CHAPTER X.

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

VOL. X.--DECEMBER, 1862.--NO. LXII.

THE PROCESSION OF THE FLOWERS.

In Cuba there is a blossoming shrub whose multitudinous crimson flowers

are so seductive to the humming-birds that they hover all day around it,

buried in its blossoms until petal and wing seem one. At first upright,

the gorgeous bells droop downward, and fall unwithered to the ground,

and are thence called by the Creoles "Cupid's Tears." Frederika Bremer

relates that daily she brought home handfuls of these blossoms to her

chamber, and nightly they all disappeared. One morning she looked toward

the wall of the apartment, and there, in a long crimson line, the

delicate flowers went ascending one by one to the ceiling, and passed

from sight. She found that each was borne laboriously onward by a little

colorless ant much smaller than itself: the bearer was invisible, but

the lovely burdens festooned the wall with beauty.

To a watcher from the sky, the march of the flowers of any zone across

the year would seem as beautiful as that West-Indian pageant. These

frail creatures, rooted where they stand, a part of the "still life" of

Nature, yet share her ceaseless motion. In the most sultry silence of

summer noons, the vital current is coursing with desperate speed through

the innumerable veins of every leaflet; and the apparent stillness, like

the sleeping of a child's top, is in truth the very ecstasy of perfected

motion.

Not in the tropics only, but even in England, whence most of our floral

associations and traditions come, the march of the flowers is in an

endless circle, and, unlike our experience, something is always in

bloom. In the Northern United States, it is said, the active growth of

most plants is condensed into ten weeks, while in the mother-country the

full activity is maintained through sixteen. But even the English winter

does not seem to be a winter, in the same sense as ours, appearing more

like a chilly and comfortless autumn. There is no month in the year

when some special plant does not bloom: the Coltsfoot there opens

its fragrant flowers from December to February; the yellow-flowered

Hellebore, and its cousin, the sacred Christmas Rose of Glastonbury,

extend from January to March; and the Snowdrop and Primrose often come

before the first of February. Something may be gained, much lost, by

that perennial succession; those links, however slight, must make the

floral period continuous to the imagination; while our year gives a

pause and an interval to its children, and after exhausted October has

effloresced into Witch-Hazel, there is an absolute reserve of blossom,

until the Alders wave again.

No symbol could so well represent Nature's first yielding in spring-time

as this blossoming of the Alder, this drooping of the tresses of these

tender things. Before the frost is gone, and while the newborn season is

yet too weak to assert itself by actually uplifting anything, it can at

least let fall these blossoms, one by one, till they wave defiance to

the winter on a thousand boughs. How patiently they have waited! Men are

perplexed with anxieties about their own immortality; but these catkins,

which hang, almost full-formed, above the ice all winter, show no such

solicitude, but when March wooes them they are ready. Once relaxing,

their pollen is so prompt to fall that it sprinkles your hand as you

gather them; then, for one day, they are the perfection of grace upon

your table, and next day they are weary and emaciated, and their little

contribution to the spring is done.

Then many eyes watch for the opening of the May-flower, day by day,

and a few for the Hepatica. So marked and fantastic are the local

preferences of all our plants, that, with miles of woods and meadows

open to their choice, each selects only some few spots for its

accustomed abodes, and some one among them all for its very earliest

blossoming. There is always some single chosen nook, which you might

almost cover with your handkerchief, where each flower seems to bloom

earliest, without variation, year by year. I know one such place for

Hepatica a mile northeast,--another for May-flower two miles southwest;

and each year the whimsical creature is in bloom on that little spot,

when not another flower can be found open through the whole country

round. Accidental as the choice may appear, it is undoubtedly based

on laws more eternal than the stars; yet why all subtile influences

conspire to bless that undistinguishable knoll no man can say. Another

and similar puzzle offers itself in the distribution of the tints

of flowers,--in these two species among the rest. There are certain

localities, near by, where the Hepatica is all but white, and others

where the May-flower is sumptuous in pink; yet it is not traceable to

wet or dry, sun or shadow, and no agricultural chemistry can disclose

the secret. Is it by some Darwinian law of selection that the white

Hepatica has utterly overpowered the blue, in our Cascade Woods, for

instance, while yet in the very midst of this pale plantation a single

clump will sometimes bloom with all heaven on its petals? Why can one

recognize the Plymouth May-flower, as soon as seen, by its wondrous

depth of color? Does it blush with triumph to see how Nature has

outwitted the Pilgrims, and even succeeded in preserving her deer like

an English duke, still maintaining the deepest woods in Massachusetts

precisely where those sturdy immigrants first began their clearings?

The Hepatica (called also Liverwort, Squirrel-Cup, or Blue Anemone) has

been found in Worcester as early as March seventeenth, and in Danvers on

March twelfth,--dates which appear almost the extreme of credibility.

Our next wild-flower in this region is the Claytonia, or Spring-Beauty,

which is common in the Middle States, but here found in only a few

localities. It is the Indian _Miskodeed_, and was said to have been

left behind when mighty Peboan, the Winter, was melted by the breath

of Spring. It is an exquisitely delicate little creature, bears its

blossoms in clusters, unlike most of the early species, and opens in

gradual succession each white and pink-veined bell. It grows in moist

places on the sunny edges of woods, and prolongs its shy career from

about the tenth of April until almost the end of May.

A week farther into April, and the Bloodroot opens,--a name of guilt,

and a type of innocence. This fresh and lovely thing appears to

concentrate all its stains within its ensanguined root, that it may

condense all purity in the peculiar whiteness of its petals. It emerges

from the ground with each shy blossom wrapt in its own pale-green leaf,

then doffs the cloak and spreads its long petals round a group of yellow

stamens. The flower falls apart so easily that when in full bloom it

will hardly bear transportation, but with a touch the stem stands naked,

a bare gold-tipped sceptre amid drifts of snow. And the contradiction

of its hues seems carried into its habits. One of the most shy of wild

plants, easily banished from its locality by any invasion, it yet takes

to the garden with unpardonable readiness, doubles its size, blossoms

earlier, repudiates its love of water, and flaunts its great leaves in

the unnatural confinement until it elbows out the exotics. Its charm is

gone, unless one find it in its native haunts, beside some cascade which

streams over rocks that are dark with moisture, green with moss, and

snowy with white bubbles. Each spray of dripping feather-moss exudes a

tiny torrent of its own, or braided with some tiny neighbor, above the

little water-fonts which sleep sunless in ever-verdant caves. Sometimes

along these emerald canals there comes a sudden rush and hurry, as if

some anxious housekeeper upon the hill above were afraid that things

were not stirring fast enough,--and then again the waving and sinuous

lines of water are quieted to a serener flow. The delicious red-thrush

and the busy little yellow-throat are not yet come to this their summer

haunt; but all day long the answering field-sparrows trill out their

sweet, shy, accelerating lay.

In the same localities with the Bloodroot, though some days later, grows

the Dog-Tooth Violet,--a name hopelessly inappropriate, but likely

never to be changed. These hardy and prolific creatures have also

many localities of their own; for, though they do not acquiesce in

cultivation, like the sycophantic Bloodroot, yet they are hard to banish

from their native haunts, but linger after the woods are cleared and the

meadow drained. The bright flowers blaze back all the yellow light of

noonday as the gay petals curl and spread themselves above their beds of

mottled leaves; but it is always a disappointment to gather them, for

indoors they miss the full ardor of the sunbeams, and are apt to go to

sleep and nod expressionless from the stalk.

And almost on the same day with this bright apparition one may greet a

multitude of concurrent visitors, arriving so accurately together that

it is almost a matter of accident which of the party shall first report

himself. Perhaps the Dandelion should have the earliest place; indeed,

I once found it in Brookline on the seventh of April. But it cannot

ordinarily be expected before the twentieth, in Eastern Massachusetts,

and rather later in the interior; while by the same date I have also

found near Boston the Cowslip or Marsh-Marigold, the Spring-Saxifrage,

the Anemones, the Violets, the Bellwort, the Houstonia, the Cinquefoil,

and the Strawberry-blossom. Varying, of course, in different spots and

years, the arrival of this coterie is yet nearly simultaneous, and they

may all be expected hereabouts before May-day at the very latest. After

all, in spite of the croakers, this festival could not have been much

better-timed, the delicate blossoms which mark the period are usually in

perfection on this day, and it is not long before they are past their

prime.

Some early plants which have now almost disappeared from Eastern

Massachusetts are still found near Worcester in the greatest

abundance,--as the larger Yellow Violet, the Red Trillium, the Dwarf

Ginseng, the Clintonia or Wild Lily-of-the-Valley, and the pretty

fringed Polygala, which Miss Cooper christened "Gay-Wings." Others again

are now rare in this vicinity, and growing rarer, though still abundant

a hundred miles farther inland. In several bits of old swampy wood one

may still find, usually close together, the Hobble-Bush and the Painted

Trillium, the Mitella, or Bishop's-Cap, and the snowy Tiarella. Others

again have entirely vanished within ten years, and that in some cases

without any adequate explanation. The dainty white Corydalis, profanely

called "Dutchman's-Breeches," and the quaint woolly Ledum, or Labrador

Tea, have disappeared within that time. The beautiful Linnaea is still

found annually, but flowers no more; as is also the case, in all but one

distant locality, with the once abundant Rhododendron. Nothing in Nature

has for me a more fascinating interest than these secret movements of

vegetation,--the sweet blind instinct with which flowers cling to old

domains until absolutely compelled to forsake them. How touching is the

fact, now well known, that salt-water plants still flower beside the

Great Lakes, yet dreaming of the time when those waters were briny as

the sea! Nothing in the demonstrations of Geology seems grander than the

light lately thrown by Professor Gray, from the analogies between the

flora of Japan and of North America, upon the successive epochs of heat

which led the wandering flowers along the Arctic lands, and of cold

which isolated them once more. Yet doubtless these humble movements

of our local plants may be laying up results as important, and may

hereafter supply evidence of earth's changes upon some smaller scale.

May expands to its prime of beauty; the summer birds come with the

fruit-blossoms, the gardens are deluged with bloom and the air with

melody, while in the woods the timid spring-flowers fold themselves away

in silence and give place to a brighter splendor. On the margin of some

quiet swamp a myriad of bare twigs seem suddenly overspread with purple

butterflies, and we know that the Rhodora is in bloom. Wordsworth never

immortalized a flower more surely than Emerson this, and it needs no

weaker words; there is nothing else in which the change from nakedness

to beauty is so sudden, and when you bring home the great mass of

blossoms they appear all ready to flutter away again from your hands and

leave you disenchanted.

At the same time the beautiful Cornel-tree is in perfection; startling

as a tree of the tropics, it flaunts its great flowers high up among the

forest-branches, intermingling its long slender twigs with theirs, and

garnishing them with alien blooms. It is very available for household

decoration, with its four great creamy petals,--flowers they are not,

but floral involucres,--each with a fantastic curl and stain at its tip,

as if the fireflies had alighted on them and scorched them; and yet I

like it best as it peers out in barbaric splendor from the delicate

green of young Maples. And beneath it grows often its more abundant

kinsman, the Dwarf Cornel, with the same four great petals enveloping

its floral cluster, but lingering low upon the ground,--an herb whose

blossoms mimic the statelier tree.

The same rich creamy hue and texture show themselves in the Wild Calla,

which grows at this season in dark, sequestered water-courses, and

sometimes well rivals, in all but size, that superb whiteness out of

a land of darkness, the Ethiopic Calla of the conservatory. At this

season, too, we seek another semi-aquatic rarity, whose homely name

cannot deprive it of a certain garden-like elegance, the Buckbean. This

is one of the shy plants which yet grow in profusion within their own

domain. I have found it of old in Cambridge, and then upon the pleasant

shallows of the Artichoke, that loveliest tributary of the Merrimack,

and I have never seen it where it occupied a patch more than a few yards

square, while yet within that space the multitudinous spikes grow always

tall and close, reminding one of hyacinths, when in perfection, but more

delicate and beautiful. The only locality I know for it in this vicinity

lies seven miles away, where a little inlet from the lower winding bays

of Lake Quinsigamond goes stealing up among a farmer's hay-fields, and

there, close beside the public road and in full of the farm-house, this

rare creature fills the water. But to reach it we commonly row down

the lake to a sheltered lagoon, separated from the main lake by a long

island which is gradually forming itself like the coral isles, growing

each year denser with alder thickets where the king-birds build;--there

leave the boat among the lily-leaves, and take a lane which winds among

the meadows and gives a fitting avenue for the pretty thing we seek.

But it is not safe to vary many days from the twentieth of May, for the

plant is not long in perfection, and is past its prime when the lower

blossoms begin to wither on the stem.

But should we miss this delicate adjustment of time, it is easy to

console ourselves with bright armfuls of Lupine, which bounteously

flowers for six weeks along our lake-side, ranging from the twenty-third

of May to the sixth of July. The Lupine is one of our most travelled

plants; for, though never seen off the American continent, it stretches

to the Pacific, and is found upon the Arctic coast. On these banks of

Lake Quinsigamond it grows in great families, and should be gathered in

masses and placed in a vase by itself; for it needs no relief from other

flowers, its own soft leaves afford background enough, and though the

white variety rarely occurs, yet the varying tints of blue upon the same

stalk are a perpetual gratification to the eye. I know not why shaded

blues should be so beautiful in flowers, and yet avoided as distasteful

in ladies' fancy-work; but it is a mystery like that which repudiates

blue-and-green from all well-regulated costumes, while Nature yet

evidently prefers it to any other combination in her wardrobe.

Another constant ornament of the end of May is the large pink

Lady's-Slipper, or Moccason-Flower, the "Cypripedium not due

till to-morrow" which Emerson attributes to the note-book of

Thoreau,--to-morrow, in these parts, meaning about the twentieth of May.

It belongs to the family of Orchids, a high-bred race, fastidious in

habits, sensitive as to abodes. Of the ten species named as rarest among

American endogenous plants by Dr. Gray, in his valuable essay on the

statistics of our Northern Flora, all but one are Orchids. And even an

abundant species, like the present, retains the family traits in its

person, and never loses its high-born air and its delicate veining.

I know a grove where it can be gathered by the hundreds within a

half-acre, and yet I never can divest myself of the feeling that each

specimen is a choice novelty. But the actual rarity occurs, at least

in this region, when one finds the smaller and more beautiful Yellow

Moccason-Flower,--_parviflorum_,--which accepts only our very choicest

botanical locality, the "Rattlesnake Ledge" on Tatessit Hill,--and may,

for aught I know, have been the very plant which Elsie Venner laid upon

her school-mistress's desk.

June is an intermediate month between the spring and summer flowers. Of

the more delicate early blossoms, the Dwarf Cornel, the Solomon's-Seal,

and the Yellow Violet still linger in the woods, but rapidly make way

for larger masses and more conspicuous hues. The meadows are gorgeous

with Clover, Buttercups, and Wild Geranium; but Nature is a little chary

for a week or two, maturing a more abundant show. Meanwhile one

may afford to take some pains to search for another rarity, almost

disappearing from this region,--the lovely Pink Azalea. It still grows

plentifully in a few sequestered places, selecting woody swamps to hide

itself; and certainly no shrub suggests, when found, more tropical

associations. Those great, nodding, airy, fragrant clusters, tossing far

above one's head their slender cups of honey, seem scarcely to belong to

our sober zone, any more than the scarlet tanager which sometimes builds

its nest beside them. They appear bright exotics, which have wandered

into our woods, and seem too happy to feel any wish for exit. And just

as they fade, their humbler sister in white begins to bloom, and carries

on through the summer the same intoxicating fragrance.

But when June is at its height, the sculptured chalices of the Mountain

Laurel begin to unfold, and thenceforward, for more than a month,

extends the reign of this our woodland queen. I know not why one should

sigh after the blossoming gorges of the Himalaya, when our forests are

all so crowded with this glowing magnificence,--rounding the tangled

swamps into smoothness, lighting up the underwoods, overtopping the

pastures, lining the rural lanes, and rearing its great pinkish masses

till they meet overhead. The color ranges from the purest white to a

perfect rose-pink, and there is an inexhaustible vegetable vigor about

the whole thing, which puts to shame those tenderer shrubs that shrink

before the progress of cultivation. There is the Rhododendron, for

instance, a plant of the same natural family with the Laurel and the

Azalea, and looking more robust and woody than either: it once grew in

many localities in this region, and still lingers in a few, without

consenting either to die or to blossom, and there is only one remote

place from which any one now brings into our streets those large

luxuriant flowers, waving white above the dark green leaves, and bearing

"just a dream of sunset on their edges, and just a breath from the green

sea in their hearts." But the Laurel, on the other hand, maintains its

ground, imperturbable and almost impassable, on every hill-side, takes

no hints, suspects no danger, and nothing but the most unmistakable

onset from spade or axe can diminish its profusion. Gathering it on the

most lavish scale seems only to serve as wholesome pruning; nor can I

conceive that the Indians, who once ruled over this whole county from

Wigwam Hill, could ever have found it more inconveniently abundant than

now. We have perhaps no single spot where it grows in such perfect

picturesqueness as at "The Laurels," on the Merrimack, just above

Newburyport,--a whole hill-side scooped out and the hollow piled

solidly with flowers, the pines curving around it above, and the river

encircling it below, on which your boat glides along, and you look up

through glimmering arcades of bloom. But for the last half of June it

monopolizes everything in the Worcester woods,--no one picks anything

else; and it fades so slowly that I have found a perfect blossom on the

last day of July.

At the same time with this royalty of the woods, the queen of the water

ascends her throne, for a reign as undisputed and far more prolonged.

The extremes of the Water-Lily in this vicinity, so far as I have known,

are the eighteenth of June and the thirteenth of October,--a longer

range than belongs to any other conspicuous wild-flower, unless we

except the Dandelion and Houstonia. It is not only the most fascinating

of all flowers to gather, but more available for decorative purposes

than almost any other, if it can only be kept fresh. The best method for

this purpose, I believe, is to cut the stalk very short before placing

in the vase; then, at night, the lily will close and the stalk curl

upward;--refresh them by changing the water, and in the morning the

stalk will be straight and the flower open.

From this time forth Summer has it all her own way. After the first of

July the yellow flowers begin to watch the yellow fireflies; Hawkweeds,

Loosestrifes, Primroses bloom, and the bushy Wild Indigo. The variety of

hues increases; delicate purple Orchises bloom in their chosen

haunts, and Wild Roses blush over hill and dale. On peat meadows the

Adder's-Tongue Arethusa (now called _Pogonia_) flowers profusely, with a

faint, delicious perfume,--and its more elegant cousin, the Calopogon,

by its side. In this vicinity we miss the blue Harebell, the identical

harebell of Ellen Douglas, which I remember waving its exquisite flowers

along the banks of the Merrimack, and again at Brattleboro', below the

cascade in the village, where it has climbed the precipitous sides

of old buildings, and nods inaccessibly from their crevices, in that

picturesque spot, looking down on the hurrying river. But with this

exception, there is nothing wanting here of the flowers of early summer.

The more closely one studies Nature, the finer her adaptations grow. For

instance, the change of seasons is analogous to a change of zones, and

summer assimilates our vegetation to that of the tropics.

In those lands, Humboldt has remarked, one misses the beauty of

wild-flowers in the grass, because the luxuriance of vegetation develops

everything into shrubs. The form and color are beautiful, "but, being

too high above the soil, they disturb that harmonious proportion which

characterizes the plants of our European meadows. Nature has, in every

zone, stamped on the landscape the peculiar type of beauty proper to

the locality." But every midsummer reveals the same tendency. In early

spring, when all is bare, and small objects are easily made prominent,

the wild-flowers are generally delicate. Later, when all verdure is

profusely expanded, these miniature strokes would be lost, and Nature

then practises landscape-gardening in large, lights up the copses with

great masses of White Alder, makes the roadsides gay with Aster and

Golden-Rod, and tops the tall coarse Meadow-Grass with nodding Lilies

and tufted Spiraea. One instinctively follows these plain hints, and

gathers bouquets sparingly in spring and exuberantly in summer.

The use of wild-flowers for decorative purposes merits a word in

passing, for it is unquestionably a branch of high art in favored hands.

It is true that we are bidden, on high authority, to love the wood-rose

and leave it on its stalk; but against this may be set the saying of

Bettine, that "all flowers which are broken become immortal in the

sacrifice"; and certainly the secret harmonies of these fair creatures

are so marked and delicate that we do not understand them till we try to

group floral decorations for ourselves. The most successful artists

will not, for instance, consent to put those together which do not grow

together; Nature understands her business, and distributes her masses

and backgrounds unerringly. Yonder soft and feathery Meadow-Sweet longs

to be combined with Wild Roses: it yearns towards them in the field,

and, after withering in the hand most readily, it revives in water as if

to be with them in the vase. In the same way the White Spiraea serves as

natural background for the Field-Lilies. These lilies, by the way, are

the brightest adornment of our meadows during the short period of their

perfection. We have two species: one slender, erect, solitary, scarlet,

looking up to heaven with all its blushes on; the other clustered,

drooping, pale-yellow. I never saw the former in such profusion as last

week, on the bare summit of Wachusett. The granite ribs have there a

thin covering of crispest moss, spangled with the white starry blossoms

of the Mountain Cinquefoil; and as I lay and watched the red lilies that

waved their innumerable urns around me, it needed but little imagination

to see a thousand altars, sending visible flames forever upward to the

answering sun.

August comes: the Thistles are out, beloved of butterflies; deeper and

deeper tints, more passionate intensities of color, prepare the way for

the year's decline. A wealth of gorgeous Golden-Rod waves over all the

hills, and enriches every bouquet one gathers; its bright colors command

the eye, and it is graceful as an elm. Fitly arranged, it gives a bright

relief to the superb beauty of the Cardinal-Flowers, the brilliant

blue-purple of the Vervain, the pearl-white of the Life-Everlasting,

the delicate lilac of the Monkey-Flower, the soft pink and white of

the Spiraeas,--for the white yet lingers,--all surrounded by trailing

wreaths of blossoming Clematis.

But the Cardinal-Flower is best seen by itself, and, indeed, needs the

surroundings of its native haunts to display its fullest beauty. Its

favorite abode is along the dank mossy stones of some black and winding

brook, shaded with overarching bushes, and running one long stream of

scarlet with these superb occupants. It seems amazing how anything so

brilliant can mature in such a darkness. When a ray of sunlight strays

in upon it, the wondrous creature seems to hover on the stalk, ready to

take flight, like some lost tropic bird. There is a spot whence I have

in ten minutes brought away as many as I could hold in both arms, some

bearing fifty blossoms on a single stalk; and I could not believe that

there was such another mass of color in the world. Nothing cultivated

is comparable to them; and, with all the talent lately lavished on

wild-flower painting, I have never seen the peculiar sheen of these

petals in the least degree delineated. It seems some new and separate

tint, equally distinct from scarlet and from crimson, a splendor for

which there is as yet no name, but only the reality.

It seems the signal of autumn, when September exhibits the first

Barrel-Gentian by the roadside; and there is a pretty insect in the

meadows--the Mourning-Cloak Moth it might be called--which gives

coincident warning. The innumerable Asters mark this period with their

varied and wide-spread beauty; the meadows are full of rose-colored

Polygala, of the white spiral spikes of the Ladies'-Tresses, and of

the fringed loveliness of the Gentian. This flower, always unique and

beautiful, opening its delicate eyelashes every morning to the sunlight,

closing them again each night, has also a thoughtful charm about it

as the last of the year's especial darlings. It lingers long, each

remaining blossom growing larger and more deep in color, as with many

other flowers; and after it there is nothing for which to look forward,

save the fantastic Witch-Hazel.

On the water, meanwhile, the last White Lilies are sinking beneath the

surface, the last gay Pickerel-Weed is gone, though the rootless plants

of the delicate Bladder-Wort, spreading over acres of shallows, still

impurple the wide, smooth surface. Harriet Prescott says that some souls

are like the Water-Lilies, fixed, yet floating. But others are like this

graceful purple blossom, floating unfixed, kept in place only by its

fellows around it, until perhaps a breeze comes, and, breaking the

accidental cohesion, sweeps them all away.

The season reluctantly yields its reign, and over the quiet autumnal

landscape everywhere, even after the glory of the trees is past, there

are tints and fascinations of minor beauty. Last October, for instance,

in walking, I found myself on a little knoll, looking northward.

Overhead was a bower of climbing Waxwork, with its yellowish pods scarce

disclosing their scarlet berries,--a wild Grape-vine, with its

fruit withered by the frost into still purple raisins,--and yellow

Beech-leaves, detaching themselves with an effort audible to the ear.

In the foreground were blue Raspberry-stems, yet bearing greenish

leaves,--pale-yellow Witch-Hazel, almost leafless,--purple

Viburnum-berries,--the silky cocoons of the Milkweed,--and, amid the

underbrush, a few lingering Asters and Golden-Rods, Ferns still green,

and Maidenhair bleached white. In the background were hazy hills,

white Birches bare and snow-like, and a Maple half-way up a sheltered

hill-side, one mass of canary-color, its fallen leaves making an

apparent reflection on the earth at its foot,--and then a real

reflection, fused into a glassy light intenser than itself, upon the

smooth, dark stream below.

The beautiful disrobing suggested the persistent and unconquerable

delicacy of Nature, who shrinks from nakedness and is always seeking

to veil her graceful boughs,--if not with leaves, then with feathery

hoar-frost, ermined snow, or transparent icy armor.

But, after all, the fascination of summer lies not in any details,

however perfect, but in the sense of total wealth which summer gives.

Wholly to enjoy this, one must give one's self passively to it, and not

expect to reproduce it in words. We strive to picture heaven, when

we are barely at the threshold of the inconceivable beauty of earth.

Perhaps the truant boy who simply bathes himself in the lake and then

basks in the sunshine, dimly conscious of the exquisite loveliness

around him, is wiser, because humbler, than is he who with presumptuous

phrases tries to utter it. There are multitudes of moments when the

atmosphere is so surcharged with luxury that every pore of the body

becomes an ample gate for sensation to flow in, and one has simply to

sit still and be filled. In after-years the memory of books seems barren

or vanishing, compared with the immortal bequest of hours like these.

Other sources of illumination seem cisterns only; these are fountains.

They may not increase the mere quantity of available thought, but they

impart to it a quality which is priceless. No man can measure what a

single hour with Nature may have contributed to the moulding of his

mind. The influence is self-renewing, and if for a long time it baffles

expression by reason of its fineness, so much the better in the end.

The soul is like a musical instrument: it is not enough that it be

framed for the very most delicate vibration, but it must vibrate long

and often before the fibres grow mellow to the finest waves of sympathy.

I perceive that in the veery's carolling, the clover's scent, the

glistening of the water, the waving wings of butterflies, the sunset

tints, the floating clouds, there are attainable infinitely more

subtile modulations of delight than I can yet reach the sensibility to

discriminate, much less describe. If, in the simple process of writing,

one could physically impart to this page the fragrance of this spray of

azalea beside me, what a wonder would it seem!--and yet one ought to be

able, by the mere use of language, to supply to every reader the total

of that white, honeyed, trailing sweetness, which summer insects haunt

and the Spirit of the Universe loves. The defect is not in language,

but in men. There is no conceivable beauty of blossom so beautiful as

words,--none so graceful, none so perfumed. It is possible to dream of

combinations of syllables so delicious that all the dawning and decay of

summer cannot rival their perfections, nor winter's stainless white

and azure match their purity and their charm. To write them, were it

possible, would be to take rank with Nature; nor is there any other

method, even by music, for human art to reach so high.

* * * * *

ONE OF MY CLIENTS.

After a practice in the legal profession of more than twenty years, I am

persuaded that a more interesting volume could not be written than the

revelations of a lawyer's office. The plots there discovered before they

were matured,--the conspiracies there detected

"Ere they hail reached their last fatal periods,"--

the various devices of the Prince of Darkness,--the weapons with which

he fought, and those by which he was overcome,--the curious phenomena of

intense activity and love of gain,--the arts of the detective, and those

by which he was eluded,--and the never-ending and ever-varying surprises

and startling incidents,--would present such a panorama of human affairs

as would outfly our fancy, and modify our unbelief in that much-abused

doctrine of the depravity of our nature.

To illustrate, let me introduce to you "one of my clients," whom I will

call Mr. Sidney, and with whom, perhaps, you may hereafter become better

acquainted. His counterpart in personal appearance you may find in the

thoroughfare at, any hour of the day. There is nothing about him to

attract attention. He is nearly forty-five years of age, and weighs,

perhaps, two hundred pounds. His face is florid and his hair sandy. His

eyes are small, piercing, and gray. His motions are slow, and none are

made without a purpose. Intellectually he is above the average, and his

perceptive faculties are well developed. The wrinkles in his lips are at

right angles with his mouth, and a close observer might detect in his

countenance self-reliance and tenacity of will and purpose. But with

ordinary faculties much may be accomplished: in this sketch, let us see

how much in two particulars.

His first entrance into my office was in the spring of 1853. He

handed me a package of papers, saying, if I would name an hour for a

professional consultation, he would be punctual. The time was agreed

upon and he withdrew. On examination of his papers, I found that his

letters of introduction were from several United States Senators, Judges

of Supreme Courts, Cabinet Officers, and Governors, and one was from a

Presidential candidate in the last election. Those directed specially

to me were from a Senator and a Member of Congress, both of whom were

lawyers and my personal friends, men in whose judgment I placed great

confidence. They all spoke in the highest terms of Mr. Sidney's

integrity, ability, and energy, and concluded by saying I might

implicitly rely upon his judgment and be governed by his counsels.

What man of the masses can this one be, thus heralded by the authorities

of the nation, and what his labor, so commended by the rulers? I glanced

at him mentally again. Perhaps he is laboring for the endowment of some

great literary or benevolent institution, for the building of a national

monument. No. Perhaps he has some theory that thousands of facts must

prove and illustrate; or it may be he is a voracious gatherer of

statistics. The last is the most probable; but the more I mused, the

more the fire burned within me to know more of his mission.

I awaited impatiently his coming. It was on the stroke of the hour

appointed. The object of that interview may not with propriety be

stated, nor the results described; but it may be said that that hour was

the most intensely exciting of any of my professional life, causing the

blood to chill and boil alternately. The business was so peculiar, and

connected with men so exalted in position, and conducted with such

wonderful ability and tact, that now, years after, scarcely a day passes

that my mind does not revert to those hours and do homage to those

transcendent abilities by which it was conducted, till I sometimes think

the possessor of them was an overmatch for Lucifer himself. My eyes

were for the first time opened to the marvellous in his department

of knowledge and art; and the region of impossibility was materially

circumscribed, and the domain of the prince of the powers of the air

extended _ad infinitum_. Into those regions it is not my present purpose

to delve.

After a business acquaintance of several years with Mr. Sidney, I have

learned that he was formerly a rich manufacturer, and that he was nearly

ruined in fortune by the burning of several warehouses in which he had

stored a large amount of merchandise that was uninsured. The owners of

these store-houses were men of wealth, influence, and respectability.

Alone of all the citizens, Mr. Sidney suspected that the block was

intentionally set on fire to defraud the insurance-offices. Without

any aid or knowledge of other parties, he began an investigation, and

ascertained that the buildings were insured far beyond their value.

He also ascertained that insurance had been obtained on a far greater

amount of merchandise than the stores could contain; and still further,

that the goods insured, as being deposited there, were not so deposited

at the time of the fire. He likewise procured a long array of facts

tending to fix the burning upon the "merchant princes" who held the

policies. To his mind, they were convincing. He therefore confronted

these men, accused them of the arson, and demanded payment for his own

loss. This was, of course, declined. Whereupon he gave them formal

notice, that, if his demand were not liquidated within thirty days,

never thereafter would an opportunity be afforded for a settlement. That

the notice produced peculiar excitement was evident. _Yet the thirty

days elapsed and his claim was not adjusted_.

From that hour, with a just appreciation of the enormity of the offence

which he believed to have been committed, he consecrated his vast

energies to the detection of crime. His whole soul was fired almost to

frenzy with the greatness of his work, and he pursued it with a firmness

of principle and fixedness of purpose that seemed almost madness, till

he exposed to the world the most stupendous league of robbers ever

dreamed of, extending into every State and Territory of the Union,

and numbering, to his personal knowledge, over seven hundred men of

influence and power, whose business as a copartnership was forgery,

counterfeiting, burglary, arson, and any other crimes that might afford

rich pecuniary remuneration.

I will not now stop to describe the organization of this band, which is

as perfect as that of any corporation; nor the enormous resources at its

command, being computed by millions; nor the great respectability of

its directors and State agents; nor the bloody oaths and forfeitures by

which the members are bound together; nor the places of their annual

meetings; nor a thousand other particulars, more startling than anything

in fiction or history. Nor will I enumerate the great number of

convictions of members of this gang for various offences through Mr.

Sidney's efforts. Prosecuting no other parties than these,--thwarting

them in those defences that had never before failed,--testifying in

open court against the character of their witnesses, who appeared to be

polished gentlemen, and enumerating the offences of which they had

been guilty,--and harassing them by all legal and legitimate means, he

gathered around him a storm that not one man in a thousand could have

withstood for an hour. Eleven times was food analyzed that had been

suspiciously set before him, and in each instance poison was detected in

it; while in hundreds of instances he declined to receive from unknown

hands presents about which hung similar suspicions. Numerous were the

infernal-machines sent him, the explosion of some of which he escaped as

if by miracle, and several exploded in his own dwelling. Without number

were the anonymous letters he received, threatening his life, if he did

not desist from prosecuting this band of robbers. Yet not for one moment

swerved from his purpose, he moved unharmed through ten thousand perils,

till at last he fell a victim to the enemy that had so long been hunting

his life. On no one has his mantle fallen.

His sole object in life seemed to be the breaking-up of this villanous

gang of plunderers, and he pursued it with a genius and strength, a

devotion, self-sacrifice, and true heroism, that are deserving of

immortality.

Not long before his death, while one of the directors of this band was

confined in prison at Mr. Sidney's instigation, awaiting a preliminary

examination, he sent for Mr. Sidney and offered him one hundred thousand

dollars, if he would desist from pursuing him alone. Mr. Sidney replied,

that he had many times before been offered the like sum, if he would

cease prosecuting the directors, and that the same reason which had

inclined him to reject that proposition would compel him to refuse this.

Whereupon the director offered, as an additional inducement, one-half of

the money taken from the messenger of the Newport banks, while on his

way to Providence to redeem their bills at the Merchants Bank, and also

the mint where they had coined the composition that had passed current

for years through all the banks and banking-houses of the country, and

which stood every test that could be applied, without the destruction of

the coin itself, which mint had cost its owners upwards of two hundred

thousand dollars. All of which Mr. Sidney indignantly rejected. And it

was not till the year after his death that the coin became known, when

it was also reported and believed that a million and a quarter of the

same was locked up in the vaults of the--Government.

The United States Government sought Mr. Sidney's services, as appears of

record. Those high in authority had decided on his employment, a fact

which in less than six hours thereafter was known to the directors, and

within that space of time five of them had arrived in Washington and

paid over to their attorney the sum of thirty-five hundred dollars for

some purpose,--the attorney being no less a personage than an honorable

member of a supreme court. The service desired of Mr. Sidney he was

willing to perform, on the condition that he should not be called upon

to prosecute any other parties than those to whose conviction he had

sworn to devote his life.

As a detective, Mr. Sidney was unequalled in this country. Vidocq may

have been his superior in dissimulation, but in that alone. He certainly

had not a tithe of Mr. Sidney's genius and strength of mind and moral

power to discern the truth, though never so deeply hidden, and to expose

it to the clear light of day.

"His blood and judgment were so well commingled,"

that his conclusions seemed akin to prophecy.

But it is not as a detective that Mr. Sidney is here presented. This

slight sketch of this remarkable man is given, that the reader may more

willingly believe that he possessed, among other wonderful powers, one

that is not known ever to have been attained to such a degree by any

other individual, namely:--

_The power of discerning, in a single specimen of handwriting, the

character, the occupation, the habits, the temperament, the health,

the age, the sex, the size, the nationality, the benevolence or the

penuriousness, the boldness or the timidity, the morality or the

immorality, the affectation or the hypocrisy, and often the intention of

the writer_.

At the age of thirty-five, the genius of Mr. Sidney as a physiognomist,

expert, and detective, remained wholly undeveloped. He was not

aware, nor were his friends, of his wonderful powers of observation,

dissection, and deduction. Nor had he taken his first lesson by being

brought in contact with the rogues. How, then, did he acquire this

almost miraculous power?

After he had ascertained the names of the directors and State agents

of the band, he collected many hundred specimens of their handwriting.

These he studied with that energy which was equalled only by his

patience. In a surprisingly short time he first of all began to perceive

the differences between a moral and an immoral signature. Afterwards he

proceeded to study the occupation, age, habits, temperament, and all

the other characteristics of the writers, and in this he was equally

successful. If this be doubted by any, let him collect a number of

signatures of Frenchmen, Englishmen, Germans, and Americans, or, what

is still better, of Jews of all nations, and at least in the latter

instance, with ordinary perceptive faculties, there will be no

difficulty in determining the question of nationality; a person with

half an eye need never mistake the handwriting of a Jew. Many can detect

pride and affectation, and most persons the sex, in handwriting, how

much soever it may be disguised.

"The bridegroom's letters stand in row above,

Tapering, yet straight, like pine-trees in his grove;

While free and fine the bride's appear below,

As light and slender as her jasmines grow."

Why, then, should it be strange, if remarkable powers of observation,

analysis, and patient and energetic study should accomplish much

more? In this department the Government had afforded Mr. Sidney great

facilities, till at last he would take the letters dropped during the

night in the post-office of a great city, and as rapidly as a skilful

cashier could detect a counterfeit in counting bank-bills, and with

unerring certainty, he would throw out those suspiciously superscribed.

"In each of these nine," he would say, "there is no letter, but money

only. This parcel is from the W--Street office. These are directed to

men that are not called by these names: they are fictitious, and assumed

for iniquitous purposes. Those are from thieves to thieves, and hint at

opportunities," and so on.

Travelling over the principal railways of the country without charge,

entertained at hotels where compensation was declined, Mr. Sidney was in

some instances induced to impart to his friends some of that knowledge

which he took much pains to conceal, believing that by so doing he

should best serve the great purposes of his life. Whether he desired

this remarkable power to be kept from the rogues, or whether he thought

he should be too much annoyed by being called upon as an expert in

handwriting in civil cases, or what his purpose was, is not known, and

probably a large number of his intimate friends are not aware of his

genius in this.

On one occasion he was in a Canadian city for the first time, and

stopped at a principal hotel. When about to depart, he was surprised

that his host declined compensation. The landlord then requested Mr.

Sidney to give him the character of a man whose handwriting he produced.

Mr. Sidney consented, and, having retired to the private office, gave

the writer's age within a year, his nationality, being a native-born

Frenchman, his height and size, being very short and fleshy, his

temperament and occupation; and described him as a generous, high-toned,

public-spirited man, of strong religious convictions and remarkable

modesty: all of which the landlord pronounced to be entirely correct.

The hotel-register was then brought, and to nearly every name Mr. Sidney

gave the marked character or peculiarity of the man. One was very

nervous, another very tall and lean; this one was penurious, that one

stubborn; this was a farmer, and that a clergyman; this name was written

in a frolic; this was a genuine name, though not written by the man

himself,--and that written by the man himself, but it was not his true

name. Of the person last specified the clerk desired a full description,

and obtained it in nearly these words:--

"He, Sir, was not christened by that name. He could never have written

it before he was thirty. He has assumed it within a year. The character

is bad,--very bad. I judge he is a gambler by profession, and--something

worse. He evidently is not confined to one department of rascality. He

was born and educated in New England, is aged about thirty-nine, is

about five feet ten in height, and is broad-shouldered and stout. His

nerves are strong, and he is bold, hypocritical, and mean. He is just

the kind of man to talk like a saint and act like a devil."

The little company raised their hands in holy horror.

"As to age, size, nerve, etc.," said the landlord, "you are entirely

correct, but in his moral character you are much mistaken"; and the

clerk laughed outright.

"Not mistaken at all," replied Mr. Sidney; "the immorality of the

signature is the most perspicuous, and it is more than an even chance

that he has graduated from a State's prison. At any rate, he will show

his true character wherever he remains a year."

"But, my dear Sir, you are doing the greatest possible damage to your

reputation; he is a boarder of mine, and"----

"You had better be rid of him," chimed in Mr. Sidney.

"Why, Mr. Sidney, he is the _clergyman_ who has been preaching very

acceptably at the ---- Church these two months!"

"Just as I told you," said Mr. Sidney; "he is a hypocrite and a rascal

by profession. Will you allow me to demonstrate this?"

The landlord assented. A servant was called, and Mr. Sidney, having

written on a card, sent it to the clergyman's room, with the request

that he would come immediately to the office. It was delivered, and the

landlord waited patiently for his Reverence.

"You think he will come?" asked Mr. Sidney.

The landlord replied affirmatively.

Mr. Sidney shook his head, and said,--"You will see."

A short time after, the servant was again ordered to make a

reconnoissance, and reported that there was no response to his knocking,

and that the door was locked on the inside. Whereupon Mr. Sidney

expressed the hope that the religious society were responsible for the

board, for he would never again lead that flock like a shepherd. It was

subsequently ascertained that the parson had in a very irreverent manner

slipped down the spout to the kitchen and jumped from there to the

ground, and, what is "very remarkable," like the load of voters upset by

Sam Weller into the canal, "was never heard of after."[A]

[Footnote A: There is a curious story connected with this "clergyman,"

which may yet appear in the biography of Mr. S.]

* * * * *

"Individual handwriting," says Lavater, "is inimitable. The more I

compare the different handwritings which fall in my way, the more am

I confirmed in the idea that they are so many expressions, so many

emanations, of the character of the writer. Every country, every nation,

every city has its peculiar handwriting." And the same might be said of

painting; for, if one hundred painters copy the same figure, an artist

will distinguish the copyist.

Some years since, a certain bank placed in my hands two promissory notes

for large amounts, purporting to be signed by a Mr. Temple and indorsed

by a Mr. Conway, and which both maker and indorser pronounced forgeries.

Both notes were written on common white paper, and were purchased by the

bank of a certain broker at a time when it was difficult to make loans

by discount in the usual manner. Before the maturity of the notes, the

broker, who was a Jew, had left for parts unknown. He left behind him

no liabilities, unless he might be holden for the payment of the notes

above specified, and several others signed and indorsed in the same

manner in the hands of other parties. Several attempts had been made by

professional experts to trace resemblances between the forgeries and the

genuine handwriting of said Temple and Conway, as well as the broker,

but all had reluctantly come to the conclusion that the signatures were

as dissimilar as well could be. The cashier was exceedingly embarrassed

by the fact that Mr. Conway was one of the directors of the bank, and

he was presumed to have been so familiar with his signature as to be

incapable of being deceived.

After a most diligent investigation and the expenditure of much time and

money, and after skilful experts and detectives had given up in despair

of ascertaining either the whereabouts of the Jew or anything further

till he could be produced, the holders of this paper had settled down

quietly in the belief that the broker was the guilty party and that all

further effort was useless. At this point of time, when all excitement

had subsided, these notes came into my possession. I immediately

telegraphed to Mr. Sidney, and it was with great joy that I received the

reply that he was on his way. At three o'clock in the morning I met him

at the railroad station. He complimented me by saying there was not

another man living for whom he would have left the city of ---- on a

similar message. I thanked him, and we walked to the office. Before

arriving there, I had merely informed him that I desired his services in

the investigation of a forgery that baffled our art. He demanded all the

papers. I produced the forged notes, several genuine checks and letters

of Mr. Temple and Mr. Conway, and several specimens of the handwriting

of the broker.

Long as I live I can never forget the almost supernatural glow that came

over his features. I could almost see the halo. No language can describe

such a marked and rapid change of countenance. His whole soul seemed

wrapt in a delightful vision. I cannot say how long this continued, as

I was lost in admiration, as he was in contemplation. I spoke, but he

seemed not to hear. At last his muscles relaxed, and he began to breathe

as if greatly fatigued. He wiped the perspiration from his brow, and

said, as if to himself,--

"Sure!"

I asked what was sure. A few minutes elapsed, and he said more loudly,--

"As sure as you are born,"--without seeming to have heard my inquiry.

I proposed to state what could be proved, and the suspicions that were

entertained of the cashier. He objected, and said,--

"I take my departure from these papers. Mr. Temple is aged thirty-eight,

a large, well-built man, full six feet high, strongly nerved, bold,

proud, and fearless. His mind is active, and in his day he has been

professor in a college. He fares well and is fashionably dressed. I

think he is not in any legitimate business. He is a German by birth,

though he has been in this country several years. He is somewhat

affected and immensely hypocritical. I think he is a gambler and dealer

in counterfeit money. He certainly is not confined to one department of

rascality. This is not the name by which he was christened, if indeed he

was ever christened at all. He could not have written it in his youth,

and must have assumed it within a year and a half." (Exact in every

known particular.)

"Mr. Conway I at first thought an attorney-at-law, but he is not. I

reckon he administers on estates, acts as guardian, and settles up the

affairs of the unfortunate in trade as their assignee, in connection

with his business of notary and note-shaver. He is aged fifty-six, was

born and educated in New England, and is probably a native of this city.

He is tall, lean, and bony. His nerves are not steady, and he is easily

excited. He probably has the dyspepsia, but he would not lose the

writing of a deed to be rid of it. The remarkable feature of his

character is stinginess. His natural abilities being good and his mind

strong, he must therefore be a man of means, and I think it matters

little to his conscience how he comes by his wealth. At the same time,

he has considerable pride and caution, which, with his interest, keep

him honest, as the world goes. If he were not an old bachelor, I should

think better of his heart, and he would be less miserly.

"The Jew's signature is the most honest of the three. Timidity is the

marked character of the man. He could not succeed in any department of

roguery. It is physically, as well as mentally and morally, impossible

for him to have had any connection with the forgery. He would be

frightened out of his wits at the very suggestion of his complicity."

"And so, Mr. Sidney," said I, "you know all about these parties and the

particulars of the forgery?"

"Nothing whatever," he replied, "save by these specimens of their

handwriting. I never heard of the forgery, nor of these men, till this

hour."

To which I replied,--

"I cannot believe that you can give such a perfectly accurate

description of them (saving their moral characters, of which I know

little) without other means of knowledge. It _must_ have been that you

knew Temple to be a German, Conway to be the most penurious old bachelor

in town, and the broker the most timid. And _how_, in the name of all

that is marvellous, _could_ you have known Conway to be afflicted with

dyspepsia?

"Then," answered Mr. Sidney, "you are not prepared to believe one other

thing, more strange and paradoxical than all the rest. Listen! These

notes are forgeries both of the maker and the indorser. And who think

you are the criminals?"

"The Jew?"

"No."

"The cashier?"

"No. But, as sure as you are born, these notes are in the handwriting of

Temple and Conway, and the signatures are not only genuine, but they are

forgeries also: for both had formed a well-matured and deliberate design

of disputing them before placing them on the paper. And, Sir, from

my notion of Conway's character and temperament, as expressed in his

handwriting, I venture the assertion that I can make him own it, and pay

the notes. He shall even faint away at my pleasure. Temple is another

kind of man, and would never own it, were it ten times proved."

A meeting of the directors of the bank was to be holden at nine o'clock

of the same morning. None of them knew Mr. Sidney, or were known by

him. It was arranged that he should meet them, Mr. Conway included,

and exhibit his skill, and if he should convince them of his power of

divination, he should discuss the genuineness of the signatures of the

supposed forgeries.

For several hours he was on trial before the board with a very large

number of specimens of handwriting of men of mark, and he astonished

them all beyond measure by giving the occupation, age, height, size,

temperament, strength of nerve, nationality, morality, and other

peculiarities of every one of the writers. His success was not partial,

it was complete. There was not simply a preponderance of evidence, it

was beyond a doubt. The directors did not question the fact; but how was

it done? Some thought mesmerism could account for it, and others thought

it miraculous.

The first experiment was this. Each director wrote on a piece of paper

the names of all the board. Eleven lists were handed him, and he

specified the writer of each by the manner in which he wrote his own

name. He then asked them to write their own or any other name, with as

much disguise as they pleased, and as many as pleased writing on the

same piece of paper; and in every instance he named the writer.

As an example of the other experiments, take this one. The

superscription of a letter was shown him. He began immediately:--

"A clergyman, without doubt, who reads his sermons, and is a little

short-sighted. He is aged sixty-one, is six feet high, weighs about one

hundred and seventy, is lean, bony, obstinate, irritable, economical,

frank, and without a particle of hypocrisy or conceit. He is naturally

miserly, and bestows charity only from a sense of duty. His mind

is methodical and strong, and he is not a genius or an interesting

preacher. If he has decided upon any doctrine or construction of

Scripture, it would be as impossible to change him as to make him over

again."

The company began to laugh, when one of them said,--

"Come, come, Mr. Sidney, you are disclosing altogether too much of my

father-in-law."

And now the supposed forged notes were handed him. He gave the

characteristics of the signatures very nearly as he had before done

in the office, but more particularly and minutely. He analyzed the

handwriting,--showed the points of resemblance, where before none could

be discerned,--showed that the writing, interpreted by itself, was

intended to be disguised,--explained the difference between the

different parts of the notes,--pointed out where the writer was firm in

his purpose, and his nerves well braced, and where his fears overcame

his resolution,--where he had paused to recover his courage, and for a

considerable time,--where he had changed his pen, and how the forgery

was continued through several days,--what parts were done by Temple, and

what by Conway,--

"Till all the interim

Between the acting of the dreadful thing

And the first motion"

was brought so vividly and truthfully to mind that Mr. Conway fell to

the floor as if dead. The cashier, relieved from a pressure that had for

weary months been grinding his very soul, burst into tears. A scene of

strange excitement ensued, during which Mr. Conway muttered incoherent

sentences in condemnation of Temple and then of himself,--now with

penitence, and then with rage. Recovering his composure, he suggested

the Jew as the guilty party. Mr. Sidney then dissected the handwriting

of the Jew, and demonstrated that there was as great a difference

between his chirography and a New-Englander's as between the English and

the Chinese characters,--showed how the Jew must have been exceedingly

timid, and stated the probability that he had left the city not because

he had taken any part in the forgery, but because he had been frightened

away. Then turning to Conway, he gave him a lecture such as no mortal

before ever gave or received. The agony of Conway's mind so distorted

his body as made it painful in the extreme to all beholders. "His inmost

soul seemed stung as by the bite of a serpent." When at last Mr. Sidney

turned and took from his valise a small steel safe, which Conway

recognized as his own, "the terrors of hell got hold of him," and his

anguish was indescribably horrible. The little safe had been by some

unknown and unaccountable process taken from a larger one in Conway's

office, and was unopened. Neither Mr. Sidney nor the directors have ever

seen its contents; but in consideration that it should not be opened,

Mr. Conway confessed his crime in the very form of Mr. Sidney's

description, paid the notes before leaving the bank, and _remains a

director to this day_. As is often the case, the greater criminal goes

unwhipped of justice.

* * * * *

Mr. Sidney, besides the faculty I have described, had acquired another,

less wonderful perhaps, but still quite remarkable, and which was of

incalculable assistance to him in the prosecution of his Herculean

labor. He was a most rare physiognomist. And by physiognomy is here

intended, not simply the art of discerning the character of the mind by

the features of the face, but also the art of discovering the qualities

of the mind by the conformation of the body,--and still further,

(although it may not be a legitimate use of the word,) the power

of distinguishing the character, mental and moral, the capacity,

occupation, and all the distinctive qualities of a person by his figure,

action, dress, deportment, and the like: for Sterne said well, that "the

wise man takes his hat from the peg very differently from a fool."

The ancient Egyptians acquired the greatest skill in this science; and

Tacitus affirms, not without reason, that their keen perception

and acute observation, essential in communicating their ideas in

hieroglyphics, contributed largely to their success. Certainly, few

better proofs of the existence of the science have been furnished than

that given by the Egyptian physiognomist at Athens in the days of Plato.

Zopyrus pronounced the face of Socrates to be that of a libertine. The

physiognomist being derided by the disciples of the great philosopher,

Socrates reproved them, saying that Zopyrus had spoken well, for in his

younger days such indeed had been the truth, and that he had overcome

the proclivities of his nature by philosophy and the severest

discipline.

Pliny affirms that Apelles could trace the likeness of men so accurately

that a physiognomist could discover the ruling passion to which they

were subject. Dante's characters, in his view of Purgatory, are drawn

with accurate reference to the principles of physiognomy; and Shakspeare

and Sterne, particularly the latter, were clever in the art; while Kempf

and Zimmermann, in their profession, are said seldom to have erred as

physiognomists. Surely it is a higher authority and more practical,

which saith, "A wicked man walketh with a froward mouth; he speaketh

with his feet; he teacheth with his fingers.--A man is known by his

look, and a wise man by the air of his countenance." And yet again, "The

wickedness of a woman changeth her face."

If it be true, as Sultzer declares, that there is not a living creature

that is not more or less skilled in physiognomy as a necessary condition

of its existence, surely _man_, with all his parts fitly joined

together, should be the most expert; and there are circumstances and

conditions, as well as qualities of mind and body, which will conduct

him more surely along the pathway of his research, and direct him onward

towards the goal of perfection. Consider, then, the characteristics of

Mr. Sidney, the circumstances by which he was surrounded, and the school

in which he was taught, in order to determine if there were in him the

elements of success.

Chiefest among the essential qualities is to be named his astonishing

strength of nerve. No danger could agitate him, however imminent or

sudden. No power could deprive him of his imperturbable coolness

and courage. Perils seemed to render his mind more clear and his

self-reliance more firm. (And yet I have heard him say, that there

was among the band of criminals before mentioned one woman of greater

strength of mind and nervous power than any person he had ever seen,

whom alone of all created beings, whether man or devil, he dreaded

to encounter.) Had not Mr. Sidney been thus potently armed, he must,

without doubt or question, have become almost a monomaniac; for,

secondly, he was for years enraged almost to madness that his entire

estate had been swept from his grasp, as he believed, by the torch of

the incendiary; and he was to the last degree exasperated, and with

a just indignation, that the merchant-princes who he supposed had

occasioned his impoverishment yet walked abroad with the confidence of

the community, and were still trusted by many a good man as the very

salt of the city. Nevertheless, Mr. Sidney, solitary and alone, had

arraigned them before a criminal tribunal. He was therefore driven to

his own resources, and there was no place in his nature, or in the

nature of things, for the first retrograde step. All his vast energies

were thenceforth consecrated to, and concentrated in, the detection of

crime. And from the time that he was refused payment for his loss, so

far as my observation extended, he seemed to have been governed by no

other purpose in life than the extermination of that great gang of

robbers which he subsequently discovered. Add to these incentives

and capacities his extraordinary perceptive faculties and power of

analytical observation, together with his wonderful patience, and it

must be granted that he was qualified to discover in any incident

connected with his pursuits more of its component parts than all other

beholders, and had greater opportunities than almost any other man by

which to be informed _how_ it is that "the heart of a man changeth his

countenance."

If I remember rightly, it was some two years after our acquaintance

commenced that I became aware of Mr. Sidney's proficiency as a

physiognomist, and it was then communicated, not so much by his choice

as by a necessity, for the accomplishment of one of his purposes.

The object of Mr. Sidney's visit to the city of P----, at that time,

was nothing less difficult than the discovery and identification of an

individual of whom no other knowledge or description had been obtained

than what could be extracted from the inspection, in another city, of a

single specimen of his handwriting in the superscription of a letter.

So much from so little. Within three days thereafter, with no other

instrumentalities than what were suggested by Mr. Sidney's expertness

in deciphering character in handwriting and his proficiency as a

physiognomist, the result was reached and the object happily attained.

In the prosecution of the enterprise, it was important, if not

essential, that I should believe that the data were sufficient by which

to arrive at a correct conclusion, and that I should confide in Mr.

Sidney's skill in order that there might be hearty coöperation.

My office was so situated, that from its windows could most

advantageously be observed, and for a considerable distance, the vast

throng that ebbed and flowed, hour after hour, through the great

thoroughfares of the city. For the greater part of three consecutive

days I sat by Mr. Sidney's side, watching the changing crowd through

the half-opened shutters, listening incredulously, at first, to the

practical application of his science to the unsuspecting individuals

below, till my derision was changed to admiration, and I was thoroughly

convinced of his power. As my friends of both sexes passed under the

ordeal, it was intensely bewitching. Hour after hour would he give, with

rapidity and correctness, the occupation and peculiarity of character

and condition of almost every individual who passed. This was not

occasional, but continuous. The marked men were not singled out, but all

were included. He was a stranger, and yet better acquainted with

the people than any of our citizens. And this was the manner of his

speaking:--

"That physician has a better opinion of himself than the people have

of him: he is superficial, and makes up in effrontery what he lacks in

qualification. The gambler yonder, with a toothpick in his mouth, has of

late succeeded in his tricks. The affairs of this kind-hearted grocer

are troubling him. Were we within a yard of that round-shouldered man

from the country, we should smell leather; for he works on his bench,

and is unmarried. Here comes an atheist who is a joker and stubborn as

a mule. There goes a man of no business at all: very probably it is the

best occupation he is fitted for, as he has no concentrativeness. The

schoolmistress crossing the street is an accomplished teacher, is

very sympathetic, and has great love of approbation. That lawyer is a

bachelor, and distrusts his own strength. This merchant should give up

the use of tobacco, and pay his notes before dinner, else he will become

a dyspeptic. Here comes a man of wealth who despises the common people

and is miserly and hypocritical; and next to him is a scamp. I think it

is Burke who says, 'When the gnawing worm is within, the impression

of the ravage it makes is visible on the outside, which appears quite

disfigured by it': and in that young man the light that was within him

has become darkness, and 'how great is that darkness!'"

Of some qualities of mind he would occasionally decline to speak until

he could see the features in play, as in conversation. Some occupations

he failed to discover, if the arms were folded, or the hands in the

pockets, or the body not in motion. It is not my purpose to specify any

of the rules by which he was governed, though they differed materially

from those of Lavater, Redfield, and others, nor the facts from which he

drew his conclusions, but simply to give results.

I selected from the crowd acquaintances of marked character and

standing, and obtained accurate descriptions of them. Of one he said,

"He is a good merchant, and has done and is doing a large business. He

carries his business home with him at night, as he should not. He has

been wealthy, and is now reduced in circumstances. His disaster weighs

heavily upon him. He has a high sense of honor, a keen conscience, and

is a meek, religious man. He has great goodness of nature, is very

modest and retiring, has more ability than he supposes, and is a man of

family and very fond of his children."

Another he accurately described thus: "He is a mechanic, of a good mind,

who has succeeded so well that I doubt if he is in active business.

Certainly he does not labor. He is very independent and radical,--can

be impudent, if occasion requires,--gives others all their rights, and

pertinaciously insists upon his own." Here the mechanic took his hands

from his pocket. "Hold! I said he was a mechanic. He is not,--he is a

house-painter."

I desired to be informed by what indications he judged him to be a

painter. He replied, that he so judged from the general appearance

and motions, and that it was difficult to specify. I insisted, and he

remarked that "the easy roll of his wrists was indicative."

After obtaining similar correct descriptions of men well known to me,

I spied one whom I did not know, and who was dressed peculiarly. I

inquired his occupation, and Mr. Sidney, without turning a glance

towards me, and still gazing through the half-opened shutters, replied,

"Yes! you never saw him before, yourself. He is a stranger in town, as

is evident from the fact of his being dressed in his best suit, and by

the manner of his taking observations. Besides, there is no opportunity

in these parts for him to follow his trade. He is a glass-blower. You

may perceive he is a little deaf, and the curvature of his motions also

indicates his occupation."

Whether this description was correct or not I failed to ascertain.

Mr. Sidney contended that any man of ordinary perceptive faculties need

never mistake a gambler, as the marks on the tribe were as distinct as

the complexion of the Ethiopian,--that, of honest callings, dealers in

cattle could be most easily discovered,--that immorality indicated its

kind invariably in the muscles of the face,--that sympathetic qualities,

love and the desire of being loved, taste and refinement,--were among

the most perspicuous in the outline of the face.

A man of very gentlemanly appearance was approaching, whom Mr. Sidney

pronounced a gambler, and also engaged in some other branch of iniquity.

His appearance was so remarkably good that I doubted. He turned the

corner, and immediately Mr. Sidney hastened to the street and soon

returned, saying he had ascertained his history: that he was in the

counterfeiting department,--that his conscience affected his nerves,

and consequently his motions,--that he was a stranger in town, and was

restless and disquieted,--that he would not remain many hours here, as

he had an enterprise on hand, and was about it. I remarked, that, as the

contrary never could be proved, he was perfectly safe in his prophecy,

when Mr. Sidney rose from his chair, and, approaching me, slowly said,

with great energy,--

"I will follow that man till it _is_ proved."

The next day but one, I received a note from Mr. Sidney, simply

saying, "I am on his track." He followed the supposed counterfeiter to

Philadelphia, where he ascertained that he had passed five-dollar bills

of the ---- bank of Connecticut. Mr. Sidney obtained the bills the

gambler had passed to compare with the genuine. Failing, however,

to find any of the same denomination, he presented the supposed

counterfeits to a broker skilled in detecting bad bills, and was

surprised to be informed that they were genuine. At Baltimore, he

repeated the inquiry at the counter of a well-known banker relative

to other similar bills, and received the same response. So again in

Washington, Pittsburg, Chicago, and several other cities whither he had

followed the suspected man, and invariably the reply of the cashier

would be, "We will exchange our bills for them, Sir." In some Western

cities he was offered a premium on the bills he had collected. At St.

Louis he obtained a known genuine bill of the bank in question, and in

company with a broker proceeded to examine the two with a microscope.

The broker pronounced the supposed counterfeits to be genuine. In the

mean time the gambler had left the city. Two days after, Mr. Sidney had

overtaken him. So great were his excitement and vexation that he could

scarcely eat or sleep. In a fit of desperation, without law and against

law, he pounced upon the suspected man and put him in irons. He beat a

parley. It was granted, and the two went to the gambler's apartments in

company. In a conversation of several hours, Mr. Sidney extracted

from him the most valuable information relating to the gang he was so

pertinaciously prosecuting, and received into his possession forty-seven

thousand dollars in counterfeits of the aforesaid bank, some of which I

now have in my possession, and which have been pronounced genuine by our

most skilful experts.

* * * * *

It would be gratifying to all lovers of science to be informed that the

practical knowledge acquired by Mr. Sidney had been preserved, and that

at least the elementary principles of the arts in which he became so

nearly perfect had been definitely explained and recorded. I am not

aware, however, that such is the fact, but am persuaded that his uniform

policy of concealment has deprived the world of much that would have

been exceedingly entertaining and instructive. That this knowledge has

not been preserved is owing mainly to the fact that he considered it

of little importance, except as a means for the accomplishment of his

purposes, and that those purposes would be most effectually achieved by

his withholding from the common gaze the instrumentality by which they

were to be attained. That he intended at some future period to make some

communication to the public I am well assured, and some materials were

collected by him with this view; but the hot pursuit of the great idea

that he never for an hour lost sight of would not allow sufficient rest

from his labors, and he deferred the publication to those riper years

of experience and acquirement from which he could survey his whole past

career.

It may be comforting for all rogues to know that he left behind him no

note of that vast amount of statistical knowledge which he possessed,

whether appertaining to crimes or criminals in general or in particular,

or more especially to the band of robbers,--and that with him perished

all knowledge of this organization as such, and the names of all the

parties therewith connected. They also have the consolation, if there be

any, of knowing that he was sent prematurely to his grave by a subtle

poison, administered by unknown hands and in an unknown manner and

moment, and that he died in the firm faith of immortality.

THE CUMBERLAND.

At anchor in Hampton Roads we lay,

On board of the Cumberland sloop-of-war;

And at times from the fortress across the bay

The alarum of drums swept past,

Or a bugle-blast

From the camp on the shore.

Then far away to the South uprose

A little feather of snow-white smoke,

And we knew that the iron ship of our foes

Was steadily steering its course

To try the force

Of our ribs of oak.

Down upon us heavily runs,

Silent and sullen, the floating fort;

Then comes a puff of smoke from her guns,

And leaps the terrible death,

With fiery breath,

From each open port.

We are not idle, but send her straight

Defiance back in a full broadside!

As hail rebounds from a roof of slate,

Rebounds our heavier hail

From each iron scale

Of the monster's hide.

"Strike your flag!" the rebel cries,

In his arrogant old plantation strain.

"Never!" our gallant Morris replies;

"It is better to sink than to yield!"

And the whole air pealed

With the cheers of our men.

Then, like a kraken huge and black,

She crushed our ribs in her iron grasp!

Down went the Cumberland all a wrack,

With a sudden shudder of death,

And the cannon's breath

For her dying gasp.

Next morn, as the sun rose over the bay,

Still floated our flag at the mainmast-head.

Lord, how beautiful was thy day!

Every waft of the air

Was a whisper of prayer,

Or a dirge for the dead.

Ho! brave hearts that went down in the seas!

Ye are at peace in the troubled stream.

Ho! brave land! with hearts like these,

Thy flag, that is rent in twain,

Shall be one again,

And without a seam!

THE FOSSIL MAN.

The greater part must be content to be as though they had not been: to

be found in the register of God, not in the records of men. The number

of the dead long exceedeth all that shall live. The Night of Time far

surpasseth the Day, and who knoweth the Equinox?--Sir THOMAS BROWNE.

What a mysterious and subtile pleasure there is in groping back through

the early twilight of human history! The mind thirsts and longs so to

know the Beginning: who and what manner of men those were who laid

the first foundations of all that is now upon the earth: of what

intellectual power, of what degree of civilization, of what race and

country. We wonder how the fathers of mankind lived, what habitations

they dwelt in, what instruments or tools they employed, what crops they

tilled, what garments they wore. We catch eagerly at any traces that may

remain of their faiths and beliefs and superstitions; and we fancy, as

we gain a clearer insight into them, that we are approaching more nearly

to the mysterious Source of all life in the soul. The germ, to our

limited comprehension, seems nearer the Creator than the perfected

growth. Then the great problem of _Origin_ forever attracts us on,--the

multitudinous and intricate questions relating to "the ordained becoming

of beings": how the Creating Power has worked, whether through an almost

endless chain of gradual and advantageous changes, or by some sudden and

miraculous _ictus_, placing at once a completed body on the earth, as

an abode and instrument for a developed soul,--all these remote and

difficult questions lead us on. And yet the search for human origins, or

the earliest historic and scientific evidences of man on the earth, is

but a groping in the dark.

We turn to the Hebrew and the inspired records; but we soon discover,

that, though containing a picture, unequalled for simplicity and

dignity, of the earliest experiences of the present family of man, they

are by no means a monument or relic of the most remote period, but

belong to a comparatively modern date, and that the question of _Time_

is not at all directly treated in them.

We visit the region where poetry and myth and tradition have placed a

most ancient civilization,--the Black-Land, or Land of the Nile: we

search its royal sepulchres, its manifold history written in funereal

records, in kingly genealogies, in inscriptions, and in the thousand

relics preserved of domestic life, whether in picture, sculpture, or the

embalmed remains of the dead; and we find ourselves thrown back to a

date far beyond any received date of history, and still we have before

us a ripened civilization, an art which could not belong to the

childhood of a race, a language which (so far as we can judge) must have

needed centuries for its development, and the divisions of human races,

whose formation from the original pair our philosophy teaches us must

have required immense and unknown spaces of time,--all as distinct as

they are at the present day.

We traverse the regions to which both the comparison of languages and

the Biblical records assign the original birthplace of mankind,--the

country of the Euphrates and the plateau of Eastern Asia. Buried

kingdoms are revealed to us; the shadowy outlines of magnificent cities

appear which flourished and fell before recorded human history, and of

which even Herodotus never heard; Art and Science are unfolded, reaching

far back into the past; the signs of luxury and splendor are uncovered

from the ruin of ages: but, remote as is the date of these Turanian and

Semitic empires, almost equalling that of the Flood in the ordinary

system of chronology, they cannot be near the origin of things, and

a long process of development must have passed ere they reached the

maturity in which they are revealed to us.

The Chinese records give us an antiquity and an acknowledged date before

the time of Abraham, (if we follow the received chronology,) and

even then their language must have been, as it is now, distinct and

solidified, betraying to the scholar no certain affinity to any other

family of language. The Indian history, so long boasted of for its

immense antiquity, is without doubt the most modern of the ancient

records, and offers no certain date beyond 1800 B.C.

In Europe, the earliest evidences of man disclosed by our investigations

are even more vague and shadowy. Probably, without antedating in time

these historical records of Asia, they reach back to a more primitive

and barbarous era. The earliest history of Europe is not studied from

inscription or manuscript or even monument; it is not, like the Asiatic,

a conscious work of a people leaving a memorial of itself to a future

age. It is rather, like the geological history, an unconscious, gradual

deposit left by the remains of extinct and unknown races in the soil of

the fields or under the sediment of the waters. The earliest European

barbarian, as he burned his canoe from a log, or fabricated his necklace

from a bone, or worked out his knife from a flint, was in reality

writing a history of his race for distant days. We can follow him now

in his wanderings through the rivers and lakes and on the edges of the

forests; we open his simple mounds of burial, and study his barbarian

tools and ornaments; we discover that he knew nothing of metals, and

that bone and flint and amber and coal were his materials; we trace out

his remarkable defences and huts built on piles in the various lakes of

Europe, where the simple savage could escape the few gigantic "fossil"

animals which even then survived, and roved through the forests of

Prussia and France, or the still more terrible human enemies who were

continually pouring into Germany, Denmark, and Switzerland from the

Asiatic plains. We find that the early savage of Switzerland and Sweden

was not entirely ignorant of the care of animals, and that he had

fabricated some rude pottery. Of what race he was, or when he appeared

amid the forests of Northern Europe, no one can confidently say.

Collecting the various indications from the superstitions, language,

and habits of this barbarian people, and comparing them with like

peculiarities of the most ancient races now existing in Europe, we can

frame a very plausible hypothesis that these early savages belonged to

that great family of which the Finns and Laps, and possibly the Basques,

are scattered members. Their skulls, also, are analogous in form to

those of the Finnish race. This age the archaeologists have denominated

the "Stone Age" of European antiquity.

Following this is what has been called by them the "Bronze Age."

Another, more powerful, and more cultivated race or collection of

peoples inundates Scandinavia, Germany, Switzerland, and other

districts. They make war against and destroy the early barbarians; they

burn their water-huts, and force them to the mountains, or to the most

northern portions of the continent. This new race has a taste for

objects of beauty. They work copper and bronze; they make use of

beautiful vases of earthenware and ornaments of the precious metals;

but they have yet no knowledge of iron or steel. Their dead are burned

instead of being buried, as was done by the preceding races. They are

evidently more warlike and more advanced than the Finnish barbarians. Of

their race or family it is difficult to say anything trustworthy. Their

skulls belong to the "long-skulled" races, and would ally them to the

Kelts. Antiquaries have called their remains "Keltic remains."

Still another age in this ancient history is the "Iron Age," when the

tribes of Europe used iron weapons and implements, and had advanced from

the nomadic condition to that of cultivators of the ground, though still

gaining most of their livelihood from fishing and hunting. This period

no doubt approached the period of historical annals, and the iron men

may have been the earliest Teutons of the North,--our own forefathers;

but of their race or mixture of races we have no certain evidence,

and can only make approximate hypotheses,--the division of "ages" by

archaeologists, it should be remembered, being not in any way a fixed

division of races, but only indicating the probability of different

races at those different early periods. What was the date of these ages

cannot at all be determined; the earlier are long before any recorded

European annals, but there is no reason to believe that they approach in

antiquity the Asiatic records and remains.

Such, until recently, were the historic and scientific evidences with

regard to the antiquity of man. His most venerable records, his most

ancient dates of historic chronology were but of yesterday, when

compared with the age of existing species of plants and animals, or

with the opening of the present geologic era. Every new scientific

investigation seemed, from its negative evidence, to render more

improbable the existence of the "fossil man." It is true that in various

parts of the world, during the past few years, human bones have been

discovered in connection with the bones of the fossil mammalia; but they

were generally found in caves or in lime-deposits, where they might

have been dropped or swept in by currents of water, or inserted in

more modern periods, and yet covered with the same deposit as the more

ancient relics. Geologists have uniformly reasoned on the _a priori_

improbability of these being fossil bones, and have somewhat strained

the evidence--as some distinguished _savans_[A] now believe--against the

theory of a great human antiquity.

[Footnote A: Pictet.]

And yet the "negative evidence" against the existence of the fossil

man was open to many doubts. The records of geology are notoriously

imperfect. We probably read but a few leaves of a mighty library of

volumes. Moreover, the last ages preceding the present period were

witnesses of a series of changes and slowly acting agencies of

destruction, from which man may have in general escaped. We have reason

to believe that during long periods of time the land was gradually

elevated and subject to oscillations, so that the courses of rivers and

the beds of lakes were disturbed, and even the bottom of the ocean was

raised. The results were the inundation of some countries, and the

pouring of great currents of water over others, wearing down the hills

and depositing in the course of ages the regular layers of gravel, sand,

and marl, which now cover so large a part of Europe. This was still

further followed by a period in which the temperature of the earth was

lowered, and ice and glaciers had perhaps a part in forming the present

surface of the northern hemisphere. During the first period, which may

be called the "Quaternary Period,"[B] the mighty animals lived whose

bones are now found in caverns, or under the slowly deposited sediment

of the waters, or preserved in bog,--the mammoth, and rhinoceros, and

elk, and bear, and elephant, as well as many others of extinct species.

[Footnote B: We should bear in mind that the Quaternary or Diluvian

Period, however ancient in point of time, has no clearly distinguishing

line of separation from the present period. The great difference lies in

the extinction of certain species of animals, which lived then, whose

destruction may be due both to gradual changes of climate and to

man.--PICTET.]

We may suppose, that, if man did exist during these convulsions and

inundations, his superior intelligence would enable him to escape

the fate of the animals that were submerged,--or that, if his few

burial-places were invaded by the waters, his remains are now completely

covered by marine deposits under the ocean. If, however, in his

barbarian condition, he had fashioned implements of any hard material,

and especially if, as do the savages of the present family of man, he

had accidentally deposited them, or had buried them with the dead in

mighty mounds, the invading waters might well sweep them together from

their place and deposit them almost in mass, in situations where the

eddies should leave their gravel and sand.[C]

[Footnote C: Sir C. Lyell, in his remarks before the British Association

in 1859, said upon the discovery alluded to here: "I am reminded of a

large Indian mound which I saw in St. Simon's Island in Georgia,--a

mound ten acres in area, and having an average height of five feet,

chiefly composed of cast-away oyster-shells, throughout which

arrow-heads, stone axes, and Indian pottery were dispersed. If the

neighboring river, the Altamalia, or the sea which is at hand, should

invade, sweep away, and stratify the contents of this mound, it might

produce a very analogous accumulation of human implements, unmixed,

perhaps, with human bones."--_Athenaeum_, September 21, 1859.]

Such seems in reality to have been the case; though in regard to so

important a fact in the history of the world much caution must be

exercised in accepting the evidence. We will state briefly the proofs,

as they now appear, of the existence of a race of human beings on this

earth in an immense antiquity.

A French gentleman, M. Boucher de Perthes, has for thirty-four years

been devoting his time and his fortune, with rare perseverance, to the

investigation of certain antiquities in the later geological deposits

in the North of France. His first work, "Les Antiquités Celtiques and

Antédiluviennes," published in 1847, was received with much incredulity

and opposition; a second, under the same title, in 1857, met with a

scarce better reception, and it was with the greatest difficulty that he

could induce even the _savans_ of his own country to look at the mass of

evidence he had collected on this subject.

He made the extraordinary claim to have discovered a great quantity of

rough implements of flint, fashioned by art, in the undisturbed beds of

clay, gravel, and sand, known as _drift_, near Abbeville and Amiens.

These beds vary in thickness from ten to twenty feet, and cover the

chalk hills in the vicinity; in portions of them, upon the hills, often

in company with the flints, are discovered numerous bones of the extinct

mammalia, such as the mammoth, the fossil rhinoceros, tiger, bear,

hyena, stag, ox, horse, and others.

The flint implements are found in the lowest beds of gravel, just above

the chalk, while above them are sands with delicate fresh-water shells

and beds of brick-earth,--all this, be it remembered, on table-lands two

hundred feet above the level of the sea, in a country whose level and

face have remained unaltered during any historical period with which we

are acquainted. "It must have required," says Sir Charles Lyell, "a

long period for the wearing down of the chalk which supplied the broken

flints (stones) for the formation of so much gravel at various heights,

sometimes one hundred feet above the level of the Somme, for the

deposition of fine sediment, including entire shells, both terrestrial

and aquatic, and also for the denudation which the entire mass of

stratified drift has undergone, portions having been swept away, so

that what remains of it often terminates abruptly in old river-cliffs,

besides being covered by a newer unstratified drift. To explain these

changes, I should infer considerable oscillations in the level of the

land in that part of France, slow movements of upheaval and subsidence,

deranging, but not wholly displacing the course of ancient rivers."

The President of the British Association, in his opening speech at

the meeting of 1860, affirms the immense antiquity of these flint

implements, and remarks:--"At Menchecourt, in the suburbs of Abbeville,

a nearly entire skeleton of the Siberian rhinoceros is said to have been

taken out about forty years ago,--a fact affording an answer to the

question often raised, as to whether the bones of the extinct mammalia

could have been washed out of an older alluvium into a newer one, and

so redeposited and mingled with the relics of human workmanship.

Far-fetched as was this hypothesis, I am informed that it would not, if

granted, have seriously shaken the proof of the high antiquity of human

productions; for that proof is independent of organic evidence or fossil

remains, and is based on physical data. As was stated to us last year

by Sir Charles Lyell, we should still have to allow time for great

denudation of the chalk, and the removal from place to place, and the

spreading out over the length and breadth of a large valley, of heaps of

chalk-flints in beds from ten to fifteen feet in thickness, covered

by loam and sands of equal thickness, these last often tranquilly

deposited,--all of which operations would require the supposition of a

great lapse of time."

An independent proof of the age of these gravel-beds and the associated

loam, containing fossil remains, is derived by the same authority from

the large deposits of peat in the valley of the Somme, which contain not

only monuments of the Roman, but also those of an older, stone period,

the Finnic period; yet, says Lord Wrottesley, "distinguished geologists

are of opinion that the growth of all the vegetable matter, and even

the original scooping out of the hollows containing it, are events long

posterior in date to the gravel with flint-implements,--nay, posterior

even to the formation of the uppermost of the layers of loam with

fresh-water shells overlaying the gravel."

The number of the flint implements is computed at above fourteen hundred

in an area of fourteen miles in length and half a mile in breadth. They

are of the rudest nature, as if formed by a people in the most degraded

state of barbarism. Some are mere flakes of flint, apparently used for

knives or arrow-heads; some are pointed and with hollowed bases, as if

for spear-heads, varying from four to nine inches in length; some are

almond-shaped, with a cutting edge, from two to nine inches in length.

Others again are fashioned into coarse representations of animals, such

as the whale, saurian, boar, eagle, fish, and even the human profile;

others have representations of foliage upon them; others are either

drilled with holes or are cut with reference to natural holes, so as to

serve as stones for slings, or for amulets, or for ornaments. The edges

in many cases seem formed by a great number of small artificial tips

or blows, and do not at all resemble edges made by a great natural

fracture. Very few are found with polished surfaces like the modern

remains in flint; and the whole workmanship differs from that of flint

arrow-heads in other parts of Europe, as well as from the later Finnish

(or so-called Keltic) remains, discovered in such quantities in France.

The only relics that have been found resembling them are, according to

Mr. Worsaae, some flint arrow-heads and spear-points discovered at great

depths in the bogs of Denmark. A few bone knives and necklaces of bone

have been met with in these deposits, but thus far no human bones. The

people who fabricated these instruments seemed to be a hunting and

fishing people, living in some such condition as the present savages of

Australia.

These discoveries of M. de Perthes have at length aroused the attention

of English men of science, and during 1859 a number of eminent

gentlemen--among them Sir Charles Lyell, Mr. Prestwich, Dr. Falconer,

and others--visited M. Perthes's collection, and saw the flints _in

situ_. Several of them have avowed their conviction of the genuineness

and antiquity of these relics. Sir Charles Lyell has given a guarded

sanction to the belief that they present one strong proof of a remote

human antiquity.

The objections that would naturally be made to this evidence are, that

the flints are purely natural formations, and not works of man,--that

the deposit is alluvial and modern, rather than of the ancient

drift,--or that these implements had been dropped into crevices, or sunk

from above, in later periods.

The testimony of disinterested observers seems to be sufficient as to

the human contrivance manifest in these flints; and the concurrence of

various scientific men hardly leaves room for doubt that these deposits

are of great antiquity, preceding the time in which the surface of

France took its present form, and dating back to what is called the

Post-Pliocene Period. Their horizontal position, and the great depth

at which the hatchets are found, together with their number, and the

peculiar incrustation and discoloration of each one, as well as their

being in company with the bones of the extinct mammalia, make it

improbable that they could have been dropped into fissures or sunk there

in modern times.[D] In regard to the absence of human bones, it should

be remembered that no bones are easily preserved, unless they are

buried in sediment or in bog; and furthermore, that the extent of the

researches in these formations is very small indeed. Besides, the

country where above all we should expect the most of human remains

in the drift-deposits, as being probably the most ancient abode of

man,--Asia,--has been the least explored for such purposes. Still this

is without doubt the weak point in the evidence, as proving human

antiquity.

[Footnote D: An article in Blackwood, (October, 1860,) which is

understood to be from the pen of Professor H.D. Rogers, admits entirely

that the flints are of human workmanship, and that it is impossible for

them to have dropped through fissures, as, according to the writer's

observation of the deposits, it would be impossible even for a mole to

penetrate them, so close are they. Professor Rogers takes the ground

that human antiquity is not proven from these relics, for two

reasons:--First, because the indications in the deposits inclosing the

flints point clearly to a "turbulent diluvial action," and therefore it

is possible for a violent incursion of the ocean to have taken place in

the historic period, and to have mixed up the more recent works of man

with the previously buried bones or relics of a pre-historic period; and

secondly, because the different geological deposits do not necessarily

prove time, but only succession,--two schools of geology interpreting

all similar phenomena differently, as relating to the time required.

The last position would be admitted by few scientific geologists at

the present day, as the evidence for time, though inferential from the

deposits known to us, is held generally to be conclusive. On the first

point, Professor Rogers has the weight of authority against him: all the

great masters of the science, who have examined the formation and the

deposits of the surrounding country, denying that there is any evidence

of an incursion of the ocean of such a nature, during the historic

period.]

The chain of evidence in regard to this important question seems to be

filled out by a recent discovery of M. Edouard Lartet in Aurignac, in

the South of France, on the head-waters of the Garonne. As we have just

observed, the weak point in M. de Perthes's discoveries was the absence

of human bones in the deposits investigated, though this might have been

accounted for by the withdrawal of human beings from the floods of the

period. M. Lartet's investigations have fortunately been conducted in a

spot which was above the reach of the ordinary inundations of the Drift

Period, and whither human beings might have fled for refuge, or where

they might have lived securely during long spaces of time.

Some ten years since, in Aurignac, (Haute Garonne,) in the

_Arrondissement_ of St. Gaudens, near the Pyrenees, a cavern was

discovered in the nummulitic rock. It had been concealed by a heap

of fragments of rock and vegetable soil, gradually detached and

accumulated, probably by atmospheric agency. In it were found the

human remains, it was estimated, of seventeen individuals, which were

afterwards buried formally by the order of the mayor of Aurignac. Along

with the bones were discovered the teeth of mammals, both carnivora and

herbivora; also certain small perforated corals, such as were used by

many ancient peoples as beads, and similar to those gathered in the

deposits of Abbeville. The cave had apparently served as a place of

sacrifice and of burial. In 1860 M. Lartet visited the spot. In

the layer of loose earth at the bottom of the cave he found flint

implements, worked portions of a reindeer's horn, mammal bones, and

human bones in a remarkable state of preservation. In a lower layer of

charcoal and ashes, indicating the presence of man and some ancient

fireplace or hearth, the bones of the animals were scratched and

indented as though by implements employed to remove the flesh; almost

every bone was broken, as if to extract the marrow, as is done by many

modern tribes of savages. The same peculiarity is noticed in the bones

discovered among the "water-huts" of the Danish lakes.

In this deposit M. Lartet picked up many human implements, such as

bone knives, flattened circular stones supposed to have been used for

sharpening flint knives, perforated sling-stones, many arrow-heads and

spear-heads, flint knives, a bodkin made of a roebuck's horn, various

implements of reindeers' horn, and teeth beads, from the teeth of the

great fossil bear (_Ursus spelaeus_). Remains were also found of nine

different species of carnivora, such as the fossil bear, the hyena, cat,

wolf, fox, and others, and of twelve of herbivora, such as the fossil

elephant, the rhinoceros, the great stag, (_Cervus elephas_,) the

European bison, (aurochs,) horse, and others. The most common were the

aurochs, the reindeer, and the fox. How savages, armed only with flint

implements, could have captured these gigantic animals, is somewhat

mysterious; but, as M. Lartet suggests, they may have snared many of

them, or have overwhelmed single monsters with innumerable arrows and

spears, as Livingstone describes the slaying of the elephant by the

negroes at the present day.

With reference to the mode in which these remains were brought to this

place, M. Lartet remarks,--"The fragmentary condition of the bones of

certain animals, the mode in which they are broken, the marks of

the teeth of the hyena on bones, necessarily broken in their recent

condition, even the distribution of the bones and their significant

consecration, lead to the conclusion that the presence of these animals

and the deposit of all these remains are due solely to human agency.

Neither the inclination of the ground nor the surrounding hydrographical

conditions allow us to suppose that the remains could have been brought

where they are found by natural causes."

The conclusion, then, in palaeontology, which would be drawn from these

facts is, that man must have existed in Europe at the same time with the

fossil elephant and rhinoceros, the gigantic hyena, the aurochs, and the

elk, and even the cave-bear. This latter animal is thought by many to

have disappeared in the very opening of the Post-Pliocene Period; so

that this cave would--judging from the remains of that animal--have been

_prior_ to the long period of inundations in which the drift-deposits of

Abbeville and Amiens were made. The drift which fills the valleys of the

Pyrenees has not, it is evident, touched this elevated spot in Aurignac.

In chronology, all that is proved by these discoveries of M. Lartet is

that the fossil animals mentioned above and man were contemporaries on

the earth. The age of each must be determined inferentially by comparing

the age of strata in which these animals are usually found with the age

in which the most ancient traces of man are discovered,--such as the

deposits already described in the North of France.

Similar discoveries on a smaller scale are recorded by Mr. Prestwich

in Suffolk, England, and in Devonshire. We are informed also by Sir C.

Lyell of a recent important discovery near Troyes, France. In the Grotto

d'Arcès, a human jaw-bone and teeth have been found imbedded with

_Elephas primigenius_, _Ursus spelaeus_, _Hyaena spelaea_, and other

extinct animals, under layers of stalagmite. Professor Pictet, the

celebrated geologist, who also gives his adhesion to these discoveries

of M. de Perthes, states that the cave-evidence has by no means been

sufficiently valued by geologists, and that there are caverns in Belgium

where the existence of human remains cannot be satisfactorily explained

on the theory of a modern introduction of them. The President of the

British Association (Lord Wrottesley) also states that in the cave of

Brixham, Devonshire, and in another near Palermo, in Sicily, flint

implements were observed by Dr. Falconer, in such a manner as to lead

him to infer that man must have coexisted with several lost species of

quadrupeds.

Professor Owen, in his "Palaeontology," (1861,) appears to put faith in

the genuineness and antiquity of these flint relics. He also states that

similar flint weapons have been found by Mr. John Frere, F.R.S., in

Suffolk, in a bed of flint gravel, sixteen feet below the surface, of

the same geological age as that in the valley of the Somme.

The conclusion from these discoveries--the most important scientific

discoveries, relating to human history, of modern times--is, that ages

ago, in the period of the extinct mammoth and the fossil bear, perhaps

before the Channel separated England from France, a race of barbarian

human beings lived on the soil of Europe, capable of fabricating rough

implements. The evidence has been carefully weighed by impartial and

experienced men, and thus far it seems complete.

The mind is lost in astonishment, in looking back at such a vast

antiquity of human beings. A tribe of men in existence tens of thousands

of years before any of the received dates of Creation! savages who

hunted, with their flint-headed arrows, the gigantic elk of Ireland and

the buffalo of Germany, or who fled from the savage tiger of France,

or who trapped the immense clumsy mammoth of Northern Europe. Who were

they? we ask ourselves in wonder. Was there with man, as with other

forms of animal life, a long and gradual progression from the lowest

condition to a higher, till at length the world was made ready for a

more developed human being, and the Creator placed the first of the

present family of man upon the earth? Were those European barbarians of

the Drift Period a primeval race, destroyed before the creation of our

own race, and lower and more barbarian than the lowest of the present

inhabitants of the world? or, as seems more probable, were these

mysterious beings--the hunters of the mammoth and the aurochs--the

earliest progenitors of our own family, the childish fathers of the

human race?

The subject hardly yet admits of an exact and scientific answer. We can

merely here suggest the probability of a vast antiquity to human beings,

and of the existence of the FOSSIL or PRE-ADAMITIC MAN.

* * * * *

LIFE IN THE OPEN AIR.

BY THE AUTHOR OF "CECIL DREEME" AND "JOHN BRENT."

KATAHDIN AND THE PENOBSCOT.

CHAPTER X.

RIPOGENUS.

Ripogenus is a tarn, a lovely oval tarn, within a rim of forest and

hill; and there behold, _O gioja!_ at its eastern end, stooping forward

and filling the sphere, was Katahdin, large and alone.

But we must hasten, for day wanes, and we must see and sketch this

cloudless summit from _terra firma_. A mile and half-way down the lake,

we landed at the foot of a grassy hill-side, where once had been a

lumberman's station and hay-farm. It was abandoned now, and lonely in

that deeper sense in which widowhood is lonelier than celibacy, a home

deserted lonelier than a desert. Tumble-down was the never-painted

house; ditto its three barns. But, besides a camp, there were two things

to be had here,--one certain, one possible, probable even. The view,

that was an inevitable certainty; Iglesias would bag that as his share

of the plunder of Ripogenus. For my bagging, bears, perchance, awaited.

The trappers had seen a bear near the barns. Cancut, in his previous

visit, had seen a disappearance of bear. No sooner had the birch's

bow touched lightly upon the shore than we seized our respective

weapons,--Iglesias his peaceful and creative sketch-book, I my warlike

and destructive gun,--and dashed up the hill-side.

I made for the barns to catch Bruin napping or lolling in the old hay.

I entertain a _vendetta_ toward the ursine family. I had a _duello_,

pistol against claw, with one of them in the mountains of Oregon,

and have nothing to show to point the moral and adorn the tale. My

antagonist of that hand-to-hand fight received two shots, and then

dodged into cover and was lost in the twilight. Soon or late in my life,

I hoped that I should avenge this evasion. Ripogenus would, perhaps,

give what the Nachchese Pass had taken away.

Vain hope! I was not to be an ursicide. I begin to fear that I shall

slay no other than my proper personal bearishness. I did my duty for

another result at Ripogenus. I bolted audaciously into every barn. I

made incursions into the woods around. I found the mark of the beast,

not the beast. He had not long ago decamped, and was now, perhaps,

sucking the meditative paw hard-by in an arbor of his bear-garden.

After a vain hunt, I gave up Beast and turned to Beauty. I looked about

me, seeing much.

Foremost I saw a fellow-man, my comrade, fondled by breeze and

brightness, and whispered to by all sweet sounds. I saw Iglesias below

me, on the slope, sketching. He was preserving the scene at its _bel

momento_. I repented more bitterly of my momentary falseness to Beauty

while I saw him so constant.

Furthermore, I saw a landscape of vigorous simplicity, easy to

comprehend. By mellow sunset the grass slope of the old farm seemed no

longer tanned and rusty, but ripened. The oval lake was blue and calm,

and that is already much to say; shadows of the western hills were

growing over it, but flight after flight of illumined cloud soared

above, to console the sky and the water for the coming of night.

Northward, a forest darkled, whose glades of brightness I could not see.

Eastward, the bank mounted abruptly to a bare fire-swept table-land,

whereon a few dead trees stood, parched and ghostly skeletons draped

with rags of moss.

Furthermost and topmost, I saw Katahdin twenty miles away, a giant

undwarfed by any rival. The remainder landscape was only minor and

judiciously accessory. The hills were low before it, the lake lowly,

and upright above lake and hill lifted the mountain pyramid.

Isolate greatness tells. There were no underling mounts about this

mountain-in-chief. And now on its shoulders and crest sunset shone,

glowing. Warm violet followed the glow, soothing away the harshness of

granite lines. Luminous violet dwelt upon the peak, while below the

clinging forests were purple in sheltered gorges, where they could climb

nearer the summit, loved of light, and lower down gloomed green and

sombre in the shadow.

Meanwhile, as I looked, the quivering violet rose higher and higher, and

at last floated away like a disengaged flame. A smouldering blue dwelt

upon the peak. Ashy-gray overcame the blue. As dusk thickened and stars

trembled into sight, the gray grew luminous. Katahdin's mighty presence

seemed to absorb such dreamy glimmers as float in limpid night-airs:

a faint glory, a twilight of its own, clothed it. King of the

daylit-world, it became queen of the dimmer realms of night, and like a

woman-queen it did not disdain to stoop and study its loveliness in

the polished lake, and stooping thus it overhung the earth, a shadowy

creature of gleam and gloom, an eternized cloud.

I sat staring and straying in sweet reverie, until the scene before me

was dim as metaphysics. Suddenly a flame flashed up in the void. It

grew and steadied, and dark objects became visible about it. In the

loneliness--for Iglesias had disappeared--I allowed myself a moment's

luxury of superstition. Were these the Cyclops of Katahdin? Possibly.

Were they Trolls forging diabolic enginery, or Gypsies of Yankeedom? I

will see,--and went tumbling down the hill-side.

As I entered the circle about the cooking-fire of drift-wood by the

lake, Iglesias said,--

"The beef-steak and the mutton-chops will do for breakfast; now, then,

with your bear!"

"Haw, haw!" guffawed Cancut; and the sound, taking the lake at a stride,

found echoes everywhere, till he grew silent and peered suspiciously

into the dark.

"There's more bears raound 'n yer kin shake a stick at," said one of the

muskrateers. "I wouldn't ricommend yer to stir 'em up naow, haowlin'

like that."

"I meant it for laffin'," said Cancut, humbly.

"Ef yer call that 'ere larfin', couldn't yer cry a little to kind er

slick daown the bears?" said the trapper.

Iglesias now invited us to _chocolat à la crème_, made with the boon

of the ex-bar-keeper. I suppose I may say, without flattery, that this

tipple was marvellous. What a pity Nature spoiled a cook by making the

muddler of that chocolate a painter of grandeurs! When Fine Art is in

a man's nature, it must exude, as pitch leaks from a pine-tree. Our

muskrat-hunters partook injudiciously of this unaccustomed dainty, and

were visited with indescribable Nemesis. They had never been acclimated

to chocolate, as had Iglesias and I, by sipping it under the shade of

the mimosa and the palm.

Up to a certain point, an unlucky hunter is more likely to hunt than

a lucky. Satiety follows more speedily upon success than despair upon

failure. Let us thank Heaven for that, brethren dear! I had bagged not a

bear, and must needs satisfy my assassin instincts upon something with

hoofs and horns. The younger trapper of muskrat, being young, was

ardent,--being young, was hopeful,--being young, believed in exceptions

to general rules,--and being young, believed, that, given a good fellow

with a gun, Nature would provide a victim. Therefore he proposed that we

should canoe it along the shallows in this sweetest and stillest of all

the nights. The senior shook his head incredulously; Iglesias shook his

head noddingly.

"Since you have massacred all the bears," said Iglesias, "I will go lay

me down in their lair in the barn. If you find me cheek-by-jowl with

Ursa Major when you come back, make a pun and he will go."

It was stiller than stillness upon the lake. Ripogenus, it seemed, had

never listened to such silence as this. Calm never could have been so

beyond the notion of calm. Stars in the empyrean and stars in Ripogenus

winked at each other across ninety-nine billions of leagues as

uninterruptedly as boys at a boarding-school table.

I knelt amidships in the birch with gun and rifle on either side. The

pilot gave one stroke of his paddle, and we floated out upon what seemed

the lake. Whatever we were poised and floating upon he hesitated to

shatter with another dip of his paddle, lest he should shatter the thin

basis and sink toward heaven and the stars.

Presently the silence seemed to demand gentle violence, and the

unwavering water needed slight tremors to teach it the tenderness of its

calm; then my guide used his blade, and cut into glassiness. We crept

noiselessly along by the lake-edge, within the shadows of the pines.

With never a plash we slid. Rare drops fell from the cautious paddle

and tinkled on the surface, overshot, not parted by, our imponderable

passage. Sometimes from far within the forest would come sounds of

rustling branches or crackling twigs. Somebody of life approaches with

stealthy tread. Gentlier, even gentlier, my steersman! Take up no pearly

drop from the lake, mother of pearliness, lest falling it sound too

loudly. Somewhat comes. Let it come unterrified to our ambush among the

shadows by the shore.

Somewhat, something, somebody was coming, perhaps, but some other thing

or body thwarted it and it came not. To glide over glassiness while

uneventful moments link themselves into hours is monotonous. Night and

stillness laid their soothing spell upon me. I was entranced. I lost

myself out of time and space, and seemed to be floating unimpelled and

purposeless, nowhere in Forever.

Somewhere in Now I suddenly found myself.

There he was! There was the moose trampling and snorting hard-by, in the

shallows of Ripogenus, trampling out of being the whole nadir of stars,

making the world conscious of its lost silence by the death of silence

in tumult.

I trembled with sudden eagerness. I seized my gun. In another instant

I should have lodged the fatal pellet! when a voice whispered over my

shoulder,--

"I kinder guess yer 've ben asleep an' dreamin', ha'n't yer?"

So I had.

Never a moose came down to cool his clumsy snout in the water and

swallow reflections of stars. Never a moose abandoned dry-browse in the

bitter woods for succulent lily-pads, full in their cells and veins of

water and sunlight. Till long past midnight we paddled and watched and

listened, whisperless. In vain. At last, as we rounded a point, the

level gleam of our dying camp-fire athwart the water reminded us of

passing hours and traveller duties, of rest to-night and toil to-morrow.

My companions, fearless as if there were no bears this side of Ursa

Major, were bivouacked in one of the barns. There I entered skulkingly,

as a gameless hunter may, and hid my untrophied head beneath a mound of

ancient hay, not without the mustiness of its age.

No one clawed us, no one chawed us, that night. A Ripogenus chill awaked

the whole party with early dawn. We sprang from our nests, shook the

hay-seed out of our hair, and were full-dressed without more ceremony,

ready for whatever grand sensation Nature might purvey for our aesthetic

breakfast.

Nothing is ever as we expect. When we stepped into out-of-doors, looking

for Ripogenus, a lake of Maine, we found not a single aquatic fact in

the landscape. Ripogenus, a lake, had mizzled, (as the Americans say,)

literally mizzled. Our simplified view comprised a grassy hill with

barns, and a stern positive pyramid, surely Katahdin; aloft, beyond,

above, below, thither, hither, and yon, Fog, not fog, but FOG.

Ripogenus, the water-body, had had aspirations, and a boon of brief

transfiguration into a cloud-body had been granted it by Nature, who

grants to every terrestrial essence prophetic experiences of what it one

day would be.

In short, and to repeat, Ripogenus had transmuted itself into vapor, and

filled the valley full to our feet. A faint wind had power to billow

this mist-lake, and drive cresting surges up against the eastern

hill-side, over which they sometimes broke, and, involving it totally,

rolled clear and free toward Katahdin, where he stood hiding the glows

of sunrise. Leagues higher up than the mountain rested a presence of

cirri, already white and luminous with full daylight, and from them

drooped linking wreaths of orange mist, clinging to the rosy-violet

granite of the peak.

Up clomb and sailed Ripogenus and befogged the whole; then we

condescended to breakfast.