CHAPTER XXXII

CONCLUSION.

Mr. Bernard Langdon had no sooner taken his degree, than, in accordance

with the advice of one of his teachers whom he frequently consulted, he

took an office in the heart of the city where he had studied. He had

thought of beginning in a suburb or some remoter district of the city

proper.

"No," said his teacher,--to wit, myself,--"don't do any such thing. You

are made for the best kind of practice; don't hamper yourself with an

outside constituency, such as belongs to a practitioner of the second

class. When a fellow like you chooses his beat, he must look ahead a

little. Take care of all the poor that apply to you, but leave the

half-pay classes to a different style of doctor,--the people who spend

one half their time in taking care of their patients, and the other half

in squeezing out their money. Go for the swell-fronts and south-exposure

houses; the folks inside are just as good as other people, and the

pleasantest, on the whole, to take care of. They must have somebody, and

they like a gentleman best. Don't throw yourself away. You have a

good presence and pleasing manners. You wear white linen by inherited

instinct. You can pronounce the word _view_. You have all the elements

of success; go and take it. Be polite and generous, but don't undervalue

yourself. You will be useful, at any rate; you may just as well be

happy, while you are about it. The highest social class furnishes

incomparably the best patients, taking them by and large. Besides, when

they won't get well and bore you to death, you can send 'em off to

travel. Mind me now, and take the tops of your sparrowgrass. Somebody

must have 'em,--why shouldn't you? If you don't take your chance, you'll

get the butt-ends as a matter of course."

Mr. Bernard talked like a young man full of noble sentiments. He wanted

to be useful to his fellow-beings. Their social differences were nothing

to him. He would never court the rich,--he would go where he was called.

He would rather save the life of a poor mother of a family than that of

half a dozen old gouty millionnaires whose heirs had been yawning and

stretching these ten years to get rid of them.

"Generous emotions!" I exclaimed. "Cherish 'em; cling to 'em till you

are fifty,--till you are seventy,--till you are ninety! But do as I tell

you,--strike for the best circle of practice, and you'll be sure to get

it!"

Mr. Langdon did as I told him,--took a genteel office, furnished it

neatly, dressed with a certain elegance, soon made a pleasant circle

of acquaintances, and began to work his way into the right kind of

business. I missed him, however, for some days, not long after he had

opened his office. On his return, he told me he had been up at Rockland,

by special invitation, to attend the wedding of Mr. Dudley Venner and

Miss Helen Darley. He gave me a full account of the ceremony, which

I regret that I cannot relate in full. "Helen looked like an

angel,"--that, I am sure, was one of his expressions. As for her dress,

I should like to give the details, but am afraid of committing blunders,

as men always do, when they undertake to describe such matters. White

dress, anyhow,--that I am sure of,--with orange-flowers, and the most

wonderful lace veil that was ever seen or heard of. The Reverend Doctor

Honeywood performed the ceremony, of course. The good people seemed to

have forgotten they ever had had any other minister,--except Deacon

Shearer and his set of malecontents, who were doing a dull business in

the meeting-house lately occupied by the Reverend Mr. Fairweather.

"Who was at the wedding?"

"Everybody, pretty much. They wanted to keep it quiet, but it was of no

use. Married at church. Front pews, old Doctor Kittredge and all the

mansion-house people and distinguished strangers,--Colonel Sprowle and

family, including Matilda's young gentleman, a graduate of one of

the fresh-water colleges,--Mrs. Pickins (late Widow Rowens) and

husband,--Deacon Soper and numerous parishioners. A little nearer the

door, Abel, the Doctor's man, and Elbridge, who drove them to church in,

the family-coach. Father Fairweather, as they all call him now, came in

late, with Father McShane."

"And Silas Peckham?"

"Oh, Silas had left The School and Rockland. Cut up altogether too

badly in the examination instituted by the Trustees. Had moved over

to Tamarack, and thought of renting a large house and 'farming' the

town-poor."

* * * * *

Some time after this, as I was walking with a young friend along by the

swell-fronts and south-exposures, whom should I see but Mr. Bernard

Langdon, looking remarkably happy, and keeping step by the side of a

very handsome and singularly well-dressed young lady? He bowed and

lifted his hat as we passed.

"Who is that pretty girl my young doctor has got there?" I said to my

companion.

"Who is that?" he answered. "You don't know? Why, that is neither more

nor less than Miss Letitia Forester, daughter of--of--why, the great

banking-firm, you know, Bilyuns Brothers & Forester. Got acquainted with

her in the country, they say. There's a story that they're engaged, or

like to be, if the firm consents."

"Oh!" I said.

I did not like the look of it in the least. Too young,--too young. Has

not taken any position yet. No right to ask for the hand of Bilyuns

Brothers & Co.'s daughter. Besides, it will spoil him for practice, if

he marries a rich girl before he has formed habits of work.

I looked in at his office the next day. A box of white kids was lying

open on the table. A three-cornered note, directed in a very delicate

lady's-hand, was distinguishable among a heap of papers. I was just

going to call him to account for his proceedings, when he pushed

the three-cornered note aside and took up a letter with a great

corporation-seal upon it. He had received the offer of a professor's

chair in an ancient and distinguished institution.

"Pretty well for three-and-twenty, my boy," I said. "I suppose you'll

think you must be married one of these days, if you accept this office."

Mr. Langdon blushed.--There had been stories about him, he knew. His

name had been mentioned in connection with that of a very charming young

lady. The current reports were not true. He had met this young lady,

and been much pleased with her, in the country, at the house of her

grandfather, the Reverend Doctor Honeywood,--you remember Miss Letitia

Forester, whom I have mentioned repeatedly? On coming to town, he found

his country-acquaintance in a social position which seemed to discourage

his continued intimacy. He had discovered, however, that he was a not

unwelcome visitor, and had kept up friendly relations with her. But

there was no truth in the current reports,--none at all.

Some months had passed, after this visit, when I happened one evening to

stroll into a box in one of the principal theatres of the city. A small

party sat on the seats before me: a middle-aged gentleman and his lady,

in front, and directly behind them my young doctor and the same very

handsome young lady I had seen him walking with on the side-walk before

the swell-fronts and south-exposures. As Professor Langdon seemed to be

very much taken up with his companion, and both of them looked as if

they were enjoying themselves, I determined not to make my presence

known to my young friend, and to withdraw quietly after feasting my eyes

with the sight of them for a few minutes.

"It looks as if something might come of it," I said to myself.

At that moment the young lady lifted her arm accidentally, in such a way

that the light fell upon the clasp of a chain which encircled her wrist.

My eyes filled with tears as I read upon the clasp, in sharp-cut Italic

letters, _E.V._ They were tears at once of sad remembrance and of joyous

anticipation; for the ornament on which I looked was the double

pledge of a dead sorrow and a living affection. It was the golden

bracelet,--the parting-gift of Elsie Venner.

* * * * *

BUBBLES.

I.

I stood on the brink in childhood,

And watched the bubbles go

From the rock-fretted sunny ripple

To the smoother lymph below;

And over the white creek-bottom,

Under them every one,

Went golden stars in the water,

All luminous with the sun.

But the bubbles brake on the surface,

And under, the stars of gold

Brake, and the hurrying water

Flowed onward, swift and cold.

II.

I stood on the brink in manhood,

And it came to my weary heart,--

In my breast so dull and heavy,

After the years of smart,--

That every hollowest bubble

Which over my life had passed

Still into its deeper current

Some sky-sweet gleam had cast;

That, however I mocked it gayly,

And guessed at its hollowness,

Still shone, with each bursting bubble,

One star in my soul the less.

CITIES AND PARKS:

WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE NEW YORK CENTRAL PARK.

The first murderer was the first city-builder; and a good deal of

murdering has been carried on in the interest of city-building ever

since Cain's day. Narrow and crooked streets, want of proper sewerage

and ventilation, the absence of forethought in providing open spaces for

the recreation of the people, the allowance of intramural burials,

and of fetid nuisances, such as slaughter-houses and manufactories of

offensive stuffs, have converted cities into pestilential inclosures,

and kept Jefferson's saying--"Great cities are great sores"--true in its

most literal and mortifying sense.

There is some excuse for the crowded and irregular character of

Old-World cities. They grew, and were not builded. Accumulations

of people, who lighted like bees upon a chance branch, they found

themselves hived in obdurate brick and mortar before they knew it; and

then, to meet the necessities of their cribbed, cabined, and confined

condition, they must tear down sacred landmarks, sacrifice invaluable

possessions, and trample on prescriptive rights, to provide

breathing-room for their gasping population. Besides, air, water, light,

and cleanliness are modern innovations. The nose seems to have acquired

its sensitiveness within a hundred years,--the lungs their objection to

foul air, and the palate its disgust at ditch-water like the Thames,

within a more recent period. Honestly dirty, and robustly indifferent to

what mortally offends our squeamish senses, our happy ancestors fattened

on carbonic acid gas, and took the exhalations of graveyards and gutters

with a placidity of stomach that excites our physiological admiration.

If they died, it was not for want of air. The pestilence carried, them

off,--and that was a providential enemy, whose home-bred origin nobody

suspected.

It must seem to foreigners of all things the strangest, that, in a

country where land is sold at one dollar and twenty-five cents the acre

by the square mile, there should in any considerable part of it be a

want of room,--any necessity for crowding the population into pent-up

cities,--any narrowness of streets, or want of commons and parks. And

yet it is an undeniable truth that our American cities are all suffering

the want of ample thoroughfares, destitute of adequate parks and

commons, and too much crowded for health, convenience, or beauty. Boston

has for its main street a serpentine lane, wide enough to drive the cows

home from their pastures, but totally and almost fatally inadequate

to be the great artery of a city of two hundred thousand people.

Philadelphia is little better off with her narrow Chestnut Street,

which purchases what accommodation it affords by admitting the parallel

streets to nearly equal use, and thus sacrificing the very idea of a

metropolitan thoroughfare, in which the splendor and motion and life

of a metropolis ought to be concentrated. New York succeeds in making

Broadway what the Toledo, the Strand, the Linden Strasse, the Italian

Boulevards are; but the street is notoriously blocked and confused, and

occasions more loss of time and temper and life and limb than would

amply repay, once in five years, the widening of it to double its

present breadth.

It is a great misfortune, that our commercial metropolis, the

predestined home of five millions of people, should not have a single

street worthy of the population, the wealth, the architectural ambition

ready to fill and adorn it. Wholesale trade, bankers, brokers, and

lawyers seek narrow streets. There must be swift communication between

the opposite sides, and easy recognition of faces across the way. But

retail trade requires no such conditions. The passers up and down on

opposite sides of Broadway are as if in different streets, and neither

expect to recognize each other nor to pass from one to the other without

set effort. It took a good while to make Broad and Canal Streets

attractive business-streets, and to get the importers and jobbers out

of Pearl Street; but the work is now done. The Bowery affords the only

remaining chance of building a magnificent metropolitan thoroughfare in

New York; and we anticipate the day--when Broadway will surrender its

pretensions to that now modest Cheapside. Already, about the confluence

of the Third and Fourth Avenues at Eighth Street are congregated some

of the chief institutions of the city,--the Bible House, the Cooper

Institute, the Astor Library, the Mercantile Library. Farther down,

the continuation of Canal Street affords the most commanding sites for

future public edifices; while the neighborhoods of Franklin and Chatham

Squares ought to be seized upon to embellish the city at imperial points

with its finest architectural piles. The capacities of New York, below

Union Square, for metropolitan splendor are entirely undeveloped; the

best points are still occupied by comparatively worthless buildings, and

the future will produce a now unlooked-for change in the whole character

of that great district.

The huddling together of our American cities is due to the recentness

of the time when space was our greatest enemy and sparseness our chief

discouragement. Our founders hated room as much as a backwoods farmer

hates trees. The protecting walls, which narrowed the ways and cramped

the houses of the Old-World cities, did not put a severer compress

upon them, than the disgust of solitude and the craving for "the sweet

security of streets" threw about our city-builders. In the Western towns

now, they carefully give a city air to their villages by crowding the

few stores and houses of which they are composed into the likeliest

appearance of an absolute scarcity of space.

They labor unconsciously to look crowded, and would sooner go into a

cellar to eat their oysters than have them in the finest saloon above

ground. And so, if a peninsula like Boston, or a miniature Mesopotamia

like New York, or a basin like Cincinnati, could be found to tuck away

a town in, in which there was a decent chance of covering over the

nakedness of the land within a thousand years, they rejoiced to seize

on it and warm their shivering imaginations in the idea of the possible

snugness which their distant posterity might enjoy.

Boston owes its only park worth naming--the celebrated Common--to

the necessity of leaving a convenient cow-pasture for the babes and

sucklings of that now mature community. Forty acres were certainly

never more fortunately situated for their predestined service, nor more

providentially rescued for the higher uses of man. May the memory of the

weaning babes who pleaded for the spot where their "milky mothers" fed

be ever sacred in our Athens, and may the cows of Boston be embalmed

with the bulls of Egypt! A white heifer should be perpetually grazing,

at her tether, in the shadow of the Great Elm. Would it be wholly

unbecoming one born in full view of that lovely inclosure to suggest

that the straightness of the lines in which the trees are planted on

Boston Common, and the rapidly increasing thickness of their foliage,

destroy in the summer season the effect of breadth and liberty, hide

both the immediate and the distant landscape, stifle the breeze, and

diminish the attractiveness of the spot? Fewer trees, scattered in

clumps and paying little regard to paths, would vastly improve the

effect. The colonnades of the malls furnish all the shade desirable in

so small an inclosure.

For the most part, the proper laying-out of cities is both a matter of

greater ease and greater importance in America than anywhere else. We

are much in the condition of those old Scriptural worthies, of whom it

could be so coolly said, "So he went and built a city," as if it were

a matter of not much greater account than "So be went and built a

log-house." Very likely some of those Biblical cities, extemporized

so tersely, were not much more finished than those we now and then

encounter in our Western and Southern tours, where a poor shed at four

cross-roads is dignified with the title. We believe it was Samuel

Dexter, the pattern of Webster, who, on hanging out his shingle in a

New England village, where a tavern, a schoolhouse, a church, and a

blacksmith's shop constituted the whole settlement, gave as a reason,

that, having to break into the world somewhere, he had chosen the

weakest place. He would have tried a new Western city, had they then

been in fashion, as a still softer spot in the social crust. But this

rage for cities in America is prophetic. The name is a spell; and most

of the sites, surveyed and distributed into town-lots with squares and

parks staked out, are only a century before their time, and will redound

to the future credit, however fatal to the immediate cash of their

projectors. Who can doubt that Cairo of Illinois--the standing joke of

tourists, (and the standing-water of the Ohio and Mississippi,) though

no joke to its founders--will one day rival its Egyptian prototype?

America runs to cities, and particularly in its Northern latitudes.

As cities have been the nurses of democratic institutions and ideas,

democratic nations, for very obvious reasons, tend to produce them. They

are the natural fruits of a democracy. And with no people are great

cities so important, or likely to be so increasingly populous, as with

a great agricultural and commercial nation like our own, covered with

a free and equal population. The vast wealth of such a people, evenly

distributed, and prevented from over-accumulation in special families by

the absence of primogeniture and entail,--their general education

and refined tastes,--the intense community of ideas, through the

all-pervading influence of a daily press reaching with simultaneous

diffusion over thousands of square miles,--the facilities of

locomotion,--all inevitably cooperate with commercial necessities to

create great cities,--not merely as the homes of the mercantile and

wealthy class, but as centres where the leisure, the tastes, the

pride, and the wants of the people at large repair more and more for

satisfaction. Free populations, educated in public schools and with an

open career for all, soon instinctively settle the high economies of

life.

Many observers have ascribed the rapid change which for twenty years

past has been going on in the relative character of towns and villages

on the one hand, and cities on the other, to the mere operation of the

railroad-system. But that system itself grew out of higher instincts.

Equal communities demand equal privileges and advantages. They tend

to produce a common level. The country does not acquiesce in the

superiority of the city in manners, comforts, or luxuries. It demands

a market at its door,--first-rate men for its advisers in all medical,

legal, moral, and political matters. It demands for itself the

amusements, the refinements, the privileges of the city. This is to

be brought about only by the application, at any cost, of the most

immediate methods of communication with the city; and behold our

railroad system,--the Briarean shaking of hands which the country gives

the city! The growth of this system is a curious commentary on the

purely mercenary policy which is ordinarily supposed to govern the

investments of capital. The railroads of the United States are as much

the products of social rivalries and the fruits of an ineradicable

democratic instinct for popularizing all advantages, as of any

commercial emulation. The people have willingly bandaged their own eyes,

and allowed themselves to believe a profitable investment was made,

because their inclinations were so determined to have the roads,

profitable or not. Their wives and daughters _would_ shop in the city;

the choicest sights and sounds were there; there concentrated themselves

the intellectual and moral lights; there were the representative

splendors of the state or nation;--and a swift access to them was

essential to true equality and self-respect.

One does not need to be a graybeard to recall the time when every

county-town in New England had, because it needs must have, its

first rate lawyer, its distinguished surgeon, its comprehensive

business-man,--and when a fixed and unchanging population gave to our

villages a more solid and a more elegant air than they now possess. The

Connecticut river-villages, with a considerable increase in population,

and a vast improvement in the general character of the dwellings, have

nevertheless lost their most characterizing features,--the large and

dignified residences of their founders, and the presence of the once

able and widely known men that were identified with their local

importance and pride. The railroads have concentrated the ability of all

the professions in the cities, and carried thither the wealth of all the

old families. To them, and not to the county-town, repair the people for

advice in all critical matters, for supplies in all important purchases,

for all their rarest pleasures, and all their most prized and memorable

opportunities.

Cities, and the immediate neighborhood of cities, are rapidly becoming

the chosen residences of the enterprising, successful, and intelligent.

As might be supposed, the movement works both ways: the locomotive

facilities carry citizens into the country, as well as countrymen into

the city. But those who have once tasted the city are never wholly

weaned from it, and every citizen who moves into a village-community

sends two countrymen back to take his place. He infects the country with

civic tastes, and acts as a great conductor between the town and the

country. It is apparent, too, that the experience of ten years, during

which some strong reaction upon the centripetal tendencies of the

previous ten years drove many of the wealthy and the self-supposed

lovers of quietude and space into the country, has dispersed several

very natural prejudices, and returned the larger part of the truants

to their original ways. One of these prejudices was, that our ordinary

Northern climate was as favorable to the outdoor habits of the leisurely

class as the English climate; whereas, besides not having a leisurely

class, and never being destined to have any, under our wise

wealth-distributing customs, and not having any out-door habits, which

grow up only on estates and on hereditary fortunes, experience has

convinced most who have tried it that we have only six months when

out-of-doors allows any comfort, health, or pleasure away from the city.

The roads are sloughs; side-walks are wanting; shelter is gone with the

leaves; non-intercourse is proclaimed; companionship cannot be found;

leisure is a drug; books grow stupid; the country is a stupendous bore.

Another prejudice was the anticipated economy of the country. This has

turned out to be, as might have been expected, an economy to those who

fall in with its ways, which citizens are wholly inapt and unprepared to

do. It is very economical not to want city comforts and conveniences.

But it proves more expensive to those who go into the country to want

them there than it did to have them where they abound. They are not to

be had in the country at any price,--water, gas, fuel, food, attendance,

amusement, locomotion in all weathers; but such a moderate measure of

them as a city-bred family cannot live without involves so great an

expense, that the expected economy of life in the country to those not

actually brought up there turns out a delusion. The expensiveness of

life in the city comes of the generous and grand scale on which it there

proceeds, not from the superior cost of the necessaries or comforts of

life. They are undoubtedly cheaper in the city, all things considered,

than anywhere in the country. Where everything is to be had, in the

smallest or the largest quantities,--where every form of service can be

commanded at a moment's notice,--where the wit, skill, competition of a

country are concentrated upon the furnishing of all commodities at the

most taking rates,--there prices will, of course, be most reasonable;

and the expensiveness of such communities, we repeat, is entirely due to

the abundant wealth which makes such enormous demands and secures such

various comforts and luxuries;--in short, it is the high standard of

living, not the cost of the necessaries of life. This high standard

is, of course, an evil to those whose social ambition drives them to a

rivalry for which they are not prepared. But no special pity is due to

hardships self-imposed by pride and folly. The probability is, that,

proportioned to their income from labor, the cost of living in the city,

for the bulk of its population, is lighter, their degree of comfort

considered, than in the country. And for the wealthy class of society,

no doubt, on the whole, economy is served by living in the city. Our

most expensive class is that which lives in the country after the manner

of the city.

A literary man, of talents and thorough respectability, lately informed

us, that, after trying all places, cities, villages, farmhouses,

boarding-houses, hotels, taverns, he had discovered that keeping house

in New York was the cheapest way to live,--vastly the cheapest, if

the amount of convenience and comfort was considered,--and absolutely

cheapest in fact. To be sure, being a bachelor, his housekeeping was

done in a single room, the back-room of a third-story, in a respectable

and convenient house and neighborhood. His rent was ninety-six dollars a

year. His expenses of every other kind, (clothing excepted,) one dollar

a week. He could not get his chop or steak cooked well enough, nor his

coffee made right, until he took them in hand himself,--nor his bed

made, nor his room cleaned. His conveniences were incredibly great. He

cooked by alcohol, and expected to warm himself the winter through on

two gallons of alcohol at seventy-five cents a gallon. This admirable

housekeeping is equalled in economy only by that of a millionnaire, a

New-Yorker, and a bachelor also, whose accounts, all accurately kept by

his own hand, showed, after death, that (1st) his own living, (2d) his

support of religion, (3d) his charities, (4th) his gifts to a favorite

niece, had not averaged, for twenty years, over five hundred dollars.

Truly, the city is a cheap place to live in, for those who know how! And

what place is cheap for those who do not?

Contrary to the old notion, the more accurate statistics of recent times

have proved the city, as compared with the country, the more healthy,

the more moral, and the more religious place. What used to be considered

the great superiority of the country--hardship, absence of social

excitements and public amusements, simple food, freedom from moral

exposure--a better knowledge of the human constitution, considered

either physically or morally, has shown to be decidedly opposed to

health and virtue. More constitutions are broken down in the hardening

process than survive and profit by it. Cold houses, coarse food

unskilfully cooked, long winters, harsh springs, however favorable to

the heroism of the stomach, the lungs, and the spirits, are not found

conducive to longevity. In like manner, monotony, seclusion, lack of

variety and of social stimulus lower the tone of humanity, drive to

sensual pleasures and secret vices, and nourish a miserable pack of

mean and degrading immoralities, of which scandal, gossip, backbiting,

tale-bearing are the better examples.

In the Old World, the wealth of states is freely expended in the

embellishment of their capitals. It is well understood, not only that

loyalty is never more economically secured than by a lavish appeal to

the pride of the citizen in the magnificence of the public buildings

and grounds which he identifies with his nationality, but that popular

restlessness is exhaled and dangerous passions drained off in the

roominess which parks and gardens afford the common people. In the

New World, it has not yet proved necessary to provide against popular

discontents or to bribe popular patriotism with spectacles and

state-parade; and if it were so, there is no government with an interest

of its own separate from that of the people to adopt this policy. It has

therefore been concluded that democratic institutions must necessarily

lack splendor and great public provision for the gratification of the

aesthetic tastes or the indulgence of the leisure of the common people.

The people being, then, our sovereigns, it has not been felt that they

would or could have the largeness of view, the foresight, the sympathy

with leisure, elegance, and ease, to provide liberally and expensively

for their own recreation and refreshment. A bald utility has been the

anticipated genius of our public policy. Our national Mercury was to be

simply the god of the post-office, or the sprite of the barometer,--our

Pan, to keep the crows from the corn-fields,--our Muses, to preside over

district-schools. It begins now to appear that the people are not likely

to think anything too good for themselves, or to higgle about the

expense of whatever ministers largely to their tastes and fancies,--that

political freedom, popular education, the circulation of newspapers,

books, engravings, pictures, have already created a public which

understands that man does not live by bread alone,--which demands

leisure, beauty, space, architecture, landscape, music, elegance, with

an imperative voice, and is ready to back its demands with the necessary

self-taxation. This experience our absolute faith in free institutions

enabled us to anticipate as the inevitable result of our political

system; but let us confess that the rapidity with which it has developed

itself has taken us by surprise. We knew, that, when the people truly

realized their sovereignty, they would claim not only the utilitarian,

but the artistic and munificent attributes of their throne,--and that

all the splendors and decorations, all the provisions for leisure,

taste, and recreation, which kings and courts have made, would be found

to be mere preludes and rehearsals to the grander arrangements and

achievements of the vastly richer and more legitimate sovereign, the

People, when he understood his own right and duty. As dynasties and

thrones have been predictions of the royalty of the people, so old

courts and old capitals, with all their pomp and circumstance, their

parks and gardens, galleries and statues, are but dim prefigurings of

the glories of architecture, the grandeur of the grounds, the splendor

and richness of the museums and conservatories with which the people

will finally crown their own self-respect and decorate their own

majesty. But we did not expect to see this sure prophecy turning itself

into history in our day. We thought the people were too busy with the

spade and the quill to care for any other sceptres at present. But it

is now plain that they have been dreaming princely dreams and thinking

royal thoughts all the while, and are now ready to put them into costly

expression.

Passing by all other evidences of this, we come at once to the most

majestic and indisputable witness of this fact, the actual existence

of the Central Park in New York,--the most striking evidence of

the sovereignty of the people yet afforded in the history of free

institutions,--the best answer yet given to the doubts and fears which

have frowned on the theory of self-government,--the first grand proof

that the people do not mean to give up the advantages and victories of

aristocratic governments, in maintaining a popular one, but to engraft

the energy, foresight, and liberality of concentrated powers upon

democratic ideas, and keep all that has adorned and improved the past,

while abandoning what has impaired and disgraced it. That the American

people appreciate and are ready to support what is most elegant,

refined, and beautiful in the greatest capitals of Europe,--that they

value and intend to provide the largest and most costly opportunities

for the enjoyment of their own leisure, artistic tastes, and rural

instincts, is emphatically declared in the history, progress, and

manifest destiny of the Central Park; while their competency to use

wisely, to enjoy peacefully, to protect sacredly, and to improve

industriously the expensive, exposed, and elegant pleasure-ground they

have devised, is proved with redundant testimony by the year and more of

experience we have had in the use of the Park, under circumstances far

less favorable than any that can ever again arise. As a test of the

ability of the people to know their own higher wants, of the power of

their artistic instincts, their docility to the counsels of their most

judicious representatives, their superiority to petty economies, their

strength to resist the natural opposition of heavy tax-payers to

expensive public works, their gentleness and amenableness to just

authority in the pursuit of their pleasures, of their susceptibility to

the softening influences of elegance and beauty, of their honest pride

and rejoicing in their own splendor, of their superior fondness for what

is innocent and elevating over what is base and degrading, when

brought within equal reach, the Central Park has already afforded most

encouraging, nay, most decisive proof.

The Central Park is an anomaly to those who have not deeply studied the

tendencies of popular governments. It is a royal work, undertaken and

achieved by the Democracy,--surprising equally themselves and their

skeptical friends at home and abroad,--and developing, both in its

creation and growth, in its use and application, new and almost

incredible tastes, aptitudes, capacities, and powers in the people

themselves. That the people should be capable of the magnanimity of

laying down their authority, when necessary to concentrate it in

the hands of energetic and responsible trustees requiring large

powers,--that they should be willing to tax themselves heavily for the

benefit of future generations,--that they should be wise enough to

distrust their own judgment and defer modestly to the counsels of

experts,--that they should be in favor of the most solid and substantial

work,--that they should be willing to have the better half of their

money under ground and out of sight, invested in drains and foundations

of roads,--that they should acquiesce cheerfully in all the restrictions

necessary to the achievement of the work, while admitted freely to the

use and enjoyment of its inchoate processes,--that their conduct and

manners should prove so unexceptionable,--their disposition to trespass

upon strict rules so small,--their use and improvement of the work so

free, so easy, and so immediately justificatory of all the cost of so

generous and grand an enterprise: these things throw light and cheer

upon the prospects of popular institutions, at a period when they are

seriously clouded from other quarters.

We do not propose to enter into any description of the Central Park.

Those who have not already visited it will find a description,

accompanying a study for the plan submitted for competition in 1858, by

Messrs. Olmsted and Vaux, and published among the Documents of the New

York Senate, which will satisfy their utmost expectations. We wish

merely to throw out some replies to the leading objections we have met

in the papers and other quarters to the plan itself. We need hardly say

that the Central Park requires no advocate and no defence. Its great

proprietor, the Public, is perfectly satisfied with his purchase and his

agents. He thinks himself providentially guided in the choice of his

Superintendent, and does not vainly pique himself upon his sagacity in

selecting Mr. Frederick Law Olmsted for the post. This gentleman, in his

place, offsets at least a thousand square plugs in round holes. He is

precisely the man for the place,--and that is precisely the place for

the man. Among final causes, it would be difficult not to assign the

Central Park as the reason of his existence. To fill the duties of his

office as he has filled them,--to prove himself equally competent as

original designer, patient executor, potent disciplinarian, and model

police-officer,--to enforce a method, precision, and strictness, equally

marked in the workmanship, in the accounts, and in the police of the

Park,--to be equally studious of the highest possible use and enjoyment

of the work by the public of to-day, and of the prospects and privileges

of the coming generations,--to sympathize with the outside people,

while in the closest fellowship with the inside,--to make himself

equally the favorite and friend of the people and of the workmen:

this proves an original adaptation, most carefully improved, which we

seriously believe not capable of being paralleled in any other public

work, of similar magnitude, ever undertaken. The union of prosaic

sense with poetical feeling, of democratic sympathies with refined

and scholarly tastes, of punctilious respect for facts with tender

hospitality for ideas, has enabled him to appreciate and embody, both in

the conception and execution of the Park, the beau-ideal of a people's

pleasure-ground. If he had not borne, as an agriculturist, and as the

keenest, most candid, and instructive of all our writers on the moral

and political economy of our American Slavery, a name to be long

remembered, he might safely trust his reputation to the keeping of New

York city and all her successive citizens, as the author and achiever of

the Central Park,--which, when completed, will prove, we are confident,

the most splendid, satisfactory, and popular park in the world.

Two grand assumptions have controlled the design from the inception.

First, That the Park would be the only park deserving the name, for a

town of twice or thrice the present population of New York; that

this town would be built compactly around it (and in this respect

of centrality it would differ from any extant metropolitan park of

magnitude); and that it would be a town of greater wealth and more

luxurious demands than any now existing.

Second, That, while in harmony with the luxury of the rich, the Park

should and would be used more than any existing park by people of

moderate wealth and by poor people, and that its use by these people

must be made safe, convenient, agreeable; that they must be expected

to have a pride and pleasure in using it rightly, in cherishing and

protecting it against all causes of injury and dilapidation, and that

this is to be provided for and encouraged.

A want of appreciation of the first assumption is the cause of all

sincere criticism against the Transverse Roads. Some engineers

originally pronounced them impracticable of construction; but all their

grounds of apprehension have been removed by the construction of two of

them, especially by the completion of the tunnel under Vista Rock, and

below the foundation of the Reservoir embankment and wall. They were

planned for the future; they are being built solidly, massively,

permanently, for the future. Less thoroughly and expensively

constructed, they would need to be rebuilt in the future at enormously

increased cost, and with great interruption to the use of the Park; and

the grounds in their vicinity, losing the advantage of age, would need

to be remodelled and remade. An engineer, visiting the Park for the

first time, and hearing the criticism to which we refer applied to the

walls and bridges of the Transverse Roads, observed,--"People in this

country are so unaccustomed to see genuine substantial work, they do not

know what it means when they meet with it." We think he did not do the

people justice.

The Transverse Roads passing through the Park will not be seen from

it; and although they will not be, when deep in the shadow of the

overhanging bridges and groves, without a very grand beauty, this will

be the beauty of utility and of permanence, not of imaginative grace.

The various bridges and archways of the Park proper, while equally

thorough in their mode of construction, and consequently expensive,

are in all cases embellished each with special decorations in form and

color. These decorations have the same quality of substantiality and

thorough good workmanship. Note the clean under-cutting of the leaves,

(of which there are more than fifty different forms in the decorations

of the Terrace arch,) and their consequent sharp and expressive shadows.

Admitting the need of these structures, and the economy of a method of

construction which would render them permanent, the additional cost of

their permanent decoration in this way could not have been rationally

grudged.

Regard for the distant future has likewise controlled the planting; and

the Commissioners, in so far as they have resisted the clamor of the

day, that the Park must be immediately shaded, have done wisely. Every

horticulturist knows that this immediate shade would be purchased at an

expense of dwarfed, diseased, and deformed trees, with stinted shade, in

the future. No man has planted large and small trees together without

regretting the former within twenty years. The same consideration

answers an objection which has been made, that the trees are too much

arranged in masses of color. Imagine a growth of twenty years, with the

proper thinnings, and most of these masses will resolve each into one

tree, singled out, as the best individual of its mass, to remain. There

is a large scale in the planting, as in everything else.

Regard to the convenience, comfort, and safety of those who cannot

afford to visit the Park in carriages has led to an unusual extent and

variety of character in the walks, and also to a peculiar arrangement by

which they are carried in many instances beneath and across the line of

the carriage-roads. Thus access can be had by pedestrians to all parts

of the Park at times when the roads are thronged with vehicles, without

any delays or dangers in crossing the roads, and without the humiliation

to sensitive democrats of being spattered or dusted, or looked down upon

from luxurious equipages.

The great irregularity of the surface offers facilities for this

purpose,--the walks being carried through the heads of valleys which are

crossed by the carriage-ways upon arches of masonry. Now with regard to

these archways, if no purposes of convenience were to be served by them,

the Park would not, we may admit, be beautified by them. But we assume

that the population of New York is to be doubled; that, when it is so,

if not sooner, the walks and drives of the Park will often be densely

thronged; and, for the comfort of the people, when that shall be the

case, we consider that these archways will be absolutely necessary.[A]

Assuming further, then, that they are to be built, and, if ever, built

now,--since it would involve an entirely new-modelling of the Park to

introduce them in the future,--it was necessary to pay some attention to

make them agreeable and unmonotonous objects, or the general impression

of ease, freedom, and variety would be interfered with very materially.

It is not to make the Park architectural, as is commonly supposed, that

various and somewhat expensive _design_ is introduced; on the contrary,

it is the intention to plant closely in the vicinity of all the arches,

so that they may be unnoticed in the general effect, and be seen only

just at the time they are being used, when, of course, they must come

under notice. The charge is made, that the features of the natural

landscape have been disregarded in the plan. To which we answer, that on

the ground of the Lower Park there was originally no landscape, in the

artistic sense. There were hills, and hillocks, and rocks, and swampy

valleys. It would have been easy to flood the swamps into ponds, to

clothe the hillocks with grass and the hills with foliage, and leave the

rocks each unscathed in its picturesqueness. And this would have been a

great improvement; yet there would be no landscape: there would be

an unassociated succession of objects,--many nice "bits" of scenery,

appropriate to a villa-garden or to an artist's sketch-book, but no

scenery such as an artist arranges for his broad canvas, no composition,

no _park-like_ prospect. It would have afforded a good place for

loitering; but if this were all that was desirable, forty acres would

have done as well as a thousand, as is shown in the Ramble. Space,

breadth, objects in the distance, clear in outline, but obscure,

mysterious, exciting curiosity, in their detail, were wanting.

[Footnote A: The length of roads, walks, etc., completed, will be found

in the last Annual Report, pp. 47-52.

The length of the famous drive in Hyde Park (the King Road) is 2 1/2

miles. There is another road, straight between two gates, 1 1/4 miles in

length. "Rotten Bow" (the Ride) is a trifle over a mile in length.

The length of Drive in Central Park will be 9 1/3 miles; the length of

Bridle Roads, 5 1/3 miles; the length of Walks, 20 miles.

Ten miles of walk, gravelled and substantially underlaid, are now

finished.

Eighteen archways are planned, beside those of the Transverse Roads,

equal 1 to 46 acres. When the planting is well-grown, no two of the

archways will be visible from the same point.]

To their supply there were hard limitations. On each side, within half

a mile of each other, there were to be lines of stone and brick houses,

cutting off any great lateral distance. Suppose one to have entered

the Park at the south end, and to have moved far enough within it to

dispossess his mind of the sentiments of the streets: he will have

threaded his way between hillocks and rocks, one after another,

differing in magnitude, but never opening a landscape having breadth or

distance. He ascends a hill and looks northward: the most distant

object is the hard, straight, horizontal line of the stone wall of the

Reservoir, flanked on one side by the peak of Vista Rock. It is a little

over a mile distant,--but, standing clear out against the horizon,

appears much less than that. Hide it with foliage, as well as the houses

right and left, and the limitation of distance is a mile in front and a

quarter of a mile upon each side. Low hills or ridges of rock in a great

degree cut off the intermediate ground from view: cross these, and the

same unassociated succession of objects might be visited, but no one of

them would have engaged the visitor's attention and attracted him onward

from a distance. The plan has evidently been to make a selection of

the natural features to form the leading ideas of the new scenery, to

magnify the most important quality of each of these, and to remove or

tone down all the irregularities of the ground between them, and by all

means to make the limit of vision undefined and obscure. Thus, in the

central portion of the Lower Park the low grounds have been generally

filled, and the high grounds reduced; but the two largest areas of low

ground have been excavated, the excavation being carried laterally into

the hills as far as was possible, without extravagant removal of rock,

and the earth obtained transferred to higher ground connecting hillocks

with hills. Excavations have also been made about the base of all the

more remarkable ledges and peaks of rock, while additional material has

been conveyed to their sides and summits to increase their size and

dignity.

This general rule of the plan was calculated to give, in the first

place, breadth, and, in the second, emphasis, to any general prospect

of the Park. A want of unity, or rather, if we may use the word, of

assemblage, belonged to the ground; and it must have been one of the

first problems to establish some one conspicuous, salient idea which

should take the lead in the composition, and about which all minor

features should seem naturally to group as accessories. The straight,

evidently artificial, and hence distinctive and notable, Mall, with its

terminating Terrace, was the resolution of this problem. It will be,

when the trees are fully grown, a feature of the requisite importance,

--and will serve the further purpose of opening the view toward, and, as

it were, framing and keeping attention directed upon, Vista Rock, which

from the southern end of the Mall is the most distant object that can be

brought into view.

For the same purpose, evidently, it was thought desirable to insist,

as far as possible, upon a pause at the point where, to the visitor

proceeding northward, the whole hill-side and glen before Vista Rock

first came under view, and where an effect of distance in that direction

was yet attainable. This is provided for by the Terrace, with its

several stairs and stages, and temptations to linger and rest. The

introduction of the Lake to the northward of the Terrace also obliges a

diversion from the direct line of proceeding; the visitor's attention is

henceforth directed laterally, or held by local objects, until at length

by a circuitous route he reaches and ascends (if he chooses) the summit

of Vista Rock, when a new landscape of entirely different character, and

one not within our control, is opened to him. Thus the apparent distance

of Vista Rock from the lower part of the Park (which is increased

by means which we have not thought it necessary to describe) is not

falsified by any experience of the visitor in his subsequent journey to

it.

There was a fine and completely natural landscape in the Upper Park. The

plan only simplifies it,--removing and modifying those objects which

were incongruous with its best predominating character, and here and

there adding emphasis or shadow.

The Park (with the extension) is two and three quarter miles in length

and nearly half a mile wide. It contains 843 acres, including the

Reservoir (136 acres).

Original cost of land to 106th Street, $5,444,369.90

Of this, assessed on adjoining property, 1,657,590.00

____________

To be paid by corporation direct, 3,786,779.90

Assessed value of extension land, (106th to 110th,) 1,400,000.00

____________

Total cost of land, $6,800,000.00[B]

[Footnote B: The amount thus far expended in construction and

maintenance is nearly $3,000,000. The plan upon which the work is

proceeding will require a further expenditure of $1,600,000. The

expenditure is not squandered. Much the larger part of it is paid for

day-labor. Account with laborers is kept by the hour, the rate of wages

being scarcely above the lowest contractor's rates, and 30 per cent.

below the rate of other public works of the city; always paid directly

into the laborer's hands,--in specie, however.

The thorough government of the work, and the general efficiency of its

direction, are indicated by the remarkable good order and absence of

"accidents" which have characterized it. See p. 64 of Annual Report,

1860. For some particulars of cost, see pp. 61, 62, of same Report.]

In all European parks, there is more or less land the only use of which

is to give a greater length to the roads which pass around it,--it being

out of sight, and, in American phrase, unimproved. There is not an acre

of land in Central Park, which, if not wanted for Park purposes, would

not sell for at least as much as the land surrounding the Park and

beyond its limits,--that is to say, for at least $60,000, the legal

annual interest of which is $4,200. This would be the ratio of the

annual waste of property in the case of any land not put to use; but,

in elaborating the plan, care has been taken that no part of the Park

should be without its special advantages, attractions, or valuable uses,

and that these should as far as possible be made immediately available

to the public.

The comprehensiveness of purpose and the variety of detail of the plan

far exceed those of any other park in the world, and have involved, and

continue to involve, a greater amount of study and invention than has

ever before been given to a park. A consideration of this should enforce

an unusually careful method of maintenance, both in the gardening and

police departments. Sweeping with a broom of brush-wood once a week is

well enough for a hovel; but the floors of a palace must needs be daily

waxed and polished, to justify their original cost. We are unused to

thorough gardening in this country. There are not in all the United

States a dozen lawns or grass-plots so well kept as the majority of

tradesmen's door-yards in England or Holland. Few of our citizens have

ever seen a really well-kept ground. During the last summer, much of the

Park was in a state of which the Superintendent professed himself to be

ashamed; but it caused not the slightest comment with the public, so far

as we heard. As nearly all men in office, who have not a personal taste

to satisfy, are well content, if they succeed in satisfying the public,

we fear the Superintendent will be forced to "economize" on the keeping

of the Park, as he was the past year, to a degree which will be as far

from true economy as the cleaning of mosaic floors with birch brooms.

The Park is laid out in a manner which assumes and requires cleanly and

orderly habits in those who use it; much of its good quality will be

lost, if it be not very neatly kept; and such negligence in the keeping

will tend to negligence in the using.

In the plan, there is taken for granted a generally good inclination, a

cleanly, temperate, orderly disposition, on the part of the public which

is to frequent the Park, and finally to be the governors of its keeping,

and a good, well-disposed, and well-disciplined police force, who would,

in spite of "the inabilities of a republic," adequately control the

cases exceptional to the assumed general good habits of that public,--at

the same time neglecting no precaution to facilitate the convenient

enforcement of the laws, and reduce the temptation to disorderly

practices to a minimum.

How thoroughly justified has been this confidence in the people, taking

into account the novelty of a good public ground, of cleanliness in our

public places, and indeed the novelty of the whole undertaking, we have

already intimated. How much the privileges of the Park in its present

incomplete condition are appreciated, and how generally the requirements

of order are satisfied, the following summary, compiled from the

Park-keeper's reports of the first summer's use after the roads of the

Lower Park were opened, will inadequately show.

Number of visitors in six months. Foot. Saddle. Carriages.

May, 184,450 8,017 26,500

June, 294,300 9,050 31,300

July, 71,035 2,710 4,945

August, 63,800 875 14,905

September, 47,433 2,645 20,708

October, 160,187 3,014 26,813

Usual number of visitors on a

fine summer's day, 2,000 90 1,200

Usual number of visitors on a

fine Sunday, 35,000 60 1,500

(Men 20,000, Women 13,000, Children 2,000.)

Sunday, May 29, entrances counted, 75,000 120 3,200

Usual number of visitors,

fine Concert day, 7,500 180 2,500

Saturday, Sept. 22, (Concert day,)

entrances counted, 13,000 225 4,650

During this time, (six months,) but thirty persons were detected upon

the Park tipsy. Of these, twenty-four were sufficiently drunk to justify

their arrest,--the remainder going quietly off the grounds, when

requested to do so. That is to say, it is not oftener than once a week

that a man is observed to be the worse for liquor while on the Park; and

this, while three to four thousand laboring men are at work within it,

are paid upon it, and grog-shops for their accommodation are all along

its boundaries. In other words, about one in thirty thousand of the

visitors to the Park has been under the influence of drink when induced

to visit it.

On Christmas and New-Year's Days, it was estimated by many experienced

reporters that over 100,000 persons, each day, were on the Park,

generally in a frolicksome mood. Of these, but one (a small boy) was

observed by the keepers to be drunk; there was not an instance of

quarrelling, and no disorderly conduct, except a generally good-natured

resistance to the efforts of the police to maintain safety on the ice.

The Bloomingdale Road and Harlem Lane, two famous trotting-courses,

where several hundred famously fast horses may be seen at the top of

their speed any fine afternoon, both touch an entrance to the Park. The

Park roads are, of course, vastly attractive to the trotters, and for

a few weeks there were daily instances of fast driving there: as soon,

however, as the law and custom of the Park, restricting speed to a

moderate rate, could be made generally understood, fast driving became

very rare,--more so, probably, than in Hyde Park or the Bois de

Boulogne. As far as possible, an arrest has been made in every case

of intentionally fast driving observed by the keepers: those arrested

number less than one to ten thousand of the vehicles entering the Park

for pleasure-driving. In each case a fine (usually three dollars) has

been imposed by the magistrate.

In six months there have been sixty-four arrests for all sorts of

"disorderly conduct," including walking on the grass after being

requested to quit it, quarrelling, firing crackers, etc.,--one in

eighteen thousand visitors. So thoroughly established is the good

conduct of people on the Park, that many ladies walk daily in the Ramble

without attendance.

A protest, as already intimated, is occasionally made against the

completeness of detail to which the Commissioners are disposed to

carry their work, on the ground that the habits of the masses of our

city-population are ill-calculated for its appreciation, and that loss

and damage to expensive work must often be the result. To which we

would answer, that, if the authorities of the city hitherto have so far

misapprehended or neglected their duty as to allow a large industrious

population to continue so long without the opportunity for public

recreations that it has grown up ignorant of the rights and duties

appertaining to the general use of a well-kept pleasure-ground, any

losses of the kind apprehended, which may in consequence occur, should

be cheerfully borne as a necessary part of the responsibility of a

good government. Experience thus far, however, does not justify these

apprehensions.

To collect exact evidence showing that the Park is already exercising a

good influence upon the character of the people is not in the nature of

the case practicable. It has been observed that rude, noisy fellows,

after entering the more advanced or finished parts of the Park, become

hushed, moderate, and careful. Observing the generally tranquil and

pleased expression, and the quiet, sauntering movement, the frequent

exclamations of pleasure in the general view or in the sight of some

special object of natural beauty, on the part of the crowds of idlers in

the Ramble on a Sunday afternoon, and recollecting the totally opposite

character of feeling, thought, purpose, and sentiment which is expressed

by a crowd assembled anywhere else, especially in the public streets of

the city, the conviction cannot well be avoided that the Park already

exercises a beneficent influence of no inconsiderable value, and of a

kind which could have been gained in no other way. We speak of Sunday

afternoons and of a crowd; but the Park evidently does induce many a

poor family, and many a poor seamstress and journeyman, to take a day or

a half-day from the working-time of the week, to the end of retaining

their youth and their youthful relations with purer Nature, and to their

gain in strength, good-humor, safe citizenship, and--if the economists

must be satisfied--money-value to the commonwealth. Already, too, there

are several thousand men, women, and children who resort to the Park

habitually: some daily, before business or after business, and women

and children at regular hours during the day; some weekly; and some at

irregular, but certain frequent chances of their business. Mr. Astor,

when in town, rarely misses his daily ride; nor Mr. Bancroft; Mr. Mayor

Harper never his drive. And there are certain working-men with their

families equally sure to be met walking on Sunday morning or Sunday

afternoon; others on Saturday. The number of these _habitués_ constantly

increases. When we meet those who depend on the Park as on the butcher

and the omnibus, and the thousands who are again drawn by whatever

impulse and suggestion of the hour, we often ask, What would they have

done, where would they have been, to what sort of recreation would they

have turned, _if to any_, had there been no park? Of one sort the answer

is supplied by the keeper of a certain saloon, who came to the Park, as

he said, to see his old Sunday customers. The enjoyment of the ice had

made them forget their grog.

Six or seven years ago, an opposition brought down the prices and

quadrupled the accommodations of the Staten Island ferry-boats. Clifton

Park and numerous German gardens were opened; and the consequence was

described, in common phrase, as the transformation of a portion of the

island, on Sunday, to a Pandemonium. We thought we would, like Dante,

have a cool look at it. We had read so much about it, and heard it

talked about and preached about so much, that we were greatly surprised

to find the throng upon the sidewalks quite as orderly and a great deal

more evidently good-natured than any we ever saw before in the United

States. We spent some time in what we had been led to suppose the

hottest place, Clifton Park, in which there was a band of music and

several thousand persons, chiefly Germans, though with a good sprinkling

of Irish servant-girls with their lovers and brothers, with beer

and ices; but we saw no rudeness, and no more impropriety, no more

excitement, no more (week-day) sin, than we had seen at the church in

the morning. Every face, however, was foreign. By-and-by came in three

Americans, talking loudly, moving rudely, proclaiming contempt for

"lager" and yelling for "liquor," bantering and offering fight, joking

coarsely, profane, noisy, demonstrative in any and every way, to the end

of attracting attention to themselves, and proclaiming that they were

"on a spree" and highly excited. They could not keep it up; they became

awkward, ill at ease, and at length silent, standing looking about them

in stupid wonder. Evidently they could not understand what it meant:

people drinking, smoking in public, on Sunday, and yet not excited, not

trying to make it a spree. It was not comprehensible. We ascertained

that one of the ferry-boat bars had disposed of an enormous stock of

lemonade, ginger-beer, and soda-water before three o'clock,--but, till

this was all gone, not half a dozen glasses of intoxicating drinks.

We saw no quarrelling, no drunkenness, and nothing like the fearful

disorder which had been described,--with a few such exceptions as we

have mentioned of native Americans who had no conception of enjoyment

free from bodily excitement.

To teach and induce habits of orderly, tranquil, contemplative, or

social amusement, moderate exercises and recreation, soothing to the

nerves, has been the most needed "mission" for New York. We think we

see daily evidence that the Park accomplishes not a little in this way.

Unfortunately, the evidence is not of a character to be expressed in

Federal currency, else the Commissioners would not be hesitating about

taking the ground from One-Hundred-and-Sixth to One-Hundred-and-Tenth

Street, because it is to cost half a million more than was anticipated.

What the Park is worth to us to-day is, we trust, but a trifle to what

it will be worth when the bulk of our hard-working people, of our

over-anxious Marthas, and our gutter-skating children shall live nearer

to it, and more generally understand what it offers them,--when its

play-grounds are ready, its walks more shaded,--when cheap and wholesome

meals, to the saving, occasionally, of the dreary housewife's daily

pottering, are to be had upon it,--when its system of cheap cabs shall

have been successfully inaugurated,--and when a daily discourse of sweet

sounds shall have been made an essential part of its functions in the

body-politic.

We shall not probably live to see "the gentility of Sir Philip Sidney

made universal," but we do hope that we shall live to know many

residents of towns of ten thousand population who will be ashamed to

subscribe for the building of new churches while no public play-ground

is being prepared for their people.

LIFE IN THE IRON-MILLS.

"Is this the end?

O Life, as futile, then, as frail!

What hope of answer or redress?"

A cloudy day: do you know what that is in a town of iron-works? The sky

sank down before dawn, muddy, flat, immovable. The air is thick, clammy

with the breath of crowded human beings. It stifles me. I open the

window, and, looking out, can scarcely see through the rain the grocer's

shop opposite, where a crowd of drunken Irishmen are puffing Lynchburg

tobacco in their pipes. I can detect the scent through all the foul

smells ranging loose in the air.

The idiosyncrasy of this town is smoke. It rolls sullenly in slow folds

from the great chimneys of the iron-foundries, and settles down in

black, slimy pools on the muddy streets. Smoke on the wharves, smoke on

the dingy boats, on the yellow river,--clinging in a coating of greasy

soot to the house-front, the two faded poplars, the faces of the

passers-by. The long train of mules, dragging masses of pig-iron through

the narrow street, have a foul vapor hanging to their reeking sides.

Here, inside, is a little broken figure of an angel pointing upward from

the mantel-shelf; but even its wings are covered with smoke, clotted

and black. Smoke everywhere! A dirty canary chirps desolately in a

cage beside me. Its dream of green fields and sunshine is a very old

dream,--almost worn out, I think.

From the back-window I can see a narrow brick-yard sloping down to

the river-side, strewed with rain-butts and tubs. The river, dull and

tawny-colored, _(la belle rivière!)_ drags itself sluggishly along,

tired of the heavy weight of boats and coal-barges. What wonder? When I

was a child, I used to fancy a look of weary, dumb appeal upon the face

of the negro-like river slavishly bearing its burden day after day.

Something of the same idle notion comes to me to-day, when from the

street-window I look on the slow stream of human life creeping past,

night and morning, to the great mills. Masses of men, with dull,

besotted faces bent to the ground, sharpened here and there by pain

or cunning; skin and muscle and flesh begrimed with smoke and ashes;

stooping all night over boiling caldrons of metal, laired by day in

dens of drunkenness and infamy; breathing from infancy to death an air

saturated with fog and grease and soot, vileness for soul and body. What

do you make of a case like that, amateur psychologist? You call it an

altogether serious thing to be alive: to these men it is a drunken jest,

a joke,--horrible to angels perhaps, to them commonplace enough. My

fancy about the river was an idle one: it is no type of such a life.

What if it be stagnant and slimy here? It knows that beyond there waits

for it odorous sunlight,--quaint old gardens, dusky with soft, green

foliage of apple-trees, and flushing crimson with roses,--air, and

fields, and mountains. The future of the Welsh puddler passing just now

is not so pleasant. To be stowed away, after his grimy work is done, in

a hole in the muddy graveyard, and after that,--_not_ air, nor green

fields, nor curious roses.

Can you see how foggy the day is? As I stand here, idly tapping the

window-pane, and looking out through the rain at the dirty back-yard and

the coal-boats below, fragments of an old story float up before me,--a

story of this old house into which I happened to come to-day. You may

think it a tiresome story enough, as foggy as the day, sharpened by no

sudden flashes of pain or pleasure.--I know: only the outline of a dull

life, that long since, with thousands of dull lives like its own, was

vainly lived and lost: thousands of them,--massed, vile, slimy lives,

like those of the torpid lizards in yonder stagnant water-butt.--Lost?

There is a curious point for you to settle, my friend, who study

psychology in a lazy, _dilettante_ way. Stop a moment. I am going to be

honest. This is what I want you to do. I want you to hide your disgust,

take no heed to your clean clothes, and come right down with me,--here,

into the thickest of the fog and mud and foul effluvia. I want you to

hear this story. There is a secret down here, in this nightmare fog,

that has lain dumb for centuries: I want to make it a real thing to you.

You, Egoist, or Pantheist, or Arminian, busy in making straight paths

for your feet on the hills, do not see it clearly,--this terrible

question which men here have gone mad and died trying to answer. I dare

not put this secret into words. I told you it was dumb. These men, going

by with drunken faces and brains full of unawakened power, do not ask it

of Society or of God. Their lives ask it; their deaths ask it. There is

no reply. I will tell you plainly that I have a great hope; and I bring

it to you to be tested. It is this: that this terrible dumb question is

its own reply; that it is not the sentence of death we think it, but,

from the very extremity of its darkness, the most solemn prophecy which

the world has known of the Hope to come. I dare make my meaning no

clearer, but will only tell my story. It will, perhaps, seem to you as

foul and dark as this thick vapor about us, and as pregnant with death;

but if your eyes are free as mine are to look deeper, no perfume-tinted

dawn will be so fair with promise of the day that shall surely come.

My story is very simple,--only what I remember of the life of one

of these men,--a furnace-tender in one of Kirby & John's

rolling-mills,--Hugh Wolfe. You know the mills? They took the great

order for the Lower Virginia railroads there last winter; run usually

with about a thousand men. I cannot tell why I choose the half-forgotten

story of this Wolfe more than that of myriads of these furnace-hands.

Perhaps because there is a secret underlying sympathy between that story

and this day with its impure fog and thwarted sunshine,--or perhaps

simply for the reason that this house is the one where the Wolfes lived.

There were the father and son,--both hands, as I said, in one of Kirby

& John's mills for making railroad-iron,--and Deborah, their cousin, a

picker in some of the cotton-mills. The house was rented then to half

a dozen families. The Wolfes had two of the cellar-rooms. The old man,

like many of the puddlers and feeders of the mills, was Welsh,--had

spent half of his life in the Cornish tin-mines. You may pick the Welsh

emigrants, Cornish miners, out of the throng passing the windows, any

day. They are a trifle more filthy; their muscles are not so brawny;

they stoop more. When they are drunk, they neither yell, nor shout, nor

stagger, but skulk along like beaten hounds. A pure, unmixed blood, I

fancy: shows itself in the slight angular bodies and sharply-cut facial

lines. It is nearly thirty years since the Wolfes lived here. Their

lives were like those of their class: incessant labor, sleeping in

kennel-like rooms, eating rank pork and molasses, drinking--God and the

distillers only know what; with an occasional night in jail, to atone

for some drunken excess. Is that all of their lives?--of the portion

given to them and these their duplicates swarming the streets to-day?

--nothing beneath?--all? So many a political reformer will tell

you,--and many a private reformer, too, who has gone among them with a

heart tender with Christ's charity, and come out outraged, hardened.

One rainy night, about eleven o'clock, a crowd of half-clothed women

stopped outside of the cellar-door. They were going home from the

cotton-mill.

"Good-night, Deb," said one, a mulatto, steadying herself against the

gas-post. She needed the post to steady her. So did more than one of

them.

"Dah's a ball to Miss Potts' to-night. Ye'd best come."

"Inteet, Deb, if hur 'll come, hur 'll hef fun," said a shrill Welsh

voice in the crowd.

Two or three dirty hands were thrust out to catch the gown of the woman,

who was groping for the latch of the door.

"No."

"No? Where's Kit Small, then?"

"Begorra! on the spools. Alleys behint, though we helped her, we dud.

An wid ye! Let Deb alone! It's ondacent frettin' a quite body. Be

the powers, an' we'll have a night of it! there'll be lashin's o'

drink,--the Vargent be blessed and praised for 't!"

They went on, the mulatto inclining for a moment to show fight, and drag

the woman Wolfe off with them; but, being pacified, she staggered away.

Deborah groped her way into the cellar, and, after considerable

stumbling, kindled a match, and lighted a tallow dip, that sent a yellow

glimmer over the room. It was low, damp,--the earthen floor covered with

a green, slimy moss,--a fetid air smothering the breath. Old Wolfe lay

asleep on a heap of straw, wrapped in a torn horse-blanket. He was a

pale, meek little man, with a white face and red rabbit-eyes. The woman

Deborah was like him; only her face was even more ghastly, her lips

bluer, her eyes more watery. She wore a faded cotton gown and a

slouching bonnet. When she walked, one could see that she was deformed,

almost a hunchback. She trod softly, so as not to waken him, and went

through into the room beyond. There she found by the half-extinguished

fire an iron saucepan filled with cold boiled potatoes, which she put

upon a broken chair with a pint-cup of ale. Placing the old candlestick

beside this dainty repast, she untied her bonnet, which hung limp and

wet over her face, and prepared to eat her supper. It was the first

food that had touched her lips since morning. There was enough of it,

however: there is not always. She was hungry,--one could see that easily

enough,--and not drunk, as most of her companions would have been found

at this hour. She did not drink, this woman,--her face told that,

too,--nothing stronger than ale. Perhaps the weak, flaccid wretch had

some stimulant in her pale life to keep her up,--some love or hope, it

might be, or urgent need. When that stimulant was gone, she would take

to whiskey. Man cannot live by work alone. While she was skinning the

potatoes, and munching them, a noise behind her made her stop.

"Janey!" she called, lifting the candle and peering into the darkness.

"Janey, are you there?"

A heap of ragged coats was heaved up, and the face of a young girl

emerged, staring sleepily at the woman.

"Deborah," she said, at last, "I'm here the night."

"Yes, child. Hur's welcome," she said, quietly eating on.

The girl's face was haggard and sickly; her eyes were heavy with sleep

and hunger: real Milesian eyes they were, dark, delicate blue, glooming

out from black shadows with a pitiful fright.

"I was alone," she said, timidly.

"Where's the father?" asked Deborah, holding out a potato, which the

girl greedily seized.

"He's beyant,--wid Haley,--in the stone house." (Did you ever hear the

word _jail_ from an Irish mouth?) "I came here. Hugh told me never to

stay me-lone."

"Hugh?"

"Yes."

A vexed frown crossed her face. The girl saw it, and added quickly,--

"I have not seen Hugh the day, Deb. The old man says his watch lasts

till the mornin'."

The woman sprang up, and hastily began to arrange some bread and flitch

in a tin pail, and to pour her own measure of ale into a bottle. Tying

on her bonnet, she blew out the candle.

"Lay ye down, Janey dear," she said, gently, covering her with the old

rags. "Hur can eat the potatoes, if hur 's hungry."

"Where are ye goin', Deb? The rain 's sharp."

"To the mill, with Hugh's supper."

"Let him hide till th' morn. Sit ye down."

"No, no,"--sharply pushing her off. "The boy'll starve."

She hurried from the cellar, while the child wearily coiled herself up

for sleep. The rain was falling heavily, as the woman, pail in hand,

emerged from the mouth of the alley, and turned down the narrow street,

that stretched out, long and black, miles before her. Here and there a

flicker of gas lighted an uncertain space of muddy footwalk and gutter;

the long rows of houses, except an occasional lager-bier shop, were

closed; now and then she met a band of mill-hands skulking to or from

their work.

Not many even of the inhabitants of a manufacturing town know the vast

machinery of system by which the bodies of workmen are governed, that

goes on unceasingly from year to year. The hands of each mill are

divided into watches that relieve each other as regularly as the

sentinels of an army. By night and day the work goes on, the unsleeping

engines groan and shriek, the fiery pools of metal boil and surge. Only

for a day in the week, in half-courtesy to public censure, the fires are

partially veiled; but as soon as the clock strikes midnight, the great

furnaces break forth with renewed fury, the clamor begins with fresh,

breathless vigor, the engines sob and shriek like "gods in pain."

As Deborah hurried down through the heavy rain, the noise of these

thousand engines sounded through the sleep and shadow of the city like

far-off thunder. The mill to which she was going lay on the river, a

mile below the city-limits. It was far, and she was weak, aching from

standing twelve hours at the spools. Yet it was her almost nightly walk

to take this man his supper, though at every square she sat down to

rest, and she knew she should receive small word of thanks.

Perhaps, if she had possessed an artist's eye, the picturesque oddity

of the scene might have made her step stagger less, and the path seem

shorter; but to her the mills were only "summat deilish to look at by

night."

The road leading to the mills had been quarried from the solid rock,

which rose abrupt and bare on one side of the cinder-covered road, while

the river, sluggish and black, crept past on the other. The mills for

rolling iron are simply immense tent-like roofs, covering acres of

ground, open on every side. Beneath these roofs Deborah looked in on a

city of fires, that burned hot and fiercely in the night. Fire in every

horrible form: pits of flame waving in the wind; liquid metal-flames

writhing in tortuous streams through the sand; wide caldrons filled with

boiling fire, over which bent ghastly wretches stirring the strange

brewing; and through all, crowds of half-clad men, looking like

revengeful ghosts in the red light, hurried, throwing masses of

glittering fire. It was like a street in Hell. Even Deborah muttered, as

she crept through, "'T looks like t' Devil's place!" It did,--in more

ways than one.

She found the man she was looking for, at last, heaping coal on a

furnace. He had not time to eat his supper; so she went behind the

furnace, and waited. Only a few men were with him, and they noticed her

only by a "Hyur comes t' hunchback, Wolfe."

Deborah was stupid with sleep; her back pained her sharply; and her

teeth chattered with cold, with the rain that soaked her clothes and

dripped from her at every step. She stood, however, patiently holding

the pail, and waiting.

"Hout, woman! ye look like a drowned cat. Come near to the fire,"--said

one of the men, approaching to scrape away the ashes.

She shook her head. Wolfe had forgotten her. He turned, hearing the man,

and came closer.

"I did no' think; gi' me my supper, woman."

She watched him eat with a painful eagerness. With a woman's quick

instinct, she saw that he was not hungry,--was eating to please her.

Her pale, watery eyes began to gather a strange light.

"Is't good, Hugh? T'ale was a bit sour, I feared."

"No, good enough." He hesitated a moment. "Ye're tired, poor lass! Bide

here till I go. Lay down there on that heap of ash, and go to sleep."

He threw her an old coat for a pillow, and turned to his work. The

heap was the refuse of the burnt iron, and was not a hard bed; the

half-smothered warmth, too, penetrated her limbs, dulling their pain and

cold shiver.

Miserable enough she looked, lying there on the ashes like a limp,

dirty rag,--yet not an unfitting figure to crown the scene of hopeless

discomfort and veiled crime: more fitting, if one looked deeper into the

heart of things,--at her thwarted woman's form, her colorless life, her

waking stupor that smothered pain and hunger,--even more fit to be a

type of her class. Deeper yet if one could look, was there nothing worth

reading in this wet, faded thing, half-covered with ashes? no story of a

soul filled with groping passionate love, heroic unselfishness, fierce

jealousy? of years of weary trying to please the one human being whom

she loved, to gain one look of real heart-kindness from him? If anything

like this were hidden beneath the pale, bleared eyes, and dull,

washed-out-looking face, no one had ever taken the trouble to read its

faint signs: not the half-clothed furnace-tender, Wolfe, certainly. Yet

he was kind to her: it was his nature to be kind, even to the very rats

that swarmed in the cellar: kind to her in just the same way. She knew

that. And it might be that very knowledge had given to her face its

apathy and vacancy more than her low, torpid life. One sees that

dead, vacant look steal sometimes over the rarest, finest of women's

faces,--in the very midst, it may be, of their warmest summer's day; and

then one can guess at the secret of intolerable solitude that lies hid

beneath the delicate laces and brilliant smile. There was no warmth, no

brilliancy, no summer for this woman; so the stupor and vacancy had time

to gnaw into her face perpetually. She was young, too, though no one

guessed it; so the gnawing was the fiercer.

She lay quiet in the dark corner, listening, through the monotonous din

and uncertain glare of the works, to the dull plash of the rain in the

far distance,--shrinking back whenever the man Wolfe happened to look

towards her. She knew, in spite of all his kindness, that there was that

in her face and form which made him loathe the sight of her. She felt by

instinct, although she could not comprehend it, the finer nature of

the man, which made him among his fellow-workmen something unique, set

apart. She knew, that, down under all the vileness and coarseness of

his life, there was a groping passion for whatever was beautiful and

pure,--that his soul sickened with disgust at her deformity, even when

his words were kindest. Through this dull consciousness, which never

left her, came, like a sting, the recollection of the dark blue eyes and

lithe figure of the little Irish girl she had left in the cellar. The

recollection struck through even her stupid intellect with a vivid glow

of beauty and of grace. Little Janey, timid, helpless, clinging to Hugh

as her only friend: that was the sharp thought, the bitter thought, that

drove into the glazed eyes a fierce light of pain. You laugh at it? Are

pain and jealousy less savage realities down here in this place I am

taking you to than in your own house or your own heart,--your heart,

which they clutch at sometimes? The note is the same, I fancy, be the

octave high or low.

If you could go into this mill where Deborah lay, and drag out from the

hearts of these men the terrible tragedy of their lives, taking it as a

symptom of the disease of their class, no ghost Horror would terrify

you more. A reality of soul-starvation, of living death, that meets you

every day under the besotted faces on the street,--I can paint nothing

of this, only give you the outside outlines of a night, a crisis in the

life of one man: whatever muddy depth of soul-history lies beneath you

can read according to the eyes God has given you.

Wolfe, while Deborah watched him as a spaniel its master, bent over the

furnace with his iron pole, unconscious of her scrutiny, only stopping

to receive orders. Physically, Nature had promised the man but little.

He had already lost the strength and instinct vigor of a man, his

muscles were thin, his nerves weak, his face (a meek, woman's face)

haggard, yellow with consumption. In the mill he was known as one of the

girl-men: "Molly Wolfe" was his _sobriquet_. He was never seen, in

the cockpit, did not own a terrier, drank but seldom; when he did,

desperately. He fought sometimes, but was always thrashed, pommelled to

a jelly. The man was game enough, when his blood was up: but he was no

favorite in the mill; he had the taint of school-learning on him,--not

to a dangerous extent, only a quarter or so in the free-school in fact,

but enough to ruin him as a good hand in a fight.

For other reasons, too, he was not popular. Not one of themselves, they

felt that, though outwardly as filthy and ash-covered; silent, with

foreign thoughts and longings breaking out through his quietness in

innumerable curious ways: this one, for instance. In the neighboring

furnace-buildings lay great heaps of the refuse from the ore after the

pig-metal is run. _Korl_ we call it here: a light, porous substance, of

a delicate, waxen, flesh-colored tinge. Out of the blocks of this korl,

Wolfe, in his off-hours from the furnace, had a habit of chipping and

moulding figures,--hideous, fantastic enough, but sometimes strangely

beautiful: even the mill-men saw that, while they jeered at him. It was

a curious fancy in the man, almost a passion. The few hours for rest he

spent hewing and hacking with his blunt knife, never speaking, until his

watch came again,--working at one figure for months, and, when it was

finished, breaking it to pieces perhaps, in a fit of disappointment. A

morbid, gloomy man, untaught, unled, left to feed his soul in grossness

and crime, and hard, grinding labor.

I want you to come down and look at this Wolfe, standing there among the

lowest of his kind, and see him just as he is, that you may judge him

justly when you hear the story of this night. I want you to look back,

as he does every day, at his birth in vice, his starved infancy; to

remember the heavy years he has groped through as boy and man,--the

slow, heavy years of constant, hot work. So long ago he began, that he

thinks sometimes he has worked there for ages. There is no hope that it

will ever end. Think that God put into this man's soul a fierce thirst

for beauty,--to know it, to create it; to _be_--something, he knows not

what,--other than he is. There are moments when a passing cloud, the sun

glinting on the purple thistles, a kindly smile, a child's face, will

rouse him to a passion of pain,--when his nature starts up with a mad

cry of rage against God, man, whoever it is that has forced this vile,

slimy life upon him. With all this groping, this mad desire, a great

blind intellect stumbling through wrong, a loving poet's heart, the man

was by habit only a coarse, vulgar laborer, familiar with sights and

words you would blush to name. Be just; when I tell you about this

night, see him as he is. Be just,--not like man's law, which seizes on

one isolated fact, but like God's judging angel, whose clear, sad

eye saw all the countless cankering days of this man's life, all the

countless nights, when, sick with starving, his soul fainted in him,

before it judged him for this night, the saddest of all.

I called this night the crisis of his life. If it was, it stole on him

unawares. These great turning-days of life cast no shadow before, slip

by unconsciously. Only a trifle, a little turn of the rudder, and the

ship goes to heaven or hell.

Wolfe, while Deborah watched him, dug into the furnace of melting iron

with his pole, dully thinking only how many rails the lump would yield.

It was late,--nearly Sunday morning; another hour, and the heavy work

would be done,--only the furnaces to replenish and cover for the next

day. The workmen were growing more noisy, shouting, as they had to do,

to be heard over the deep clamor of the mills. Suddenly they grew less

boisterous,--at the far end, entirely silent. Something unusual had

happened. After a moment, the silence came nearer; the men stopped their

jeers and drunken choruses. Deborah, stupidly lifting up her head,

saw the cause of the quiet. A group of five or six men were slowly

approaching, stopping to examine each furnace as they came. Visitors

often came to see the mills after night: except by growing less noisy,

the men took no notice of them. The furnace where Wolfe worked was near

the bounds of the works; they halted there hot and tired: a walk over

one of these great foundries is no trifling task. The woman, drawing out

of sight, turned over to sleep. Wolfe, seeing them stop, suddenly roused

from his indifferent stupor, and watched them keenly. He knew some

of them: the overseer, Clarke,--a son of Kirby, one of the

mill-owners,--and a Doctor May, one of the town-physicians. The other

two were strangers. Wolfe came closer. He seized eagerly every chance

that brought him into contact with this mysterious class that shone down

on him perpetually with the glamour of another order of being. What made

the difference between them? That was the mystery of his life. He had

a vague notion that perhaps to-night he could find it out. One of the

strangers sat down on a pile of bricks, and beckoned young Kirby to his

side.

"This _is_ hot, with a vengeance. A match, please?"--lighting his cigar.

"But the walk is worth the trouble. If it were not that you must have

heard it so often, Kirby, I would tell you that your works look like

Dante's Inferno."

Kirby laughed.

"Yes. Yonder is Farinata himself in the burning tomb,"--pointing to some

figure in the shimmering shadows.

"Judging from some of the faces of your men," said the other, "they bid

fair to try the reality of Dante's vision, some day."

Young Kirby looked curiously around, as if seeing the faces of his hands

for the first time.

"They're bad enough, that's true. A desperate set, I fancy. Eh, Clarke?"

The overseer did not hear him. He was talking of net profits just

then,--giving, in fact, a schedule of the annual business of the firm to

a sharp peering little Yankee, who jotted down notes on a paper laid on

the crown of his hat: a reporter for one of the city-papers, getting up

a series of reviews of the leading manufactories. The other gentlemen

had accompanied them merely for amusement. They were silent until the

notes were finished, drying their feet at the furnaces, and sheltering

their faces from the intolerable heat. At last the overseer concluded

with--"I believe that is a pretty fair estimate, Captain."

"Here, some of you men!" said Kirby, "bring up those boards. We may as

well sit down, gentlemen, until the rain is over. It cannot last much

longer at this rate."

"Pig-metal,"--mumbled the reporter,--"um!--coal facilities,--um!--hands

employed, twelve hundred,--bitumen,--um!--'all right, I believe, Mr.

Clarke;--sinking-fund,--what did you say was your sinking-fund?"

"Twelve hundred hands?" said the stranger, the young man who had first

spoken. "Do you control their votes, Kirby?"

"Control? No." The young man smiled complacently. "But my father brought

seven hundred votes to the polls for his candidate last November. No

force-work, you understand,--only a speech or two, a hint to form

themselves into a society, and a bit of red and blue bunting to make

them a flag. The Invincible Roughs,--I believe that is their name. I

forget the motto: 'Our country's hope,' I think."

There was a laugh. The young man talking to Kirby sat with an amused

light in his cool gray eye, surveying critically the half-clothed

figures of the puddlers, and the slow swing of their brawny muscles. He

was a stranger in the city,--spending a couple of months in the

borders of a Slave State, to study the institutions of the South,--a

brother-in-law of Kirby's,--Mitchell. He was an amateur gymnast,--hence

his anatomical eye; a patron, in a _blasé_ way, of the prize-ring; a man

who sucked the essence out of a science or philosophy in an indifferent,

gentlemanly way; who took Kant, Novalis, Humboldt, for what they were

worth in his own scales; accepting all, despising nothing, in heaven,

earth, or hell, but one-idead men; with a temper yielding and brilliant

as summer water, until his Self was touched, when it was ice, though

brilliant still. Such men are not rare in the States.

As he knocked the ashes from his cigar, Wolfe caught with a quick

pleasure the contour of the white hand, the blood-glow of a red ring he

wore. His voice, too, and that of Kirby's, touched him like music,--low,

even, with chording cadences. About this man Mitchell hung the

impalpable atmosphere belonging to the thorough-bred gentleman. Wolfe,

scraping away the ashes beside him, was conscious of it, did obeisance

to it with his artist sense, unconscious that he did so.

The rain did not cease. Clarke and the reporter left the mills; the

others, comfortably seated near the furnace, lingered, smoking

and talking in a desultory way. Greek would not have been more

unintelligible to the furnace-tenders, whose presence they soon forgot

entirely. Kirby drew out a newspaper from his pocket and read aloud some

article, which they discussed eagerly. At every sentence, Wolfe listened

more and more like a dumb, hopeless animal, with a duller, more stolid

look creeping over his face, glancing now and then at Mitchell, marking

acutely every smallest sign of refinement, then back to himself, seeing

as in a mirror his filthy body, his more stained soul.

Never! He had no words for such a thought, but he knew now, in all the

sharpness of the bitter certainty, that between them there was a great

gulf never to be passed. Never!

The bell of the mills rang for midnight. Sunday morning had dawned.

Whatever hidden message lay in the tolling bells floated past these men

unknown. Yet it was there. Veiled in the solemn music ushering the risen

Saviour was a key-note to solve the darkest secrets of a world gone

wrong,--even this social riddle which the brain of the grimy puddler

grappled with madly to-night.

The men began to withdraw the metal from the caldrons. The mills were

deserted on Sundays, except by the hands who fed the fires, and those

who had no lodgings and slept usually on the ash-heaps. The three

strangers sat still during the next hour, watching the men cover the

furnaces, laughing now and then at some jest of Kirby's.

"Do you know," said Mitchell, "I like this view of the works better than

when the glare was fiercest? These heavy shadows and the amphitheatre

of smothered fires are ghostly, unreal. One could fancy these red

smouldering lights to be the half-shut eyes of wild beasts, and the

spectral figures their victims in the den."

Kirby laughed. "You are fanciful. Come, let us get out of the den. The

spectral figures, as you call them, are a little too real for me to

fancy a close proximity in the darkness,--unarmed, too."

The others rose, buttoning their overcoats, and lighting cigars.

"Raining, still," said Doctor May, "and hard. Where did we leave the

coach, Mitchell?"

"At the other side of the works.--Kirby, what's that?"

Mitchell started back, half-frightened, as, suddenly turning a corner,

the white figure of a woman faced him in the darkness,--a woman, white,

of giant proportions, crouching on the ground, her arms flung out in

some wild gesture of warning.

"Stop! Make that fire burn there!" cried Kirby, stopping short.

The flame burst out, flashing the gaunt figure into bold relief.

Mitchell drew a long breath.

"I thought it was alive," he said, going up curiously.

The others followed.

"Not marble, eh?" asked Kirby, touching it.

One of the lower overseers stopped.

"Korl, Sir."

"Who did it?"

"Can't say. Some of the hands; chipped it out in off-hours."

"Chipped to some purpose, I should say. What a flesh-tint the stuff has!

Do you see, Mitchell?"

"I see."

He had stepped aside where the light fell boldest on the figure, looking

at it in silence. There was not one line of beauty or grace in it: a

nude woman's form, muscular, grown coarse with labor, the powerful limbs

instinct with some one poignant longing. One idea: there it was in the

tense, rigid muscles, the clutching hands, the wild, eager face, like

that of a starving wolf's. Kirby and Doctor May walked around it,

critical, curious. Mitchell stood aloof, silent. The figure touched him

strangely.

"Not badly done," said Doctor May. "Where did the fellow learn that

sweep of the muscles in the arm and hand? Look at them! They are

groping,--do you see?--clutching: the peculiar action of a man dying of

thirst."

"They have ample facilities for studying anatomy," sneered Kirby,

glancing at the half-naked figures.

"Look," continued the Doctor, "at this bony wrist, and the strained

sinews of the instep! A working-woman,--the very type of her class."

"God forbid!" muttered Mitchell.

"Why?" demanded May. "What does the fellow intend by the figure? I

cannot catch the meaning."

"Ask him," said the other, dryly. "There he stands,"--pointing to Wolfe,

who stood with a group of men, leaning on his ash-rake.

The Doctor beckoned him with the affable smile which kind-hearted men

put on, when talking to these people.

"Mr. Mitchell has picked you out as the man who did this,--I'm sure I

don't know why. But what did you mean by it?"

"She be hungry."

Wolfe's eyes answered Mitchell, not the Doctor.

"Oh-h! But what a mistake you have made, my fine fellow! You have given

no sign of starvation to the body. It is strong,--terribly strong. It

has the mad, half-despairing gesture of drowning."

Wolfe stammered, glanced appealingly at Mitchell, who saw the soul of

the thing, he knew. But the cool, probing eyes were turned on himself

now,--mocking, cruel, relentless.