragrant tokens for the quick and the dead--and so the chapter ended!

The monotonous drip of the eaves, the fitful sough of the miasmatic

wind, the odor of the humid garden-plot, the blood-red hem of the

leaden clouds whose skirts trailed languidly along the western

horizon--all, all so vividly recalled that grievous hour of sepulture,

so painfully accentuated its anniversary, that, in very desolation of

soul, he exclaimed,

"My God! how unutterably lonely and wretched I am! What would I not

give for one word, one glimpse, for the slightest assurance that we

are not doomed to eternal separation; that the closing of the eyes in

death does not signify instant annihilation!"

The sudden clang of the office-bell interrupted his utterance and

almost deprived him of breath, so significant seemed the punctuation

to his thought. He rose hastily and, contrary to his custom, preceded

the servant through the hall.

Upon throwing open the outer door, he found himself confronted by a

woman, closely veiled and clothed in black, her tall and slender

figure standing forth in strong relief against the lurid gloom of the

evening.

For an instant silence prevailed, save for the retreating footsteps of

the servant as he returned to his quarters.

"You are Doctor Loyd Morton," the woman began in a tone low yet

perfectly distinct, a tone of assertion rather than inquiry. "Can you

give me a few moments' consultation?"

"These are my office-hours, madam," he replied, a feeling of mingled

curiosity and repulsion taking possession of him.

"I know; but I am told that you are in great request. Shall we be

undisturbed?"

"Quite so. Will you come in?"

He stepped aside and she entered, raising her veil as she did so,

though the darkness of the hall prevented his determining what manner

of countenance she wore. The twilight that penetrated the office

through uncurtained windows, however, discovered a delicate, pale face

framed in tendrils of soft chestnut hair and alight with eyes of the

same indescribable tint. It was not a strictly beautiful face,

according to the canons of beauty, yet it was one of those faces one

glance at which invites another, until the spell of fascination claims

the beholder.

Loyd Morton had had impressionable days, but for obvious reasons they

were at an end. Still, he was interested; and the better to study his

visitor he was about to strike a match for the purpose of lighting a

lamp, when the woman, with swift divination of his intent, exclaimed:

"I prefer the twilight," adding; "I shall not detain you long."

Morton hesitatingly replaced the unignited match, and glanced at his

visitor in a manner eloquent of his desire to learn the object of her

call.

She noted the silent interrogation in her keen way, and, after a swift

survey of the shadowy apartment, continued:

"I believe you assured me that we should be undisturbed."

"I did, madam."

"We are not alone, however."

"I beg your pardon; we are quite alone."

"No, no! there is a presence here beside our own--a presence so real,

so powerful, as to be almost tangible. Oh, I understand that look of

quick intelligence in your eyes and that wan smile lurking about your

lips. You think me deranged; but I can easily prove to you that I am

not."

She had spoken with unexpected fervor, and now paused, pressing her

slender hand upon her eyes, as if to compose herself.

"I did not think to encounter one of my so-called crises here," she

resumed presently; "but it is just as well, since by this means you

can better form some diagnosis of my case. Do--do I afford you any

hint? Perhaps, though, I do not interest you?"

His unresponsive silence seemed to dispirit her, for her eager eyes

fell dejectedly.

"On the contrary, you interest me very much," he answered gently.

"Will you be seated, and give me some information regarding your

symptoms?"

She sank into the depths of a reclining-chair that faced the western

window, while Morton seated himself directly before her.

The blood-red ribbon below the rainy clouds had faded and shrunk to a

filament of pale olive that gave forth a weird, crepuscular glimmer.

Objects as white as the pallid face among the cushions seemed to

absorb the sensitive light and to grow yet more spectral through its

aid.

"First of all," remarked the young doctor, "kindly give me your name

and such information as you please concerning your manner of life."

The voice that replied was low to drowsiness.

"My name is Revaleon--Margaret Revaleon. I am an Englishwoman by

birth, and have been for three years the wife of a Canadian. Until my

child was born I enjoyed, if not robust, at least excellent, health.

For the past year I have lost ground; while these crises, as I call

them, have debilitated and depressed me. Thinking a change would

benefit me, I have come to visit friends in this neighborhood. In the

hope of relief from my peculiar ailment, which I believe to be purely

nervous, I have sought you out, attracted by your fame as an expert in

disorders of the nervous system. Ah, doctor," she added, struggling

against the lethargy that oppressed her, "do not tell me that I am

incurable, since I have so much to live for!"

She seemed as ingenuous as a child; her unaffected manner being such

as speedily wins its way to confidence. The sense of mingled repulsion

and curiosity, which in the first moment she had exerted upon Morton,

vanished, giving place to a feeling of genuine interest, perhaps

concern.

"I see no reason for pronouncing the doom you dread, Mrs. Revaleon,"

he said; "not, at least, until you explain the 'peculiar ailment' you

allude to."

Her eyes rested upon him with singular intentness--singular, because

they appeared to lack speculation; that is to say, they were dilated,

and luminous with a strange yellow light. At the same time it was

evident that their regard was introspective, if speculative at all.

Yet her reply followed with a full consciousness of the situation.

"I am unable to explain my malady," she said. "It consists in little

more than what you see at this moment. If _you_ cannot account for my

present condition, it must continue a mystery to me."

He leaned forward and took her hands in his. They were icy cold,

although they responded to his touch with an indescribable, nervous

vibration.

"I have no trouble of the heart," she murmured, divining his

suspicion; "I suffer this lowering of vitality only when in my present

condition."

He released her hands and sat back in his chair, regarding her

fixedly.

After a brief pause, he remarked,

"I must ask you to explain what you mean by your 'present condition.'"

"I mean, Dr. Morton, that, since you assure me that there is no

presence in this room other than our own, I must possess some species

of clairvoyance which my present condition induces. I assure you that

there _is a third presence here_, that completely overshadows you! The

consciousness of this fact freezes my very marrow and chills my being

with the chill of death. It is by no means the first time that I have

experienced these baleful sensations, or I should not have come to you

for advice and counsel. Heaven knows I have no wish to be cognizant of

these occult matters; but I am completely powerless to struggle

against them. Ah, me!" she sighed wearily, "had I lived in the days of

witchcraft, I suppose I should have been burned at the stake, despite

my innocence."

Her voice sank to a whisper, and with its cadence her eye-lids drooped

and closed; her breathing became stertorous, while her teeth ground

each other with an appalling suggestion of physical agony, of which

her body gave no evidence, being quiescent.

Startled though he was, Morton's first suspicion was that he was being

made the victim of some clever imposture. This fancy, however, soon

gave place to a belief that he was witnessing some sort of refined

hysteria. Were the latter supposition the case, he felt himself equal

to the emergency.

He leaned forward and placed his hands firmly upon the shoulders of

the inanimate woman. "Enough of this, Mrs. Revaleon!" he exclaimed in

a firm voice; "if I am to assist you, you must assist me! I command

you to open your eyes!"

Not so much as a nerve vibrated in the corpse-like figure.

Aroused to a determination to thoroughly investigate the phenomenon,

Morton quickly ignited a candle, and, holding it in one hand, he

passed it close to the woman's eyes, the heavy lids of which he

alternately raised with the fingers of his disengaged hand.

The eyes returned a dull, sightless glare to the test.

As a last resort to arouse consciousness or discover imposture, he

produced a delicate lancet, and, raising the lace about the woman's

wrist, he lightly scarified the cold, white flesh. Blood sluggishly

tinged the slight abrasion, but, to his amazement, the immobility of

his subject failed to relax one jot; yet the experiment was not

entirely without result, since at the same moment a voice, muffled and

far away in sound, broke the expectant silence:

"Loyd! Loyd!"

The twilight had deepened to actual gloom, which the flickering of the

weird candle-light but served to accentuate. It seemed impossible to

establish evidence to prove that it was the lips of Margaret Revaleon

that had framed the thrilling utterance; indeed, the eerie tone could

be likened to nothing human.

Spellbound the young doctor stood, doubting the evidence of his

senses, yet listening--listening, until it came again, with positive

enunciation and import,

"Loyd!"

"In Heaven's name, who calls?" he exclaimed.

"Paula, your wife."