In a few brief words Miss Gerard told her story.

"And after this you presume to ask a pass of me!" said the officer;

and, putting his pen behind his ear and springing impetuously to his

feet, he led her by one hand to the window, while with his other he

pointed to a gloomy-looking brick building plainly in sight, and

sternly said, "Do you see that parish prison?"

"I do."

"Well, I shall have to put you there unless you consent to take the

oath of allegiance."

Thinking to mollify his wrath, Helen replied in a winning tone, as

only a woman can, "I shall not object to prison if you will be my

jailer"--words that had a prophetic import, as the event proved.

To conceal his feelings, for while she aroused his anger this

fascinatingly perverse girl also strangely attracted him, the marshal

said, "I shall leave you here for a few moments to consider the

matter," and suddenly left the room, but he took the precaution to

lock the door, taking the key with him.

Her eye caught sight of some books and photograph-albums on the table.

Taking up one of the latter and turning over the leaves at random,

her heart stood pulseless for a moment when she saw the photograph of

her own brother; and now she was impatient for Captain McDowell, the

provost-marshal, to return and explain to her this singular possession.

The unexpected sight of a face she loved more than her own life was

enough in this critical situation; not for worlds would she be untrue

to the vow she had given him, whatever might be the result of such

firmness; and she trembled with these violent emotions while she rose

and walked the floor.

After two hours' imprisonment Miss Gerard heard the key turn in the

door, and the captain entered. He asked at what hotel she was staying

and what hour she dined.

"The City Hotel--at five o'clock," she replied.

"I beg your pardon for keeping you here so long," he said. "You may go

now, and I will be there at that hour to dine with you."

Gladly did she avail herself of the permission, saying to herself, "At

dinner I will learn how he came to have brother's picture;" and she

was stimulated in the idea of entertaining the handsome officer by

the thought that she was to show courtesy to one who was perhaps her

brother's friend, and might therefore prove himself an assistant on her

way home.

Helen paid unusual attention to her toilette on this occasion. All

weapons are lawful in war, and none are more conclusive than those fair

woman employs to the confusion of the peace of the masculine mind.

Scarcely were her preparations for the campaign completed when Captain

McDowell was announced. She descended into the parlor to meet him,

full of eagerness to learn about the picture, but she controlled her

curiosity until dinner was over and they were seated in the parlor. She

was then informed that her brother had been a paroled prisoner under

the charge of Captain McDowell until exchanged. A friendship had sprung

up between them, and when parting they had exchanged photographs. The

captain assured her of his pleasure at meeting with the sister of one

he so highly regarded, and that he was ready to assist her out of her

present predicament in every way consistent with his official duties.

He left her with the promise of dining with her on the day of sailing

and of seeing her on board.

The hour of departure found Miss Gerard at the wharf with Captain

McDowell at her side. When they reached the plank leading to the

steamer's deck the provost-marshal's authoritative voice to the

officers detailed there with crossed swords was a sufficient open

sesame to enable Helen to walk quietly on board. After they were in

the cabin the gallant captain lingered at her side until he obtained

from her a promise to correspond with him. Strange inconsistency! one

may say of our fair girl, but not singular in a woman, that after such

fidelity to the cause of the South, and bound by such an inflexible vow

to her brother, which she never verbally broke, she was at that very

hour actually touched by a tenderness for one who was doing all in

his power to overthrow the Confederacy, and had proved his earnestness

on many a hard-fought field, especially at Raymond and Fort Gibson,

where they had already trodden the same path without being aware of

each other's existence. But this very inconsistency is, after all, the

strongest proof that politics holds a secondary place in the heart of

woman, and that love is always the first necessity of her being.

Helen, after such various and hazardous adventures, found herself once

more in her native city, New York. Many solicitous and finally tender

letters passed between the captain and Miss Gerard, but when the formal

proposal of marriage was made she placed the missive in her father's

hands.

"Daughter, is your heart in this?" he asked.

"Yes," was her modest reply; and the next steamer carried a joint

letter from father and daughter extending a cordial invitation to

Captain McDowell to make them a visit. In the following autumn one of

October's fairest days saw Helen the bride of the officer in blue coat

and brass buttons.

S.G.W. BENJAMIN.

HEINRICH HEINE.

Somewhat more than twenty years have elapsed since Heine's death. Had

he lived to the present time he would have been little past the age of

eighty, and there are many of his contemporaries and associates who are

still alive. Though an exceptionally isolated figure in the world of

letters, he serves to connect us in a great measure with the heroic age

of German literature; and not in point of time only, but by the nature

of his work, which exhibits certain elements of the Goethe-and-Schiller

period, combined with others of the school of "Young Germany," so

called. This, at least, is the position always assigned him; and the

following pages may not be uninteresting in showing to some extent,

and by means of a few of the more striking points of his character and

genius, how far he really occupies this place in literature.

How came Heinrich Heine to be a product of German soil at all? is the

first question which naturally arises in regard to him--that "son of

the Revolution," as he somewhere styles himself, who made France his

adopted country for nearly half his life; with his ardent sympathy for

French ideas; with his wonderful wit, which laid presumptuous claim to

the mantle of Voltaire and Aristophanes; with such rapid and facile

powers of expression for his thought as makes even Lowell, who greatly

amuses himself at the expense of German composition in general, admit

that "Heine can be airily light in German;" with his intense belief

in the progressive spirit of his own time, and his intense hatred of

its accompanying advance of utilitarianism and philistinism? Even the

poet's laurel, the closest tie that bound him to his own people, he

would have been willing to lay aside. "I do not know," he writes, "if I

fairly deserve to have my grave adorned with the poet's laurel. Poetry,

however much I loved her, was always but a sacred plaything to me, or a

consecrated means to divine ends. I have never laid much stress on the

poet's fame, and care little if my songs get praise or blame. But ye

may lay a sword upon my coffin, for I was a brave soldier in the War of

Liberation for humanity." And yet, in spite of it all, by his culture,

by his sentiment and by his real sympathies, Heine belonged to the land

of his birth rather than to the land of his adoption.

But there is one circumstance which must be regarded at the very outset

in treating of him--a circumstance of race, which colors more deeply

than any other his intellectual as well as his worldly career, and

leaves its mark on almost everything that comes from his hand: Heine

was a Jew, possessing certain indelible characteristics of his race.

This we must never forget, for Heine himself never forgot it. His

Jewish origin was always a mingled source of bitterness and pride. His

deification of the chosen people and the pitiless mockery which he

bestows on them would be hard to reconcile in another. He gloried in

what their past could show, but spared no words of ridicule and scorn

for the days of their weakness and infirmity: he became unfaithful to

their traditions, and was baptized a Christian in order to obtain a

university degree; and yet he never escaped what he himself calls "the

ineradicable Jew in him."

To be a Jew in Germany in the early part of the present century meant,

if not actual physical persecution, a political and social one of the

crudest kind for all whose intellectual and spiritual necessities

carried them beyond the barriers imposed by legislation and by society.

It is true that in Berlin there had gathered a brilliant circle of

cultivated Israelites who had risen to the highest intellectual

attainments; but they were excluded, as well as their less-enlightened

brethren, from all national existence, and even from all the learned

professions except that of medicine. They had formed, what was called

a "Society for the Promotion of Culture and Progress among the Jews,"

in which Heine himself was at one time much interested, but after his

baptism he seems to have mingled as little as possible with his own

people.

Heine's conversion to Christianity--or rather his baptism, for the

word "conversion" cannot be applied to the renunciation of one form

of religious dogma and the adoption of another for purely material

ends--has been the cause of more controversy than any other incident

of his life, and has always been used as a main stronghold and point

of attack by his enemies. There is not much defence to offer for the

act, for Heine, in spite of a Voltairean scorn of dogma and creed,

possessed a deep tinge of religious feeling, and that he felt keenly

the humiliation of his position--to use no harsher term--can be seen by

the following expression regarding it. "Is it not foolish?" he writes

to a friend. "I am no sooner baptized than I am cried down as a Jew:

I am now hated by Jew and Christian alike." And again, in speaking of

another converted Jew who is engaged in preaching his newly-acquired

doctrine: "If he does this from conviction, he is a fool: if he does it

from hypocritical motives, he is worse. I shall not cease to love Gans,

but I confess I had far rather have learned instead of this that he

had stolen silver spoons. That you, dear Moser," he continues, "should

think as Gans does I cannot believe, although assured. I should be very

sorry if my own baptism should appear to you in any favorable light.

I assure you if the laws permitted the stealing of silver spoons I

should not have been baptized." The jest has its pathos as well as its

wit, for Heine's pecuniary prospects were always precarious, and the

fatal baptism, which only brought upon him the pity and contempt of his

friends and doubled the insults of his enemies, defeated its own ends

and contributed nothing to his material needs.

Heine's personal history is unusually obscure. An interesting and

valuable _Life_ of him has been written by Herr Adolph Stroeltmann,

but the author's materials are avowedly scanty, and the Heine memoirs,

which have long been watched for with hungry eyes by the critics and

biographers, are still withheld from publication by members of the

family, with the prospect that they will never be given to the public.

He was born at Düsseldorf on the Rhine December 13, 1799. "On my

cradle," he writes, "fell the last moonbeams of the eighteenth century

and the first morning-glow of the nineteenth"--words not a little

significant of the lifelong sense within him of the genius of a bygone

age and the spirit of a coming one. His boyhood was passed during the

time of Napoleon's supremacy in the Rhine provinces, and among other

changes wrought under French jurisdiction was the establishment by

imperial decree of certain state schools called "lyceums," at one of

which Heine received the greater part of his school-education. The town

was garrisoned by French troops, and here it was that the boy became

acquainted with the old French drummer whom he afterward commemorates

so charmingly in the sketch of his childhood known as the "Buch Le

Grand." These early influences must certainly have been at the root of

that passion for French ideas and French manners which characterized

his later years, just as his boyish visions of the Great Emperor as he

passed through Düsseldorf never quite lost their enchantment in after

life, and long blinded him to the real meaning of Bonapartism.

Twice he saw Napoleon--once in 1811, and again in the following

year--and his impressions are worth recording, especially as they are

given in his most characteristic manner: "What were my feelings when

I saw him with my own favored eyes!--himself, hosannah! the emperor!

It was in the avenue of the court-garden at Düsseldorf. As I pushed my

way among the gaping people I thought of his battles and his deeds; and

yet I thought at the same time of the police regulations against riding

through the avenue on pain of a five-thaler fine, and the emperor rode

quietly through the avenue and no policeman stopped him. Never will

his image vanish from my memory. I shall always see him high upon his

steed, with those eternal eyes in his marble imperial face looking down

with the calmness of Fate on the guards defiling by. He was sending

them to Russia, and the old grenadiers looked up to him in such awful

devotion, such deeply-conscious sympathy, such pride of death!--

Te, Cæsar, morituri salutant!

Sometimes a secret doubt creeps over me whether I have really seen

him, whether we really were his associates; and then it seems to me

as if his image, snatched from the meagre frame of the present, melts

ever more proudly and more imperiously into the twilight of the past.

His name already sounds like a voice from the ancient world, and as

antique and heroic as the names of Alexander and Cæsar." Even to

Heine, Napoleon was the representative of the great principles of the

Revolution: moreover, he assumed at one time the rôle of liberator of

the Jews by conferring on them civil and political rights, while in his

armies positions of the highest distinction, dependent only on personal

merit, awaited them. But this too ardent hero-worship did not last.

"Take me not, dear reader, I pray, for an unconditional Bonapartist,"

he says sorrowfully on the battle-field of Marengo. "My homage does

not touch the actions but the genius of the man, whether his name be

Alexander or Cæsar or Napoleon. I did love him unconditionally until

the Eighteenth Brumaire: then he betrayed liberty." And again, later:

"It is true, it is a thousand times true, that Napoleon was an enemy of

freedom, a crowned despot of selfishness:" "he could deal with men and

personal interests, not with ideas; and that was his greatest fault and

the reason of his fall." "At bottom he is nothing but a brilliant fact,

the meaning of which is still half a secret."

Among Heine's home-influences during his childhood that of his mother

stands most prominent for good, and he never speaks of her but with

reverence and affection. Of the character of his father very little

is known. Harry, as the boy was originally named, was destined for

a business career, as his parents were unable to send him to the

university, and he was placed for this purpose in a banker's office

in Frankfort. The situation was exceedingly distasteful to him, and

he left it at the end of two weeks. Another attempt was made to

establish him in the banking-business at Hamburg under the charge of

a millionaire uncle, one of Hamburg's most worthy and respectable

citizens, who plays an important part in the earlier part of Heine's

career. Here he remained about two years, but with little better result

than before. His Hamburg life seems to have been a failure in almost

every sense. He got into trouble with certain of his uncle's relations,

fell in love with one of his cousins, who shortly after married a more

successful rival, and chafed under the dreary monotony which a business

life offered to his susceptible temperament; until finally his uncle,

seeing that he was in every way unfitted for his occupation, determined

to send him to the University of Bonn, under the condition that he

should fit himself for the legal profession. Thus Heine was pledged,

as it were, from the first to his conversion--a fact all the more

remarkable as Solomon Heine, the uncle, was a sturdy adherent of the

Jewish faith himself.

The next five years were passed, with certain intervals, at the

universities of Bonn, Göttingen and Berlin, and the elder Heine must

have watched with some natural concern the career of his wilful

protégé, who pursued anything but the course of study marked out

for him, and turned his attention mainly to Oriental and mediæval

literature, history, philology and other congenial pursuits, quite to

the detriment of his professional studies. It was during the years of

his university life that he appeared before the world as an author.

His first volume of poems was published in 1821, soon followed by the

two tragedies of _Ratcliffe_ and _Almanzor_--deservedly the least

popular of all his works--and the first volume of the _Reisebilder_.

Never were the writings of an unknown author greeted with a speedier

recognition, and he stepped at once into the full sunshine of his

fame. Nevertheless, fame alone without its more substantial benefits

could not free him from a pecuniary dependence on his uncle which was

often as humiliating as it was indispensable. "Had the stupid boy

learned anything," replied the latter once when congratulated upon his

distinguished nephew, "he would not need to write books;" and these

words betray an abundant source for those wearisome and ceaseless

misunderstandings between uncle and nephew which only ceased with the

former's death, and indicate perhaps one reason for the unhappy temper

of the young author's genius.

There is but one theme in nearly all the early poems of Heine, and

more particularly in those of the _Lyrisches Intermezzo_. The sorrows

of an unhappy love are sung with a passion and a fervor such as one

finds only in the higher forms of poetry. He adopted for his verse

the old mediæval ballad-metre, preserving in a wonderful degree the

limpid simplicity of the original, and infusing into it, as into all

that comes from his pen, the modern sentiment and spirit. He calls upon

all external Nature to share his sufferings, and invests every natural

object with an intense personal interest which belongs only to that

people whose egoism has outlived centuries of obliterating influences.

The following songs, although they are very familiar ones, illustrate

particularly well the characteristics just mentioned. I give them in

the original, as they suffer unusually by translation:

Und wüssten's die Blumen die kleinen,

Wie tief verwundet mein Herz,

Sie würden mit mir weinen,

Zu heilen meinen Schmerz.

Und wüssten's die Nachtigallen,

Wie ich so traurig und krank,

Sie hiessen fröhlich erschallen

Erquickenden Gesang.

Und wüssten sie meine Wehe,

Die goldenen Sternelein,

Sie kämen aus ihrer Höhe,

Und sprächen Trost mir ein.

Die alle können's nicht wissen,

Nur eine kennt mein Schmerz:

Sie hat ja selbst zerrissen,

Zerrissen mir das Herz.

Or--

Warum sind denn die Rosen so blass,

O sprich, mein Lieb, warum?

Warum sind denn im grünen Gras

Die blauen Veilchen so stumm?

Warum singt denn mit so kläglichem Laut

Die Lerche in der Luft?

Warum steigt denn aus dem Balsamkraut

Hervor ein Leichenduft?

Warum scheint denn die Sonn' auf die Au

So kalt und verdriesslich herab?

Warum ist denn die Erde so grau

Und öde wie ein Grab?

Warum bin ich selbst so krank und so trüb,

Mein liebes Liebchen? Sprich!

O sprich, mein herzallerliebstes Lieb,

Warum verliessest du mich?

Heine could never write in any of the classic metres, and an amusing

anecdote is related by Maximilian Heine, the younger brother of the

poet, of an attempt once made by the latter at hexameter verse. This

brother, Max, was at the time in one of the upper classes of the

Gymnasium, and, pluming himself greatly on his own proficiency in the

composition of hexameters, urged the young poet to try his skill in the

same direction. Heine complied, and came in due time to read to his

brother the result of his efforts. Hardly had he reached the third line

when Max broke forth impatiently: "For Heaven's sake, dear brother,

this hexameter has but five feet!" and he pompously scanned the verse.

When convinced of his error Heinrich petulantly tore the paper into

bits, exclaiming, "Shoemaker, stick to your last!" and nothing more

was heard about hexameters until two days later, when Max was awakened

early one morning to find his brother at his bedside. "Ah, dear Max,"

he began with a piteous air, "what a fearful night have I passed! Only

think! Directly after midnight, just as I had gone to sleep, I felt

a mountain's weight upon me: the unhappy hexameter had come limping

on five feet to my bedside, demanding of me, in terrible tones and

with the most fearful threats, its sixth foot. Shylock could not have

insisted more obstinately upon his pound of flesh. It appealed to its

primeval classic right, and left me with the most frightful menaces,

only on condition that I never again in my whole life would meddle with

a hexameter."

The time of Heine's entrance in the field of literature was no

unfavorable one for an individual genius like his own. The so-called

Classic and Romantic schools of Germany had each in its own direction

reached the ultimate limits of its development. Schiller was

dead, Goethe was at work upon the second part of _Faust_ and the

_Westöstliche Divan_, while such of the Romantic writers as were left

had penetrated far into the realms of mediæval mysticism to bring

to the light only wild and distorted forms of imagery and the most

extravagant creations of morbid fancy. In Heine, who could sing of love

and moonlight and nightingales with the best of them, they thought they

had found a new champion to revive their now declining glory, little

dreaming that ten years later, in his famous essay on the Romantic

school, he was destined to deal their cause its deathblow and disperse

for ever the lingering mists and spectres of German Romanticism.

Nevertheless, all Heine's earlier writings, prose as well as verse,

show very clearly the influence of the school. "I am tired of this

guerrilla warfare," he writes in 1830, "and long for rest. What an

irony of fate, that I, who would rest so gladly on the pillow of a

quiet, contemplative inner life--that I should be destined to scourge

my poor fellow-countrymen from their comfortable existence and stir

them into activity--I, who like best to watch the passing clouds, to

invent (_erklügeln_) metrical magic, to hearken to the secrets of the

spirits of the elements and absorb myself in the wonder-world of old

tales,--I must edit political annals, preach the topics of the time,

stir up the passions!" A little later comes the news of the Revolution

in Paris, and all these vague romantic longings have vanished into air,

melted away by the beams of the July sun.

These tendencies may have first roused the determined hostility with

which the followers of Goethe greeted the new poet and indignantly

repelled the claims of his friends for his succession to Goethe's lyric

muse. There was, at all events no love lost between the great Goethe

himself and his younger contemporary. Goethe simply ignored Heine,

and the latter, though he could not reciprocate in this way, did not

spare his mighty rival certain home-thrusts on his most vulnerable

side. He made a pilgrimage to Weimar in 1824 on his return from the

famous Harz journey, but he is exceedingly reticent on the subject,

and the following humorous account from the _Romantische Schule_ is

almost the only one to be had of the visit. "His form," he writes, "was

harmonious, clear, joyous, nobly-proportioned, and Greek art could be

studied in him as in an antique: his eyes were at rest like those of

a god. It is generally the distinguishing mark of the gods that their

gaze is steadfast, and their eyes do not wander in uncertainty hither

and thither. Napoleon's eyes had this peculiarity also, and therefore

I am convinced that he was a god. Goethe's eyes were as divine in his

advanced age as in his youth. Time had covered his head with snow,

but it could not bend it. He bore it ever proud and high, and when he

reached forth his hand, it was as if he would prescribe to the stars

their course in the heavens. There are those who profess to have

observed the cold lines of egotism about his mouth, but these lines

belong also to the immortal gods, and above all to the Father of the

gods, the great Jupiter, with whom I have already compared Goethe. In

truth, when I visited him in Weimar and stood before him, I glanced

involuntarily aside to see if the eagle and the thunderbolts were at

hand. I came very near addressing him in Greek, but when I noticed

that he understood German I told him in German that the plums on the

road between Weimar and Jena tasted very good. I had pondered in so

many long winter nights over all the lofty and profound things I should

say to Goethe if I should ever see him, and when at last I saw him

I told him that the Saxon plums tasted very good; and Goethe smiled

with the same lips that had once kissed the fair Leda, Europa, Danäe,

Semele, and so many other princesses or even ordinary nymphs."--"My

soul is shaken," he cries elsewhere, "and my eye burns, and that is an

unfavorable condition for a writer, who should control his material

and remain beautifully objective (_hübsch objektiv bleiben soll_), as

the Art School requires and as Goethe has done. He has become eighty

years old by it," he adds with incomparable irony, "and minister, and

well-to-do (_wohlhabend_). Poor German people! this is thy greatest

man!" To all this there is a keenly personal edge, but the real gulf

between the two lies deeper than wounded vanity on the one side and

possible jealousy on the other, and is as wide and impassable as

Heine's own distinction between the Hellenic and the Judaic views of

life. Heine, vitally absorbed in all the questions that the present

brought, and in the very heat and stress of its conflicts, watched the

"Great Pagan" in the fulness of his years crystallizing his life's

experience in beautiful and polished, but ever more and more lifeless,

forms of verse, striving toward pure Hellenism, as Goethe's followers

called his imitation of classic forms, withdrawn from all the social

and political problems of the day far into the realms of scientific

research; and he cried out impatiently about coldness, indifference to

the true interests of mankind--compared Goethe's creations to the Greek

statues in the Louvre, with no humanity in them, but only divinity and

stone. But Goethe, with his theory of color, with his botany, anatomy,

osteology and the rest, had caught a spark from what was to be the

genius of a future generation, and this Heine was not prophet enough to

see.

The time, we have said, was favorable for Heine's entrance into

literature: it was anything but favorable for the rôle which he began

almost at once to play--that of political and social agitator. The

political atmosphere of Germany during the years that preceded the July

Revolution was stifling in the extreme. The famous War of Liberation

had freed the people from the grasp of Napoleon, but seemed only to

have increased the weight of home despotism: the press was subjected

to searching government investigation, and as a result all political

opinions were suppressed in the daily journals, which in lieu of

politics supplied little else but theatrical and musical gossip.

This was no condition of things for Heine, who could never move in

prescribed paths in any direction, and who had to submit to seeing his

work scarred and mutilated by the red pencil of the censorship; and he

began to look toward France as a land of refuge in case of accident,

as it were, until finally, after the July Revolution, the Rhine

became a Jordan and Paris a New Jerusalem to his longing eyes, and he

emigrated thither, to the land of freedom and "good cheer," to return

but once again to his native country. There is no real evidence of his

exile being a compulsory one, but under such circumstances his life

at home must have been at best a precarious one. According to his own

delightfully humorous account, he had learned from an old councillor

at Berlin who had passed many years at the fortress of Spandau how

unpleasant it was to wear chains in winter. "'If they had only warmed

our chains for us a little they would not have made such an unpleasant

impression: they ought, too, to have had the forethought to have them

perfumed with essence of roses and laurel, as they do in this country.'

I asked my councillor if he often had oysters at Spandau. He said, 'No:

Spandau was too far from the sea. Meat,' he said, 'was quite rare there

too, and there was no other kind of fowl than the flies which fell into

the soup.' And so, as I really needed recreation, and Spandau was too

far from the sea for oysters, and the Spandau fowl-broth did not tempt

me especially, and the Prussian chains were very cold in winter and

quite detrimental to my health, I resolved to journey to Paris, and

there, in the fatherland of champagne and the Marseillaise, to drink

the one and to hear the other sung."

Few particulars of Heine's Parisian life are known, notwithstanding

that during its earlier period he reached the zenith of his fame and

popularity, and lived, according to his own statement, like a god--a

life to end, alas! only too soon. He set himself during these years

to the task of bringing about a mutual understanding between the

French and the German people, and with this end in view he wrote his

famous essays on the _Romantic School_ and _Religion and Philosophy

in Germany_, and sent to the Augsburg _Allgemeine Zeitung_ those

letters on the politics and art of the day which give one of the most

brilliant and vivid pictures in existence of Paris under the "Citizen"

monarchy. Well for Heine if those bright Parisian days had lasted! He

was overtaken only too soon by a fate as terrible as any that martyr

was ever called upon to endure. His nervous organization had always

been an exceedingly sensitive one, and he had long suffered from severe

and frequent headaches. During the latter part of his life in Paris his

health gradually declined, until in 1848 he received his deathblow in a

stroke of paralysis which left him almost blind, crippled and helpless,

and subject to frequent attacks of intense physical agony--a blow which

did not kill him, however, for eight years. His patience--nay, his

heroism--through all his lingering torture was the testimony of every

one who was a witness of his sufferings; and, what was more wonderful,

he retained the powers of his mind in undiminished vigor to the very

end. He died in February, 1856, poor as he had almost always lived, and

almost in obscurity, for the world had withdrawn from the spectacle of

so much suffering, and only a few friends remained to him to the last.

Such a death is terribly sad, but its heroism has all the pathos and

nobility of real tragedy, and atones in more than full measure for a

life that was not always heroic. Can it atone as well for a literary

name that was not wholly untarnished? Nothing can quite justify certain

literary sins which Heine at times committed, but when such offences

are noted down it is best to let them go. Heine's life was certainly

one of unremitting warfare--one long record of personal attacks on his

enemies, of broils with his critics, of unblushing license of speech,

of undaunted adherence to the ideas for which he lived and wrote--one

long cry of protest against the outward conditions of life and society

as he found them, which rings in those strange minor tones of feeling

that are the keynote of his genius, rising sometimes to an almost

childish petulance, and sinking again into chords of the truest pathos.

Where is his place and what was his achievement it is very hard to say.

He was one of those figures which arise here and there in the history

of literature--of men intensely penetrated with the spirit of the age

in which they live, who are alike bitterly impatient of its follies

and its conservatism. They cannot see far into the future, they cannot

always estimate the past: their genius is not universal, but it has

always something of the vitality of present interest about it, and is

subject in no common degree to the errors of contemporary judgment.

Byron was another such figure, and, though his genius had almost

nothing in common with Heine's, the ideas for which they fought were

very nearly the same--ideas which were the outgrowth of the Revolution,

by which they sought to stem the tide of reactionary feeling that set

in so strongly from every direction, in religion and politics as well

as in literature, during the early part of our own century. Their

method of fighting, too, was the same, for they both used their own

persons as weapons in their cause; but where Byron's egotism becomes

dreary and oppressive, Heine's awakens that vivid feeling of interest

which comes usually with personal intercourse alone. He uses himself,

along with and as a part of his material, in such a way that his very

egotism lends to his writings the greater part of their force and

originality, and becomes one of the most potent instruments of his

irony and wit.

Heine chose for himself the sword of the soldier rather than the

poet's laurel, but he chose to fight alone, and the nineteenth century

is not the age nor its society the field for single-handed combat.

That he seems to have felt this himself, one of his latest poems from

the _Romancero_ will show. I give it in Lord Houghton's admirable

translation: it is called

ENFANT PERDU.

In Freedom's war of "Thirty Years" and more

A lonely outpost have I held in vain,

With no triumphant hope or prize in store,

Without a thought to see my home again.

I watched both day and night: I could not sleep

Like my well-tented comrades far behind,

Though near enough to let their snoring keep

A friend awake if e'er to doze inclined.

And thus, when solitude my spirits shook,

Or fear--for all but fools know fear sometimes--

To rouse myself and them I piped, and took

A gay revenge in all my wanton rhymes.

Yes, there I stood, my musket always ready,

And when some sneaking rascal showed his head

My eye was vigilant, my aim was steady,

And gave his brains an extra dose of lead.

But war and justice have far different laws,

And worthless acts are often done right well:

The rascals' shots were better than their cause,

And I was hit--and hit again, and fell!

That outpost is abandoned: while the one

Lies in the dust, the rest in troops depart.

Unconquered, I have done what could be done,

With sword unbroken and with broken heart.

This little poem represents rather pathetically, and in a certain

sense the limitations of Heine's genius; for it is impossible not to

feel that his genius never found its highest expression--that confined

within a narrower channel its force would have been irresistible where

now it is only brilliantly dispersive. It seems as if literature in its

proper sense had lost something by Heine's personal enlistment in all

the conflicts of his day--as if the man of ideas had tried to approach

too closely and too curiously to the realities of life, and had only

succeeded in bringing into glaring prominence the irreconcilable nature

of the forces at work in the world and in ourselves; and never was

reconcilement less possible between the real and the ideal than at the

time of which we speak. This is the meaning of the _Weltschmerz_ and

the _maladie du siècle_ of which we hear so much, and everything

seemed to conspire to render Heine its chief representative.

But a negative judgment is not enough for a final estimate of Heinrich

Heine. Much of his service to literature and to mankind was of a very

positive character. As a man of letters he created a prose style

unequalled in clearness and brilliancy by anything previously known

in German literature--Goethe's prose is ponderous in comparison--and

its influence will be felt long after certain of its mannerisms have

passed into oblivion. His wit is destined to immortality by reason of

the serious purpose that underlies it. It has a spontaneity which no

wit exercised merely for its own ends can ever have. Those who call

Heine frivolous and a mocker, simply because he can jest at serious

things, can only know him very superficially or else must be ignorant

of the real part which humor has to play in the world. Perhaps there

never was a writer who shook himself so free of all conventionalities

of style. His very mannerisms--and his writings abound in them--have a

spontaneity about them, and only become affectations in the innumerable

imitations which cluster around all his literary productions. This

is his service to literature: his service to posterity was as great.

He did some goodly service in the "War of Liberation of humanity,"

if in no other way, by setting the example of a man who could speak

unflinchingly for principles at a time when such utterance was not easy.

It will not be possible to follow up these general statements with any

further examination of Heine's life or his writings. It has been the

present purpose to indicate only in the broadest outlines the scope and

general character of the man and his work, and leave to the reader to

prove the truth of what has been said by his own investigation. There

is no single literary figure that is better worth the task of study

than Heine, and to sum up briefly what this article has been mainly

designed to show, we must pronounce him if not one of the greatest, at

least one of the most original, figures in all literature.

A. PARKER.

DAWN.

What was thy dream, sweet Morning? for, behold!

Thine eyes are heavy with the balm of night,

And, like reluctant lilies, to the light

The languid lids of lethargy unfold.

Was it the tale of Yesterday retold--

An echo wakened from the western height,

Where the warm glow of sunset dalliance bright

Grew, with the pulse of waning passion, cold?

Or was it some heraldic vision grand

Of legends that forgotten ages keep

In twilight, where the sundering shoals of day

Vex the dim sails, unpiloted, of sleep,

Till, one by one, the freighting fancies gay,

Like bubbles, vanish on the treacherous strand?

JOHN B. TABB.

MRS. MARCELLUS.

BY A GUEST AT HER SATURDAYS.

All the celebrated creatures whom Fate or the lecture-committee chance

to bring to our town profess themselves amazed that Mrs. Marcellus

should continue to make this little-celebrated locality her home.

The comment has a double import, containing at once a compliment

and the reverse. If therein be conveyed an intimation that Hurville

as a place of residence is devoid of those varied opportunities for

self-improvement, gayety and æsthetic culture which render existence

in the great centres so diversified and so charming, or even should

the insinuation go so far as to clearly express the indubitable

fact that it is a crude, ragged little town, with a few staring red

brick business-houses fronting each other on the muddy or dusty

or frozen main street (according to the season), and a numerous

colony of wooden cottages dotted around "promiscuous" as an outer

fringe--nay, should Hurville even be apostrophized as a "hole," as

it was once by a lecturer who came during the mud-reign and failed

to draw a house,--why, even the most enthusiastic Hurvillian need

take no offence. But whatever the town may be, think what our

fellow-townswoman, Mrs. Marcellus, is! One of the greatest favorites

our lecture-committee secures for us each year, a dramatic reader

with a stentorian voice and a fine frenzy rolling around loose in his

eye, expressed the whole thing in what I may call a Shakespearian

nutshell by a happy paraphrase of the great bard. "It was not," said

Mr. Blankenhoff, "that people appreciated Hurville _less_, but Mrs.

Marcellus _more_." That settled it.

I have been very frank, as you see, about Hurville, because, although

many of our business-men, in a sort of small beer of local patriotism,

insist upon taking up the utterly untenable position that Hurville is

the only "live town" in the country outside of New York and Chicago, I

am unable to recognize this astonishing vitality myself, and I always

say that if Hurville is "live," I should like to know what something

dead looks like, acts like, and especially buys and sells like. The

commerce of the place has been completely stagnant for several years,

and in Hurville, if ever anywhere, is it a mystery to one half the

world how the other half lives. I believe both halves would now be one

complete and thoroughly defunct whole were it not that the vital spark

is kept alive in both sections by Mrs. Marcellus. Her position in a

community so provincial, and in many respects so narrow-minded, as that

of our little place, has always been an exceedingly singular one; yet

she was lifted to the throne of leadership of our choicest circle on

her arrival, and has wielded the sceptre uninterruptedly ever since,

without the slightest breath of disaffection having arisen among her

courtiers. When she first came to Hurville, fifteen years ago, she was

a young widow of thirty, very handsome, very travelled, very cultured,

very stylish and passably rich. She is all this yet, and much more that

is good and lovable as well. On the left-hand side of the account there

is nothing to make a blur except that she is now a motherly lady of

forty-five, instead of being, as she was when she first came, just on

the last step of the stairs where girlhood shuts the door in a woman's

face finally--at thirty.

Her coming to Hurville was rather odd, and at first she had not the

slightest intention of remaining. Her object in visiting the place

was to negotiate the sale of the residence she now occupies, the

best house in the town yet, and fifteen years ago considered a very

imposing mansion--so much so that when the railroad came the heavy

men of the community insisted on the track being laid in such a way

that passengers inside the cars could get a full view of the Marcellus

house as they whizzed by. The house was built for the father of Mrs.

Marcellus's husband, a sharp old fellow who came to the town when the

general impression prevailed that Hurville was going to make Chicago

shut up shop, and ultimately to see the grass grow in what are still

very thriving thoroughfares of the city of New York. Old Marcellus

made all the money out of Hurville that the town will afford for the

next half century at least, and died in the shanty he had always lived

in just as the builders were putting the last touch on that elegant

mansion, which was supposed to be but the first of a series of princely

residences which when completed would make Fifth Avenue and Walnut

street wonder what they were begun for if thus so early they were done

for by the wealth and enterprise of Hurville. Old Marcellus's son never

came to Hurville. He was educated abroad, and married this lady, a

young New Yorker, at her home. He was in poor health and died in Paris,

leaving his wife a good deal of property, including this house, and two

little daughters to take care of.

She stayed a few weeks at the hotel of those days, a most comfortable

one--for, though the building was of frame and the furniture old

and shabby, travellers often say that the meals were better and the

bed-linen cleaner and better aired than in the present imposing

Dépôt Hotel--and finding no one willing or able to buy the Marcellus

house at anything like its value, she one day astonished everybody

by saying that the house was now withdrawn from sale and that she

was going to live in it herself. What a sensation occurred when her

furniture arrived! She had brought over all her elegant belongings

from Paris, those being days when household effects which had been

in use by Americans abroad for a year were passed free of duty at

the custom-house. Even now you can scarcely find in any community a

house more beautifully furnished than Mrs. Marcellus's. She still uses

the things she brought from France, and never allows her head to be

turned by any vagaries respecting house-decoration. Her pale-yellow

satin drawing-room furniture is charming, a real reminiscence of Marie

Antoinette's at the Little Trianon at Versailles. Bronzes and marbles

of chaste and beautiful subjects, water-colors and oil-paintings signed

by noted names, fresh flowers in lovely abundance at all seasons of the

year,--oh, it is a rare home of beauty and culture! And the best of it

is, as Mrs. Marcellus often tells us at her pleasant dinner-parties or

her cozy Saturday evenings, that by living in Hurville she can enjoy

this agreeable and ladylike mode of existence, can do what we know she

does for the poor, can subscribe to all periodicals of the day in any

way worthy, can entertain her friends often--to their great delight,

all loudly exclaim--without being haunted by the slightest shadow of

anxiety regarding her income. If she had continued to live in New York

she would by this time probably be bankrupt, for a similar manner of

living in that costly city would be a dozen times more expensive than

it is in Hurville. As it is, she even lays up money; and when her

daughters both married, as they did on the same day five years ago,

Mrs. Marcellus astonished all the wedding-participants by announcing to

them the growth of a plum to the credit of each which she had planted

and preserved for them in the hothouse of an old reliable banker's safe

in Boston.

I have mentioned Mrs. Marcellus's Saturday evenings. They are the sole

means of intellectual exchange Hurville possesses. In fact, without

them our mental condition must have degenerated long ere this into

something analogous to that of the cabbage, for most of us are too

poor to take trips to the cities to brush up our brains, and we have

no public or private library worthy the name in the place. Of late

even our lecture-course--which used to be renowned as one of the

most successful in the country, for a small town--has dwindled down

almost to nothing, the hard times affecting this as everything else.

No, not everything: hard times make no difference in Mrs. Marcellus's

Saturdays, thank the powers! Every Saturday evening we gather around

that yellow satin furniture, inspect once more those oft-inspected

pictures (always discovering new beauties in them), try to air a little

art-jargon concerning the statuettes and bric-à-brac, look over the

last new periodicals, sniff the flowers and say "How sweet!"--the women

always asking how she keeps them with the gas, and Mrs. Marcellus

always answering that she doesn't: she has them changed. At nine

o'clock tea and etceteras are served up. The fine tea-service of rarest

old blue Nankin is laid out upon a tablecloth of daintiest linen

deeply embroidered with blue of a corresponding shade. Tea-cakes and

pâtés whose ingredients are to be found in no cookery-book whatever

greet the delighted and unexpectant palate. With her white, shapely,

graceful hands Mrs. Marcellus tenders us these luscious lollipops and

again and again refills the steaming bowl. At eleven o'clock precisely

the neat and pretty maid, who always wears a white cap, brings in Mrs.

Marcellus's small bedroom lamp; and this means good-night to visitors.

These evenings are the pride and comfort of the town, and it is a

point of honor with those of us who know we are welcome to attend

every Saturday without intermission. Whenever the gathering chances

to be small you may be sure that the cause of it is to be found in a

weather-condition when to say "raining cats and dogs," "blowing great

guns" or "snowing like Siberia" is to use a comparison quite feeble

and inexpressive. But even on such occasions a few gentlemen always

contrive to drop in. They are sent by their wives when these cannot

come, and they always find Mrs. Marcellus her amiable, reposeful self,

whom no chances of temperature can affect.

On a particularly stormy and disagreeable Saturday of the past winter

I hesitated long about making my usual call. Not that I did not want

to go, nor that I cared much for the weather, but it seemed to me

impossible that on such a night Mrs. Marcellus should take the trouble

to light her gas-jets (always supplemented by a large, softly-beaming

oil-lamp for the centre-table) or ignite the splendid roaring fire of

wood and coal mingled which, burning redly in a deep, low, richly

colored grate of brass and steel, gives in winter the finishing touch

of comfort and home-likeness to that delicious yellow satin drawing

room. In summer the grate is entirely removed, and the vacant space

is filled with flowering plants, tastefully framed by the hanging

mantelpiece valance above and long, narrow, gracefully draped curtains

at the sides, which take away all look of bareness from that central

point of interest in every apartment, the fireplace. Yet the prospect

of spending in my own cheerless room and quite alone the only evening

of the week on which circumstances permit me to sit up at all late

was scarcely flattering. I have to be at the store every morning

before eight, and therefore on every night but Saturday I retire at

an hour of a primitive earliness only equalled by that prevailing in

well-regulated nurseries. On Sunday mornings I am able to sleep rather

late, but pay for the privilege by the enforced juxtaposition of the

heavy breakfast sausage with the tough dinner roast beef, my landlady,

in a fit of the contraries, always advancing dinner many hours on the

day when of all others it should be very much retarded, and would be if

the digestive apparatus of the American people had any rights which the

landlady of the period were bound to respect.

But these details have small bearing on the story I am relating.

To resume: Driven out, in spite of the stormy weather, by the

cheerlessness of my room, I hastened on the Saturday evening in

question to seek the warm and comforting shelter of Mrs. Marcellus's

abode. All was as serene within that model home as if the raging

elements themselves had been subdued by the grand white hands of Mrs.

Marcellus, and at her order had been stuffed with eiderdown and covered

with yellow satin by a Paris upholsterer. How soothing to the rasped

nerves was this interior--the crackling fire, the lights, the flowers,

the soft rays from the lamp falling on the gray silk dress and the

lace headdress of Mrs. Marcellus as she sat at the solid, large round

centre-table with a basket of gay-colored embroidery-silks before

her! Besides myself there were five visitors, all gentlemen of course,

and most of them individuals who are not much given to loquacity.

The lack of conversation was somewhat marked. Still, no one felt any

obligation to keep the ball of small talk rolling. Mrs. Marcellus says

that when people come to see her she wants them to converse or to keep

silent as the spirit moves. The wings of silence brooded over this

gathering again and again, yet no one felt guilty. There were many

pleasant and home-like sounds--the tintinnabulation of the teaspoons

and sugar-tongs, the pricking of the needle through the stiff linen,

the whirl of a book-leaf, the laying down of card upon card in the

game of solitaire which some one was playing, the bloodless execution

of a paper-knife cutting apart the sheets of a newly-arrived magazine,

the rustling of the Saturday's local paper, delivered just at dusk

and not opened till now, the fresh ink made doubly pungent in the

warm atmosphere till it yielded to the pressure of the summer-like

temperature and dried up--like the rest of us.

"It is odd," said Henry L. Thompkins at length, closing a novel which

he had been reading by slow instalments at Mrs. Marcellus's Saturdays

for the last year at least, and whose finis he had now reached, "that

so many authors write love-stories."

"Why shouldn't they," said Mrs. Marcellus, "when so many readers like

to peruse them?"

"Who likes to peruse them?"

"Why, you do, I should think, else you would have laid down that

book long ago. You've been perfectly absorbed in it: there have

been chapters which made your color come and go with their exciting

interest. I've watched you;" and she shook her needle at him accusingly.

I scarcely remember how it was that when upon this the conversation

became animated it instantly drifted into love-stories and love-affairs

and jiltings and heart-breakings, and all the rest of it. Everybody

had something to say which he fancied had never before been said about

the tender passion; and suddenly a proposition fell from the lips

of Mrs. Marcellus which certainly took the company by surprise. She

said that she wished, just for curiosity's sake, every one present

would tell her about the last love-affair he had had. It would really

be fun: she wished they would. Objections and modest declinings were

unanimous at first, of course, but our hostess insisted; and finally

this conditional agreement was decided upon: that her desire should be

acceded to, provided Mrs. Marcellus would relate her own experience

in this line and tell the company the particulars of _her_ last

love-affair. She instantly consented, though I thought I detected a

flying blush tinge her cheek at the rush of recollections brought about

by the proposal.

The first autobiographer was Henry L. Thompkins himself. Mr. Thompkins

is the principal banker of our place, and, from the almost dead level

of Hurvillian impecuniosity, he is considered to be a man of colossal

fortune. He is very well off in respect to wealth, and has been a

widower for many years. In the grief and loneliness which engulfed him

at the loss of his wife, he told us, he had sought solace in the warm

affections of his sister, a widow lady with a large number of sons,

and had recklessly adopted her boys and promised to be a father to

them--an engagement which had placed him in such a position toward a

lot of young spendthrifts that by actual experience he was now fully

qualified to perform the part of the testy old uncle of Sheridan's

plays, whose principal duty in life is to shake a stick in his nephew's

face and exclaim, "Zounds! you young rascal!" or "Egad! you young dog!"

But instead of one scapegrace nephew he had half a dozen to bleed him.

During one of his visits to his sister, who lived in the West, he found

there, also on a visit, a young lady who made a marked impression upon

him. She was rather good-looking, kind, sensible and quiet in her ways.

For her sake he lengthened his visit: every day her influence over him

became stronger. On the final Sabbath of his stay it happened that

of all the household he and she alone were able to attend service.

The sermon had a distinct bearing on the sanctity of wedded life. As

they walked home he resolved to sound her feelings on the subject of

marriage. He began by saying that he was glad to see she was a friend

of his family, because that empowered him to ask her this question:

Would she like to become a member of it? She blushed, bit her lip

and said, as Heaven was her judge, she would, but she had no fortune

of her own, and she had seen too much of married life in poverty to

dare to enter it under those circumstances. "Poverty!" exclaimed Mr.

Thompkins: "you need have no fear of that. I will see that you have

every comfort--indeed, every luxury." The girl was so startled she

stood still in the street and gazed at him, tears flooding her handsome

eyes. "Oh, Mr. Thompkins," she murmured, "you are the best man in the

world, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart. But I have felt

from the first moment how really noble and generous you are; and it

was only last evening I told Edward, when he took me to the Minstrels,

that I believed if he'd muster up courage to ask his uncle for money

enough to set him up in business, and tell him he wanted to marry and

settle down, that you would do it." The only thing consoling about the

affair was, that the girl never suspected anything. She married his

eldest nephew, whom he has since set up in business three consecutive

times (three consecutive failures following), and the couple are now

rearing a plentiful crop of grand-nephews, who, though still young,

have already developed to perfection the paternal eye for searching out

the main chance, and invariably expect--nay, obstreperously claim--a

full line of costly presents at Christmas, New Year's, Thanksgiving and

all the anniversaries of everybody's birthday, wedding and demise.

We were very glad that Mr. Thompkins so framed the concluding sentence

of his story as to allow us to laugh. We knew very well, from the

character of the second speaker, that we should require all our store

of thrills and shivers for his recital. He was a long, thin, red-headed

man named McLaughlin, who by perseverance had absorbed the most of

the leather and findings trade of Hurville and round about, but was

always talking of the brilliant and exciting early days of his career,

when, fired by a story he had read of the dangers and pleasures of

life before the mast, he resolved to run away, and did run away, to

sea. His love-story was a wild and inconsequent recital, with staccato

stops, of an adventure he had when he was a sailor and his vessel lay

in one of the ports of India for some weeks--at Calcutta, I think.

Anyhow, there were tiger-skins mixed up in it, and elephants' tusks,

and long, moist, horrible serpents trailing after people, and a house

where his lady-love lived which was provided with traps and secret

panels in the walls and other such trifles; and the lady-love was

a native woman who desired to renounce the faith of her people for

him, but was interfered with by a cochineal-colored father of a very

unpleasant sort, who rampaged around twirling the lance he used in

pig-sticking, and often finishing off his enemies with a poisoned

creese, such as you read about. Of course there was nothing left for

McLaughlin but to fight a duel with this unreasonable parent--a duel

which suddenly became contagious, the whole population of Calcutta

joining in it; the foreseen conclusion of the terrific narrative being

of course that everybody was killed except McLaughlin. No one dared

even to smile at this sanguinary catastrophe, for McLaughlin was really

a fiery-tempered fellow, and on more than one occasion had been known

to back his opinions by inserting his hand under his right coat-tail

to find an additional argument wherewith to enforce a similarity of

political views. Nevertheless, our hostess slyly asked if it could be

possible that the native lady who had wished to relinquish the faith

of her cochineal-colored fathers was the amiable--and she might have

said, the essentially pale and milk-and-watery--lady who was known to

the community as Mrs. McLaughlin, and who would have been, save for

the storm, "one of ours" to-night. Mac said, Of course not; but what

was the use of sitting down to talk about the jogtrot events of these

later years, during which destiny and leather had bound him, as it

were, to Hurville? He thought we wanted romance while we were about it.

No. 3 was our military man, an ex-brigadier-general who still wears the

Kossuth hat of his grade, and who holds, to the satisfaction of all,

the berth of postmaster at Hurville. Like most amateur army-officers,

the general thinks that as regards military tactics he is a very

Napoleon, and he has so impressed this opinion on Hurville that we

know full well, though the country at large may not, exactly what

brigadier-general it was by whom the stamping out of the rebellion was

principally performed. In the various engagements which have taken

place between the armies of Europe during the last decade none have had

so satisfactory a termination as they might had our postmaster-general

(if I may so compound him) been in command of the field. The French,

for instance: it seems a great pity that that brilliant people should

not have put themselves in communication with Hurville, if only by

wire, at the time of the disastrous Prussian war. There was our

general, every Saturday evening at Mrs. Marcellus's, winning the most

stupendous victories for them on a large map of the seat of war, with

little flags mounted on pins stuck all over it; and it was really

exciting to see how the general caused the Prussian standard to

retreat at Sedan, the tri-color advancing in triumph at the head of an

overwhelming body of troops rushing upon the enemy _en masse_, hemming

him in on all sides, while the stirring tones of an imaginary brass

band entoned the glorious Marseillaise, its clarion cry proclaiming

once again to _tout le monde_ that _les enfants de la patrie_ had

won another victory for _la grande nation_. "_Marchons! marchons!_

tum-ti-tum--and victory or death!" Oh dear! what a surprise it was

to us all when the cable-despatch came announcing a very different

termination to the fray at Sedan! At first we were incredulous. The

brigadier clapped his hand to his head, seized the paper, ran with

it into a corner and turned his back on us, that he might study the

matter from the strategic point of view undisturbed by uninformed

comment. When he returned he said he saw quite clearly how it was:

the French had failed to advance their left flank--the despatches

showed it--and there was the fatal error. The despatches also showed

quite clearly that the French had no left flank to advance, nor right

either, not to speak of any rear; but the general said he couldn't

help that--they should have advanced their left flank: that was the

only really soldier-like thing for them to do. When armies meet on

the battle-field they should almost always (I think he said) advance

their left flank. Again (to hasten to recent events), here were these

puerile, unspeakable, unutterable heathens, the Turks. Vile as their

moral status was, their military advantages were such that had they had

among their pachas one man who possessed the slightest glimmering of a

conception of the art of war they would not only have held Stamboul,

but they would have advanced their left flank right into the heart of

Russia and set the Crescent flag to flying from the tops of the palaces

on the banks of the Neva.

Naturally, knowing his bellicose proclivities, we were fully prepared

to hear that the general's love-affair was intimately connected with

the war-period; for Mrs. Marcellus herself proposed that the general

should follow Mr. McLaughlin's example and relate, not his last

love-affair necessarily, but his most romantic one. Everybody present

respected the active, self-helpful wife of the postmaster too much

to desire, even for a joke, that the fine sentiments which drew such

a woman into marriage should be made the theme of a story told by a

fireside for the beguilement of a winter's evening. So the general

started by saying that prior to courting and wedding his dear wife

he had been led into an affair of the heart: with a contrite spirit

he confessed that that affair was one which might have had the most

fatal consequences. Luckily, his eyes were opened in time. But had

circumstances been otherwise, had the government at Washington known

the brink on which he stood, he who was now honored by his country's

confidence to the extent of the postmastership of the town of Hurville

might instead be figuring in the reprobatory annals of the republic's

history along with Benedict Arnold and Major André. The conviction

instantly spread among the listeners that we were now to learn that the

general himself on some important occasion had failed to advance his

left flank: if so, we should have him on the hip in future--the left

hip, of course. But the dreadful episode occurred, it seemed, not on

the battle-field, but during the leisure hours when nothing was astir

in camp. It was no question of infantry, cavalry or artillery, but the

old, old story of a pair of brown eyes. "She" was a Southern girl; they

met by chance; he ordered her to walk under the flag; she smiled at him

as she did so; stolen interviews followed; she swore to renounce her

allegiance to the "Lost Cause" and accompany him to the North. Deceived

by her promises, he told her when, how and at what time the corps was

to strike tents and leave the locality--secret information. On the

night prior to the morning they had fixed upon to go the order to march

was countermanded, and the general hastened to his lady-love to tell

her the change of plans. Thinking to give her a lover's surprise, he

crept up to the veranda of her house on tip-toe and noiselessly peered

into the parlor where his enchantress was wont to sit swinging away the

heavy hours in the sweet dalliance of a rocking-chair. To his surprise,

he found she was not alone: a Confederate officer stood by her side,

his arm encircling her taper waist, his lips ever and anon tasting

the honey that dwelt on hers. In intervals between these caresses the

treacherous beauty poured into her lover's ear all she had gleaned

about the change of base of the army from her too credulous brigadier.

A movement made the next day by the Confederates showed they had formed

designs in accordance with the information the girl imparted, but the

Unionist plan having been altered the consequence was in no degree

disastrous to our troops.

The termination of this story found the listeners all very silent. No

one seemed to know what comment to make. From the pained expression

of the brigadier's face it was evident that he still looked upon the

experience as one which but for an accident might have brought danger

to the country and shame and disgrace to himself. Mrs. Marcellus said,

as usual, just the right word. She assured the general that she could

not see in what way he had swerved from his duty as a loyal soldier

in the affair, since the lady had won his confidence by the false

assertion that she desired to renew her allegiance to the flag.

The editor now had the floor. The editor is of course the oracle of the

community, and his newspaper, in the opinion of the entire population

of Hurville--including himself--is an organ which for real power

and earnest writing exceeds any of the monster dailies of the large

cities, whose fame, stupidly enough, extends the length and breadth

of the land, while the _Hurville Gazette_ blushes unseen, claiming

only an average circulation of two thousand; and some say this is

an exaggerated figure. The editor's story was of course thoroughly

characteristic--editorial, so to speak--the recital going straight to

the point at issue without redundant phraseology or extraneous matter

of any kind: it was, in fact, a report, as epigrammatic as a six-lined

local paragraph, boiled down to the utmost limit of concentrated

fact-essence. Yet the gist of the story greatly surprised us. He had

become interested in an anonymous female contributor of love-poems

sent every week to a newspaper he was then editing in the West. At

length, by dint of perseverance, he had unveiled the incognita of the

poetess, in time won her affections, and finally married her. The

general impression was that this must refer to a former wife, of whom

we had never heard, for every one knew the editor's better half to be a

diligent housekeeper, patient mother, a ceaseless sewing-machinist, a

walking encyclopædia of cookery-recipes, and the least literary woman

of our set. Poetry she never read, and she had even been known to sneer

at rhymesters, especially those of her own sex, who, she averred,

might find some better and more profitable way of passing their time

than scribbling nonsense. Yet this change of views, the editor now

assured us, was due solely to the influence of time and a very large

and uncommonly obstreperous family of boys.

The next speaker was the head of the firm of E.T. Perkins & Co.,

dry-goods merchants of the Perkins Block. An extremely religious though

not a bigoted man, generous, good-natured and jovial, everybody likes

him, and we all looked forward with pleasure to hearing his story. He

seemed to have difficulty at first in remembering anything sufficiently

unusual in its incidents to interest us; for, as he said, we all knew

that he had married Mrs. Perkins when he was a clerk in the dry-goods

store of her late father, and had succeeded to the business on his

death, his wife giving great impetus to trade by her own extravagance

in dress, which spread like a contagion among the other ladies of the

town, who until then had been mostly satisfied with nice calicoes and

cheap merinos. As for love-affairs, continued Mr. Perkins, if he had

ever had any before he met Mrs. Perkins he couldn't remember them; but

in a _friendly_ way a curious kind of thing had happened to him many

years ago in New York, when he was in the white-goods department of one

of the big wholesale houses. He was a very young man, not twenty-one,

and trying hard to do right amid the trials and temptations of the

great city. He was a church-member, and in aid of the funds of the

church to which he belonged he had taken one winter a subscription to a

course of lectures to be delivered in some hall down town which has now

disappeared. Seats were reserved for ticket-holders; and so it happened

that he found himself twice a week seated next a lady and her husband

to whom he had been previously introduced by a friend after service

one Sunday evening, but with whom he had had till then but a bowing

acquaintance. Now they fell to chatting of course. He considered the

lady very handsome, though older than himself--about thirty perhaps.

She was of a full figure--might even have been called stout--with

rosy cheeks, pouting lips, laughing black eyes, glossy hair, and a

gay, pleasant manner that was very attractive. Her husband was very

much the senior of his wife, and was cross, ugly, lame and asthmatic.

Sometimes he would leave the hall in the middle of a lecture and go

and sit outside in the cold till it was over, when he would join his

wife, grumbling at everything in general and her in particular. During

these absences Mr. Perkins and the lady had time to exchange many of

their views on various subjects, which were found to be very much in

accord. In brief, the acquaintance was so pleasant that young Perkins,

at the last lecture of the course (the husband having stepped out),

made bold to hint that he would be glad to have it continue, and would

be happy to call, if agreeable. To his surprise, the lady whispered

a few hurried words in his ear of a startling character. Her husband

was exceedingly jealous--utterly without cause, of course--and the

idea of a young gentleman calling at the house in a friendly way was

one that was not to be entertained for an instant. This was a state of

things such as young Perkins had never dreamed possible except in the

exaggerated and wearisome pages of long-winded novels and unreadable

poems in cantos. He immediately exalted himself into a hero of romance,

nor was the sensation diminished when he felt the folds of a bit of

note-paper slipped between his fingers as he shook hands with the lady

at parting. When he returned home he made himself acquainted with the

contents of the mysterious billetdoux, and the sentiment of adventure

was heightened when he read therein a request which the lady must

have written previously to coming to the lecture-hall, since it was

in ink. She desired, she said, to bid him adieu before parting _for

ever_, and as it was impossible for her to do that at her own home,

on account of _something_, she had asked a friend of hers to let her

see him at _her_ house. The call must be made at rather an _unusual_

hour--half-past six in the morning. She was going to see a departing

friend to the _boat_, and she would stop in Hudson street on her way

back. Now, what was more natural, continued Mr. Perkins, for a foolish

young fellow to do than to go to the place on the day appointed? The

hour _was_ rather unusual, and the morning being bitterly cold the

experience was anything but pleasant. The friend's house proved to

be in a very disagreeable neighborhood, and the parlor into which

he was ushered was a small, musty room, with a dirty carpet on the

floor, and otherwise furnished with a few cane-seat chairs and a

rickety marble-topped centre-table, the place being rendered still

more uninviting by a sheet-iron stove which belched forth volumes of

smoke from the unwilling beginnings of a rebellious fire that had just

been kindled in it. Mr. Perkins sat down in the cheerless apartment,

and waited long, half numbed with cold. Having left his home so early,

he was breakfast-less, and that fact did not render his condition any

the more comfortable. The romance of the adventure oozed out of him

from every pore in an almost perceptible stream. The absurdity of

the situation became every moment more painfully apparent, when at

length in walked the lady. But could this indeed be she? Why, she was

completely changed. Instead of the gay, bright, trim, rosy, laughing,

sparkling-eyed lady of the evenings, he beheld a stout, untidy,

sallow-complexioned, faded-out woman of forty. She was old enough to be

his mother--old enough to be ashamed of herself. Never was a youth's

foolish illusion more quickly dispelled. He took her proffered hand

listlessly, and declined the invitation to reseat himself, pleading the

necessity for getting to the store at once. His exit must have been

farcical in its abruptness. The most jealous husband in the world could

have found no occasion for complaint in such conduct, unless indeed

he had changed his views and objected to his wife being treated so

cavalierly. The lady's billetdoux had indeed possessed the essential

element of truth, as opposed to the fiction of poetry: they bade each

other adieu before parting _for ever_.

There may be little enough humor in this story, given thus barely, but

Mr. Perkins's droll tone of voice and the mirthful twinkle in his

eye kept us in peals of laughter while he related the adventure. The

history gained an added zest from the frankness of the narrator, for it

proved once again how little the gold of his nature was cheapened by

the dross of an assumed ultra-holiness, which more than anything else

is repulsive to young people when coming from a religious Mentor. "Was

_you_ ever a little girl?" asks the pranksome Miss Lotta in one of her

nursery-rhyme plays of a particularly cross and crabbed old grenadier

of an aunt. A similar question was never propounded to Mr. Perkins.

No boy in Hurville--even the copper-toed ruffians of the editor's

wife--entertains any doubts of the unadulterated boyishness, at some

remote period, of Mr. Perkins. His pious monitions and enthusiastic

essays to lead the boys in the path of a noble manhood lose nothing

from the knowledge.

It was now the turn of Mrs. Marcellus to speak. We peremptorily bade

her unfold herself, as did Hamlet the Ghost. She smiled and craved

a minute's grace in which to serve us all anew fresh jorums of the

fragrant Kyshow Congou--a tea unparalleled which she imports herself

direct from Oxford Circus in famed London Town--and when the incense

of the fragrant brew rose on the ambient air of the yellow satin

drawing-room our hostess desired us to rattle our teaspoons and clatter

our cups and saucers with a will, as she thought, she said, that a

little confusion would enable her to get through the recital with

more courage. In spite of this request, the most unobtrusive mice

could scarcely have been more noiseless than we as we listened to her

narrative, not a word of which escaped our attentive ears.

"You know," began Mrs. Marcellus, "that it is now five years since the

double wedding of my two darling daughters, parting from whom was such

a dreadful cross for me to bear. Every mother knows how sharp a pang

it gives to transfer to another, almost a stranger--a man whose very

existence six months or a year before was unknown to us--the treasured

being whose smiles and tears have been since babyhood her mother's rain

and sunshine. Ah me! if mothers suffer in this way at the marriage of

one daughter, think how doubly great must the trial have been to me

when I was called upon to relinquish both my girls at once--to see

them both go away on the train, joyous and happy with the men of their

choice, while nothing was left for me but to come back here into the

empty house and begin a new plan of existence with the vivifying and

soul-sustaining element of constant and ever-present love left out! I

don't think any one in Hurville had the slightest glimmering of an idea

of what I suffered."

Mr. Perkins, who sat next her, shook her hand in testimony of the

appreciation of all Hurville of her kindness in never once remitting

(in spite of her private feelings) the pleasant social gatherings which

were so prized by the community; and all present gave audible assent to

the unanimity of opinion on this head.

"You know that some two months before the double wedding I took my

daughters to New York for the purpose of completing the purchases I

considered necessary to furnish each with a suitable trousseau. Much

had been bought here at Mr. Perkins's nice store, almost all the

underclothing which was so much admired by their Boston friends when

the girls arrived at their husbands' homes was made here by the neat

fingers of our Hurville seamstresses, but there were a few things

for which the New York style was necessary, or at least so the girls

thought, and that was the same thing. We were in New York about ten

days, and though every moment, except when we were asleep, was absorbed

by the intricate duties of our shopping, my sense of approaching

loneliness grew deeper and sadder, until it became so overwhelming that

in spite of my efforts to conceal it from them I feared my daughters

would observe my melancholy, and that it would cast a gloom over the

last joyous days of their maidenhood. But they were too full of spirits

and excitement to notice it, and attributed whatever was unusual in my

manner to the exceptional fatigue of the occasion. Finally, our task

seemed finished, and we started for home laden with purchases, leaving

a number of unfinished orders, which were to be sent us by express when

completed. We got to the dépôt rather late, and I found a long line of

people standing before me at the ticket-office window. I was almost at

the tail of an elongated serpent of humanity which wriggled forward

with despairing slowness, and after standing a while I impatiently

left the ranks and went to where my daughters were sitting. 'We shall

never get all that baggage checked in time,' I said: 'I'm afraid we

can't get off by this train.' At that moment a young gentleman who was

awaiting his turn, and was only the second or third person from the

window, leaned toward us and said to me, 'I'll get your tickets for you

if you'll allow me. How many? Three?'--'Yes,' I answered: 'three for

Hurville, please,' offering him the money. 'Never mind that now: wait

till I bring you the tickets;' and I saw him pay for them out of his

well-stuffed wallet. Of course I refunded, with many thanks, as soon

as he brought the tickets, which he did in a minute or two, and I then

hurried away to check the baggage, while the girls went on the train to

secure seats together and get the conductor to let us face each other.

"We had a pleasant day for our journey, but the train was uncomfortably

crowded. A succession of way-passengers, one after another, absorbed

our vacant seat, and prevented the girls from indulging in that

exchange of secret, and in general highly-laughable, confidences

with which young people of their age are always bubbling over. Some

of these local passengers were not very pleasant company, being

frequently encumbered with market-baskets which were not only in

everybody's way, but proclaimed by unmistakable odors the nature of

their contents. Seeing that it was impossible for us to retain the

fourth seat, and having learned from the conductor that there was no

room in the parlor-car, it was really a great relief, as a certainty

of escape from unpleasant companionship, when the same young gentleman

who had kindly helped me at the ticket-office came up and asked if we

had any objection to his sitting there, as he had given up two seats

in succession to ladies, and had been standing the most of the time

since we left New York. Of course we assented, and for the first time

I examined our fellow-traveller minutely. He was very good-looking--a

blond, a style of coloring that I have always particularly admired in

a man when it does not degenerate into effeminacy, as it certainly

did not in this instance. In figure he was tall and slender, with

the erect and graceful carriage of the accomplished soldier, not the

awkward stiffness of the recruit. His eyes were a deep, rich blue,

almost violet--eyes that in themselves would have been sufficient

to make a woman's reputation for beauty: his long silken moustache

shaded from blond to golden red, and was parted fanlike over his

vermilion lips, fragrant and glowing with youth and health. His manners

were essentially those of distinguished society, and his well-cut

gray travelling-suit, his superlatively fine linen, his tiny gold

watch-chain with a valuable pearl set in the slide, his fresh gloves,

his dark-blue necktie carelessly twisted in a sailor's knot, his fine

shoes fitting every curve of his aristocratic foot and covered by

neat cloth gaiters buttoned at the side, his elegant travelling-rug

rolled in a pair of Russia-leather straps, his stylish umbrella, his

fine handkerchief embroidered evidently in Paris in quite a new way--a

fac-simile of a seal in red wax, with a monogram and crest standing

out upon it--above all, his silver-fitted travelling-bag, even finer

than those we had priced at Tiffany's for one hundred and fifty dollars

each,--all gave evidence of a position of something more than ease in

regard to money; while his beautifully-white teeth, his exactly-parted

hair, his scrupulously-tended hands, all spoke of that extreme care

of the person which unmistakably indicates the habit of contact with

people of dignity and good-breeding. Remember, friends, I did not

judge my new friend from the point of view, naturally restricted, of

Hurville. I looked at him from the summits of the forty centuries

of civilization of the European capitals, and I at once adjudged him to

be a man of the world and a gentleman.

"Of course we fell into conversation, and his tone of thought and

mode of expression fully coincided with the elevated character of

his appearance. He was English by descent, he told us, but American

by birth. His reading had evidently been extensive, and his comments

on every subject that arose showed that an original as well as a

scholarly mind had been brought to bear upon it. Yet never was he so

absorbed in the discussion as to neglect any of those attentions which

are so agreeable, even so necessary, to ladies while travelling. His

politeness was constantly on the alert, and his quick eye detected

wants even before they were fully felt, much less spoken of.

"His journey might or might not be so long as ours. He had taken his

ticket for a place he named, a small station in Pennsylvania, where

his father's horses and carriage would be waiting to drive him to the

town where their home was, a bustling lumber-centre back among the

Alleghanies some twenty miles off the railway. His father was the owner

of an immense tract of timber-land there, a property which had come

into his hands many years ago in England as an offset to a very bad

debt incurred by some scamp who had inherited it, but had never seen

it and knew not whether it was valueless or the reverse. For thirty

years his father had paid taxes on these unpromising forest-lands, and

then suddenly there was a rush of enterprise in that direction and the

property became a fortune. The timber was of the finest and the demand

for it unlimited. He was his father's business-representative in the

cities, and had been to Europe also, where he had visited their English

relations, who were very high-toned and all that, but not quite so

well off now as those of the family who were in the plebeian bustle of

successful trade-enterprise in America--to wit, his father and himself.

If the coachman and team were at the station when we arrived (we were

to take supper there), he should go home with him: if the man and

horses were _not_ there, he should find a telegram from his father, in

which case he was to go on to Pittsburg, and would see us at breakfast

in the morning at the place where we changed cars for Hurville.

"In the course of conversation I mentioned to him the peculiar and

interesting circumstance which had called us to New York, the girls

both blushing and ejaculating in a duet, 'Oh don't, mamma!' But I

know so well the heart of youth, both male and female, that I did not

think it right to expose this young man to a misconception in regard

to the position of my girls, more especially as ever since he had

joined us he had sat and gazed at the seat which I occupied with my

younger daughter with a look in his eyes which betrayed the secret of

an inward and sudden yearning which was almost pain. To my surprise,

the announcement of the approaching wedding of both my girls produced

no especial effect upon him. He seemed interested, and indulged in a

little graceful badinage; but this was what struck me as so strange:

every time he spoke to the girls he was smiling and gay and joking,

but every time he turned his eyes on me his expression of face,

his whole manner, changed. His gaze became riveted on my features,

and his soulful eyes lingered there with a fixity that abashed and

disconcerted me. I could not understand it. Why did he look at me so?

Years had passed since last that sort of gaze had been fastened upon

my face, for it was a gaze which unmistakably says, 'You have made

an impression upon me which I cannot resist: everything about you is

pleasing to me.' Try as I would to avoid this look, turn my head as I

might to escape the gaze of those bewitching eyes--even when I closed

my own and feigned sleep--still I felt their tender rays upon me, and

never once did I find it otherwise.

"It is this point of the story, friends, where I feel confession

so difficult. You who have known me for fifteen years, pursuing

unswervingly the prosaic path of duty, will find it difficult to

understand the power of the impression this stranger made upon my poor

heart, widowed in its prime and at that moment about to be further

robbed of all it had to love and cherish. All the years during which I

had employed the most rigid rules of subjection over myself seemed to

vanish like a mist. Every moment I felt more and more strongly a belief

that this new-born passion was sincere, and knew that if it should

really prove so the time when it would meet with full and grateful

return on my part would not be far distant.

"So wore on the daylight hours. Dusk came early, and after the lamps

were lit first one and then the other of my girls wrapped herself in

her shawl, and cuddling together on one seat with the head of each on

the other's shoulders, they both dropped asleep. He and I were now

sitting side by side. For a long time neither spoke. I persistently

stared out of the window at the flying landscape, almost invisible now

in the increasing darkness; but I could feel, though I did not even

glance at him, that he had turned in his seat, his elbow resting on

the back of it, his cheek on his hand and his eyes on me. At length

he bent over toward me, and in so low a tone of voice that the girls

could scarce have heard it had they been awake he whispered, 'Will you

permit me to say a few words to you?'

"'I have no objection,' I answered coldly--'always with the proviso

that what you have to say to me is something which it will be no

derogation of my dignity as a mother of grown daughters to hear.'

"'Could you, madam, for a moment believe me capable of saying anything

unworthy you, unworthy myself?' he exclaimed reproachfully. 'Oh no:

I do not think I have given you any cause to believe me other than a

gentleman. I am not in search of a love-affair, believe me, nor have I

hitherto been considered as at all of an impressionable nature. I am

perhaps not quite so young as I look, and certainly the opportunity of

meeting beautiful and fascinating women has not been lacking to me.

I know scores of such, and still I have borne hitherto an unoccupied

heart. Now, I -- But I am tongue-tied: I fear to give offence. I know

very well you would not let me tell you that you have inspired in me

one of those passions which, born in an instant, often shape a whole

destiny--that I love you as fondly as a man ever loved a woman. No,

no, do not stop me. I say that I do _not_ make such assertions, because

I know you would not allow me; but there is one thing I will make bold

to do--one favor I must crave at your hands. Will you grant it?'

"'What is it?'

"'This: that you will let me count myself among your friends. Give me

that foothold, and something I feel here in my innermost heart tells

me that by it I may lift myself to a niche in yours which no other man

now fills. Let time try the sincerity of what I say. All I ask of you

is that if I ever come to Hurville (as I surely shall if I'm alive),

you will allow me to call upon you merely as a friend: I ask no more.'

"'Are you sincere in this wish?'

"'As Heaven is my judge, I am. In less than an hour this train will

arrive at the station where, in all probability, we shall have to

part. I cannot endure to think that in a formal shake of the hand at a

railway-dépôt you and I are going to separate, never perhaps to meet

in this world again. Both of us have made plenty of such impromptu

acquaintances before now, and have seen the end of them approach with

the utmost indifference, and never given another thought to these

chance friendships of a passing hour. But I feel in my innermost heart

that this meeting between you and me was brought about by the hand of

Providence itself, and for a purpose that we at this early stage of

our knowledge of each other cannot divine. I will not, I cannot, see

it fade away. Will you give me leave to come and see you at Hurville?'

"'With pleasure,' I replied.

"He sprang to my side as I assented, pressing against me so closely

that I withdrew myself hastily lest it should become an open embrace.

Yet even as I repulsed him he smiled fondly on me and said in a tender

voice, 'Thank you, my friend: this is all I ask. I shall soon see you

again, and I warn you I shall see you often. I am willing to take my

chances for the future. Time will try me.'

"'Come, come!' I answered: 'these hints and insinuations are mere

folly. It would be disingenuous in me to pretend not to understand

them; but let them stop here: let us banish all nonsense. I am older

than yourself by some years, and when you become better acquainted

with me you will find that there is nothing in the least extraordinary

about me. I am simply a middle-aged, might even be called an old,

woman, wrapped up in a pleasant but very unromantic set of friends,

and with all the love of my nature buried in the grave of a dead past,

except what survives in the persons of those two sizable young ladies

who sit nodding opposite.'

"'Every word you say,' he said, again drawing near to me in an

affectionate way, 'but confirms the impression you first made upon me.

I think you are a woman of the noblest nature, the soundest sense,

the warmest heart, I ever met. I admire you as much, as deeply, as

I respect you. But this you must permit me to say: you are doing

yourself a great injustice by laying out for yourself a loveless

future. You will feel the heart-void very powerfully when your

daughters leave you. You are _not_ an old woman, even in years, while

in appearance you are not even middle-aged: no one would dream of your

being the mother of these young ladies. Now, is it right in a woman so

exceptionally endowed with affections as you are to say you will never

love again? Leave the future to take care of itself: you do not know

what it has in store for you.'

"With that he pressed my hand, and I pressed his in return, and then

drew away from him, and, covering my face with my veil, nestled,

half frightened, half joyous, into the window-corner. The emotion he

had caused me filled my eyes with tears, yet whether I shed them in

happiness or sorrow I could not tell. There was the dead love, the

girlhood's sweet dream so cruelly finished, my long conviction that

on this earth never again would the delicious oneness of wedded life

be mine. Could it really be that I had inspired in the bosom of this

thoughtful young man the sentiments which lead to the devotion of one

soul to another? Even as I questioned thus my inner self I raised my

veil, and meeting the fixed gaze of those lovely eyes they smiled an

assent, and I sank back, trembling in the ecstasy of my new-found joy.

"We arrived at the supper-station, and with his usual gentlemanly

care our friend helped us from the car and escorted us into the

supper-room. He seated us at a table, and turning down a chair for

himself he whispered in my ear, 'I'll go now and see if there is a

despatch for me. If there is I shall just have time to jump on the

Western-bound train. That is it, there: it is only waiting for this

connection. If there is no despatch and my father's man is here, I

will come back and have supper with you before starting home. In any

case I'll see you soon in Hurville.'

"I was too agitated to partake of food. I tried to sip some scalding

tea, but could not, and rising from the table told the girls to pay

for the supper when they had finished: they would find me outside on

the platform. I heard the whistle of the departing westward train, and

as its ponderous weight thundered over the gleaming rails I saw that

he was in it, kneeling on a seat and peering anxiously out, trying, no

doubt, to get a parting glimpse of me. Just as he was whirled away I

saw the flutter of a handkerchief, and knew that at the last instant

he had recognized me where I stood.

"'Where's our friend?' said one of the girls, who had now finished

supper and come out. 'I thought he was going to have supper: he turned

down a chair.'

"'He left on the Western-bound train,' I answered.

"'I suppose he got the despatch he expected and hadn't time to come in

and say good-bye.'

"It was the first time a secret had ever come between me and my

daughters. I felt distressed, and even guilty.

"'Girls,' said I when we were again seated in the train, 'what did you

think of our travelling-companion?'

"My elder girl thought he was a perfect gentleman, evidently rich,

very well bred, very handsome, and, strange to say with all this, a

scholar. She had no doubt he moved in the best society wherever he

went.

"My younger girl's impression was quite different. In spite of all

he had told us about his wealthy father and his lumber-forests, she

said she didn't believe but what if the truth were known he would be

discovered to be a New York drummer in the button business or perhaps

a Western man in the ham trade.

"'Well, my dears, I am going to tell you something about him that will

surprise you. He is not what you have said, Minnie, nor what you have

said, Jennie, nor what he himself said: he is simply nothing more nor

less than a pickpocket!'