"is such as M. Martin describes it, I advise you to close with him at
once. I would accompany you, Philip, but the truth is, I am too sad at
losing this little bird to assist you in selecting a cage for her.
Remember, the last train for town leaves at five. Be sure not to miss
it; for we have seats for M. Sardou's new comedy to-morrow night. By
to-morrow night," he added laughingly, "little Julie here will be an old
lady, ----'t is such an age from now until then."
The next morning the train bore Philip to one of the loveliest spots
within thirty miles of Paris. An hour's walk through green lanes brought
him to M. Martin's estate. In a kind of dream the young man wandered
from room to room, inspected the conservatory, the stables, the lawns,
the strip of woodland through which a merry brook sang to itself
continually; and, after dining with M. Martin, completed the purchase,
and turned his steps towards the station, just in time to catch the
express train.
As Paris stretched out before him, with its million lights twinkling in
the early dusk, and its sharp spires here and there pricking the sky, it
seemed to Philip as if years had elapsed since he left the city. On
reaching Paris he drove to his hotel, where he found several letters
lying on the table. He did not trouble himself even to glance at their
superscriptions as he threw aside his travelling surtout for a more
appropriate dress.
If, in his impatience to see Mademoiselle Dorine, the cars had appeared
to walk, the fiacre which he had secured at the station appeared to
creep. At last it turned into the Place Vendôme, and drew up before M.
Dorine's residence. The door opened as Philip's foot touched the first
step. The servant silently took his cloak and hat, with a special
deference, Philip thought; but was he not now one of the family?
"M. Dorine," said the servant slowly, "is unable to see Monsieur at
present. He wishes Monsieur to be shown up to the _salon_."
"Is Mademoiselle--"
"Yes, Monsieur."
"Alone?"
"Alone, Monsieur," repeated the man, looking curiously at Philip, who
could scarcely repress an exclamation of pleasure.
It was the first time that such a privilege had been accorded him. His
interviews with Julie had always taken place in the presence of M.
Dorine, or some member of the household. A well-bred Parisian girl has
but a formal acquaintance with her lover.
Philip did not linger on the staircase; his heart sang in his bosom as
he flew up the steps, two at a time. Ah! this wine of air which one
drinks at twenty, and seldom after! He hastened through the softly
lighted hall, in which he detected the faint scent of her favorite
flowers, and stealthily opened the door of the _salon_.
The room was darkened. Underneath the chandelier stood a slim black
casket on trestles. A lighted candle, a crucifix, and some white flowers
were on a table near by. Julie Dorine was dead.
When M. Dorine heard the indescribable cry that rang through the silent
house, he hurried from the library, and found Philip standing like a
ghost in the middle of the chamber.
It was not until long afterwards that Wentworth learned the details of
the calamity that had befallen him. On the previous night Mademoiselle
Dorine had retired to her room in seemingly perfect health. She
dismissed her maid with a request to be awakened early the next morning.
At the appointed hour the girl entered the chamber. Mademoiselle Dorine
was sitting in an arm-chair, apparently asleep. The candle had burnt
down to the socket; a book lay half open on the carpet at her feet. The
girl started when she saw that the bed had not been occupied, and that
her mistress still wore an evening dress. She rushed to Mademoiselle
Dorine's side. It was not slumber. It was death.
Two messages were at once despatched to Philip, one to the station at
G----, the other to his hotel. The first missed him on the road, the
second he had neglected to open. On his arrival at M. Dorine's house,
the servant, under the supposition that Wentworth had been advised of
Mademoiselle Dorine's death, broke the intelligence with awkward
cruelty, by showing him directly to the _salon_.
Mademoiselle Dorine's wealth, her beauty, the suddenness of her death,
and the romance that had in some way attached itself to her love for the
young American, drew crowds to witness the funeral ceremonies which took
place in the church in the Rue d'Aguesseau. The body was to be laid in
M. Dorine's tomb, in the cemetery of Montmartre.
This tomb requires a few words of description. First there was a grating
of filigraned iron; through this you looked into a small vestibule or
hall, at the end of which was a massive door of oak opening upon a short
flight of stone steps descending into the tomb. The vault was fifteen or
twenty feet square, ingeniously ventilated from the ceiling, but
unlighted. It contained two sarcophagi: the first held the remains of
Madame Dorine, long since dead; the other was new, and bore on one side
the letters J. D., in monogram, interwoven with fleurs-de-lis.
The funeral train stopped at the gate of the small garden that enclosed
the place of burial, only the immediate relatives following the bearers
into the tomb. A slender wax candle, such as is used in Catholic
churches, burnt at the foot of the uncovered sarcophagus, casting a dim
glow over the centre of the apartment, and deepening the shadows which
seemed to huddle together in the corners. By this flickering light the
coffin was placed in its granite shell, the heavy slab laid over it
reverently, and the oaken door revolved on its rusty hinges, shutting
out the uncertain ray of sunshine that had ventured to peep in on the
darkness.
M. Dorine, muffled in his cloak, threw himself on the back seat of the
carriage, too abstracted in his grief to observe that he was the only
occupant of the vehicle. There was a sound of wheels grating on the
gravelled avenue, and then all was silence again in the cemetery of
Montmartre. At the main entrance the carriages parted company, dashing
off into various streets at a pace that seemed to express a sense of
relief. The band plays a dead march going to the grave, but _Fra
Diavolo_ coming from it.
It is not with the retreating carriages that our interest lies. Nor yet
wholly with the dead in her mysterious dream; but with Philip Wentworth.
The rattle of wheels had died out of the air when Philip opened his
eyes, bewildered, like a man abruptly roused from slumber. He raised
himself on one arm and stared into the surrounding blackness. Where was
he? In a second the truth flashed upon him. He had been left in the
tomb! While kneeling on the farther side of the stone box, perhaps he
had fainted, and in the last solemn rites his absence had been
unnoticed.
His first emotion was one of natural terror. But this passed as quickly
as it came. Life had ceased to be so very precious to him; and if it
were his fate to die at Julie's side, was not that the fulfilment of the
desire which he had expressed to himself a hundred times that morning?
What did it matter, a few years sooner or later? He must lay down the
burden at last. Why not then? A pang of self-reproach followed the
thought. Could he so lightly throw aside the love that had bent over his
cradle. The sacred name of mother rose involuntarily to his lips. Was it
not cowardly to yield up without a struggle the life which he should
guard for her sake? Was it not his duty to the living and the dead to
face the difficulties of his position, and overcome them if it were
within human power?
With an organization as delicate as a woman's, he had that spirit which,
however sluggish in repose, can leap with a kind of exultation to
measure its strength with disaster. The vague fear of the supernatural,
that would affect most men in a similar situation, found no room in his
heart. He was simply shut in a chamber from which it was necessary that
he should obtain release within a given period. That this chamber
contained the body of the woman he loved, so far from adding to the
terror of the case, was a circumstance from which he drew consolation.
She was a beautiful white statue now. Her soul was far hence; and if
that pure spirit could return, would it not be to shield him with her
love? It was impossible that the place should not engender some thought
of the kind. He did not put the thought entirely from him as he rose to
his feet and stretched out his hands in the darkness; but his mind was
too healthy and practical to indulge long in such speculations.
Philip chanced to have in his pocket a box of wax-tapers which smokers
use. After several ineffectual attempts, he succeeded in igniting one
against the dank wall, and by its momentary glare perceived that the
candle had been left in the tomb. This would serve him in examining the
fastenings of the vault. If he could force the inner door by any means,
and reach the grating, of which he had an indistinct recollection, he
might hope to make himself heard. But the oaken door was immovable, as
solid as the wall itself, into which it fitted air-tight. Even if he had
had the requisite tools, there were no fastenings to be removed: the
hinges were set on the outside.
Having ascertained this, he replaced the candle on the floor, and leaned
against the wall thoughtfully, watching the blue fan of flame that
wavered to and fro, threatening to detach itself from the wick. "At all
events," he thought, "the place is ventilated." Suddenly Philip sprang
forward and extinguished the light. His existence depended on that
candle!
He had read somewhere, in some account of shipwreck, how the survivors
had lived for days upon a few candles which one of the passengers had
insanely thrown into the long-boat. And here he had been burning away
his very life.
By the transient illumination of one of the tapers, he looked at his
watch. It had stopped at eleven,--but at eleven that day, or the
preceding night? The funeral, he knew, had left the church at ten. How
many hours had passed since then? Of what duration had been his swoon?
Alas! it was no longer possible for him to measure those hours which
crawl like snails by the wretched, and fly like swallows over the happy.
He picked up the candle, and seated himself on the stone steps. He was a
sanguine man, this Wentworth, but, as he weighed the chances of escape,
the prospect did not seem encouraging. Of course he would be missed. His
disappearance under the circumstances would surely alarm his friends;
they would instigate a search for him; but who would think of searching
for a live man in the cemetery of Montmartre? The Prefect of Police
would set a hundred intelligences at work to find him; the Seine might
be dragged, _les misérables_ turned over at the dead-house; a minute
description of him would be in every detective's pocket; and he--in M.
Dorine's family tomb!
Yet, on the other hand, it was here he was last seen; from this point a
keen detective would naturally work up the case. Then might not the
undertaker return for the candlestick, probably not left by design? Or,
again, might not M. Dorine send fresh wreaths of flowers, to take the
place of those which now diffused a pungent, aromatic odor throughout
the chamber? Ah! what unlikely chances! But if one of these things did
not happen speedily, it had better never happen. How long could he keep
life in himself?
With unaccelerated pulse, he quietly cut the half-burned candle into
four equal parts. "To-night," he meditated, "I will eat the first of
these pieces; to-morrow, the second; to-morrow evening, the third; the
next day, the fourth; and then--then I'll wait!"
He had taken no breakfast that morning, unless a cup of coffee can be
called a breakfast. He had never been very hungry before. He was
ravenously hungry now. But he postponed the meal as long as practicable.
It must have been near midnight, according to his calculation, when he
determined to try the first of his four singular repasts. The bit of
white-wax was tasteless; but it served its purpose.
His appetite for the time appeased, he found a new discomfort. The
humidity of the walls, and the wind that crept through the unseen
ventilator, chilled him to the bone. To keep walking was his only
resource. A sort of drowsiness, too, occasionally came over him. It took
all his will to fight it off. To sleep, he felt, was to die; and he had
made up his mind to live.
Very strange fancies flitted through his head as he groped up and down
the stone floor of the dungeon, feeling his way along the wall to avoid
the sepulchres. Voices that had long been silent spoke words that had
long been forgotten; faces he had known in childhood grew palpable
against the dark. His whole life in detail was unrolled before him like
a panorama; the changes of a year, with its burden of love and death,
its sweets and its bitternesses, were epitomized in a single second. The
desire to sleep had left him. But the keen hunger came again.
It must be near morning now, he mused; perhaps the sun is just gilding
the pinnacles and domes of the city; or, may be, a dull, drizzling rain
is beating on Paris, sobbing on these mounds above me. Paris! it seems
like a dream. Did I ever walk in its gay streets in the golden air? O
the delight and pain and passion of that sweet human life!
Philip became conscious that the gloom, the silence, and the cold were
gradually conquering him. The feverish activity of his brain brought on
a reaction. He grew lethargic, he sunk down on the steps, and thought of
nothing. His hand fell by chance on one of the pieces of candle; he
grasped it and devoured it mechanically. This revived him. "How
strange," he thought, "that I am not thirsty. Is it possible that the
dampness of the walls, which I must inhale with every breath, has
supplied the need of water? Not a drop has passed my lips for two days,
and still I experience no thirst. That drowsiness, thank Heaven, has
gone. I think I was never wide awake until this hour. It would be an
anodyne like poison that could weigh down my eyelids. No doubt the dread
of sleep has something to do with this."
The minutes were like hours. Now he walked as briskly as he dared up and
down the tomb; now he rested against the door. More than once he was
tempted to throw himself upon the stone coffin that held Julie, and make
no further struggle for his life.
Only one piece of candle remained. He had eaten the third portion, not
to satisfy hunger, but from a precautionary motive. He had taken it as a
man takes some disagreeable drug upon the result of which hangs safety.
The time was rapidly approaching when even this poor substitute for
nourishment would be exhausted. He delayed that moment. He gave himself
a long fast this time. The half-inch of candle which he held in his hand
was a sacred thing to him. It was his last defence against death.
At length, with such a sinking at heart as he had not known before, he
raised it to his lips. Then he paused, then he hurled the fragment
across the tomb, then the oaken door was flung open, and Philip, with
dazzled eyes, saw M. Dorine's form sharply defined against the blue sky.
When they led him out, half blinded, into the broad daylight, M. Dorine
noticed that Philip's hair, which a short time since was as black as a
crow's wing, had actually turned gray in places. The man's eyes, too,
had faded; the darkness had spoiled their lustre.
"And how long was he really confined in the tomb?" I asked, as Mr.
H----concluded the story.
_"Just one hour and twenty minutes!"_ replied Mr. H----, smiling
blandly.
As he spoke, the little sloops, with their sails all blown out like
white roses, came floating bravely into port, and Philip Wentworth
lounged by us, wearily, in the pleasant April sunshine.
* * * * *
Mr. H----'s narrative made a deep impression on me. Here was a man who
had undergone a strange ordeal. Here was a man whose sufferings were
unique. His was no threadbare experience. Eighty minutes had seemed like
two days to him! If he had really been immured two days in the tomb, the
story, from my point of view, would have lost its tragic element.
After this it was but natural I should regard Mr. Wentworth with
deepened interest. As I met him from day to day, passing through the
Common with that same abstracted air, there was something in his
loneliness which touched me. I wondered that I had not before read in
his pale meditative face some such sad history as Mr. H---- had confided
to me. I formed the resolution of speaking to him, though with what
purpose was not very clear to my mind. One May morning we met at the
intersection of two paths. He courteously halted to allow me the
precedence.
"Mr. Wentworth," I began, "I--"
He interrupted me.
"My name, sir," he said, in an off-hand manner, "is Jones."
"Jo-Jo-Jones!" I gasped.
"Not Jo Jones," he returned coldly, "Frederick."
Mr. Jones, or whatever his name is, will never know, unless he reads
these pages, why a man accosted him one morning as "Mr. Wentworth," and
then abruptly rushed down the nearest path, and disappeared in the
crowd.
The fact is, I had been duped by Mr. H----. Mr. H---- occasionally
contributes a story to the magazines. He had actually tried the effect
of one of his romances on me!
My hero, as I subsequently learned, is no hero at all, but a commonplace
young man who has some connection with the building of that pretty
granite bridge which will shortly span the crooked little lake in the
Public Garden.
When I think of the cool ingenuity and readiness with which Mr.
H----built up his airy fabric on my credulity, I am half inclined to
laugh; though I feel not slightly irritated at having been the
unresisting victim of his Black Art.
FREEDOM IN BRAZIL.
With clearer light, Cross of the South, shine forth
In blue Brazilian skies;
And thou, O river, cleaving half the earth
From sunset to sunrise,
From the great mountains to the Atlantic waves
Thy joy's long anthem pour.
Yet a few days (God make them less!) and slaves
Shall shame thy pride no more.
No fettered feet thy shaded margins press;
But all men shall walk free
Where thou, the high-priest of the wilderness,
Hast wedded sea to sea.
And thou, great-hearted ruler, through whose mouth
The word of God is said,
Once more, "Let there be light!"--Son of the South,
Lift up thy honored head,
Wear unashamed a crown by thy desert
More than by birth thy own,
Careless of watch and ward; thou art begirt
By grateful hearts alone.
The moated wall and battle-ship may fail,
But safe shall justice prove;
Stronger than greaves of brass or iron mail
The panoply of love.
Crowned doubly by man's blessing and God's grace,
Thy future is secure;
Who frees a people makes his statue's place
In Time's Valhalla sure.
Lo! from his Neva's banks the Scythian Czar
Stretches to thee his hand
Who, with the pencil of the Northern star,
Wrote freedom on his land.
And he whose grave is holy by our calm
And prairied Sangamon,
From his gaunt hand shall drop the martyr's palm
To greet thee with "Well done!"
And thou, O Earth, with smiles thy face make sweet,
And let thy wail be stilled,
To hear the Muse of prophecy repeat
Her promise half fulfilled.
The Voice that spake at Nazareth speaks still,
No sound thereof hath died;
Alike thy hope and Heaven's eternal will
Shall yet be satisfied.
The years are slow, the vision tarrieth long,
And far the end may be;
But, one by one, the fiends of ancient wrong
Go out and leave thee free.
MY VISIT TO SYBARIS.
It is a great while since I first took an interest in Sybaris. Sybarites
have a bad name. But before I had heard of them anywhere else, I had
painfully looked out the words in the three or four precious anecdotes
about Sybaris in the old Greek Reader; and I had made up my boy's mind
about the Sybarites. When I came to know the name they had got
elsewhere, I could not but say that the world had been very unjust to
them!
O dear! I can see it now,--the old Latin school-room, where we used to
sit, and hammer over that Greek, after the small boys had gone. They
went at eleven; we--because we were twelve years old--stayed till
twelve. From eleven to twelve we sat, with only those small boys who had
been "kept" for their sins, and Mr. Dillaway. The room was long and
narrow; how long and how narrow, you may see, if you will go and examine
M. Duchesne's model of "Boston as it was," and pay twenty-five cents to
the Richmond schools. For all this is of the past; and in the same spot
in space where once a month the Examiner Club now meets at Parker's, and
discusses the difference between religion and superstition, the folly of
copyright, and the origin of things, the boys who did not then belong to
the Examiner Club, say Fox and Clarke and Furness and Waldo Emerson,
thumbed their Greek Readers in "Boston as it was," and learned the truth
about Sybaris! A long, narrow room, I say, whose walls, when I knew them
first, were of that tawny orange wash which is appropriated to kitchens.
But by a master stroke of Mr. Dillaway's these walls were made lilac or
purple one summer vacation. We sat, to recite, on long settees,
pea-green in color, which would teeter slightly on the well-worn floor.
There, for an hour daily, while brighter boys than I recited, I sat an
hour musing, looking at the immense Jacobs's Greek Reader, and waiting
my turn to come. If you did not look off your book much, no harm came to
you. So, in the hour, you got fifty-three minutes and a few odd seconds
of day-dream, for six minutes and two thirds of reciting, unless, which
was unusual, some fellow above you broke down, and a question passed
along of a sudden recalled you to modern life. I have been sitting on
that old green settee, and at the same time riding on horseback in
Virginia, through an open wooded country, with one of Lord Fairfax's
grandsons and two pretty cousins of his, and a fallow deer has just
appeared in the distance, when, by the failure of Hutchinson or Wheeler,
just above me, poor Mr. Dillaway has had to ask me, "Ingham, what verbs
omit the reduplication?" Talk of war! Where is versatility, otherwise
called presence of mind, so needed as in recitation at a public school?
Well, there, I say, I made acquaintance with Sybaris. Nay, strictly
speaking, my first visits to Sybaris were made there and then. What the
Greek Reader tells of Sybaris is in three or four anecdotes, woven into
that strange, incoherent patchwork of "Geography." In that place are
patched together a statement of Strabo and one of Athenæus about two
things in Sybaris which may have belonged some eight hundred years
apart. But what of that to a school-boy! Will your descendants, dear
reader, in the year 3579 A. D., be much troubled, if, in the English
Reader of their day, Queen Victoria shall be made to drink Spartan black
broth with William the Conqueror out of a conch-shell in New Zealand?
With regard to Sybaris, then, the old Jacobs's Greek Reader tells the
following stories: "The Sybarites were distinguished for luxury. They
did not permit the trades which made a loud noise, such as those of
brass-workers, carpenters, and the like, to be carried on in the heart
of the city, so that their sleep might be wholly undisturbed by
noise.... And a Sybarite who had gone to Lacedæmon, and had been invited
to the public meal, after he had sat on their wooden benches and
partaken of their fare, said that he had been astonished at the
fearlessness of the Lacedæmonians when he knew it only by report; but
now that he had seen them, he thought that they did not excel other men,
for he thought that any brave man had much rather die than be obliged to
live such a life as they did." Then there is another story, among the
"miscellaneous anecdotes," of a Sybarite who was asked if he had slept
well. He said, No, that he believed he had a crumpled rose-leaf under
him in the night. And there is yet another, of one of them who said that
it made his back ache to see another man digging.
I have asked Polly, as I write, to look in Mark Lemon's Jest-Book for
these stories. They are not in the index there. But I dare say they are
in Cotton Mather and Jeremy Taylor. Any way, they are bits of very cheap
Greek. Now it is on these stories that the reputation of the Sybarites
in modern times appears to depend.
Now look at them. This Sybarite at Sparta said, that in war death was
often easier than the hardships of life. Well, is not that true? Have
not thousands of brave men said it? When the English and French got
themselves established on the wrong side of Sebastopol, what did that
engineer officer of the French say to somebody who came to inspect his
works? He was talking of St. Arnaud, their first commander. "Cunning
dog," said he, "he went and died." Death was easier than life. But
nobody ever said he was a coward or effeminate because he said this.
Why, if Mr. Fields would permit an excursus in twelve numbers here, on
this theme, we would defer Sybaris to the 1st of April, 1868, while we
illustrated the Sybarite's manly epigram, which these stupid Spartans
could only gape at, but could not understand.
Then take the rose-leaf story. Suppose by good luck you were
breakfasting with General Grant, or Pelissier, or the Duke of
Wellington. Suppose you said, "I hope you slept well," and the great
soldier said, "No, I did not; I think a rose-leaf must have stood up
edgewise under me." Would you go off and say in your book of travels
that the Americans, or the French, or the English are all effeminate
pleasure-seekers, because one of them made this nice little joke? Would
you like to have the name "American" go down to all time, defined as
Webster[B] defines Sybarite?
A-M[)E]R'I-CAN, _n._ [Fr. _Américain_, Lat. _Americanus_, from
Lat. _America_, a continent noted for the effeminacy and
voluptuousness of its inhabitants.] A person devoted to luxury
and pleasure.
Should you think that was quite fair for your great-grandson's
grandson's descendant in the twenty-seventh remove to read, who is going
to be instructed about Queen Victoria and William the Conqueror?
Worst of all, and most frequently quoted, is the story of the
coppersmiths. The Sybarites, it is said, ordered that the coppersmiths
and brass-founders should all reside in one part of the city, and bang
their respective metals where the neighbors had voluntarily chosen to
listen to banging. What if they did? Does not every manufacturing city
practically do the same thing? What did Nicholas Tillinghast use to say
to the boys and girls at Bridgewater? "The tendency of cities is to
resolve themselves into order."
Is not Wall Street at this hour a street of bankers? Is not the Boston
Pearl Street a street of leather men? Is not the bridge at Florence
given over to jewellers? Was not my valise, there, bought in Rome at the
street of trunk-makers? Do not all booksellers like to huddle together
as long as they can? And when Ticknor and Fields move a few inches from
Washington Street to Tremont Street, do not Russell and Bates, and
Childs and Jenks, and De Vries and Ibarra, follow them as soon as the
shops can be got ready?
"But it is the motive," pipes up the old gray ghost of propriety, who
started this abuse of the Sybarites in some stupid Spartan black-broth
shop (English that for _café_), two thousand two hundred and twenty-two
years ago,--which ghost I am now belaboring,--"it is the motive. The
Sybarites moved the brass-founders, because they wanted to sleep after
the brass-founders got up in the morning." What if they did, you old rat
in the arras? Is there any law, human or divine, which says that at one
and the same hour all men shall rise from bed in this world? My
excellent milkman, Mr. Whit, rises from bed daily at two o'clock. If he
does not, my family, including Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts, will
not have their fresh milk at 7.37, at which time we breakfast or pretend
to. But because he rises at two, must we all rise at two, and sit
wretchedly whining on our respective camp-stools, waiting for Mr. Whit
to arrive with the grateful beverage? Many is the time, when I have been
watching with a sick child at five in a summer morning, when the little
fellow had just dropped into a grateful morning doze, that I have
listened and waited, dreading the arrival of the Providence morning
express. Because I knew that, a mile and a half out of Boston, the
engine would begin to blow its shrill whistle, for the purpose, I
believe, of calling the Boston station-men to their duty. Three or four
minutes of that _skre-e-e-e_ must there be, as that train swept by our
end of the town. And hoping and wishing never did any good; the train
would come, and the child would wake. Is not that a magnificent power
for one engine-man to have over the morning rest of thirty thousand
sleeping people, because you, old Spartan croaker, who can't sleep easy
underground it seems, want to have everybody waked up at the same hour
in the morning. When I hear that whistle, and the fifty other whistles
of the factories that have since followed its wayward and unlicensed
example, I have wished more than once that we had in Boston a little
more of the firm government of Sybaris.
For if, as it would appear from these instances, Sybaris were a city
which grew to wealth and strength by the recognition of the personal
rights of each individual in the state,--if Sybaris were a republic,
where the individual was respected, had his rights, and was not left to
the average chances of the majority of men,--then Sybaris had found out
something which no modern city has found out, and which it is a pity we
have all forgotten.
I do not say that I went through all this speculation at the Latin
school. I got no further there than to see that the Sybarites had got a
very bad name, and that the causes did not appear in the Greek Reader. I
supposed there were causes somewhere, which it was not proper to put
into the Greek Reader. Perhaps there were. But if there were, I have
never found them,--not being indeed very well acquainted with the lines
of reading in which those who wanted to find them should look for them.
* * * * *
What I did find of Sybaris, when I could read Greek rather more easily,
and could get access to some decent atlases, was briefly this.
Well forward in the hollow of the arched foot of the boot of Italy, two
little rivers run into the Gulf of Tarentum. One was named Crathis, one
was named Sybaris. Here stood the ancient city of Sybaris, founded,
about the time of Romulus or Numa Pompilius, by a colony from Greece.
For two hundred years and more,--almost as long, dear Atlantic, as your
beloved Boston has subsisted,--Sybaris flourished, and was the Rome of
that region, ruling it from sea to sea.
It was the capital of four states,--a sort of New England, if you will
observe,--and could send three hundred thousand armed men into the
field. The walls of the city were six miles in circumference, while the
suburbs covered the banks of the Crathis for a space of seven miles. At
last the neighboring state of Crotona, under the lead of Milon the
Athlete (he of the calf and ox and split log), the Heenan or John
Morrissey of his day, vanquished the more refined Sybarites, turned the
waters of the Crathis upon their prosperous city, and destroyed it. But
the Sybarites had had that thing happen too often to be discouraged.
Five times, say the historians, had Sybaris been destroyed, and five
times they built it up again. This time the Athenians sent ten vessels,
with men to help them, under Lampon and Xenocritus. And they, with those
who stood by the wreck, gave their new city the name of Thurii. Among
the new colonists were Herodotus, and Lysias the orator, who was then a
boy. The spirit that had given Sybaris its comfort and its immense
population appeared in the legislation of the new state. It received its
laws from CHARONDAS, one of the noblest legislators of the world. Study
these laws and you will see that in the young Sybaris the individual had
his rights, which the public preserved for him, though he were wholly in
a minority. There is an evident determination that a man shall live
while he lives, and that, too, in no sensual interpretation of the
words.
Of the laws made by Charondas for the new Sybaris a few are preserved.
1. A calumniator was marched round the city in disgrace, crowned with
tamarisk. "In consequence," says the Scholiast, "they all left the
city." O for such a result, from whatever legislation, in our modern
Pedlingtons, great or little!
2. All persons were forbidden to associate with the bad.
3. "He made another law, better than these, and neglected by the older
legislators. For he enacted that all the sons of the citizens should be
instructed in letters, the city paying the salaries of the teachers. For
he held that the poor, not being able to pay their teachers from their
own property, would be deprived of the most valuable discipline." There
is FREE EDUCATION for you, two thousand and seventy-six years before the
date of your first Massachusetts free school; and the theory of free
education completely stated.
4. Deserters or cowards in battle had to sit in women's dresses in the
Forum three days.
5. With regard to the amendment of laws, any man or woman who moved one
did it with a noose round his neck, and was hanged if the people refused
it. Only three laws were ever amended, therefore, all which are recorded
in the history. Observe that the women might move amendments,--and think
of the simplicity of legislation!
6. The law provided for cash payments, and the government gave no
protection for those who sold on credit.
7. Their communication with other nations was perfectly free.
I might give more instances. I should like to tell some of the curious
stories which illustrate this simple legislation. Poor Charondas himself
fell a victim to it. One of the laws provided that no man should wear a
sword into the public assembly. No Cromwells there! Unfortunately, by
accident, Charondas wore his own there one day. Brave fellow! when the
fault was pointed out, he killed himself with it.
Now do you wonder that a city where there were no calumniators, no long
credit, no bills at the grocers, no fighting at town meetings, no
amendments to the laws, no intentional and open association with
profligates, and where everybody was educated by the state to letters,
proved a comfortable place to live in? It is of the old Sybaris that the
coppersmith and the rose-leaf stories are told; and it was the new
Sybaris that made the laws. But do you not see that there is one spirit
in the whole? Here was a nation which believed that the highest work of
a nation was to train its people. It did not believe in fight, like
Milon or Heenan or the old Spartans; it did not believe in legislation,
like Massachusetts and New York; it did not believe in commerce, like
Carthage and England. It believed in men and women. It respected men and
women. It educated men and women. It gave their rights to men and women.
And so the Spartans called them effeminate. And the Greek Reader made
fun of them. But perhaps the people who lived there were indifferent to
the opinions of the Spartans and of the Greek Reader. Herodotus lived
there till he died; wrote his history there, among other things. Lysias,
the orator, took part in the administration. It is not from them, you
may be sure, that you get the anecdotes which ridicule the old city of
Sybaris!
You and I would probably be satisfied with such company as that of
Herodotus and Charondas and Lysias. So we hunt the history down to see
if there may be lodgings to let there this summer, but only to find that
it all pales out in the ignorance of our modern days. The name gets
changed into Lupiæ; but there it turns out that Pausanias made "a
strange mistake," and should have written Copia,--which was perhaps
Cossa, or sometimes Cosa. Pyrrhus appears, and Hadrian rebuilds
something, and the "Oltramontani," whoever they may have been, ravage
it, and finally the Saracens fire and sack it; and so, in the latest
Italian itinerary you can find, there is no post-road goes near it, only
a _strada rotabile_ (wheel-track) upon the hills; and, alas! even the
_rotabile_ gives way at last, and all the map will own to is a _strada
pedonale_, or foot-path. But the map is of the less consequence, when
you find that the man who edited it had no later dates than the
beginning of the last century, when the family of Serra had transferred
the title to Sybaris to a Genoese family without a name, who received
from it forty thousand ducats yearly, and would have received more, if
their agents had been more faithful. There the place fades out of
history, and you find in your Swinburne, "that the locality has _never_
been thoroughly examined"; in your Smith's Dictionary, that "the whole
subject is very obscure, and a careful examination still much needed";
in the Cyclopædia, that the site of Sybaris is lost. Craven saw the
rivers Crathis and Sybaris. He seems not to have seen the wall of
Sybaris, which he supposed to be under water. He does say of Cassano,
the nearest town he came to, that "no other spot can boast of such
advantages." In short, no man living who has written any book about it
dares say that anybody has looked upon the certain site of Sybaris for
more than a hundred years.[C] If a man wanted to write a mythical story,
where could he find a better scene?
Now is not this a very remarkable thing? Here was a city, which, under
its two names of Sybaris or of Thurium, was for centuries the regnant
city of all that part of the world. It could call into the field three
hundred thousand men,--an army enough larger than Athens ever furnished,
or Sparta. It was a far more populous and powerful state than ever
Athens was, or Sparta, or the whole of Hellas. It invented and carried
into effect free popular education,--a gift to the administration of
free government larger than ever Rome rendered. It received and honored
Charondas, the great practical legislator, from whose laws no man shall
say how much has trickled down into the Code Napoleon or the Revised
Statutes of New York, through the humble studies of the Roman jurists.
It maintained in peace, prosperity, happiness, and, as its maligners
say, in comfort, an immense population. If they had not been as
comfortable as they were,--if a tenth part of them had received alms
every year, and a tenth part were flogged in the public schools every
year,--if one in forty had been sent to prison every year, as in the
happy city which publishes the "Atlantic Monthly,"--then Sybaris,
perhaps, would never have got its bad name for luxury. Such a city
lived, flourished, ruled, for hundreds of years. Of such a city all that
you know now with certainty is, that its coin is "the most beautifully
finished in the cabinets of ancient coinage"; and that no traveller even
pretends to be sure that he has been to the site of it for more than a
hundred years. That speaks well for your nineteenth century.
Now the reader who has come thus far will understand that I, having come
thus far, in twenty-odd years since those days of teetering on the
pea-green settee, had always kept Sybaris in the background of my head,
as a problem to be solved, and an inquiry to be followed to its
completion. There could hardly have been a man in the world better
satisfied than I to be the hero of the adventure which I am now about to
describe.
* * * * *
If the reader remembers anything about Garibaldi's triumphal entry into
Porto Cavallo in Sicily in the spring of 1859, he will remember that,
between the months of March and April in that year, the great chieftain
made, in that wretched little fishing haven, a long pause, which was not
at the time understood by the journals or by their military critics, and
which, indeed, to this hour has never been publicly explained. I suppose
I know as much about it as any man now living. But I am not writing
Garibaldi's memoirs, nor, indeed, my own, excepting so far as they
relate to Sybaris; and it is strictly nobody's business to inquire as to
that detention, unless it interest the ex-king of Naples, who may write
to me, if he chooses, addressing Frederic Ingham, Esq., Waterville, N.
H. Nor is it anybody's business how long I had then been on Garibaldi's
staff. From the number of his staff-officers who have since visited me
in America, very much in want of a pair of pantaloons, or a ticket to
New York, or something with which they might buy a glass of whiskey, I
should think that his staff alone must have made up a much more
considerable army than Naples, or even Sybaris, ever brought into the
field. But where these men were when I was with him, I do not know. I
only know that there was but a handful of us then, hard-worked fellows,
good-natured, and not above our work. Of its military details we knew
wretchedly little. But as we had no artillery, ignorance was less
dangerous in the chief of artillery; as we had no maps to draw, poor
draughtsmanship did not much embarrass the engineer in chief. For me, I
was nothing but an aid, and I was glad to do anything that fell to me as
well as I knew how. And, as usual in human life, I found that a cool
head, a steady resolve, a concentrated purpose, and an unselfish
readiness to obey, carried me a great way. I listened instead of
talking, and thus got a reputation for knowing a great deal. When the
time to act came, I acted without waiting for the wave to recede; and
thus I sprang into many a boat dry-shod, while people who believed in
what is popularly called prudence missed their chance, and either lost
the boat or fell into the water.
This is by the way. It was under these circumstances that I received my
orders, wholly secret and unexpected, to take a boat at once, pass the
straits, and cross the Bay of Tarentum, to communicate at Gallipoli
with--no matter whom. Perhaps I was going to the "Castle of Otranto." A
hundred years hence anybody who chooses will know. Meanwhile, if there
should be a reaction in Otranto, I do not choose to shorten anybody's
neck for him.
Well, it was five in the afternoon,--near sundown at that season. I
went to dear old Frank Chaney,--the jolliest of jolly Englishmen, who
was acting quartermaster-general,--and told him I must have
transportation. I can see him and hear him now,--as he sat on his barrel
head, smoked his vile Tunisian tobacco in his beloved short meerschaum,
which was left to him ever since he was at Bonn, as he pretended, a
student with Prince Albert. He did not swear,--I don't think he ever
did. But he looked perplexed enough to swear. And very droll was the
twinkle of his eye. The truth was, that every sort of a thing that would
sail, and every wretch of a fisherman that could sail her, had been, as
he knew, and as I knew, sent off that very morning to rendezvous at
Carrara, for the contingent which we were hoping had slipped through
Cavour's pretended neutrality. And here was an order for him to furnish
me "transportation" in exactly the opposite direction.
"Do you know of anything, yourself, Fred?" said he.
"Not a coffin," said I.
"Did the chief suggest anything?"
"Not a nutshell," said I.
"Could not you go by telegraph?" said Frank, pointing up to the dumb old
semaphore in whose tower he had established himself. "Or has not the
chief got a wishing carpet? Or can't you ride to Gallipoli? Here are
some excellent white-tailed mules, good enough for Pindar, whom
Colvocoressis has just brought in from the monastery. 'Transportation
for one!' Is there anything to be brought back? Nitre, powder, lead,
junk, hard-tack, mules, horses, pigs, _polenta_, or _olla podrida_, or
other of the stores of war?"
No; there was nothing to bring back except myself. Lucky enough if I
came back to tell my own story. And so we walked up on the tower deck to
take a look.
Blessed St. Lazarus, chief of Naples and of beggars! a little felucca
was just rounding the Horse Head and coming into the bay, wing-wing. The
fishermen in her had no thought that they were ever going to get into
the Atlantic. May be they had never heard of the Ocean or of the
Monthly. Can that be possible? Frank nodded, and I. He filled up with
more Tunisian, beckoned to an orderly, and we walked down to the
landing-jetty to meet them.
_"Viva Italia!"_ shouted Frank, as they drew near enough to hear.
_"Viva Garibaldi!"_ cried the skipper, as he let his sheet fly and
rounded to the well-worn stones. A good voyage had they made of it, he
and his two brown, ragged boys. Large fish and small, pink fish, blue,
yellow, orange, striped fish and mottled, wriggled together, and flapped
their tails in the well of the little boat. There were even too many to
lie there and wriggle. The bottom of the boat was well covered with
them, and, if she had not shipped waves enough to keep them cool, the
boy Battista had bailed a plenty on them. Father and son hurried on
shore, and Battista on board began to fling the scaly fellows out to
them.
A very small craft it was to double all those capes in, run the straits,
and stretch across the bay. If it had been mine "to make reply," I
should undoubtedly have made this, that I would see the quartermaster
hanged, and his superiors, before I risked myself in any such
rattletrap. But as, unfortunately, it was mine to go where I was sent, I
merely set the orderly to throwing out fish with the boys, and began to
talk with the father.
Queer enough, just at that moment, there came over me the feeling that,
as a graduate of the University, it was my duty to put up those red,
white, and blue scaly fellows, who were flopping about there so briskly,
and send them in alcohol to Agassiz. But there are so many duties of
that kind which one neglects in a hard-worked world! As a graduate, it
is my duty to send annually to the College Librarian a list of all the
graduates who have died in the town I live in, with their fathers' and
mothers' names, and the motives that led them to College, with anecdotes
of their career, and the date of their death. There are two thousand
three hundred and forty-five of them I believe, and I have never sent
one half-anecdote about one! Such failure in duty made me grimly smile
as I omitted to stop and put up these fish in alcohol, and as I plied
the unconscious skipper with inquiries about his boat. "Had she ever
been outside?" "O signor, she had been outside this very day. You cannot
catch _tonno_ till you have passed both capes,--least of all such fine
fish as that is,"--and he kicked the poor wretch. Can it be true, as
C---- says, that those dying flaps of theirs, are exquisite luxury to
them, because for the first time they have their fill of oxygen? "Had he
ever been beyond Peloro?" "O yes, signor; my wife, Caterina, was herself
from Messina,"--and on great saints' days they had gone there often.
Poor fellow, his great saint's day sealed his fate. I nodded to
Frank,--Frank nodded to me,--and Frank blandly informed him that, by
order of General Garibaldi, he would take the gentleman at once on
board, pass the strait with him, "and then go where he tells you."
The Southern Italian has the reputation, derived from Tom Moore, of
being a coward. When I used to speak at school,
"Ay, down to the dust with them,--slaves as they are!"--
stamping my foot at "dust," I certainly thought they were a very mean
crew. But I dare say that Neapolitan school-boys have some similar
school piece about the risings of Tom Moore's countrymen, which
certainly have not been much more successful than the poor little
Neapolitan revolution which he was pleased to satirize. Somehow or
other, Victor Emanuel is, at this hour, king of Naples. Coward or not,
this fine fellow of a fisherman did not flinch. It is my private opinion
that he was not nearly as much afraid of the enterprise as I was. I made
this observation at the moment with some satisfaction, sent Frank's man
up to my lodgings with a note ordering my own traps sent down, and in an
hour we were stretching out, under the twilight, across the little bay.
No! I spare you the voyage. Sybaris is what we are after, all this time,
if we can only get there. Very easy it would be for me to give you cheap
scholarship from the Æneid, about Palinurus and Scylla and Charybdis.
Neither Scylla nor Charybdis bothered me,--as we passed wing-wing
between them before a smart north wind. I had a little Hunter's Virgil
with me, and read the whole voyage,--and confused Battista utterly by
trying to make him remember something about Palinuro, of whom he had
never heard. It was much as I afterwards asked my negro waiter at Fort
Monroe about General Washington at Yorktown. "Never heard of him,
sir,--was he in the Regular army?" So Battista thought Palinuro must
have fished in the Italian fleet, with which the Sicilian boatmen were
not well acquainted. Messina made no objections to us. Perhaps, if the
sloop of war which lay there had known who was lying in the boat under
her guns, I might not be writing these words to-day. Battista went
ashore, got lemons, macaroni, hard bread, polenta, for themselves, the
_Giornale di Messina_ for me, and more Tunisian; and, not to lose that
splendid breeze, we cracked on all day, passed Reggio, hugged the shore
bravely, though it was rough, ran close under those cliffs which are the
very end of the Apennines,--will it shock the modest reader if I say the
very toe-nails of the Italian foot?--hauled more and more eastward, made
Spartivento blue in the distance, made it purple, made it brown, made it
green, still running admirably,--ten knots an hour we must have got
between four and five that afternoon,--and by the time the lighthouse at
Spartivento was well ablaze we were abreast of it, and might begin to
haul more northward, so that, though we had a long course before us, we
should at last be sailing almost directly towards our voyage's end,
Gallipoli.
At that moment--as in any sea often happens, if you come out from the
more land-locked channel into the larger body of water--the wind
appeared to change. Really, I suppose, we came into the steady southwest
wind which had probably been drawing all day up toward the Adriatic. In
two hours more we made the lighthouse of Stilo, and I was then tired
enough to crawl down into the fearfully smelling little cuddy, and,
wrapping Battista's heavy storm-jacket round my feet, I caught some sort
of sleep.
But not for very long. I struck my watch at three in the morning. And
the air was so unworthy of that name,--it was such a thick paste,
seeming to me more like a mixture of tar and oil and fresh fish and
decayed fish and bilge-water than air itself,--that I voted three
morning, and crawled up into the clear starlight,--how wonderful it was,
and the fresh wet breeze that washed my face so cheerily!--and I bade
Battista take his turn below, while I would lie there and mind the helm.
If--if he had done what I proposed, I suppose I should not be writing
these lines; but his father, good fellow, said: "No, signor, not yet. We
leave the shore now for the broad bay, you see; and if the wind haul
southward, we may need to go on the other tack. We will all stay here,
till we see what the deep-sea wind may be." So we lay there, humming,
singing, and telling stories, still this rampant southwest wind behind,
as if all the powers of the Mediterranean meant to favor my mission to
Gallipoli. The boat was now running straight before it. We stretched out
bravely into the gulf; but, before the wind, it was astonishing how
easily the lugger ran. He said to me at last, however, that on that
course we were running to leeward of our object; but that it was the
best point for his boat, and if the wind held, he would keep on so an
hour longer, and trust to the land breeze in the morning to run down the
opposite shore of the bay.
"If" again. The wind did not keep on. Either the pole-star, and the
dipper, and all the rest of them, had rebelled and were drifting
westward,--and so it seemed; or this steady southwest gale was giving
out; or, as I said before, we had come into the sweep of a current even
stronger, pouring from the Levantine shores of the Mediterranean full up
the Gulf of Tarentum. Not ten minutes after the skipper spoke, it was
clear enough to both of us that the boat must go about, whether we
wanted to or not, and we waked the other boy, to send him forward,
before we accepted the necessity. Half asleep, he got up, courteously
declined my effort to help him by me as he crossed the boat, stepped
round on the gunwale behind me as I sat, and then, either in a lurch or
in some misstep, caught his foot in the tiller as his father held it
firm, and pitched down directly behind Battista himself, and, as I
thought, into the sea. I sprang to leeward to throw something after him,
and found him in the sea indeed, but hanging by both hands to the
gunwale, safe enough, and in a minute, with Battista's help and mine, on
board again. I remember how pleased I was that his father did not swear
at him, but only laughed prettily, and bade him be quick, and step
forward; and then, turning to the helm, which he had left free for the
moment, he did not swear indeed, but he did cry "Santa Madre!" when he
found there was no tiller there. The boy's foot had fairly wrenched it,
not only from his father's hand, but from the rudder-head,--and it was
gone!
We held the old fellow firmly by his feet and legs, as he lay over the
stern of the boat, head down, examining the condition of the
rudder-head. The report was not favorable. I renewed the investigation
myself in the same uncomfortable attitude. The phosphorescence of the
sea was but an unsteady light, but light enough there was to reveal what
daylight made hardly more certain,--that the wrench which had been given
to the rotten old fixtures, shaky enough at best, had split the head of
the rudder, so that the pintle hung but loosely in its bed, and that
there was nothing available for us to rig a jury-tiller on. This
discovery, as it became more and more clear to each of us four in
succession, abated successively the volleys of advice which we were
offering, and sent us back to our more quiet "Santa Madres" or to
meditations on "what was next to best."
Meanwhile the boat was flying, under the sail she had before, straight
before the wind, up the Gulf of Tarentum.
If you cannot have what you like, it is best, in a finite world, to like
what you have. And while the old man brought up from the cuddy his
wretched and worthless stock of staves, rope-ends, and bits of iron, and
contemplated them ruefully, as if asking them which would like to assume
the shape of a rudder-head and tiller, if his fairy godmother would
appear on the top of the mast for a moment, I was plying the boys with
questions,--what would happen to us if we held on at this tearing rate,
and rushed up the bay to the head thereof. The boys knew no more than
they knew of Palinuro. Far enough, indeed, were we from their parish.
The old man at last laid down the bit of brass which he had saved from
some old waif, and listened to me as I pointed out to them on my map the
course we were making, and, without answering me a word, fell on his
knees and broke into most voluble prayer,--only interrupted by sobs of
undisguised agony. The boys were almost as much surprised as I was. And
as he prayed and sobbed, the boat rushed on!
Santa Madre, San Giovanni, and Sant' Antonio,--we needed all their help,
if it were only to keep him quiet; and when at last he rose from his
knees, and came to himself enough to tend the sheets a little, I asked,
as modestly as I could, what put this keen edge on his grief or his
devotions. Then came such stories of hobgoblins, witches, devils,
giants, elves, and fairies, at this head of the bay!--no man ever
returned who landed there; his father and his father's father had
charged him, and his brothers and his cousins, never to be lured to
make a voyage there, and never to run for those coves, though schools of
golden fish should lead the way. It was not till this moment, that,
trying to make him look upon the map, I read myself there the words, at
the mouth of the Crathis River, "Sybaris Ruine."
Surely enough, this howling Euroclydon--for Euroclydon it now was--was
bearing me and mine directly to Sybaris!
And here was this devout old fisherman confirming the words of Smith's
Dictionary, when it said that nobody had been there and returned, for
generation upon generation.
At a dozen knots an hour, as things were, I was going to Sybaris! Nor
was I many hours from it. For at that moment we cannot have been more
than five-and-thirty miles from the beach, where, in less than four
hours, Euroclydon flung us on shore.
The memory of the old green settees, and of Hutchinson and Wheeler and
the other Latin-school boys, sustained me beneath the calamity which
impended. Nor do I think at heart the boys felt so bad as their father
about the djins and the devils, the powers of the earth and the powers
of the air. Is there, perhaps, in the youthful mind, rather a passion
for "seeing the folly" of life a little in that direction? None the less
did we join him in rigging out the longest sweep we had aft, lashing it
tight under the little rail which we had been leaning on, and trying
gentle experiments, how far this extemporized rudder might bring the
boat round to the wind. Nonsense the whole. By that time Euroclydon was
on us, so that I would never have tried to put her about if we had had
the best gear I ever handled, and our experiments only succeeded far
enough to show that we were as utterly powerless as men could be.
Meanwhile day was just beginning to break. I soothed the old man with
such devout expressions as heretic might venture. I tried to turn him
from the coming evil to the present necessity. I counselled with him
whether it might not be safer to take in sail and drift along. But from
this he dissented. Time enough to take in sail when we knew what shore
we were coming to. He had no kedge or grapple or cord, indeed, that
would pretend to hold this boat against this gale. We would beach her,
if it pleased the Virgin; and if we could not,--shaking his head,--why,
that would please the Virgin, too.
And so Euroclydon hurried us on to Sybaris.
The sun rose, O how magnificently! Is there anywhere to see sunrise like
the Mediterranean? And if one may not be on the top of Katahdin, is
there any place for sunrise like the very level of the sea? Already the
Calabrian mountains of our western horizon were gray against the sky.
One or another of us was forward all the time, trying to make out by
what slopes the hills descended to the sea. Was it cliff of basalt, or
was it reedy swamp, that was to receive us. I insisted at last on his
reducing sail. For I felt sure that he was driving on under a sort of
fatality which made him dare the worst. I was wholly right, for the boat
now rose easier on the water, and was much more dry.
Perhaps the wind flagged a little as the sun rose. At all events, he
took courage, which I had never lost. I made his boy find us some
oranges. I made them laugh by eating their cold polenta with them. I
even made him confess, when I called him aft and sent Battista forward,
that the shore we were nearing looked low. For we were near enough now
to see stone pines and chestnut-trees. Did anybody see the towers of
Sybaris?
Not a tower! But, on the other hand, not a gnome, witch, Norna's Head,
or other intimation of the underworld. The shore looked like many other
Italian shores. It looked not very unlike what we Yankees call
salt-marsh. At all events, we should not break our heads against a wall!
Nor will I draw out the story of our anxieties, varying as the waves
did on which we rose and fell so easily. As she forged on, it was clear
at last that to some wanderers, at least, Sybaris had some hospitality.
A long, low spit made out into the sea, with never a house on it, but
brown with storm-worn shrubs, above the line of which were the
stone-pines and chestnuts which had first given character to the shore.
Hard for us, if we had been flung on the outside of this spit. But we
were not. Else I had not been writing here to-day. We passed it by fifty
fathom clear. Of course under its lee was our harbor. Battista let go
the halyards in a moment, and the wet sails came rattling down. The old
man, the boy, Battista, and I seized the best sweeps he had left. Two of
us at each, working on the same side, we brought her head round as fast
as she would bear it in that fearful sea. Inch by inch we wrought along
to the smoother water, and breathed free at last, as we came under the
partial protection of the friendly shore.
Battista and his brother then hauled up the sail enough to give such
headway to the boat as we thought our sweeps would control. And we crept
along the shore for an hour, seeing nothing but reeds, and now and then
a distant buffalo, when at last a very hard knock on a rock the boy
ahead had not seen under water started the planks so that we knew that
was dangerous play; and, without more solicitation, the old man beached
the boat in a little cove where the reeds gave place for a trickling
stream. I told them they might land or not, as they pleased. I would go
ashore and get assistance or information. The old man clearly thought I
was going to ask my assistance from the father of lies himself. But he
was resigned to my will,--said he would wait for my return. I stripped,
and waded ashore with my clothes upon my head, dressed as quickly as I
could, and pushed up from the beach to the low upland.
Clearly enough I was in a civilized country. Not that there was a
gallows, as the old joke says; but there were tracks in the shingle of
the beach showing where wheels had been, and these led me to a
cart-track between high growths of that Mediterranean reed which grows
all along in those low flats. There is one of the reeds on the hooks
above my gun in the hall as you came in. I followed up the track, but
without seeing barn, house, horse, or man, for a quarter of a mile,
perhaps, when behold,--
Not the footprint of a man! as to Robinson Crusoe;--
Not a gallows and man hanging! as in the sailor story above named;--
But a railroad track! Evidently a horse-railroad.
"A horse-railroad in Italy!" said I, aloud. "A horse-railroad in
Sybaris! It must have changed since the days of the coppersmiths!" And I
flung myself on a heap of reeds which lay there, and waited.
In two minutes I heard the fast step of horses, as I supposed; in a
minute more four mules rounded the corner, and a "horse-car" came
dashing along the road. I stepped forward and waved my hand, but the
driver bowed respectfully, pointed back, and then to a board on top of
his car, and I read, as he dashed by me, the word
[Greek: Plêron],
displayed full above him; as one may read _Complet_ on a Paris omnibus.
Now [Greek: Plêron] is the Greek for full. "In Sybaris they do not let
the horse-railroads grind the faces of the passengers," said I. "Not so
wholly changed since the coppersmiths." And, within the minute, more
quadrupedantal noises, more mules, and another car, which stopped at my
signal. I entered, and found a dozen or more passengers, sitting back to
back on a seat which ran up the middle of the car, as you might ride in
an Irish jaunting-car. In this way it was impossible for the conductor
to smuggle in a standing passenger, impossible for a passenger to catch
cold from a cracked window, and possible for a passenger to see the
scenery from the window. "Can it be possible," said I, "that the
traditions of Sybaris really linger here?"
I sat quite in the front of the car, so that I could see the fate of my
first friend [Greek: Plêron],--the full car. In a very few minutes it
switched off from our track, leaving us still to pick up our complement,
and then I saw that it dropped its mules, and was attached, on a side
track, to an endless chain, which took it along at a much greater
rapidity, so that it was soon out of sight. I addressed my next neighbor
on the subject, in Greek which would have made my fortune in those old
days of the pea-green settees. But he did not seem to make much of that,
but in sufficiently good Italian told me, that, as soon as we were full,
we should be attached in the same way to the chain, which was driven by
stationary engines five or six stadia apart, and so indeed it proved. We
picked up one or two market-women, a young artist or two, and a little
boy. When the child got in, there was a nod and smile on people's faces;
my next neighbor said to me, [Greek: Plêron], as if with an air of
relief; and sure enough, in a minute more, we were flying along at a
2.20 pace, with neither mule nor engine in sight, stopping about once a
mile to drop passengers, if there was need, and evidently approaching
Sybaris.
All along now were houses, each with its pretty garden of perhaps an
acre, no fences, because no cattle at large. I wonder if the Vineland
people know they caught that idea from Sybaris! All the houses were of
one story,--stretching out as you remember Pliny's villa did, if Ware
and Van Brunt ever showed you the plans,--or as Erastus Bigelow builds
factories at Clinton. I learned afterwards that stair-builders and
slaveholders are forbidden to live in Sybaris by the same article in the
fundamental law. This accounts, with other things, for the vigorous
health of their women. I supposed that this was a mere suburban habit,
and, though the houses came nearer and nearer, yet, as no two houses
touched in a block, I did not know we had come into the city till all
the passengers left the car, and the conductor courteously told me we
were at our journey's end.
When this happens to you in Boston, and you leave your car, you find
yourself huddled on a steep sloping sidewalk, under the rain or snow,
with a hundred or more other passengers, all eager, all wondering, all
unprovided for. But I found in Sybaris a large glass-roofed station,
from which the other lines of neighborhood cars radiated, in which women
and even little children were passing from route to to route, under the
guidance of civil and intelligent persons, who, strange enough, made it
their business to conduct these people to and fro, and did not consider
it their duty to insult the traveller. For a moment my mind reverted to
the contrast at home; but not long. As I stood admiring and amused at
once, a bright, brisk little fellow stepped up to me, and asked what my
purpose was, and which way I would go. He spoke in Greek first, but,
seeing I did not catch his meaning, relapsed into very passable Italian,
quite as good as mine.
I told him that I was shipwrecked, and had come into town for
assistance. He expressed sympathy, but wasted not a moment, led me to
his chief at an office on one side, who gave me a card with the address
of an officer whose duty it was to see to strangers, and said that he
would in turn introduce me to the chief of the boat-builders; and then
said, as if in apology for his promptness,
"[Greek: Chrê xeiuon pareonta philein, ethelonta de pempein.]"
"Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest."
He called to me a conductor of the red line, said [Greek: Xenos], which
we translate guest, but which I found in this case means "dead-head," or
"free," bowed, and I saw him no more.
"Strange country have I come to, indeed," said I, as I thought of the
passports of Civita Vecchia, of the indifference of Scollay's Buildings,
and of the surliness of Springfield. "And this is Sybaris!"
* * * * *
We sent down a tug to the cove which I indicated on their topographical
map, and to the terror of the old fisherman and his sons, to whom I had
sent a note, which they could not read, our boat was towed up to the
city quay, and was put under repairs. That last thump on the hidden rock
was her worst injury, and it was a week before I could get away. It was
in this time that I got the information I am now to give, partly from my
own observations, partly from what George the Proxenus or his brother
Philip told me,--more from what I got from a very pleasing person, the
wife of another brother, at whose house I used to visit freely, and
whose boys, fine fellows, were very fond of talking about America with
me. They spoke English very funnily, and like little school-books. The
ship-carpenter, a man named Alexander, was a very intelligent person;
and, indeed, the whole social arrangement of the place was so simple,
that it seemed to me that I got on very fast, and knew a great deal of
them in a very short time.
I told George one day, that I was surprised that he had so much time to
give to me. He laughed, and said he could well believe that, as I had
said that I was brought up in Boston. "When I was there," said he, "I
could see that your people were all hospitable enough, but that the
people who were good for anything were made to do all the work of the
_vauriens_, and really had no time for friendship or hospitality. I
remember an historian of yours, who crossed with me, said that there
should be a motto stretched across Boston Bay, from one fort to another,
with the words, 'No admittance, except on business.'"
I did not more than half like this chaffing of Boston, and asked how
they managed things in Sybaris.
"Why, you see," said he, "we hold pretty stiffly to the old Charondian
laws, of which perhaps you know something; here's a copy of the code, if
you would like to look over it," and he took one out of his pocket. "We
are still very chary about amendments to statutes, so that very little
time is spent in legislation; we have no bills at shops, and but little
debt, and that is all on honor, so that there is not much
account-keeping or litigation; you know what happens to gossips,--gossip
takes a good deal of time elsewhere,--and somehow everybody does his
share of work, so that all of us do have a good deal of what you call
'leisure.' Whether," he added pensively, "in a world God put us into
that we might love each other, and learn to love,--whether the time we
spend in society, or the time we spend caged behind our office desks, is
the time which should be called devoted to the 'business of life,' that
remains to be seen."
"How came you to Boston," said I, "and when?"
"O, we all have to travel," said George, "if we mean to go into the
administration. And I liked administration. I observe that you appoint a
foreign ambassador because he can make a good stump speech in Kentucky.
But since Charondas's time, training has been at the bottom of our
system. And no man could offer himself here to serve on the school
committee, unless he knew how other nations managed their schools."
"Not if he had himself made school-books?" said I.
"No!" laughed George, "for he might introduce them. With us no professor
may teach from a text-book he has made himself, unless the highest
council of education order it; and on the same principle we should never
choose a bookseller on the school committee. And so, to go back," he
said, "when my father found that administration was my passion, he sent
me the grand tour. I learned a great deal in America, and am very fond
of the Americans. But I never saw one here before."
I did not ask what he learned in America, for I was more anxious to
learn myself how they administered government in Sybaris.
* * * * *
The inns at Sybaris are not very large, not extending much beyond the
compass of a large private house. Mine was kept by a woman. As we sat
there, smoking on the piazza, the first evening I was there, I asked
George about this horse-railroad management, and the methods they took
to secure such personal comfort.
He said that my question cut pretty low down, for that the answer really
involved the study of their whole system. "I have thought of it a good
deal," said he, "when I have been in St. Petersburg, and in England and
America; and as far as I can find out, our peculiarity in everything is,
that we respect--I have sometimes thought we almost worshipped--the
rights, even the notions or whims, of the individual citizen. With us
the first object of the state, as an organization, is to care for the
individual citizen, be he man, woman, or child. We consider the state to
be made for the better and higher training of men, much as your divines
say that the Church is. Instead of our lumping our citizens, therefore,
and treating Jenny Lind and Tom Heenan to the same dose of public
schooling,--instead of saying that what is sauce for the goose is sauce
for the gander,--we try to see that each individual is protected in the
enjoyment, not of what the majority likes, but of what he chooses, so
long as his choice injures no other man."
I thought, in one whiff, of Stuart Mill, and of the coppersmiths.
"Our horse-railroad system grew out of this theory," continued he. "As
long ago as Herodotus, people lived here in houses one story high, with
these gardens between. But some generations ago, a young fellow named
Apollidorus, who had been to Edinburgh, pulled down his father's house
and built a block of what you call houses on the site of it. They were
five stories high, had basements, and so on, with windows fore and aft,
and, of course, none on the sides. The old fogies looked aghast. But he
found plenty of fools to hire them. But the tenants had not been in a
week, when the Kategoros, district attorney, had him up 'for taking
away from a citizen what he could not restore.' This, you must know, is
one of the severest charges in our criminal code.
"Of course, it was easy enough to show that the tenants went willingly;
he showed dumb-waiters, and I know not what infernal contrivances of
convenience within. But he could not show that the tenants had north
windows and south windows, because they did not. The government, on
their side, showed that men were made to breathe fresh air, and that he
could not ventilate his houses as if they were open on all sides; they
showed that women were not made to climb up and down ladders, and to
live on stages at the tops of them; and he tried in vain to persuade the
jury that this climbing was good for little children. He had lured these
citizens into places dangerous for health, growth, strength, and
comfort. And so he was compelled to erect a statue typical of strength,
and a small hospital for infants, as his penalty. That spirited
Hercules, which stands in front of the market, was a part of his fine.
"Of course, after a decision like this, concentration of inhabitants was
out of the question. Every pulpit in Sybaris blazed with sermons on the
text, 'Every man shall sit under his vine and under his fig-tree.'
Everybody saw that a house without its own garden was an abomination,
and easy communication with the suburbs was a necessity.
"It was, indeed, easy enough to show, as the city engineer did, that the
power wasted in lifting people up, and, for that matter, down stairs, in
a five-story house, in one day, would carry all those people I do not
know how many miles on a level railroad track in less time. What you
call horse-railroads, therefore, became a necessity."
I said they made a great row with us.
"Yes," said he, "I saw they did. With us the government owns and repairs
the track, as you do the track of any common road. We never have any
difficulty.
"You see," he added after a pause, "with us, if a conductor sprains the
ankle of a citizen, it is a matter the state looks after. With you, the
citizen must himself be the prosecutor, and virtually never is. Did you
notice a pretty winged Mercury outside the station-house you came to?"
I had noticed it.
"That was put up, I don't know how long ago, in the infancy of these
things. They took a car off one night, without public notice beforehand.
One old man was coming in on it, to his daughter's wedding. He missed
his connection out at Little Krastis, and lost half an hour. Down came
the Kategoros. The company had taken from a citizen what they could not
restore, namely, half an hour."
George lighted another cigar, and laughed very heartily. "That's a great
case in our reports," he said. "The company ventured to go to trial on
it. They hoped they might overturn the old decisions, which were so old
that nobody knows when they were made,--as old as the dancing horses,"
said he, laughing. "They said _time_ was not a thing,--it was a relation
of ideas; that it did not exist in heaven; that they could not be made
to suffer because they did not deliver back what no man ever saw, or
touched, or tasted. What was half an hour? But the jury was pitiless. A
lot of business men, you know,--they knew the value of time. What did
they care for the metaphysics? And the company was bidden to put up an
appropriate statue worth ten talents in front of their station-house, as
a reminder to all their people that a citizen's time was worth
something."
This was George's first visit to me; and it was the first time,
therefore, that I observed a queer thing. Just at this point he rose
rather suddenly and bade me good evening. I begged him to stay, but had
to repeat my invitation twice. His hand was on the handle of the door
before he turned back. Then he sat down, and we went on talking; but
before long he did the same thing again, and then again.
At last I was provoked, and said: "What is the custom of your country?
Do you have to take a walk every eleven minutes and a quarter?"
George laughed again, and indeed blushed. "Do you know what a bore is?"
said he.
"Alas! I do," said I.
"Well," said he, "the universal custom here is, that an uninvited guest,
who calls on another man on his own business, rises at the end of eleven
minutes, and offers to go. And the courts have ruled, very firmly, that
there must be a _bona fide_ effort. We get into such a habit of it,
that, with you, I really did it unawares. The custom is as old as
Cleisthenes and his wedding. But some of the decisions are not more than
two or three centuries old, and they are very funny.
"On the whole," he added, "I think it works well. Of course, between
friends, it is absurd, but it is a great protection against a class of
people who think their own concerns are the only things of value. You
see you have only to say, when a man comes in, that you thank him for
coming, that you wish he would stay, or to take his hat or his
stick,--you have only to make him an invited guest,--and then the rule
does not hold."
"Ah!" said I; "then I invite you to spend every evening with me while I
am here."
"Take care," said he; "the Government Almanac is printed and distributed
gratuitously from the fines on bores. Their funds are getting very low
up at the department, and they will be very sharp on your friends. So
you need not be profuse in your invitations."
* * * * *
This conversation was a clew to a good many things which I saw while I
was in the city. I never was in a place where there were so many
tasteful, pretty little conveniences for everybody. At the quadrants,
where the streets cross, there was always a pretty little sheltered seat
for four or five people,--shaded, stuffed, dry, and always the morning
and evening papers, and an advertisement of the times of boats and
trains, for any one who might be waiting for a car or for a friend.
Sometimes these were votive offerings, where public spirit had spoken in
gratitude. More often they had been ordered at the cost of some one who
had taken from a citizen what he could not repay. The private citizen
might often hesitate about prosecuting a bore, or a nuisance, or a
conceited company officer. But the Kategoroi made no bones about it.
They called the citizen as a witness, and gave the criminal a reminder
which posterity held in awe. Their point, as they always explained it to
me, is, that the citizen's health and strength are essential to the
state. The state cannot afford to have him maimed, any more than it can
afford to have him drunk or ignorant. The individual, of course, cannot
be following up his separate grievances with people who abridge his
rights. But the public accuser can and does.
With us, public servants, who know they are public servants, are always
obliging and civil. I would not ask better treatment in my own home than
I am sure of in Capitol, State-house, or city hall. It is only when you
get to some miserable sub-bureau, where the servant of the servant of a
creature of the state can bully you, that you come to grief. For
instance the State of Massachusetts just now forbids corporations to
work children more than ten hours a day. The _corporations_ obey. But
the overseers in the rooms, whom the corporations employ, work children
eleven hours, or as many as they choose. They would not stand that in
Sybaris.
* * * * *
I was walking one day with one of the bright boys of whom I spoke, and I
asked him, as I had his father, if I was not keeping him away from his
regular occupation. Ought he not be at school?
"No," said he; "this is my off-term."
"Pray, what is that?"
"Don't you know? We only go to school three months in winter and three
in summer. I thought you did so in America. I know Mr. Webster did. I
read it in his Life."
I was on the point of saying that we knew now how to train more powerful
men than Mr. Webster, but the words stuck in my throat, and the boy
rattled on.
"The teachers have to be there all the time, except when they go in
retreat. They take turns about retreat. But we are in two choroi; I am
choros-boy now, James is anti-choros. Choros have school in January,
February, March, July, August, September. Next year I shall be
anti-choros."
"Which do you like best,--off-term or school?" said I.
"O, both is as good as one. When either begins, we like it. We get
rather sick of either before the three months are over."
"What do you do in your off-terms?" said I,--"go fishing?"
"No, of course not," said he, "except Strep, and Hipp, and Chal, and
those boys, because their fathers are fishermen. No, we have to be in
our fathers' offices, we big boys; the little fellows, they let them
stay at home. If I was here without you now, that truant-officer we
passed just now would have had me at home before this time. Well, you
see they think we learn about business, and I guess we do. I know I do,"
said he, "and sometimes I think I should like to be a Proxenus when I am
grown up, but I do not know."
I asked George about this, the same evening. He said the boy was pretty
nearly right about it. They had come round to the determination that the
employment of children, merely because their wages were lower than
men's, was very dangerous economy. The chances were that the children
were over-worked, and that their constitution was fatally impaired. "We
do not want any Manchester-trained children here." Then they had found
that steady brain-work on girls, at the growing age, was pretty nearly
slow murder in the long run. They did not let girls go to school with
any persistency after they were twelve or fourteen. After they were
twenty, they might study what they chose.
"But the main difference between our schools and yours," said he, "is
that your teacher is only expected to hear the lesson recited. Our
teacher is expected to teach it also. You have in America, therefore,
sixty scholars to one teacher. We do not pretend to have more than
twenty to one teacher. We do this the easier because we let no child go
to school more than half the time; nor, even with the strongest, more
than four hours a day.
"Why," said he, "I was at a college in America once, where, with
splendid mathematicians, they had had but one man teach any mathematics
for thirty years. And he was travelling in Europe when I was there. The
others only heard recitations of those who could learn without being
taught."
"I was once there," said I.
* * * * *
The boat's repairs still lingered, and on Sunday little Phil. came round
with a note from his mother, to ask if I would go to church with them.
If I had rather go to the cathedral or elsewhere, Phil. would show me
the way. I preferred to go with him and her together. It was a pretty
little church,--quite open and airy it would seem to us,--excellent
chance to see dancing vines, or flying birds, or falling rains, or other
"meteors outside," if the preacher proved dull or the hymns undevout.
But I found my attention was well held within. Not that the preaching
was anything to be repeated. The sermon was short, unpretending, but
alive and devout. It was a sonnet, all on one theme; that theme pressed,
and pressed, and pressed again, and, of a sudden, the preacher was done.
"You say you know God loves you," he said. "I hope you do, but I am
going to tell you once more that he loves you, and once more and once
more." What pleased me in it all was a certain unity of service, from
the beginning to the end. The congregation's singing seemed to suggest
the prayer; the prayer seemed to continue in the symphony of the organ;
and, while I was in revery, the organ ceased; but as it was ordered, the
sermon took up the theme of my revery, and so that one theme ran through
the whole. The service was not ten things, like the ten parts of a
concert, it was one act of communion or worship. Part of this was due, I
guess, to this, that we were in a small church, sitting or kneeling near
each other, close enough to get the feeling of communion,--not parted,
indeed, in any way. We had been talking together, as we stood in the
churchyard before the service began, and when we assembled in the church
the sense of sympathy continued. I told Kleone that I liked the home
feeling of the church, and she was pleased. She said she was afraid I
should have preferred the cathedral. There were four large cathedrals,
open, as the churches were, to all the town; and all the clergy, of
whatever order, took turns in conducting the service in them. There were
seven successive services in each of them that Sunday. But each
clergyman had his own special charge beside,--I should think of not more
than a hundred families. And these families, generally neighbors in the
town, indeed, seemed, naturally enough, to grow into very familiar
personal relations with each other.
* * * * *
I asked Philip one day how long his brother George would hold his office
of host, or Proxenus. Philip turned a little sharply on me, and asked if
I had any complaints to make, being, in fact, rather a quick-tempered
person. I soothed him by explaining that all that I asked about was the
tenure of office in their system, and he apologized.
"He will be in as long as he chooses, probably. In theory, he remains in
until a majority of the voters, which is to say the adult men and women,
join in a petition for his removal. Then he will be removed at once.
The government will appoint a temporary substitute, and order an
election of his successor."
"Do you mean there is no fixed election-day?"
"None at all," said Philip. "We are always voting. When we stopped just
now I went in to vote for an alderman of our ward, in place of a man who
has resigned. I wish I had taken you in with me, though there was
nothing to see. Only three or four great books, each headed with the
name of a candidate. I wrote my name in Andrew Second's book. He is, on
the whole, the best man. The books will be open three months. No one, of
course, can vote more than once, and at the end of that time there will
be a count, and a proclamation will be made. Then about removal; any one
who is dissatisfied with a public officer puts his name up at the head
of a book in the election office. Of course there are dozens of books
all the time. But unless there is real incapacity, nobody cares.
Sometimes, when one man wants another's place, he gets up a great
breeze, the newspapers get hold of it, and everybody is canvassed who
can be got to the spot. But it is very hard to turn out a competent
officer. If in three months, however, at all the registries, a majority
of the voters express a wish for a man's removal, he has to go out.
Practically, I look in once a week at that office to see what is going
on. It is something as you vote at your clubs."
"Did you say women as well as men?" said I.
"O, yes," said Philip, "unless a woman or a man has formally withdrawn
from the roll. You see, the roll is the list, not only of voters, but of
soldiers. For a man to withdraw, is to say he is a coward and dares not
take his chance in war. Sometimes a woman does not like military
service, and if she takes her name off I do not think the public feeling
about it is quite the same as with a man. She may have things to do at
home."
"But do you mean that most of the women serve in the army?" said I.
"Of course they do," said he. "They wanted to vote, so we put them on
the roll. You do not see them much. Most of the women's regiments are
heavy artillery, in the forts, which can be worked just as well by
persons of less as of more muscle if you have enough of them. Each
regiment in our service is on duty a month, and in reserve six. You know
we have no distant posts."
"We have a great many near-sighted men in America," said I, "who cannot
serve in the army."
"We make our near-sighted men work heavy guns, serve in light artillery,
or, in very bad cases, we detail them to the police work of the camps,"
said he. "The deaf and dumb men we detail to serve the military
telegraphs. They keep secrets well. The blind men serve in the bands.
And the men without legs ride in barouches in state processions.
Everybody serves somewhere."
"That is the reason," said I, with a sigh, "why everybody has so much
time in Sybaris!"
* * * * *
But the reader has more than enough of this. Else I would print my
journal of "A Week in Sybaris." By Thursday the boat was mended. I
hunted up the old fisherman and his boys. He was willing to go where my
Excellency bade, but he said his boys wanted to stay. They would like to
live here.
"Among the devils?" said I.
The old man confessed that the place for poor men was the best place he
ever saw; the markets were cheap, the work was light, the inns were
neat, the people were civil, the music was good, the churches were free,
and the priests did not lie. He believed the reason that nobody ever
came back from Sybaris was, that nobody wanted to.
The Proxenus nodded, well pleased.
"So Battista and his brother would like to stay a few months; and he
found he might bring Caterina too, when my Excellency had returned from
Gallipoli; or did my Excellency think that, when Garibaldi had driven
out the Bourbons, all the world would be like Sybaris?"
My Excellency hoped so; but did not dare promise.
* * * * *
"You see now," said George, "why you hear so little of Sybaris. Enough
people come to us. But you are the only man I ever saw leave Sybaris who
did not mean to return."