CHAPTER XXXV.

During the time which had elapsed since the night on which Eve Pascal

and Reuben May renewed their bond of friendship many an anxious

incident had occurred to test its value and cement its strength.

Jerrem and Adam were familiar names to Reuben now, and the men who

bore them were often before his eyes and constantly in his thoughts.

Prepared as Reuben had been for undergoing much awkwardness in

delivering himself of the tale he had to tell, he found he had greatly

underrated the pain and humiliation he actually felt when, through the

interest of his friend, he found himself within the walls of Newgate

and in the presence of Adam. Reuben was no coward, yet it needed all

the strength of his strictly-disciplined mind to open up and lay bare

before a rival's eyes those wounds which love had made and time had

had no space to heal. He shrank from placing in front of Adam the

picture of himself and Eve as they had stood in the days when, Adam all

unknown, the balance of a happy future seemed trembling still within

the hand of Fate; and he paused from time to time as he spoke, hoping

some word or sign would make his task more easy; but Adam never spoke

or turned aside his eyes, and under that fixed gaze Reuben was forced

to tell his tale out to the end, constraining his pride to give out

word for word what Eve had said in Adam's praise, and searing the green

memory of his love by making his lips repeat those vows which she had

told him bound her to another.

At length the task was ended, the jealous rage, the mad revenge, was

all confessed; and satisfied that, whatever guilt it might please Adam

to lay to his charge, he had at least shown that Eve was free from any

shadow of stain, Reuben paused, and the two so strangely linked stood

looking at each other with envy, jealousy, distrust clouding their

minds, while a chord of sympathy drew them together as they recognized

a similitude in their actions which made each self-abasement uttered

find an echo in its listener's breast. Proud, stern, unyielding to

emotion as both these men had lived, it was not in them to take comfort

in the shifts and excuses weaker natures find: the hearts that had

refused pity for their neighbors would not entreat it because they

themselves now stood in need. As they had judged their fellows so they

arraigned themselves, and thus unwittingly rendered the first atonement

man is called upon to make.

The sight of Adam's strong, powerful form shaken and bowed down by

the remorse he strove in vain to control moved Reuben strangely. The

haggard pallor of his striking face, the sunken eyes, the untasted

food, the unslept-in bed,--each told its tale of misery and woe, and

opened out to Reuben a depth of despair his own experience hitherto had

furnished him with no gauge to measure. What if with no further warning

he fetched up Eve to Adam's aid? The thought would bear no hesitation:

a thousand jealous "Noes" battled with the suggestion, but Reuben's

better self resolved to have its way, and, seizing the opportunity of

Adam's head being bent down in his arms, Reuben went swiftly out and

along down to the keeper's room, where Eve had been left impatiently

awaiting his return.

Although the grating of the hinge roused Adam, he neither stirred nor

moved until, satisfied by the unbroken silence that Reuben had left him

to himself, he ventured to raise his head. Where could he go? where

hide himself from human gaze? And as the thought of all his shame came

crowding to his mind he started up and wildly stared around, and then

around again, seeing each time the walls, which looked so near, draw

nearer still. No hope! no hope! Here he must live until the hour when

those who brought him here would drag him forth to swear away his

comrade's life. O God! how helpless he felt! and as he let himself drop

down each limb gave way and nerveless fell, as if Dejection claimed him

for her own. The time had been when Adam's mind was racked by thoughts

of what lay in the hearts of those he had left behind: their pictured

hatred and contempt stung him to madness; the words they would say,

the curses they were uttering, seemed ever ringing in his ears. But

Reuben's tale had for the time swept this away and filled its place

with dark remorse for what he had done to Jerrem. True, Reuben had

shown that Jerrem's hand had wrought his own and their destruction,

but what of that? Adam through him had wreaked his vengeance on them

all--had, Judas-like, delivered them to death: henceforth, branded and

disgraced, he must be an outcast or a wanderer. As this fallen spectre

of himself rose up and flitted in his sight a cry of wild despair burst

forth, wrenched from the depths of his proud heart--a cry which some

one near sent echoing back; and as it came his hands were caught, and

Pity seemed to stretch her arms and fold him to her breast.

Was it a nightmare he was waking from--some hideous dream in which our

bodies slumber while our fancies live a lifetime? Would this vision

of Eve (for Eve it was who knelt close by his side, her arms around

his neck) melt away and fade as many a one of her had done before? She

calls him love--her love, the husband of her heart. What! he, this

guilty outcast--can he be this to any one, and most of all to Eve?

A finger's touch seemed laid upon the veil which hitherto had shut out

hope from Adam's view, and as it shrivelled up and rolled away the

light revealed that Mercy still sat throned on high, and bowing down

his head on Eve's neck he let his stricken soul take comfort in the

thought.

* * * * *

But while Adam was thus cast down under suffering, sorrow had taken but

a slight hold on Jerrem, who, after the first shock produced by the

horrors of a place then branded as "the darkest seat of woe this side

of hell," gradually regained his old elasticity, and was soon ready to

treat, laugh and drink with all who came near him. His merry jokes, his

quaint sea-songs, the free handling he gave to his plentiful supply of

money,--all served to ensure his popularity, so that, instead of the

man sunk under misery and despair whom Reuben, after leaving Adam, had

girded himself up to encounter, he came upon Jerrem rollicking and

gay, a prime favorite with all the authorities, and a choice spirit

amid the crew of tried and untried prisoners who in those days crowded

together in the foul wards of Newgate.

Fresh from the sight of Adam's dark remorse, filled with compunction

at the thought of all the ills their joint passions had hurled on

Jerrem's head, Reuben had invested Jerrem with a sense of wrong, to

make reparation for which he had come prepared to offer whatever

sacrifice he should demand. To find the man for whom all this feeling

had been conjured up reckless and unconcerned, casting oaths against

his ill-luck one moment and cutting jokes at his possible fate the

next, jarred upon Reuben terribly, and made him at once decide that it

would be worse than useless to urge upon him any necessity for taking

thought for his soul when he was so utterly reckless as to what would

become of his body. The story Reuben had to tell of himself and Eve,

the betrayal, and the suspicions it had aroused against Eve in Adam,

merely affected Jerrem as a matter for surprise and curiosity. He

seemed pleased to hear that Eve was close at hand, but still expressed

no wish to see her. He talked about Adam, and with a painful absence of

all malice told Reuben to say to him that he'd best lay it thick on his

back, so that the judge and jury would let the other chaps go free. The

circumstance of being brought to London to be tried seemed to afford

him immense satisfaction--a thing, he said, that hadn't happened for

sixty years and more, since old ---- swung for it; and then he fell

to wondering how soon that might be his fate, and if so how many from

Polperro would make the stretch to come so far. He'd promise them it

shouldn't be for nothing: he'd show the Cornishmen that he could cut

his capers game. Only one subject seemed able to sober or subdue his

reckless spirit, and this was any mention of Joan or Uncle Zebedee: to

them the poor soul seemed to cling with all the love his nature could

command. And when Reuben, instructed by Eve, told him how stricken

down the old man lay, and farther on promised to write for him all

the messages he wished to send to Joan, a heart of wax seemed given

to his keeping, in which it now must be his care to mould the little

good there yet was time to teach. And so it happened that in all his

future visits--and every hour that Reuben had to spare was given up

to Jerrem--Joan was the theme that threaded all their discourse, and

by her power Jerrem's soft heart and softer nature became to Reuben

as an open page, wherein he read of actions in which good and bad

were so mixed up and jumbled that in the very midst of his reproof

and condemnation Reuben was often forced to stand abashed before some

act of generous pity which found no echo in his former life. And out

of this humility, which grew in strength, there sprang forth greater

merits than from all the weary efforts he made at working out his own

atonement; for Reuben, like Adam, had been over-satisfied about his

own rectitude, and took pride in the knowledge that if ever he had

committed a wrong he had acknowledged it freely and expiated it to

the uttermost farthing; while Jerrem, for the first time in his life

brought to see guilt in what he had counted pleasure, scarce dared to

listen to a hope of mercy for himself, but rather craved Reuben to beg

it for the many who had been thoughtless sharers in his folly. His

ruling desire was to see Joan once more, and no sooner was he told that

the admiralty session had begun and that his day of trial, although not

fixed, was near at hand, than he begged Reuben to write and ask Joan to

delay her promised visit no longer; and this Reuben did, adding on his

own account that, from what the lawyer said, it would be best she came

at once by the coach which would reach London on the following Thursday

week, on which day Reuben would be waiting to receive her.

Now, at the onset of this disaster had such a letter reached Polperro

not a man in the place but, short of knowing it would cost his life,

would have risked all else to go to London, and if Jerrem was to die

give him courage by mustering round their comrade at the last. But

the downpour of disaster had cowed these daring spirits, and the men

who had not known what fear meant so long as success was secure now

trembled and gave way under the superstitious certainty that Ill-luck

was following them and Misfortune had marked them for her own. Their

energies paralyzed, they succumbed to what they looked upon as Fate,

and in most cases were seized without a struggle and led off to the

nearest prisons without an effort on their own part toward resistance.

The money over which, from the small scope for spending it, they had

seemed so lavish and reckless, when needed for lawyers and counsel and

bribes went but a small way; and though they made a common purse of all

their hoards, not a day passed without some house being stripped of the

substance which adorned it, so that money might be got for the husband,

the son, the brothers who had brought these treasures home. The women,

on their knees, pressed on the farmers' wives their chintzes, their

lace, their gaudy stock of jewelry, and when this market failed toiled

along to Liskeard, Plymouth and Launceston, carrying their china,

silver plate and bowls in the hope of finding somebody to buy them.

With a revenue cutter--often two--always in sight, landing parties

of king's men, who, recalling ugly thoughts of the hated press-gang,

roamed hither and thither, ready to seize any one who happened to

show his face; with half the husbands, sons and brothers in Plymouth

clink or Bodmin jail, and the rest skulking in farm-houses or lying

hidden in the secret places; with plenty vanishing and poverty drawing

nigh,--the past circumstances which had led to this desolation were

swallowed up in the present misery it had entailed upon them; and

though every one now knew the whole story as it stood--how that through

Jerrem writing to Eve she had had it in her power to tell Reuben May,

her former lover, who, led on by jealousy, had betrayed them to the

revenue-men--so familiar had Reuben's good services to Jerrem become

known that it was taken as only one more of his many friendly actions

that he should write to Joan, urging her to come to London without

delay, and promising to meet her and see that she was taken care of.

If any among them thought that Joan would go probably to Eve's home,

they made no mention of it, for Eve's name was by a tacit understanding

banished from their mouths, and the memory of her lay as a seal to that

dark sepulchre wherein, with bitter scorn and hate, Adam lay buried.

There was no question now of Uncle Zebedee going, for the confinement,

the excitement and the degradation had been too much for the old man,

whose free and happy life had never known trouble or restraint, and

his mind had gradually weakened under the burden imposed upon it; so

that now, except when some unexpected incident roused the flickering

flame of memory, the past few months were blotted from his mind, and

in company with Jonathan--who, broken down by ill-usage and turned

out of prison to die, had managed to crawl back to the friends he knew

he should find shelter with--he roamed about harmless and contented,

always watching for the Lottery's return, and promising, when she did

come back, that he would give them all a fling such as Polperro had not

seen for many a day.

It was an easy matter to cheat him now, and when, her journey all

arranged, Joan stepped into the boat which was to take her round to

Plymouth and left old Zebedee standing on the shore, raising his thin

cracked voice to fetch her ear with cheery messages for Jerrem and

for Adam, whom she was going to meet, her cup of bitterness seemed to

overflow.

_The Author of "Dorothy Fox."_

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

A PIVOTAL POINT

We are but beginning to understand what this America of ours is to

do for the Old World. If we consider it under the figure of a vast

steamship journeying to the relief of the mother nations, surely the

beef and the flour, the cotton and the corn, even the inventions, with

which it is freighted, form the least portion of its immeasurable

cargo of supplies. Now, imagining our republic to be such a vessel,

if Alaska be the stern and Florida the prow turned toward the other

hemisphere for the peaceful conquest thereof, then must New York on

the left hand and Texas upon the right be, in the days to come, the

great paddle-wheels which shall drive it onward--New York not more so

in a commercial than Texas in an agricultural sense. But it is with

Texas only that we have here to do, and this in order to detail certain

things hitherto unpublished which may not be without their use to the

Humes and Motleys, the Froudes and Macaulays, of our nation in the

wonderful future.

It is well to bear in mind from the outset that Texas is by far the

largest of the States. To get even an idea of this, place within its

boundaries New England, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Ohio

and Pennsylvania: even then you must pack into the crevices between

these two or three granite boulders each of the size of Massachusetts

to make a solid territory as large as Texas. As to that, however,

Alaska is vast, and so is Sahara. If you set out upon a journey south

and south-westward, beginning at the Potomac, and visit every Southern

State in its order upon the map, you will find--and that almost

immediately upon your arrival in Texas--that you have reached that

State of them all which surpasses the others as much in prosperity as

it does in dimensions. Near as Texas is to the equator, the oxygen of

its abnormal growth is perceived by the newcomer in almost his first

breath. There is a combination of causes for this. The Puritan who

landed on Plymouth Rock gave character to, and transmitted himself

down, the after ages of New England history; and the same is true

of the influence of the Connecticut Austin who in 1820 began the

settlement of Texas. The lapse of two centuries may have given a more

earthward direction to the old energy, but the energy itself is there;

and, somehow, the character and history of this larger New England of

the West have been along the same line. Everything has helped forward

the prosperity of the State. General health, moderate taxation,

fertility of soil, astonishing diversity of product, cheap and rapid

construction of railroads along lines both of latitude and longitude,

immeasurable reserves of alternate sections of land held sacred for

education,--these are some of the causes which are attracting an

immigration of about a hundred thousand a year to a realm so vast that

the two millions already there seem but pioneers of the coming hosts.

But that which strikes the stranger most is the seemingly small

proportion of negroes to whites in comparison with other Southern

States; and this is becoming more marked every year. In one thing the

population seems to be unanimous, and that is that Texas shall remain,

vast as it is, one undivided State, a recent legislature having set

apart three millions of acres toward the construction of a new capitol

at Austin which shall be worthy of that one of the United States which

is also, and in itself, an empire so much larger than Germany that

to bring the balance to a level you must cast into the scale with it

Jamaica, Holland, Denmark, Belgium and Greece. There is the momentum

as of its enormous bulk in the prosperity of Texas; and not a man of

us, however wide awake he is, but is a Rip Van Winkle as to what it is

coming to be.

But all this is said in order to something else. Heaven knows that the

history of Texas was romantic enough during the era of the mysterious

Aztec, then of the Frenchman, the Spaniard, the Mexican, and after that

of the original and unadulterated Texan of the battles of '36, and yet

there is a page, unprinted hitherto, of its annals, in connection with

the Confederacy, which is, in some senses, the most interesting of

all. To appreciate it one must remember that, unlike any other State,

Texas was once a republic which had won its independence with its own

sword. Of its own free will it deliberately abdicated its nationality

as such to become one of the United States. When the fever of Secession

set in, of all the Southern States it was, on account both of its size

and strategic location, the most important. An anecdote in regard to

Mr. Lincoln may illustrate this. One of the early settlers of Texas

was a gentleman whom I will designate as Mr. S----. There is hardly a

citizen of the State but will know who is meant, so long and thoroughly

has he been recognized over its broad domain for his indomitable

energy, sagacity and magnificent success, as well as for an integrity

and high sense of honor unimpeached by any. Except as he was compelled

by the very qualities of his clear-headed character to be a Union man

during the rebellion, Mr. S---- has never meddled in politics, and no

man stands higher to-day in the estimation of the best men in Texas

than he. As a Union man he was obliged to absent himself from the

State during the war, and was in Washington in 1864. As soon as Mr.

Lincoln knew of his arrival he sent for him, and held three different

interviews with him in regard to Texas. During these conversations

the President dwelt at length and with the utmost energy upon the

necessity, in a military sense, of Texas to the Federal cause. "If we

held Texas," he said, "we should not only outflank the Confederacy by

land, but by water also;" and he developed the statement in all its

details. "Go back," he entreated Mr. S----, "and say to your State that

if it will return to the Union the slaves will not be interfered with."

"But the Emancipation Proclamation has been issued," Mr. S----

exclaimed.

"No matter for that. We will consent to any plan for gradual

emancipation the Texans will make," replied the President: "they may

arrange for it not to go into effect for forty years to come if they

will but return. We will fix it to suit them. One thing is certain,"

he went on: "even if the Confederacy should succeed with the other

Southern States, we will never give up Texas. With it we can fence in

the Confederacy, and whatever befalls we can never let Texas go--never!"

After much further conversation the President led Mr. S---- to the

window and pointed to the trees. "Do you see," he said, "how the buds

upon those boughs are swelling as they yield to the coming spring and

summer? So is it in regard to the matters of which we are speaking:

there is a Power mightier than we which, inevitable, irresistible, is

dealing with them. Upon that Power we also can afford to wait. But we

will never give up Texas, Mr. S----: never!"

Let it be added here, as casting light upon the characteristics of

Texas, that it was never conquered by the Federal forces. Although

attacked often and from almost every quarter, it invariably repelled

the assault. When it succumbed at last it was from within, and not

as the result of any victory achieved by Federal troops upon its own

soil. But all this is merely to show that, superior in many respects

to every other Southern State, the case of Texas was unique in almost

every point of view; and this is stated with reference to what is now

to follow.

When the rebellion began, General Sam Houston, who had been president

of Texas when it was a republic, was governor of the State. In common

with the overwhelming majority of the people, Houston was utterly

hostile to Secession. With them he knew too well what Texas had been

and how it had come into the Union. There was a certain grand inertia

of the great State which resisted the noisy efforts of South Carolina

to drag it out, as a stately ship resists, of itself and although

its crew be passive, the attempts of a little tug to tow it along.

Not one-fourth of the people of the State voted, when the test came,

for Secession, and no man opposed it more determinedly than did its

governor. If, like Texas among the States, he towered among men, almost

a giant in stature and breadth of person, like Texas also he was

peculiar every way. It required men of marked individuality to settle

the country, to wrest it from Mexico, to erect it into a republic; and

no Texan was more emphatically "himself and nobody else" than was the

ponderous chief magistrate. Manifold stories illustrative of this are

still afloat there: let one suffice, even if it shows also the weakness

of the man. One morning when he was president of the republic the

envoy from France called to confer with him upon an affair of critical

importance. The executive mansion was but a log-cabin boarding-house at

the time, and the only thing to be done was for the portly president

to promenade up and down the long porch in front of the building, the

envoy, who was the most polished and nervous of Frenchmen, walking by

his side. But a small nurse-girl was engaged in drawing a screaming

baby upon the porch in a roughly-constructed child's wagon. When

he passed it the president said, with the politeness which always

characterized him when anything female was in question, "Will you be so

kind as to roll your charge somewhere else?" The nurse merely stared

at him, and continued to drag the squalling infant up and down upon

the squeaking wheels, the president and the envoy conferring together

as well as they could as they walked. "My young friend," the former

remonstrated at last as he halted before the girl, "I will esteem it

a singular favor if you will go elsewhere." But it was little the

nurse cared for the affairs of empires, and she paid no attention

to the request. It so chanced that when the rival occupants of the

porch passed each other the next time it was opposite the steep steps

leading down into the yard, the Frenchman being upon that side. As the

president came upon the rolling nuisance, now noisier than before,

he whirled about. "I had rather," he shouted to the astonished girl,

his face ablaze, his arms extended, "meet all hell in harness, and be

dragged down the streets of the New Jerusalem by wild horses, than meet

your horrible cart!" and, glancing around for his companion, he saw

that in the violence of his explosion he had hurled the represented

majesty of France down the steps and into the dirt.

He was an older man when Jeff Davis came along trundling _his_

species of nuisance upon their common path, but he was no milder in

his denunciation. Morning, noon and night, in public addresses and

in private conversation, he left no shadow of doubt in the mind of

any as to his opinion of Secession and its certain result. "Texas

and the Federal government are like two noble mastiffs," he told the

people from the steps of the Capitol at Austin in the earliest days

of the rebellion, "and these miserable politicians are like little

curs snapping and snarling about them to provoke them to fight. When

the mastiffs are launched at last into bloody battle these wretched

curs, holding themselves carefully out of danger, will circle about

the big dogs which are tearing each other to pieces, with their shrill

bow-wow-wows." And the writer remembers how well the old hero imitated

as he said it, and with more accuracy than dignity, the vicious

feebleness of the querulous spaniels.

Nor was the governor backward in doing also what he could to save his

State from the coming chaos. A well-known and efficient lawyer of Texas

hastened to Washington and had an audience with President Buchanan at

the very outset of things, commissioned, doubtless, to do so by General

Houston. "Relieve the officer now in command of that department," he

urged upon Buchanan, "and appoint Houston in his place. Do that, do it

at once, and we can assure you that you need have no fear of seeing

Texas secede." The poor President shrank aghast from the proposition.

We know how clerical in appearance Mr. Buchanan was, especially in the

spotless whiteness of his ample necktie. "When I mentioned Houston to

him," the lawyer said afterward, "he turned as pale as his cravat."

What was to be done? Governor Houston demanded it of himself as he

sat and whittled shingles in his easy-chair at the executive office

in the basement of the Capitol. General Twiggs was in command of the

United States troops in that department, and they comprised one-fourth

of the entire army then at the disposal of the Federal government.

There were one hundred and twenty-one commissioned officers then

in Texas--three thousand troops in thirteen forts and ten camps,

including seven companies of the Third Infantry. At the general's

head-quarters in San Antonio were fifty-five thousand dollars in cash,

and thirty-five thousand stand of arms and seventy cannon within

reach, with horses, mules, ammunition, wagons, tents, in abundance.

In other words, General Twiggs, with a disciplined army and military

stores of the value of over three millions of dollars, was available

for resistance to Secession. But what about the officer in command?

When General Twiggs shortly before had gone on leave of absence to

Georgia, he had left Robert E. Lee in charge, remarking even at that

early date, "If Old Hickory were President he could hold things." But

Twiggs had returned, and Lee had left Texas, saying, "I am going to

Virginia to turn planter. There will be at least one soldier the less

to do the fighting." Could the governor rely upon General Twiggs?

Captain R.M. Potter of the army, then in Texas, assures the writer that

Twiggs did it merely as a ruse and to save time, but the governor had

received tidings from him two months before that he could rely upon

him. As it was, the United States troops were scattered six hundred

miles along the frontier, and something must be done, secretly and

instantly. Governor Houston knew that he could count upon many thousand

volunteers. And not upon men merely as Union men: throughout the State

were multitudes of those whose devotion to Houston was more almost of a

religious nature than a matter of politics. These "Houston men" would

have rallied to him rifle in hand, more or less indifferent to the

cause he espoused, so that if there was to be a fight, and Houston was

to command, he could have had plenty of soldiers, whoever and whatever

was to be fought for or against.

And so the old governor sat awaiting events, a King Canute upon the

seashore, and the ocean already lapping his feet. Almost every one

of the many papers of Texas was ablaze with the prairie-fires of

Secession. Everywhere the men were being rapidly organized into

companies, ladies were making and presenting banners, editors,

recruits, haranguing politicians rushing into the affair as purely from

sentimental considerations, and with as little sound consideration,

as the youngest and most frivolous of the excited beauties who were

decking out lovers and brothers to their death. But the Secession

convention assembled at Austin: how could the governor prevent it?

Resisting the importunities of inflamed, remonstrating, exasperated,

vituperative, threatening men, the old man sat in the executive

department silently whittling away, a cypress shingle in one hand, a

jack-knife in the other. The swarming politicians could not but revere

and be afraid of him. Was he not "Old Sam," "the hero of San Jacinto"?

He had been president of the republic, United States Senator, possible

President of the United States. He was, as has been said, a very large

man, of commanding aspect, and he threw his whole weight, so to speak,

into his detestation and denunciation of Jeff Davis and all his crew.

As he sat and whittled he could not but hear the uproar in the

legislative hall overhead in which the convention was assembled: the

vehement applause of clapping hands and stamping feet reached his ears,

even if he could not hear the eloquence which had aroused it. So far,

he had fired blank shot only from behind his entrenchments, but he

outnumbered--and all knew it--in his one person, and ten times over,

the throngs of brave but mistaken men discussing and rushing through

grandiloquent resolutions above, not a man of whom but was thinking

all along of the governor down stairs as of a sort of legitimate Guy

Fawkes who might at any moment blow their noisy parliament to the moon.

"What do you think Old Sam will do?" That was the question of the day

with them beyond every other. Alas! that was the conundrum which the

governor, ponder as he might, was so far unable to answer. He had

conquered and driven out the Mexicans; had sent the Texan soldiers home

with the one charge, "Go and plant corn;" had seen Texas grow into a

republic under his care; had rejoiced when he had helped place it in

the Union. Now the imperial State was in the act of being hurled into

what he confidently regarded as the most causeless of catastrophes;

but what could he do? That was the supreme question. "What can I do to

prevent it? What ought I to do, to-day and before it is too late?"

Early one morning a man entered the executive office, locked the door

behind him and walked up to the pondering governor, his felt hat in

his hand. It was not his name, but I will content myself with calling

him Jack Jones. You would not have looked at him a second time had

you passed him in the street, for he was merely a tall, pallid-faced,

pigeon-chested, stoop-shouldered victim, apparently, of consumption,

and as mild as could be desired in tone and manner. Governor Houston

knew him well, however--knew him so well that he gave him a cordial

reception and listened to him to the end as his visitor proceeded

to unfold his plans. They were exceedingly simple, and in substance

this: "I hate these scoundrels of the convention as much as you do,

governor, and you know it, and you know _me_! I have got eight hundred

men of the same stripe up in Burnet county. We have plenty of guns and

ammunition, and are more than ready. We can save Texas. Only say the

word, governor, and we will clean out the convention in twenty-four

hours. What do you say?"

The governor debated with himself as he sat. Suppose he consented.

There would be a fight, possibly a bloody massacre. Might not the

Secessionists call another convention to meet at Galveston, Houston,

somewhere else? In any case, war, civil war in its worst form, would

follow. Hat in hand, the messenger waited for his answer. "Thank you,

but not quite yet," the governor said. "Go back to Burnet county and

hold your men in readiness. When I send for you come, and come quick."

There was no time to be lost. "But these men: how am I to feed them

when they come?" the chief magistrate asked of himself.

"About two months before the passage of the Secession ordinance," said

the Mr. S---- to whom allusion has already been made, and in reluctant

answer to the questioning of the writer, "General Houston, Mrs. Houston

and some of their children drove out to my house in the country near

Austin, ostensibly upon a friendly visit. General Houston and myself

took seats on the porch, while the ladies retired to the parlor. After

some of the usual small-talk, the general remarked of the roses then

in bloom, 'I see you have a beautiful garden: let us take a walk among

them.' We did so, but soon took our seats in the arbor. There, after

pledging me to secrecy, he said, 'Although Mr. Lincoln is not yet

inaugurated, he has sent a Mr. Lander to me as an agent to assure me of

all the aid I need the day he takes office if I can but hold the State

until then. General Twiggs,'the governor added,'has agreed to do what

he can to help me. I have eight hundred men waiting to come at a word.

Volunteers will pour in. I am sure that I can, with the aid of General

Twiggs, hold Texas against any force the Confederacy can send. But my

men must be supplied with powder and lead, and must be fed. Above all,'

added the governor, 'they must have plenty of coffee. Can you undertake

the task? I am not going to rob the State treasury, but I pledge you

my honor as governor that you shall be paid in the end. Abundant

assurances have been made me from Washington that the money will be on

hand as soon as Lincoln is inaugurated, and no appropriation will be

necessary from the State.'

"The next day," continued Mr. S---- in narrating the facts to me, "I

saw the governor in his office. Locking himself with me into an inner

apartment, we discussed the whole matter, and I agreed to supply five

hundred thousand rations, and as many more as possible, the governor

insisting again and again upon there being, whatever else might be

lacking, an abundance of coffee. For these rations I was to be paid at

the rate of thirty cents each, and transportation. The governor then

wrote out the contract, spelling out every word aloud, according to his

habit, as he did so. I hastened away with the contract duly signed,

and, going down to Houston and Galveston, I purchased two hundred and

fifty-seven sacks of Rio coffee to begin with--all I could find--and

enough percussion-caps, bacon, rice and flour to meet the emergency

impending. Meanwhile, I could not but laugh at what seemed to me the

puerile efforts at fortification going on in Galveston;" and my friend

paused, as he told me the story yesterday, to unroll and put into my

hand the commission given him by the governor as quartermaster-general

upon his staff with the rank of colonel.

"In two weeks," continued Mr. S----, "I was back again, but the instant

the governor had locked me with him into his inner office he turned to

me with rage in his face. 'Sir,' he said to me in a manner and tone of

voice which I can never forget, 'Twiggs is a traitor!' Then he sank

into a chair, the tears trickling down his heroic countenance, and

sobbed like a child. He then clenched his fist and smote the table

with what seemed to be a suppressed curse, long and deep. After he had

somewhat recovered he repeated to me the message Captain Smith had

brought him from Twiggs. It was in such cautious language as to the

general's isolation and want of instructions from Washington that I

suggested to Governor Houston that possibly he misunderstood General

Twiggs. 'No, sir,' the governor exclaimed, again smiting the table with

his huge fist, 'there can be no mistake. Twiggs is a traitor! We are

to have a fearful civil war;' and he appealed to God for wisdom and

protection in a manner which touched me to the heart. In a few weeks

thereafter," added Mr. S----, "the ordinance of Secession was passed,

and Twiggs surrendered everything to a stageload of politicians and a

preconcerted show of a few men improvised as soldiers whom a corporal's

guard of loyal men could have easily dispersed if there had been any

one to give orders. About a year after this an ex-governor of Texas and

an ardent Secessionist whispered to me in the street, 'Take my advice

and destroy that contract with General Houston.' How it had become

known that there was such a contract is and for ever will be a mystery

to me. But the pity of the whole thing was that Governor Houston was

not the man he had once been--was too old."

Mr. S---- was perhaps the largest merchant at the capital, but the

choicest of his merchandise just then was seven tons of rifle-powder.

This was seized ere long by the Confederate authorities. When Mr. S----

protested against it and refused Confederate money in payment, the

State treasurer hastened to give him his price for the powder in silver

thalers which happened to be rusting in the vaults. Would the Federal

authorities have been as complaisant toward a man in their midst known

to be a rebel and who refused greenbacks? Surely, as in the hesitation

already alluded to of Twiggs and Lee, while the feelings of the leaders

were fired their judgment must to the last have remained but half

convinced as to the justice, and therefore ultimate success, of the

Confederate cause. Gallant as, in most instances, they were, they would

have struck more unhesitatingly, more vigorously, more victoriously,

had every man been able to put his entire self, brain and conscience as

well as heart, into the blow.

It was extremely little of themselves that the Union men of Texas

invested in their show of obedience to Secession when that was

required of them at last. How well the writer recalls the rueful

aspect of a body of these who, to save themselves from worse things,

had been organized into a military company! They comprised some of the

best citizens of Austin, but Falstaff himself did not have, morally

speaking, as forlorn a set of recruits when they formed into dismal

lines under the trees of Court-house Square. Every man had his weapons,

but they dispensed with music: gladly would they have marched and

countermarched without a flag also. But there were ladies ardent in the

cause of Secession who, unasked and with malicious haste, constructed

a particularly large and gorgeous Confederate flag for them. If it was

presented with enthusiasm, it was received by the dolorous warriors

in sepulchral silence, and the wheelings hither and thither of the

ununiformed heroes thereafter were more funereal, if possible, than

before. The one spark of hope in every bosom was that in some way

Governor Houston or somebody else might suddenly employ them against

the flag, more hateful to them than Fluellen's leek, which they were

constrained for the time to flaunt. "Never mind, men," a certain

Mr. O---- in their ranks whispered to them as they sadly trudged

along--"never you mind. Some day we may prove to be the _mucilage_

around which a Federal army will rally."

It so happened that the writer was about this time at the house of

Captain Whitely, a noble-hearted officer of the army who remained true

to the Union. It was in San Antonio, and one morning General Twiggs

drove up in his carriage and entered the parlor. He was a large and

unwieldy man, with an exceedingly red face, and he sat for a time

in sombre silence. "Whitely," he said at last, "what can I do? The

Southern people hate the North as Comanches do the whites, and the

North returns the compliment. Five times have I written to General

Scott, and not a word of instructions has he sent me. What can I do?"

Ignorant as the writer was of such matters, he easily conjectured,

what Twiggs must have well known, that all despatches to and fro were

intercepted. "Ah! what an opportunity!" he thought as he looked at

the hesitating man--"what an opportunity for you to act on your own

responsibility! You may become, if you do, as one of the immortals."

"You are my superior officer," was the only reply of Captain Whitely,

who knew what Twiggs had already determined to do, himself in

consequence thereof soon after a prisoner of war.

And so in a few days Governor Houston's fears were realized. Everything

was surrendered to the Confederacy. As Twiggs rode through the streets

of San Antonio with his disgraced army, many of them weeping as they

went, in such triumphal procession as Rome never knew in its worst

degradation, it was not for nothing that San Antonio had given a large

majority against Secession. An old watchmaker known by everybody

shouted as Twiggs went by, "Hurrah for General Hull!" But the people

did not recognize the name of the man who in other days had dishonored

America by his surrender. They should know what was meant. Mounting

upon a goods box, his white hair upon the breeze, and in a voice heard

by all, the aged patriot shouted, "Three cheers for Benedict Arnold!"

In due time, as we know, the name of Twiggs was struck from the Army

List as a coward and traitor, nor did he make a new name for himself

in the Confederate ranks. The paymaster did not hand over the military

chest to the new authorities. Was there not the half conviction as to

Secession in this also? He placed it upon the porch of his house, and

let them take it instead. I know not how true it is, but it is said

that Davis could not be induced afterward to give employment to this

man, whose name has slipped into oblivion from my memory also.

Somehow, there is always a flash of farce even in the agony of the

darkest tragedy. When Twiggs surrendered his stores he demanded that

somebody should receipt to him for the three millions of United

States property which he gave up. Three small politicians stepped

eagerly forward and signed the document. But Twiggs was not content.

"I must have a more responsible name," he said. And so a Mr. M----,

the wealthiest man in San Antonio, was brought in, and, "as a mere

matter of form" he was told, he attached his name beneath that of the

others. Afterward the possible import of what he had done began to

dawn upon Mr. M----. One day, as he walked the troubled streets of San

Antonio, he was observed to stop and soliloquize aloud. "A---- has

signed that paper," he said to himself. "A----? Yes, he is worth about

one thousand dollars. B----, he signed it, and he couldn't raise over

three thousand to save his life. C----? Heavens! he is not worth one

cent! Three millions of dollars! Good Lord! and _I_ am responsible for

it all!" and, slapping his hand upon his forehead, he rushed away to

digest the thing in private.

The hurly-burly is hushed into silence now. Good men and bad, gallant

but mistaken heroes, and those who faltered not in the fiercest blowing

of the terrible storm--the whole period has come and gone. Like the

sudden "northers" peculiar to Texas, the tempest broke upon it and

passed away, leaving its imperial expanse all the greener and more

fruitful, as if enriched by the blood of so many of its noblest sons.

But for my part, as I look back into the darkness of those days, the

central figure of them all is that of the old governor sitting in his

chair in the basement of the Capitol, the tumultuous convention in

session overhead, sorrowfully meditating what it were best to do. As he

sat a day came when the officer of the gathering up stairs summoned the

old man three times to come forward and take the oath of allegiance,

as governor, to the Confederacy. I remember as yesterday the call

thrice repeated--"Sam Houston! Sam Houston! Sam Houston!" but the man

sat silent, immovable, in his chair below, whittling steadily on. The

pert lieutenant-governor stepped at last with brisk willingness upon

the platform, and was sworn in to an official nothingness in Houston's

place. Very early next morning, when the old man went as usual to his

office, he found his seat occupied by his smirk successor, and there

was nothing for him to do but to abandon his last hope of help from any

quarter and retire. Withdrawing to his plantation, he died before the

war ended, a Union man still.

WILLIAM M. BAKER.

THE MISTAKES OF TWO PEOPLE.

It seemed an extraordinary chance which brought those two people

together upon that dirty little Neapolitan steamer. But then any

incident of our human lives, divorced from the chain of cause and

effect that has been forging since the world began, would seem

an extraordinary chance, just as this did, which really was not

extraordinary at all.

For the lady had been busy all winter in Rome copying in the Borghese

Gallery, and it was not until she had found herself almost alone among

the deserted rooms, whence all her companions of the year had fled

before fear of the fever, that she had also sought some place where

she could paint, and rest from painting when she would, the remainder

of the summer. This and a second-class railway-ticket were what had

brought her to Naples, where she had driven to the Mole and embarked

upon the little steamer just five minutes before the gentleman, who had

come from Rome in a first-class carriage, also stepped upon it.

His appearance there, just upon that day of all days, might be called

stranger than hers. For, really, there was no reason whatever for his

being there that sleepy midsummer day. Indeed, reason had nothing

whatever to do with it. It was brought about by something quite remote

from reason--by an indescribable longing, which was perhaps, however,

as unyielding a link in the chain of cause and effect--or of destiny,

let us say--as any more visible and tangible one.

These two people were not entirely strangers to each other. Fifteen

years before they had spent a summer together in an old farm-house far

away beyond where the sun would set this evening behind old Roman Baiæ.

That farm-house was wonderfully picturesque, although picturesqueness

had been none of its original builder's intention. It had been a sort

of manor-house, built by a blond and robust English family in memory

of the Elizabethan mansion in which, father and son and son's son,

they had thriven and decayed across the sea. Generations had come

and gone since then. The Tudor gables and overhanging stories, like

the Tudor nose in Westminster Abbey, had felt the tooth of time. The

nose is imperious still, although its royal end is broken off, and it

points heavenward with its regal pride not in the least abated with

its proportions. Unlike the Tudor nose, the Tudor gables had weakened,

and sunk and bulged in all sorts of picturesquely-pusillanimous lines

and curves under a soft veil of moss. The house had become a medley

of quaint humps and protuberances, huddled together without rhyme or

reason by the taste or needs of each succeeding heir. But, flooded and

dashed with blooming, radiant neglect, throttled with many-fingered

vines, the gray centre of a rainbow of wild brier, syringa, hollyhocks

and sunflowers, it was a delight to artistic eyes.

"It's only 'cos pa's enjoyed such pore health for long back, and we

bein' all girls, that the ole place looks so like creation," would

always say one of the "girls," thus apologetic of the dilapidation and

decay which were the chief means of the family's support. For never an

artist passed that way that he did not stay his steps and beg to be

sheltered by that quaint old roof for at least a day or two. And when,

gone hence, the strolling artist would sing of the idyllic nook he had

found in a crescent of hills by the sea, where heaven came down to

earth and board was but two dollars a week, others of his kind would be

sure to be lured by echo of his strain to the same spot.

Thus every summer for three years the house had been full of boarders.

Its owners gained thus the means to live during all the year, and also

were able to secure a reservoir of gossip and tittle-tattle from which

to draw refreshing streams during all the arid days between October's

late dahlias and the earliest roses of June.

The two people upon the Neapolitan steamer had met for the first

time in the great dining-room one noon of June. It was at a farmer's

dinner of beef, potatoes and dandelion-greens, finished with a sort

of machicolated decoration of square pieces of rhubarb pie set beside

each plate in saucers--nicked saucers, whereon indigo mandarins floated

airily over sky-blue hills on their pious way from one indigo pagoda

to another. Dancing vines at the open windows spread quaint, shifting

embroidery over the coarse tablecloth, yellow walls and unpainted

floor. The drowsy hum of bees was heard above the iron clatter of

knives and forks. Sweet incense of myriad rose-censers floated above

the vulgar odors of the meal, and the open doorway with its flat white

doorstone was a picture-frame sculptured in foliage and bloom around a

foreground of wild garden, of black sea-weed and sea-shell, roughened

rocks, and then a borderless stretch of blue glittering sea and sky.

There were half a dozen men and women around the table, who chanced at

the moment the new boarder appeared to be elevating half a dozen noses

in the air before the alkaline fumes of the hot biscuits.

She was rather a pretty little thing, with blue eyes, a collar all

awry, and the headless, leafless stalks of what had once been red roses

standing up valiantly in her brown hair.

"What a flutter-budget!" he thought as he saw by the swift, birdlike

motion of her head that indeed flowers must needs have more than

flower-like frames to remain long undecapitated amid all that

breeziness.

And indeed "flutter-budget" was not amiss as a descriptive word for her

who sang oftener than she spoke, because it was her nature to, and who

danced more naturally than she walked, because God had made her so.

It was rather ridiculous to think of her painting pictures. One

could scarcely imagine her doing anything that required a moment's

repose, and therefore was not unnatural the remark whispered by the

monochromatic Miss Grey into the ear of the water-colored Miss Bray as

the newcomer floated to her seat: "_She_ paint! Mmnph! I wouldn't trust

her to paint a yellow dog!"

Miss Grey, by the by, didn't paint: she only taught Art in five lessons

at seventy-five cents a lesson.

But the monochromatic maiden was right. Annie Deane would have made

a queer mess of painting a yellow dog. But if one chose to give her

an order for a flower-piece, then would be seen how she rivalled

the pearly finish of Nature--how she gathered the rare tints, the

marvellous transparencies and shadows, the breath-broken dewiness,

almost even the fragrance of field and garden favorites, upon her

paper. Thus in time even the yellow-dog sceptic was brought to realize

that there are artistic triumphs even for one who quails and cowers

before the ochreous canine.

"Shall I help you to some more of the greens?" were his first words to

her, seeing her indigo mandarins loom up dimly from her nearly empty

plate.

"No, thank you, but I will trouble you for the vinegar," were her first

words to him.

There was nothing novel or suggestive in this, was there? Is there

often anything novel or suggestive in the first greetings we exchange

as we float upon the sea of life with those who hereafter will cause

our wreck or share it?

These two people, He and She, became great friends that summer.

Her fresh, blithe nature was pleasant to him, although, it may be

confessed, its manifestations were sometimes confusing. He was of

rather elephantine temperament, as he was also heroic of stature and

handsome. He was so unswift of speech and motion that she could dance

around him a dozen times before he could say "Jack Robinson;" which, by

the way, he never did say. She often got sadly in the way of his slow,

conscientious sketching from Nature, but he did not complain, for she

was pleasant, he thought, to look upon, even though his palette dried

and the cloud-shadow on hill and sea floated miles away while he did

so.

It was not a sentimental relation that grew up between them. How could

it be when everybody said there was "no sentiment in Ben Shaw, or even

in his pictures"? They were never known to raise any clamor concerning

their "kinship of souls" and all the usual sentimental etcetera. They

liked each other, and took "solid comfort" in the companionship that

made that summer's sketching so much pleasanter than had sketching ever

been for either of them before. That was all.

It was not very long before he very naturally took the place of teacher

and she of pupil, for it was an open secret that she aspired to higher

art than still life, while he, although not six months her senior,

had been longer a student than she. Simpletons that they both were,

they grappled audaciously with the purple, gold-filtered, ever-elusive

and brooding mystery of the distant hills, and struggled with the

infinite suggestiveness of the great, awful sea. They came home every

night from both grapple and struggle with canvases as expressive of

the mighty influences they had labored with as a child's fairy-tale

hints at the divine splendor of mystery of the book of Revelation, and

sat down to their supper of cold beef and doughnuts believing they

feasted on ambrosia and nectar, and lived as divinely as were those

not Massachusetts but Thessalian hills. How insolent is youth, and how

foolish, to us who have outlived it!

Unsymmetrical as this friendship was--that is, so dwarfed on the

sentimental side--there was one of those two silly mortals who thus

fooled themselves with the fancy that this was Olympus and their green

apple-sauce honey of Hymettus who would not have changed places with

the divinest divinity of all the immortal host.

As one moon after another waxed baby-faced and then pined away to a

wan shadow the friends became more inseparable than ever. And, behold!

seeing these things, all the masculine boarders and the "girls" of the

manor-house looked at each other obliquely with an expression that

consorts best with paganism and pig-tails, while the lady-boarders

smiled with that exasperating significance which when given to one's

own affairs makes one yearn for the smiler's scalp. But in spite of

these oblique glances and significant smiles, in spite of everything

indicative of the contrary, they were not an atom in love with each

other.

Unless they both of them fibbed! Which young people in their

circumstances were never known to do.

Nevertheless, one day Annie Deane was sitting in an embrasured window

writing, school-girl fashion, upon an atlas in her lap. She wore a blue

gingham dress in the style of a loose blouse. The skirt was short, and

had no scruples about revealing two nicely-booted feet crossed one over

the other, the toe of one pointing to the zenith, the other toward the

coast of Europe. This was her sketching-costume, and she had not found

time to change it for the more conventional one in which she usually

took tea, as she was hurrying to finish a letter in time for the

butcher, who would soon pass by on his return from Mansfield, to take

to the post-office at Baysville.

The room was spacious, and tried its best to be gloomy. The canopied

bed against the wall was hung with funereal drapery, and reminded one

somehow of a _Cinque-cento_ tomb. When an occupant was extended there

the resemblance could not but be dolorously striking. A tremendous old

chest of drawers opposite, mighty among furniture as Goliath among men,

hung its brass rings massively downward; and I was forcibly reminded

of that chest of drawers the other day when I saw how the sainted dead

of imperial Rome were packed away in the Catacombs of St. Calixtus.

Imagine a chest of drawers which gives an impression that upon pulling

its brass rings one will see, not dainty garments frothy with lace and

ruffles, but a spectacle of rich animal mould and white holy bones!

There were one or two dignified old chairs--judicial, majestic chairs,

which evidently imagined that they impressed the vulgar radicals

of this New World with the idea that in their own country they had

been thrones or something of that sort. It was a most dignified and

impressive room in spite of its rag carpet, its cane-seated rockers,

camp-stools, books, the sketches pinned upon the walls, flowers, and

all the odds and ends of feminine finery that betrayed the levity

of its modern habit. That is, perhaps one might better say it would

have been dignified and impressive had one ever been able to see it

otherwise than as merely an architectural background, like the chairs

behind Giovanni Bellini's gracious Madonnas, to the pretty picture of

youth and content writing there by the seaward window. Everybody always

spoke of Annie Deane as "little," although she was five feet four in

her stockings. Everybody always ran away with the impression--and

treated her accordingly--that she was very young, although she had

seen every day of twenty-five years. "I was born young, and have never

learned much of anything since," she would laughingly say when somebody

had called her "child" and advised her about her manners.

She _was_ a child spiritually, and it certainly seemed as if she would

never be spiritually grown up. Her father had died at sixty, so springy

of step, so airy of movement, so jaunty, so natty, so nice in his No.

3 gaiters and his nobby hats, that to see him ten paces off one would

have sworn he had not twenty years upon his canary-bird head. Annie was

like him, and her head swung and swayed, fluttered and tiptilted on its

graceful neck, as much as his had done as a young canary-bird's ways

are like an old one's.

"Ef the air of that girl ain't enough to make a hoss larf!" said,

with edifying perseverance, the youngest and burnt-umberest of the

burnt-umber maidens with whom they boarded.

Miss Roberta Editha was sentimental and thirty-five. She pressed a

vision of beauty to her virginal breast. Years before she had cut

from some illustrated paper a very pretty picture representing some

strolling actor who played Hamlet and Claude Melnotte upon the boards

of rural theatres. It had miraculously large eyes, a small mouth with

downward curves, and flat rings of hair upon its pallid brow. Its air

was generally cankered and worm-eaten, but Miss Roberta ("Old Bob,"

some of the graceless artists called her behind her back) interpreted

that air as expressive of a soul which found this life of too rank and

coarse a flavor for its daily food. She had cut out this woodcut, and

had worn it for years in a massive heirloom locket around her long,

brown neck.

It was the Ideal of her Yearning Soul. "Never till I meet a Being like

this will I give my heart," she had said, now these many years. Once

she thought she had met that Being: it was the natty clerk who sold her

calico and clothes-pins at Mansfield. But when that mercenary Hylas

married a Baysville widow with money she wept a while, and then saw

clearly through her tears that the deceiver looked not in the least

like a Being, but only like a very commonplace man. Once again it was

an artist who had boarded with them a summer, and whose red hair fell

over his rosy brow in a manner that indicated a possible Being. But it

turned out that this artist was married and the father of a thriving

family; whereupon he too faded out of Roberta Editha's ideal world into

the prosaic region where are not Beings, but only men and women. After

that it was several artists, all of whom in turn had died, under some

blight, out from the thoughts of the burnt-umber maiden. Latterly she

had been bending soulful eyes upon Ben Shaw, sure that at last in his

lineaments she could trace the adored image. Ben's eyes were neither

miraculously large nor superlatively dark: neither had he a small mouth

with downward curves. He was blond and robust, inclined to be rather

high-colored, especially after dinner, which proved his digestion

defective or that appetite outran it; but, setting such little

discrepancies aside, she was sure her Ideal was there.

But while Roberta Editha described Annie Deane's airy manners in such

unflattering terms, it is more than probable that Ben Shaw would be

saying to the latter at that very moment, "Never lose your youthful

nature, and always preserve your young ways, Annie: they are your

greatest charm." For this was a habit with Ben Shaw.

She was smiling and bridling now as she wrote by the seaward window,

although she must have known that nothing could see her save that

turquoise crescent of sea, the blue arch of the sky and the swaying

rose-globes and leaves that shadowed her paper. She could not even

dip her pen into the ink like anybody else, but must needs poise over

it for a breezy instant, just as a humming-bird flutters over honeyed

flowers.

She had just written these words: "Truly, mamma dear, he has never said

a word of love to me, and yet, strange as it may seem, I am as sure

that he loves me as--"

A voice called up from the southern-wood thicket under her window,

where somebody, rubicund with stooping, was picking burdock-burrs from

off his trousers' legs, "Miss Deane, will you go with me to see the

sunset from Castle Rock? We can be home in time for supper."

When the butcher rattled by in company with a staring calf's head

and quivering pig's liver, nobody hailed him from the Tudor mansion.

Roberta Editha was kneading bread on top of a flour-barrel in the

buttery; Ethelberta was picking over currants on the back doorstep;

and Miss Bray stood a little way off toward the lichen-grown stone

wall blocking in her Antignone wailing over Polynices. Miss Bray had

chosen the elder and more commonplace Ethelberta for her suggestion of

a position, rather than the younger and more poetic Roberta Editha, for

the simple reason that the former's attitude over her currants was more

suggestive of an heroic corpse on her knees and less of a chastised

infant than Roberta's would be under any circumstances.

Rowena, the eldest of the "girls," was busy at that moment, if the

truth must be told, in looking to see if any of the boarders had

carelessly left bureau-drawers or writing-desks unlocked. The boarders

were all absent upon hill or shore, the invalid father slept in his

chair, the mother in Baysville cemetery, and the Tudor mansion was

still.

On a monster rock a mile or more away two figures made silhouettes

against the jewelled sunset.

"Annie," said one of the figures, "I did not wish to make a

sensation by telling it first at the supper-table, and I want _your_

congratulations before any others. I have sold my _Esmeralda_. I go to

Boston to-morrow, and shall sail for Europe next week."

Her sight was darkened, her heart stood still. Life seemed to die out

of her with one horrible pang. Nevertheless, in an instant her head

tiptilted, and she twittered her congratulations as airily as if the

whole universe had burst into a sudden marvel of bloom and beauty and

she were the first humming-bird born into it.

"Always keep your young nature and preserve your young ways, Annie," he

said admiringly: "they are your greatest charm."

Then they turned and walked supperward together.

* * * * *

The Neapolitan steamer was greasy and smelled of garlic and bitumen.

The red-shirted sailors were singing "Santa Lucia" from high and low,

and a stalwart contadina was accompanying them with her tambourine down

in the third-class place. Very few passengers were scattered about the

deck, and the general speech was of the Blue Grotto. Evidently, of the

first-class passengers only two were making more than an excursion from

Naples, the excursionists intending to return with the steamer after a

peep into the famous cave.

One of these two persons was rather a remarkable-looking lady. She wore

a jaunty hat many years too young for the face: it did _not_ shade.

Her coquettish jacket and short skirt made her from a distance--a very

long one--seem like a girl of eighteen. She wore her hair in a girlish

braid--alas, woefully faded! She was airy of motion and coquettish of

gesture, evidently one of those sad women who, burying their heads from

the sight of the passing years, fancy that Time forgets to touch them.

The other person was a handsome gentleman of more than forty. The

Hyperion curls had been thicker on his brow than now, and his shadow

more slender, but it by no means follows that he was as bald as

Cæsar or as bulky as the Belvidere Torso. He was dressed in elegant

travelling costume, and, as well-dressed men must be, with coat

evidently of London make and trousers Parisian.

As he dropped a handsome travelling-satchel on the coal-flecked seat

beside the lady's color-box he chanced to meet her eye. It was a

curious meeting of eyes that had last met so differently. He had only

time to commune with his secret soul, "What a larky old girl!" when a

look of half-startled recognition came into his face.

It was reflected in hers, and a humming-bird tremor passed over her.

"Was this not formerly Miss Deane?" he asked.

"It _is_ Miss Deane, Mr. Shaw," twittered the lady, with head tiptilted

like a frosted flower.

Alas! what a tyrant is that power which makes and moulds us like

potter's clay to her own patterns, whether of glory or shame, and whom

we call Nature!--a tyrant which forms us into that which we would cry

and pray not to be were there any ear to be moved by our beseeching.

Alas, poor Annie! It was not her fault that Nature took a canary-bird

for her model. And it is the fault of none of us that the graces of our

youth become grotesquenesses with our forties.

"Who would ever have dreamed of our meeting here? And to think you

are still Miss Deane!" he exclaimed with obtuseness pre-eminently

masculine. "But you are very pale: does the motion of the steamer make

you ill?"

Nearer and nearer came the opalescent isle, drawn like a jewelled

chariot by thousands of blue coursers with foaming mouths.

After fifteen minutes or so of vague reminiscences and comparisons of

experiences of travel the gentleman seemed to fall into a brown study

and to become almost rudely oblivious of his companion's presence. His

eyes were riveted upon the island with a strange intensity. Could the

airy little old maid by his side have heard the beating of the heart

in that broad bachelor bosom, she would have been astonished, as would

almost anybody else, to hear its sentimental music. "At last, after

all these cruel years!" was its refrain.

Cruelty was evidently a discipline that did not impoverish his physical

system.

Upon the beach was a scene of uproar and confusion. Brown-faced

peasant-girls, with dark eyes like wild sylvan creatures, thrust

wilted flowers into the travellers' hands and clamored for _soldi_.

Fisher-boys, almost as naked as bronze cupids, yelled offers to guide

anybody and everybody up the heights to the village. Bright-shirted

and bare-legged boatmen, with Indian locks and huge gold crescents in

their ears, bellowed to each other, while weatherbeaten crones screamed

till they were hoarse that here were the saddled donkeys on which _i

signori_ could ride.

Mr. Shaw assisted Miss Deane--whom, until he saw her nearly pulled in

pieces between two donkey-women, he had quite forgotten--upon one of

the most docile-looking of the animals.

She mounted with such thistledown sprightliness that she nearly went

over the saddle and down on the other side. He looked astonished as she

fluttered above his hat, and then--forgot her.

If any one find this portly bachelor discourteous and basely recreant

to certain of the best memories of his manhood, let that one stop a

moment and think. This frisky lady, who always seemed carrying on a

most desperate flirtation with some invisible adorer, was certainly not

the Annie of his summer in the Tudor mansion. She was spiritually not a

day older than Annie, but her face was very much older; and what, after

all, is the same soul to us if the casket is strange? What is a young

face grown old to us who knew its youth and have not seen its changing?

Moreover, that perennial youth of hers, touching and sad as it may

possibly seem when thought about, would have been the object of your

ridicule could you have seen it face to face.

Much as we may prate of natures ever young, there is no more melancholy

sight in the world than soul and body that miss step with each other in

this heavy and forced march called Life. Why should we seek to keep our

hearts young, we who must die? For unto youth or youthfulness what is

death but darkness and night at noonday?

Then another thing to excuse Mr. Shaw's apparent neglect: he was

approaching a crisis of his own life, and what are the convulsions of a

universe compared to those quicker heart-beats which we call Crises in

our little lives?

After assisting Miss Deane he mounted another donkey, and rode, not

exactly like paladin of old, but like a portly and absent-minded modern

tourist, silently by her side up the steep path, whither their luggage

followed them upon the heads of women.

Between their donkeys strode a bare-legged woman in a ragged petticoat.

She was bronzed and wrinkled, with straggling hair thrust through with

a silver arrow, and coarse brown chemise falling widely open over an

unlovely neck and breast. She uttered many a strident yell, accentuated

by heavy thwacks of her club upon her donkeys' flanks. She was dirty,

wild-eyed and hideous. It were as difficult to imagine her comely

and young as to believe this little dried-up old girl had not been a

flirting old maid from her cradle.

Ah, but Nature is cruel to woman! Freshness and beauty of flesh are

hers, not that she may rejoice in her own beauty and freshness, but

that she may become the mother of men. Bearing children, in the bearing

dies one beauty and charm after another, just as trees die, leaf

by leaf, which have enriched the world by their allotted harvests.

Childless, her beauty and freshness die of her unfruitfulness, while

Nature's pet offspring, man, waxes strong and proud years after all her

leaves have fallen.

Look at these three people: the handsome and robust bachelor was the

oldest of them all.

"What a capital model she would make for an Erinnys hunting Orestes to

his fate!" thought Miss Deane.

She was bumping up and down in her saddle like a rubber ball.

Nevertheless, in the pauses of those bumps she had time enough to grow

very angry at something she saw. She turned a regular Spitzenberg red

as she detected the searching, passionate gaze her companion bent

upon every pretty islander they met. She saw the black-eyed girl with

a huge bundle of fagots on her head, the brown-eyed one with immense

building-timbers pressing down her curly locks, the blue-eyed one with

copper water-jar gleaming goldenly over her dagger-thrust braids, smile

significantly after coquettishly returning his gaze.

They are not so guileless as one might think, those picturesque,

brown-skinned island-girls. Too many foreign artists have come this

way, and too many strong-limbed, full-chested girls have become first

their models, then mothers of their children, and then their wedded

wives, not now-a-days to look upon every gazing _forestiere_ as a

possible husband, or at least lover.

Yet is it true that not one of them dreamed of the feeling beneath that

immaculately-laundried shirt-bosom as the wearer turned away from them,

one girl after another. Why should they, forsooth? Had not even Ben

Shaw's own friends always declared there was no sentiment in him, or

even in his pictures?

At one of her donkeys' stumbles over the lava-stones the driver yelled

so horribly in Miss Deane's ears that that lady's discomfort puckered

her face up like a frozen apple.

Mr. Shaw saw it. "By Jove!" he remarked to his donkey, who laid back

its ears and pretended to understand English, "I must have been very

veally ever to find that face pretty! But there's one thing sure: she

has taken on a thousand girlish airs and graces with every year she has

lived since then."

Poor Annie! Not an air or a grace had she more than fifteen years

before. And how was she to know that she was too old for a girl's ways,

she who had never ceased to be a girl to become wife and mother?

Quoth Mr. Shaw to the driver, "My good woman, if you will drive these

beasts with less noise it will be better for your _buona mancia_."

The "good woman" stared. She had done a good deal of staring since they

left the beach far down below. Her eyes in this moment looked out

fiercer than ever from the bed of wrinkles folded about them by many a

tropical sun and scorching sirocco. "Has the signor ever been upon the

island before?" she asked a moment later.

"Si, madre mia: I was here one summer several years ago. I lived in

yonder palm-shaded house facing toward Sicily. I painted pictures

here. Afterward I went away to my own country." Then he added, with

melancholy intonation, half under his breath, "I ought to have returned

long ago: I have come only to-day."

Miss Deane was looking over the tops of lava-walls that narrowed in

their climbing way. She saw pale-green vineyards changing color and

trembling in the sea air like a maiden under her lover's first kiss.

Gloomy stone-pines guarded the hills like eternal sentinels. Through

dim gray-green olive-thickets houses that seemed of alabaster shimmered

and shone in the sunshine.

They had now climbed so high up the orange- and lemon-flecked sides of

the island that Vesuvius yonder seemed to sink low and slumberously

upon the bosom of the radiant bay, while Naples across the little

stretch of sea showed vaguely white in the golden distance, scarcely

more real than a city sculptured in snow beneath an August sun. Up from

vineyard and thicket, down from the village and the cactus-pencilled

heights beyond, came the long-drawn, melancholy wail which is the

islander's song at his labor, but which is weird and mournful enough to

be the swan-song of a parting soul to its mate.

She was aroused from her artistic dreaminess by the croaking of a voice

broken by years of vociferous yellings: "Dio mio! si: you painted

Antonia Pisano. Yes, yes, I remember. You painted her over on yonder

cliff, from whence she watched the barca of her lover Giuseppe gone

fishing for coral over on the African coast. You called the picture

_Good-bye, Sweetheart_. Si, I remember. You were handsomer than you

are now, and your shoulders were not so broad. There were patches all

over your velveteen blouse, and you remained here after all the other

foreign artists were gone, because the money came not with which you

must pay Giaccomo for the macaroni you had eaten for months, and the

barber Angelo in the piazza for the canvases and colors you had used in

painting Antonia all the months of that summer. Si, si, I remember."

The handsome bachelor looked distressed at the coarsely-vivid realism

with which the woman pictured that most idyllic summer of his life.

Miss Deane considerately pretended not to have heard, and kept her blue

eyes vaguely set in the direction of the dread volcano dreaming in the

arms of the bay. But she had mistaken the cause of her countryman's

embarrassment. And who would not have done so, believing as all the

world does that romance and robustness mate not together?

"Yes, I was very poor in those days. Many and many a dinner did I go

without, that I might buy a new kerchief for Antonia or send to Naples

for another string of beads for her neck. Those patches betrayed

only half my poverty, for nobody knew that I put them there myself

to save the few soldi a seamstress would demand, that I might give

Antonia another festa and worship her wild grace as she danced the

tarantella and rattled her castanets upon the moonlighted roof of some

fisher-friend's house."

He seemed to address Miss Deane, for he spoke in English. She, in

common politeness, could not do less than say, "Indeed! And who was

Antonia?"

"She is the loveliest creature on the island, and as good as she is

beautiful. She came as straight from the heart of Nature as a flower

or a bird's song. Neither poetry nor painting could ever grasp the

freshness of her wild sweetness: one must see her to know the abject

poverty of their highest efforts."

To hear such adolescent rubbish from middle-aged lips what sensible

mortal would not have giggled in his sleeve?

Strangely enough, it was the donkey-woman who proved her good sense and

surprised them both not only by laughing discordantly aloud, but by

speaking in very broken but intelligible English: "Si, si, I remember.

And why have you come back to the island, signor?"

Actually, the bachelor blushed. "To marry Antonia," he said as

bashfully as if he weighed one hundred instead of two hundred and

twenty pounds, "and to remain on this savagely-beautiful isle all the

rest of my life."

This he had said in Italian. But he continued, half musingly, in his

mother tongue: "I could not take her away with me _then_, even though

I loved her with all my heart and she was willing to share my poverty.

I had not the heart to see her pine and pale in narrow city streets. I

knew that she was a wild flower that would lose fragrance and beauty,

would die, if transplanted from its native soil. I went away to earn

money enough that I might come back and live with my darling where only

she could live at her best. I have worked hard for her in all these

years. I know I ought to have come sooner, but it insensibly grew a

habit with me each year to wait yet one year more, that I might come to

her a little richer. But I have come at last. I have sent her letters

and presents each year, and she has written me often through some

amanuensis, for she cannot write herself; and I am come to her able to

say truly that she is the only woman I ever loved, or ever imagined

myself to have loved, in all my life."

How little that man dreamed who heard him say this--that one heard him

who for fifteen long years had guarded in the purest crystal of her

memory the belief, "though all things fade and die, and even he forget

me, yet _once_ he loved me"! This to her, the faded, slight little

old maid, thumping up and down on her donkey like a Neapolitan girl's

fist on her tambourine, whose crystal-guarded treasure turned to dust

before her eyes, and who knew thus for the first time that it was but a

spurious treasure she had guarded since that summer by the sea!

She seemed somehow much smaller and paler, more faded and wrinkled,

than before, when the donkey-woman laughed again. That unlovely

creature said, with witch-like laughter, "You told Antonia that you

loved her better than Giuseppe ever could--that you would marry her and

make her a signora who should wear a gold ring and have shoes for every

day. You went away saying that you would come back when you had sold

your pictures. You have not come back until to-day, and you come back

to laugh at poor Antonia for being such a fool as to believe a foreign

signor would tell the truth to an island-girl."

She gave a thundering thwack upon the donkeys' flanks as the party

rushed across the tiny lava-paved piazza where all the island was

gathered to see the new arrivals pass on through a dusky-arched street

to the albergo-door.

The cook, chambermaid, landlord, facchino and landlady rushed to bid

the travellers welcome in island fashion. The landlord was barefooted;

the landlady was the fruitful bough from which hung an apple-shaped

infant; the cook, chambermaid and facchino were each armed with

the insignia of their different professions--stewpan, broom and

blacking-brush.

Returning their salutations, the gentleman and lady descended from

their steeds. Mr. Shaw turned to pay the donkey-woman for her services.

And, behold! she lifted up once more that hoarse, broken voice to croak

with frightful glee, "Make it a good buona mancia, Signor Ben, for the

sake of old times. It was Giuseppe who answered your letters: I am

Antonia his wife, mother of his ten children. It should be a good, a

brave buona mancia that I did not wait for you--not thirteen years, not

even six months, only till Giuseppe came home from his coral-fishing."

Till her dying day the little old maid will never forget the look

that settled upon his face after the first paralyzed moment in which

he realized the woman's meaning. It was such a look that she hastily

averted her eyes and tremblingly followed the chambermaid up the wide

stone stairs.

She never saw him afterward, for he left the island that same evening.

But she heard of him only last summer. He has married a sprightly girl

of eighteen, and has some renown in his own country--that of being

the heaviest eater, sleeper, talker and _sitter_ of the Lotus Club.

As his friends always said, he has no sentiment, even in his pictures.

As for Miss Deane, she is no older now than then. The volatile drops in

her blood effervesce as of old, and her flirtation is as desperate with

that invisible adorer as if she were twenty instead of--more.

But it is true that sometimes, at long intervals, she takes a bit of

yellow paper from a secret place, and her spectacles grow dim (she

wears them only in private) as she reads, in a feminine hand that seems

to skip and chipper all over the page, "Truly, mamma dear, he has

never said a word of love to me, and yet, strange as it may seem, I

am as sure that he loves me as--" Then she usually giggles, in queer,

mirthless fashion, as she chirrups, "What a ridiculous little goosie

I was!" before she folds the paper away for another long repose,

readjusts her coquettish but scanty frizzes, and goes down stairs again

to her invisible adorer and her perpetual flirtation.

And nobody hears the wail in her foolish old-young heart as she goes:

"Ah, why might it not have been?"

Alas! why not?

For then she might have been less lively, and he less dead, both grown

side by side into richer, fuller, sweeter ripeness for the great

harvester whom we call Death.

MARGARET BERTHA WRIGHT.

LIMOGES, AND ITS PORCELAIN.

The traveller who, leaving Paris by express at 10 A.M., reaches the

Orleans dépôt at Limoges at six in the evening, will see spacious

boulevards, imposing buildings and a general air of stateliness and

pretension, recalling the metropolis he left behind him in the morning.

His omnibus will whisk him through streets crowded with promenaders, a

picturesque panorama of well-dressed people, with a generous sprinkling

of the light-blue jackets of the chasseurs, the gleaming helmets of the

dragoons, the red kepis of the infantry, the broad-brimmed hats and

sable mantles of the priesthood and the red-and-orange head-kerchiefs

of the working-women. If it be late in the season and the days are

short, he will see at every turn cafés ablaze with light, and the wide

sidewalks before them lined with tables at which, cool as it may be,

crowds of loungers are seated sipping bier, absinthe or eau sucrée.

But, looking up the dingy side-streets, here and there he may detect,

by the lines of flickering, straggling gas-lights, glimpses of another

Limoges--glimpses of steep streets ending in stairways; of narrow and

darkened passages where the opposite buildings nod to each other from

across the street until they all but touch; of courts where curious

little enshrined images of the Madonna and the saints look down from

niches in the corners, and where heads are peeping out from every

window to catch a whiff of evening air; and of sombre alleys, each

lighted by a single lamp suspended midway, under the uncertain rays

of which swarms of children and dogs are vying to awaken the loudest

echoes.

A great conflagration devastated Limoges in 1865, but it proved to

that city what our political economists would have us believe the

national debt has been to the United States--a blessing in disguise.

Incident to the rebuilding of the burnt quarter a spirit of general

renovation seems to have crept over the minds of the city fathers, and

from that time to the present the work of tearing down old buildings

and widening or straightening narrow or crooked streets has been

pushed forward to such a degree that were some Limousin Rip Van

Winkle, after a twenty years' slumber in the adjacent mountains, to

happen in suddenly upon the haunts of his childhood, he would open

his eyes as wide as did his Knickerbocker namesake. But there are

some things that no amount of outlay or engineering can accomplish;

and though many costly improvements have been made in modernizing

Limoges and bringing it up to a realizing sense of its dignity as the

great porcelain-manufacturing city of Europe, there are yet within its

walls some streets so crooked that nothing short of total demolition

will ever straighten them, and others so steep and rocky that enough

nitro-glycerine to shake down a hundred neighboring houses would have

to be employed to level them. So it has come to be acknowledged that,

with all the goodwill in the world for putting on modern airs, there

are tumble-down, straggling, rickety relics of the past in Limoges

which no amount of municipal resolutions or appropriations--nothing, in

fact, but an earthquake--can ever remove. Every lover of the antique

and quaint will fervently pray that no such disaster may ever come to

efface the curious reminders of a time gone by.

For they are the pages upon which successive centuries have left their

imprints. Here, for instance, is a street called the Rue du Consulat.

By a happy coincidence, the United States consular office fronts upon

it, but let not the patriotic American flatter himself that the street

thence derives its name. Here lived one of the Roman proconsuls, and

here stood the building in which the governors of the city, formerly

known as "consuls," held their sessions. In this simple fact we

discover a suggestion of the impress left by the domination of the

Romans. But on their heels, in turn, came the Visigoths; then Clovis,

who made Limoges one of his first conquests; and then the Saracens, who

barely set foot on the soil ere Charles Martel's victory at Poitiers

compelled them to leave. Some fragmentary bands, however, remained

in the province, and one of them founded the neighboring city of

Eymontiers, where buildings of Arabic architecture are still standing.

The Moors, surging northward from Spain, have left their impress in

these fertile valleys that border the Vienne--an impress everywhere

visible in the olive complexions and the costumes of the people, and

audible in their language. The ethnologist is astonished at discovering

so far to the North all the characteristics of a Spanish population.

On fair-days, when the peasantry from a wide circuit are gathered on

the Champ de Foires, one hears spoken a dialect incomprehensible to

ordinary Frenchmen. It is a patois, a rolling, mellifluous brogue, much

resembling the Gascon or the tongue spoken in the Basque provinces

among the Pyrenees. Nor are the country-people the sole monopolists

of this singular accent: the talk of most of the town-people is more

or less tinctured with it. It is to the pure French what a good sweet

Irish brogue is to the pure English. It is "Gascon"--and, after all,

that is the only word that describes it--and you hear it spoken at

every corner in Limoges, just as you meet everywhere swarthy faces,

lustrous black eyes, raven hair and a marked dominance of the Southern

type.

Limoges has had many masters. Charlemagne made a present of it to

his son, Louis le Débonnaire. On another occasion, though the place

is nearly two hundred miles inland, the Norman pirates came marching

in and sacked it utterly. Louis the Stammerer, Carloman and Eudes

were each in turn here crowned king of Aquitaine, and the last in 876

established the line of viscounts of Limoges, the last of whom, Henry

of Navarre, reunited the domain to the crown of France. These viscounts

inhabited from the thirteenth century the castle of Chalusset, about

ten miles distant from the city. Its ruins are still interesting, and

are a favorite resort for pleasure-parties. But still more frequently

visited are the ruins of the castle of Chalus or Chabrol, where

Richard C[oe]ur de Lion fell in 1199. A railway-ride of an hour to

Bussière-Galand, and another hour by stage, bring the visitor there.

The very spot on which Richard fell is pointed out, and even at

this late day it is proposed to erect there a monument bearing this

inscription:

ANNO DOMINI 1199,

HIC

TELUM LEMOGIÆ OCCIDIT LEONEM

ANGLIÆ.

After Richard's death Limoges kept on changing masters as before.

In 1355, Edward the Black Prince unfurled the British flag from its

battlements, but Bishop Jean de Crose, in whose charge he had left it,

delivered it over to the king of France. Edward returned in wrath,

recaptured it and put many of the inhabitants to the sword. Under

Charles VII. Limoges became permanently a French city, retaining its

peculiar form of local government by twelve consuls, which constituted

it a sort of independent republic. As Jeanne d'Albret, mother of

Henry of Navarre, was viscountess of Limoges, it was impossible that

the surrounding province should escape being drawn into the wars of

religion. At Roche l'Abeille, a few miles south of the city, is the

battle-field where Admiral Coligny's Protestant army met and defeated

the royal forces under the duke of Anjou. But with the accession of

Henry IV. came a new order of things, and the visit of that monarch in

1605 opened an era of industry, prosperity and peace.

To this day the butchers of Limoges have good cause to remember Henry's

visit. That chivalrous but improvident ruler was always pecuniarily

embarrassed, and never, it appears, more so than on that October

day when, preceded by the flower of the military, magistracy and

ecclesiastical dignitaries of the province, he rode in through the

gorgeous gateway surmounted by a colossal figure of the giant Limovex,

the traditional founder of the city, which held a silver key in the

right hand and a heart in the left, by way of tendering to His Majesty

the submission and affections of the city. The butchers' guild was at

that period notoriously prosperous and wealthy. A happy conceit entered

the royal mind. For and in consideration of a handsome sum of money and

so many horses he offered to accord them in perpetuity the right of

heading the escort whenever thereafter royalty should enter the city.

The butchers took up the offer, paid the cash, produced the required

number of horses, and in return received a charter and privileges

which they have jealously guarded to this day. In 1810, when the duc

de Berri, and in 1844, when the duc de Montpensier, visited Limoges,

the butchers, with their white flag bearing a green cross, led the

van in the processions that escorted them. The butchers form a little

community, living all to themselves in the heart of the city, and

intermarrying to such a degree that only five or six surnames are to

be found among the eighty-odd families composing them. In the crooked,

narrow little street, only two blocks long, which they inhabit--it is

called the Rue des Boucheries--there are none but meat-shops, and the

names "Cibeau," "Malvolin" and one or two others predominate on the

signs over the doorways. In this babel of patronymics nicknames become

necessary to distinguish one from another, and accordingly we find one

man known as "_alias_ Louis XVIII.," another as "_alias_ the Captain,"

and so on through a variety of amusing sobriquets. These butchers are

richer to-day, if anything, than they were in Henry's time, and there

is no impecunious monarch to levy on them now. They have their own

place of worship too, a little chapel dedicated to St. Aurelien, and

standing modestly aside in a court at the foot of their narrow street.

It is scarcely larger than the vestibule of an ordinary church, and

its exterior is as plain as that of any country barn. But step quietly

in, and as soon as your eyes are accustomed to the gloom look about

you. What a surprise! Frescoes, stained glass, paintings, statuary,

tapestries and vessels of gold and silver are crowded together with

lavish profuseness in that little sanctuary. A monolith cross dating

from the fifteenth century stands just outside the portal, bearing

exquisitely-carved representations of Christ, the Virgin and the

apostles--a gem of sculpture rearing itself unexpectedly in the midst

of a muddy and squalid neighborhood.

The history of Limoges, like that of most European cities, is

closely interwoven with that of its churches. St. Michael of the

Lions, familiarly known as the Church of the Boule d'Or from a large

gilded ball which adorns its tapering spire, stands upon one of the

highest points in the city. About its base, in the niches between

its projecting abutments, cobblers and dealers in old clothes and

bric-à-brac have, with the sanction of time, reared unopposed their

rickety shanties, so that the church-walls, with their ancient carvings

and quaint designs, seem to spring up incongruously out of a medley

of combustible rubbish. On the steps at the main doorway, in careless

disorder, are to be seen the three life-size stone lions which gave the

church its name. They date from the twelfth century, and are so worn by

time that only the outlines of their features are still discernible.

St. Michael's spire, which is one hundred and sixty-five feet high and

ascended by an iron ladder on the exterior, was completed in 1383.

The interior of the church is richly adorned, though somewhat defaced

during the Revolutionary days of '93, when it was reared into a temple

of Reason and witnessed many a saturnalian orgy, during one of which

one of its finest windows was broken to fragments.