CHAPTER III.

I have often wondered at the freshness, loquacity and altogether unreal

tone of the duellists' rooms pending an encounter; and I can only liken

it to the mind of an assiduous chess-player, which still even in dreams

is tilting with ivory knights and banning with puppet bishops. Such

fancies are accepted among duelling men as the real sentiments that move

and govern society. To Lind Mason, who was naturally made of paste-board

and stuffed with bran, they were the breath in his nostrils. He vapored

of the family as if, instead of plain Brown, it had been born in the

purple. Payne on his return had said, "The funk wanted to apologize,"

and that "Lind had a soft thing of it," chaffing his principal not a

little over the prospects of his aunt's generosity.

"Ye-as," said Lind, negligently drawing the long silky moustache and

beard through the hollow of his hand and letting the points drop.

"Woodlawn. We talked it over. 'Marry, my boy,' said the old girl, 'and

settle.' 'All right!' said I, 'aunty: _I'll_ marry, and _you_ settle.'

Payne and I made out a liberal schedule of my liabilities for her lawyer

last night. My motto is, be off at the tap if you can, or a wink before

it, and come down the quarter under the whip. I consider my autograph on

Aunt Fanny good for a thousand any day. T'other day I said to Payne I

wanted the stick and two hoops ($100), and Aunt Fanny just said, 'Double

it, and arrange with your cousin Sue.' Soon as this baggytell is over

little Sue Brown jines the Masons.--Here's to her, gentlemen! and no

heeltaps. No need to say fellows of this party are welcome to our

table;" and he delicately tipped off the wine, saying "he had drunk

better."

"Payne says the fellow will apologize," said one. "What will you do?"

"Well," drawled Mason, dipping a cracker in the fragrant sherry and

munching, "a fellow that saw it all from Mill Springs to Appomattox

doesn't care for these little things. If it was the first time, or even

the second or third, I wouldn't stand it. But after that the thing loses

its gloss and gets to be a confounded bore. You see it's getting up so

early; and there's your man squatting on the grass like a hurt

wild-duck, and all the fellows scared and ugly, and poking at you as if

it was your fault. And the confounded police, and the bother of keeping

out of the way, and maybe lose the spring meeting. It gets to be deuced

low, fellows. No: if the little man will own up and quit annoying

somebody--" with a lazy wink. "I drink to Sue Mason, _née_ Brown,

gentlemen. I don't care: he may get off whole. Of course a written

apology."

"Apology," said Major Johnstone, whose impressible nature went with the

extremists. "My God, sir! is a venerable lady of wealth and fashion--of

the American peerage, by George, sir! American peerage--to be insulted

in an assembly of her nearest relatives, and the base scullion to escape

with a bare 'Sorry for it'? A pocket full of apologies and a back full

of bruises, as Tom Marshall said, by George! Look at Rule 10, Tipperary

Code," slapping Barrington's _Sketches_ emphatically. "No, sir! Such an

example would corrupt American youth."

"Bosh!" said another, who sat on the side of the bed and rocked his legs

alternately as if for a wager. "That rot is past salting down. A lady's

name involved! Our chivalrous principal is right. Honorably adjusted,

satisfactory, etc., is the end of it."

"But a blow?" said the major, like a weathercock in contradictory flaws,

and running over the leaves. "Here is Rule 5--"

"That's Payne," said one, interrupting the major unceremoniously at a

step outside.

"Payne never walked that fast in his life," was the reply. "Payne was

born tired. There's somebody with him."

The door opened, and Deane Lee in gray tweed, from foot to forage-cap

the dashing soldier, saluted. "Honor to report from Captain Nettles," he

said, touching his cap. Military titles prevail on such occasions.

"Will you join us?" said Payne, motioning to the refreshments, as Mason

read the note.

"Don't care if I do. Plain: no cooked drinks for me," said the envoy

briefly.

This struck the major as having a judicial bearing upon the coats of the

stomach. He cocked his chin and began unconsciously to imitate the

dashing stranger.

"An unfortunate affair," said Payne. He had thought it amusing, absurd,

but something in this young fellow impressed him also, and he said it,

and meant it.

"D---- unlucky!" said the other, in much the same tone as if he had said

"lucky." "But my man is all right. He had to hunt me up, or I'd been in

your lines before now." He took the ice from the tumbler, dashed off the

moisture, and ate it like a salamander.

The major was possessed. He whispered behind his hand to his neighbors,

"Never saw but one like him."

"Who?" asked several, for the easy, cool assurance of Bob Nettles's

second affected them all.

The major shook his head and sighed grievously.

"Was he killed?" asked one eagerly.

"Kill him!" said the major in hollow emphasis of scorn: "no, sir."

"Died, then?" suggested another.

"No, sir," said the major: "his worst enemy could not say that of him.

No, he didn't die."

"Drowned?" put in a third, venturing at the major's conundrum.

"No, sir," said the major gutturally. "Water couldn't drown him. It is

not wet enough. Lost."

"Lost!" marvelled his auditors at this sphinx. "How?"

"Married," said the major in basso-profundo, husky with emotion.

Such an ornament lost to the chivalry of duelling accentuated their

admiration of his after-type in Bob's second.

"When I last saw him," continued the major, in the tone of Griffith

describing the last hours of Wolsey--

"Well?" ejaculated all in one voice.

"He was buying seed-corn."

Degradation could no lower go, and in the pause they could hear the blue

fly buzz in the window-pane.

Mason had beckoned Payne aside. The two found that reply a hard nut to

crack. Payne had regarded the duel as a huge hoax, and counted on easily

bluffing the burgher's second. But bluffing those steely nerves yonder,

that stood at ease with a suggestion of military accoutrements, was not

to be thought of. Nor could his principal go out, under the pretext of

controlling the associations of Walter Brown's family, without Walter

Brown's approval.

"For proper reasons, no doubt," said Payne courteously, "your principal

ignores what is, with us, the gravamen of his offence--his behavior in

the house of Mr. Mason's relations."

Pretty well covered for Mr. Payne, but it would not do.

"Don't want to ignore anything," said Deane Lee. "Just don't want

petticoats mixed up in it. My man does not pledge worth a--pyrotechnic."

He had got it in at last, and with a step--a peremptory refusal to

submit to dictation of any kind.

Payne felt outmanœuvred and crowded. He saw Bob Nettles was not to be

bullied out of little Sue, and they must give up that point. "My

principal is disposed to waive that part," said Payne haughtily, "rather

than involve others."

"All right!" said Deane carelessly. "It's not in the regulations--but

come to taps. We want this thing over before reveille. I've got an

infernal mule-team to yank up and down these streets after that."

It was done with the easiest nonchalance, yet Wilde Payne felt he was

bitted and spurred, and the butt of this ridiculous duel might prove to

be the man who had brought it about.

"I don't know where he picked up Deane Lee," said he after his rival

left; "but Deane will fight his man. It isn't going to be such a soft

thing, after all."

"He is only a street-car conductor," said a callow Brown, who looked on,

and thought all this very heroic and fine.

"I don't care," said the major, rising on his crutch, "but if that man

drives a mule, it is a credit, sir--to the mule; and, gentlemen, I wish

you well out of it--I do, by George!" and he stumped off and out of the

room. The major's departure was as significant as the sinking of the

mercury in the sealed tube: it indicated a stormy atmosphere outside,

setting in favor of the other side.

But an incident just then, seeming to confirm some of Mason's vaporing,

created a profound sensation, and so complicated and embarrassed the

duel for that gentleman as to tax all his ingenuity and address to come

out of it with anything like credit. It adds a lustre to his boast that

he was "betting on a certainty" and "intended to put the saddle on the

right horse." A servant presented a card on a tray, with "Lady in

ladies' parlor C wishes to see Captain Mason."

Mason took it up, looked flushed, flattered, more pompous than ever.

"Here, Payne," said he; and the two whispered.

"You'd better not," said Payne critically: "it will compromise you."

"But she knows I am here--meddlesome servant, etc." In fact, Mason was

too flattered by the visit to deny the lady or himself.

"Poor girl!" was whispered about--"desperately attached."--"She needn't

be uneasy: it's the other fellow ought to be looked after."

To explain who this mysterious visitor was we must go back a little.

Sudie arose the morning after her garden-party flushed and feverish,

with a strange consciousness of being unlike herself. She drifted from

room to room; peeped into the parlor, with its fading garlands, in a

little superstitious awe of her last night's vision, and then took to

standing at the gate or looking from the west windows toward the city,

as if she expected some one. But she did not: it was only that all her

anxiety lay there. At 10 A.M. she took the pony carriage to town and

hurried to Aunt Fanny, only to learn that the etiquette of the code had

excluded the dowager's messenger, and that Her Majesty was so incensed

thereat as to resolve to let matters take their course. This by no means

satisfied Sudie. She thought it horrible, wicked. She would see

papa--she had all a child's confidence in papa--and he could stop it.

Passing the hotel, an impulse seized her to appeal to her cousin; for he

was her cousin, Sudie repeated to herself to justify her resolution; and

so, without any formed plan of appeal, she sent up her card. She was

enough confused and embarrassed at her cousin's entrance to have

deceived a wiser man than Lind Mason; but, luckily, he was better at

reading the backs of his cards than a woman's face, and, to his credit,

felt supremely silly.

"Cousin Lind," said the little girl, speaking the first thought in her

mind, "I was going to see papa, and--" and she broke down.

"Hem! Mr. Brown is in the city, ha? Of course," blundered Mason, shy as

an awkward girl to her first lover, and obstinately turning that eye

away from her on which Bob Nettles had left his mark.

"And--and--" hesitated Sudie, with a little shuddering, nervous laugh,

like a smothered cry, "have you and Mr. Nettles met this morning?"

To do Mason justice, he was too artificial and shallow to retain any

resentments. He was only confused at his novel position, and before he

could muster a reply Sudie went on: "Because I want you and him to be

friends," with that tremulous laugh again; "and I should be so mad

if--if he was to--to hurt you."

"By Joe!" thought Lind, "what am I to do if she proposes outright?" He

was terribly scared: no one is so timid as one of these fast, horsey

men in the presence of an innocent, pure-minded girl. The situation was

trying: he thought it was his cue to put his arm about her and say

something; but when he saw how she sat back in the chair, and had tested

his own nerves, he felt he could not do it. Little Sue, therefore, had

it all to herself, recovering courage by her own freedom, without any

conception of what was troubling the thoughts of the great, handsome,

awkward booby before her. "Aunt Fanny wants you to be friends," she

continued, "and so do I."

Mason began to pluck up a little at this. The association of Aunt

Fanny's name suggested that she had talked the matter over with her

niece, as she had with him, and broken the ice for him. He looked over

his shoulder to see if the parlor was clear. She was leaning forward

now, holding out two plump little hands, like a child going to beg, and

with a sly, roguish look too. He thought he could do it now: he would

drop gracefully on one knee and--

And Sudie went on: "Somebody else will be mad too, you don't know." A

half whisper from the roguish pucker of those dimpling lips: "Ma'amselle

Hortense."

The blood rushed to that ensanguined face till it looked like a great

romanete apple: "Hortense?"

"Yes," with a half-dozen mischievous, confidential little nods. "There!

Now you go right straight and see Mr. Nettles, and tell him _I_ sent

you; and if he doesn't behave himself to you, just let _me_ know." And,

nodding intelligence, little Sue rose with a rustle and flutter of

puffs and bows, in childish confidence of having done her whole duty and

stopped that wicked, wicked business.

That skilful card-player Mason was as completely stumped as if some one

had raked down the stakes on a pair of deuces against his exhibit of the

four aces. Nothing but the most gracious condescension and chaste

humility of salutation had passed between him and his aunt's French

maid; yet shrewd little Sudie, with her intuitive woman's instinct, had

shot her arrow in the dark and cloven the wand.

She went out in the innocent simplicity of her childlike faith, and it

was hours before she came to realize how utterly she had failed in

stopping the execution of that deadly purpose.

How often is it the case with her sex that, having no other coin than

the affections, so dear to themselves, they over-value them for others,

and only know from finding them soiled and trampled in the mud how

little they are estimated in the hard and selfish dealings of man with

man! But the little girl went off, happy in her delusion. God bless the

rest of heart from apprehension that it gave her!

But Mason had to slip aside into the hotel bar and drink a mighty jorum

of brandy before he could rejoin his friends. As he thought of all the

confounded annoyances and embarrassments growing out of the little

girl's discovery, including the loss of her hand and fortune, the terse

and pithy brevity of his summing-up of the situation was an epitome of

Spartan eloquence. It was, "D---- it!"

WILL WALLACE HARNEY.

THE DOINGS AND GOINGS-ON OF HIRED GIRLS.

Leave the town and the highway, journey onward deep among the hills, and

in their farthest nooks and crannies you will come to places where the

hired girls are living happily. You will come to places where the hired

girls do not long to be old nor long to be dead--spots where there are

no vulgar, insulting rich, untrained to the management of servants and

ignorant of the routine of good housework--neighborhoods where the maxim

of the ancient noblesse of France, that only the low-born are hard with

their hirelings, still prevails. In Mid New York, for instance, are

regions sweet as Thessaly, hilly, shaggy with woods, and peopled by

descendants of the Puritans bearing old Shakespearian names--Ford, Page,

Peck and Scroop--a yeomanry on whom the rich soil of their present seats

has had a powerful effect: they enjoy their hills in health and mellow

content, and their servants live at ease with them.

The New York farmer of Puritan descent is a patriot. He can never enough

gloat over the number of Britishers his ancestors killed at the battle

of Lexington. He loves politics. He is great at voting. He stands up for

his candidate almost to the fighting-point. Squires Catesby and Plunket

did have a little fight at the Forge Hollow election; not actually

coming to blows--that would be too absurd for men of their figure and

property--but hunching and shouldering each other around the tavern

bar-room until they hunched the stove over and the chairs and tables

upside down. A farmer of their type has a mind busied in operating,

American fashion, on every conceivable topic--you will see such a one in

town, broad-shouldered as an Egyptian statue, matching silk for his wife

after selling a herd of cattle--and this kind of man is not the one to

be "snooping round the house" worrying his servants. His wife is like

himself, a comfortable person to serve. It would be hard to find a more

luxurious woman, one fonder of taking naps and of driving about the

country paying visits--our opulent New York farmer has not the least

suspicion that his wife can walk anywhere--and partly because of a

paucity of fashionable calls and milliners' windows, partly because the

country doctor is such a good one to make her think she needs medicine,

she cultivates a gentle hypochondria, spins talk spider-like from her

own frame, thinks she lives in a sort of human oven where she is in

constant peril of being overdone, and so is tender of her domestics,

lest they be overdone. The rich farmer's wife does not wash trencher nor

scrape dish; she boils not, neither does she skin apple or potato; she

occupies herself with fancy-work that would make Solomon in all his

glory stare. You ought to see her best bedroom: it is a bower of

bonbonnerie of her own make. Its treatment, as an architect would say,

is in the Decorated pocketed style--pockets on the wall for papers;

pockets for rags and scraps; a double pocket for slippers; one for your

watch, one for your comb, one for lamplighters, one for burnt matches;

ever so many others for what you can't guess; and all beaded, bugled,

tasselled and embroidered to form a perfect zodiac of splendors.

Though the country wife is kind to her domestics, she has a knack of

getting the best out of them. The girl who scorches things and boils tea

as if some incantation of double, double toil and trouble, fire burn and

teapot bubble, had got into her head--the girl who stands like a

Stoughton bottle and bawls "Ma'am!" whenever she is spoken to--the slow

girl who can't tell time, forgets to put on the teakettle, and never

gets beyond "one I, one--two I, two," on the kitchen clock--the small

servant with the bad cold who _will_ sit by the parlor fire coughing,

snuffing and breathing hard--the girl like an overgrown man who slobbers

dish-water on the floor and steps in it--the Deutsche girl who spoils

the parlor clock turning it upside down to dust it thoroughly,--these

and worse become reliable people under the sway of the old-fashioned

country housewife. The Deutsche girl becomes a paragon in the farmhouse,

quickly falling into Yankee ways and picking up Yankee kitchen phrases,

and turning them with a bold originality. "Them clothes is bone dry,"

says the Deutsche girl. "Oh land! yes: they got a bone drying to-day. I

gave them clothes a bone rubbing and a bone boiling, and to-morrow

they'll get a bone ironing, you bet," says she. Next to her rank the

Dane and the Swede. The Irish girl is never a congenial inmate of the

farmhouse. The Irish girl is too noisy and too much given to lying. The

last might be endured--the farmer's wife would rather hear an Irish girl

tell forty lies than sing one song--but the noise she makes talking to

the butcher's boy, the peddler, the essence-man and the ash-gatherer is

insufferable; and when the Irish rag-merchant bursts open the kitchen

door roaring, "God bless you! you're a real lady; got any rags? don't

sell to them theivin' Jews, they're villains; sold your rags to a man

that pays more than me? divil a man in the county pays more than me,"

why, the farmhouse quiet is torn to ribbons. And then the Irish girl is

cross to visitors, who form the solace and charm of country life. "I

wants no lady-visitors around me; they makes too much bodderin' wid

towels and wather; they're always a-washin' of theirselves. They wants a

clean towel to every one of their tin fingers: they're afraid us gurrels

sha'n't earn our wages. Give me men for my money: they ain't always

a-cleanin' of theirselves," growls the Irish girl.

No girl of any species can compare with an oldish American hired girl.

Give Sar' Ann her due. She works at a spanking pace; she is "poison

clean;" she can do up a shirt fit for a funeral, and she is a dabster at

cooking. In butchering or in haying and harvesting she will pitch in and

work without a murmur until she is pale and damp with weariness, and at

such times will let her hair go until her head looks like Encke's comet,

one halo of frowse, with a frowsy knob in its periphery. Still, she will

put up with no asperity from her mistress: "the foodle ages" are done

with, look you! as to Sar' Ann. Let her mistress once reprimand her, she

turns the tables on that lady slap, dab. "It's a poor story," ejaculates

Sar' Ann, "for you to talk so, Mis' Fife. I've dug and delved for you

six year, and run my daylights out of me, and I won't do it no longer.

It's jaw, jaw, jaw with you till I'm worn to a shadder. I've spunked up

now, Mis' Fife, and I'll light out. I never crep' nor crawled to nobody,

and I won't begin now. I'll throw my dishcloth right smack up the

chimbly, and I'll clear." If you have a servant who understands her

rights and business better than you do yours, where are you? "Why, there

you are," as the man in the play says.

In the farmhouse kitchen you sometimes find a girl rare, now-a-days,

outside of old portraits, and one seen only in spots as sequestered as

the haunts of the deer and wild-duck. She has hair of a burnished copper

color, eyes so fair they reflect crystal sparkles of light from their

lashes, a pure skin, round cheeks, a delicate cocked-up nose, a chin all

weakness and a look of wistful propitiation. Another girl peculiar to

country kitchens, not so rare, but delicious, is a fresh, dark nymph of

a temperament both gay and imperturbable. This one has almost perfect

beauty--black hair that should be crowned with water-cresses, black eyes

with a thrilling glance, and a sudden, frank, enchanting smile. Perhaps

you will say her nose and lips are a line too heavy: there is no

skimping in her outlines. The country-people never find out that she is

handsome. "Adeline would be quite handsome if she was not so dark," say

they.

A well-to-do farmhouse, where the work is "done up" early, is a pleasant

place to work in. Adeline has an hour of liberty every day in which she

may stand in the door "dressed up," looking out over the meadows, or run

to The Corners to "borry a teaspoonful of soda," or look over a

newspaper. If Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoigne Cecil, marquis of Salisbury

(what a sound that has!), were the farmer's guest, Adeline would

condescend to talk to him during this hour when she is waiting for

tea-time. "I guess you feel pretty lonesome over here," she would say;

and when he replied that he felt "like a crumb of bread at the bottom of

a trowsers pocket," as he probably would, she would try to amuse him

with innocent rustic familiarity. It never occurs to her that she is not

as good as "them kings" or anybody else, she has such an idea of her own

smartness and respectability. At five o'clock she sits down to tea with

her mistress. The men-folks take supper after milking is done, the

farmer supping with his men that he may talk over the harvest. When

there is company the hired people have all the good things

going--jelly-cake sixteen streaks deep, floating islands, preserves,

tarts, pound-sweet apples boiled in sweet cider, boiled tongue,

inconceivable pickles, cabbage salad--everything. After a company supper

the hired man is just able to crawl out and perch himself on the

dooryard fence, where he sits blown up as by hydraulic pressure until

bedtime brings him the deep satisfaction of a hired man's sleep.

A circumstance that makes farmhouse servitude agreeable is, that the

hired girl's friends are welcome there. Her mother comes often to see

her. This interesting old woman has a face dried down as if to last for

ages, strong gray hair and a smile that drives back a score of wrinkles

in her cheeks, being "tough as a biled owl." She wears a black bombazine

dress, and under it a heavy quilted petticoat, in which she invariably

sleeps, goodness gracious only knows why. She comes in with the remark,

"Sorry to hender;" she calls flowers "blummies," houses, "housen,"

bouquets, "beaupots;" terminates her assertions with "'sfurzino" ("as

far as I know"), and talks with a muffled yang-yang, as if she had an

invisible tumor at the end of her nose. Her observations would remind

you of something in Browning's _Aristophanes' Apology_--

You too, my Chrusomelolthian-Phaps

Girl-goldling-beetle-beauty,

for example. Her conversation has the effect of hasheesh for lengthening

the apparent duration of time: the Happy Thought man would call it dry

as an extinct volcano; it drives everybody to the wall; is a perfect

battering-ram for that--all talk and no wool, you know. She is

perpetually finding mares' nests and getting news by the "grapevine

telegraph," and she is always looking for signs in the air, in the

embers, in candle-snuff, in empty teacups, as if mysterious laws like

Kepler's threaded the universe and she knew the clue to them. If the cat

turns her tail to the fire, the hired girl's mother thinks something

will happen. She has a great deal of trouble. "Trouble sticks to me,"

says she. She keeps turkeys which are creatures that assert their

American origin by running away to the woods and going wild at every

opportunity, and a respectable old lady in cap and spectacles cannot

chase wild turkeys through the woods; besides, they insist on roosting

in her neighbors' cherry trees, a proceeding sure to kill the trees. And

she keeps a cow with a genius for opening gates. Her cow has a habit of

standing meditatively before a garden gate swinging her tail, but

suddenly, after looking cautiously round, she will hook one horn into

the gate by a quick twirl of her head, and by giving it a series of

searching shakes will unfasten the latch, after which she will shoulder

herself into the garden and take off its cream in great content. These

facts are calculated to inflict a wound on neighborly peace not so deep

as a well nor so wide as a church-door, but all the king's horses and

all the king's men could not make it whole again. The hired girl's

mother keeps hens too, and being a lone woman lets them run round the

house for company. In winter you will be surprised to see a hen's face

looking from her parlor window with an air of being at home.

The hired girl's sister and sister's husband also come frequently to see

her, riding in an old wagon drawn by a large, gray, famished horse that

devours the farmer's oats by the bushel. The sister's husband is a

carpenter by trade. He usually has a large boil or carbuncle on his arm

that gives him leisure, and he sits by the kitchen fire with his chair

tilted back, rubbing a grease spot on the wall from his bushy black hair

and getting redder and redder in the face, talking about his boil until

his head looks like a lampwick that has burned too long and needs

snuffing. They stay until the sisters begin to quarrel. "Your coffee is

dish-water and your gravy paste," sneers the hired girl's sister before

she goes, alluding to the fact that thin coffee and fried pork gravy, in

which are lumps that break on the tongue and fill the mouth with dry

flour, are the vulnerable points of the farmhouse breakfast.

When there is a young girl in the kitchen, she is on good terms with the

jingle-legged boys of the farm. She is interested in their pets,

especially in that funny one of the bear tribe that has the head of a

fox with shaggy whiskers round his sharp visage, and that sits on his

hind legs and holds his food in his hands and looks around him when he

eats, and that makes friends so insinuatingly with the puppies, kittens

and ducks until he finds a chance to devour them--the raccoon. Of

evenings, when the barefoot boys sit on the kitchen lounge tired with

their long day's work, yet scuffling and knocking their elbows and knees

together, she keeps up an incessant tittering with them. And in the

beginning of the season, when they clear out the leavings of last year's

pease, beans and seed-corn from the garret, she has a good time with the

boys a-dodging the wasps that fly through the garret singing their bass

buzz and carrying blobs of mud like boxing-gloves on their feet, and

taking such irregular zig-zags their course cannot be foreseen. She

wastes her time then watching quivering fights between spiders and

unfortunate wasps that have become entangled in cobwebs among the

rafters. "She has found a te-he's nest with a lot of ha-ha's eggs in

it," says the farmer's wife, listening at the foot of the garret-stairs.

"That girl is not worth her keep." The girl has another gala-day with

the boys if the bees swarm in May: that brings a mild jollity to the

house, because

A swarm of bees in May

Is worth a load of hay;

In June

Is worth a silver spoon;

In July

It ain't worth a fly.

She thinks it is fun to see the bees make a rush at the hired man

blundering about in the way, and when he throws his hat at them,

thinking to fool them, and sets to whipping his own ears, and the wise

creatures settle in his hair, and the boys madly whisk hay in the air

for his salvation, she "laughs like ten christenings."

Much farmhouse work has a trace of pleasure. Such is going a-greening in

mornings of the still season before grasshoppers chirp or moths flutter

or bats whir or dewdrops patter--mornings when people look up and repeat

the distich,

Mackerel sky! mackerel sky!

It won't be long wet, and it won't be long dry.

While the girl gathers skokeweed, milkweed, dock and dandelion from the

fields, deerweed from the corners of the fence that runs around the

woods, cowslip from the fragrant swamp, and adder's tongue and

crinkle-root from the black forest earth, to make a dish loved by women

and hated by men, she sees the airy attacks of crows upon a hawk, and

his escape from them by sailing up, up, in circles delightful to

contemplate for their height and immensity to altitudes his enemies

cannot attain. At times she is near enough to a hawk to catch one glance

from his bright, observant, defiant eye--a different glance from that of

the caged bird. At times she finds an owl dreaming on the edge of a

wood, and gazes long into its strange, deep, contemplative, satisfying

eyes, and recollects the boys say an owl knows whether a hunter's gun is

loaded or not. She sees the crows make an attack on the owl too, rushing

upon it with a wild "ha! ha!" of multitudinous laughter and clattering

of wings that are met with still indifference, for the owl knows that

not one dares venture within reach of its iron claw and bending beak.

And, ah, too rarely, she beholds an eagle on the dry branch of a tall

pine. He, like the owl, encounters with nonchalance the insolent hate

of the crows, who caw, flap their wings about his head and perch around

him in myriads. When he rises, as he waves his broad and long wings in

the leisurely movements that plunge him so swiftly through the blazing

sky, the eagle will grasp a crow in his talons and drop it dead on the

plain, where the girl picks it up, a mass of crushed feathers.

To go blackberrying is a fête. It falls on a day when the morning

meadows, veiled in cobwebs strung with drops of dew, assert that though

The wind may alter twenty ways,

A tempest cannot blow.

It may blow north, it still is warm;

Or south, it still is clear;

Or east, it smells like a clover-farm;

Or west, no thunder fear.

They go in straw hats and sun-bonnets, with tinkling milkpails and

buckets in their wagon, and driving the sleek bay brood mare as

carefully as if she were crammed with nitro-glycerine and would blow up

at a touch. They travel merrily along a road that is nothing but "the

bare possibility of going somewhere;" they pass through a pair of bars;

they follow a lonely farm-track; they stop in a stump-lot, where they

leave the mare in a doze, and, crossing the light baked earth of the

clearing still covered with puff-balls and the dry stalks and kexes of

forest plants, they dive into the berry-patch, a steep gulf of briers

terraced by former berry-seekers. As they pick their way downward in the

hot sunshine, the pealing sound of waters comes up to meet them through

dense woods beneath their feet, for a broad, dark, perfumed stream,

margined with pebbles and yeasty and barmy with foam, rushes through the

bottom of the ravine. Refreshing is its odor when the berry-pickers

reach it: they quaff its moist breath as one would drink some

melanagogue, some old medicine able to cure sorrow or fear. The sight of

its heavy verdure and of its gurges heaped high with froth lifts them

like immortal thoughts. Half an hour of skipping stones on the water, a

lunch on a rock, a drive homeward with their wagonload of fruit, and the

day's work is done.

There is a ball in summer for the hired girl's delectation. You should

stand in the village street and look up at the lighted tavern ball-room,

and listen to the thundering floor. You would see the heads of the

village tailor, harness-maker and photographer bobbing up and down; the

hired man's head, with its heavy forelock whipping his forehead; the

white brow and swarthy cheeks of the farm-boy leaping above the rest;

and the hired girl's rosy face shaken up with scores of other young

girls' faces, wagging, whirling, swaying, in delirious arcs and

parabolas, and all wearing a perturbed and anxious expression, as if

they were hard put to it to keep track of the fiddler's "Swing pardners

once and a half; all sashay; allemand left," and so on. The hired girl

dances "every heat," and at half-past three rides home through a

landscape like a line from Milton, giving a vast idea of night and

darkness and the stillness brooding over a woody, pastoral country. As

she lifts the kitchen latch she sees a line of citron-green light behind

the eastern hills, and

The curled moon

Is like a little feather

Fluttering far down the gulf.

Later comes the hired man on foot, having run the risk of being "chawed

up" by farmhouse dogs for a mile and a half. The two seek their beds

through Saharas of darkness in woodhouse, kitchen, back entry and back

stairs, and at five are both up milking and milk-skimming.

Going to funerals is a heart's delight for the hired girl. She relishes

the ride in fine weather, the good funeral sermon, the sight of other

people's best clothes and furniture, the touch of tragedy we all like in

life, the cheerful reaction after the solemnity, and the staving good

supper she cooks when they come home.

"Bill, go up to Ford Hill and find out about that funeral," is her

entreaty on the eve of the event.

Bill has been raking with the horse-rake, or, worse, mowing pease all

day. Whatever you have to do in this world, if you have ever mowed

pease, that you will acknowledge to be the hardest work you have ever

done. Bill is tired. There is a hole in the toe of his boot into which a

stiff pea-straw has thrust itself once in five minutes all day--a

circumstance exhausting to the nervous system of a hired man. And he had

the heifer to hunt before milking. The old cows wait at the bars to come

up, but the heifer stays a mile away at the top of the pasture. Bill can

see her every night lying with her ears pricked up against the sky, and

never stirring until she feels a pebble against her forehead. Then she

gallops homeward as if remembering that Bill's motto is a kick in time

saves nine. However, Bill likes to accommodate. "I'm off like a

pot-leg," says he.

"What time is it to be?" asks the hired girl when he returns.

"I forgot to ask," he replies.

"Who's a-going to preach?"

"Nobody said," is the answer.

"Is it at the house or church?"

"I didn't think to find out," returns he.

"Well, you _are_ a nimshi!" declares she.

"Go yourself next time," rejoins he.

"I wish I had your wooden head for a chopping-bowl," says she.

"Gaul darn it! you're never suited," says he.

"Needn't get your Dutch up: we're going together. You may depend on

takin' on us to that funeral: him and her is going," says she.

"Walking is too good for you, by thunder!" says he.

"It's a sin to be as mad as hops at nothing," says she.

"I'm as much of a angel as you be: put a pair of wings on you, you'd be

a hen turkey," says he.

"I ain't a goose: I've got a head on me, Bill Blowers."

"So has a pin."

"If I'm a pin, you let me be: children and fools shouldn't play with

edge tools. I'm a pin that'll go to that funeral, then. It'll be a good

funeral--singing and everything right up to the handle."

"Plague take it! I knowed how it would be when I started on the arrant,"

he grumbles.

"You're blue as a whetstone now, but a couple of fritters big as

rhinoceroses on your plate to-morrow night will set you up again, I

guess," she says.

The hired man has a monstrous inaptitude for doing an errand. The time

he spends going to the Green to get the horses shod is enormous. He can

be depended on for nothing but to come home across lots when the

dinner-horn blows.

Said the farmer to his hired man, "Go to the Holler and bring the square

immediately."--"That saws my legs off," he added soon after, seeing

"Square" Catesby pounding along the road toward the farm with a face of

great importance and concern, the hired man in full swing behind,

evidently bringing him.

Melvine, a fat, lazy farmer--so fat he had lost his voice, probably

inside of him somewhere--while dozing away a winter afternoon yawned to

such an immoderate degree that he dislocated his jaw. The hired man was

despatched to the village for a doctor, and in the course of revolving

ages returned, without the doctor. "Where is the doctor?" cried the

folks. "He wasn't to hum," replied the hired man.--"Misery to tell!

Didn't you bring one? Go back and get one," shouted they. The hired man

mogged off, hitched up again, and after an interminable period, during

which Melvine cast figurative ashes on his bald head (if they had been

actual wood-ashes and "lively" he could not have suffered worse), did

bring a doctor. The doctor gave Melvine's jaw a tap: it flew into place.

Here pause: trouble no kind heart with the hired man's fate when Melvine

regained the use of his jaw.

The hired girl's autumn and winter beam with long evenings of leisure,

when neighbors drop in for talk, games and stories go round, and

spitzenbergs and gillyflowers, nutcakes, cider, and butternuts that make

cider taste wonderfully delicious, are enjoyed. In farm-houses among the

hills games are played that were known to the hearths of the Angles.

"Saddleback" is one. The farmer takes a brand from the fire, saying,

"Robin's alive--as live as a bee:

If he dies in my hand, you may saddleback me;"

and gives it to his next neighbor, who repeats the verse and hands the

brand to his neighbor; and thus it goes round the circle. He in whose

hand the brand goes out ('tis the hired man, of course, who never can

scramble through his verse half fast enough) must be blind-folded and

guess what objects are held before him, all he guesses wrong to be

placed on his back at the end of his guessing. Then he lies face down on

the floor, while kitchen tables and chairs, skillets, pokers, tongs,

frying-pans, the bread-board, the rolling-pin, the egg-beater, all are

piled on his back; after which he rises slowly and overturns the things

with a house-quaking crash which is rather interesting to hear and see.

Antique stories that were never written, or, if at all, were written in

dead languages that tell no tales at the present time, fill the lapse of

the winter evening until it is time honest folks were in bed and thieves

a-jogging. Listen to this: it has the flavor of a sip of mulse from a

yew-tree keg. It was told among the Druids, maybe, long ago in gray-lit

ages a thousand years before the mediæval darkness, when King Cymbeline

was building his city of Warwick, and his fair daughter Imogen was

having adventures in a cavern. Call it _How Cunning paid better than

Industry_.

Richard was a hard-working, saving farmer: his brother Ned was a lazy

lout. Ned's cow died, and he hung the cowskin up in the barn to dry, too

lazy to carry it to market. After the cowskin was dried up, Ned started

for town to sell it. On the way, feeling lazy, he wrapped himself in his

cowskin and went to sleep in a barn's hay-mow. Night came, and some

robbers with a lantern entered the barn to count their gold. Ned with a

groan rolled himself down from the mow, horns, hoofs and tail, and the

robbers fled in terror, leaving their money behind. "Where did you get

your gold?" asked Richard, seeing his brother's treasure.--"I sold my

cowskin for a penny a hair," answered Ned. Then Richard killed his cows,

dried their skins and took them to market. Enraged at not selling them,

he fell upon his brother, tied him in a bag and took him to the river to

drown him. Before throwing him in he thought he would give Ned a good

licking; so he went to the woods to get some withes. While he was gone a

man with a flock of sheep came by, who, seeing Ned struggling in the bag

on the river-bank, asked, "What are you doing in the bag?"--"Going to

heaven," replied Ned.--"How is that?" questioned the man.--"You get in

here and you will see," said Ned. The man untied the bag, and took Ned's

place therein. Ned tied him up, and drove the sheep off to market. When

Richard returned from the woods he gave the shepherd in the bag a

basting, threw him into the river, and after the last bubble had risen

to the surface went home, where he found Ned counting a pile of gold.

"Whence that treasure?" asked Richard.--"The bubbles you saw when you

drowned me turned into sheep, and I took them to town and sold them,"

quoth Ned.

As a rule, the hired girl and the hired man are not good friends: he

derides her, and she scorns him. "I do expise that Bill Blowers: he

don't know beans when the bag's untied. He's as bashful as nothing,"

says she. She likes the farm-hand by the day: she often visits his

cotland on the edge of a woods. He really is a man to respect, knows a

reason for the crooks in the mully scythe and in the light cradle's

snath, and can tell the time of day by holding his hoe-handle straight

in the sunshine and looking at its shadow on the ground. The hired girl

particularly hates the Scotch hired man, a fellow with a face like a

wig-block, white hair and eyebrows, and a working-suit made apparently

of old snuff-rags and flatiron-holders. He keeps his eye on the

blue-ringed cider pitcher of winter evenings, and, to the huge disgust

of his comrades, drinks up the vial of cider vinegar placed in the pail

with the boiled potatoes and sweet, buttery pork which form their lunch

when they go to the forest chopping. Ralph Waldo Emerson says that an

awkward man is graceful when he is asleep or at work or agreeably

amused. It is perfectly evident that Emerson has never seen the Scotch

hired man. When _he_ is asleep his knurly limbs are twisted to an

indescribable pitch, his right elbow under his head, his left in the

small of his back; when at work he humps himself out of all proportion;

and when agreeably amused he canters about as does a new-born calf with

its legs thrust out at different angles.

The hired girl does fall in love with the English hired man on occasion.

"Stay me with flagons and comfort me with apples, for I am sick of

love!" cries the farmer's wife then. 'Tis a fine thing for the hired

man. He escapes the miseries human beings have to endure going

courting--the "slicking up," the hair-oiling, the blacking of wrinkly,

turn-up-toed fine boots, the wearing of a fine shirt that must have been

made to fit a pelican, it is so bulgy-bosomed, and the awful and

stiffening sensations a man feels when he goes into a stark neat parlor

to see a girl. He does his courting with rolled-up sleeves and the dust

of the bean-thrashing in his hair. The English hired man is a prize for

the girl. When first he comes to America he wears coarse linen, heavy

shoes, corduroys and a pair of broad, inelastic, red and white

suspenders, capable of sustaining several tons, that he bought in

Liverpool before sailing. He eats a leg of mutton and potatoes to match

at a sitting; he slips the half of a custard pie on to his plate, and

takes down a whole "boiled Indian" like smoke if it stands at his hand.

He ignores salt-spoons, sugar-spoons and butter-knives, and, if the

truth must be told, cleans his knife in his mouth. (The man whom

Professor Proctor, the astronomer, saw at Des Moines putting his knife

down his throat and sticking it into the butter, and wrote home to the

_Gentleman's Magazine_ about, was an English hired man on his travels.)

Nevertheless, living among decent people corrects these blemishes in the

Englishman, and his merits soon shine undimmed. He has a hale

countenance; he has length of limb, breadth of grasp, glorious

plenitudes of health, English self-conceit, the taste for toil and

distaste for pleasure; and he has a talent for economizing. He carries

his money around until it is worked into a hard ball in his pocket-book,

so that when he wants to lend some he has to peel it off. Vast are the

revenues of parsimony. "Sense and economy must rule in a world that is

made of sense and economy." The English hired man is the first of

adventurers. His wages are waiting for him; his farm is prepared; bees,

beeves, orchards and fields of wheat are his for the taking. The hired

girl marries him, and her career ends in a blaze of happiness and

prosperity.

MARY DEAN.

THE CHEF'S BEEFSTEAK

On the morning of the twenty-fifth of February, Mr. Nibby glanced out of

the window and unhesitatingly pronounced himself the most miserable man

in Mentone. There is a certain savage joy in such a conviction of

supreme wretchedness, and Mr. Nibby, while he called himself the most

miserable of men, experienced a feeling of satisfaction and was

conscious of a pre-eminence among his fellow-creatures. At the same

moment Fräulein Rottenhöfer looked forth from the window above, her

blond hair dishevelled, her eyes red with weeping, and wrung her hands

with a gesture of passionate despair. "Oh, why was I ever born?" she

sighed.

To a casual and philosophical observer the disquiet of these two people

might have seemed sufficiently perplexing, unless he had remembered that

our world lies within ourselves, and not in external circumstance. They

happened to gaze from their respective windows at the same time, with

this abstracted aspect, unaware of their mutual propinquity and

unacquainted with each other's history: the two stories of the hotel

might well have represented separate worlds. Fräulein Rottenhöfer had

travelled from Bonn to Mentone in the train of that distinguished

invalid the Baroness von Merk: Mr. Nibby was a forlorn waif from the New

World. He wore at this hour an Oriental dressing-gown of gorgeous hues,

but he had laid aside his cigar unsmoked, and his face was sallow with

illness as he presented it to the sun's pitiless inspection.

The beauty of the scene on which Fräulein Rottenhöfer looked with that

hand-wringing of desperation, and Mr. Nibby below stairs, in the

gorgeous dressing-gown, surveyed so dolefully, is unsurpassed on that

coast of enchantment, the Riviera--realm of pure skies, purple mountains

capped by glittering snow-peaks, the smoky gray of olive-orchards, and

gleaming sea acquiring the splendor of melting jewels in the glow of

fiery sunsets. The Hôtel des Jasmins was a small establishment of

exquisite elegance and the highest reputation: its fame for select

privacy, an irreproachable cuisine and lovely surroundings may be said

to have gone forth to all lands. The _chef_ was known to be an artist

for whose valuable services the proprietors of other mansions had basely

plotted and conspired, as the Hôtel des Jasmins was kept by a woman;

but, fortunately, their evil endeavors had been thus far frustrated by

the devotion of the great man to madame's interests. Countless nobles

had appended their names to the glorious record of the office register:

Belgian counts, French marquises and German princes had all been

sheltered beneath this roof and reflected lustre on the name of the

hotel. The suite of rooms through which plain, republican Mr. Nibby now

prowled like an unhappy ghost had once been tenanted by an English lord,

who had been kind enough to depart this life in the state bed.

"What shall I try next?" quoth Mr. Nibby gloomily, thrusting his hands

deep into the pockets of the dressing-gown. Then he opened the sash and

leaned one elbow on the window-ledge.

The whole garden sparkled with the morning freshness. Marble steps led

down to the green sward; the balustrade was draped in a luxuriant mantle

of heliotrope that loaded the air with the fragrance of clustering

blossoms; the beds of roses and geranium swept like a wave of color in

the direction of those nooks of shrubbery where the fervent heat of

noonday was tempered by a canopy of delicate foliage. Mr. Nibby's eye

roved languidly over the fountain with its column of silvery spray and

gushing spouts formed by the gaping mouths of grotesque heads. Mr. Nibby

detested that fountain: its babbling music kept him awake at night.

Beyond the garden was a margin of rustling palms and a glimpse of blue

Mediterranean sea. If any aspect of Nature could lure forth a man into

the balmy beauty of a perfect day, it must be such a vision of

loveliness as this one--the garden blooming with a Southern warmth of

color and richness of perfume, that margin of palms affording views of

the sea--a crystal shield--and on the other side a reach of orange

plantation, the boughs powdered with snowy blossoms.

The weak human clay asserted itself instead, and Mr. Nibby merely

groaned. He had passed a sleepless night; he was wretchedly ill; and, so

far from improving his health by journeying in Europe, as he had hoped

to do, he now looked back regretfully to the days when he suffered from

mild dyspepsia in his native land. Constant nausea had afflicted the

unfortunate gentleman since he came to the Mediterranean shore and took

up his residence at the charming Hôtel des Jasmins, where madame made

out the most extortionate bills, although he subsisted on the sparsest

diet.

"I might be poisoned," soliloquized Mr. Nibby with another groan.

Then his idle glance fell on two persons with a suddenly awakened

interest. The chef appeared for a moment at an opening in the

shrubbery, and then was to be discerned strolling down a sequestered

path in the direction of a kitchen-garden, where he finally paused and

became absorbed in the contemplation of various hot-beds. The mighty

artist possessed the beauty so largely bestowed by capricious Nature on

his class in France and Italy. His bearing was dignified, his features

perfect, his form as finely proportioned as that of the classical

athlete; a silky black moustache drooped to his firm chin; his eye was

large, tranquil and lustrous, reflecting all things and revealing

nothing. He wore his linen cap and apron with grace, and his feet were

encased in slippers of green carpet.

"He must be the head-cook of whom madame is so proud," murmured Mr.

Nibby. "I have half a mind to call him and inquire of him if he could

make me some honest gruel of Indian meal, well salted."

The second person was no other than Fräulein Rottenhöfer, her blond hair

smoothed and her outward aspect composed.

"Why, that is the very girl I helped on the Cologne boat!" exclaimed Mr.

Nibby with reviving animation as he put on his eye-glass.

What a light figure had the Fräulein in a blue muslin gown, with a black

velvet ribbon about her throat! How pretty the sunshine rendered those

fair tresses, piled high over a cushion on the top of her head, which

left the low, broad forehead and round face fully revealed! She walked

rapidly toward the hot-beds, where the chef lingered with a sprig of

parsley in his hand. That celebrated artist, although absorbed in a

professional reverie over certain herbs, became aware of the approach of

maidenly charms and doffed his cap.

The Fräulein disliked excessively the task assigned her. She was a

gentlewoman by birth, shy, sensitive and proud, now dependent for bread

on the whims of that wicked old woman, the baroness. The latter had said

on this particular morning, as she sat up in bed to sip her chocolate,

looking like a witch, "Fräulein Rottenhöfer, you will have the kindness

to present my compliments to the chef of this hotel, and tell him I

approve of his hare ragoût. He may serve it more frequently for my

déjeuner."

The Fräulein had flushed uneasily, and murmured, "Perhaps Fritz or

Margret could do it better."

Whereupon the baroness, who seemed to exist solely for the pleasure of

tormenting those dependent on her caprices, had rolled one black eye at

the young girl and rejoined, "You will do it personally, and to-day,

understand. Tut! doubtless you often gossip with the chef."

The Fräulein winced and compressed her lips. She, a born gentlewoman

reduced to distressing poverty, was accused of gossiping with the hotel

chef, like any other servant! However, she had watched her opportunity,

dreading exceedingly to seek the kitchens, and Fate had sent him out to

the hot-beds in order to be waylaid. She made her little speech

concerning the ragoût, and the chef laid his hand on his heart,

declaring that the lady baroness was too kind in praising his poor

efforts. Then, as the Fräulein was about to turn away, a softer

expression beamed from his fine, dark eyes, the tones of his voice

acquired the caressing intonation of Southern races, and this knight of

the copper stew-pan desired to know if mademoiselle herself had a

penchant for any particular dish. She was young, pretty and amiable,

ready to smile if the baroness would only permit, as she did now while

assuring the chef that _all_ his efforts pleased her. She tripped back

to the hotel, having accomplished the mission, and met full shock the

spectacled glance of Mr. Nibby as he stood in the window, eye-glass on

nose and Oriental dressing-gown glowing like the plumage of a tropical

bird. The Fräulein blushed, hesitated, walked on a pace, and paused,

evidently recognizing him.

"I hope you are better to-day," she said in careful English, then

vanished quickly through the door.

Mr. Nibby was profoundly interested. He forgot how he felt for ten

minutes at least. This was the very girl he had assisted on the Cologne

boat in the autumn. The service rendered was a trifling one: her pocket

had been picked coming on board the steamer; she was alone and

frightened; evidently the official was sceptical as to her story, when

Mr. Nibby stepped in opportunely, paid for another ticket and took the

young girl under his own protection to the extent of frowning upon the

advances of certain other tourists of a pronounced type. She had

explained with simplicity and dignity of manner that she was journeying

to Bonn for the purpose of applying to a great lady for the position of

companion, and had only just quitted the school where she was educated.

Then she had gone ashore at Bonn with shyly-expressed thanks, and Mr.

Nibby, good Samaritan by the way, had been swept on by the Rhine to

distant Mayence. Here she was again, at Mentone, tripping through that

tropical garden with its palms, oranges, and mantling heliotrope, with

the sunshine playing over her blond hair and fair face, the blue muslin

robe a bright and charming element of color.

The garçon appeared with Mr. Nibby's déjeuner as he turned away from the

window.

"Salad? No, I detest the sight and smell of oil," said Mr. Nibby

pettishly in response to an inquiry: then he added, in gloomy soliloquy,

"I wish there was not such an article as a beefsteak in the world."

The garçon stared at Mr. Nibby sympathetically. He was a chuckle-headed

youth in a black coat with tails that threatened to sweep the ground,

and a white cravat of stiffest quality and enormous dimensions. It might

have wrung the chef's heart to have beheld Mr. Nibby turn over his

dainty beefsteak with a fork and sniff at it disdainfully, but he was

fortunately spared that spectacle. Mr. Nibby, in his truly alarming

state of health, was restricted by his physician to the simplest diet:

thus the chef's beefsteak had become the bane of his existence. He was

like the needy adventurer who subsisted on pigeons for a month to win a

wager, or the prisoner who starved on chocolate. He lost no time in

making inquiries about the Fräulein Rottenhöfer, and the sympathetic

garçon, although still a fledgling in years and with a down on his upper

lip like that on a gosling's back, immediately saw his way clearly to

fresh perquisites of office. If Mr. Nibby, occupant of the best suite of

rooms in the hotel, was interested in a lady, any stray news concerning

her fetched by himself would naturally result in francs. There was an

abundance to impart at the outset. Mr. Nibby, kind of heart, left the

detested beefsteak to grow cold while he listened, although that

sacrifice was not a great one.

The Baroness von Merk was very old and paralytic, and possessed a

fearful temper. The sympathetic garçon drew the cork of a wine-bottle,

and opined that she was mad. She had been a celebrated court beauty in

one of the German principalities, perhaps married with the left hand by

the duke, and still retained fantastic caprices as the dregs in her

spent cup of pleasure. Her own relatives had been driven away by her

evil and malicious tongue. Her servants lived in purgatory, but then

they received good wages, the garçon affirmed solemnly as he removed the

cover of a potato-dish. What would monsieur think of her slapping the

Fräulein with a fan for not reading distinctly or for not retrimming a

lace mantle to please such a whimsical mistress? Old Margret, the

lady's-maid, was kept awake night after night to watch beside the

baroness's couch when she was nervous and feared the ghosts of her own

past. Fritz was the gray-haired person in livery, who had served too

long to permit his own digestion to be disturbed.

"The women cry, but I do not. I have lived with her forty years," Fritz

observed in those kitchen regions where the faults of the great are

freely criticised, with a gesture toward his cheeks, in texture like

parchment.

When Mr. Nibby heard this sad tale of petty tyranny his sympathies were

moved. He had bought a fresh ticket on the Cologne boat which consigned

the Fräulein to the tender mercies of the baroness. He began to

experience a degree of personal responsibility in the whole matter. How

could he help the girl out of her painful position now?

"Dear me!" ejaculated Mr. Nibby, pushing aside the untasted beefsteak,

and the garçon subsequently devoured it by stealth, seated on the back

stairs with a tray balanced precariously on his knees.

Our invalid continued to say "Dear me!" during his afternoon drive, and

on returning to the hotel either the lack of that matutinal beefsteak or

interest in the Fräulein Rottenhöfer induced him to announce that he

would dine at the _table d'hôte_. What need to add that the sympathetic

garçon placed him beside the Fräulein, who appeared slightly startled at

first, and then pleased? When the companion had begged to be spared the

ordeal of eating alone at the table d'hôte, the baroness had insisted on

compliance: her _dame de compagnie_ always dined at the table d'hôte.

Good often results from evil in this world.

Mr. Nibby enjoyed the meal amazingly. The _salle-à-manger_ was decked

with flowers, the table linen was snowy white, the plate glittered, and

there was as a central ornament a mediæval castle of spun sugar perched

on almond rocks, which must have cost the chef much time to design. It

was the fête of madame's patron saint, and the church-bells which had

resounded in the town since dawn meant also a dinner of unusual elegance

at the Hôtel des Jasmins, concluded by champagne of inferior quality,

but freely dispensed to all. The saint had brought her very good luck,

madame piously observed. Thus the meal was a sort of feast to Mr. Nibby

and the Fräulein. Both remembered the Cologne boat, and she required no

other incentive than gratitude to prompt inquiry as to her benefactor's

health. There are more unfavorable places for growth of mutual

confidence than a table d'hôte. Amidst a hum of voices and clatter of

dishes, with many lights twinkling before his dazzled eyes, Mr. Nibby

became aware that the Fräulein had an aunt living in America, whom she

desired to visit, although her ideas of distance were of the vaguest.

Poor Fräulein! belonging to that vast army of educated women teeming in

every land and needing to coin money out of their accomplishments, she

must wait on the whimsical old baroness a while longer before making a

journey to distant America.

In turn, she learned that Mr. Nibby had long promised himself the

recreation of foreign travel, and had now escaped from active

business-life for the realization. Alas! his health had improved in

England only to suffer severely on the Continent, especially in the

Hôtel des Jasmins.

"Perhaps the climate is too warm for you," she said, looking at him with

mild blue eyes.

Thus the banquet concluded. Mr. Nibby was quite animated in manner,

while the Fräulein was all the prettier for the additional color in her

cheeks induced by a little excitement. The sympathetic garçon with the

long coat-tails grinned at a sideboard where he was clashing about

knives and forks. Mr. Nibby retired, carrying away the image of his fair

neighbor for evening reverie over his cigar, and that night he slept so

soundly, without recurrence of his afflicting nausea, that he was

disposed to make of madame's saint's day one of most favorable augury

for himself.

The Fräulein went up stairs, and read aloud to the baroness. Her

thoughts strayed to the good-looking gentleman with a gray moustache,

friendly smile and well-kept, white hands who had been so kind to her.

At ten o'clock she received an unexpected gift. Lo! on the fête-day the

chef had compounded for her a second edifice in the shape of a nougat

house stocked with bonbons. She blushed, then laughed like a child.

* * * * *

A month later, the Fräulein again sat reading to the baroness, her

thoughts astray and her tone of voice so monotonous that it acted

soporifically on her listener. The baroness nodded in her arm-chair,

with her pet poodle on her knee. The coquettish cap on her head was

grotesquely crumpled, and her false front pushed awry, while the sneer

on her pinched features only deepened their habitual expression of

ill-nature in repose. The fat poodle blinked and the Fräulein yawned. In

the large, gloomy house at Bonn was a florid portrait of the shrivelled

old creature before her, there represented in slim youth, in blue

velvet, with state jewels clasped about her throat. Outside, the garden

still glowed with vivid patches of flowers, but the sky was dull and the

piercing mistral swept clouds of dust over the boundary-wall

occasionally. Again did the chef stroll down that remote path in the

shrubbery, where the boundary of his dominions seemed marked by the

forcing-beds of the kitchen-garden.

The Fräulein's eyes sparkled with a sudden determination. She closed her

book softly and glanced apprehensively at the slumbering baroness. The

poodle winked one eye at her, as if perfectly comprehending the

situation, and laid its nose on two little folded paws. Then she slipped

noiselessly out of the room, ran down stairs, and met Mr. Nibby in the

hall. He looked very ill, and shook his head in response to her inquiry

concerning his health. Mr. Nibby's health could scarcely be worse, and

yet he lingered at the Hôtel des Jasmins, where he constantly met

Fräulein Rottenhöfer. Sympathy is the first requisite of the human

heart. Such sympathy as the young German lady had unexpectedly required

of the American tourist on the Cologne boat she was striving to return

in another fashion.

"I have a thought," she exclaimed with unusual animation of manner as

she now encountered the invalid. "Will you be so kind to come in ze

pavilion while I talk with ze chef?"

Mr. Nibby, rather puzzled, slid into the pavilion, and the Fräulein

paused in the path beyond to accost her unconscious victim. Through the

mantling vines Mr. Nibby could witness the smiles this really ingenuous

young creature was prepared to lavish on the susceptible chef because

already aware of her power. The Fräulein's tongue ran nimbly enough in

French. It was now the turn of beefsteak to be praised. Did the baroness

like his beefsteak then? the chef inquired, hand on heart, large eyes

darting admiring glances, and yet with a wholly inscrutable smile. The

Fräulein colored slightly: her gaze sought the ground. Unquestionably,

the baroness approved. The dish was always most skilfully cooked, the

gravy exquisitely flavored, and the meat fibre possessed the tenderness

of game, the Fräulein said. The chef, always with a sprig of parsley

twirling between his fingers to assist conversation, confessed modestly

that there was skill in his treatment of the prosaic beefsteak.

Mr. Nibby listened, fascinated, and with a dawning suspicion in his

mind. What was the Fräulein striving to accomplish? Actually, this

daughter of Eve was begging to be instructed in the preparation of the

culinary triumph. Perhaps she had never received before such a tribute

to her charms as when the chef, rolling his fine eyes languishingly,

confessed himself to be wax in her hands, and ready to yield up one of

the secrets of his profession without the bribe of gold. The steak need

not be the best quality of beef: even a tough and inferior portion would

serve. The chef approached nearer his questioner while vouchsafing this

explanation, and lowered his voice mysteriously. The Fräulein winced,

but stood her ground. Ah, that was much to know, she assented with a

bright smile, if one should be required to cook for an invalid. The chef

nodded sagely. The steak must be laid in oil for twelve hours, which

made it deliciously tender, then removed, dried slightly, and broiled.

He never cooked with oil for foreigners, he added with scarcely veiled

contempt of tone.

Mr. Nibby groaned in the summer-house. What! the chef's beefsteak was

prepared in oil, and he had been born with such an antipathy to the

luxury that it made him uncomfortable to sit at table opposite a castor!

Could his daily illness be attributed to the simple diet selected in

the belief that a beefsteak was the most harmless food for a dyspeptic?

The Fräulein returned to him radiant with success. "I have thought it

must be what you eat," she exclaimed.

"How clever women are!" said Mr. Nibby fervently. "You always jump at

conclusions, and now I am placed under an everlasting obligation."

"Then I am glad," she answered simply.

Mr. Nibby took her hand and kissed it. "Would you like to visit your

aunt in America?" he inquired tenderly.

The mistral blew and the sky was gray. Up in her salon the baroness had

awakened, and the poodle on her knee not only winked one eye, but cocked

an ear apprehensively.

"Continue the reading: I am not asleep," croaked the old lady.

No response. Then the baroness opened her eyes wide, and they flashed

ominously. Never had Fräulein Rottenhöfer dared to quit her seat before.

The crash of an overturned chair succeeded the peal of a bell pulled by

a tremulous hand, and then there was a stifled scream.

When the Fräulein came up stairs later in guilty haste, she paused to

fasten an exquisite rose, gift of Mr. Nibby, in her dress, and the

flower rivalled only the fine color of her own cheeks.

The baroness lay on the floor, stiff and rigid, with old Margret

wringing her hands helplessly, and old Fritz looking on with solemnity.

For the first time on record these two faithful retainers dared to

express a candid opinion in her presence. "It's another stroke," said

Fritz. "See to what a pass you have brought yourself by temper,

mistress!"

"You could not walk alone," moaned Margret.

The baroness, dumb as if her features were frozen in a mask, lay in

impotent and awful silence, staring back at them.

That night Mr. Nibby formed two resolutions: one was to ask the Fräulein

Rottenhöfer to marry him, and the other never to eat another of the

chef's beefsteaks.

In the garden of the Hôtel des Jasmins the flowers still bloom, the

palms rustle and the orange trees change their snowy blossoms to balls

of gold. Madame has occasion to be dissatisfied with her celebrated

artist of the kitchen. He seasons his sauces savagely with excess of

fiery condiments; there is no nice discrimination exercised in his

vols-au-vent; the treatment of his entrées is commonplace, not to say

coarse; he has been known to burn the soup hopelessly. He no longer

seeks the garden in a leisure hour of the morning, but may be seen in

the twilight standing with his back to the wall, smoking a cheap cigar

and staring moodily at the windows once occupied by the pretty Fräulein.

He sighs profoundly.

The Baroness von Merk has been carried back to her home on the Rhine by

the faithful Fritz, a helpless burden, to be disposed of according to

the judgment of others. What the air-castles of the chef might have

been, built out of such rainbows as the Fräulein's smiles and praises,

must ever remain buried in his own bosom. Ladies have been known to

condescend to those of low estate before, especially when such personal

beauty as his own manly perfections were in the balance. Did the chef

dream of a rival Hôtel des Jasmins, with the Fräulein as attractive

landlady, while he managed the whole establishment?

Alas, poor chef! left to sigh in the shadowy garden, while a most

blooming bride crosses the Atlantic with fortunate bridegroom Mr. Nibby,

miraculously restored in health and spirits. The first-cabin passengers

are puzzled at table by the archness with which Mrs. Nibby proffers

beefsteak to her husband, and his shudder of aversion as he rejects the

dish.

If it is true that one man's meat is another man's poison, may not

unconscious Mr. Nibby be deemed quits with the disconsolate chef in

bearing away Fräulein Rottenhöfer as his wife?

VIRGINIA W. JOHNSON.

LONDON AT MIDSUMMER.

I believe it is supposed to require a good deal of courage to confess

that one has spent the month of August in London; and I will therefore,

taking the bull by the horns, plead guilty at the very outset to this

dishonorable weakness. I might attempt some ingenious extenuation of it.

I might say that my remaining in town had been the most unexpected

necessity or the merest inadvertence; I might pretend I liked it--that I

had done it, in fact, for the love of the thing; I might claim that you

don't really know the charms of London until on one of the dog-days you

have imprinted your boot-sole in the slumbering dust of Belgravia, or,

gazing along the empty vista of the Drive in Hyde Park, have beheld, for

almost the first time in England, a landscape without figures. But

little would remain of these specious apologies save the naked fact that

I had distinctly failed to retire from the metropolis--either on the

first of August with the ladies and children, or on the thirteenth with

the members of Parliament, or on the fifteenth when the grouse-shooting

began. (I am not sure that I have got my dates right to a day, but these

were about the proper opportunities.) I have, in fact, survived the

departure of everything genteel, and the four millions of persons who

remained behind with me have been witnesses of my shame.

I cannot pretend, on the other hand, that, having remained in town, I

have found it a very odious or painful experience. Being a stranger, I

have not felt it necessary to incarcerate myself during the day and

steal abroad only under cover of the darkness--a line of conduct imposed

by public opinion, if I am to trust the social criticism of the weekly

papers (which I am far from doing), upon the native residents who allow

themselves to be overtaken by the unfashionable season. I have indeed

always had a theory that few things could be more pleasant than during

the hot weather to have a great city, and a large house within it, quite

to one's self. If it were necessary, I could point with some exultation

to the fact that I have never come so near as on the present occasion to

an opportunity of testing my theory; and I must add that I have now

tested it under circumstances which have deprived the experiment of half

of its value.

To make it perfect, the summer should be very hot and the house in which

you live very cool. You should keep it cool by keeping it dark--just

dark enough not to prevent you from reading a charming old book as you

lie on the sofa in one of the lighter rooms. Your costume as you lie on

the sofa and wander about from chamber to chamber should be of the most

imponderable; in fact, you should have on almost no clothes at all. To

increase the comfort of your undressedness you must have no

fellow-inmates but the servants, who remain below stairs and adapt

themselves to the temperature as best they can. They are free, of

course, to sit in the cellar. And then you must have several other

resources--resources which, if you are an American, you may be pardoned

for believing to be most easily secured in the case of your trying your

experiment in your native land. The carpets must all have been taken up

and the floors covered with straw matting in pale, tender colors. There

must be an everlasting gush of the coldest water into a bath big enough

for you, if the fancy takes you, to drown yourself in. You must have

plenty of peaches and pears, of grapes and melons. You must commit

unseen excesses in the consumption of ice-cream. You must sit in the

evening on a balcony and, looking up and down the empty street, see here

and there in other balconies the gleam of a white robe in the darkness.

These harmless conditions have not been combined in my own metropolitan

sojourn, and I have received an impression that in London it would be

rather difficult for a person not having the command of a good deal of

powerful machinery to find them united. English summer weather is rarely

hot enough to make it necessary to darken one's house and disrobe. The

present year has indeed in this respect been "exceptional," as any year

is, for that matter, that one spends anywhere. But the manners of the

people are, to American eyes, a sufficient indication that at the best

(or the worst) the highest flights of the thermometer in the British

Islands are not particularly startling. People live with closed windows

in August, very much as they do in January, and there is to the eye no

appreciable difference in the character of their apparel. A "bath" in

England, for the most part all the year round, means a little portable

tin tub and a sponge. Peaches and pears, grapes and melons, are not a

more obvious ornament of the market at mid-summer than at Christmas.

This matter of peaches and melons, by the way, offers one of the best

examples of that fact to which a foreign commentator on English manners

finds himself constantly recurring, and to which he grows at last almost

ashamed of alluding--the fact that the beauty and luxury of the

country--that elaborate system known and revered all over the world as

"English comfort"--is a distinctly limited and restricted, an

essentially private, affair. I am not one of those irreverent strangers

who talk of English "fruit" as a rather audacious _plaisanterie_, though

I could see very well what was meant a short time since by an anecdote

related to me in a tone of contemptuous generalization by a couple of my

fellow-countrywomen. They had arrived in London in the dog-days, and,

lunching at their hotel, had asked to be served with some fruit. The

hotel was of the stateliest pattern, and they were waited upon by a

functionary whose grandeur was proportionate. This gentleman bowed and

retired, and after a long delay, reappearing, placed before them, with

an inimitable gesture, a dish of gooseberries and currants. It appeared

upon investigation that these acrid vegetables were the only "fruit"

that the establishment could undertake to supply; and it seemed to

increase the irony of the situation that the establishment was as near

as possible to Buckingham Palace. I say that the heroines of my anecdote

seemed disposed to generalize: this was sufficiently the case, I mean,

to give me a pretext for assuring them that in Devonshire, in

Warwickshire, in Norfolk, in Dorset and in twenty other English counties

whose names they had certainly heard, the most beautiful peaches and

melons might be seen growing in considerable numbers in the most

admirably organized hot-houses in the depths of the most extensive and

picturesque properties. My auditors tossed their heads, of course, at

the counties, the peaches and melons, the admirable hot-houses and the

extensive properties; and indeed at their ascetic hostelry close to

Buckingham Palace these reflections were but scantily consoling. But

these are the things they have had in mind, the reasonable English

people whom in other countries I have heard upholding the superiority of

English fruit. I have heard them argue the case most resolutely against

Frenchmen and Americans, but, in reality, the contending parties were

talking about two very different things. One side was talking about

fruit as a luxury, and the other about fruit as a necessity. The

Englishman was thinking of the soft-colored, smooth-skinned peaches that

he had been invited down into Dorsetshire to eat at eight o'clock in the

evening at a brilliantly-lighted table: the American and the Frenchman

were thinking of these articles as they importuned you from heaped-up

fruit stalls in your daily walk. The difference brings me back to what I

referred to as the "private" character of this particular branch of

English comfort. A stranger may spend a summer in London and never be

reminded of the existence of pears and grapes. Those establishments

known in America as fruit-stalls are conspicuous by their absence, and

their office is in no appreciable degree supplied by the inns, the

restaurants or the clubs. I believe there are peaches of great rotundity

to be obtained at Covent Garden market at half a crown apiece, but

Covent Garden is hardly on the line of one's daily strolls. The

irritated stranger, therefore, sitting down to gooseberries at a

"palace" hotel, may be pardoned for unflattering generalizations. He

gradually learns, if he remains in England, that the relation of hotels

and restaurants to the life of the country is here essentially different

from what it is elsewhere. It may be said, generally, that such places,

at their best, represent the maximum comfort of the community. The

traveller in England must teach himself that they represent the minimum,

and he must learn the further lesson that "English comfort"--the comfort

which, as I said just now, is known and venerated all over the

world--means, strictly, the maximum comfort, the privilege, of a small

minority, of the opulent and luxurious class. To make good inns and good

restaurants there must be a comfortable _bourgeoisie_, for people of

great fortune are able to do things in a way that makes them independent

of a public fund of entertainment.

It is to this public fund of entertainment that the desultory stranger

in any country chiefly appeals, especially in summer weather; and as I

have implied that there is little encouragement in England to such an

appeal, it may appear remarkable that I should not have found London, at

this season, at least as uncongenial as orthodoxy pronounces it. But

one's liking for London--a stranger's liking at least--is at the best an

anomalous and illogical sentiment, of which he may feel it hardly more

difficult to give a categorical account at one time than at another. I

am far from meaning by this that there are not in this mighty metropolis

a thousand sources of interest, entertainment and delight: what I mean

is, that for one reason and another, with all its social resources, the

place lies heavy on the foreign consciousness. It seems grim and dusty,

fierce and unbeautiful. And yet the foreign consciousness accepts it at

least with a kind of grudging satisfaction, and finds something warm and

comfortable, something that if removed would be greatly missed, in its

heavy pressure. It must be admitted, however, that, granting that every

one is out of town, your choice of pastimes is not embarrassing. If it

has been your fortune to spend a certain amount of time in foreign

cities, London will seem to you but slenderly provided with innocent

diversions. This, indeed, brings us back simply to that question of the

absence of a "public fund" of amusement to which reference was just now

made. You must give up the idea of going to sit somewhere in the open

air, to eat an ice and listen to a band of music. You will find neither

the seat, the ice nor the band; but, on the other hand, faithful to your

profession of observant foreigner, you may supply the place of these

delights by a little private meditation upon the deep-lying causes of

the English indifference to them. In such reflections nothing is

idle--every grain of testimony counts; and one need therefore not be

accused of jumping too suddenly from small things to great if one traces

a connection between the absence of ices and music and the aristocratic

constitution of English society. This aristocratic constitution of

English society is the great and ever-present fact to the mind of a

stranger: there is hardly a detail of English life that does not appear

in some degree to point to it. It is really only in a country in which a

good deal of democratic feeling prevails that people of "refinement," as

we say in America, will be willing to sit at little round tables, on a

pavement or a gravel-walk, at the door of a café. The upper classes are

too genteel, and the lower classes are too miserable. One must hasten to

add too, in justice, that the upper classes are, as a general thing,

quite too well furnished with entertainments of their own: they have

those special resources which I mentioned a while since. They are always

rich, and are naturally independent of communistic pleasures. If you can

sit on a terrace in a high-walled garden and have your _café noir_

handed to you in Pompadour cups by servants in powder and plush, you

have hardly a decent pretext for going to a public-house. In France and

Italy, in Germany and Spain, the count and countess will sally forth and

encamp for the evening under a row of colored lamps upon the

paving-stones, but it is ten to one that the count and countess live on

a single floor up several pairs of stairs. They are, however, I think,

not appreciably affected by considerations which operate potently in

England. An Englishman who should propose to sit down at a café-door

would find himself remembering that he is exposing himself to the danger

of meeting his social inferiors. The danger is great, because his social

inferiors are so numerous; and I suspect that if we could look straight

into the English consciousness we should be interested to find how

serious a danger it appears. It is not of the fear of contact with the

great herd of one's unknown fellow-citizens that I speak: it is of the

possibility of meeting individuals with whom in the business of life one

has had some sort of formal relations--one's grocer, one's bootmaker,

one's apothecary, even one's solicitor. To an American, a Frenchman, an

Italian, there is of necessity nothing alarming in such an incident:

there is at the worst a way of taking it easily. But as it looms up

before an Englishman it has the power of making him extremely

uncomfortable; and, combined with a corresponding anxiety on the part of

the inferior himself, this prospective discomfort operates as a

chronically deterrent force. These, however, are mysteries which I

should not have allowed myself to deal with so parenthetically. I have

ventured to do so because there is a very familiar illustration of the

phenomenon I speak of. It may be found in the usual demeanor of English

servants. If you "meet" an English servant--that is, if you encounter

him at a moment when he is not literally executing an order for you--if

you are left in a room with him, if you pass him in the hall, if you are

confronted with him in the portico, you perceive that his effort is

immediately to spare you a possibly offensive realization of his

presence. He has been taught that at such times he is uncomfortable to

you--that you don't, mentally as it were, know what to do with him. His

place in the universe is to answer your bell, and from your point of

view he should only exist by intermission. He has been trained to adapt

himself to this point of view, and he does so with remarkable success.

He not only rigidly abstains from bidding you good-morning, but he

abstains equally from responding to the good-morning which in a moment

of culpable inconsistency you may have offered him. A couple of months

since, paying a visit to a friend in the country, I drove to the door

with a gentleman whom I had met at the station, and who was engaged in

the same pleasant errand as myself. The butler who admitted us stood

motionless and inarticulate as we crossed the threshold, with his eyes,

in the manner of butlers, fixed upon our boots. He was a very admirable

servant, and having, in the course of twenty-four hours, taken the

measure of this fact, I on the following day called my companion's

attention to it. My companion was an Englishman, but he was young and

perhaps foolishly sentimental. "Oh yes, he's an excellent servant," he

said, "but he might give one a faint sign of recognition when one

arrives."--"You had seen him, then," I asked, "before?"--"I have stayed

in the house half a dozen times, and half a dozen times on departing I

have given him the sidelong tip; yet whenever I arrive he gives me a

stony stare, as if I were a perfect stranger." But the stony stare, for

butlers, is not simply the English custom: I think it may be said that

it is the English ideal.

I have wandered very far from the potential little tables for ices

in--where shall I say?--in Oxford street; but, after all, there is no

reason why our imagination should hover about them. I am afraid they

would not be very pleasant. In such matters everything hangs together,

and I am afraid that the customs of the Boulevard des Italiens and the

Piazza Colonna would not harmonize with the scenery of the great London

thoroughfare. A gin-palace right and left and a detachment of the London

rabble in an admiring semicircle,--these, I confess, strike me as some

of the more obvious features of the affair. At this time, however, one's

social studies must, at the least, be studies of low life, for wherever

you may go for a stroll or to spend your summer afternoon the

unfashionable side of things is uppermost. There is no one in the parks

save the rough characters who are lying on their faces in the

sheep-polluted grass. These people are always tolerably numerous in the

Green Park, through which I frequently pass, and I never fail to drop a

wondering glance upon them. But your wonder will go far if it begins to

bestir itself on behalf of weary British tramps. You see among them some

magnificent specimens of weariness. Their velveteen legs and their

colossal high-lows, their purple necks and car-tips, their knotted

sticks and little greasy hats, make them look like stage villains in a

realistic melodrama. I may do them great injustice, but I always assume

that they have had a taste of penal servitude--that they have paid the

penalty of stamping on some one with those huge square heels that are

turned up to the summer sky. But, actually, they are innocent enough,

for they are sleeping as peacefully as the most accomplished

philanthropist, and it is their look of having walked over half England,

and of being confoundedly hungry and thirsty, that constitutes their

romantic attractiveness. These six feet of brown grass are their present

sufficiency, but how long will they sleep, whither will they go next,

and whence did they come last? You permit yourself to wish that they

might sleep for ever and go nowhere else at all.

The month of August is so unfashionable in London that going a few days

since to Greenwich, that famous resort, I found it possible to get but

half a dinner. The hotel (where you are supposed to be able to obtain

one of the best dinners in England) had put out its stoves and locked up

its pantry. But for this discovery I should have mentioned the little

expedition to Greenwich as a charming relief to the monotony of a London

August. Greenwich and Richmond are, classically, the two suburban

dining-places. I don't know how it may be at this time with Richmond,

but the Greenwich incident brings me back (I hope not once too often) to

the element of what has lately been called "particularism" in English

pleasures. It was in obedience to a perfectly logical argument that the

Greenwich hotel had, as I say, locked up its pantry. All genteel people

leave London after the first week in August, _ergo_ those who remain

behind are not genteel, and cannot therefore rise to the conception of a

"fish dinner." Why, then, should we have anything ready? I had other

impressions, fortunately, of this interesting suburb, and I hasten to

declare that during the genteel period the dinner at Greenwich is the

best of all dinners. It begins with fish and it continues with fish:

what it ends with--except songs and speeches and affectionate

partings--I hesitate to affirm. It is a kind of mermaid reversed; for I

do know, in a vague way, that the tail of the creature is elaborately

and interminably fleshy. If it were not grossly indiscreet I should risk

an allusion to the particular banquet which was the occasion of my

becoming acquainted with the Greenwich _cuisine_. I should say that it

is very pleasant to sit in a company of clever and distinguished men

before the large windows that look out upon the broad brown Thames. The

ships swim by as if they were part of the entertainment and put down in

the bill: the afternoon light fades ever so slowly. We eat all the fish

of the sea, and wash them down with liquids that bear no resemblance to

salt water. We partake of any number of those sauces with which,

according to the French adage, one could dine upon one's grandmother. To

speak of the particular merits of my companions would indeed be

indiscreet, but there is nothing indelicate in expressing a high

appreciation of the manly frankness and robustness of English

conviviality. The stranger--the American at least--who finds himself in

the company of a number of Englishmen assembled for a convivial purpose

becomes conscious of a certain indefinable and delectable something

which, for want of a better name, he will call their superior richness

of temperament. He takes note of the liberal share of the individual in

the magnificent temperament of the race. This seems to him one of the

finest things in the world, and his satisfaction will take a keener edge

from such an incident as the single one I may permit myself to mention.

It was one of those little incidents which can occur only in an old

society--a society in which every one that a newcomer meets strikes him

as having in some degree or other a sort of historic identity, being

connected with some one or something that he has heard of. If they are

not the rose, they have lived more or less near it. There is an old

English song-writer whom we all know and admire--whose songs are sung

wherever the language is spoken. Of course, according to the law I just

hinted at, one of the gentlemen sitting opposite must be his

great-grandson. After dinner there are songs, and the gentleman trolls

out one of his ancestral ditties with the most charming voice and the

most finished art.

I have still other memories of Greenwich, where there is a charming old

park, on a summit of one of whose grassy undulations the famous

observatory is perched. To do the thing completely, you must take

passage upon one of the little grimy sixpenny steamers that ply upon the

Thames, perform the journey by water, and then, disembarking, take a

stroll in the park to get up an appetite for dinner. I find an

irresistible charm in any sort of river-navigation, but I am rather at a

loss as to how to speak of the little voyage from Westminster Bridge to

Greenwich. It is in truth the most prosaic possible form of being

afloat, and to be recommended rather to the inquiring than to the

fastidious mind. It initiates you into the duskiness, the blackness, the

crowdedness, the intensely commercial character of London. Few European

cities have a finer river than the Thames, but none certainly has

expended more ingenuity in producing an ugly river-front. For miles and

miles you see nothing but the sooty backs of warehouses, or perhaps they

are the sooty fronts: in these rigidly-unfeatured edifices it is

impossible to distinguish. They stand massed together on the banks of

the wide, turbid stream, which is fortunately of too opaque a quality to

reflect their hideousness. A damp-looking, dirty blackness is the

universal tone. The river is almost black, and is covered with black

barges: above the black housetops, from among the far-stretching docks

and basins, rises a dusky wilderness of masts. The little puffing

steamer is dingy and begrimed: it belches a sable cloud that keeps you

company as you go. In this carboniferous shower your companions, who

belong chiefly, indeed, to the less brilliant classes, assume an

harmonious dinginess; and the whole picture, glazed over with the

glutinous London mist, becomes a masterpiece of bituminous-looking

color. But it is very impressive in spite of its want of lightness and

brightness, and in its own sombre fashion it is extremely picturesque.

Like so many of the aspects of English civilization that are untouched

by elegance or grace, it has the merit of being serious. Viewed in this

intellectual light, the polluted river, the sprawling barges, the

dead-faced warehouses, the dreary people, the atmospheric impurities,

become richly suggestive. It sounds rather absurd to say so, but all

this sordid detail reminds me of nothing less than the wealth and power

of the British empire at large; so that a kind of metaphysical

picturesqueness hovers over the scene, and supplies what may be

literally wanting. I don't exactly understand the association, but I

know that when I look off to the left at the East India Docks, or pass

under the dark, hugely-piled bridges, where the railway trains and the

human processions are for ever moving, I feel a kind of imaginative

thrill. The tremendous piers of the bridges, in especial, seem the very

pillars of the British empire.

It is doubtless owing to this habit of obtrusive reverie that the

sentimental tourist thinks it very fine to see the Greenwich Observatory

lifting its two modest little brick towers. The sight of this useful

edifice gave me an amount of pleasure which may at first seem

unreasonable. The reason was, simply, that I used to see it as a child

in woodcuts in school geographies, and in the corners of large maps

which had a glazed, sallow surface, and which were suspended in

unexpected places, in dark halls and behind doors. The maps were hung so

high that my eyes could reach only to the lower corners, and these

corners usually contained a print of a strange-looking house standing

among trees upon a grassy bank that swept down before it with the most

engaging steepness. I used always to think that it must be an ineffable

joy to run straight down that bank. Close at hand was usually something

printed about something being at such and such a number of degrees "east

of Greenwich." Why east of Greenwich? The vague wonder that the childish

mind felt on this point gave the place a mysterious importance, and

seemed to put it into relation with the difficult and fascinating parts

of geography--the countries of fantastic outline and the lonely-looking

pages of the atlas. Yet there it stood the other day, the spot from

which longitude is calculated; there was the plain little façade with

the old-fashioned cupolas; there was the bank on which it would be so

delightful not to be able to stop running. It made me feel terribly old

to find that I did not forthwith proceed to taste of this delight. There

are indeed a great many steep banks in Greenwich Park, which tumbles up

and down in the most picturesque fashion. It is a charming place, rather

shabby and footworn, as befits a strictly popular resort, but with a

character all its own. It is filled with magnificent dwarfish chestnut

trees, planted in long, convergent avenues, with trunks of extraordinary

girth and limbs that fling a dusky shadow far over the grass; there are

plenty of benches, and there are deer as tame as sleepy children; and

from the tops of the bosky hillocks there are views of the widening

Thames, and the moving ships, and the two classic inns by the waterside,

and the great pompous buildings of the old hospital, which have been

despoiled of their ancient pensioners and converted into a kind of naval

academy.

Taking note of all this, I arrived at a far-away angle in the wall of

the park, where a little postern door stood ajar. I pushed the door

open, and found myself, by a picturesque transition, upon Blackheath

Common. One had often heard of Blackheath: well, here it was--a great

green, breezy place, where various lads in corduroys were playing

cricket. I always like an English common: it may be curtailed and

cockneyfied, as this one was--which had lamp-posts stuck about on its

turf and a fresh-painted banister all around--but it is sure to be one

of the places that remind you vividly that you are in England. Even if

the turf is too much trodden, there is, to foreign eyes, an English

greenness about it, and there is something peculiarly insular in the way

the high-piled, weather-bearing clouds hang over it and drizzle down

their gray light. Still further to identify this spot, here was the

British soldier emerging from two or three of the roads, with his cap

upon his ear, his white gloves in one hand and his foppish little cane

in the other. He wore the uniform of the artillery, and I asked him

where he had come from. I learned that he had walked over from Woolwich,

and that this feat might be accomplished in half an hour. Inspired again

by vague associations, I proceeded to accomplish its equivalent. I bent

my steps to Woolwich, a place which I knew, in a general way, to be a

nursery of British valor. At the end of my half hour I emerged upon

another common, where local color was still more intense. The scene was

very entertaining. The open grassy expanse was immense, and the evening

being beautiful it was dotted with strolling soldiers and townsfolk.

There were half a dozen cricket-matches: the soldiers were playing

against the lads in corduroys. At one end of this peaceful _campus

martius_, which stretches over a hilltop, rises an interminable

façade--one of the fronts of the artillery barracks. It has a very

honorable air, and more windows and doors, I imagine, than any building

in Britain. There is a great clean parade before it, and there are many

sentinels pacing in front of neatly-kept places of ingress to officers'

quarters. Everything that looks out upon it is military--the

distinguished college (where the French prince imperial lately studied

the art of war) on one side; a sort of model camp--a collection of the

tidiest plank huts--on the other; a hospital, on a well-ventilated site,

at the remoter end. And then in the town below there are a great many

more military matters--barracks on an immense scale; a dock-yard that

presents an interminable dead wall to the street; an arsenal which the

gatekeeper (who refused to admit me) declared to be "five miles" in

circumference; and, lastly, grogshops enough to inflame the most craven

spirit. These latter institutions I glanced at on my way to the

railway-station at the bottom of the hill; but before departing I had

spent half an hour in strolling about the common in vague consciousness

of certain emotions that are called into play (I speak but for myself)

by almost any glimpse of the imperial machinery of this great country.

The glimpse may be of the slightest: it stirs a peculiar sentiment. I

know not what to call this sentiment unless it be simply an admiration

for the greatness of England. The greatness of England: that is a very

pregnant phrase, but I am not using it analytically. I use it only as it

sounds in the imagination of any American who really enjoys the

enjoyable parts of this head-spring of his patriotism. I mean the great

part that England has played in history, the great space she has

occupied, her tremendous might, her far-stretching sway. That these

clumsily-general ideas should be suggested by the sight of some

infinitesimal fraction of the English administrative system may seem to

indicate a too hysterical cast of fancy; but if so, I must plead guilty

to the weakness. Why should a sentry-box more or less set one thinking

of the glory of this little island, which has manufactured the means of

so vast a dominion? This is more than I can say; and all I shall attempt

to say is, that in the difficult days that are now elapsing a

sympathetic stranger finds his meditations singularly quickened. It is

the picturesque element in English history that he has chiefly cared

for, and he finds himself wondering whether the picturesque epoch is

completely closed. It is a moment when all the nations of Europe seem to

be doing something, and he waits to see what England, who has done so

much, will do. He has been meeting of late a good many of his

country-people--Americans who live on the Continent and pretend to speak

with assurance of continental ways of feeling. These people have been

passing through London, and many of them are in that irritated condition

of mind which appears to be the portion of the American sojourner in the

British metropolis when he is not given up to the delights of the

historic sentiment. They have affirmed with emphasis that the

continental nations have ceased to care a straw for what England thinks;

that her traditional prestige is completely extinct; that General

Ignatieff twisted Lord Salisbury round his finger; and that the affairs

of Europe will be settled quite independently of the power whose capital

is on the Thames. England will do nothing, will risk nothing: there is

no cause bad enough for her not to find a selfish interest in it--there

is no cause good enough for her to fight about it. Poor old England is

exploded: it is about time she should haul in her nets. To all this the

sympathetic stranger replies that, in the first place, he does not

believe a word of it; and, in the second place, he does not care a fig

for it--care, that is, what the continental nations think. If the

greatness of England were really waning, it would be to him as a

personal grief; and as he strolls about the breezy common at Woolwich,

with all those mementoes of British dominion around him, he is quite too

softly exhilarated to admit discomposure.

He wishes, nevertheless, as I said before, that England would do

something--something striking and powerful and picturesque. He asks

himself what she can do, and he remembers that that greatness of England

which he so much admires was formerly much exemplified in her "taking"

something. Can't she "take" something now? There is the _Spectator_, who

wants her to occupy Egypt: can't she occupy Egypt? The _Spectator_

considers this her moral duty--inquires even whether she has a right

_not_ to bestow the blessings of her beneficent rule upon the

down-trodden Fellaheen. I found myself in company with a very

intelligent young Frenchman a day or two after this eloquent plea for a

partial annexation of the Nile had appeared in the most ingenious of

journals. Some allusion was made to it, and my companion proceeded to

pronounce it a masterpiece of British hypocrisy. I don't know how

powerful a defence I made of it, but while I read it I certainly had

been carried away by it. I recalled it while I pursued my

contemplations, but I recalled at the same time that sadly prosaic

speech of Mr. Gladstone's to which it had been a reply. Mr. Gladstone

had said that England had much more urgent duties than the occupation of

Egypt: she had to attend to the great questions of--What were the great

questions? Those of local taxation and the liquor-laws. Local taxation

and the liquor-laws! The phrase, to my ears, just then made a painful

discord. These were not the things I had been thinking of: it was not as

she should bend anxiously over these doubtless interesting subjects that

the sympathetic stranger would seem to see England in his favorite

posture--that, as Macaulay says, of hurling defiance at her foes. Of

course, Mr. Gladstone was probably right, but Mr. Gladstone was not a

sympathetic stranger.

H. JAMES, JR.

SVEN DUVA.

FROM THE SWEDISH OF JOHAN LUDVIG RUNEBERG.

Sven Duva's sire a sergeant was, with many winters white:

In Eighty-eight, though past his prime, he went into the fight,

And after living on his land he reared him fruit and corn,

While children nine around him grew, and Sven was youngest born.

None knows if Duva's father was with sense enough endowed

To still keep some part for himself, and share with such a crowd;

But it must be unto the eight far more than right did fall,

For scarcely to the latest born fell any share at all.

Yet, none the less, young Sven grew up broad-shouldered, strong of limb:

He hewed the tree and ploughed the glebe, for toil was play to him.

More mild than many a wiser man, more prompt he hied along,

And turned his hand to anything, but everything turned wrong.

"In God's name, witless son of mine, what shall become of thee?"

So oft the white-haired sergeant cried in his perplexity,

That 'neath the burden of the tune Sven's patience fell to earth,

And weighed he, far as in him lay, his own degree of worth.

So, when upon a certain day the sergeant raised again

The burden of the tiresome tune, "What wilt thou be, O Sven?"

The old man scarce believed his ears when, all unwontedly,

Sven's massive jaws wide opened with, "A soldier I will be!"

Then loud the sergeant laughed in scorn, and answered mockingly,

"What! thou wouldst bear a rifle?--thou, a booby! Shame on thee!"

"Why," said the boy, "here 'neath my hands unhandy works each thing:

Less handiness may serve to die for country and for king."

Old Duva stood a while amazed, then went in grieving mood,

And pack on back Sven forth did fare to where the barracks stood.

His stature fine, his sturdy height, all lesser needs o'erweighed,

And one in Dunker's company young Sven was quickly made.

But when was need that he should learn the drill and carriage meet,

God wot it was a sight to see how chance did guide his feet:

The corporal laughed aloud and cried, and cried and laughed again,

But still unchanged did his recruit in frown and fun remain.

Yet tireless was he, certainly, if ever mortal yet:

He marched and stamped that earth did shake, and laid the dust with sweat;

But at the word to change or move he missed the meaning quite:

When "Left face!" called the corporal, Sven's face looked toward the right.

Now he was taught to order arms, and arms to shoulder too,

To fix his bayonet, and present; and all, it seemed, he knew,

But at the "Order" usually he fixed his bayonet,

And at "Present" as gracefully his gun his shoulder met.

And so it came Sven Duva's drill was far and wide renowned:

'Midst all--commander, captains, men--the good jest passed around;

But Sven still kept his quiet way--was patient as before,

And always hoped for better times. And so broke out the war.

Now 'midst his comrades question rose, since they their land must shield,

If Sven were sane enough to go with them unto the field.

He let them talk, stood calmly by, and said in coolest tone,

"If with the ranks I cannot go, why I can go alone."

They let him keep his soldier arms, nor put his hands away,

For he was servant in the halt and soldier in the fray;

But board or sword, 'twas one with him: his cool way still he had,

And none might call him coward, though betimes they called him mad.

Once Sandels was in full retreat, pushed back by Russian ranks,

And yielding step by step along a river's reedy banks:

Ahead, a foot-bridge crossed the stream upon the army's way,

Where--scarcely twenty men they were--a little outpost lay.

Sent but to mend the broken road, when all the toil was o'er

At rest they lay at distance far from noises of the war:

A grange near hand they made their camp, nor fared they on its least,

And Sven--for he was of the band--did serve them at the feast.

But soon a change came on them there, for down a slope hard by

Spurred Sandels' aide fast hurrying, and rose his sudden cry:

"To arms! to arms! for God's good sake! and be the bridge your care,

For word is brought a hostile force will cross the river there.

"And, sir," said he to him who led the guard, "if yet you can,

Tear quickly down the bridge, or fight till falls the latest man.

'Tis ruin if the Russian can assail us in the rear;

And fear ye not, for help is by: the general hurries here."

So sped he back, but to the bridge scarce reached the little band

When high a Russian platoon rose upon the shore beyond.

It wider grows, it thicker grows; a volley blazes wide;

Beneath the blast nigh half the band are dying or have died.

A fear runs through the little band; a longer stay is vain;

Again a thundering volley roars, and only five remain.

Then all obeyed the swift command to shoulder arms, retreat:

Sven Duva only missed the word, and fixed his bayonet.

Still more his turning to retreat th' old look of bungling wore,

For, far from going with the rest, upon the bridge he bore;

And there he stood, broad-shouldered, stiff, with his old coolness still,

Prepared to teach to whomsoe'er the best points of his drill.

Nor long he waited ere was need he should his tactics show,

For in a moment all the bridge was freighted with the foe:

Fast on they pressed, man after man, but each who came was met

And tumbled bleeding to the earth by Sven's good bayonet.

To push this giant down was more than single arm could do,

And still his nearest foe a shield from shots of others grew:

The quicker pressed the pushing foe, the more his hope was foiled,

'Till Sandels with his host appeared, and saw how Duva toiled.

"Well done!" the chieftain cried, "well done! my bravest soldier thou!

Let not a devil pass the bridge: hold out a moment now.

Yon brave man be a soldier called, and so a Finn should fight.

Come, help him well, for well we owe our safety to his might."

The foe soon found th' attack was foiled, and without long delay

The Russian forces wheeled around and slowly moved away.

The chief, dismounting, sought the stream when all the din was o'er,

And asked for him who held the bridge and stayed the Russian war.

They pointed to Sven Duva then: his war was overfought;

Yea, manlike he had warred, and now the battle-hour was not.

It seemed that he had lain to rest what time the sport was done--

Well, scarce more quiet than of old, but much more pale and wan.

Above the fallen Sandels bent, the features well to trace--

No stranger features to the chief: it was a well-known face.

Beneath Sven's heart where he was laid the green grass gleamed with red:

A ball had pierced the willing heart, and he was of the dead.

"That bullet knew to take effect, we must confess who see,"

So simply spoke the general. "It knew much more than we:

It let alone his forehead, for it was his weakest part:

It entered at a nobler spot--into a faithful heart."

Those words were bruited far and wide throughout the general host,

And unto each one everywhere the general's words seemed just;

"For surely unto Duva brains were scant in measure doled,

But, though his head was rather bad, his heart was good as gold."

C. ROSELL.

A LAW UNTO HERSELF.