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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96,
+October 1865, by Various
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865
+
+Author: Various
+
+Release Date: December 2, 2006 [EBook #19996]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ATLANTIC MONTHLY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Joshua Hutchinson, Josephine Paolucci and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net.
+(This file was produced from images generously made
+available by Cornell University Digital Collections).
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE
+
+ATLANTIC MONTHLY.
+
+_A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics._
+
+VOL. XVI.--OCTOBER, 1865.--NO. XCVI.
+
+Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1865, by TICKNOR
+AND FIELDS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the
+District of Massachusetts.
+
+
+Transcriber's Note: Minor typos have been corrected and footnotes moved
+to the end of the article.
+
+
+
+
+SAINTS WHO HAVE HAD BODIES.
+
+
+All doubtless remember the story which is told of the witty Charles II.
+and the Royal Society: How one day the King brought to the attention of
+its members a most curious and inexplicable phenomenon, which he stated
+thus: "When you put a trout into a pail full of water, why does not the
+water overflow?" The savans, naturally enough, were surprised, and
+suggested many wise, but fruitless explanations; until at last one of
+their number, having no proper reverence for royalty in his heart,
+demanded that the experiment should actually be tried. Then, of course,
+it was proved that there was no phenomenon to be explained. The water
+overflowed fast enough. Indeed, it is chronicled that the evolutions of
+this lively member of the piscatory tribe were so brisk, that the
+difficulty was the exact opposite of what was anticipated, namely, how
+to keep the water in.
+
+This story may be a pure fable, but the lesson it teaches is true and
+important. It illustrates forcibly the facility with which even wise men
+accept doubtful propositions, and then apply the whole power of their
+minds to explain them, and perhaps to defend them. Latterly one hears
+constantly of the physical decay which threatens the American people,
+because of their unwise and disproportioned stimulation of the brain. It
+is assumed, almost as an axiom, that there is "a deficiency of physical
+health in America." Especially is it assumed that great mental progress,
+either of races or of individuals, has been generally purchased at the
+expense of the physical frame. Indeed, it is one of the questions of the
+day, how the saints, that is, those devoted to literary and professional
+pursuits, shall obtain good and serviceable bodies; or, to widen the
+query, how the finest intellectual culture can exist side by side with
+the noblest physical development; or, to bring this question into a form
+that shall touch us most sharply, how our boys and girls can obtain all
+needful knowledge and mental discipline, and yet keep full of graceful
+and buoyant vitality.
+
+What do we say to the theories and convictions which are underneath this
+language? What answer shall we make to these questions? What answer
+ought we to make? Our first reply would be, We doubt the proposition.
+We ask for the broad and firm basis of undoubted facts upon which it
+rests. And we enter an opposite plea. We affirm that the saints have as
+good bodies as other people, and that they always did have. We deny that
+they need to be patched up or watched over any more than their
+neighbors. They live as long and enjoy as much as the rest of mankind.
+They can endure as many hard buffets, and come out as tough and strong,
+as the veriest dolt whose intellectual bark foundered in the unsounded
+depths of his primer. The world's history through, the races which are
+best taught have the best endowment of health. Nay, in our own New
+England, with just such influences, physical, mental, and moral, as
+actually exist, there is no deterioration in real vitality to weep over.
+
+We hold, then, on this subject very different opinions from those which
+prevail in many quarters. We believe in the essential healthfulness of
+literary culture, and in the invigorating power of sound knowledge.
+Emphatically do we believe that our common schools have been in the
+aggregate a positive physical benefit. We are confident, that, just to
+the degree that the unseen force within a man receives its rightful
+development, does vigorous life flow in every current that beats from
+heart to extremities. With entire respect for the opinions of others,
+even while we cannot concur with them, with a readiness to admit that
+the assertion of those opinions may have been indirectly beneficial, we
+wish to state the truth as it looks to us, to exhibit the facts which
+bear upon this subject in the shape and hue they have to our own minds,
+and to give the grounds of our conviction that a cultivated mind is the
+best friend and ally of the body.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Would it not be singular, if anything different were true? You say, and
+you say rightly, that the best part of a man is his mind and soul, those
+spiritual elements which divide him from all the rest of the creation,
+animate or inanimate, and make him lord and sovereign over them all. You
+say, and you say wisely, that the body, however strong and beautiful, is
+nothing,--that the senses, however keen and vigorous, are nothing,--that
+the outward glories, however much they may minister to sensual
+gratification, are nothing,--unless they all become the instruments for
+the upbuilding of the immortal part in man. But what a tremendous
+impeachment of the wisdom or power of the Creator you are bringing, if
+you assert that the development of this highest part, whether by its
+direct influence on the body, or indirectly by the habits of life which
+it creates, is destructive of all the rest, nay, self-destructive! You
+may show that every opening bud in spring, and every joint, nerve, and
+muscle in every animate creature, are full of proofs of wise designs
+accomplishing their purposes, and it shall all count for less than
+nothing, if you can demonstrate that the mind, in its highest, broadest
+development, brings anarchy into the system,--or, mark it well,
+produces, or tends to produce, habits of living ruinous to health, and
+so ruinous to true usefulness. At the outset, therefore, the very fact
+that the mind is the highest creation of Divine wisdom would force us to
+believe that that development of it, that increase of knowledge, that
+sharpening of the faculties, that feeding of intellectual hunger, which
+does not promote joy and health in every part, must be false and
+illegitimate indeed.
+
+And it is hardly too much to say, that, in a rational being, thought is
+almost synonymous with vitality of all sorts. The brain throws out its
+network of nerves to every part of the body; and those nerves are the
+pathways along which it sends, not alone physical volitions, but its
+mental force and high intelligence, to mingle by a subtile chemistry
+with every fibre, and give it a finer life and a more bounding
+elasticity. So one might foretell, before the study of a single fact of
+experience, that, other things being equal, he who had few or no
+thoughts would have not only a dormant mind, but also a sluggish and
+inert body, less active than another, less enduring, and especially less
+defiant of physical ills. And one might prophesy, too, that he who had
+high thoughts and wealth of knowledge would have stored up in his brain
+a magazine of reserved power wherewith to support the faltering body: a
+prophecy not wide apart, perhaps, from any broad and candid observation
+of human life.
+
+And who can fail to remember what superior resources a cultivated mind
+has over one sunk in sloth and ignorance,--how much wider an outlook,
+how much larger and more varied interests, and how these things support
+when outward props fail, how they strengthen in misfortune and pain, and
+keep the heart from anxieties which might wear out the body? Scott,
+dictating "Ivanhoe" in the midst of a torturing sickness, and so rising,
+by force of a cultivated imagination, above all physical anguish, to
+revel in visions of chivalric splendor, is but the type of men
+everywhere, who, but for resources supplied by the mind, would have sunk
+beneath the blows of adverse fortune, or else sought forgetfulness in
+brutalizing and destructive pleasures. Sometimes a book is better far
+than medicine, and more truly soothing than the best anodyne. Sometimes
+a rich-freighted memory is more genial than many companions. Sometimes a
+firm mind, that has all it needs within itself, is a watchtower to which
+we may flee, and from which look down calmly upon our own losses and
+misfortunes. He who does not understand this has either had a most
+fortunate experience, or else has no culture, which is really a part of
+himself, woven into the very texture of the soul. So, if there were no
+facts, considering the mind, and who made it, and how it is related to
+the body, and how, when it is a good mind and a well-stored mind, it
+seems to stand for all else, to be food and shelter and comfort and
+friend and hope, who could believe anything else than that a
+well-instructed soul could do nought but good to its servant the body?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After all, we cannot evade, and we ought not to seek to evade, the
+testimony of facts. No cause can properly stand on any theory, however
+pleasant and cheering, or however plausible. What, then, of the facts,
+of the painful facts of experience, which are said to tell so different
+a tale? This,--that the physical value of education is in no way so
+clearly demonstrated as by these very facts. We know what is the
+traditional picture of the scholar,--pale, stooping, hectic, hurrying
+with unsteady feet to a predestined early grave; or else morbid,
+dyspeptic, cadaverous, putting into his works the dark tints of his own
+inward nature. At best, he is painted as a mere bookworm, bleached and
+almost mildewed in some learned retirement beneath the shadow of great
+folios, until he is out of joint with the world, and all fresh and
+hearty life has gone out of him. Who cannot recall just such pictures,
+wherein one knows not which predominates, the ludicrous or the pitiful?
+We protest against them all. In the name of truth and common-sense
+alike, we indignantly reject them. We have a vision of a sturdier
+manhood: of the genial, open countenance of an Irving; of the homely,
+honest strength that shone in every feature of a Walter Scott; of the
+massive vigor of a Goethe or a Humboldt. How much, too, is said of the
+physical degeneracy of our own people,--how the jaw is retreating, how
+the frame is growing slender and gaunt, how the chest flattens, and how
+tenderly we ought to cherish every octogenarian among us, for that we
+are seeing the last of them! If this is intended to be a piece of
+pleasant badinage, far be it from us to arrest a single smile it may
+awaken. But if it is given as a serious description, from which serious
+deductions can be drawn, then we say, that, as a delineation, it is, to
+a considerable extent, purely fanciful,--as an argument, utterly so. The
+facts, so far as they are ascertained, point unwaveringly to this
+conclusion,--that every advance of a people in knowledge and refinement
+is accompanied by as striking an advance in health and strength.
+
+Try this question, if you please, on the largest possible scale. Compare
+the uneducated savage with his civilized brother. His form has never
+been bent by confinement in the school-room. Overburdening thoughts have
+never wasted his frame. And if unremitting exercise amid the free airs
+of heaven will alone make one strong, then he will be strong. Is the
+savage stronger? Does he live more years? Can he compete side by side
+with civilized races in the struggle for existence? Just the opposite is
+true. Our puny boys, as we sometimes call them, in our colleges, will
+weigh more, lift more, endure more than any barbarian race of them all.
+This day the gentle Sandwich-Islanders are wasting like snow-wreaths, in
+contact with educated races. This day our red men are being swept before
+advancing civilization like leaves before the breath of the hurricane.
+And it requires no prophet's eye to see, that, if we do not give the
+black man education as well as freedom, an unshackled mind as well as
+unshackled limbs, he, too, will share the same fate.
+
+To all this it may naturally be objected, that the reason so many savage
+races do not display the greatest physical stamina is not so much
+intellectual barrenness as their vices, native or acquired,--or because
+they bring no wisdom to the conduct of life, but dwell in smoky huts,
+eat unhealthy food, go from starvation to plethora and from plethora to
+starvation again, exchange the indolent lethargy which is the law of
+savage life for the frantic struggles of war or the chase which
+diversify and break up its monotony. Allow the objection; and then what
+have we accomplished, but carrying the argument one step back? For what
+are self-control and self-care, but the just fruits of intelligence? But
+in truth it is a combination of all these influences, and not any of
+them alone, that enables the civilized man to outlive and outrival his
+barbarian brother. He succeeds, not simply because of the superior
+address and sagacity which education gives him, though that, no doubt,
+has much to do with it; not altogether because his habits of life are
+better, though we would not underrate their value; but equally because
+the culture of the brain gives a finer life to every red drop in his
+arteries, and greater hardihood to every fibre which is woven into his
+flesh. If it is not so, how do you explain the fact that our colored
+soldier, fighting in his native climate, with the same exposure in
+health and the same care in sickness, succumbs to wounds and diseases
+over which his white comrade triumphs? Or how will you explain analogous
+facts in the history of disease among other uneducated races? Our
+explanation is simple. As the slightest interfusion of carbon may change
+the dull iron into trenchant steel, so intelligence working through
+invisible channels may add a new temper to the physical nature. And thus
+it may be strictly true that it is not only the mind and soul which
+slavery and ignorance wrong, but the body just as much.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It may be said, and perhaps justly, that a comparison between races so
+unlike is not a fair comparison. Take, then, if you prefer, the
+intelligent and unintelligent periods in the history of the same race.
+The old knights! Those men with mail-clad bodies and iron natures, who
+stand out in imagination as symbols of masculine strength! The old
+knights! They were not scholars. Their constitutions were not ruined by
+study, or by superfluous sainthood of any kind. They were more at home
+with the sword than the pen. They loved better "to hear the lark sing
+than the mouse squeak." So their minds were sufficiently dormant. How
+was it with their bodies? Were they sturdier men? Did they stand heavier
+on their feet than their descendants? It is a familiar fact that the
+armor which inclosed them will not hold those whom we call their
+degenerate children. A friend tells me that in the armory of London
+Tower there are preserved scores, if not hundreds, of the swords of
+those terrible Northmen, those Vikings, who, ten centuries ago, swept
+the seas and were the dread of all Europe, and that scarcely one of them
+has a hilt large enough to be grasped by a man of this generation. Of
+races who have left behind them no methodical records, and whose story
+is preserved only in the rude rhymes of their poets and ruder
+chronicles, it is not safe to make positive affirmations; but all the
+indications are that the student of to-day is a larger and stronger man
+than the warrior of the Middle Ages.
+
+If we come down to periods of historical certainty, no one will doubt
+that the England of the present hour is more educated than the England
+of fifty years ago, or that the England of fifty years since had a
+broader diffusion of intelligence than the England of a century
+previous. Yet that very intelligence has prolonged life. An Englishman
+lives longer to-day than he did in 1800, and longer yet than in 1700.
+Here is a curious proof. Annuities calculated on a certain rate of life
+in 1694 would yield a fortune to those who issued them. Calculated at
+the same rate in 1794, they would ruin them; for the more general
+diffusion of knowledge and refinement had added, I am not able to say
+how many years to the average British life. Observe how this statement
+is confirmed by some wonderful statistics preserved at Geneva. From 1600
+to 1700 the average length of life in that city was 13 years 3 months.
+From 1700 to 1750 it was 27 years 9 months. From 1750 to 1800, 31 years
+3 months. From 1800 to 1833, 43 years 6 months.
+
+One more pertinent fact. Take in England any number of families you
+please, whose parents can read and write, and an equal number of
+families whose parents cannot read and write, and the number of children
+in the latter class of families who will die before the age of five
+years will greatly exceed that in the former class,--some thirty or
+forty per cent. So surely does a thoughtful ordering of life come in the
+train of intelligence. If faith is to be placed in statistics of any
+sort, then it holds true in foreign countries that human life is long in
+proportion to the degree that knowledge, refinement, and virtue are
+diffused. That is, sainthood, so far from destroying the body, preserves
+it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I anticipate the objection which may be made to our last argument.
+Abroad, we are told, there is such an element of healthy, out-door life,
+that any ill effects which might naturally follow in the train of
+general education are neutralized. Abroad, too, education with the
+masses is elementary, and advanced also with more moderation than with
+us. Abroad, moreover, the whole social being is not pervaded with the
+intense intellectual activity and fervor which are so characteristic
+especially of New England life.
+
+Come home, then, to our own Massachusetts, which some will have is
+school-mad. What do you find? Here, in a climate proverbially changeable
+and rigorous,--here, where mental and moral excitements rise to
+fever-heat,--here, where churches adorn every landscape, and
+school-houses greet us at every corner, and lyceums are established in
+every village,--here, where newspapers circulate by the hundred
+thousand, and magazines for our old folks, and "Our Young Folks," too,
+reach fifty thousand,--here, in Massachusetts, health is at its climax:
+greater and more enduring than in bonnie England, or vine-clad France,
+or sunny Italy. I read some statistics the other day, and I have ever
+since had a greater respect for the land of "east-winds, and salt-fish
+and school-houses," as scandalous people have termed Massachusetts. What
+do these statistics say? That, while in England the deaths reach
+annually 2.21 per cent of the whole population, and in France 2.36 per
+cent, and in Italy 2.94 per cent, and in Austria 3.34 per cent, in
+Massachusetts, the deaths are only 1.82 per cent annually. Even in
+Boston, with its large proportion of foreign elements, the percentage of
+deaths is only 2.35. It may be said, in criticism of these statements,
+that in our country statistics are not kept with sufficient accuracy to
+furnish correct data. However this may be in our rural districts, it
+certainly is not true of the metropolis. The figures are not at hand,
+but they exist, and they prove conclusively that those wards in Boston
+which have a population most purely native reach a salubrity unexcelled.
+So that, with all the real drawbacks of climate, and the pretended
+drawbacks of unnatural or excessive mental stimulus, the health here is
+absolutely unequalled by that of any country in Europe. Certainly, if
+the mental and moral sainthood which we have does not build up the body,
+it cannot be said that it does any injury to it.
+
+Have we noted what a splendid testimony the war which has just closed
+has given to the physical results of our New England villages and put
+into the ranks of our army--young men who learned the alphabet at four,
+who all through boyhood had the advantages of our common-school system,
+who had felt to the full the excitement of the intellectual life about
+them--have stood taller, weighed heavier, fought more bravely and
+intelligently, won victory out of more adverse circumstances, and, what
+is more to the point, endured more hardship with less sickness, than a
+like number of any other race on earth. We care not where you look for
+comparison, whether to Britain, or to France, or to Russia, where the
+spelling-book has almost been tabooed, or to Spain, where in times past
+the capacity to read the Bible was scarcely less than rank heresy, at
+least for the common people. This war has been brought to a successful
+issue by the best educated army that ever fought on battle-field, or, as
+the new book has it, by "the thinking bayonet," by men whose physical
+manhood has received no detriment from their intellectual culture.
+
+These assertions are founded upon statistics which have been preserved
+regiments whose members were almost exclusively native-born. And the
+results are certainly in accordance with all candid observation. It may,
+indeed, be said that the better health of our army has been after all
+the result of the better care which the soldier has taken of himself. We
+answer, the better care was the product of his education. It may be said
+again that this health was owing in a great measure to the superior
+watchfulness exercised over the soldier by others, by the Government, by
+the Sanitary Commission, and by State agencies. Then we reply, that this
+tenderness of the soldier, if tenderness it be, and this sagacity, if
+sagacity prompted the care, were both the offspring of that high
+intelligence which is the proper result of popular education.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There is but one possible mode of escape from such testimony. This whole
+train of argument is inconclusive, it may be asserted, because what is
+maintained is not that intellectual culture is unhealthful, where it is
+woven into the web of active life, but only where the pursuit of
+knowledge is one's business. It may be readily allowed, that, where the
+whole nature is kept alive by the breath of outward enterprise, when the
+great waves of this world's excitements are permitted to roll with
+purifying tides into the inmost recesses of the soul, the results of
+mental culture may be modified. But what of the saints? What of the
+literary men _par excellence_?
+
+Ah! if you restrain us to that line of inquiry, the argument will be
+trebly strong, and the facts grow overwhelmingly pertinent and
+conclusive. Will you examine the careful registry of deaths in
+Massachusetts which has been kept the last twenty years? It will inform
+you that the classes whose average of life is high up, almost the
+highest up, are with us the classes that work with the brain,--the
+judges, the lawyers, the physicians, the clergymen, the professors in
+your colleges. The very exception to this statement rather confirms than
+contradicts our general position, that intellectual culture is
+absolutely invigorating. The cultivators of the soil live longest. But
+note that it is the educated, intelligent farmers, the farmers of
+Massachusetts, the farmers of a State of common schools, the farmers who
+link thought to labor, who live long. And doubtless, if they carried
+more thought into their labor, if they were more intelligent, if they
+were better educated, they would live yet longer. At any rate, in
+England the cultivators of her soil, her down-trodden peasantry,
+sluggish and uneducated, do not live out half their days. Very likely
+the farmer's lot, _plus_ education and _plus_ habits of mental activity,
+is the healthiest as it is the primal condition of man. Nevertheless,
+considering what is the general opinion, it is surprising how slight is
+the advantage which he has even then over the purely literary classes.
+
+Will you go to Harvard University and ascertain what becomes of her
+children? Take up, then, Dr. Palmer's Necrology of the Alumni of Harvard
+from 1851 to 1863. You will learn, that, while the average age of all
+persons who in Massachusetts die after they have attained the period of
+twenty years is but fifty years, the average age of Harvard graduates,
+who die in like manner, is fifty-eight years. Thus you have, in favor of
+the highest form of public education known in the State, a clear average
+of eight years. You may examine backward the Triennial Catalogue as far
+as you please, and you will not find the testimony essentially
+different. The statement will stand impregnable, that, from the time
+John Harvard founded our little College in the wilderness, to this hour,
+when it is fast becoming a great University, with its schools in every
+department, and its lectures covering the whole field of human
+knowledge, the graduates have always attained a longevity surpassing
+that of their generation.
+
+And you are to observe that this comparison is a strictly just
+comparison. We contrast not the whole community, old and young, with
+those who must necessarily have attained manhood before they are a class
+at all; but adults with adults, graduates with those of other avocations
+who have arrived at the period of twenty years. Neither do we compare
+the bright and peculiar luminaries of Harvard with the mass of
+men,--though, in fact, it is well known that the best scholars live the
+most years,--but we compare the whole body of the graduates, bright and
+dull, studious and unstudious, with the whole body of the community.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To the array of evidence which may be brought from all the registries of
+all the states and universities under heaven, some may triumphantly
+exclaim, "Statistics are unworthy of trust." "To lie like statistics,"
+"false as a fact," these are the stalest of witticisms. But the
+objection to which they give point is practically frivolous. Grant that
+statistics are to a certain degree doubtful, are they not the most
+trustworthy evidence we have? And in the question at issue, are they not
+the only evidence which has real force? And allowing their general
+defectiveness, how shall we explain, that, though gathered from all
+sides and by all kinds of people, they so uniformly favor education?
+Why, if they must err, do they err so pertinaciously in one direction?
+How does it happen, that, summon as many witnesses as you please, and
+cross-question them as severely as you can, they never falter in this
+testimony, that, where intelligence abounds, there physical vigor does
+much more abound? that, where education is broad and generous, there the
+years are many and happy?
+
+If, therefore, facts can prove anything, it is that just such a
+condition of life as that which is growing more and more general among
+us, and which our common-school system directly fosters, where every man
+is becoming an educated man,--where the farmer upon his acres, the
+merchant at his desk, and the mechanic in his shop, no less than the
+scholar poring over his books shall be in the truest sense
+educated,--that such a condition is the one of all others which promotes
+habits of thought and action, an elasticity of temper and a breadth of
+vision and interest most conducive to health and vigor. It is the
+fashion to talk of the appearance of superior robustness so
+characteristic of our English brethren. But we suspect that in this
+case, too, appearances are deceitful. That climate may produce in us a
+restless energy inconsistent with rounded forms and rosy cheeks we
+freely allow. But in strength and real endurance the New England
+constitution will yield to none. And the stern logic of facts shows
+beyond a peradventure, that here there are no influences, climatic or
+intellectual, which war with longevity. What may be hidden in the
+future, what results may come from a still wider diffusion of education,
+we cannot tell, but hitherto nothing but good has come of
+ever-increasing knowledge.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We hasten now to inquire concerning the health and years of special
+classes of literary men: not, indeed, to prove that there is no real war
+between the mind and the body,--for we consider that point to be already
+demonstrated,--but rather to show that we need shrink from no field of
+inquiry, and that from every fresh field will come new evidence of the
+substantial truth of our position.
+
+We have taken the trouble to ascertain the average age of all the
+English poets of whom Johnson wrote lives, some fifty or sixty in all.
+Here are great men and small men, men with immortal names and men whose
+names were long since forgotten, men of good habits and men whose habits
+would undermine any constitution, flourishing, too, in a period when
+human life was certainly far shorter in England than now. And how long
+did they live? What do you think? Thirty, forty years? No; they endured
+their sainthood, or their want of it, for the comfortable period of
+fifty-six years. Nor is the case a particle different, if you take only
+the great and memorable names of English poetry. Chaucer, living at the
+dawn almost of English civilization; Shakspeare, whose varied and
+marvellous dramas might well have exhausted any vitality; Milton,
+struggling with domestic infelicity, with political hatred, and with
+blindness; Dryden, Pope, Swift: none of these burning and shining lights
+of English literature went out at mid-day. The result is not altered, if
+you come nearer our own time. That galaxy of talent and genius which
+shone with such brilliancy in the Scottish capital at the beginning of
+the century,--Sydney Smith, Lord Jeffrey, Christopher North, Macaulay,
+Mackintosh, De Quincey, Brougham,--all these, with scarcely an
+exception, have lived far beyond the average of human life. So was it
+with the great poets and romancers of that period. Wordsworth, living
+the life of a recluse near the beautiful lakes of Westmoreland, lasted
+to fourscore. Southey, after a life of unparalleled literary industry,
+broke down at sixty-six. Coleridge, with habits which ought to have
+destroyed him early, lingered till sixty-two. Scott, struggling to throw
+off a mountain-load of debt, endured superhuman labor till more than
+sixty. Even Byron and Burns, who did not live as men who desired length
+of days, died scarcely sooner than their generation.
+
+You are not willing, perhaps, to test this question by the longevity of
+purely literary men. You ask what can be said about the great preachers.
+You have always heard, that, while the ministers were, no doubt, men of
+excellent intentions and much sound learning, what with their morbid
+notions of life, and what with the weight of a rather heavy sort of
+erudition, they were saints with the very poorest kind of bodies. Just
+the contrary. No class lives longer. We once made out a list of the
+thirty most remarkable preachers of the last four centuries that we
+could call to mind. Of the age to which most of these attained we had at
+the outset no idea whatever. In that list were included the men who must
+figure in every candid account of preaching. The great men of the
+Reformation, Luther, Melancthon, Calvin, Beza, Knox, were there. That
+resplendent group which adorned the seventeenth century, and whose
+names are synonymes for pulpit eloquence, Barrow, South, Jeremy Taylor,
+and Tillotson, were prominent in it. The milder lights of the last
+century, Paley, Blair, Robertson, Priestley, were not forgotten. The
+Catholics were represented by Massillon, Bossuet, Bourdalouë, and
+Fénelon. The Protestants as truly by Robert Hall and Chalmers, by Wesley
+and Channing. In short, it was a thoroughly fair list. We then proceeded
+to ascertain the average life of those included in it. It was just
+sixty-nine years. And we invite all persons who are wedded to the notion
+that the saints are always knights of the broken body, to take pen and
+paper and jot down the name of every remarkable preacher since the year
+1500 that they can recall, and add, if they wish, every man in their own
+vicinity who has risen in learning and talent above the mass of his
+profession. We will insure the result without any premium. They will
+produce a list that would delight the heart of a provident director of a
+life-insurance company. And their average will come as near the old
+Scripture pattern of threescore years and ten as that of any body of men
+who have lived since the days of Isaac and Jacob.
+
+If now any one has a lurking doubt of the physical value of an active
+and well-stored mind, let him pass from the preachers to the statesmen,
+from the men who teach the wisdom of the world to come to the men who
+administer the things of this world. Let him begin with the grand names
+of the Long Parliament,--Hampden, Pym, Vane, Cromwell,--and then gather
+up all the great administrators of the next two centuries, down to the
+octogenarians who are now foremost in the conduct of British affairs;
+and if he wishes to widen his observation, let him pass over the Channel
+to the Continent, and in France recall such names as Sully and
+Richelieu, Mazarin and Colbert, Talleyrand and Guizot; in Austria,
+Kaunitz and Metternich. And when he has made his list as broad, as
+inclusive of all really great statesmanship everywhere as he can, find
+his average; and if he can bring it much beneath seventy, he will be
+more fortunate than we were when we tried the experiment.
+
+Do not by any means omit the men of science. There are the astronomers.
+If any employment would seem to draw a man up to heaven, it would be
+this. Yet, of all men, astronomers apparently have had the most wedded
+attachment to earth. Galileo, Newton, La Place, Herschel,--these are the
+royal names, the fixed stars, set, as it were, in that very firmament
+which for so many years they searched with telescopic eye. And yet
+neither of them lived less than seventy-eight years. As for the men of
+natural science, it looks as though they were spared by some
+Providential provision, in order that they might observe and report for
+long epochs the changes of this old earth of ours. Cuvier dying at
+seventy-five, Sir Joseph Banks at seventy-seven, Buffon at eighty-one,
+Blumenbach at eighty-eight, and Humboldt at fourscore and ten, are some
+of the cases which make such a supposition altogether reasonable.
+
+Cross the ocean, and you will find the same testimony, that mental
+culture is absolutely favorable to physical endurance. The greatest men
+in our nation's history, whether in walks of statesmanship, science, or
+literature, almost without exception, have lived long. Franklin,
+Washington, Jefferson, Madison, the elder Adams, and Patrick Henry, in
+earlier periods,--the younger Adams, Clay, Calhoun, Webster, Choate, and
+Everett, Irving, Prescott, Cooper, and Hawthorne, in later times,--are
+cases in point. These men did not die prematurely. They grew strong by
+the toil of the brain. And to-day the quartette of our truest
+poets--Bryant, Whittier, Longfellow, and Holmes--are with us in the hale
+years of a green age, never singing sweeter songs, never harping more
+inspiring strains. Long may our ears hear their melodies!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If now we could enter the walks of private life, and study widely the
+experience of individual men, we should have an interesting record
+indeed, and a manifold and wellnigh irresistible testimony. Consider a
+few remarkable, yet widely differing cases.
+
+Who can read attentively the life of John Wesley, and not exclaim, if
+varied and exhausting labor, if perpetual excitement and constant drafts
+upon the brain, would ever wear a man out, he would have worn out? It
+was his creative energy that called into existence a denomination, his
+ardent piety that inspired it, his clear mind that legislated for it,
+his heroic industry that did no mean part of the incessant daily toil
+needful for its establishment. Yet this man of many labors, who through
+a long life never knew practically the meaning of the word _leisure_,
+says, at seventy-two, "How is it that I find the same strength that I
+did thirty years ago, that my nerves are firmer, that I have none of the
+infirmities of old age, and have lost several that I had in youth." And
+ten years later, he devoutly records, "Is anything too hard for God? It
+is now eleven years since I have felt such a thing as weariness." And he
+continued till eighty-eight in full possession of his faculties,
+laboring with body and mind alike to within a week of his death.
+
+Joseph Priestley was certainly a very different man, but scarcely less
+remarkable. No mean student in all branches of literature, a
+metaphysician, a theologian, a man of science, he began life with a
+feeble frame, and ended a hearty old age at seventy-one. He himself
+declares at fifty-four, that, "so far from suffering from application to
+study, I have found my health steadily improve from the age of eighteen
+to the present time."
+
+You would scarcely find a life more widely divided from these than that
+of Washington Irving. Nevertheless, it is like them in one respect, that
+it bears emphatic testimony to the real healthiness of mental exertion.
+He was the feeblest of striplings at eighteen. At nineteen, Judge Kent
+said, "He is not long for this world." His friends sent him abroad at
+twenty-one, to see if a sea voyage would not husband his strength. So
+pale, so broken, was he, that, when he stepped on board the ship, the
+captain whispered, "There is a chap who will be overboard before we are
+across!" Irving had, too, his share of misfortunes,--failure in
+business, loss of investments, in earlier life some anxiety as to the
+ways and means of support. Even his habits of study were hardly what the
+highest wisdom would direct. While he was always genial and social, and
+at times easy almost to indolence, when the mood seized him, he would
+write incessantly for weeks and even for months, sometimes fourteen,
+fifteen, or sixteen hours in a day. But he grew robust for half a
+century, and writes, at seventy-five, that he has now "a streak of old
+age."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The example of some of those who are said to have been worn out by
+intense mental application furnishes perhaps the most convincing proof
+of all that no reasonable activity of the mind ever warred with the best
+health of the body. Walter Scott, we are told, wore out. And very
+likely, to a certain extent, the statement is true. But what had he not
+accomplished before he wore out? He had astonished the world with that
+wonderful series of romances which place him scarcely second to any name
+in English literature. He had sung those border legends which delighted
+the ears of his generation. He had produced histories which show, that,
+had he chosen, he might have been as much a master in the region of
+historic fact as in the realm of imagination. He had edited other men's
+works; he had written essays; he had lent himself with a royal
+generosity to every one who asked his time or influence; and when,
+almost an old man, commercial bankruptcy overtook him, and he sought to
+lift the mountain of his debt by pure intellectual toil, he wore out.
+But declining years, disappointed hopes, desperate exertions, may wear
+anybody out. He wore out, but it was at more than threescore years, when
+nine tenths of his generation had long slept in quiet graves,--when the
+crowd of the thoughtless and indolent, who began life with him, had
+rusted out in inglorious repose. Yes, Walter Scott wore out, if you call
+that wearing out.
+
+John Calvin, all his biographers say, wore out. Perhaps so;--but not
+without a prolonged resistance. Commencing life with the frailest
+constitution, he was, as early as twenty-five, a model of erudition, and
+had already written his immortal work. For thirty years he was in the
+heat and ferment of a great religious revolution. For thirty years he
+was one of the controlling minds of his age. For thirty years he was the
+sternest soldier in the Church Militant, bearing down stubborn
+resistance by a yet more stubborn will. For thirty years neither his
+brain nor his pen knew rest. And so at fifty-six this man of broken body
+and many labors laid down the weapons of his warfare; but it was at
+Geneva, where the public registers tell us that the average of human
+life in that century was only nine years.
+
+One writes words like these:--"John Kitto died, and his death was the
+judgment for overwork, and overwork of a single organ,--the brain." And
+who was John Kitto? A poor boy, the son a drunken father, subject from
+infancy to agonizing headache. An unfortunate lad, who at thirteen fell
+from a scaffolding and was taken up for dead, and escaped only with
+total deafness and a supposed permanent injury to the brain. A hapless
+apprentice, who suffered at the hands of a cruel taskmaster all that
+brutality and drunken fury could suggest. A youth, thirsting for
+knowledge, but able to obtain it only by the hardest ways, peering into
+booksellers' windows, reading at book-stalls, purchasing cheap books
+with pennies stained all over with the sweat of his toil. An heroic
+student, who labored for more than twenty years with almost unparalleled
+industry, and with an equally unparalleled neglect of the laws of
+health; of whom it is scarcely too much to say literally, that he knew
+no change, but from his desk to his bed, and from his bed to his desk
+again. A voluminous writer, who, if he produced no work of positive
+genius, has done more than any other man to illustrate the Scriptures,
+and to make familiar and vivid the scenery, the life, the geography, and
+the natural history of the Holy Land. And he died in the harness,--but
+not so very early,--at fifty. And we say that he would have lived much
+longer, had he given his constitution a fair chance. But when we
+remember his passionate fondness for books, how they compensated him for
+the want of wealth, comforts, and the pleasant voices of wife and
+children that he could not hear, we grow doubtful. And we hear him
+exclaim almost in rhapsody,--"If I were blind as well as deaf, in what a
+wretched situation should I be! If I could not read, how deplorable
+would be my condition! What earthly pleasure equal to the reading of a
+good book? O dearest tomes! O princely and august folios! to obtain you,
+I would work night and day, and forbid myself every sensual joy!" When
+we behold the forlorn man, shut out by his misfortune from so many
+resources, and finding more than recompense for this privation within
+the four walls of his library, we are tempted to say, No, he would not
+have lived as long; had he studied less, he would have remembered his
+griefs more.
+
+Of course it is easy to take exception to all evidence drawn from the
+life and experience of individual men,--natural to say that one must
+needs be somewhat old before he can acquire a great name at all, and
+that our estimate considers those alone to whom mere prolongation of day
+has given reputation, and forgets "the village Hampdens, the mute,
+inglorious Miltons," the unrecorded Newtons, the voiceless orators,
+sages, or saints who have died and made no sign. To this the simple
+reply is, that individual cases, however numerous and striking, are not
+relied upon to prove any position, but only to illustrate and confirm
+one which general data have already demonstrated. Grant the full force
+of every criticism, and then it remains true that the widest record of
+literary life exhibits no tendency of mental culture to shorten human
+life or to create habits which would shorten it. Indeed, we do not know
+where to look for any broad range of facts which would indicate that
+education here or anywhere else has decreased or is likely to decrease
+health. And were it not for the respect which we cherish towards those
+who hold it, we should say that such a position was as nearly pure
+theory or prejudice or opinion founded on fragmentary data as any view
+well could be.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But do you mean to assert that there is no such thing as intellectual
+excess? that intellectual activity never injures? that unremitting
+attention to mental pursuits, with an entire abstinence from proper
+exercise and recreation, is positively invigorating? that robbing the
+body of sleep, and bending it sixteen or eighteen hours over the desk,
+is the best way to build it up in grace and strength? Of course no one
+would say any such absurd things. There is a right and wrong use of
+everything. Any part of the system will wear out with excessive use.
+Overwork kills, but certainly not any quicker when it is overwork of the
+mind than when it is overwork of the body. Overwork in the study is just
+as healthful as overwork on the farm or at the ledger or in the smoky
+shop, toiling and moiling, with no rest and no quickening thoughts.
+Especially is it true that education does not peculiarly tempt a man to
+excess.
+
+But are you ready to maintain that there is no element of excess infused
+into our common-school system? Certainly. Most emphatically there is
+not. What, then, is there to put over against these terrible statements
+of excessive labor of six or seven hours a day, under which young brains
+are reeling and young spines are bending until there are no rosy-checked
+urchins and blooming maids left among us? The inexorable logic of facts.
+The public schools of Massachusetts were taught in the years 1863-4 on
+an average just thirty-two weeks, just five days in a week, and, making
+proper allowance for recesses and opening exercises, just five and a
+quarter hours in a day. Granting now that all the boys and girls studied
+during these hours faithfully, you have an average for the three hundred
+and thirteen working days of the year of two hours and forty-one minutes
+a day,--an amount of study that never injured any healthy child. But,
+going back a little to youthful recollections, and considering the
+amazing proclivity of the young mind to idleness, whispering, and fun
+and frolic in general, it seems doubtful whether our children ever yet
+attained to so high an average of actual study as two hours a day. As a
+modification of this statement, it may be granted that in the cities and
+larger towns the school term reaches forty weeks in a year. If you add
+one hour as the average amount of study at home, given by pupils of over
+twelve years, (and the allowance is certainly ample,) you have four
+hours as the utmost period ever given by any considerable class of
+children. That there is excess we freely admit. That there are easy
+committee-men who permit too high a pressure, and infatuated teachers
+who insist upon it, that there are ambitious children whom nobody can
+stop, and silly parents who fondly wish to see their children
+monstrosities of brightness, lisping Latin and Greek in their cradles,
+respiring mathematics as they would the atmosphere, and bristling all
+over with facts of natural science like porcupines, till every bit of
+childhood is worked out of them,--that such things are, we are not
+inclined to deny. But they are rare exceptions,--no more a part of the
+system than white crows are proper representatives of the dusky and
+cawing brotherhood.
+
+Or yet again, do we mean to assert that no attention need be given to
+the formation of right physical habits? or that bodily exercise ought
+not to be joined to mental toils? or that the walk in the woods, the row
+upon the quiet river, the stroll with rod in hand by the babbling brook,
+or with gun on shoulder over the green prairies, or the skating in the
+crisp December air on the glistening lake, ought to be discouraged? Do
+we speak disrespectfully of dumb-bells and clubs and parallel bars, and
+all the paraphernalia of the gymnasium? Are we aggrieved at the mention
+of boxing-gloves or single-stick or foils? Would it shock our nervous
+sensibilities, if our next-door neighbor the philosopher, or some
+near-by grave and reverend doctor of divinity, or even the learned judge
+himself, should give unmistakable evidence that he had in his body the
+two hundred and odd bones and the five hundred and more muscles, with
+all their fit accompaniments of joints and sinews, of which the
+anatomists tell us? Not at all. Far from it. We exercise, no doubt, too
+little. We know of God's fair world too much by description, too little
+by the sight of our own eyes. Welcome anything which leads us out into
+this goodly and glorious universe! Welcome all that tends to give the
+human frame higher grace and symmetry! Welcome the gymnastics, too,
+heavy or light either, if they will guide us to a more harmonious
+physical development.
+
+We ourselves own a set of heavy Indian-clubs, of middling Indian-clubs,
+and of light Indian-clubs. We have iron dumb-bells and wooden
+dumb-bells. We recollect with considerable satisfaction a veritable
+bean-bag which did good service in the household until it unfortunately
+sprung a-leak. In an amateur way we have tried both systems, and felt
+the better for them. We have a dim remembrance of rowing sundry leagues,
+and even of dabbling with the rod and line. We always look with friendly
+eye upon the Harvard Gymnasium, whenever it looms up in actual or mental
+vision. Never yet could we get by an honest game of cricket or base-ball
+without losing some ten minutes in admiring contemplation. We bow with
+deep respect to Dr. Windship and his heavy weights. We bow, if anything,
+with a trifle more of cordiality to Dr. Lewis and his light weights.
+They both have our good word. We think that they would have our example,
+were it not for the fatal proclivity of solitary gymnastics to dulness.
+If we have not risen to the high degrees in this noble order of muscular
+Christians, we claim at least to be a humble craftsman and faithful
+brother.
+
+Speaking with all seriousness, we have no faith in mental activity
+purchased at the expense of physical sloth. It is well to introduce into
+the school, into the family, and into the neighborhood any movement
+system which will exercise all the muscles of the body. But the educated
+man is not any more likely to need this general physical development
+than anybody else. Establish your gymnasium in any village, and the
+farmer fresh from the plough, the mechanic from swinging the hammer or
+driving the plane, will be just as sure to find new muscles that he
+never dreamed of as the palest scholar of them all. And the diffusion of
+knowledge and refinement, so far from promoting inactivity and banishing
+recreations from life, directly feeds that craving for variety out of
+which healthful changes come, and awakens that noble curiosity which at
+fit seasons sends a man out to see how the wild-flower grows in the
+woods, how the green buds open in the spring, how the foliage takes on
+its painted autumn glory, which leads him to struggle through tangled
+thickets or through pathless woods that he may behold the brook laughing
+in cascade from rock to rock, or to breast the steep mountain that he
+may behold from a higher outlook the wonders of the visible creation.
+Other things being equal, the educated man in any vocation is quite as
+likely as another to be active, quick in every motion and free in every
+limb.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But admit all that is claimed. Admit that increasing intelligence has
+changed the average of man's life from the twenty-five years of the
+seventeenth century to the thirty-five of the eighteenth or the
+forty-five years of the nineteenth century. Admit, too, that the best
+educated men of this generation will live five or ten years more than
+the least educated men. Ought we to be satisfied with things as they
+are? Should we not look for more than the forty or fifty years of human
+life? Assuredly. But it is not our superfluous sainthood which is
+destroying life. It is not that we have too much saintliness, but too
+little, too limited wisdom, too narrow intelligence, too small an
+endowment of virtue and conscience. It is our fierce absorption in
+outward plans which plants anxieties like thorns in the heart. It is out
+sloth and gluttony which eat out vitality. It is our unbridled appetites
+and passions which burn like a consuming fire in our breasts. It is our
+unwise exposure which saps the strength and gives energy and force to
+latent disease. These, tenfold more than any intense application of the
+brain to its legitimate work, limit and destroy human life. The truly
+cultivated mind tends to give just aims, moderate desires, and good
+habits.
+
+Ay, and when the true sainthood shall possess and rule humanity,--when
+the fields of knowledge with their wholesome fruits shall tempt every
+foot away from the forbidden paths of vice and sensual indulgence,--when
+a wise intelligence shall cool the hot passions which dry up the
+refreshing fountains of peace and joy in the heart,--when a heavenly
+wisdom shall lift us above any bondage to this world's fortunes, and
+when a good conscience and a lofty trust shall forbid us to be slaves to
+any occupation lower than the highest,--when we stand erect and free,
+clothed with a real saintliness,--then the years of our life may
+increase, and man may go down to his grave "in a full age, like as a
+shock of corn cometh in in his season."
+
+Meanwhile we must stand firmly on this assertion, that, the more of
+mental and moral sainthood our people achieve, the more that sainthood
+will write fair inscriptions on their bodies, will shine out in
+intelligence in their faces, will exhibit itself in graceful form and
+motion, and thus add to the deeper and more lasting virtues physical
+power, a body which shall be at once a good servant and the proper
+representative of a refined and elevated soul.
+
+
+
+
+NO TIME LIKE THE OLD TIME.
+
+
+    There is no time like the old time, when you and I were young,
+    When the buds of April blossomed, and the birds of spring-time sung!
+    The garden's brightest glories by summer suns are nursed,
+    But, oh, the sweet, sweet violets, the flowers that opened first!
+
+    There is no place like the old place where you and I were born,
+    Where we lifted first our eyelids on the splendors of the morn
+    From the milk-white breast that warmed us, from the clinging arms that bore,
+    Where the dear eyes glistened o'er us that will look on us no more!
+
+    There is no friend like the old friend who has shared our morning days,
+    No greeting like his welcome, no homage like his praise:
+    Fame is the scentless sunflower, with gaudy crown of gold;
+    But friendship is the breathing rose, with sweets in every fold.
+
+    There is no love like the old love that we courted in our pride;
+    Though our leaves are falling, falling, and we're fading side by side,
+    There are blossoms all around us with the colors of our dawn,
+    And we live in borrowed sunshine when the light of day is gone.
+
+    There are no times like the old times,--they shall never be forgot!
+    There is no place like the old place,--keep green the dear old spot!
+    There are no friends like our old friends,--may Heaven prolong their lives!
+    There are no loves like our old loves,--God bless our loving wives!
+
+
+
+
+COUPON BONDS.
+
+
+PART II.
+
+Mr. Ducklow had scarcely turned the corner of the street, when, looking
+anxiously in the direction of his homestead, he saw a column of smoke.
+It was directly over the spot where he knew his house to be situated. He
+guessed at a glance what had happened. The frightful catastrophe he
+foreboded had befallen. Taddy had set the house afire.
+
+"Them bonds! them bonds!" he exclaimed, distractedly. He did not think
+so much of the house: house and furniture were insured; if they were
+burned, the inconvenience would be great indeed, and at any other time
+the thought of such an event would have been a sufficient cause for
+trepidation,--but now his chief, his only anxiety was the bonds. They
+were not insured. They would be a dead loss. And what added sharpness to
+his pangs, they would be a loss which he must keep a secret, as he had
+kept their existence a secret,--a loss which he could not confess, and
+of which he could not complain. Had he not just given his neighbors to
+understand that he held no such property? And his wife,--was she not at
+that very moment, if not serving up a lie on the subject, at least
+paring the truth very thin indeed?
+
+"A man would think," observed Ferring, "that Ducklow had some o' them
+bonds on his hands, and got scaret, he took such a sudden start. He has,
+hasn't he, Mrs. Ducklow?"
+
+"Has what?" said Mrs. Ducklow, pretending ignorance.
+
+"Some o' them cowpon bonds. I ruther guess he's got some."
+
+"You mean Gov'ment bonds? Ducklow got some? 'Ta'n't at all likely he'd
+spec'late in them, without saying something to _me_ about it! No, he
+couldn't have any without my knowing it, I'm sure!"
+
+How demure, how innocent she looked, plying her knitting-needles, and
+stopping to take up a stitch! How little at that moment she knew of
+Ducklow's trouble, and its terrible cause!
+
+Ducklow's first impulse was to drive on and endeavor at all hazards to
+snatch the bonds from the flames. His next was, to return and alarm his
+neighbors, and obtain their assistance. But a minute's delay might be
+fatal; so he drove on, screaming "Fire! fire!" at the top of his voice.
+
+But the old mare was a slow-footed animal; and Ducklow had no whip. He
+reached forward and struck her with the reins.
+
+"Git up! git up!--Fire! fire!" screamed Ducklow. "Oh, them bonds! them
+bonds! Why didn't I give the money to Reuben? Fire! fire! fire!"
+
+By dint of screaming and slapping, he urged her from a trot into a
+gallop, which was scarcely an improvement as to speed, and certainly
+not as to grace. It was like the gallop of an old cow. "Why don't ye go
+'long!" he cried despairingly.
+
+Slap, slap! He knocked his own hat off with the loose ends of the reins.
+It fell under the wheels. He cast one look behind, to satisfy himself
+that it had been very thoroughly run over and crushed into the dirt, and
+left it to its fate.
+
+Slap, slap! "Fire, fire!" Canter, canter, canter! Neighbors looked out
+of their windows, and, recognizing Ducklow's wagon and old mare in such
+an astonishing plight, and Ducklow himself, without his hat, rising from
+his seat, and reaching forward in wild attitudes, brandishing the reins,
+at the same time rending the azure with yells, thought he must be
+insane.
+
+He drove to the top of the hill, and looking beyond, in expectation of
+seeing his house wrapped in flames, discovered that the smoke proceeded
+from a brush-heap which his neighbor Atkins was burning in a field near
+by.
+
+The revulsion of feeling that ensued was almost too much for the
+excitable Ducklow. His strength went out of him. For a little while
+there seemed to be nothing left of him but tremor and cold sweat.
+Difficult as it had been to get the old mare in motion, it was now even
+more difficult to stop her.
+
+"Why! what has got into Ducklow's old mare? She's running away with him!
+Who ever heard of such a thing!" And Atkins, watching the ludicrous
+spectacle from his field, became almost as weak from laughter as Ducklow
+was from the effects of fear.
+
+At length Ducklow succeeded in checking the old mare's speed, and in
+turning her about. It was necessary to drive back for his hat. By this
+time he could hear a chorus of shouts, "Fire! fire! fire!" over the
+hill. He had aroused the neighbors as he passed, and now they were
+flocking to extinguish the flames.
+
+"A false alarm! a false alarm!" said Ducklow, looking marvellously
+sheepish, as he met them. "Nothing but Atkins's brush-heap!"
+
+"Seems to me you ought to have found that out 'fore you raised all
+creation with your yells!" said one hyperbolical fellow. "You looked
+like the Flying Dutchman! This your hat? I thought 'twas a dead cat in
+the road. No fire, no fire!"--turning back to his comrades,--"only one
+of Ducklow's jokes."
+
+Nevertheless, two or three boys there were who would not be convinced,
+but continued to leap up, swing their caps, and scream "Fire!" against
+all remonstrance. Ducklow did not wait to enter into explanations, but,
+turning the old mare about again, drove home amid the laughter of the
+bystanders and the screams of the misguided youngsters. As he approached
+the house, he met Taddy rushing wildly up the street.
+
+"Thaddeus! Thaddeus! where ye goin', Thaddeus?"
+
+"Goin' to the fire!" cried Taddy.
+
+"There isn't any fire, boy!"
+
+"Yes, there is! Didn't ye hear 'em? They've been yellin' like fury."
+
+"It's nothin' but Atkins's brush."
+
+"That all?" And Taddy appeared very much disappointed. "I thought there
+was goin' to be some fun. I wonder who was such a fool as to yell fire
+jest for a darned old brush-heap!"
+
+Ducklow did not inform him.
+
+"I've got to drive over to town and git Reuben's trunk. You stand by the
+mare while I step in and brush my hat."
+
+Instead of applying himself at once to the restoration of his beaver, he
+hastened to the sitting-room, to see that the bonds were safe.
+
+"Heavens and 'arth!" said Ducklow.
+
+The chair, which had been carefully planted in the spot where they were
+concealed, had been removed. Three or four tacks had been taken out, and
+the carpet pushed from the wall. There was straw scattered about.
+Evidently Taddy had been interrupted, in the midst of his ransacking, by
+the alarm of fire. Indeed, he was even now creeping into the house to
+see what notice Ducklow would take of these evidences of his mischief.
+
+In great trepidation the farmer thrust in his hand here and there, and
+groped, until he found the envelope precisely where it had been placed
+the night before, with the tape tied around it, which his wife had put
+on to prevent its contents from slipping out and losing themselves.
+Great was the joy of Ducklow. Great also was the wrath of him, when he
+turned and discovered Taddy.
+
+"Didn't I tell you to stand by the old mare?"
+
+"She won't stir," said Taddy, shrinking away again.
+
+"Come here!" And Ducklow grasped him by the collar. "What have you been
+doin'? Look at that!"
+
+"'Twa'n't me!"--beginning to whimper, and ram his fists into his eyes.
+
+"Don't tell me 'twa'n't you!" Ducklow shook him till his teeth
+chattered. "What was you pullin' up the carpet for?"
+
+"Lost a marble!" snivelled Taddy.
+
+"Lost a marble! Ye didn't lose it under the carpet, did ye? Look at all
+that straw pulled out!"--shaking him again.
+
+"Didn't know but it might 'a' got under the carpet, marbles roll so,"
+explained Taddy, as soon as he could get his breath.
+
+"Wal, Sir!" Ducklow administered a resounding box on his ear. "Don't you
+do such a thing again, if you lose a million marbles!"
+
+"Ha'n't got a million!" Taddy wept, rubbing his cheek. "Ha'n't got but
+four! Won't ye buy me some to-day?"
+
+"Go to that mare, and don't you leave her again till I come, or I'll
+_marble_ ye in a way you won't like!"
+
+Understanding, by this somewhat equivocal form of expression, that
+flagellation was threatened, Taddy obeyed, still feeling his smarting
+and burning ear.
+
+Ducklow was in trouble. What should he do with the bonds? The floor was
+no place for them, after what had happened; and he remembered too well
+the experience of yesterday to think for a moment of carrying them about
+his person. With unreasonable impatience, his mind reverted to Mrs.
+Ducklow.
+
+"Why a'n't she to home? These women are forever a-gaddin'! I wish
+Reuben's trunk was in Jericho!"
+
+Thinking of the trunk reminded him of one in the garret, filled with old
+papers of all sorts,--newspapers, letters, bills of sale, children's
+writing-books,--accumulations of the past quarter of a century. Neither
+fire nor burglar nor ransacking youngster had ever molested those
+ancient records during all those five-and-twenty years. A bright thought
+struck him.
+
+"I'll slip the bonds down into that wuthless heap o' rubbish, where no
+one 'u'd ever think o' lookin' for 'em, and resk 'em."
+
+Having assured himself that Taddy was standing by the wagon, he paid a
+hasty visit to the trunk in the garret, and concealed the envelope,
+still bound in its band of tape, among the papers. He then drove away,
+giving Taddy a final charge to beware of setting anything afire.
+
+He had driven about half a mile when he met a peddler. There was nothing
+unusual or alarming in such a circumstance, surely; but as Ducklow kept
+on, it troubled him.
+
+"He'll stop to the house now, most likely, and want to trade. Findin'
+nobody but Taddy, there's no knowin' what he'll be tempted to do. But I
+a'n't a-goin' to worry. I'll defy anybody to find them bonds. Besides,
+she may be home by this time. I guess she'll hear of the fire-alarm, and
+hurry home: it'll be jest like her. She'll be there, and--trade with the
+peddler?" thought Ducklow, uneasily. Then a frightful fancy possessed
+him. "She has threatened two or three times to sell that old trunkful of
+papers. He'll offer a big price for 'em, and ten to one she'll let him
+have 'em. Why _didn't_ I think on 't? What a stupid blunderbuss I be!"
+
+As Ducklow thought of it, he felt almost certain that Mrs. Ducklow had
+returned home, and that she was bargaining with the peddler at that
+moment. He fancied her smilingly receiving bright tin-ware for the old
+papers; and he could see the tape-tied envelope going into the bag with
+the rest! The result was, that he turned about and whipped the old mare
+home again in terrific haste, to catch the departing peddler.
+
+Arriving, he found the house as he had left it, and Taddy occupied in
+making a kite-frame.
+
+"Did that peddler stop here?"
+
+"I ha'n't seen no peddler."
+
+"And ha'n't yer Ma Ducklow been home, neither?"
+
+"No."
+
+And with a guilty look, Taddy put the kite-frame behind him.
+
+Ducklow considered. The peddler had turned up a cross-street: he would
+probably turn down again and stop at the house, after all: Mrs. Ducklow
+might by that time be at home: then the sale of old papers would be very
+likely to take place. Ducklow thought of leaving word that he did not
+wish any old papers in the house to be sold, but feared lest the request
+might excite Taddy's suspicions.
+
+"I don't see no way but for me to take the bonds with me," thought he,
+with an inward groan.
+
+He accordingly went to the garret, took the envelope out of the trunk,
+and placed it in the breast-pocket of his overcoat, to which he pinned
+it, to prevent it by any chance from getting out. He used six large,
+strong pins for the purpose, and was afterwards sorry he did not use
+seven.
+
+"There's suthin' losin' out of yer pocket!" bawled Taddy, as he was once
+more mounting the wagon.
+
+Quick as lightning, Ducklow clapped his hand to his breast. In doing so,
+he loosed his hold of the wagon-box and fell, raking his shin badly on
+the wheel.
+
+"Yer side-pocket! it's one o' yer mittens!" said Taddy.
+
+"You rascal! how you scared me!"
+
+Seating himself in the wagon, Ducklow gently pulled up his trousers-leg
+to look at the bruised part.
+
+"Got anything in yer boot-leg to-day, Pa Ducklow?" asked Taddy,
+innocently.
+
+"Yes, a barked shin!--all on your account, too! Go and put that straw
+back, and fix the carpet; and don't ye let me hear ye speak of my
+boot-leg again, or I'll _boot-leg_ ye!"
+
+So saying, Ducklow departed.
+
+Instead of repairing the mischief he had done in the sitting-room, Taddy
+devoted his time and talents to the more interesting occupation of
+constructing his kite-frame. He worked at that, until Mr. Grantley, the
+minister, driving by, stopped to inquire how the folks were.
+
+"A'n't to home: may I ride?" cried Taddy, all in a breath.
+
+Mr. Grantley was an indulgent old gentleman, fond of children; so he
+said, "Jump in"; and in a minute Taddy had scrambled to a seat by his
+side.
+
+And now occurred a circumstance which Ducklow had foreseen. The alarm of
+fire had reached Reuben's; and although the report of its falseness
+followed immediately, Mrs. Ducklow's inflammable fancy was so kindled by
+it that she could find no comfort in prolonging her visit.
+
+"Mr. Ducklow'll be going for the trunk, and I _must_ go home and see to
+things, Taddy's _such_ a fellow for mischief! I can foot it; I sha'n't
+mind it."
+
+And off she started, walking herself out of breath in her anxiety.
+
+She reached the brow of the hill just in time to see a chaise drive away
+from her own door.
+
+"Who _can_ that be? I wonder if Taddy's there to guard the house! If
+anything should happen to them bonds!"
+
+Out of breath as she was, she quickened her pace, and trudged on,
+flushed, perspiring, panting, until she reached the house.
+
+"Thaddeus!" she called.
+
+No Taddy answered. She went in. The house was deserted. And lo! the
+carpet torn up, and the bonds abstracted!
+
+Mr. Ducklow never would have made such work, removing the bonds. Then
+somebody else must have taken them, she reasoned.
+
+"The man in the chaise!" she exclaimed, or rather made an effort to
+exclaim, succeeding only in bringing forth a hoarse, gasping sound. Fear
+dried up articulation. _Vox faucibus hoesit._
+
+And Taddy? He had disappeared; been murdered, perhaps,--or gagged and
+carried away by the man in the chaise.
+
+Mrs. Ducklow flew hither and thither, (to use a favorite phrase of her
+own,) "like a hen with her head cut off"; then rushed out of the house,
+and up the street, screaming after the chaise,--
+
+"Murder! murder! Stop thief! stop thief!"
+
+She waved her hands aloft in the air frantically. If she had trudged
+before, now she trotted, now she cantered; but if the cantering of the
+old mare was fitly likened to that of a cow, to what thing, to what
+manner of motion under the sun, shall we liken the cantering of Mrs.
+Ducklow? It was original; it was unique; it was prodigious. Now, with
+her frantically waving hands, and all her undulating and flapping
+skirts, she seemed a species of huge, unwieldy bird attempting to fly.
+Then she sank down into a heavy, dragging walk,--breath and strength all
+gone,--no voice left even to scream murder. Then the awful realization
+of the loss of the bonds once more rushing over her, she started up
+again. "Half running, half flying, what progress she made!" Then
+Atkins's dog saw her, and, naturally mistaking her for a prodigy, came
+out at her, bristling up and bounding and barking terrifically.
+
+"Come here!" cried Atkins, following the dog. "What's the matter? What's
+to pay, Mrs. Ducklow?"
+
+Attempting to speak, the good woman could only pant and wheeze.
+
+"Robbed!" she at last managed to whisper, amid the yelpings of the cur
+that refused to be silenced.
+
+"Robbed? How? Who?"
+
+"The chaise. Ketch it."
+
+Her gestures expressed more than her words; and Atkins's horse and
+wagon, with which he had been drawing out brush, being in the yard near
+by, he ran to them, leaped to the seat, drove into the road, took Mrs.
+Ducklow aboard, and set out in vigorous pursuit of the slow two-wheeled
+vehicle.
+
+"Stop, you, Sir! Stop, you, Sir!" shrieked Mrs. Ducklow, having
+recovered her breath by the time they came up with the chaise.
+
+It stopped, and Mr. Grantley the minister put out his good-natured,
+surprised face.
+
+"You've robbed my house! You've took"----
+
+Mrs. Ducklow was going on in wild, accusatory accents, when she
+recognized the benign countenance.
+
+"What do you say? I have robbed you?" he exclaimed, very much
+astonished.
+
+"No, no! not you! You wouldn't do such a thing!" she stammered forth,
+while Atkins, who had laughed himself weak at Mr. Ducklow's plight
+earlier in the morning, now laughed himself into a side-ache at Mrs.
+Ducklow's ludicrous mistake. "But did you--did you stop at my house?
+Have you seen our Thaddeus?"
+
+"Here I be, Ma Ducklow!" piped a small voice; and Taddy, who had till
+then remained hidden, fearing punishment, peeped out of the chaise from
+behind the broad back of the minister.
+
+"Taddy! Taddy! how came the carpet"----
+
+"I pulled it up, huntin' for a marble," said Taddy, as she paused,
+overmastered by her emotions.
+
+"And the--the thing tied up in a brown wrapper?"
+
+"Pa Ducklow took it."
+
+"Ye sure?"
+
+"Yes, I seen him!"
+
+"Oh, dear!" said Mrs. Ducklow, "I never was so beat! Mr. Grantley, I
+hope--excuse me--I didn't know what I was about! Taddy, you notty boy,
+what did you leave the house for? Be ye quite sure yer Pa Ducklow"----
+
+Taddy repeated that he was quite sure, as he climbed from the chaise
+into Atkins's wagon. The minister smilingly remarked that he hoped she
+would find no robbery had been committed, and went his way. Atkins,
+driving back, and setting her and Taddy down at the Ducklow gate,
+answered her embarrassed "Much obleeged to ye," with a sincere "Not at
+all," considering the fun he had had a sufficient compensation for his
+trouble. And thus ended the morning's adventures, with the exception of
+an unimportant episode, in which Taddy, Mrs. Ducklow, and Mrs. Ducklow's
+rattan were the principal actors.
+
+At noon Mr. Ducklow returned.
+
+"Did ye take the bonds?" was his wife's first question.
+
+"Of course I did! Ye don't suppose I'd go away and leave 'em in the
+house, not knowin' when you'd be comin' home?"
+
+"Wal, I didn't know. And I didn't know whuther to believe Taddy or not.
+Oh, I've had such a fright!"
+
+And she related the story of her pursuit of the minister.
+
+"How could ye make such a fool of yerself? It'll git all over town, and
+I shall be mortified to death. Jest like a woman, to git frightened!"
+
+"If _you_ hadn't got frightened, and made a fool of _yourself_, yelling
+fire, 'twouldn't have happened!" retorted Mrs. Ducklow.
+
+"Wal! wal! say no more about it! The bonds are safe."
+
+"I was in hopes you'd change 'em for them registered bonds Reuben spoke
+of."
+
+"I did try to, but they told me to the bank it couldn't be did. Then I
+asked 'em if they would keep 'em for me, and they said they wouldn't
+object to lockin' on 'em up in their safe; but they wouldn't give me no
+receipt, nor hold themselves responsible for 'em. I didn't know what
+else to do, so I handed 'em the bonds to keep."
+
+"I want to know if you did now!" exclaimed Mrs. Ducklow, disapprovingly.
+
+"Why not? What else could I do? I didn't want to lug 'em around with me
+forever. And as for keepin' 'em hid in the house, we've tried that!" and
+Ducklow unfolded his weekly newspaper.
+
+Mrs. Ducklow was placing the dinner on the table, with a look which
+seemed to say, "_I_ wouldn't have left the bonds in the bank; _my_
+judgment would have been better than all that. If they are lost, _I_
+sha'n't be to blame!" when suddenly Ducklow started and uttered a cry of
+consternation over his newspaper.
+
+"Why, what have ye found?"
+
+"Bank robbery!"
+
+"Not _your_ bank? Not the bank where _your bonds_"----
+
+"Of course not; but in the very next town! The safe blown open with
+gunpowder! Five thousand dollars in Gov'ment bonds stole!"
+
+"How strange!" said Mrs. Ducklow. "Now what did I tell ye?"
+
+"I believe you're right," cried Ducklow, starting to his feet. "They'll
+be safer in my own house, or even in my own pocket!"
+
+"If you was going to put 'em in any safe, why not put 'em in Josiah's?
+He's got a safe, ye know."
+
+"So he has! We might drive over there and make a visit Monday, and ask
+him to lock up----yes, we might tell him and Laury all about it, and
+leave 'em in their charge."
+
+"So we might!" said Mrs. Ducklow.
+
+Laura was their daughter, and Josiah her husband, in whose honor and
+sagacity they placed unlimited confidence. The plan was resolved upon at
+once.
+
+"To-morrow's Sunday," said Ducklow, pacing the floor. "If we leave the
+bonds in the bank over night, they must stay there till Monday."
+
+"And Sunday is jest the day for burglars to operate!" added Mrs.
+Ducklow.
+
+"I've a good notion--let me see!" said Ducklow, looking at the clock.
+"Twenty minutes after twelve! Bank closes at two! An hour and a half,--I
+believe I could git there in an hour and a half. I will. I'll take a
+bite and drive right back."
+
+Which he accordingly did, and brought the tape-tied envelope home with
+him again. That night he slept with it under his pillow. The next day
+was Sunday; and although Mr. Ducklow did not like to have the bonds on
+his mind during sermon-time, and Mrs. Ducklow "dreaded dreadfully," as
+she said, "to look the minister in the face," they concluded that it was
+best, on the whole, to go to meeting, and carry the bonds. With the
+envelope once more in his breast-pocket, (stitched in this time by Mrs.
+Ducklow's own hand,) the farmer sat under the droppings of the
+sanctuary, and stared up at the good minister, but without hearing a
+word of the discourse, his mind was so engrossed by worldly cares, until
+the preacher exclaimed vehemently, looking straight at Ducklow's pew,--
+
+"What said Paul? 'I would to God that not only thou, but also all that
+hear me this day, were both almost and altogether such as I am, _except
+these bonds_.' _'Except these bonds'!_" he repeated, striking the Bible.
+"Can you, my hearers,--can you say, with Paul, 'Would that all were as I
+am, _except these bonds_'?"
+
+A point which seemed for a moment so personal to himself, that Ducklow
+was filled with confusion, and would certainly have stammered out some
+foolish answer, had not the preacher passed on to other themes. As it
+was, Ducklow contented himself with glancing around to see if the
+congregation was looking at him, and carelessly passing his hand across
+his breast-pocket to make sure the bonds were still there.
+
+Early the next morning, the old mare was harnessed, and Taddy's adopted
+parents set out to visit their daughter,--Mrs. Ducklow having postponed
+her washing for the purpose. It was afternoon when they arrived at their
+journey's end. Laura received them joyfully, but Josiah was not expected
+home until evening. Mr. Ducklow put the old mare in the barn, and fed
+her, and then went in to dinner, feeling very comfortable indeed.
+
+"Josiah's got a nice place here. That's about as slick a little barn as
+ever I see. Always does me good to come over here and see you gittin'
+along so nicely, Laury."
+
+"I wish you'd come oftener, then," said Laura.
+
+"Wal, it's hard leavin' home, ye know. Have to git one of the Atkins
+boys to come and sleep with Taddy the night we're away."
+
+"We shouldn't have come to-day, if 't hadn't been for me," remarked Mrs.
+Ducklow. "Says I to your father, says I, 'I feel as if I wanted to go
+over and see Laury; it seems an age since I've seen her,' says I. 'Wal,'
+says he, 's'pos'n' we go!' says he. That was only last Saturday; and
+this morning we started."
+
+"And it's no fool of a job to make the journey with the old mare!" said
+Ducklow.
+
+"Why don't you drive a better horse?" said Laura, whose pride was always
+touched when her parents came to visit her with the old mare and the
+one-horse wagon.
+
+"Oh, she answers my purpose. Hossflesh is high, Laury. Have to
+economize, these times."
+
+"I'm sure there's no need of your economizing!" exclaimed Laura, leading
+the way to the dining-room. "Why don't you use your money, and have the
+good of it?"
+
+"So I tell him," said Mrs. Ducklow, faintly.--"Why, Laury! I didn't want
+you to be to so much trouble to git dinner jest for us! A bite would
+have answered. Do see, father!"
+
+At evening Josiah came home; and it was not until then that Ducklow
+mentioned the subject which was foremost in his thoughts.
+
+"What do ye think o' Gov'ment bonds, Josiah?" he incidentally inquired,
+after supper.
+
+"First-rate!" said Josiah.
+
+"About as safe as anything, a'n't they?" said Ducklow, encouraged.
+
+"Safe?" cried Josiah. "Just look at the resources of this country!
+Nobody has begun yet to appreciate the power and undeveloped wealth of
+these United States. It's a big rebellion, I know; but we're going to
+put it down. It'll leave us a big debt, very sure; but we handle it now
+easy as that child lifts that stool. It makes him grunt and stagger a
+little, not because he isn't strong enough for it, but because he don't
+understand his own strength, or how to use it: he'll have twice the
+strength, and know just how to apply it, in a little while. Just so with
+this country. It makes me laugh to bear folks talk about repudiation and
+bankruptcy."
+
+"But s'pos'n' we do put down the Rebellion, and the States come back:
+then what's to hender the South, and Secesh sympathizers in the North,
+from j'inin' together and votin' that the debt sha'n't be paid?"
+
+"Don't you worry about that! Do ye suppose we're going to be such fools
+as to give the Rebels, after we've whipped 'em, the same political power
+they had before the war? Not by a long chalk! Sooner than that, we'll
+put the ballot into the hands of the freedmen. They're our friends.
+They've fought on the right side, and they'll vote on the right side. I
+tell ye, spite of all the prejudice there is against black skins, we
+a'n't such a nation of ninnies as to give up all we're fighting for, and
+leave our best friends and allies, not to speak of our own interests, in
+the hands of our enemies."
+
+"You consider Gov'ments a good investment, then, do ye?" said Ducklow,
+growing radiant.
+
+"I do, decidedly,--the very best. Besides, you help the Government; and
+that's no small consideration."
+
+"So I thought. But how is it about the cowpon bonds? A'n't they rather
+ticklish property to have in the house?"
+
+"Well, I don't know. Think how many years you'll keep old bills and
+documents and never dream of such a thing as losing them! There's not a
+bit more danger with the bonds. I shouldn't want to carry 'em around
+with me, to any great amount,--though I did once carry three
+thousand-dollar bonds in my pocket for a week. I didn't mind it."
+
+"Curi's!" said Ducklow: "I've got three thousan'-dollar bonds in my
+pocket this minute!"
+
+"Well, it's so much good property," said Josiah, appearing not at all
+surprised at the circumstance.
+
+"Seems to me, though, if I had a safe, as you have, I should lock 'em up
+in it."
+
+"I was travelling that week. I locked 'em up pretty soon after I got
+home, though."
+
+"Suppose," said Ducklow, as if the thought had but just occurred to
+him,--"suppose you put my bonds into your safe: I shall feel easier."
+
+"Of course," replied Josiah. "I'll keep 'em for you, if you like."
+
+"It will be an accommodation. They'll be safe, will they?"
+
+"Safe as mine are; safe as anybody's: I'll insure 'em for twenty-five
+cents."
+
+Ducklow was happy. Mrs. Ducklow was happy. She took her husband's coat,
+and with a pair of scissors cut the threads that stitched the envelope
+to the pocket.
+
+"Have you torn off the May coupons?" asked Josiah.
+
+"No."
+
+"Well, you'd better. They'll be payable now soon; and if you take them,
+you won't have to touch the bonds again till the interest on the
+November coupons is due."
+
+"A good idea!" said Ducklow.
+
+He took the envelope, untied the tape, and removed its contents.
+Suddenly the glow of comfort, the gleam of satisfaction, faded from his
+countenance.
+
+"Hello! What ye got there?" cried Josiah.
+
+"Why, father! massy sakes!" exclaimed Mrs. Ducklow.
+
+As for Ducklow himself, he could not utter a word; but, dumb with
+consternation, he looked again in the envelope, and opened and turned
+inside out, and shook, with trembling hands, its astonishing contents.
+The bonds were not there: they had been stolen, and three copies of the
+"Sunday Visitor" had been inserted in their place.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Very early on the following morning a dismal-faced middle-aged couple
+might have been seen riding away from Josiah's house. It was the
+Ducklows returning home, after their fruitless, their worse than
+fruitless, journey. No entreaties could prevail upon them to prolong
+their visit. It was with difficulty even that they had been prevented
+from setting off immediately on the discovery of their loss, and
+travelling all night, in their impatience to get upon the track of the
+missing bonds.
+
+"There'll be not the least use in going to-night," Josiah had said. "If
+they were stolen at the bank, you can't do anything about it till
+to-morrow. And even if they were taken from your own house, I don't see
+what's to be gained now by hurrying back. It isn't probable you'll ever
+see 'em again, and you may just as well take it easy,--go to bed and
+sleep on it, and get a fresh start in the morning."
+
+So, much against their inclination, the unfortunate owners of the
+abstracted bonds retired to the luxurious chamber Laura gave them, and
+lay awake all night, groaning and sighing, wondering and surmising, and
+(I regret to add) blaming each other. So true it is, that "modern
+conveniences," hot and cold water all over the house, a pier-glass, and
+the most magnificently canopied couch, avail nothing to give
+tranquillity to the harassed mind. Hitherto the Ducklows had felt great
+satisfaction in the style their daughter, by her marriage, was enabled
+to support. To brag of her nice house and furniture and two servants was
+almost as good as possessing them. Remembering her rich dining-room and
+silver service and porcelain, they were proud. Such things were enough
+for the honor of the family; and, asking nothing for themselves, they
+slept well in their humblest of bed-chambers, and sipped their tea
+contentedly out of clumsy earthen. But that night the boasted style in
+which their "darter" lived was less appreciated than formerly: fashion
+and splendor were no longer a consolation.
+
+"If we had only given the three thousan' dollars to Reuben!" said
+Ducklow, driving homewards with a countenance as long as his whip-lash.
+"'Twould have jest set him up, and been some compensation for his
+sufferin's and losses goin' to the war."
+
+"Wal, I had no objections," replied Mrs. Ducklow. "I always thought he
+ought to have the money eventooally. And, as Miss Beswick said, no doubt
+it would 'a' been ten times the comfort to him now it would be a number
+o' years from now. But you didn't seem willing."
+
+"I don't know! 'twas you that wasn't willin'!"
+
+And they expatiated on Reuben's merits, and their benevolent intentions
+towards him, and, in imagination, endowed him with the price of the
+bonds over and over again: so easy is it to be generous with lost money!
+
+"But it's no use talkin'!" said Ducklow. "I've not the least idee we
+shall ever see the color o' them bonds again. If they was stole to the
+bank, I can't prove anything."
+
+"It does seem strange to me," Mrs. Ducklow replied, "that you should
+have had no more gumption than to trust the bonds with strangers, when
+they told you in so many words they wouldn't be responsible."
+
+"If you have flung that in my teeth once, you have fifty times!" And
+Ducklow lashed the old mare, as if she, and not Mrs. Ducklow, had
+exasperated him.
+
+"Wal," said the lady, "I don't see how we're going to work to find 'em,
+now they're lost, without making inquiries; and we can't make inquiries
+without letting it be known we had bought."
+
+"I been thinkin' about that," said her husband. "Oh, dear!" with a
+groan; "I wish the pesky cowpon bonds had never been invented!"
+
+They drove first to the bank, where they were of course told that the
+envelope had not been untied there. "Besides, it was sealed, wasn't
+it?" said the cashier. "Indeed!" He expressed great surprise, when
+informed that it was not. "It should have been: I supposed any child
+would know enough to look out for that!"
+
+And this was all the consolation Ducklow could obtain.
+
+"Just as I expected," said Mrs. Ducklow, as they resumed their journey.
+"I just as much believe that man stole your bonds as that you trusted
+'em in his hands in an unsealed wrapper! Beats all, how you could be so
+careless!"
+
+"Wal, wal! I s'pose I never shall hear the last on 't!"
+
+And again the poor old mare had to suffer for Mrs. Ducklow's offences.
+
+They had but one hope now,--that perhaps Taddy had tampered with the
+envelope, and that the bonds might be found somewhere about the house.
+But this hope was quickly extinguished on their arrival. Taddy, being
+accused, protested his innocence with a vehemence which convinced even
+Mr. Ducklow that the cashier was probably the guilty party.
+
+"Unless," said he, brandishing the rattan, "somebody got into the house
+that morning when the little scamp run off to ride with the minister!"
+
+"Oh, don't lick me for that! I've been licked for that once; ha'n't I,
+Ma Ducklow?" shrieked Taddy.
+
+The house was searched in vain. No clew to the purloined securities
+could be obtained,--the copies of the "Sunday Visitor," which had been
+substituted for them, affording not the least; for that valuable little
+paper was found in almost every household, except Ducklow's.
+
+"I don't see any way left but to advertise, as Josiah said," remarked
+the farmer, with a deep sigh of despondency.
+
+"And that'll bring it all out!" exclaimed Mrs. Ducklow. "If you only
+hadn't been so imprudent!"
+
+"Wal, wal!" said Ducklow, cutting her short.
+
+Before resorting to public measures for the recovery of the stolen
+property, it was deemed expedient to acquaint their friends with their
+loss in a private way. The next day, accordingly, they went to pay
+Reuben a visit. It was a very different meeting from that which took
+place a few mornings before. The returned soldier had gained in health,
+but not in spirits. The rapture of reaching home once more, the flush of
+hope and happiness, had passed away with the visitors who had flocked to
+offer their congratulations. He had had time to reflect: he had reached
+home, indeed; but now every moment reminded him how soon that home was
+to be taken from him. He looked at his wife and children, and clenched
+his teeth hard to stifle the emotions that arose at the thought of their
+future. The sweet serenity, the faith and patience and cheerfulness,
+which never ceased to illumine Sophronia's face as she moved about the
+house, pursuing her daily tasks, and tenderly waiting upon him, deepened
+at once his love and his solicitude. He was watching her thus when the
+Ducklows entered with countenances mournful as the grave.
+
+"How are you gittin' along, Reuben?" said Ducklow, while his wife
+murmured a solemn "good morning" to Sophronia.
+
+"I am doing well enough. Don't be at all concerned about me! It a'n't
+pleasant to lie here, and feel it may be months, months, before I'm able
+to be about my business; but I wouldn't mind it,--I could stand it
+first-rate,--I could stand anything, anything, but to see her working
+her life out for me and the children! To no purpose, either; that's the
+worst of it. We shall have to lose this place, spite of fate!"
+
+"Oh, Reuben!" said Sophronia, hastening to him, and laying her soothing
+hands upon his hot forehead; "why won't you stop thinking about that? Do
+try to have more faith! We shall be taken care of, I'm sure!"
+
+"If I had three thousand dollars,--yes, or even two,--then I'd have
+faith!" said Reuben. "Miss Beswick has proposed to send a
+subscription-paper around town for us; but I'd rather die than have it
+done. Besides, nothing near that amount could be raised, I'm confident.
+You needn't groan so, Pa Ducklow, for I a'n't hinting at you. I don't
+expect you to help me out of my trouble. If you had felt called upon to
+do it, you'd have done it before now; and I don't ask, I don't beg of
+any man!" added the soldier, proudly.
+
+"That's right; I like your sperit!" said the miserable Ducklow. "But I
+was sighing to think of something,--something you haven't known anything
+about, Reuben."
+
+"Yes, Reuben, we should have helped you," said Mrs. Ducklow, "and did,
+did take steps towards it"----
+
+"In fact," resumed Ducklow, "you've met with a great misfortin', Reuben.
+Unbeknown to yourself, you've met with a great misfortin'! Yer Ma
+Ducklow knows."
+
+"Yes, Reuben, the very day you came home, your Pa Ducklow made an
+investment for your benefit. We didn't mention it,--you know I wouldn't
+own up to it, though I didn't exactly say the contrary, the morning we
+was over here"----
+
+"Because," said Ducklow, as she faltered, "we wanted to surprise you; we
+was keepin' it a secret till the right time, then we was goin' to make
+it a pleasant surprise to ye."
+
+"What in the name of common-sense are you talking about?" cried Reuben,
+looking from one to the other of the wretched, prevaricating pair.
+
+"Cowpon bonds!" groaned Ducklow. "Three thousan'-dollar cowpon bonds!
+The money had been lent, but I wanted to make a good investment for you,
+and I thought there was nothin' so good as Gov'ments"----
+
+"That's all right," said Reuben. "Only, if you had money to invest for
+my benefit, I should have preferred to pay off the mortgage the first
+thing."
+
+"Sartin! sartin!" said Ducklow; "and you could have turned the bonds
+right in, if you had so chosen, like so much cash. Or you could have
+drawed your interest on the bonds in gold, and paid the interest on your
+mortgage in currency, and made so much, as I rather thought you would."
+
+"But the bonds?" eagerly demanded Reuben, with trembling hopes, just as
+Miss Beswick, with her shawl over her head, entered the room.
+
+"We was jest telling about our loss, Reuben's loss," said Mrs. Ducklow
+in a manner which betrayed no little anxiety to conciliate that terrible
+woman.
+
+"Very well! don't let me interrupt." And Miss Beswick, slipping the
+shawl from her head, sat down.
+
+Her presence, stiff and prim and sarcastic, did not tend in the least to
+relieve Mr. Ducklow from the natural embarrassment he felt in giving his
+version of Reuben's loss. However, assisted occasionally by a judicious
+remark thrown in by Mrs. Ducklow, he succeeded in telling a sufficiently
+plausible and candid-seeming story.
+
+"I see! I see!" said Reuben, who had listened with astonishment and pain
+to the narrative. "You had kinder intentions towards me than I gave you
+credit for. Forgive me, if I wronged you!" He pressed the hand of his
+adopted father, and thanked him from a heart filled with gratitude and
+trouble. "But don't feel so bad about it. You did what you thought best
+I can only say, the fates are against me."
+
+"Hem!" coughing, Miss Beswick stretched up her long neck and cleared her
+throat "So them bonds you had bought for Reuben was in the house the
+very night I called!"
+
+"Yes, Miss Beswick," replied Mrs. Ducklow; "and that's what made it so
+uncomfortable to us to have you talk the way you did."
+
+"Hem!" The neck was stretched up still farther than before, and the
+redoubtable throat cleared again. "'Twas too bad! Ye ought to have told
+me. You'd actooally bought the bonds,--bought 'em for Reuben, had ye?"
+
+"Sartin! sartin!" said Ducklow.
+
+"To be sure!" said Mrs. Ducklow.
+
+"We designed 'em for his benefit, a surprise, when the right time
+come," said both together.
+
+"Hem! well!" (It was evident that the Beswick was clearing her decks for
+action.) "When the right time come! yes! That right time wasn't
+somethin' indefinite, in the fur futur', of course! Yer losin' the bonds
+didn't hurry up yer benevolence the least grain, I s'pose! Hem! let in
+them boys, Sophrony!"
+
+Sophronia opened the door, and in walked Master Dick Atkins, (son of the
+brush-burner,) followed, not without reluctance and concern, by Master
+Taddy.
+
+"Thaddeus! what you here for?" demanded the adopted parents.
+
+"Because I said so," remarked Miss Beswick, arbitrarily. "Step along,
+boys, step along. Hold up yer head, Taddy, for ye a'n't goin' to be hurt
+while I'm around. Take yer fists out o' yer eyes, and stop blubberin'.
+Mr. Ducklow, that boy knows somethin' about Reuben's cowpon bonds."
+
+"Thaddeus!" ejaculated both Ducklows at once, "did you touch them
+bonds?"
+
+"Didn't know what they was!" whimpered Taddy.
+
+"Did you take them?" And the female Ducklow grasped his shoulder.
+
+"Hands off, if you please!" remarked Miss Beswick, with frightfully
+gleaming courtesy. "I told him, if he'd be a good boy, and come along
+with Richard, and tell the truth, he shouldn't be hurt. _If_ you
+please," she repeated, with a majestic nod; and Mrs. Ducklow took her
+hands off.
+
+"Where are they now? where are they?" cried Ducklow, rushing headlong to
+the main question.
+
+"Don't know," said Taddy.
+
+"Don't know? you villain!" And Ducklow was rising in wrath. But Miss
+Beswick put up her hand deprecatingly.
+
+"If _you_ please!" she said, with grim civility; and Ducklow sank down
+again.
+
+"What did you do with 'em? what did you want of 'em?" said Mrs. Ducklow,
+with difficulty restraining an impulse to wring his neck.
+
+"To cover my kite," confessed the miserable Taddy.
+
+"Cover your kite! your kite!" A chorus of groans from the Ducklows.
+"Didn't you know no better?"
+
+"Didn't think you'd care," said Taddy. "I had some newspapers Dick give
+me to cover it; but I thought them things 'u'd be pootier. So I took
+'em, and put the newspapers in the wrapper."
+
+"Did ye cover yer kite?"
+
+"No. When I found out you cared so much about 'em, I dars'n't; I was
+afraid you'd see 'em."
+
+"Then what _did_ you do with 'em?"
+
+"When you was away, Dick come over to sleep with me, and I--I sold 'em
+to him."
+
+"Sold 'em to Dick!"
+
+"Yes," spoke up Dick, stoutly, "for six marbles, and one was a
+bull's-eye, and one agate, and two alleys. Then, when you come home and
+made such a fuss, he wanted 'em ag'in. But he wouldn't give me back but
+four, and I wa'n't going to agree to no such nonsense as that."
+
+"I'd lost the bull's-eye and one common," whined Taddy.
+
+"But the bonds! did you destroy 'em?"
+
+"Likely I'd destroy 'em, after I'd paid six marbles for 'em!" said Dick.
+"I wanted 'em to cover _my_ kite with."
+
+"Cover _your_--oh! then _you_'ve made a kite of 'em?" said Ducklow.
+
+"Well, I was going to, when Aunt Beswick ketched me at it. She made me
+tell where I got 'em, and took me over to your house jest now; and Taddy
+said you was over here, and so she put ahead, and made us follow her."
+
+Again, in an agony of impatience, Ducklow demanded to know where the
+bonds were at that moment.
+
+"If Taddy'll give me back the marbles," began Master Dick.
+
+"That'll do!" said Miss Beswick, silencing him with a gesture. "Reuben
+will give you twenty marbles; for I believe you said they was Reuben's
+bonds, Mr. Ducklow?"
+
+"Yes, that is"----stammered the adopted father.
+
+"Eventooally," struck in the adopted mother.
+
+"Now look here! What am I to understand? Be they Reuben's bonds, or be
+they not? That's the question!" And there was that in Miss Beswick's
+look which said, "If they are not Reuben's, then your eyes shall never
+behold them more!"
+
+"Of course they're Reuben's!" "We intended all the while"----"His
+benefit"----"To do jest what he pleases with 'em," chorused Pa and Ma
+Ducklow.
+
+"Wal! now it's understood! Here, Reuben, are your cowpon bonds!"
+
+And Miss Beswick, drawing them from her bosom, placed the precious
+documents, with formal politeness, in the glad soldier's agitated hands.
+
+"Glory!" cried Reuben, assuring himself that they were genuine and real.
+"Sophrony, you've got a home! Ruby, Carrie, you've got a home! Miss
+Beswick! you angel from the skies! order a bushel and a half of marbles
+for Dick, and have the bill sent to me! Oh, Pa Ducklow! you never did a
+nobler or more generous thing in your life. These will lift the
+mortgage, and leave me a nest-egg besides. Then when I get my back pay,
+and my pension, and my health again, we shall be independent."
+
+And the soldier, overcome by his feelings, sank back in the arms of his
+wife.
+
+"We always told you we'd do well by ye, you remember?" said the
+Ducklows, triumphantly.
+
+The news went abroad. Again congratulations poured in upon the returned
+volunteer. Everybody rejoiced in his good fortune,--especially certain
+rich ones who had been dreading to see Miss Beswick come round with her
+proposed subscription-paper.
+
+Among the rest, the Ducklows rejoiced not the least; for selfishness was
+with them, as it is with many, rather a thing of habit than a fault of
+the heart. The catastrophe of the bonds broke up that life-long habit,
+and revealed good hearts underneath. The consciousness of having done an
+act of justice, although by accident, proved very sweet to them: it was
+really a fresh sensation; and Reuben and his dear little family, saved
+from ruin and distress, happy, thankful, glad, was a sight to their old
+eyes such as they had never witnessed before. Not gold itself, in any
+quantity, at the highest premium, could have given them so much
+satisfaction; and as for coupon bonds, they are not to be mentioned in
+the comparison.
+
+"Won't you do well by me some time, too?" teased little Taddy, who
+overheard his adopted parents congratulating themselves on having acted
+so generously by Reuben. "I don't care for no cowpen bonds, but I do
+want a new drum!"
+
+"Yes, yes, my son!" said Ducklow, patting the boy's shoulder.
+
+And the drum was bought.
+
+Taddy was delighted. But he did not know what made the Ducklows so much
+happier, so much gentler and kinder, than formerly. Do you?
+
+
+
+
+THE AUTHOR OF "SAUL."[A]
+
+
+We are not one of those who believe that the manifestation of any
+native, vigorous faculty of the mind is dependent upon circumstances. It
+is true that education, in its largest sense, modifies development; but
+it cannot, to any serious extent, add to, or take from, the power to be
+developed. In the lack of encouragement and contemporary appreciation,
+certain of the finer faculties may not give forth their full and perfect
+fragrance; but the rose is always seen to be a rose, though never a bud
+come to flower. The "mute, inglorious Milton" is a pleasant poetic
+fiction. Against the "hands that the rod of empire _might_ have swayed"
+we have nothing to object, knowing to what sort of hands the said rod
+has so often been intrusted.
+
+John Howard Payne once read to us--and it was something of an
+infliction--a long manuscript on "The Neglected Geniuses of America,"--a
+work which only death, we suspect, prevented him from giving to the
+world. There was not one name in the list which had ever before reached
+our ears. Nicholas Blauvelt and William Phillips and a number of other
+utterly forgotten rhymesters were described and eulogized at length, the
+quoted specimens of their poetry proving all the while their admirable
+right to the oblivion which Mr. Payne deprecated. They were men of
+culture, some of them wealthy, and we could detect no lack of
+opportunity in the story of their lives. Had they been mechanics, they
+would have planed boards and laid bricks from youth to age. The Ayrshire
+ploughman and the Bedford tinker were made of other stuff. Our inference
+then was, and still is, that unacknowledged (or at least unmanifested)
+genius is no genius at all, and that the lack of sympathy which many
+young authors so bitterly lament is a necessary test of their fitness
+for their assumed vocation.
+
+Gerald Massey is one of the most recent instances of the certainty with
+which a poetic faculty by no means of the highest order will enforce its
+own development, under seemingly fatal discouragements. The author of
+"Saul" is a better illustration of the same fact; for, although, in our
+ignorance of the circumstances of his early life, we are unable to
+affirm what particular difficulties he had to encounter, we know how
+long he was obliged to wait for the first word of recognition, and to
+what heights he aspired in the course of many long and solitary years.
+
+The existence of "Saul" was first made known to the world by an article
+in the "North British Review," in the year 1858, when the author had
+already attained his forty-second year. The fact that the work was
+published in Montreal called some attention to it on this side of the
+Atlantic, and a few critical notices appeared in our literary
+periodicals. It is still, however, comparatively unknown; and those into
+whose hands it may have fallen are, doubtless, ignorant of the author's
+name and history. An outline of the latter, so far as we have been able
+to ascertain its features, will help the reader to a more intelligent
+judgment, when we come to discuss the author's claim to a place in
+literature.
+
+Charles Heavysege was born in Liverpool, England, in the year 1816. We
+know nothing in regard to his parents, except that they were poor, yet
+able to send their son to an ordinary school. His passion for reading,
+especially such the poetry as fell into his hands, showed itself while
+he was yet a child. Milton seems to have been the first author who made
+a profound impression upon his mind; but it is also reported that the
+schoolmaster once indignantly snatched Gray's "Elegy" from his hand,
+because he so frequently selected that poem for his reading-lesson.
+Somewhat later, he saw "Macbeth" performed, and was immediately seized
+with the ambition to become an actor,--a profession for which few
+persons could be less qualified. The impression produced by this
+tragedy, combined with the strict religious training which he appears to
+have received, undoubtedly fixed the character and manner of his
+subsequent literary efforts.
+
+There are but few other facts of his life which we can state with
+certainty. His chances of education were evidently very scanty, for he
+must have left school while yet a boy, in order to learn his
+trade,--that of a machinist. He had thenceforth little time and less
+opportunity for literary culture. His reading was desultory, and the
+poetic faculty, expending itself on whatever subjects came to hand,
+produced great quantities of manuscripts, which were destroyed almost as
+soon as written. The idea of publishing them does not seem to have
+presented itself to his mind. Either his life must have been devoid of
+every form of intellectual sympathy, or there was some external
+impediment formidable enough to keep down that ambition which always
+co-exists with the creative power.
+
+In the year 1843 he married, and in 1853 emigrated to Canada, and
+settled in Montreal. Even here his literary labor was at first performed
+in secrecy; he was nearly forty years old before a line from his pen
+appeared in type. He found employment in a machine-shop, and it was only
+very gradually--probably after much doubt and hesitation--that he came
+to the determination to subject his private creations to the ordeal of
+print. His first venture was a poem in blank verse, the title of which
+we have been unable to ascertain. A few copies were printed anonymously
+and distributed among personal friends. It was a premature birth, which
+never knew a moment's life, and the father of it would now be the last
+person to attempt a resuscitation.
+
+Soon afterwards appeared--also anonymously--a little pamphlet,
+containing fifty "so-called" sonnets. They are, in reality, fragmentary
+poems of fourteen lines each, bound to no metre or order of rhyme. In
+spite of occasional crudities of expression, the ideas are always poetic
+and elevated, and there are many vigorous couplets and quatrains. They
+do not, however, furnish any evidence of sustained power, and the
+reader, who should peruse them as the only productions of the author,
+would be far from inferring the latter's possession of that lofty epical
+utterance which he exhibits in "Saul" and "Jephthah's Daughter."
+
+We cannot learn that this second attempt to obtain a hearing was
+successful, so far as any public notice of the pamphlet is concerned;
+but it seems, at least, to have procured for Mr. Heavysege the first
+private recognition of his poetic abilities which he had ever received,
+and thereby given him courage for a more ambitious venture. "Saul," as
+an epical subject, must have haunted his mind for years. The greater
+portion of it, indeed, had been written before he had become familiar
+with the idea of publication; and even after the completion of the work,
+we can imagine the sacrifices which must have delayed its appearance in
+print. For a hard-working mechanic, in straitened circumstances, courage
+of another kind was required. It is no slight expense to produce an
+octavo volume of three hundred and thirty pages; there must have been
+much anxious self-consultation, a great call for patience, fortitude,
+and hope, with who may know what doubts and despondencies, before, in
+1857 "Saul" was given to the world.
+
+Nothing could have been more depressing than its reception, if, indeed,
+the term "reception" can be applied to complete indifference. A country
+like Canada, possessing no nationality, and looking across the Atlantic,
+not only for its political rule, but also (until very recently, at
+least) for its opinions, tastes, and habits, is especially unfavorable
+to the growth of an independent literature. Although there are many men
+of learning and culture among the residents of Montreal, they do not
+form a class to whom a native author could look for encouragement or
+appreciation sufficient to stamp him as successful. The reading public
+there accept the decrees of England and the United States, and they did
+not detect the merits of "Saul," until the discovery had first been made
+in those countries.
+
+Several months had elapsed since the publication of the volume; it
+seemed to be already forgotten, when the notice to which we have
+referred appeared in the "North British Review." The author had sent a
+copy to Mr. Hawthorne, then residing in Liverpool, and that gentleman,
+being on friendly terms with some of the writers for the "North
+British," procured the insertion of an appreciative review of the poem.
+Up to that time, we believe, no favorable notice of the work had
+appeared in Canada. The little circulation it obtained was chiefly among
+the American residents. A few copies found their way across the border,
+and some of our authors (among whom we may mention Mr. Emerson and Mr.
+Longfellow) were the first to recognize the genius of the poet. With
+this double indorsement, his fellow-townsmen hastened to make amends for
+their neglect. They could not be expected to give any very enthusiastic
+welcome, nor was their patronage extensive enough to confer more than
+moderate success; but the remaining copies of the first small edition
+were sold, and a second edition--which has not yet been
+exhausted--issued in 1859.
+
+In February, 1860, we happened to visit Montreal. At that time we had
+never read the poem, and the bare fact of its existence had almost faded
+from memory, when it was recalled by an American resident who was
+acquainted with Mr. Heavysege, and whose account of his patience, his
+quiet energy, and serene faith in his poetic calling strongly interested
+us. It was but a few hours before our departure; there was a furious
+snow-storm; yet the gentleman ordered a sleigh, and we drove at once to
+a large machine-shop, in the outskirts of the city. Here, amid the noise
+of hammers, saws, and rasps, in a great grimy hall smelling of oil and
+iron-dust, we found the poet at his work-bench. A small, slender man,
+with a thin, sensitive face, bright blonde hair, and eyes of that
+peculiar blue which burns warm, instead of cold, under excitement,--in
+the few minutes of our interview the picture was fixed, and remains so.
+His manner was quiet, natural, and unassuming: he received us with the
+simple good-breeding which a gentleman always possesses, whether we find
+him on a throne or beside an anvil. Not a man to assert his claim
+loudly, or to notice injustice or neglect by a single spoken word; but
+one to take quietly success or failure, in the serenity of a mood
+habitually untouched by either extreme.
+
+In that one brief first and last interview, we discovered, at least, the
+simple, earnest sincerity of the man's nature,--a quality too rare, even
+among authors. When we took our seat in the train for Rouse's Point, we
+opened the volume of "Saul." The first part was finished as we
+approached St. Albans; the second at Vergennes; and twilight was falling
+as we closed the book between Bennington and Troy. Whatever crudities of
+expression, inaccuracies of rhythm, faults of arrangement, and
+violations of dramatic law met us from time to time, the earnest purpose
+of the writer carried us over them all. The book has a fine flavor of
+the Elizabethan age,--a sustained epic rather than dramatic character,
+an affluence of quaint, original images; yet the construction was
+frequently that of a school-boy. In opulence and maturity of ideas, and
+poverty of artistic skill, the work stands almost alone in literature.
+What little we have learned of the history of the author suggests an
+explanation of this peculiarity. Never was so much genuine power so long
+silent.
+
+"Saul" is yet so little known, that a descriptive outline of the poem
+will be a twice-told tale to very few readers of the "Atlantic." The
+author strictly follows the history of the renowned Hebrew king, as it
+is related in I Samuel, commencing with the tenth chapter, but divides
+the subject into three dramas, after the manner of Schiller's
+"Wallenstein." The first part embraces the history of Saul, from his
+anointing by Samuel at Ramah to David's exorcism of the evil spirit,
+(xvi. 23,) and contains five acts. The second part opens with David as a
+guest in the palace at Gibeah. The defeat of the Philistines at Elah,
+Saul's jealousy of David, and the latter's marriage with Michal form the
+staple of the _four_ acts of this part. The third part consists of _six_
+acts of unusual length, (some of them have thirteen scenes,) and is
+devoted to the pursuits and escapes of David, the Witch of Endor, and
+the final battle, wherein the king and his three sons are slain. No
+liberties have been taken with the order of the Scripture narrative,
+although a few subordinate characters have here and there been
+introduced to complete the action. The author seems either to lack the
+inventive faculty, or to have feared modifying the sacred record for the
+purposes of Art. In fact, no considerable modification was necessary.
+The simple narrative fulfils almost all the requirements of dramatic
+writing, in its succession of striking situations, and its cumulative
+interest. From beginning to end, however, Mr. Heavysege makes no attempt
+to produce a dramatic effect. It is true that he has availed himself of
+the phrase "an evil spirit from the Lord," to introduce a demoniac
+element, but, singularly enough, the demons seem to appear and to act
+unwillingly, and manifest great relief when they are allowed to retire
+from the stage.
+
+The work, therefore, cannot be measured by dramatic laws. It is an epic
+in dialogue; its chief charm lies in the march of the story and the
+detached individual monologues, rather than in contrast of characters or
+exciting situations. The sense of proportion--the latest developed
+quality of the poetic mind--is dimly manifested. The structure of the
+verse, sometimes so stately and majestic, is frequently disfigured by
+the commonest faults; yet the breath of a lofty purpose has been
+breathed upon every page. The personality of the author never pierces
+through his theme. The language is fresh, racy, vigorous, and utterly
+free from the impress of modern masters: much of it might have been
+written by a contemporary of Shakspeare.
+
+In the opening of the first part, Saul, recently anointed king, receives
+the messengers of Jabesh Gilead, and promises succor. A messenger
+says,--
+
+                            "The winds of heaven,
+    Behind thee blow: and on our enemies' eyes
+    May the sun smite to-morrow, and blind them for thee!
+    But, O Saul, do not fail us.
+
+    "_Saul._ Fail ye
+    Let the morn fail to break; I will not break
+    My word. Haste, or I'm there before you. Fail?
+    Let the morn fail the east; I'll not fail you,
+    But, swift and silent as the streaming wind,
+    Unseen approach, then, gathering up my force
+    At dawning, sweep on Ammon, as Night's blast
+    Sweeps down the Carmel on the dusky sea."
+
+This is a fine picture of Saul steeling his nature to cruelty, when be
+has reluctantly resolved to obey Samuel's command "to trample out the
+living fire of Amalek":--
+
+    "Now let me tighten every cruel sinew,
+    And gird the whole up in unfeeling hardness,
+    That my swollen heart, which bleeds within me tears,
+    May choke itself to stillness. I am as
+    A shivering bather, that, upon the shore,
+    Looking and shrinking from the cold, black waves,
+    Quick starting from his reverie, with a rush
+    Abbreviates his horror."
+
+And this of the satisfied lust of blood, uttered by a Hebrew soldier,
+after the slaughter:--
+
+    "When I was killing, such thoughts came to me, like
+    The sound of cleft-dropped waters to the ear
+    Of the hot mower, who thereat stops the oftener
+    To whet his glittering scythe, and, while he smiles,
+    With the harsh, sharpening hone beats their fall's time,
+    And dancing to it in his heart's straight chamber,
+    Forgets that he is weary."
+
+After the execution of Agag by the hand of Samuel, the demons are
+introduced with more propriety than in the opening of the poem. The
+following passage has a subtle, sombre grandeur of its own:--
+
+    "_First Demon._ Now let us down to hell: we've seen the last.
+
+    "_Second Demon._ Stay; for the road thereto is yet incumbered
+    With the descending spectres of the killed.
+    _'Tis said they choke hell's gates, and stretch from thence
+    Out like a tongue upon the silent gulf_;
+    Wherein our spirits--even as terrestrial ships
+    That are detained by foul winds in an offing--
+    Linger perforce, _and feel broad gusts of sighs
+    That swing them on the dark and billowless waste_,
+    O'er which come sounds more dismal than the boom,
+    At midnight, of the salt flood's foaming surf,--
+    Even dead Amalek's moan and lamentation."
+
+The reader will detect the rhythmical faults of the poem, even in these
+passages. But there is a vast difference between such blemishes of the
+unrhymed heroic measure as terminating a line with "and," "of," or
+"but," or inattention to the cćsural pauses, and that mathematical
+precision of foot and accent, which, after all, can scarcely be
+distinguished from prose. Whatever may be his shortcomings, Mr.
+Heavysege speaks in the dialect of poetry. Only rarely he drops into
+bald prose, as in these lines:--
+
+    "But let us go abroad, and in the twilight's
+    Cool, tranquillizing air discuss this matter."
+
+We remember, however, that Wordsworth wrote,--
+
+                  "A band of officers
+    Then stationed in the city were among the chief
+    Of my associates."
+
+We had marked many other fine passages of "Saul" for quotation, but must
+be content with a few of those which are most readily separated from the
+context.
+
+                  "Ha! ha! the foe,
+    Having taken from us our warlike tools, yet leave us
+    The little scarlet tongue to scratch and sting with."
+
+    "Here's lad's-love, and the flower which even death
+    Cannot unscent, the all-transcending rose."
+
+                  "The loud bugle,
+    And the hard-rolling drum, and clashing cymbals,
+    Now reign the lords o' the air. These crises, David,
+    Bring with them their own music, as do storms
+    Their thunders."
+
+                  "Ere the morn
+    Shall tint the orient with the soldier's color,
+    We must be at the camp."
+
+    "But come, I'll disappoint thee; for, remember,
+    Samuel will not be roused for thee, although
+    I knock with thunder at his resting-place."
+
+The lyrical portions, of the work--introduced in connection with the
+demoniac characters--are inferior to the rest. They have occasionally a
+quaint, antique flavor, suggesting the diction of the Elizabethan
+lyrists, but without their delicate, elusive richness of melody. Here
+most we perceive the absence of that highest, ripest intellectual
+culture which can be acquired only through contact and conflict with
+other minds. It is not good for a poet to be alone. Even where the
+constructive faculty is absent, its place may be supplied through the
+development of that artistic sense which files, weighs, and
+adjusts,--which reconciles the utmost freedom and force of thought with
+the mechanical symmetries of language,--and which, first a fetter to the
+impatient mind, becomes at length a pinion, holding it serenely poised
+in the highest ether. Only the rudiment of the sense is born with the
+poet, and few literary lives are fortunate enough, or of sufficiently
+varied experience, to mature it.
+
+Nevertheless, before closing the volume, we must quote what we consider
+to be the author's best lyrical passage. Zaph, one of the attendants of
+Malzah, the "evil spirit from the Lord," sings as follows to one of his
+fellows:--
+
+    "Zepho, the sun's descended beam
+    Hath laid his rod on th' ocean stream,
+    And this o'erhanging wood-top nods
+    Like golden helms of drowsy gods.
+    Methinks that now I'll stretch for rest,
+    With eyelids sloping toward the west;
+    That, through their half transparencies,
+    The rosy radiance passed and strained,
+    Of mote and vapor duly drained,
+    I may believe, in hollow bliss,
+    My rest in the empyrean is.
+    Watch thou; and when up comes the moon,
+    Atowards her turn me; and then, boon,
+    Thyself compose, 'neath wavering leaves
+    That hang these branched, majestic eaves:
+    That so, with self-imposed deceit,
+    Both, in this halcyon retreat,
+    By trance possessed, imagine may
+    We couch in Heaven's night-argent ray."
+
+In 1860 Mr. Heavysege published by subscription a drama entitled "Count
+Filippo; or, the Unequal Marriage." This work, of which we have seen
+but one critical notice, added nothing to his reputation. His genius, as
+we have already remarked, is not dramatic; and there is, moreover,
+internal evidence that "Count Philippo" did not grow, like "Saul," from
+an idea which took forcible possession of the author's mind. The plot is
+not original, the action languid, and the very names of the _dramatis
+personć_ convey an impression of unreality. Though we know there never
+was a Duke of Pereza in Italy, this annoys us less than that he should
+bear such a fantastic name as "Tremohla"; nor does the feminine "Volina"
+inspire us with much respect for the heroine. The characters are
+intellectual abstractions, rather than creatures of flesh and blood; and
+their love, sorrow, and remorse fail to stir our sympathies. They have
+an incorrigible habit of speaking in conceits. As "Saul" is pervaded
+with the spirit of the Elizabethan writers, so "Count Filippo" suggests
+the artificial manner of the rivals of Dryden. It is the work of a poet,
+but of a poet working from a mechanical impulse. There are very fine
+single passages, but the general effect is marred by the constant
+recurrence of such forced metaphors as these:--
+
+    "Now shall the he-goat, black Adultery,
+    With the roused ram, Retaliation, twine
+    Their horns in one to butt at Filippo."
+
+          "As the salamander, cast in fire,
+    Exudes preserving mucus, so my mind,
+    Cased in thick satisfaction of success,
+    Shall be uninjured."
+
+The work, nevertheless, appears to have had some share in improving its
+author's fortunes. From that time, he has received at least a partial
+recognition in Canada. Soon after its publication, he succeeded in
+procuring employment on the daily newspaper press of Montreal, which
+enabled him to give up his uncongenial labor at the work-bench. The
+Montreal Literary Club elected him one of its Fellows, and the
+short-lived literary periodicals of the Province no longer ignored his
+existence. In spite of a change of circumstances which must have given
+him greater leisure as well as better opportunities of culture, he has
+published but two poems in the last five years,--an Ode for the
+ter-centenary anniversary of Shakspeare's birth, and the sacred idyl of
+"Jephthah's Daughter." The former is a production the spirit of which is
+worthy of its occasion, although, in execution, it is weakened, by an
+overplus of imagery and epithet. It contains between seven and eight
+hundred lines. The grand, ever-changing music of the Ode will not bear
+to be prolonged beyond a certain point, as all the great Masters of Song
+have discovered: the ear must not be allowed to become _quite_
+accustomed to the surprises of the varying rhythm, before the closing
+Alexandrine.
+
+"Jephthah's Daughter" contains between thirteen and fourteen hundred
+lines. In careful finish, in sustained sweetness and grace, and solemn
+dignity of language, it is a marked advance upon any of the author's
+previous works. We notice, indeed, the same technical faults as in
+"Saul," but they occur less frequently, and may be altogether corrected
+in a later revision of the poem. Here, also, the Scriptural narrative is
+rigidly followed, and every temptation to adorn its rare simplicity
+resisted. Even that lament of the Hebrew girl, behind which there seems
+to lurk a romance, and which is so exquisitely paraphrased by Tennyson,
+in his "Dream of Fair Women,"--
+
+    "And I went, mourning: 'No fair Hebrew boy
+      Shall smile away my maiden blame among
+    The Hebrew mothers,'"--
+
+is barely mentioned in the words of the text. The passion of Jephthah,
+the horror, the piteous pleading of his wife and daughter, and the final
+submission of the latter to her doom, are elaborated with a careful and
+tender hand. From the opening to the closing line, the reader is lifted
+to the level of the tragic theme, and inspired, as in the Greek tragedy,
+with a pity which makes lovely the element of terror. The central
+sentiment of the poem, through all its touching and sorrowful changes,
+is that of repose. Observe the grave harmony of the opening lines:--
+
+    "'Twas in the olden days of Israel,
+    When from her people rose up mighty men
+    To judge and to defend her: ere she knew,
+    Or clamored for, her coming line of kings,
+    A father, rashly vowing, sacrificed
+    His daughter on the altar of the Lord;--
+    'Twas in those ancient days, coeval deemed
+    With the song-famous and heroic ones,
+    When Agamemnon, taught divinely, doomed
+    _His_ daughter to expire at Dian's shrine,--
+    So doomed, to free the chivalry of Greece,
+    In Aulis lingering for a favoring wind
+    To waft them to the fated walls of Troy.
+    Two songs with but one burden, twin-like tales.
+    Sad tales! but this the sadder of the twain,--
+    This song, a wail more desolately wild;
+    More fraught this story with grim fate fulfilled."
+
+The length to which this article has grown warns us to be sparing of
+quotations, but we all the more earnestly recommend those in whom we may
+have inspired some interest in the author to procure the poem for
+themselves. We have perused it several times, with increasing enjoyment
+of its solemn diction, its sad, monotonous music, and with the hope that
+the few repairing touches, which alone are wanting to make it a perfect
+work of its class, may yet be given. This passage, for example, where
+Jephthah prays to be absolved from his vow, would be faultlessly
+eloquent, but for the prosaic connection of the first and second
+lines:--
+
+    "'Choose Tabor for thine altar: I will pile
+    It with the choice of Bashan's lusty herds,
+    And flocks of fallings, _and for fuel, thither
+    Will bring umbrageous Lebanon to burn_.'
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+    "He said, and stood awaiting for the sign,
+    And heard, above the hoarse, bough-bending wind,
+    The hill-wolf howling on the neighboring height,
+    And bittern booming in the pool below.
+    Some drops of rain fell from the passing cloud
+    That sudden hides the wanly shining moon,
+    And from the scabbard instant dropped his sword,
+    And, with long, living leaps, and rock-struck clang,
+    From side to side, and slope to sounding slope,
+    In gleaming whirls swept down the dim ravine."
+
+The finest portion of the poem is the description of that transition of
+feeling, through which the maiden, warm with young life and clinging to
+life for its own unfulfilled promise, becomes the resigned and composed
+victim. No one but a true poet could have so conceived and represented
+the situation. The narrative flows in one unbroken current, detached
+parts whereof hint but imperfectly of the whole, as do goblets of water
+of the stream wherefrom they are dipped. We will only venture to present
+two brief passages. The daughter speaks:--
+
+    "Let me not need now disobey you, mother,
+    But give me leave to knock at Death's pale gate,
+    Whereat indeed I must, by duty drawn,
+    By Nature shown the sacred way to yield.
+    Behold, the coasting cloud obeys the breeze;
+    The slanting smoke, the invisible sweet air;
+    the towering tree its leafy limbs resigns
+    To the embraces of the wilful wind:
+    Shall I, then, wrong, resist the hand of Heaven!
+    Take me, my father! take, accept me, Heaven!
+    Slay me or save me, even as you will!"
+
+    "Light, light, I leave thee!--yet am I a lamp,
+    Extinguished now, to be relit forever.
+    Life dies: but in its stead death lives."
+
+In "Jephthah's Daughter," we think, Mr. Heavysege has found that form of
+poetic utterance for which his genius is naturally qualified. It is
+difficult to guess the future of a literary life so exceptional
+hitherto,--difficult to affirm, without a more intimate knowledge of the
+man's nature, whether he is capable of achieving that rhythmical
+perfection (in the higher sense wherein sound becomes the symmetrical
+garment of thought) which, in poets, marks the line between imperfect
+and complete success. What he most needs, of _external_ culture, we have
+already indicated: if we might be allowed any further suggestion, he
+supplies it himself, in one of his fragmentary poems:--
+
+    "Open, my heart, thy ruddy valves,--
+      It is thy master calls:
+    Let me go down, and, curious, trace
+      Thy labyrinthine halls.
+    Open, O heart! and let me view
+      The secrets of thy den:
+    Myself unto myself now show
+      With introspective ken.
+    Expose thyself, thou covered nest
+      Of passions, and be seen:
+    Stir up thy brood, that in unrest
+      Are ever piping keen:--
+    Ah! what a motley multitude,
+      Magnanimous and mean!"
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[A] _Saul._ A Drama, in Three Parts. Montreal: John Lovell. 1850.
+
+_Count Fillippo; or The Unequal Marriage._ By the Author of "Saul."
+Montreal: Printed for the Author. 1860.
+
+_Jephthah's Daughter._ By Charles Heavysege, Author of "Saul." Montreal:
+Dawson Brothers. 1865.
+
+
+
+
+NEEDLE AND GARDEN.
+
+THE STORY OF A SEAMSTRESS WHO LAID DOWN HER NEEDLE AND BECAME A
+STRAWBERRY-GIRL.
+
+WRITTEN BY HERSELF.
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+CONCLUSION.
+
+Although two thirds of our little patrimony had thus been devoted to the
+cultivation of fruit, yet the other third was far from being suffered to
+remain unproductive. We thoroughly understood the art of raising all the
+household vegetables, as we had been brought up to assist our father at
+intervals throughout the season. Then none of us were indifferent to
+flowers. There were little clumps and borders of them in numerous
+places. Nowhere did the crocus come gayly up into the soft atmosphere of
+early spring in advance of ours. The violets perfumed the air for us
+with the same rich profusion as in the carefully tended parterre of the
+wealthiest citizen. There were rows of flowering almonds, which were
+sought after by the bees as diligently as if holding up their delicate
+heads in the most patrician garden; and they flashed as gorgeously in
+the sun. The myrtle displayed its blue flowers in abundance, and the
+lilacs unfolded their paler clusters in a dozen places. Over a huge
+cedar in the fence-corner there clambered up a magnificent wistaria,
+whose great blue flowers, covering the entire tree, became a monument of
+floral beauty so striking, that the stranger, passing by the spot, would
+pause to wonder and admire. In the care of these flowers all of us
+united with a common fondness for the beautiful as well as the useful.
+It secured to us, from the advent of the earliest crocus to the
+departure of the last lingering rose that dropped its reluctant flowers
+only when the premonitory blasts of autumn swept across the garden, all
+that innocent enjoyment which comes of admiration for these bright
+creations of the Divine hand.
+
+These little incidental recompenses of the most perfect domestic harmony
+were realized in everything we undertook. That harmony was the animating
+as well as sustaining power of my horticultural enterprise. Had there
+been wrangling, opposition, or ridicule, it is probable that I should
+never have ventured on the planting of a single strawberry. Success,
+situated as I was, was dependent on united effort, the coöperation of
+all. This coöperation of the entire family must be still more necessary
+in agricultural undertakings on a large scale. A wife, taken reluctantly
+from the city to a farm, with no taste for rural life, no love of
+flowers, no fondness for the garden, no appreciation of the mysteries of
+seed-time and harvest, no sensibility to fields of clover, to green
+meadows, to the grateful silence of the woods, or to the voices of
+birds, and who pines for the unforgotten charms of city life, may mar
+the otherwise assured happiness of the household. One refractory inmate
+in ours would have been especially calamitous.
+
+The floral world is pervaded with miraculous sympathies. Another spring
+had opened on our garden, and flower after flower came out into gorgeous
+bloom. My strawberries, as if conscious of the display around them, and
+ambitious to increase it, opened their white blossoms toward the close
+of April. Those set the preceding autumn gave promise of an abundant
+yield, but not equal to that presented by the runners which crowded
+around the parent plants on the original half-acre. The winter had been
+unfriendly, sending no heavy covering of snow to shelter them; while
+the frost, in making its first escape from the earth, had loosened many
+plants, bringing some of them half-way out of the ground, while a few
+had been thrown entirely upon the surface, where they quickly perished.
+
+I had read that accidents of this kind would sometimes happen, and that,
+when plants were thus partially dislodged by frost, the roller must be
+passed over them to crowd back the roots into their proper places. I had
+discovered this derangement immediately on the frost escaping, but we
+had neither roller nor substitute. As pressure alone was needed, I set
+Fred to walking over the entire acre, and with his heavy winter boots to
+trample down each plant in its old place. The operation was every way as
+beneficial as if the ground had been well rolled. When performed before
+the roots have been many days exposed to the air, it not only does no
+injury, but effectually repairs all damage committed by the frost.
+
+Everything, this second season, was on a larger scale than before,
+requiring greater care and labor, but at the same time brightening my
+hopes and doubling my anticipations. I was compelled to hire a gardener
+occasionally to assist in keeping the ground clean and mellow, although
+among us we contrived to perform a large portion of the work ourselves.
+I found that constant watchfulness secured an immense economy of labor.
+It was far easier to cut off a weed when only an inch high than when
+grown up to the stature of a young tree. It was the same with the white
+clover or a grass-root. These two seem native to the soil, and will come
+in and take possession, smothering and routing out the strawberries,
+unless cut up as fast as they appear. When attacked early, before their
+rambling, but deeply penetrating roots obtain a strong hold, they are
+easily destroyed. I consider, therefore, that watchfulness may be made
+an effective substitute for labor, really preventing all necessity for
+hard work. This watchfulness we could generally exercise, though
+physically unable to perform much labor. Hence, when ladies undertake
+the management of an established strawberry-bed, a daily attention to
+it, with a light hoe, will be found as useful as a laborious clearing up
+by an able-bodied man, with the additional advantage of occasioning no
+injurious disturbance to the roots in removing great quantities of
+full-grown weeds.
+
+The blossoms fell to the ground, the berries set in thick clusters,
+turning downward as they increased in size, and changing, as they
+enlarged, from a pale green to a delicate white, then becoming suffused
+with a slight blush, which gradually deepened into an intense red. It
+was a joyful time, when, with my mother and sister, I made the first
+picking. All of us were struck with the improved appearance of the fruit
+on the first half-acre. This was natural, as well as what is commonly
+observed. The plants had acquired strength with age. They had had
+another season in which to send out new and longer roots; and these,
+rambling into wider and deeper fountains of nourishment, had drawn from
+them supplies so copious, that the berries were not only much more
+numerous than the year before, but they were every way larger and finer.
+The contrast between the fruit on these and the new plants was very
+decided. Hence we had a generous gathering to begin with. It was all
+carefully assorted, as before; but the quantity was so large that
+additional baskets were required, and Fred was obliged to employ an
+assistant to carry it to market.
+
+While engaged in making our second picking, carefully turning aside the
+luxuriant foliage to reach the berries which had ripened in concealment,
+with capacious sun-bonnets that shut out from observation all objects
+but those immediately before us, it was no wonder that a stranger could
+come directly up without being noticed. Thus intently occupied one
+afternoon, we were surprised at hearing a subdued and timid voice
+asking,--
+
+"May I sell some strawberries for you?"
+
+I looked round,--for the voice came from behind us,--and beheld a girl
+of some ten years old, having in her hand a basket, which she had
+probably found on the common, as, in place of the original bottom, a
+pasteboard substitute had been fitted into it. It was filled with little
+pasteboard boxes, stitched at the corners, but strong enough to hold
+fruit. I noticed, that, old as it was, it had been scoured up into
+absolute cleanness. The child's attire was in keeping with her basket.
+Though she had no shoes, and the merest apology for a bonnet, with a
+dress that was worn and faded, as well as frayed out into a ragged
+fringe about her feet, yet it was all scrupulously clean. Her features
+struck me as even beautiful, and her soft hazel eyes would command
+sympathy from all who might look into them. Her manner and appearance
+prepossessed me in her favor.
+
+"But did you ever sell strawberries?" I inquired.
+
+"No, Ma'am, but I can try," she answered.
+
+"But it will never do to trust her," interrupted my mother. "We do not
+know who she is, and may never see her again."
+
+"Oh, Ma'am, I will bring the money back to you. Dear lady, let me have
+some to sell," she entreated, with childish earnestness, her voice
+trembling and her eyes moistening with apprehension of refusal.
+
+"Mother," said I, "this child is a beginner. Is it right for us to
+refuse so trifling an encouragement? Who knows to what useful ends it
+may lead? You remember how difficult it was for me to procure the
+plants, and how keenly you felt my trouble. Will you inflict a keener
+one on this child, whose heart seems bent on doing something for
+herself, and on whom disappointment will fall even more painfully than
+it did on me? Are we not all bound to do something for those who are
+more destitute than ourselves? and even if we lose what we let her have,
+it will never be missed."
+
+The poor girl looked up imploringly into my face as I pleaded for her,
+her eyes brightened with returning hopefulness, and again she besought
+us,--
+
+"Dear lady, let me have a few; my mother knows you."
+
+"Tell me your name," I replied.
+
+"Lucy Varick,--mother says she knows you," was the answer.
+
+"Varick!" replied my mother, quickly, surprised as well as evidently
+pleased. "You shall have all you can sell."
+
+She was the daughter of the miserable man whose terrible deathbed we had
+both witnessed, and my mother had no difficulty in trusting to her
+honesty. Her basket would contain but a few quarts, and these we had
+already gathered. I filled her little pasteboard boxes immediately, with
+the fruit just as picked from the vines. The poor child fairly capered
+with joy as she witnessed the operation. She saw her fortune in a few
+quarts of strawberries! I think that as she tripped nimbly through the
+gate, my gratification at seeing how cheerfully she thus began her life
+of toil was equal to all that she could have experienced herself.
+
+Before the afternoon was half gone, Lucy surprised us by returning with
+an empty basket. She had found customers wherever she went, and wanted a
+fresh supply of fruit. This was promptly given to her, for she had
+obtained even better prices than the widow was getting for us in the
+market. That afternoon she made the first half-dollar she ever earned,
+and during the entire season she continued to find plenty of the best of
+customers at their own doors.
+
+I had long since made up my mind that our pastor was entitled to some
+recognition of the substantial kindnesses he had extended to us at the
+time of our deep affliction. We had seen him regularly at the Sunday
+school, but he knew nothing of my conversion into a strawberry-girl.
+What else could we do, in remembrance of his friendship, but to make him
+a present of our choicest fruit? Never were strawberries more carefully
+selected than those with which I filled a new basket of ample size, as a
+gift for him. On my way to the factory the next morning, I delivered
+the basket at his door, with a little note expressive of our continued
+gratitude, and begging him to accept its contents as being fruit which I
+had myself raised. I knew it was but a trifle, but what else than
+trifles had I to offer even to the kindest friend we had ever known?
+
+That very afternoon, while my mother and I were at our usual occupation
+of picking, I heard the gate open at the other end of the garden, and,
+looking up, saw two gentlemen approaching us. They advanced slowly
+around the strawberry-beds, apparently examining the plants and fruit,
+frequently stooping to turn over the great clusters on a portion of the
+ground which we had not yet picked. I saw that one of them was our
+pastor, but the other was a stranger. As they drew nearer, we rose to
+receive them. No words can describe the confusion which overcame me as I
+recognized in the stranger the same gentleman whom I had encountered,
+the preceding summer, as the first customer for my strawberries, at the
+widow's stand in the market-house. I had never forgotten his face. Mr.
+Seeley introduced him as his friend Mr. Logan. Somehow I felt certain
+that he also recognized me. I was confused enough at being thus taken by
+surprise. It is true that my sun-bonnet, though of prodigious size, was
+neatly cut and handsomely fashioned, even becoming, as I supposed, and
+that I was fortunately habited in a plain, but entirely new dress, that
+was more than nice enough for the work I was performing. But the hot
+sun, in spite of my bonnet, had already turned my face brown. My hands,
+exposed to its fiercest rays, were even more tanned, while the stain of
+fruit was visible on my fingers. I was in no condition to receive
+company of this unexpected description.
+
+But the gentlemen were affable, and I soon became at ease with them. Mr.
+Seeley had received my basket, and had come to thank me for it. Mr.
+Logan had been dining with him, and was enthusiastic over the quality of
+my strawberries. He had never seen them equalled, though devoting all
+his leisure to horticulture; and learning that they were raised by a
+lady, insisted on coming down, not only to look into her mode of
+culture, but to see the lady herself. It was pleasant thus to meet our
+friend the pastor, and I did my utmost to render the visit agreeable to
+him and his companion. My mother gave up the care of their entertainment
+to me; so, dropping my basket in the unfinished strawberry-row, I left
+her to continue the afternoon picking alone.
+
+The gentlemen seemed in no haste to leave us. I was surprised that they
+could find so much to interest them in a spot which I had supposed could
+be interesting only to ourselves. Mr. Seeley was pleased with all that
+he saw, but Mr. Logan was polite enough to be much more demonstrative in
+his admiration. I think the visit of the former would have been much
+briefer but for the presence of the latter, who seemed in no hurry to
+depart. He was generous in praise of my flowers, and was inquisitive
+about my strawberries. He had many of the most celebrated varieties, and
+was kind enough to offer me such as I might desire. He thought that I
+could teach him lessons in horticulture more valuable than any he had
+yet picked up, either in books or in his own garden, and asked
+permission to come down often during the fruit season, to see and learn.
+I was surprised that he should think it possible for a young
+strawberry-girl like myself to teach anything to one who was evidently
+so much better informed. Then I told him that what he saw was the result
+of an endeavor to determine whether there was not some better dependence
+for a woman than the needle, that I had accomplished all this by my own
+zeal and perseverance, and that this season promised complete success.
+
+"I cannot give you too much praise," he observed. "Your tastes harmonize
+admirably with my own. I have long believed that women are confined to
+too small a circle of useful occupations. They too seldom teach
+themselves, and are too little taught by others whose duty it is to
+enlarge their sphere of action. All my sisters have learned what you may
+call trades,--that is, to support themselves, if ever required to do so,
+by employments particularly adapted to their talents. You have chosen
+the garden, and you seem in a fair way to succeed. I must know how much
+your strawberry-crop will yield you."
+
+On thus discovering the object I had in view, and that this was my own
+experiment, his interest in all that he saw appeared to increase. The
+very tones of his voice became softer and kinder. There was nothing
+patronizing in his manner; it was deferential, and so sympathetic as to
+impress me very strongly. I felt that he understood the train of thought
+that had been running through my mind, and that he heartily entered into
+and approved of my plans.
+
+My first false shame at being known as a strawberry-girl now gave place
+to a feeling of pride and emulation. Here was one who could appreciate
+as well as encourage. Hence my explanations were as full as it was
+proper to set before a stranger. Our pastor listened to them with
+surprise, as most of them were new even to him, nor did he fail to unite
+with his companion in encouragement and congratulation. Long
+acquaintance gave him the privilege to be familiar and inquisitive. It
+is possible that in place of being abashed and humble, I may now have
+been confident and boastful.
+
+Our visitors left us with promises to repeat their call; and with a
+lighter heart than ever, I went again to assist in picking.
+
+The fruit continued to turn out well, and our widow in the market-house
+proved true to the promises she had made,--there was no difficulty in
+finding a sale for it, and somehow it yielded even better prices than
+the year before. She said that others were complaining of a drought, and
+that the fruit in consequence was generally inferior in size, so that
+those who, like myself, had been lucky enough, or painstaking enough, to
+secure a full crop, were doing better than ever. Then our little
+strawberry-peddler, Lucy Varick, was doing a thriving business. She
+established a list of customers among the great ladies in the city, who
+bought large daily supplies from her, paying her the highest prices. Her
+young heart seemed overflowing with joyfulness at her unexpected
+success. It enabled her to take home many a dollar to her mother. Alas!
+she seemed to think--if, indeed, she thought at all upon the
+subject--that the strawberry season would be a perpetual harvest.
+
+We throve so satisfactorily that my mother seemed to have given up her
+cherished longing for a strawberry-garden. Now that we had a new class
+of visitors who were likely to be frequent in their calls, I think she
+felt a kind of pride in abandoning the project. There was a sort of
+dignity in the production of fruit, but something humiliating in the
+idea of keeping an eating-house. She even went so far as to decline all
+applications from transient callers who had mistaken our premises for
+those of our neighbors, thus leaving the latter in undisturbed
+possession of their long trains of customers. They were not slow in
+discovering that we had ceased to be rivals in this branch of their
+business; and finding themselves mistaken in supposing that my
+strawberry-crop would come into ruinous competition with theirs, they
+seemed disposed to be a little friendly toward us. Indeed, on one or two
+occasions, Mrs. Tetchy herself came to us for a large basketful of
+fruit, declaring that their own supply was not equal to the demand. She
+was unusually pleasant on those occasions, but at the same time insisted
+on having the fruit at less than we were getting for it. My mother could
+not contend with such a woman, and so submitted to her exactions. I feel
+satisfied, however, that her visits were to be attributed quite as much
+to a desire to gratify her curiosity as to any want of strawberries; for
+I noticed that she never came on these errands without impudently
+walking all over our garden, scrutinizing whatever we were doing, how
+the beds were arranged, and particularly inspecting and even handling
+the fruit. Of course we had nothing to be ashamed of; but though
+everything about the garden was much neater than hers, she never dropped
+a word of commendation.
+
+Only a day or two after the gentlemen had been down to see us, we found
+it necessary to resume the task of weeding between the rows. The drought
+at the beginning of the season had been succeeded by copious rains, with
+warm southerly winds, under which the weeds were making an alarming
+growth, notwithstanding the trampling which they received from the
+pickers. I confess that our heavy hoes made this so laborious an
+operation that I rather dreaded its necessity; but a hot sun was now
+shining, which would be sure to kill the weeds, if we cut them off, so
+all hands were turned in to accomplish the work. While thus busily
+occupied, whom should I see coming into the gate but Mr. Logan?
+
+"Capital exercise, Miss, and a fine day for it!" he exclaimed, as he
+came up to me. "No successful gardening where the weeds are permitted to
+grow! I have the same pests to contend against, but I apply the same
+remedy. There is nothing like a sharp hoe."
+
+"Nothing indeed, if one only knew how to make it so," I replied.
+
+As he spoke, his eye glanced at the uncouth implement I was using, and
+reaching forth his hand he took it from me. Examining it carefully, a
+smile came over his handsome face, and he shook his head, as if thinking
+that would never do. It was one of the old tools my father had used,
+heavy and tiresome for a woman's hand, with a blade absurdly large for
+working among strawberries, and so dull as to hack off instead of
+cutting up a weed at one stroke. Fred had undertaken to keep our hoes
+sharp for us, but this season he had somehow neglected to put them in
+order.
+
+"This will never do, Miss," he observed. "Your hoe is heavy enough to
+break you down. This is not exercise such as a lady should take, but
+downright hard work. I must get you such as my sisters use; and now I
+mean to do your day's work for you."
+
+Then, taking my place, he proceeded during the entire morning to act as
+my substitute. We were surprised at his affability, as well as at his
+industry. It was evident that grubbing up weeds was no greater novelty
+to him than to us. All the time he had something pleasant to say, and
+thus conversation and work went on together: for, not thinking it polite
+to leave him to labor alone, I procured a rake, and contrived to keep
+him company in turning up the weeds to the sun, the more effectually to
+kill them.
+
+Now I had never been able to learn the botanical names of any of these
+pests of the garden, nor whether any of them were useful to man, nor how
+it was that the earth was so crowded with them. Neither did I know the
+annuals from the perennials, nor why one variety was invariably found
+flourishing in moist ground, while another preferred a drier situation.
+If I had had a desire to learn these interesting particulars of things
+that were my daily acquaintances, I had neither books to consult nor
+time to devote to them.
+
+But it was evident from Mr. Logan's conversation that he was not only a
+horticulturist, but an accomplished botanist. Both my mother and myself
+were surprised at the new light which he threw upon the subject. I was
+tugging with my fingers at a great dandelion which had come up directly
+between two strawberry-plants, trying to pull it up, when its brittle
+leaves broke off in my hand, leaving the root in the ground. Mr. Logan,
+seeing the operation, observed,--
+
+"No use in cutting it off; the root must come out, or it will grow
+thicker and stronger, and plague you every season"; and plying the
+corner of his hoe all round the neck of the dandelion, so as to loosen
+the earth a considerable depth, he thrust his fingers down, seized the
+root, and drew forth a thick white fibre at least a foot long.
+
+"That fellow must be three years old," said he, holding it up for me to
+examine. "Very likely you have cut off the top every season, supposing
+you were killing it. But the dandelion can be exterminated only by
+destroying the root.
+
+"Then," he continued, "there is the dock, more prolific of seeds than
+the dandelion, and the red-sorrel, worse than either, because its roots
+travel under ground in all directions, throwing up suckers at every
+inch, while its tops are hung with myriads of seeds,--the hoe will never
+exterminate these pests. You must get rid of the roots; throw them out
+to such a sun as this, and then you may hope to be somewhat clear of
+them."
+
+All this was entirely new to me, as well as the botanical names, with
+which he seemed to be as familiar as with the alphabet. I had often
+wondered how it was that the dandelions in our garden never diminished
+in number, though not one had usually been allowed to go to seed. I now
+saw, that, instead of destroying the plant itself, we had only been
+removing the tops.
+
+"But how is it, Mr. Logan," I inquired, "that the weeds are everywhere
+more numerous than the flowers?"
+
+"Ah, Miss," he replied, resting the hoe upon his shoulder, taking off
+his hat, and wiping the perspiration from his forehead, "I sometimes
+think the weeds are immortal, but that the flowers are not. Some one has
+said that the earth is mother of the weeds, but only step-mother to the
+flowers. I think it is really so. We who cultivate the soil must
+maintain against them, as against sin, a perpetual warfare."
+
+"This is hoeing made easy," said my sister, as Mr. Logan walked away
+toward the house for a glass of water. "A nice journeyman, Lizzie, eh?
+Don't seem as if he could ever be tired! Will you ask him to come
+again?"
+
+"Why, Jane, you are foolish!" I replied.
+
+But there was an arch smirk on her countenance, and she continued
+looking at me with so much latent meaning in the expression of her eye,
+that I was fairly compelled to turn away.
+
+Noon came, that witching time with all who labor in the fields or woods,
+and not until then did Mr. Logan lay down his clumsy hoe. I half pitied
+his condition as we came out of the hot sun into the shelter of a
+trellis which ran along the side of the house, over which a dozen
+grape-vines were hanging so thickly as to exclude even the noonday
+glare. It was a sweltering day for a gentleman to work among the weeds
+in a strawberry-field, in coat and cravat. But he made very light of it,
+and declared that he would come the next morning and see us through the
+job, and even another, if we thought there would be room for him. After
+he had gone, Jane reminded me of these offers; adding,--
+
+"I felt quite sure he would be down again, even without your inviting
+him. He seems to admire something else here besides strawberries. What
+do you think it can be?"
+
+But I considered her inquiries too ridiculous to be worth replying to.
+
+After dinner we gave up hoeing for the day, and went to our usual
+afternoon occupation of picking the next morning's supply for the widow.
+She not only sold readily all we could gather, and at excellent prices,
+but even called for more. It seemed that her customers were also
+increasing, as well as those of our neighbors. Indeed, her urgency for
+more fruit was such, during the entire season, that the question
+repeatedly crossed my mind, whether we could not appropriate more ground
+to strawberries by getting rid of some of the flowers. They were
+beautiful things, but then they paid no profit.
+
+When one strikes a vein that happens to be profitable, he is apt to
+become impatient of doing well in a small way, and forthwith casts about
+for ways and means to increase its productiveness, as he thinks, by
+enlarging his operations. It was natural for me to conclude, that, if I
+were thus fortunate on one acre, I could do much better by cultivating
+more. I presume this hankering after additional acres must be a national
+weakness, as there were numerous disquisitions on the subject scattered
+through my agricultural papers, in many of which I noticed that there
+was great fault-finding because men in this country undertook the
+cultivation of twice as much land as they could properly manage. The
+propensity for going on and enlarging their possessions seemed a very
+general one. Thus even I, in my small way, was insensibly becoming a
+disciple of these deluded people. But there was this comfort in my case,
+that, while others were able to enlarge, even to their ruin, there was a
+limit to my expansion, as it was impossible for me to go beyond an acre
+and a half.
+
+That afternoon we had just got well under way at picking, when a man
+came into the garden with a bundle of hoes and rakes on his shoulder,
+and coming up to us, took off his hat and bowed with the utmost
+deference, then drew from his pocket a letter, which, singularly enough,
+he handed to me, instead of giving it either to my mother or Jane. On
+opening it, I found it to be a note from Mr. Logan, in which he said he
+had noticed that our garden-tools were so heavy as to be entirely unfit
+for ladies' use, and he had therefore taken the liberty of sending me a
+variety of others that were made expressly for female gardeners, asking
+me to do him the great favor to accept them. Both my mother and Jane had
+stopped picking, as this unexpected donation was laid before us, so I
+read the note aloud to them, the messenger having previously taken his
+leave. I think, altogether, it was the greatest surprise we had ever
+had.
+
+"The next thing, I suppose," said Jane, "you'll have him down here to
+show you how to use them"; and she laughed so heartily as quite to
+mortify me. I understood her meaning, but my mother did not appear to
+comprehend it, for she replied, with the utmost gravity,--
+
+"No need of his coming to teach us; haven't we been hoeing all our
+lives?"
+
+"Not _us_, mother," interrupted Jane, in her peculiarly provoking way,
+"but _her_; he won't come to teach _us_,--one will be enough. As to the
+_need_ of his coming, it looks to me to be growing stronger and
+stronger."
+
+She fairly screamed with laughter, as she said this. I was so provoked
+at her, that I was almost ready to cry; and as to answering her as she
+deserved, it seemed beyond my power. My mother could not understand what
+she meant; but while Jane was going on in this foolish way, she had
+untied the bundle and was examining the tools. There were three hoes,
+and as many rakes. Observing this, Jane again cried out,--
+
+"What! all for _you_? Well, Lizzie, you are making a nice beginning! I
+suppose you will now have more conversational topics than ever, though
+there seemed to be plenty of them this morning!"
+
+One would think that this was quite enough, but she went on with,--
+
+"Don't you wish the weeds would last all summer? for what is to become
+of you when they are gone?"
+
+Still I made no reply, and Jane persisted in her jokes and laughter. But
+I think one can always tell when one is blushing. So I held down my head
+and concealed my face in my sun-bonnet, as I felt the blood rushing up
+into my cheeks, and was determined that she should not have the
+satisfaction of discovering it.
+
+These garden-tools were the most beautiful I had ever seen, and there
+was evidently a hoe and a rake for each of us. They were made of
+polished steel, with slender handles, all rubbed so smooth as to make it
+a pleasure to take hold of them. The blades had been sharpened beyond
+anything that Fred had been able to achieve. Being semicircular in
+shape, they had points at the corners, adapted to reaching into
+out-of-the-way places,--as after a weed that had grown up in the middle
+of a strawberry-row, thinking, perhaps, that a shelter of that kind
+would preserve it from destruction. Then they were so light that even a
+child could ply them all day without their weight occasioning the least
+fatigue. The rakes were equally complete, with long and sharp teeth,
+which entered the ground with far greater facility than the old-time
+implements we had been using. Indeed, they were the very tools we had
+been promising ourselves out of the profits of our second year. My
+mother was especially pleased with them, as she was not of very robust
+constitution, and found the old heavy tools a great drag upon her
+strength. I think no small present I have ever received was so
+acceptable as this.
+
+Whoever first manufactured and introduced these beautiful and
+appropriate garden-tools for ladies has probably done as much to make
+garden-work attractive to the sex as half the writers on fruits and
+flowers. It is vain to expect them to engage in horticulture, unless the
+most complete facilities are provided for them. Their physical strength
+is not equal to several hours' labor with implements made exclusively
+for the hands of strong men; and when garden-work, instead of proving a
+pleasant recreation, degenerates into drudgery, one is apt to become
+disgusted with it, and will thus give up an occupation truly feminine,
+invariably healthful, and in many cases highly profitable.
+
+True to his promise of the preceding day, Mr. Logan came down next
+morning to help us through with our job of hoeing, but rather better
+prepared to operate under a broiling June sun. My mother, seeing his
+determination to assist us, invited him to take off his coat, and
+brought out Fred's straw hat for him to wear. He seemed truly grateful
+for these marks of consideration for his comfort, and in consequence
+there sprung up quite a cordiality between them. There was of course a
+profusion of thanks given to him for the handsome and appropriate
+present he had made, but he seemed to consider it a very small affair.
+Still, I think he appeared as much gratified at finding he had thus
+anticipated our wishes as we were ourselves. It is singular how far a
+little act of kindness, especially when its value is enhanced by its
+appropriateness and the delicacy with which it is performed, will go
+toward establishing a bond of sympathy between giver and receiver.
+
+I may here say, that, the better we became acquainted with Mr. Logan,
+the more evident it was that his heart was made up of kindness. He
+seemed to consider himself as almost nothing, and his neighbor as
+everything. His spirit was of that character that wins its way through
+life, tincturing every action with good-will for others, and seeking to
+promote the happiness of all around him in preference to his own. He
+once remarked, that we must not look for happiness in the things of the
+world, but within ourselves, in our hearts, our tempers, and our
+dispositions. On another occasion he quoted to me something he had just
+been reading in an old author, who said that men's lives should be like
+the day, most beautiful at eventide,--or like the autumn rich with
+golden sheaves, where good works have ripened into an abundant harvest.
+
+Of course, at that time, we knew nothing of who or what he was, beyond
+an assurance incidentally given by our pastor, that he was the worthiest
+young man of his acquaintance, and that he hoped we would entertain him
+in the best way we could, as his passion for the pursuits he discovered
+me to be engaged in, coupled with what he had learned of the great
+object I had in view, had so much interested him in my behalf that he
+thought it likely Mr. Logan would often come down to watch my progress,
+and very possibly in some way assist me. This recommendation was quite
+sufficient to make him a welcome visitor at our little homestead. But
+even without that, we all felt he would have no difficulty in winning
+his way wherever he might think it desirable to make a favorable
+impression. Though he was evidently highly educated, and had been
+brought up in a superior circle to ours, and, for aught we knew, might
+be very wealthy, yet his whole manner was so free from pretension to
+superiority of any kind, that we never felt the least constraint in his
+company.
+
+Well, as I was saying, Mr. Logan came down to assist me in my weeding.
+Jane had gone to the factory, telling me that I should have help enough
+to do her share of the hoeing. I was really not sorry for her absence,
+as she seemed to have taken up some very strange notions, which led her
+into remarks that annoyed me. Besides, she was sometimes so impetuous in
+giving utterance to these notions, that I was afraid she might
+thoughtlessly break out where he would overhear. I might have had other
+reasons, not worth while to allude to, for not regretting her absence;
+but this dangerous propensity was quite sufficient. Hence that was a
+most agreeable morning. It is true that my mother was a good deal
+absent, having something extra to do within doors, thus leaving Mr.
+Logan and myself sole tenants of the garden for probably an hour at a
+time. But it did not occur to me that her presence would have made the
+time pass away any more quickly, or that any remarks from her would have
+made our interchange of ideas more interesting. There was abundance of
+conversation between us, as he seemed at no fault for either words or
+topics. Then there were long pauses in the work, when we would rest upon
+the handles of our hoes, and discuss some point that one of us had
+started. On these occasions I was struck with the extreme politeness and
+deference of his manner toward me. The very tones of his voice were
+different from any I had ever heard. How different, indeed, from those
+of the coarse and mercenary creatures it had been my fortune to
+encounter elsewhere! It was impossible to overlook the contrast. What
+wonder, then, that the softness with which they were modulated, when
+conversing with me, should fall with grateful impressiveness on my
+heart?
+
+But this pleasant acquaintance occasioned no interruption of my labors
+in harvesting my strawberry-crop. It was picked regularly every
+afternoon, and I went with Fred every morning by daylight to see it
+safely delivered to the widow. The sale kept up as briskly as ever,
+though the price gradually declined as the season advanced,--not, as the
+widow informed me, because the people had become tired of strawberries,
+but because the crops from distant fields were now crowding into market.
+Then, too, she said, as other delicacies came forward, buyers were
+disposed to change a little for something different.
+
+It was a striking feature of the business, that, however abundant the
+strawberries might be, selected fruit always commanded a higher price
+than that which went to market in a jumble just as it came from the
+vines. This is a matter which it is important for all cultivators to
+keep in remembrance, as attention to it is a source of considerable
+profit. We all know that the large berries are no better or sweeter than
+the smaller ones; but then we are the growers, not the consumers, and
+the public have set their hearts on having the largest that can be
+produced. In fruits, as in other things, it seems that "the world is
+still deceived by ornament." Moreover, people are willing to pay liberal
+prices for it, and thus the producer is sure of being rewarded for a
+choice article. I never discovered that a pumpkin or a turnip possessed
+any superior flavor because it had been stimulated to mammoth size. But
+such being the public craving for vegetable monsters, the shrewd
+cultivator is constantly on the alert to minister to it, knowing that it
+pays.
+
+Fred kept his usual tally of the number of baskets we took to market,
+and how much money each lot produced. His ridiculous miscalculation, the
+previous year, of what our profits would be, had so moderated his
+enthusiasm, that during all this season his anticipations were confined
+within very modest bounds. But as his column of figures lengthened, and
+he ciphered out for us the average price for each day's sales, it was
+remarkable how much higher it stood than that of most of the fruit I saw
+in the market. It was evident that our care in assorting our berries was
+giving a good account of itself. Besides, I saw that the widow had the
+jumbled-up berries of others on her stand, and heard her complain that
+they remained on hand some hours after all mine had been sold. Then, was
+it not the superiority of mine that had drawn forth such strong
+commendation from my first customer, Mr. Logan? and had he not continued
+to admire all that I did in the strawberry way? Setting aside the high
+prices, I sometimes thought that this alone was worth all the pains we
+had taken.
+
+The season lasted about three weeks, during all which time our pastor
+was a frequent visitor at our garden. As both he and Mr. Logan had been
+made acquainted with my general object and plans, so from generals they
+were at last taken into confidence as to particulars. I showed them
+Fred's tally, and it appeared to me they entered into the study of it
+with almost as much interest as we did ourselves. Though in many
+respects a very small affair, yet it involved great results for me, and
+our visitors both thought it might be turned to the advantage of others
+also.
+
+"I am astonished," said Mr. Seeley, one day, after examining Fred's
+tally, and expressing himself in terms of admiration at the success of
+our enterprise,--"I am astonished at the wasteful lives which so many of
+our women are living. They seem utterly destitute of purpose. They make
+no effort to give them shape or plan, or to set up a goal in the
+distance, to be reached by some kind of industrious application. They
+drift along listlessly and mechanically, in the old well-worn tracks,
+trusting to accident to give them a new direction. It is a sad thing,
+this waste of human existence!"
+
+"But consider, Sir," I replied, "how limited are our opportunities, how
+circumscribed the circle in which we are compelled to move, and with how
+much jealousy the world stands guard upon its boundaries, as if it were
+determined we should not overstep them. When women succeed, is it not
+solely by accident, or, if there be such a thing, by luck?"
+
+"Accident, Miss," replied Mr. Logan, "undoubtedly has something to do
+with it. But observation, energy, and tact are much more important
+elements of success. More than sixty years ago a young New-England girl
+fell desperately in love with an imported straw bonnet which she
+accidentally met with in a shop. The price was too large for her slender
+purse, so she determined to make one for herself. With no guide but
+recollection of the charming novelty she had seen, no other pattern to
+work by, no opportunity of unbraiding it to see how it was made, no
+instruction whatever, she persevered until she had produced a bonnet
+that filled the hearts of her female friends with envy, as well as with
+ambition to copy it. This was the origin of the once famous Dunstable
+bonnet. From this accidental beginning there sprung up a manufacture
+which now employs ten thousand persons, most of whom are women, and the
+product of which, in Massachusetts alone, amounts to six millions of
+hats and bonnets annually. This girl thus became a public benefactor.
+She opened a new and profitable employment to women, and at the same
+time enriched herself."
+
+"Yes," added Mr. Seeley, "and there are many other employments for
+female skill and labor that may yet be opened up. This that you are
+toiling in, Lizzie, may turn out something useful. I presume that even
+bonnets cannot be more popular than strawberries."
+
+"I should think so," interrupted Fred, "It is the women only who wear
+the one, but it looks to me as if the whole world wanted the other."
+
+Well, when our little crop had all been sold, I found that it amounted
+to nearly twelve hundred quarts, and that it produced three hundred and
+eighty dollars clear of expenses. This was quite as much as we expected;
+besides, it was enough to enable me to quit the factory altogether, and
+stay at home with my mother. And there was a fair prospect of this
+release being a permanent one, as it was very certain I now understood
+the whole art and mystery of cultivating strawberries. There was another
+encouraging incident connected with this season's operations. It
+appeared that our pastor had mentioned me and my labors to a number of
+his friends, among whom was one who wanted to set out a large field with
+plants, all of which he purchased of me, amounting to sixty dollars.
+This was a most unexpected addition to our income.
+
+But my sister Jane did not seem at all anxious to give up the factory. I
+had, a good while before, let in an idea that there was some other
+attraction about the establishment besides the sewing-machine. I
+noticed, that, now we had so considerably increased our means, she was
+more dressy than ever, and spent a great deal more time at her toilet
+before leaving for the factory, as if there were some one there to whom
+she wanted to appear more captivating than usual. Poor girl! I know it
+was very natural for her to do so. Indeed, I must confess to some little
+weakness of the same description myself. We had drawn to us quite a new
+set of visitors, and it was natural that I should endeavor to make our
+house as attractive to them as possible. As all our previous earnings
+had gone into a common purse, from which my mother made distribution
+among us, so the new accession from the garden went into the same
+repository. Jane was much more set up with this flourishing condition of
+our finances than myself. In addition to beautiful new bonnets and very
+gay shawls which we bought, she began to tease my mother for a silk
+dress, an article which had never been seen in our house. But as the
+latter prudently insisted on treating us with equal indulgence, and as I
+thought my time for such finery had not come, I was unwilling to go to
+that expense, so Jane was obliged to do without it. But I was now to
+have a sewing-machine.
+
+Time passed more pleasantly than I had ever known. It was a great
+happiness to be able to devote an hour or two to reading every day, and
+leisure prompted me to some little enterprises for the improvement of
+the surroundings of the old homestead. It seemed to me the easiest thing
+in the world to invest even the rudest exterior with true elegance, and
+I found that the indulgence of a little taste in this way could be had
+for a very small outlay. A silk dress, in my opinion, was not to be
+compared with such an object.
+
+I scarcely know how it happened, but, instead of the end of the
+strawberry-season being the termination of Mr. Logan's visits, they
+continued full as frequent as when there was really pressing work for
+him to assist in. It could not have been because his curiosity to see
+how my crop would turn out was still ungratified, as he knew all about
+it, how much we had sold, and what money it produced. But he seemed to
+have quite fallen in love with the garden; and, indeed, he one day
+observed, that "there would ever be something in that garden to interest
+him." Then in my little improvements about the house, in fixing up some
+of our old trellises, in planting new vines and flowers, and in
+transplanting trees and shrubs, he insisted on helping me nearly half
+the week. He really performed far more work of this kind than Fred had
+ever done, and appeared to be perfectly familiar with such matters.
+Moreover, he approved so generally of my plans that I at last felt it
+would be difficult to do without him. But I could not help considering
+it strange that he should so frequently give up the higher society to
+which he was accustomed in the city, and spend so much of his time at
+our humble cottage.
+
+Thus the season went on until August came in, when the strawberry-ground
+was becoming thickly covered with runners, especially from the newly
+planted half-acre. I had intended bestowing no particular care on these,
+except to keep down the weeds so that the runners could take root. But
+when Mr. Logan learned this, he said it would never do. Besides, he
+said, the ground looked to him as if it were not rich enough. So, if he
+could have his own way, he would show me how the thing should be
+managed. Well, as by this time he really appeared to have as much to say
+about the garden as any of us, what could I do but consent? First,
+then, with my assistance, he turned back the runners into the rows, and
+then had the spaces between covered with a thick coat of fine old
+compost, which he probably bought somewhere in the neighborhood,--but
+how much it cost we could never get him to say. Then he brought in a man
+with a plough, who broke up the ground, turning the manure thoroughly
+in, and then harrowing it until the surface was as finely pulverized as
+if done with a rake. Then we spread out the runners again, and he showed
+me how to fasten them by letting them down into the soft earth with the
+point of my hoe. I told him I never should have thought of taking so
+much trouble; but he said there was no other way by which the runners
+could be converted into robust plants, certain to produce a heavy crop
+the next season. They must have a freshly loosened soil to run over, and
+in which to form strong roots; and as to enriching the ground, it was
+absolutely indispensable. To be sure, I could produce fruit without it,
+but it would be of very inferior quality.
+
+One may well suppose that this intimate association, this almost daily
+companionship, this grateful interchange of thoughts and feelings that
+seemed to flow in one harmonious current from a common fountain, should
+have exerted a powerful influence over me. Such intercourse with one so
+singularly gifted with the faculty of winning favor from all who knew
+him gave birth to emotions within me such as I had never experienced. Am
+I to blame for being thus affected, or in confessing that every long
+October evening was doubly pleasant when it brought him down to see us?
+Indeed, I had insensibly begun to expect him. There was an indescribable
+something in his manner, especially when we happened to be alone, that I
+thought it impossible to misunderstand. Once, when strolling round the
+garden, I directed his attention to a group of charming autumn flowers.
+But, instead of noticing them, he looked at me, and replied,--
+
+"Ah, Miss Lizzie, I long since discovered that this garden contains a
+sweeter flower than any of these!"
+
+I turned away from him, abashed and silent, for I was confused and
+frightened by the idea that he was alluding to me, and it was a long
+time before I could venture to raise my eyes to his. I thought of what
+he had said, and of the studied tenderness of voice with which he had
+spoken, all through our lengthened walk, and until I rested upon my
+pillow; and the strange sensations it awakened came over my spirit in
+repeated dreams.
+
+Thus forewarned, as I thought, I was not slow in afterwards detecting
+fresh manifestations of a tenderer interest for me than I had supposed
+it possible for him to entertain.
+
+One evening in November, when the moon was shining with her softest
+lustre through the deep haze peculiar to our Indian summer, he came as
+usual to our little homestead. Somehow, I can scarcely tell why, I had
+been expecting him. He had dropped something the previous evening which
+had awakened in my mind the deepest feeling, and I was half sure that he
+would come. I felt that there were quicker pulses dancing through my
+veins, a flutter in my heart such as no previous experience had brought,
+a doubt, a fear, an expectation, as well as an alarm, which no
+reflection could analyze, no language could describe, all contending
+within me for ascendancy. Who that has human sympathies, who that is
+young as I was, diffident of herself, and comparatively alone and
+friendless, will wonder that I should be thus overcome, or reproach me
+for giving way to impulses which I felt it impossible to control? There
+was a terror of the future, which even recollection of the happy past
+was powerless to dissipate. Society, even books, became irksome, and I
+went out into the garden alone, there to have uninterrupted communion
+with myself.
+
+There was an old arbor in a by-place of the garden, covered with creeper
+and honeysuckle, and though rudely built, yet there was a quiet
+retirement about it that I felt would be grateful to my spirit. Its
+rustic fittings, its heavy old seats, its gravelled floor, had been the
+scene of a thousand childish gambols with my brother and sister. Old
+memories clung to it with a loving fondness. Even when the sports of
+childhood gave place to graver thoughts and occupations, the cool
+retirement of this rustic solitude had never failed to possess the
+strongest attractions for me. The songbirds built their little nests
+within the overhanging foliage, and swarms of bees gave melodious voices
+to the summer air as they hovered over its honey-yielding flowers. The
+past united with the present to direct my steps toward this favorite
+spot I entered, and, seating myself on one of the old low branches that
+encircled it, was looking up through the straggling vines that festooned
+the entrance, admiring the soft haze through, which the cloudless moon
+was shedding a peculiar brilliancy on all around, when I heard a step
+approaching from the house.
+
+I stopped the song which I had been humming, and listened. It is said
+that there are steps which have music in them. I am sure, the cadences
+of that music which the poet has so immortalized sounded distinctly in
+my listening ear. It was the melody of recognition. I knew instinctively
+the approaching step, and in a moment Mr. Logan stood before me.
+
+"What!" said he, extending his hand as I rose, and pressing mine with a
+warmth that was unusual, even retaining it until we were seated,--"ever
+happy! There must be a perpetual sunshine in your heart!"
+
+"Oh, no!" I replied. "Happiness is a creation of the fireside. One does
+not find it in his neighbor's garden, and many times not even in his
+own."
+
+"For once, dear Lizzie, I only half agree with you," he replied, again
+taking my hand, and pressing it in both of his.
+
+I sought in vain to withdraw it, but he held it with an embarrassing
+tenacity. He had never spoken such words before, never used my name
+even, without the usual prefix which politeness exacts. I was glad that
+the moonlight found but feeble entrance into the arbor, as the blood
+mounted from my heart into my face, and I felt that I must be a
+spectacle of confusion. I cannot now remember how long this
+indescribable embarrassment kept possession of me, but I did summon
+strength to say,--
+
+"Your language surprises me, Mr. Logan."
+
+"But, dear Lizzie," he rejoined, "my deportment toward you ought to
+lessen that surprise, and become the apology for my words. Others may
+find no happiness in their neighbor's garden, but I have discovered that
+mine is concentrated in yours. You, dear Lizzie, are its fairest,
+choicest flower, which I seek to transplant into my own, there to
+flourish in the warmth of an affection such as I have felt for no one
+but yourself. Never has woman been so loved as you. Let me add fresh
+blessings to the day on which I first met you here, by claiming you as
+my wife."
+
+Oh, how can I write all this? But memory covers every incident of the
+past with flowers. What I said in reply to that overwhelming declaration
+has all gone from me. I may have been silent,--I think I must have
+been,--under the crowd of conflicting sensations,--amazement, modesty, a
+happiness unspeakable,--which came thronging over my heart I cannot
+remember all, but I covered my face, and the tears came into my eyes.
+Still keeping my hand, he placed his arm around me, drew me yet closer
+to him,--my head fell upon his breast,--I think he must have kissed me.
+
+If other evenings fled on hasty wings, how rapid was the flight of what
+remained of this! I cannot repeat the thoughts we uttered to each other,
+the confidences we exchanged, the glimpses of the happy future that
+broke upon me. Joy seemed to fill my cup even to overflowing; happiness
+danced before my bewildered mind; the longing of my womanly nature was
+satisfied with the knowledge that my affection was returned. Out of all
+the world in which he had to choose, he had preferred _me_.
+
+That night was made restless by the very fulness of my happiness. At
+breakfast the next morning, Jane questioned me on my somewhat haggard
+looks, and was inquisitive to know if anything had happened. Somehow she
+was unusually pertinacious; but I parried her inquiries. I was unwilling
+that others, as yet, should become sharers of my joy. But when she left
+upon her usual duties, I put on my best attire, with all the little
+novelties in dress which we had recently been able to purchase, making
+my appearance as genteel as possible. For the first time in my life I
+did think that silk would be becoming, and was vexed with myself for
+being without it. I was now anxious to be found agreeable. But it really
+made no difference.
+
+Presently a knock was heard at the front door; and on my mother's
+opening it, Mr. Logan entered, with a young lady whom he introduced as
+his sister. The room was so indifferently lighted that I could not at
+first distinguish her features, but, on her throwing up her veil, I
+instantly recognized in her my fellow-pupil at the sewing-school,--my
+"guide, philosopher, and friend," Miss Effie Logan!
+
+"Two years, dear Lizzie, since we met!" she exclaimed, "and what a
+meeting now! You see I know it all. Henry has told me everything. I am
+half as happy as yourself!"
+
+She took me in her arms, embraced me, kissed me with passionate
+tenderness, and called me "sister." What a recognition it was for me!
+Her beautiful face, lighted up with a new animation, appeared more
+lovely than ever. There was the same open-hearted manner of other days,
+now made doubly engaging by the warmest manifestation of genuine
+affection. I had never dreamed that Mr. Logan was the brother of whom
+this loving girl had so often spoken to me at the sewing-school, nor
+that the inexpressible happiness of calling her my sister was in store
+for me. But now I could readily discover resemblances which it was no
+wonder I had heretofore overlooked. If he, in sweetness of disposition,
+were to prove the counterpart of herself, what more could woman ask? It
+was not possible for a recognition to be more joyful than this.
+
+My mother stood by, witnessing these incomprehensible proceedings,
+silent, yet anxious as to their meaning. Effie took her into the
+adjoining room,--she was far readier of speech than myself,--and there
+explained to her the mystery of my new position with Mr. Logan. She told
+me that my mother was overcome with surprise, for, dearly as she loved
+her children, she had been strangely dull in her apprehension of what
+had been so long enacting within her own domestic circle. But why should
+I amplify these homely details? They are daily incidents the world over,
+varied, it is true, by circumstances; for everywhere the human heart is
+substantially the same mysterious fountain of emotion.
+
+A secret of this sort, once known, even to one's mother only, travels
+with miraculous rapidity, until the whole gaping neighborhood becomes
+confidentially intrusted with its keeping. It seems that ours had been
+more observant and suspicious than even my dear mother. But such eager
+care-takers of other people's affairs exist wherever human beings may
+chance to congregate. Humble life secured us no exemption.
+
+Our pastor was one of the first to hear of the interesting event. It may
+be that Mr. Logan had given him some inkling of it beforehand, for he
+was early in his congratulations. Jane, as might be expected, declared
+that it was no surprise to her, and was sure that my mother would not
+think of having the wedding without indulging her in her long-coveted
+silk. Fred took to Mr. Logan with almost as much kindliness as even
+myself. Throughout the neighborhood the affair created an immense
+sensation, as it was currently believed that Mr. Logan was exceedingly
+rich, and that now I was likely to become a lady. While poor, I was only
+a strawberry-girl; but rich, I would be a lady! Who is to account for
+these false estimates of human life? Who is mighty enough to correct
+them?
+
+Nothing had ever so melted down the rude stiffness of the Tetchy family
+as this wonderful revolution in my domestic prospects. They became
+amusingly disposed to sociability, as well as to inquisitiveness. But I
+was glad to see my mother stiffen up in proportion to their sudden
+condescension, for she would have nothing to do with them.
+
+Who, among casuists, can account for the contagious sympathy that seems
+to govern the affections? I had often heard it said that one wedding
+generally leads the way to another. Not a fortnight after these
+important events, Jane gave a new surprise to the household by
+introducing to us a lover of her own. It appeared that everything had
+been arranged between them before we knew a word about it. The happy
+young man in this case was a junior partner in the factory; and this, as
+I had long suspected, was the great secret of her attraction there. How
+my mother could have been so blind to the signs of coming events, such
+as were developing around her, I could not understand. But both affairs
+were real surprises to her. If we had depended on her genius as a
+matchmaker, I fear that both Jane and myself would have had a very
+discouraging experience!
+
+Thus the services of our pastor were likely to be in great request, for
+Jane insisted that he should officiate at her wedding, and Mr. Logan
+would think of no other for his own; and for myself, I thought it best,
+as this was the first time, not to let it be said that I had volunteered
+to make a difficulty by being contrary on such a point! Effie offered to
+be my bridesmaid, and Mr. Logan declared that Fred should be his first
+groomsman. It was a hazardous venture, Fred being as much a novice at
+such performances as myself,--who had never officiated even as bride!
+With a little tutoring, however, he turned out a surprising success.
+Lucy, no longer a little barefoot fruit-peddler, was promoted to be my
+waiting-maid.
+
+The new year came, bringing with it silks and jewels, and the double
+wedding. If I write that I am married, I must add that I am still
+without a sewing-machine. To me the garden has been better than the
+needle.
+
+There is a moral to be drawn from all that I have written, wherein it
+may be seen that the field of my choice is wide enough for many others.
+If I retire from market as a strawberry-girl, it must not be inferred
+that it is because the business has been overdone.
+
+
+
+
+JOHN JORDAN,
+
+FROM THE HEAD OF BAINE.
+
+
+Among the many brave men who have taken part in this war,--whose dying
+embers are now being trodden out by a "poor white man,"--none, perhaps,
+have done more service to the country, or won less glory for themselves,
+than the "poor whites" who have acted as scouts for the Union armies.
+The issue of battles, the result of campaigns, and the possession of
+wide districts of country, have often depended on their sagacity, or
+been determined by the information they have gathered; and yet they have
+seldom been heard of in the newspapers, and may never be read of in
+history.
+
+Romantic, thrilling, and sometimes laughable adventures have attended
+the operations of the scouts of both sections; but more difficulty and
+danger have undoubtedly been encountered by the partisans of the North
+than of the South. Operating mostly within the circle of their own
+acquaintance, the latter have usually been aided and harbored by the
+Southern people, who, generally friendly to Secession, have themselves
+often acted as spies, and conveyed dispatches across districts occupied
+by our armies, and inaccessible to any but supposed loyal citizens.
+
+The service rendered the South by these volunteer scouts has often been
+of the most important character. One stormy night, early in the war, a
+young woman set out from a garrisoned town to visit a sick uncle
+residing a short distance in the country. The sick uncle, mounting his
+horse at midnight, rode twenty miles in the rain to Forrest's
+head-quarters. The result was, the important town of Murfreesboro' and a
+promising Major-General fell into the hands of the Confederates; and all
+because the said Major-General permitted a pretty woman to pass his
+lines on "a mission of mercy."
+
+At another time, a Rebel citizen, professing disgust with Secession for
+having the weakness to be on "its last legs," took the oath of
+allegiance and assumed the Union uniform. Informing himself fully of the
+disposition of our forces along the Nashville Railroad, he suddenly
+disappeared, to reappear with Basil Duke and John Morgan in a midnight
+raid on our slumbering outposts.
+
+Again, a column on the march came upon a wretched woman, with a child in
+her arms, seated by the dying embers of a burning homestead,--burning,
+she said, because her sole and only friend, her uncle, (these ladies
+seldom have any nearer kin,) "stood up stret fur the kentry." No
+American soldier ever refused a "lift" to a woman in distress. This
+woman was soon "lifted" into an empty saddle by the side of a
+staff-officer, who, with many wise winks and knowing nods, was
+discussing the intended route of the expedition with a brother
+simpleton. A little farther on the woman suddenly remembered that
+another uncle, who did not stand up quite so "stret fur the kentry,"
+and, consequently, had a house still standing up for him, lived "plumb
+up thet 'ar' hill ter the right o' the high-road." She was set down, the
+column moved on, and--Streight's well planned expedition miscarried. But
+no one wasted a thought on the forlorn woman and the sallow baby whose
+skinny faces were so long within earshot of the wooden-headed
+staff-officer.
+
+Means quite as ingenious and quite as curious were often adopted to
+conceal dispatches, when the messenger was in danger of capture by an
+enemy. A boot with a hollow heel, a fragment of corn-pone too stale to
+tempt a starving man, a strip of adhesive plaster over a festering
+wound, or a ball of cotton-wool stuffed into the ear to keep out the
+west wind, often hid a message whose discovery would cost a life, and
+perhaps endanger an army. The writer has himself seen the hollow
+half-eagle which bore to Burnside's beleaguered force the welcome
+tidings that in thirty hours Sherman would relieve Knoxville.
+
+The perils which even the "native" scout encountered can be estimated
+only by those familiar with the vigilance that surrounds an army. The
+casual meeting with an acquaintance, the slightest act inconsistent with
+his assumed character, or the smallest incongruity between his speech
+and that of the district to which he professed to belong, has sent many
+a good man to the gallows. One of the best of Rosecrans's scouts--a
+native of East Kentucky--lost his life because he would "bounce" (mount)
+his nag, "pack" (carry) his gun, eat his bread "dry so," (without
+butter,) and "guzzle his peck o' whiskey," in the midst of Bragg's camp,
+when no such things were done there, nor in the mountains of Alabama,
+whence he professed to come. Acquainted only with a narrow region, the
+poor fellow did not know that every Southern district has its own
+dialect, and that the travelled ear of a close observer can detect the
+slightest deviation from its customary phrases. But he was not alone in
+this ignorance. Almost every Northern writer who has undertaken to
+describe Southern life has fallen into the same error. Even Olmstead,
+who has caught the idioms wonderfully, confounds the dialects of
+different regions, and makes a Northern Georgian "right smart," when he
+had been only "powerful stupid" all his life.
+
+The professional scout generally was a native of the South,--some
+illiterate and simple-minded, but brave and self-devoted "poor white
+man," who, if he had worn shoulder-straps, and been able to write
+"interesting" dispatches, might now be known as a hero half the world
+over. Some of these men, had they been born at the North, where free
+schools are open to all, would have led armies, and left a name to live
+after them. But they were born at the South, had their minds cramped and
+their souls stunted by a system which dwarfs every noble thing; and so,
+their humble mission over, they have gone down unknown and unhonored,
+amid the silence and darkness of their native woods.
+
+I hope to rescue the memory of one of these men--John Jordan, from the
+head of Baine--from utter oblivion by writing this article. He is now
+beyond the hearing of my words; but I would record one act in his short
+career, that his pure patriotism may lead some of us to know better and
+love more the much-abused and misunderstood class to which he belonged.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Early in the war the command of an important military expedition was
+intrusted to the president of a Western college. Though a young man,
+this scholar had already achieved a "character" and a history. Beginning
+life a widow's son, his first sixteen years were passed between a farm,
+a canal, and a black-saltern. Being an intelligent, energetic lad, his
+friends formed the usual hopes of him; but when he apprenticed himself
+to a canal-boat, their faith failed, and, after the fashion of Job's
+friends, they comforted his mother with the assurance that her son had
+taken the swift train to the Devil. But, like Job, she knew in whom she
+believed, and the boy soon justified her confidence. An event shortly
+occurred which changed the current of his life, gave him a purpose, and
+made him a man.
+
+One dark midnight, as the boat on which he was employed was leaving one
+of those long reaches of slackwater which abound in the Ohio and
+Pennsylvania Canal, he was called up to take his turn at the bow.
+Tumbling out of bed, his eyes heavy with sleep, he took his stand on the
+narrow platform below the bow-deck, and began uncoiling a rope to steady
+the boat through a lock it was approaching. Slowly and sleepily he
+unwound it, till it knotted, and caught in a narrow cleft in the edge of
+the deck. He gave it a sudden pull, but it held fast; then another and a
+stronger pull, and it gave way, but sent him over the bow into the
+water. Down he went into the dark night and the still darker river; and
+the boat glided on to bury him among the fishes. No human help was near.
+God only could save him, and He only by a miracle. So the boy thought,
+as he went down saying the prayer his mother had taught him.
+Instinctively clutching the rope, he sunk below the surface; but then it
+tightened in his grasp, and held firmly. Seizing it hand over hand, he
+drew himself up on deck, and was again a live boy among the living.
+Another kink had caught in another crevice, and saved him! Was it that
+prayer, or the love of his praying mother, which wrought this miracle?
+He did not know, but, long after the boat had passed the lock, he stood
+there, in his dripping clothes, pondering the question.
+
+Coiling the rope, he tried to throw it again into the crevice; but it
+had lost the knack of kinking. Many times he tried,--six hundred, says
+my informant,--and then sat down and reflected. "I have thrown this
+rope," he thought, "six hundred times; I might throw it ten times as
+many without its catching. Ten times six hundred are six thousand,--so,
+there were six thousand chances against my life. Against such odds,
+Providence only could have saved it. Providence, therefore, thinks it
+worth saving; and if that's so, I won't throw it away on a canal-boat.
+I'll go home, get an education, and be a man."
+
+He acted on this resolution, and not long afterwards stood before a
+little log cottage in the depths of the Ohio wilderness. It was late at
+night; the stars were out, and the moon was down; but by the fire-light
+that came through the window, he saw his mother kneeling before an open
+book which lay on a chair in the corner. She was reading; but her eyes
+were off the page, looking up to the Invisible. "Oh, turn unto me," she
+said, "and have mercy upon me! give Thy strength unto Thy servant, and
+save the son of Thine handmaid!" More she read, which sounded like a
+prayer, but this is all that the boy remembers. He opened the door, put
+his arm about her neck, and his head upon her bosom. What words he said
+I do not know; but there, by her side, he gave back to God the life
+which He had given. So the mother's prayer was answered. So sprang up
+the seed which in toil and tears she had planted.
+
+The boy worked, the world rolled round, and twelve years later Governor
+Dennison offered him command of a regiment. He went home, opened his
+mother's Bible, and pondered upon the subject. He had a wife, a child,
+and a few thousand dollars. If he gave his life to the country, would
+God and the few thousand dollars provide for his wife and child? He
+consulted the Book about it. It seemed to answer in the affirmative; and
+before morning he wrote to a friend,--"I regard my life as given to the
+country. I am only anxious to make as much of it as possible before the
+mortgage on it is foreclosed."
+
+To this man, who thus went into the war with a life not his own, was
+given, on the 16th of December, 1861, command of the little army which
+held Kentucky to her moorings in the Union.
+
+He knew nothing of war beyond its fundamental principles,--which are, I
+believe, that a big boy can whip a little boy, and that one big boy can
+whip two little boys, if he take them singly, one after the other. He
+knew no more about it; yet he was called upon to solve a military
+problem which has puzzled the heads of the greatest generals: namely,
+how two small bodies of men, stationed widely apart, can unite in the
+presence of an enemy, and beat him, when he is of twice their united
+strength, and strongly posted behind intrenchments. With the help of
+many "good men and true," he solved this problem; and in telling how he
+solved it, I shall come naturally to speak of John Jordan, from the head
+of Baine.
+
+Humphrey Marshall with five thousand men had invaded Kentucky. Entering
+it at Pound Gap, he had fortified a strong natural position near
+Paintville, and, with small bands, was overrunning the whole Piedmont
+region. This region, containing an area larger than the whole of
+Massachusetts, was occupied by about four thousand blacks and one
+hundred thousand whites,--a brave, hardy, rural population, with few
+schools, scarcely any churches, and only one newspaper, but with that
+sort of patriotism which grows among mountains and clings to its barren
+hillsides as if they were the greenest spots in the universe. Among this
+simple people Marshall was scattering firebrands. Stump-orators were
+blazing away at every cross-road, lighting a fire which threatened to
+sweep Kentucky from the Union. That done,--so early in the
+war,--dissolution might have followed. To the Ohio canal-boy was
+committed the task of extinguishing this conflagration. It was a
+difficult task, one which, with the means at command, would have
+appalled any man not made equal to it by early struggles with hardship
+and poverty, and entire trust in the Providence that guards his country.
+
+The means at command were twenty-five hundred men, divided into two
+bodies, and separated by a hundred miles of mountain country. This
+country was infested with guerrillas, and occupied by a disloyal people.
+The sending of dispatches across it was next to impossible; but
+communication being opened, and the two columns set in motion, there was
+danger that they would be fallen on and beaten in detail before they
+could form a junction. This was the great danger. What remained--the
+beating of five thousand Rebels, posted behind intrenchments, by half
+their number of Yankees, operating in the open field--seemed to the
+young Colonel less difficult of accomplishment.
+
+Evidently, the first thing to be done was to find a trustworthy
+messenger to convey dispatches between the two halves of the Union army.
+To this end, the Yankee commander applied to the Colonel of the
+Fourteenth Kentucky.
+
+"Have you a man," he asked, "who will die, rather than fail or betray
+us?"
+
+The Kentuckian reflected a moment, then answered: "I think I have,--John
+Jordan, from the head of Baine."[B]
+
+Jordan was sent for. He was a tall, gaunt, sallow man of about thirty,
+with small gray eyes, a fine, falsetto voice, pitched in the minor key,
+and his speech the rude dialect of the mountains. His face had as many
+expressions as could be found in a regiment, and he seemed a strange
+combination of cunning, simplicity, undaunted courage, and undoubting
+faith; yet, though he might pass for a simpleton, he talked a quaint
+sort of wisdom which ought to have given him to history.
+
+The young Colonel sounded him thoroughly; for the fate of the little
+army might depend on his fidelity. The man's soul was as clear as
+crystal, and in ten minutes the Yankee saw through it. His history is
+stereotyped in that region. Born among the hills, where the crops are
+stones, and sheep's noses are sharpened before they can nibble the thin
+grass between them, his life had been one of the hardest toil and
+privation. He knew nothing but what Nature, the Bible, the "Course of
+Time," and two or three of Shakspeare's plays had taught him; but
+somehow in the mountain air he had grown to be a man,--a man as
+civilized nations account manhood.
+
+"Why did you come into the war?" at last asked the Colonel.
+
+"To do my sheer fur the kentry, Gin'ral," answered the man. "And I
+didn't druv no barg'in wi' th' Lord. I guv Him my life squar' out; and
+ef He's a mind ter tuck it on this tramp, why, it's a His'n; I've
+nothin' ter say agin it."
+
+"You mean that you've come into the war not expecting to get out of it?"
+
+"That's so, Gin'ral."
+
+"Will you die rather than let the dispatch be taken?"
+
+"I wull."
+
+The Colonel recalled what had passed in his own mind when poring over
+his mother's Bible that night at his home in Ohio; and it decided him.
+"Very well," he said; "I will trust you."
+
+The dispatch was written on tissue paper, rolled into the form of a
+bullet, coated with warm lead, and put into the hand of the Kentuckian.
+He was given a carbine, a brace of revolvers, and the fleetest horse in
+his regiment, and, when the moon was down, started on his perilous
+journey. He was to ride at night, and hide in the woods or in the houses
+of loyal men in the day-time.
+
+It was pitch-dark when he set out; but he knew every inch of the way,
+having travelled it often, driving mules to market. He had gone twenty
+miles by early dawn, and the house of a friend was only a few miles
+beyond him. The man himself was away; but his wife was at home, and she
+would harbor him till nightfall. He pushed on, and tethered his horse in
+the timber; but it was broad day when he rapped at the door, and was
+admitted. The good woman gave him breakfast, and showed him to the
+guest-chamber, where, lying down in his boots, he was soon in a deep
+slumber.
+
+The house was a log cabin in the midst of a few acres of
+deadening,--ground from which trees have been cleared by girdling. Dense
+woods were all about it; but the nearest forest was a quarter of a mile
+distant, and should the scout be tracked, it would be hard to get away
+over this open space, unless he had warning of the approach of his
+pursuers. The woman thought of this, and sent up the road, on a mule,
+her whole worldly possessions, an old negro, dark as the night, but
+faithful as the sun in the heavens. It was high noon when the mule came
+back, his heels striking fire, and his rider's eyes flashing, as if
+ignited from the sparks the steel had emitted.
+
+"Dey 'm comin', Missus!" he cried,--"not haff a mile away,--twenty
+Secesh,--ridin' as ef de Debil wus arter 'em!"
+
+She barred the door, and hastened to the guest-chamber.
+
+"Go," she cried, "through the winder,--ter the woods! They'll be here in
+a minute."
+
+"How many is thar?" asked the scout.
+
+"Twenty,--go,--go at once,--or you'll be taken!"
+
+The scout did not move; but, fixing his eyes on her face, he said,--
+
+"Yes, I yere 'em. Thar's a sorry chance for my life a'ready. But,
+Rachel, I've thet 'bout me thet's wuth more 'n my life,--thet, may-be,
+'ll save Kaintuck. If I'm killed, wull ye tuck it ter Cunnel Cranor, at
+Paris?"
+
+"Yes, yes, I will. But go: you've not a minnit to lose, I tell you."
+
+"I know, but wull ye swar it,--swar ter tuck this ter Cunnel Cranor
+'fore th' Lord thet yeres us?"
+
+"Yes, yes, I will," she said, taking the bullet. But horses' hoofs were
+already sounding in the door-yard. "It's too late," cried the woman.
+"Oh, why did you stop to parley?"
+
+"Never mind, Rachel," answered the scout. "Don't tuck on. Tuck ye keer
+o' th' dispatch. Valu' it loike yer life,--loike Kaintuck. The Lord's
+callin' fur me, and I'm a'ready."
+
+But the scout was mistaken. It was not the Lord, but a dozen devils at
+the door-way.
+
+"What does ye want?" asked the woman, going to the door.
+
+"The man as come from Garfield's camp at sun-up,--John Jordan, from the
+head o' Baine," answered a voice from the outside.
+
+"Ye karn't hev him fur th' axin'," said the scout. "Go away, or I'll
+send some o' ye whar the weather is warm, I reckon."
+
+"Pshaw!" said another voice,--from his speech one of the chivalry.
+"There are twenty of us. We'll spare your life, if you give up the
+dispatch; if you don't, we'll hang you higher than Haman."
+
+The reader will bear in mind that this was in the beginning of the war,
+when swarms of spies infested every Union camp, and treason was only a
+gentlemanly pastime, not the serious business it has grown to be since
+traitors are no longer dangerous.
+
+"I've nothin' but my life thet I'll guv up," answered the scout; "and ef
+ye tuck thet, ye'll hev ter pay the price,--six o' yourn."
+
+"Fire the house!" shouted one.
+
+"No, don't do thet," said another. "I know him,--he's cl'ar grit,--he'll
+die in the ashes; and we won't git the dispatch."
+
+This sort of talk went on for half an hour; then there was a dead
+silence, and the woman went to the loft, whence she could see all that
+was passing outside. About a dozen of the horsemen were posted around
+the house; but the remainder, dismounted, had gone to the edge of the
+woods, and were felling a well-grown sapling, with the evident intention
+of using it as a battering-ram to break down the front door.
+
+The woman, in a low tone, explained the situation; and the scout said,--
+
+"It 'r' my only chance. I must run fur it. Bring me yer red shawl,
+Rachel."
+
+She had none, but she had a petticoat of flaming red and yellow.
+Handling it as if he knew how such articles can be made to spread, the
+scout softly unbarred the door, and, grasping the hand of the woman,
+said,--
+
+"Good bye, Rachel. It 'r' a right sorry chance; but I may git through.
+Ef I do, I'll come ter night; ef I don't, git ye the dispatch ter the
+Cunnel. Good bye."
+
+To the right of the house, midway between it and the woods, stood the
+barn. That way lay the route of the scout. If he could elude the two
+mounted men at the door-way, he might escape the other horsemen; for
+they would have to spring the barn-yard fences, and their horses might
+refuse the leap. But it was foot of man against leg of horse, and "a
+right sorry chance."
+
+Suddenly he opened the door, and dashed at the two horses with the
+petticoat. They reared, wheeled, and bounded away like lightning just
+let out of harness. In the time that it takes to tell it, the scout was
+over the first fence, and scaling the second; but a horse was making the
+leap with him. The scout's pistol went off, and the rider's earthly
+journey was over. Another followed, and his horse fell mortally wounded.
+The rest made the circuit of the barn-yard, and were rods behind when
+the scout reached the edge of the forest. Once among those thick
+laurels, nor horse nor rider can reach a man, if he lies low, and says
+his prayer in a whisper.
+
+The Rebels bore the body of their comrade back to the house, and said to
+the woman,--
+
+"We'll be revenged for this. We know the route he'll take, and will have
+his life before to-morrow; and you--we'd burn your house over your head,
+if you were not the wife of Jack Brown."
+
+Brown was a loyal man, who was serving his country in the ranks of
+Marshall. Thereby hangs a tale, but this is not the time to tell it.
+Soon the men rode away, taking the poor woman's only wagon as a hearse
+for their dead comrade.
+
+Night came, and the owls cried in the woods in a way they had not cried
+for a fortnight. "T'whoot! t'whoot!" they went, as if they thought there
+was music in hooting. The woman listened, put on a dark mantle, and
+followed the sound of their voices. Entering the woods, she crept in
+among the bushes, and talked with the owls as if they had been human.
+
+"They know the road ye'll take," she said; "ye must change yer route.
+Here ar' the bullet."
+
+"God bless ye, Rachel!" responded the owl, "ye 'r' a true 'ooman!"--and
+he hooted louder than before, to deceive pursuers, and keep up the
+music.
+
+"Ar' yer nag safe?" she asked.
+
+"Yes, and good for forty mile afore sun-up."
+
+"Well, here ar' suthin' ter eat: ye'll need it. Good bye, and God go wi'
+ye!"
+
+"He'll go wi' ye, fur He loves noble wimmin."
+
+Their hands clasped, and then they parted: he to his long ride; she to
+the quiet sleep of those who, out of a true heart, serve their country.
+
+The night was dark and drizzly; but before morning the clouds cleared
+away, leaving a thick mist hanging low on the meadows. The scout's mare
+was fleet, but the road was rough, and a slosh of snow impeded the
+travel. He had come by a strange way, and did not know how far he had
+travelled by sunrise; but lights were ahead, shivering in the haze of
+the cold, gray morning. Were they the early candles of some sleepy
+village, or the camp-fires of a band of guerrillas? He did not know, and
+it would not be safe to go on till he did know. The road was lined with
+trees, but they would give no shelter; for they were far apart, and the
+snow lay white between them. He was in the blue grass region. Tethering
+his horse in the timber, he climbed a tall oak by the roadside; but the
+mist was too thick to admit of his discerning anything distinctly. It
+seemed, however, to be breaking away, and he would wait until his way
+was clear; so he sat there, an hour, two hours, and ate his breakfast
+from the satchel John's wife had slung over his shoulder. At last the
+fog lifted a little, and he saw close at hand a small hamlet,--a few
+rude huts gathered round a cross-road. No danger could lurk in such a
+place, and he was about to descend, and pursue his journey, when
+suddenly he heard, up the road by which he came, the rapid tramp of a
+body of horsemen. The mist was thicker below; so half-way down the tree
+he went, and waited their coming. They moved at an irregular pace,
+carrying lanterns, and pausing every now and then to inspect the road,
+as if they had missed their way or lost something. Soon they came near,
+and were dimly outlined in the gray mist, so the scout could make out
+their number. There were thirty of them,--the original band, and a
+reinforcement. Again they halted when abreast of the tree, and searched
+the road narrowly.
+
+"He must have come this way," said one,--he of the chivalry. "The other
+road is six miles longer, and he would take the shortest route. It's an
+awful pity we didn't head him on both roads."
+
+"We kin come up with him yit, ef we turn plumb round, and foller on
+t'other road,--whar we lost the trail,--back thar, three miles ter the
+deadnin'."
+
+Now another spoke, and his voice the scout remembered. He belonged to
+his own company in the Fourteenth Kentucky. "It 'so," he said; "he has
+tuck t' other road. I tell ye, I'd know thet mar's shoe 'mong a million.
+Nary one loike it wus uver seed in all Kaintuck,--only a d----d Yankee
+could ha' invented it."
+
+"And yere it ar'," shouted a man with one of the lanterns, "plain as
+sun-up."
+
+The Fourteenth Kentuckian clutched the light, and, while a dozen
+dismounted and gathered round, closely examined the shoe-track. The
+ground was bare on the spot, and the print of the horse's hoof was
+clearly cut in the half-frozen mud. Narrowly the man looked, and life
+and death hung on his eyesight. The scout took out the bullet, and
+placed it in a crotch of the tree. If they took him, the Devil should
+not take the dispatch. Then he drew a revolver. The mist was breaking
+away, and he would surely be discovered, if the men lingered much
+longer; but he would have the value of his life to the uttermost
+farthing.
+
+Meanwhile, the horsemen crowded around the foot-print, and one of them
+inadvertently trod upon it. The Kentuckian looked long and earnestly,
+but at last he said,--
+
+"'Ta'n't the track. Thet 'ar' mar' has a sand-crack on her right
+fore-foot. She didn't take kindly to a round shoe; so the Yank, he guv
+her one with the cork right in the middle o' the quarter. 'Twas a durned
+smart contrivance; fur ye see, it eased the strain, and let the nag go
+nimble as a squirrel. The cork ha'n't yere,--'ta'n't her track,--and
+we're wastin,' time in luckin'."
+
+The cork was not there, because the trooper's tread had obliterated it.
+Reader, let us thank him for that one good step, if he never take
+another; for it saved the scout, and, may-be, it saved Kentucky. When
+the scout returned that way, he halted abreast of that tree, and
+examined the ground about it. Right there, in the road, was the mare's
+track, with the print of the man's foot still upon the inner quarter! He
+uncovered his head, and from his heart went up a simple thanksgiving.
+
+The horsemen gone, the scout came down from the tree, and pushed on into
+the misty morning. There might be danger ahead, but there surely was
+danger behind him. His pursuers were only half convinced that they had
+struck his trail; and some sensible fiend might put it into their heads
+to divide and follow, part by one route, part by the other.
+
+He pushed on over the sloshy road, his mare every step going slower and
+slower. The poor beast was jaded out; for she had travelled sixty miles,
+eaten nothing, and been stabled in the timber. She would have given out
+long before, had her blood not been the best in Kentucky. As it was, she
+staggered along as if she had taken a barrel of whiskey. Five miles
+farther on was the house of a Union man. She must reach it, or die by
+the wayside; for the merciful man regardeth not the life of his beast,
+when he carries dispatches.
+
+The loyalist did not know the scout, but his honest face secured him a
+cordial welcome. He explained that he was from the Union camp on the Big
+Sandy, and offered any price for a horse to go on with.
+
+"Yer nag is wuth ary two o' my critters," said the man. "Ye kin take the
+best beast I've got; and when ye 'r' ag'in this way, we'll swop back
+even."
+
+The scout thanked him, mounted the horse, and rode off into the mist
+again, without the warm breakfast which the good woman had, half-cooked,
+in the kitchen. It was eleven o'clock; and at twelve that night he
+entered Colonel Cranor's quarters at Paris,--having ridden a hundred
+miles with a rope round his neck, for thirteen dollars a month,
+hard-tack, and a shoddy uniform.
+
+The Colonel opened the dispatch. It was dated, Louisa, Kentucky,
+December 24th, midnight; and directed him to move at once with his
+regiment, (the Fortieth Ohio, eight hundred strong,) by the way of Mount
+Sterling and McCormick's Gap, to Prestonburg. He would incumber his men
+with as few rations and as little luggage as possible, bearing in mind
+that the safety of his command depended on his expedition. He would also
+convey the dispatch to Lieutenant-Colonel Woolford, at Stamford, and
+direct him to join the march with his three hundred cavalry.
+
+Hours now were worth months of common time, and on the following morning
+Cranor's column began to move. The scout lay by till night, then set out
+on his return, and at daybreak swapped his now jaded horse for the fresh
+Kentucky mare, even. He ate the housewife's breakfast, too, and took his
+ease with the good man till dark, when he again set out, and rode
+through the night in safety. After that his route was beset with perils.
+The Providence which so wonderfully guarded his way out seemed to leave
+him to find his own way in; or, as he expressed it, "Ye see, the Lord,
+He keered more fur the dispatch nor He keered fur me: and 'twas nateral
+He should; 'case my life only counted one, while the dispatch, it stood
+fur all Kaintuck."
+
+Be that as it may, he found his road a hard one to travel. The same gang
+which followed him out waylaid him back, and one starry midnight he fell
+among them. They lined the road forty deep, and seeing he could not run
+the gauntlet, he wheeled his mare and fled backwards. The noble beast
+did her part; but a bullet struck her, and she fell in the road dying.
+Then--it was Hobson's choice--he took to his legs, and, leaping a fence,
+was at last out of danger. Two days he lay in the woods, not daring to
+come out; but hunger finally forced him to ask food at a negro shanty.
+The dusky patriot loaded him with bacon, brown bread, and blessings, and
+at night piloted him to a Rebel barn, where he enforced the Confiscation
+Act, to him then "the higher law,"--necessity.
+
+With his fresh horse he set out again; and after various adventures and
+hair-breadth escapes, too numerous to mention,--and too incredible to
+believe, had not similar things occurred all through the war,--he
+entered, one rainy midnight, (the 6th of January,) the little log hut,
+seven miles from Paintville, where Colonel Garfield was sleeping.
+
+The Colonel rubbed his eyes, and raised himself upon his elbow.
+
+"Back safe?" he asked. "Have you seen Cranor?"
+
+"Yes, Gin'ral. He can't be more 'n two days ahind o' me, nohow."
+
+"God bless you, Jordan! You have done us great service," said Garfield,
+warmly.
+
+"I thanks ye, Gin'ral," said the scout, his voice trembling, "Thet's
+more pay 'n I expected."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To give the reader a full understanding of the result of the scout's
+ride, I must now move on with the little army. They are only fourteen
+hundred men, worn out with marching, but boldly they move down upon
+Marshall. False scouts have made him believe they are as strong as he:
+and they are; for every one is a hero, and they are led by a general.
+The Rebel has five thousand men,--forty-four hundred infantry and six
+hundred cavalry,--besides twelve pieces of artillery,--so he says in a
+letter to his wife, which Buell has intercepted and Garfield has in his
+pocket. Three roads lead to Marshall's position: one at the east,
+bearing down to the river, and along its western bank; another, a
+circuitous one, to the west, coming in on Paint Creek, at the mouth of
+Jenny's Creek, on the right of the village; and a third between the
+others, a more direct route, but climbing a succession of almost
+impassable ridges. These three roads are held by strong Rebel pickets,
+and a regiment is outlying at the village of Paintville.
+
+To deceive Marshall as to his real strength and designs, Garfield orders
+a small force of infantry and cavalry to advance along the river, drive
+in the Rebel pickets, and move rapidly after them as if to attack
+Paintville. Two hours after this force goes off, a similar one, with the
+same orders, sets out on the road to the westward; and two hours later
+still, another small body takes the middle road. The effect is, that the
+pickets on the first route, being vigorously attacked and driven,
+retreat in confusion to Paintville, and dispatch word to Marshall that
+the Union army is advancing along the river. He hurries off a thousand
+infantry and a battery to resist the advance of this imaginary column.
+When this detachment has been gone an hour and a half, he hears, from
+the routed pickets on the right, that the Federals are advancing along
+the western road. Countermanding his first order, he now directs the
+thousand men and the battery to check the new danger; and hurries off
+the troops at Paintville to the mouth of Jenny's Creek to make a stand
+there. Two hours later the pickets on the central route are driven in,
+and, finding Paintville abandoned, flee precipitately to the fortified
+camp, with the story that the Union army is close at their heels and
+occupying the town. Conceiving that he has thus lost Paintville,
+Marshall hastily withdraws the detachment of one thousand men to his
+fortified camp; and Garfield, moving rapidly over the ridges of the
+central route, occupies the abandoned position.
+
+So affairs stand on the evening of the 8th of January, when a spy enters
+the camp of Marshall, with tidings that Cranor, with thirty-three
+hundred (!) men, is within twelve hours' march at the westward. On
+receipt of these tidings, the "big boy,"--he weighs three hundred pounds
+by the Louisville hay-scales,--conceiving himself outnumbered, breaks up
+his camp, and retreats precipitately, abandoning or burning a large
+portion of his supplies. Seeing the fires, Garfield mounts his horse,
+and, with a thousand men, enters the deserted camp at nine in the
+evening, while the blazing stores are yet unconsumed. He sends off a
+detachment to harass the retreat, and waits the arrival of Cranor, with
+whom he means to follow and bring Marshall to battle in the morning.
+
+In the morning Cranor comes, but his men are footsore, without rations,
+and completely exhausted. They cannot move one leg after the other. But
+the canal-boy is bound to have a fight; so every man who has strength to
+march is ordered to come forward. Eleven hundred--among them four
+hundred of Cranor's tired heroes--step from the ranks, and with them,
+at noon of the 9th, Garfield sets out for Prestonburg, sending all his
+available cavalry to follow the line of the enemy's retreat and harass
+and delay him.
+
+Marching eighteen miles, he reaches at nine o'clock that night the mouth
+of Abbott's Creek, three miles below Prestonburg,--he and the eleven
+hundred. There he hears that Marshall is encamped on the same stream,
+three miles higher up; and throwing his men into bivouac, in the midst
+of a sleety rain, he sends an order back to Lieutenant-Colonel Sheldon,
+who is left in command at Paintville, to bring up every available man,
+with all possible dispatch, for he shall force the enemy to battle in
+the morning. He spends the night in learning the character of the
+surrounding country and the disposition of Marshall's forces; and now
+again John Jordan comes into action.
+
+A dozen Rebels are grinding at a mill, and a dozen honest men come upon
+them, steal their corn, and make them prisoners. The miller is a tall,
+gaunt man, and his clothes fit the scout as if they were made for him.
+He is a Disunionist, too, and his very raiment should bear witness
+against this feeding of his enemies. It does. It goes back to the Rebel
+camp, and--the scout goes in it. That chameleon face of his is smeared
+with meal, and looks the miller so well that the miller's own wife might
+not detect the difference. The night is dark and rainy, and that lessens
+the danger; but still he is picking his teeth in the very jaws of the
+lion,--if he can be called a lion, who does nothing but roar like unto
+Marshall.
+
+Space will not permit me to detail this midnight ramble; but it gave
+Garfield the exact position of the enemy. They had made a stand, and
+laid an ambuscade for him. Strongly posted on a semicircular hill, at
+the forks of Middle Creek, on both sides of the road, with cannon
+commanding its whole length, and hidden by the trees, they were waiting
+his coming.
+
+The Union commander broke up his bivouac at four in the morning and
+began to move forward. Reaching the valley of Middle Creek, he
+encountered some of the enemy's mounted men, and captured a quantity of
+stores they were trying to withdraw from Prestonburg. Skirmishing went
+on until about noon, when the Rebel pickets were driven back upon their
+main body, and then began the battle. It is not my purpose to describe
+it; for that has already been ably done, in thirty lines, by the man who
+won it.
+
+It was a wonderful battle. In the history of this war there is not
+another like it. Measured by the forces engaged, the valor displayed,
+and the results which followed, it throws into the shade even the
+achievements of the mighty hosts which saved the nation. Eleven hundred
+men, without cannon, charge up a rocky hill, over stumps, over stones,
+over fallen trees, over high intrenchments, right into the face of five
+thousand, and twelve pieces of artillery!
+
+For five hours the contest rages. Now the Union forces are driven back;
+then, charging up the hill, they regain the lost ground, and from behind
+rocks and trees pour in their murderous volleys. Then again they are
+driven back, and again they charge up the hill, strewing the ground with
+corpses. So the bloody work goes on; so the battle wavers, till the
+setting sun, wheeling below the hills, glances along the dense lines of
+Rebel steel moving down to envelop the weary eleven hundred. It is an
+awful moment, big with the fate of Kentucky. At its very crisis two
+figures stand out against the fading sky, boldly defined in the
+foreground.
+
+One is in Union blue. With a little band of heroes about him, he is
+posted on a projecting rock, which is scarred with bullets, and in full
+view of both armies. His head is uncovered, his hair streaming in the
+wind, his face upturned in the darkening daylight, and from his soul is
+going up a prayer,--a prayer for Sheldon and Cranor. He turns his eyes
+to the northward, and his lip tightens, as he throws off his coat, and
+says to his hundred men,--"Boys, _we_ must go at them!"
+
+The other is in Rebel gray. Moving out to the brow of the opposite hill,
+and placing a glass to his eye, he, too, takes a long look to the
+northward. He starts, for he sees something which the other, on lower
+ground, does not distinguish. Soon he wheels his horse, and the word
+"RETREAT" echoes along the valley between them. It is his last
+word; for six rifles crack, and the Rebel Major lies on the ground
+quivering.
+
+The one in blue looks to the north again, and now, floating proudly
+among the trees, he sees the starry banner. It is Sheldon and Cranor!
+The long ride of the scout is at last doing its work for the nation. On
+they come like the rushing wind, filling the air with their shouting.
+The rescued eleven hundred take up the strain, and then, above the swift
+pursuit, above the lessening conflict, above the last boom of the
+wheeling cannon, goes up the wild huzza of Victory. The gallant Garfield
+has won the day, and rolled back the disastrous tide which has been
+sweeping on ever since Big Bethel. In ten days Thomas routs Zollicoffer,
+and then we have and hold Kentucky.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Every one remembers a certain artist, who, after painting a "neighing
+steed," wrote underneath the picture, "This is a horse," lest it should
+be mistaken for an alligator. I am tempted to imitate his example, lest
+the reader, otherwise, may not detect the rambling parallel I have
+herein drawn between a Northern and a Southern "poor white man."
+
+President Lincoln, when he heard of the Battle of Middle Creek, said to
+a distinguished officer, who happened to be with him,--
+
+"Why did Garfield in two weeks do what would have taken one of you
+Regular folks two months to accomplish?"
+
+"Because he was not educated at West Point," answered the West-Pointer,
+laughing.
+
+"No," replied Mr. Lincoln. "That wasn't the reason. It was because, when
+he was a boy, he had to work for a living."
+
+But our good President, for once, was wrong,--for once, he did not get
+at the core of the matter. Jordan, as well as Garfield, "had, when a
+boy, to work for a living." The two men were, perhaps, of about equal
+natural abilities,--both were born in log huts, both worked their own
+way to manhood, and both went into the war consecrating their very lives
+to their country: but one came out of it with a brace of stars on his
+shoulder, and honored by all the nation; the other never rose from the
+ranks, and went down to an unknown grave, mourned only among his native
+mountains. Something more than _work_ was at the bottom of this contrast
+in their lives and their destinies. It was FREE SCHOOLS, which
+the North gave the one, and of which the South robbed the other. Plant a
+free school at every Southern cross-road, and every Southern Jordan will
+become a Garfield. Then, and not till then, will this Union be
+"reconstructed."
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[B] The Baine is a small stream which puts into the Big Sandy, a short
+distance from the town of Louisa, Ky.
+
+
+
+
+NOËL.[C]
+
+
+    L'Académie en respect,
+    Nonobstant l'incorrection,
+    A la faveur du sujet,
+      Ture-lure,
+    N'y fera point de rature;
+    Noël! ture-lure-lure.
+
+                        GUI-BARÔZAI.
+
+
+                1.
+
+    Quand les astres de Noël
+    Brillaient, palpitaient au ciel,
+    Six gaillards, et chacun ivre,
+    Chantaient gaîment dans le givre,
+          "Bons amis,
+    Allons done chez Agassiz!"
+
+                2.
+
+    Ces illustres Pčlerins
+    D'Outre-Mer, adroits et fins,
+    Se donnant des airs de prętre,
+    A l'envi se vantaient d'ętre
+          "Bons amis
+    De Jean Rudolphe Agassiz!"
+
+               3.
+
+    Oeil-de-Perdrix, grand farceur,
+    Sans reproche et sans pudeur,
+    Dans son patois de Bourgogne,
+    Bredouillait comme un ivrogne,
+          "Bons amis,
+    J'ai dansé chez Agassiz!"
+
+               4.
+
+    Verzenay le Champenois,
+    Bon Français, point New-Yorquois,
+    Mais des environs d'Avize,
+    Fredonne, ŕ mainte reprise,
+          "Bons amis,
+    J'ai chanté chez Agassiz!"
+
+              5.
+
+    A côté marchait un vieux
+    Hidalgo, mais non mousseux;
+    Dans le temps de Charlemagne
+    Fut son pčre Grand d'Espagne!
+          "Bons amis,
+    J'ai dîné chez Agassiz!"
+
+               6.
+
+    Derričre eux un Bordelais,
+    Gascon, s'il en fut jamais,
+    Parfumé de poésie
+    Riait, chantait plein de vie,
+          "Bons amis,
+    J'ai soupé chez Agassiz!"
+
+               7.
+
+    Avec ce beau cadet roux,
+    Bras dessus et bras dessous,
+    Mine altičre et couleur terne,
+    Vint le Sire de Sauterne:
+          "Bons amis,
+    J'ai couché chez Agassiz!"
+
+               8.
+
+    Mais le dernier de ces preux
+    Était un pauvre Chartreux,
+    Qui disait, d'un ton robuste,
+    "Bénédictions sur le Juste!
+          Bons amis,
+    Bénissons Pčre Agassiz!"
+
+               9.
+
+    Ils arrivent trois ŕ trois,
+    Montent l'escalier de bois
+    Clopin-clopant! quel gendarme
+    Peut permettre ce vacarme,
+          Bons amis,
+    A la porte d'Agassiz!
+
+              10.
+
+    "Ouvrez donc, mon bon Seigneur,
+    Ouvrez vite et n'ayez peur;
+    Ouvrez, ouvrez, car nous sommes
+    Gens de bien et gentilshommes,
+          Bons amis
+    De la famille Agassiz!"
+
+             11.
+
+    Chut, ganaches! taisez-vous!
+    C'en est trop de vos glouglous;
+    Épargnez aux Philosophes
+    Vos abominables strophes!
+          Bons amis,
+    Respectez mon Agassiz!
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[C] Sent to Mr. Agassiz, with a basket of wine, on Christmas Eve, 1864.
+
+
+
+
+WILHELM MEISTER'S APPRENTICESHIP.
+
+SECOND PAPER.
+
+
+In a preceding paper I have sought to trace the main lines of spiritual
+growth, as these appear in Goethe's great picture. But is such growth
+possible in this world? Do the circumstances in which modern men are
+placed comport with it? Or is it, perhaps, a cherub only _painted_ with
+wings, and despite the laws of anatomy? These questions are pertinent.
+It concerns us little to know what results the crescent powers of life
+might produce, if, by good luck, Eden rather than our struggling
+century, another world instead of this world, were here. This world, it
+happens, is here undoubtedly; our century and our place in it are facts,
+which decline to take their leave, bid them good morning and show them
+the door how one may. Let us know, then, what of good sufficing may be
+achieved in their company. If Goethe's picture be only a picture, and
+not a possibility, we will be pleased with him, provided his work prove
+pleasant; we will partake of his literary dessert, and give him his meed
+of languid praise. But if, on the other hand, his book be written in
+full, unblinking view of all that is fixed and limitary in man and
+around him, and if, in face of this, it conduct growth to its
+consummation, then we may give him something better than any
+praise,--namely, heed.
+
+Is it, then, written in this spirit of reality? In proof that it is so,
+I call to witness the most poignant reproach, save one, ever uttered
+against it by a superior man. Novalis censured it as "thoroughly modern
+and prosaic." Well, _on one side_, it is so,--just as modern and prosaic
+as the modern world and actual European civilization. What is this but
+to say that Goethe faces the facts? What is it but to say that he
+accepts the conditions of his problem? He is to show that the high
+possibilities of growth can be realized _here_. To run off, get up a
+fancy world, and then picture these possibilities as coming to fruition
+_there_, would be a mere toying with his readers. Here is modern
+civilization, with its fixed forms, its rigid limits, its traditional
+mechanisms. Here is this life, where men make, execute, and obey laws,
+own and manage property, buy and sell, plant, sail, build, marry and
+beget children and maintain households, pay taxes, keep out of debt, if
+they are wise, and go to the poorhouse, or beg, or do worse, if they are
+unwise or unfortunate. Here such trivialities as starched collars,
+blacked boots, and coats according to the mode compel attention. Society
+has its fixed rules, by which it enforces social continuity and
+connection. To neglect these throws one off the ring; and, with rare
+exceptions, isolation is barrenness and death. One cannot even go into
+the street in a wilfully strange costume, without establishing
+repulsions and balking relations between him and his neighbors which
+destroy their use to each other. Every man is bound to the actual form
+of society by his necessities at least, if not by his good-will.
+
+To step violently out of all this puts one in a social vacuum,--a
+position in which few respire well, while most either perish or become
+in some degree monstrous. It is necessary that one should live and work
+with his fellows, if he is to obtain the largest growth. On the other
+hand, to be merely in and of this--a wheel, spoke, or screw, in this
+vast social mechanism--makes one, not a man, but a thing, and precludes
+all growth but such as is obscure and indirect. Thousands, indeed, have
+no desire but to obtain some advantageous place in this machinery.
+Meanwhile this enormous conventional civilization strives, and must
+strive, to make every soul its puppet. Let each fall into the routine,
+pursue it in some shining manner, asking no radical questions, and he
+shall have his heart's desire. "Blessed is he," it cries, "who
+handsomely and with his whole soul reads upwards from man to position
+and estate,--from man to millionnaire, judge, lord, bishop! Cursed is he
+who questions, who aims to strike down beneath this great mechanism, and
+to connect himself with the primal resources of his being! There are no
+such resources. It is a wickedness to dream of them. Man has no root but
+in tradition and custom, no blessing but in serving them."
+
+As that assurance is taken, and as that spirit prevails, man forfeits
+his manhood. His life becomes mechanical. Ideas disappear in the forms
+that once embodied them; imagination is buried beneath symbol; belief
+dies of creed, and morality of custom. Nothing remains but a world-wide
+pantomime. Worship itself becomes only a more extended place-hunting,
+and man the walking dummy of society. And then, since man no longer is
+properly vitalized, disease sets in, consumption, decay, putrefaction,
+filling all the air with the breath of their foulness.
+
+The earlier part of the eighteenth century found all Europe in this
+stage. Then came a stir in the heart of man: for Nature would not let
+him die altogether. First came recoil, complaint, reproach, mockery.
+Voltaire's light, piercing, taunting laugh--with a screaming wail inside
+it, if one can hear well--rang over Europe. "Aha, you are found out! Up,
+toad, in your true shape!" Then came wild, shallow theories, half true;
+then wild attempt to make the theories real; then carnage and chaos.
+
+Accompanying and following this comes another and purer phase of
+reaction. "Let us get out of this dead, conventional world!" cry a few
+noble spirits, in whose hearts throbs newly the divine blood of life.
+"Leave it behind; it is dead. Leave behind all formal civilization; let
+us live only from within, and let the outward be formless,--momentarily
+created by our souls, momentarily vanishing."
+
+The noblest type I have ever known of this _extra-vagance_, this
+wandering outside of actual civilization, was Thoreau. With his purity,
+as of a newborn babe,--with his moral steadiness, unsurpassed in my
+observation,--with his indomitable persistency,--by the aid also of that
+all-fertilizing imaginative sympathy with outward Nature which was his
+priceless gift,--he did, indeed, lend to his mode of life an
+indescribable charm. In him it came at once to beauty and to
+consecration.
+
+Yet even he must leave out marriage, to make his scheme of life
+practicable. He must ignore Nature's demand that humanity continue, or
+recognize it only with loathing. "Marriage is that!" said he to a
+friend,--and held up a carrion-flower.
+
+Moreover, the success of his life--nay, the very quality of his
+being--implied New England and its civilization. To suppose him born
+among the Flathead Indians were to suppose _him_, the Thoreau of our
+love and pride, unborn still. The civilization he slighted was an air
+that he breathed; it was implied, as impulse and audience, in those
+books of his, wherein he enshrined his spirit, and whereby he kept its
+health.
+
+A fixed social order is indirectly necessary even to him who, by rare
+gifts of Nature, can stand nobly and unfalteringly aside from it. And it
+is directly, instantly necessary to him who, either by less power of
+self-support or by a more flowing human sympathy, _must_ live with men,
+and _must_ comply with the conditions by which social connection is
+preserved.
+
+The problem, therefore, recurs. Here are the two terms: the soul, the
+primal, immortal imagination of man, on the one side; the enormous,
+engrossing, dehumanizing mechanism of society, on the other. A noble few
+elect the one; an ignoble multitude pray to its opposite. The
+reconciling word,--is there a reconciling word?
+
+Here, now, comes one who answers, Yes. And he answers thus, not by a
+bald assertion, but by a picture wherein these opposites lose their
+antagonism,--by a picture which is true to both, yet embraces both, and
+shapes them into a unity. That is Goethe. This attempt represents the
+grand _nisus_ of his life. It is most fully made in "Wilhelm Meister."
+
+Above the world he places the growing spirit of man, the vessel of all
+uses, with his resource in eternal Nature. Then he seizes with a
+sovereign hand upon actual society, upon formal civilization, and of it
+all makes food and service for man's spirit. This prosaic civilization,
+he says, is prosaic only in itself, not when put in relation to its true
+end. So he first recognizes it with remorseless verity, depicts it in
+all its littleness and limitation; then strikes its connection with
+growth: and lo, the littleness becomes great in serving the greater; the
+harsh prosaicism begins to move in melodious measure; and out of that
+jarring, creaking mechanism of conventional society arise the grand
+rolling organ-harmonies of life.
+
+That he succeeds to perfection I do not say. I could find fault enough
+with his book, if there were either time or need. There is no need: its
+faults are obvious. In binding himself by such unsparing oaths to
+recognize and admit all the outward truth of society, he has, indeed,
+grappled with the whole problem, but also made its solution a little
+cumbrous and incomplete. Nay, this which he so admits in his picture was
+also sufficiently, perhaps a touch more than sufficiently, admitted in
+his own being. He would have been a conventionalist and epicurean,
+unless he had been a seer. He would have been a mere man of the world,
+had he not been Goethe. But whereas a man of the world reads up from man
+to dignity, estate, and social advantage, he reverses the process, and
+reads up from these to man. Say that he does it with some stammering,
+with some want of the last nicety. What then? It were enough, if he set
+forth upon the true road, though his own strength fail before the end is
+reached. It is enough, if, falling midway, even though it be by excess
+of the earthly weight he bears, he still point forward, and his voice
+out of the dust whisper, "There lies your way!" This alone makes him a
+benefactor of mankind.
+
+This specific aim of Goethe's work makes it, indeed, a novel.
+Conventional society and the actual conditions of life are, with respect
+to eternal truth, but the _novelties_ of time. The novelist is to
+picture these, and, in picturing, subordinate them to that which is
+perpetual and inspiring. Just so far as he opens the ravishing
+possibilities of life in commanding reconciliation with the formal
+civilization of a particular time, he does his true work.
+
+The function of the poet is different. His business it is simply to
+_refresh_ the spirit of man. To its lip he holds the purest ichors of
+existence; with ennobling draughts of awe, pity, sympathy, and joy, he
+quickens its blood and strengthens its vital assimilations. The
+particular circumstances he uses are merely the cup wherein this wine of
+life is contained. This he may obtain as most easily he can; the world
+is all before him where to choose.
+
+The novelist has no such liberty. His business it is to find the ideal
+possibilities of man _here_, in the midst of actual society. He shall
+teach us to free the heart, while respecting the bonds of circumstance.
+And the more strictly he clings to that which is central in man on the
+one hand, and the more broadly and faithfully he embraces the existing
+prosaic limitations on the other, the more his work answers to the whole
+nature of his function. Goethe has done the latter thoroughly, his
+accusers themselves being judges; that he has done the other, and how he
+has done it, I have sought to show in a preceding paper. He looks on
+actual men and actual society with an eye of piercing observation; he
+depicts them with remorseless verity; and through and by all builds,
+builds at the great architectures of spiritual growth.
+
+Hence the difference between him and satirists like Thackeray, who
+equal him in keenness of observation, are not behind him in verity of
+report, while surpassing him often in pictorial effect,--but who bring
+to the picture out of themselves only a noble indignation against
+baseness. They contemn; he uses. They cry, "Fie!" upon unclean
+substances; he ploughs the offence into the soil, and sows wheat over
+it. They see the world as it is; he sees it, and through it. They probe
+sores; he leads forth into the air and the sunshine. They tinge the
+cheek with blushes of honorable shame; he paints it with the glow of
+wholesome activity. Their point of view is that of pathology; his, that
+of physiology. The great satirists, at best, give a medicine to
+sickness; Goethe gives a task to health. They open a door into a
+hospital; he opens a door _out_ of one, and cries, "Lo, the green earth
+and blue heaven, the fields of labor, the skies of growth!"
+
+On the other hand, by this relentless fidelity to observation, by his
+stern refusal to give men supposititious qualities and characters, by
+his resolute acceptance of European civilization, by his unalterable
+determination to practicable results, by always limiting himself _to
+that which all superior men might be expected not merely to read of with
+gusto, but to do_, he is widely differenced from novelists like the
+authoress of "Consuelo." He does not propose to furnish a moral luxury,
+over which at the close one may smack the lips, and cry, "How sweet!" No
+gardener's manual ever looked more simply to results. His aim is, to get
+something _done_, to get _all_ done which he suggests. Accordingly, he
+does not gratify us with vasty magnanimities, holy beggaries voluntarily
+assumed, Bouddhistic "missions"; he shows us no more than high-minded,
+incorruptible men, fixed in their regards upon the high ends of life,
+established in noble, fruitful fellowship, willing and glad to help
+others so far as they can clearly see their way, not making public
+distribution of their property, but managing it so that it shall in
+themselves and others serve culture, health, and all well-being of body
+and mind. Wealth here is a trust; it is held for use; its uses are, to
+subserve the high ends of Nature in the spirit of man. Lothario seeks
+association with all who can aid him in these applications. So intent is
+he, that he _loves_ Theresa because she has a genius at once for
+economizing means and for seeing where they may be applied to the
+service of the more common natures. He keeps the great-minded,
+penetrating, providential Abbé in his pay, that this inevitable eye may
+distinguish for him the more capable natures, and find out whether or
+how they may be forwarded on their proper paths. Here are no sublime
+professions, but a steady, modest, resolute, discriminate doing.
+
+For suggestion of what one may really _do_, and for impelling one toward
+the practicable best, I find this book worth a moonful of "Consuelos."
+The latter work has, indeed, beautiful pictures; and simply as a picture
+of a fresh, sweet, young life, it is charming. But in its aim at a
+higher import I find it simply an arrow shot into the air, going _so_
+high, but at--nothing! If one crave a moral luxury, it is here. If he
+desire a lash for egoism, this, perhaps, is also here. If he is already
+praying the heavens for a sufficing worth and work in life, and is
+asking only the _what_ and _how_, this book, taken in connection with
+its sequel, says, "Distribute your property, and begin wandering about
+and 'doing good.'"
+
+I decline. After due consideration, I have fully determined to own a
+house, and provide each day a respectable dinner for my table, if the
+fates agree; to secure, still in submission to the fates, such a
+competency as will give me leisure for the best work I can do; to
+further justice and general well-being, so far as is in me to further or
+hinder, but always on the basis of the existing civilization; to cherish
+sympathy and good-will in myself, and in others by cherishing them in
+myself; to help another when I clearly can; and to give, when what I
+give will obviously do more service toward the high ends of life, in
+the hands of another than in my own. Toward carrying out these purposes
+"Consuelo" has not given me a hint, not one; "Wilhelm Meister" has given
+me invaluable hints. Therefore I feel no great gratitude to the one, and
+am profoundly grateful to the other.
+
+It is not the mere absence of suffering, it is not a pound of beef on
+every peasant's plate, that makes life worth living. Health, happiness,
+even education, however diffused, do not alone make life worth living.
+Tell me the quality of a man's happiness before I can very rapturously
+congratulate him upon it; tell me the quality of his suffering before I
+can grieve over it without solace. Noble pain is worth more than ignoble
+pleasure; and there is a health in the _dying_ Schiller which beggars in
+comparison that of the fat cattle on a thousand hills. All the world
+might be well fed, well clothed, well sheltered, and very properly
+behaved, and be a pitiful world nevertheless, were this all.
+
+Let us get out of this business of merely improving _conditions_. There
+are two things which make life worth living. First, the absolute worth
+and significance of man's spirit in its harmonious completeness; and
+hence the absolute value of culture and growth in the deepest sense of
+the words. Secondly, the relevancy of actual experience and the actual
+world to these ends. Goethe attends to both these, and to both in a
+spirit of great sanity. He fixes his eye with imperturbable steadiness
+on the central fact, then with serene, intrepid modesty suggests the
+relevancy to this of the world as it is around us, and _then trusts the
+healthy attraction of the higher to modify and better the lower_. Give
+man, he says, something to work _for_, namely, the high uses of his
+spirit; give him next something to work _with_, namely, actual
+civilization, the powers, limits, and conditions which actually exist in
+and around him; and if these instruments be poor, be sure he will begin
+to improve upon them, the moment he has found somewhat inspiring and
+sufficing to do with them. Actual conditions will improve precisely in
+proportion as _all_ conditions are utilized, are placed in relations of
+service to a result which contents the soul of men. And to establish in
+this relation all the existing conditions of life, natural and
+artificial, is the task which Goethe has undertaken.
+
+I invite the reader to dwell upon this fact, that, the moment life has
+an inspiring significance, and the moment also the men, industries, and
+conditions around us become instrumental toward resolving that, in this
+moment one must begin, so far as he may, bettering these conditions. If
+I hire a man to work in my garden, how much is it worth to me, if he
+bring not merely his hands and gardening skill, but also an appreciable
+soul, with him! So soon as that fact is apparent, fruitful relations are
+established between us, and sympathies begin to fly like bees, bearing
+pollen and winning honey, from each heart to the other. To let a man be
+degraded, or stupid, or thwarted in all his inward life, when I _can_
+make it otherwise? Not unless I am insensate. To allow anywhere a
+disserviceable condition, when I could make it serviceable? Not in full
+view of the fact that all which thwarts the inward being of another
+thwarts me. If there be in the world a man who might write a grand book,
+but through ill conditions cannot write it, then in me and you a door
+will remain closed, which might have opened--who knows upon what
+treasure? With the high ends of life before him, no man can _afford_ to
+be selfish. With the fact before him that formal civilization is
+instrumental, no man can afford to run away from it. With the fact in
+view that each man needs every other, and needs that every other should
+do and be the best he can, no one can afford to withhold help, where it
+can be rendered. Finally, seeing that means are limited, and that the
+means and services which are crammed into others, without being
+spiritually assimilated, breed only indigestion, no one must throw his
+services about at random, but see where Nature has prepared the way for
+him, and there in modesty do what he can.
+
+To strike the connection, then, between the inward and the outward,
+between the spiritual and the conventional, between man and society,
+between moral possibility and formal civilization,--to give growth, with
+all its immortal issues, a place, and means, and opportunity,--this was
+Goethe's aim; and if the execution be less than perfect, as I admit, it
+yet suggests the whole; and if the shortcoming be due in part to his
+personal imperfections, which doubtless may be affirmed, it yet does not
+mar the sincerity of his effort. His hand trembles, his aim is not
+nicely sure, but it is an aim at the right object nevertheless.
+
+There are limits and conditions in man, as well as around him, to which
+the like justice is done. Such are Special Character, Natural Degree and
+Vocation, Moral Imperfection, and Limitation of Self-Knowledge. Each of
+these plays a part of vast importance in life; each is portrayed and
+used in Goethe's picture. But, though with reluctance, I must merely
+name and pass them by. Enough to say here, that he sees them and sees
+through them. Enough that they appear, and as means and material. Nor
+does he merely distinguish and harp upon them, after the hard analytic
+fashion one would use here; but, as the violinist sweeps all the strings
+of his instrument, not to show that one sounds _so_ and another _so_,
+but out of all to bring a complete melody, so does this master touch the
+chords of life, and, in thus recognizing, bring out of them the
+melodious completeness of a human soul.
+
+One inquiry remains. What of inspirational impulse does Goethe bring to
+his work? He depicts growth; what leads him to do so? Is it nothing but
+cold curiosity? and does he leave the reader in a like mood? Or is he
+commanded by some imperial inward necessity? and does he awaken in the
+reader a like noble necessity, not indeed to write, but to _live_?
+
+The inspiration which he feels and communicates is art infinite,
+unspeakable reverence for Personality, for the completed, spiritual
+reality of man. Literally unspeakable, it is the silent spirit in which
+he writes, sovereign in him and in his work,--the soul of every
+sentence, and professed in none. You find it scarcely otherwise than in
+his manner of treating his material. But there you _may_ find it: the
+silent, majestic homage that he pays to every _real_ grace and spiritual
+accomplishment of man or woman. Any smallest trait of this is delineated
+with a heed that makes no account of time or pains, with a venerating
+fidelity and religious care that _unutterably_ imply its preciousness.
+Indeed, it is one point of his art to bestow elaborate, reverential
+attention upon some minor grace of manhood or womanhood, that one may
+say, "If this be of such price, how priceless is the whole!" He resorts
+habitually to this inferential suggestion,--puzzling hasty readers, who
+think him frivolously exalting little things, rather than hinting beyond
+all power of direct speech at the worth of the greater. In landscape
+paintings a bush in the foreground may occupy more space than a whole
+range of mountains in the distance: perhaps the bush is there to show
+the scale of the drawing, and intimate the greatness, rather than
+littleness, of the mountains.
+
+The undertone of every page, should we mask its force in hortatives,
+would be,--"Buy manhood; buy verity and completeness of being; buy
+spiritual endowment and accomplishment; buy insight and clearness of
+heart and wholeness of spirit; pay ease, estimation, estate,--never
+consider what you pay: for though pleasure is not despicable, though
+wealth, leisure, and social regard are good, yet there is no tint of
+inherent grace, no grain nor atom of man's spiritual substance, but it
+outweighs kingdoms, outweighs all that is external to itself."
+
+But hortatives and assertions represent feebly, and without truth of
+tone, the subtile, sovereign persuasion of the book. This is said
+sovereignly by _not_ being said expressly. We are at pains to affirm
+only that which may be conceived of as doubtful, therefore admit a
+certain doubtfulness by the act of asserting. When one begins to
+asseverate his honesty, his hearers begin to question it. The last
+persuasion lies in assumptions,--not in assumptions made consciously and
+with effort, but in those which one makes because he cannot help it, and
+even without being too much aware what he does. All that a man of power
+assumes utterly, so that he were not himself without assuming it, he
+will impress upon others with a persuasion that has in it somewhat of
+the infinite. Jesus never said, "There is a God,"--nor even, "God is our
+Father,"--nor even, "Man is immortal"; he took all this as implicit
+basis of labor and prayer. Implicit assumptions rule the world; they
+build and destroy cities, make and unmake empires, open and close
+epochs; and whenever Destiny in any powerful soul has ripened a new
+truth to this degree,--made it for him an _inevitable_ assumption--then
+there is in history an end and a beginning. Goethe's homage to
+Personality, to the full spiritual being of man, is of this degree, and
+is a soul of eloquence in his book.
+
+Nor can we set this aside as a piece of blind and gratuitous sentiment.
+Blind and gratuitous sentiment is clearly not his forte. Every line of
+every page exhibits to us a man who has betaken himself, once for all,
+to the use of his eyes. All sentiment, as such, he ruled back, with a
+sovereign energy, into his heart,--and then, as it were, compelling his
+heart into his eyes, made it an organ for discerning truth. His head was
+an observatory, and every power of his soul did duty there. He enjoyed,
+he suffered, intensely; but behind joy and pain alike lay the sleepless
+questioner, demanding of each its message. And this, the supreme
+function, the exceeding praise and preciousness of the man, the one
+thing that he was born to do, and religiously did, this has been made
+his chief reproach.
+
+No zealot, then, no sentimentalist, no devotee of the god Wish, have we
+here; but an imperturbable beholder, whose dauntless and relentless
+eyeballs, telescopic and microscopic by turns, can and will see what the
+fact _is_. If the universe be bad, as some dream, he will see how bad;
+if good, he will perceive and respect its goodness. A man, for once,
+equal to the act of seeing! Having, as the indispensable preliminary,
+encountered himself, and victoriously fought on all the fields of his
+being the battle against self-deception, he now comes armed with new and
+strange powers of vision to encounter life and the world,--ready either
+to soar of dive,--above no fact, beneath none, by none appalled, by none
+dazzled,--a falcon, whose prey is truth, and whose wing and eye are well
+mated. And _he_ it is who sets that ineffable price on the being of a
+real man.
+
+This is manifested in many ways, all of them silent, rather than
+obstreperous and obtrusive. It is shown by a certain gracious, ineffable
+expectation with which for the first time he approaches any human soul,
+as if unknown and incalculable possibilities were opening here; by a
+noble ceremonial which he ever observes toward his higher characters,
+standing uncovered in their presence; by the space in his eye, not
+altogether measurable, which a man of worth is perceived to fill. Each
+of his principal characters has an atmosphere about him, like the earth
+itself; each has a vast perspective, and rounds off into mystery and
+depths of including sky.
+
+The common novelist holds his characters in the palm of his hand, as he
+would his watch; winds them up, regulates, pockets them, is exceedingly
+handy with them. He may continue some little, pitiful puzzle about them
+for his readers; but _he_ can see over, under, around them, and can make
+them stop or go, tick or be silent, altogether at pleasure. To Goethe
+his characters are as intelligible and as mysterious as Nature herself.
+He sees them, studies them, and with an eye how penetrating, how subtile
+and sure! But over, under, and around them he would hold it for no less
+than a profanity to pretend that he sees. They come upon the scene to
+prove what they are; he and the reader study them together; and when
+best known, their possibilities are obviously unexhausted, the unknown
+remains in them still. They go forward into their future, with a real
+future before them, with an unexplained life to live: not goblets whose
+contents have been drained, but fountains that still flow when the
+traveller who drank from them has passed on. Jarno, for example, a man
+of firm and definite outlines, and drawn here with masterly
+distinctness, without a blur or a wavering of the hand in the whole
+delineation, is yet the unexplained, unexhausted Jarno, when the book
+closes. He goes forward with the rest, known and yet unknown, a man of
+very definite limitations, and yet also of possibilities which the
+future will ever be defining.
+
+In this sense, the book, almost alone among novels, consists with the
+hope of immortality. In average novels, there is nothing left of the
+hero when the book ends. "He is utterly married," as "Eothen" says.
+Utterly, sure enough! He ends at the altar, like a burnt-out candle over
+which the priest puts an extinguisher to keep it from smoking. One yawns
+over the last page, not considering himself any longer in company. Think
+of giving perpetuity to such lives! What could they do but get
+unmarried, and begin fussing at courtship again? But when Goethe's
+characters leave the stage, they seem to be rather entering upon life
+than quitting it; possibility opens, expectation runs before them, and
+our interest grows where observation ceases.
+
+Goethe looks at Personality as through a telescope, and sees it shade
+away, beyond its cosmic systems, into star-dust and shining nebulć; he
+inspects it as with a microscope, and on that side also resolves it only
+in part. He brings to it all the most spacious, all the most delicate
+interpretations of his wit, yet confessedly leaves more beyond.
+
+Now it is this large-eyed, liberal regard of man, this grand, childlike,
+all-credent appreciation, which distinguishes the earlier and Scriptural
+literatures. Abraham fills up all the space between earth and heaven.
+Later, we arrive at limitations and secondary laws; we heap these up
+till the primal fact is obscured, is hidden by them. Then ensues an
+impression of man's littleness, emptiness, insignificance, utter,
+mechanical limitation. Then sharp-eyed gentlemen discover that man has a
+trick of dressing up his littleness in large terms,--liberty, intuition,
+inspiration, immortality,--and that he only is a philosopher, who cannot
+be deceived by this shallow stratagem. Your "philosopher" sees what men
+are made of. Populaces may fancy that man is central in the world, that
+he is the all-containing vessel of its uses: but your philosopher,
+admirable gentleman, sees through all that; he is superior to any such
+vulgar partiality for that particular species of insect to which he
+happens to belong. "A fly thinks himself the greatest of created
+beings," says philosopher; "man flatters himself in the same way; but I,
+I am not merely man, I am philosopher, and know better."
+
+The early seers and poets had not attained to this sublime
+superciliousness of self-contempt; for this, of course, is a fruit to be
+borne only by the "progress of the species." They are still weak enough
+to believe in gods and godlike men, in spirit and inspiration, in the
+ineffable fulness and meaning of a noble life, in the cosmic
+relationship of man, in the _divineness_ of speech and thought. In their
+books man is placed in a large light; honor and estimation come to him
+out of the heavens; what he does, if it be in any profound way
+characteristic, is told without misgiving, without fear to be
+superfluous; he is the care, or even the companion, of the immortals. To
+go forth, therefore, from our little cells of criticism and controversy,
+and to enter upon the pages where man's being appears so spacious and
+significant,--where, at length, it is really _imagined_,--is like
+leaving stove-heated, paper-walled rooms, and passing out beneath the
+blue cope and into the sweet air of heaven.
+
+Quite this epic boldness and wholeness we cannot attribute to Goethe. He
+is still a little straitened, a little pestered by the doubting and
+critical optics which our time turns upon man, a little victimized by
+his knowledge of limitary conditions and secondary laws. Nevertheless, a
+noble man is not to his eye "contained between hat and boots," but is of
+untold depth and dimension. He indicates traits of the soul with that
+repose in his facts and respect for them which Lyell shows in spelling
+out terrestrial history, or Herschel in tracing that of the solar
+system. Observe how he relates the plays of a child,--with what grave,
+imperial respect, with what undoubting, reverential minuteness! He does
+not say, "Bear with me, ladies and gentlemen; I will come to something
+of importance soon." This is important,--the formation of suns not more
+so.
+
+In this respect he stands in wide contrast to the prevailing tone of the
+time. It seems right and admirable that Tyndale should risk life and
+limb in learning the laws of glaciers, that large-brained Agassiz should
+pursue for years, if need be, his microscopic researches into the
+natural history of turtles; and were life or eyesight lost so, we should
+all say, "Lost, but well and worthily." But ask a conclave of sober
+_savans_ to listen to reports on the natural-spiritual history of babies
+and little children,--ask them to join, one and all, in this piece of
+discovery, spending labor and lifetime in watching the sports, the
+moods, the imaginations, the fanciful loves and fears, the whole baby
+unfolding of these budding revelations of divine uses in Nature,--and
+see what they will think of your sanity. You may, indeed, if such be
+your humor, observe these matters, nay, even write books upon them, and
+still escape the lunatic asylum,--_provided_ you do so in the way of
+pleasantry. In this case, the gravest _savant_, if he have children, may
+condescend to listen, and even to smile. But ask him to attend to this
+_in his quality of man of science_, and no less seriously than he would
+investigate the history of mud-worms, and you become ridiculous in his
+eyes.
+
+Goethe is guiltless of this inversion of interest. Truth of outward
+Nature he respects; truth of the soul he reverences. He can really
+_imagine_ men,--that is, can so depict them that they shall not be mere
+bundles of finite quantities, a yard of this and a pound of that, but so
+that the illimitable possibilities and immortal ancestries of man shall
+look forth from their eyes, shall show in their features, and give to
+them a certain grace of the infinite. The powers which created for the
+Greeks their gods are active in him, even in his observation of men; and
+this gives him that other eye, without which the effigies of men are
+seen, but never man himself. And because he has this divine eye for the
+inner reality of personal being, and yet also that eagle eye of his for
+conditions and limits,--because he can see man as central in Nature, the
+sum of all uses, the vessel of all significance, and yet has no
+"carpenter theory" of the universe,--and because he can discern the
+substance and the _revealing_ form of man, while yet no satirist sees
+more clearly man's accidental and concealing form,--because of this,
+history comes in him to new blood, regaining its inspirations without
+forfeiture of its experience.
+
+Carlyle has the same eye, but less creative, and tinctured always with
+the special humors of his temperament; yet the attitude he can hold
+toward a human personality, the spirit in which he can contemplate it,
+gives that to his books which will keep them alive, I think, while the
+world lasts.
+
+Among the recent writers of prose fiction in England, I know of but one
+who, in a degree worth naming in this connection, has regarded and
+delineated persons in the large, old, believing way. That one is the
+author of "Counterparts." In many respects her book seems to me weak;
+its theories are crude, its tone extravagant. But man and woman are
+wonderful to her; and when she names them in full voice of admiration,
+one thinks he has never heard the words before. And this merit is so
+commanding, that, despite faults and imbecilities, it renders the book
+almost unique in excellence. Sarona is impossible: thanks for that noble
+impossibility! Impossible, he yet embodies more reality, more true
+suggestion of human possibility and resource, than a whole swarming
+limbo of the ordinary heroes of fiction,--very credible, and the more's
+the pity! He is finely _imagined_, and poorly _conceived_,--true, that
+is, to the inspiring substance of man, but not true to his limitary
+form: for imagination gives the revealing form, conception the form
+which limits and conceals.
+
+In spite, therefore, of marked infirmities and extravagances, the book
+remains a superior, perhaps a great work. The writer can look at a human
+existence with childlike, all-believing, Homeric eyes. That creative
+vision which of old peopled Olympus still peoples the world for her,
+beholding gods where the skeptic, critical eye sees only a medical
+doctor and a sick woman. So is she stamped a true child of the Muse,
+descended on the one side from Memory, or superficial fact, but on the
+other from Zeus, the _soul_ of fact; and being gifted to discern the
+divine halo on the brows of humanity, she rightly obtains the laurel
+upon her own.
+
+Goethe, at least, rivals her in this Olympic intelligence, while he
+combines it with a practical wisdom far profounder, with a survey and
+fulness of knowledge incomparably wider and more various, with a tone
+tempered to the last sobriety, for the whole of actual life, which no
+man of the world ever surpassed, and no seer ever equalled. And thus I
+must abide in my opinion, that he has given us the one prose epic of the
+world, up to this date. In other words, he has best reconciled World
+with the final vessel of its uses, Man,--and best reconciled actual
+civilization and the fixed conditions of man with the uses of that in
+which all the meaning of his existence is summed, his seeing and unseen
+spirit.
+
+
+
+
+DOCTOR JOHNS.
+
+
+XXXIV.
+
+Reuben has in many respects vastly improved under his city education. It
+would be wrong to say that the good Doctor did not take a very human
+pride in his increased alertness of mind, in his vivacity, in his
+self-possession,--nay, even in that very air of world-acquaintance which
+now covered entirely the old homely manner of the country lad. He
+thought within himself, what a glad smile of triumph would have been
+kindled upon the face of the lost Rachel, could she but have seen this
+tall youth with his kindly attentions and his graceful speech. May-be
+she did see it all,--but with far other eyes, now. Was the child
+ripening into fellowship with the sainted mother?
+
+The Doctor underneath all his pride carried a great deal of anxious
+doubt; and as he walked beside his boy upon the thronged street, elated
+in some strange way by the touch of that strong arm of the youth, whose
+blood was his own,--so dearly his own,--he pondered gravely with
+himself, if the mocking delusions of the Evil One were not the occasion
+of his pride? Was not Satan setting himself artfully to the work of
+quieting all sense of responsibility in regard to the lad's future, by
+thus kindling in his old heart anew the vanities of the flesh and the
+pride of life?
+
+"I say, father, I want to put you through now. It'll do you a great deal
+of good to see some of our wonders here in the city."
+
+"The very voice,--the very voice of Rachel!" says the Doctor to himself,
+quickening his laggard step to keep pace with Reuben.
+
+"There are such lots of things to show you, father! Look in this store,
+now. You can step in, if you like. It's the largest carpet-store in the
+United States, three stories packed full. There's the head man of the
+firm,--the stout man in a white choker; with half a million, they say:
+he's a deacon in Mowry's church."
+
+"I hope, then, Reuben, that he makes a worthy use of his wealth."
+
+"Oh, he gives thunderingly to the missionary societies," said Reuben,
+with a glibness that grated on the father's ear.
+
+"You see that building yonder? That's Gothic. They've got the finest
+bowling-alleys in the world there."
+
+"I hope, my son, you never go to such places?"
+
+"Bowl? Oh, yes, I bowl sometimes: the physicians recommend it; good
+exercise for the chest. Besides, it's kept by a fine man, and he's got
+one of the prettiest little trotting horses you ever saw in your life."
+
+"Why, my son, you don't mean to tell me that you know the keeper of this
+bowling-alley?"
+
+"Oh, yes, father,--we fellows all know him; and he gave me a splendid
+cigar the last time I was there."
+
+"You don't mean to say that you smoke, Reuben?" said the old gentleman,
+gravely.
+
+"Not much, father: but then everybody smokes now and then. Mowry--Dr.
+Mowry smokes, you know; and they say he has prime cigars."
+
+"Is it possible? Well, well!"
+
+"You see that fine building over there?" said Reuben, as they passed on.
+
+"Yes, my son."
+
+"That's the theatre,--the Old Park."
+
+The Doctor ran his eye over it, and its effigy of Shakspeare upon the
+niche in the wall, as Gabriel might have looked upon the armor of
+Beelzebub.
+
+"I hope, Reuben, you never enter those doors?"
+
+"Well, father, since Kean and Mathews are gone, there's really nothing
+worth the seeing."
+
+"Kean! Mathews!" said the Doctor, stopping in his walk and confronting
+Reuben with a stern brow,--"is it possible, my son, that I hear you
+talking in this familiar way of play-actors? You don't tell me that you
+have been a participant in such orgies of Satan?"
+
+"Why, father," says Reuben, a little startled by the Doctor's
+earnestness, "the truth is, Aunt Mabel goes occasionally, like 'most all
+the ladies; but we go, you know, to see the moral pieces, generally."
+
+"Moral pieces! moral pieces!" says the Doctor, with a withering scowl.
+"Reuben! those who go thither take hold on the door-posts of hell!"
+
+"That's the Tract Society building yonder," said Reuben, wishing to
+divert the Doctor, if possible, from the special object of his
+reflections.
+
+"Rachel's voice!--always Rachel's voice!"--said the Doctor to himself.
+
+"Would you like to go in, father?"
+
+"No, my son, we have no time; and yet"--meditating, and thrusting his
+hand in his pocket--"there is a tract or two I would like to buy for
+you, Reuben."
+
+"Go in, then," says Reuben. "Let me tell them who you are, father, and
+you can get them at wholesale prices. It's the merest song."
+
+"No, my son, no," said the Doctor, disheartened by the blithe air of
+Reuben. "I fear it would be wasted effort. Yet I trust that you do not
+wholly neglect the opportunities for religious instruction on the
+Sabbath?"
+
+"Oh, no," says Reuben, gayly. "I see Dr. Mowry off and on, pretty often.
+He's a clever old gentleman,--Dr. Mowry."
+
+Clever old gentleman!
+
+The Doctor walked on oppressed with grief,--silent, but with lips moving
+in prayer,--beseeching God to take away the stony heart from this poor
+child of his, and to give him a heart of flesh.
+
+Reuben had improved, as we said, by his New York schooling. He was quick
+of apprehension, well informed; and his familiarity with the
+counting-room of Mr. Brindlock had given him a business promptitude
+that was specially agreeable to the Doctor, whose habits in that regard
+were of woful slackness. But religiously, the good man looked upon his
+son as a castaway. It was only too apparent that Reuben had not derived
+the desired improvement from attendance at the Fulton-Street Church.
+That attendance had been punctual, indeed, for nearly all the first year
+of his city life, in virtue of the inexorable habit of his education;
+but Dr. Mowry had not won upon him by any personal magnetism. The city
+Doctor was a ponderously good man, preaching for the most part ponderous
+sermons, and possessed of a most imposing friendliness of manner. When
+Reuben had presented to him the credentials from his father, (which he
+could hardly have done, save for the urgency of the Brindlocks,) the
+ponderous Doctor had patted him upon the shoulder, and said,--
+
+"My young friend, your father is a most worthy man,--most worthy. I
+should be delighted to see you following in his steps. I shall be most
+glad to be of service to you. Our meetings for Bible instruction are on
+Wednesdays, at seven: the young men upon the left, the young ladies on
+the right."
+
+The Doctor appeared to Reuben a man solemnly preoccupied with the
+immensity of his charge; and it seemed to him (though it was doubtless a
+wicked thought of the boy) that the ponderous minister would have
+counted it a matter of far smaller merit to instruct, and guide, and
+save a wanderer from the country, than to perform the same offices for a
+good fat sinner of the city.
+
+As we have said, the memory of old teachings for a year or more made any
+divergence from the severe path of boyhood seem to Reuben a sin; and
+these divergencies so multiplied by easy accessions as to have made him,
+after a time, look upon himself very confidently, and almost cheerily,
+as a reprobate. And if a reprobate, why not taste the Devil's cup to the
+full?
+
+That first visit to the theatre was like a bold push into the very
+domain of Satan. Even the ticket-seller at the door seemed to him on
+that eventful night an understrapper of Beelzebub, who looked out at him
+with the goggle eyes of a demon. That such a man could have a family, or
+family affections, or friendships, or any sense of duty or honor, was to
+him a thing incomprehensible; and when he passed the wicket for the
+first time into the vestibule of the old Park Theatre, the very usher in
+the corridor had to his eye a look like the Giant Dagon, and he
+conceived of him as mumbling, in his leisure moments, the flesh from
+human bones. And when at last the curtain rose, and the damp air came
+out upon him from behind the scenes as he sat in the pit, and the play
+began with some wonderful creature in tight bodice and painted cheeks,
+sailing across the stage, it seemed to him that the flames of Divine
+wrath might presently be bursting out over the house, or a great
+judgment of God break down the roof and destroy them all.
+
+But it did not; and he took courage. It is so easy to find courage in
+those battles where we take no bodily harm! If conscience, sharpened by
+the severe discipline he had known, pricked him awkwardly at the first,
+he bore the stings with a good deal of sturdiness. A sinner, no
+doubt,--that he knew long ago: a little slip, or indeed no slip at all,
+had ranked him with the unregenerate. Once a sinner, (thus he pleasantly
+reasoned,) and a fellow may as well be ten times a sinner: a bad job
+anyhow. If in his moments of reflection--these being not yet wholly
+crowded out from his life--there comes a shadowy hope of better things,
+of some moral poise that should be in keeping with the tenderer
+recollections of his boyhood,--all this can never come, (he bethinks
+himself, in view of his old teaching,) except on the heel of some
+terrible conviction of sin; and the conviction will hardly come without
+some deeper and more damning weight of it than he feels as yet. A heavy
+cumulation of the weight may some day serve him a good turn. Thus the
+Devil twists his vague yearning for a condition of spiritual repose into
+a pleasantly smacking lash with which to scourge his grosser appetites;
+so that, upon the whole, Reuben drives a fine, showy team along the
+high-road of indulgence.
+
+Yet the minister's son had no love for gross vices; there were human
+instincts in him (if it maybe said) that rebelled against his more
+deliberate sinnings. Nay, he affected with his boon companions an
+enjoyment of wanton excesses that he only half felt. A certain
+adventurous, dare-devil reach in him craved exercise. The character of
+Reuben at this stage would surely have offered a good subject for the
+study and the handling of Dr. Mowry, if that worthy gentleman could have
+won his way to the lad's confidence; but the ponderous methods of the
+city parson showed no fineness of touch. Even the father, as we have
+seen, could not reach down to any religious convictions of the son; and
+Reuben keeps him at bay with a banter, and an exaggerated attention to
+the personal comforts of the old gentleman, that utterly baffle him.
+Reuben holds too much in dread the old catechismal dogmas and the
+ultimate "anathema maran-atha."
+
+So it was with a profound sigh that the father bade his son adieu after
+this city visit.
+
+"Good bye, father! Love to them all in Ashfield."
+
+So like Rachel's voice! So like Rachel's! And the heart of the old man
+yearned toward him and ached bitterly for him. _"O my son Absalom! my
+son! my son Absalom!"_
+
+
+XXXV.
+
+Maverick hurried his departure from the city; and Adčle, writing to Rose
+to announce the programme of her journey, says only this much of
+Reuben:--"We have of course seen R----, who was very attentive and kind.
+He has grown tall,--taller, I should think, than Phil; and he is quite
+well-looking and gentlemanly. I think he has a very good opinion of
+himself."
+
+The summer's travel offered a season of rare enjoyment to Adčle. The
+lively sentiment of girlhood was not yet wholly gone, and the
+thoughtfulness of womanhood was just beginning to tone, without
+controlling, her sensibilities. The delicate attentions of Maverick were
+more like those of a lover than of a father. Through his ever watchful
+eyes, Adčle looked upon the beauties of Nature with a new halo on them.
+How the water sparkled to her vision! How the days came and went like
+golden dreams!
+
+Ah, happy youth-time! The Hudson, Lake George, Saratoga, the Mountains,
+the Beach,--to us old stagers, who have breasted the tide of so many
+years, and flung off long ago all the iridescent sparkles of our
+sentiment, these are only names of summer thronging-places. Upon the
+river we watch the growth of the crops, or ask our neighbors about the
+cost of our friend Faro's new country-seat; we lounge upon the piazzas
+of the hotels, reading price-lists, or (if not too old) an editorial; we
+complain of the windy currents upon the lake, and find our chiefest
+pleasure in a trout boiled plain, with a dressing of Champagne sauce; we
+linger at Fabian's on a sunny porch, talking politics with a rheumatic
+old gentleman in his overcoat, while the youngsters go ambling through
+the fir woods and up the mountains with shouts and laughter. Yet it was
+not always thus. There were times in the lives of us old travellers--let
+us say from sixteen to twenty--when the great river was a glorious
+legend trailing its storied length through the Highlands; when in every
+opening valley there lay purple shadows whereon we painted castles; when
+the corridors and shaded walks of the "United States" were like a fairy
+land, with flitting skirts and waving plumes, and some delicately gloved
+hand beating its reveille upon the heart; and when every floating film
+of mist along the sea, whether at Newport or Nahant, tenderly entreated
+the fancy.
+
+But we forget ourselves, and we forget Adčle. In her wild exuberance of
+joy Maverick shares with a spirit that he had believed to be dead in him
+utterly. And if he finds it necessary to check from time to time the
+noisy effervescence of her pleasure, as he certainly does at the first,
+he does it in the most tender and considerate way; and Adčle learns,
+what many of her warm-hearted sisters never do learn, that a well-bred
+control over our enthusiasms in no way diminishes the exquisiteness of
+their savor.
+
+Maverick should be something over fifty now, and his keenness of
+observation in respect to feminine charms is not perhaps so great as it
+once was; but even he cannot fail to see, with a pride that he makes no
+great effort to conceal, the admiring looks that follow the lithe,
+graceful figure of Adčle, wherever their journey may lead them. Nor,
+indeed, were there any more comely toilettes for a young girl to be met
+with anywhere than those which had been provided for the young traveller
+under the advice of Mrs. Brindlock.
+
+It may be true--what his friend Papiol had predicted--that Maverick will
+be too proud of his child to keep her in a secluded corner of New
+England. For his pride there is certainly abundant reason; and what
+father does not love to see the child of whom he is proud admired?
+
+Yet weeks had run by and Maverick had never once broached the question
+of a return. The truth was, that the new experience was so charming and
+so engrossing for him, the sweet, intelligent face ever at his side was
+so full of eager wonder, and he so delightfully intent upon providing
+new sources of pleasure and calling out again and again the gushes of
+her girlish enthusiasm, that he shrunk instinctively from a decision in
+which must be involved so largely her future happiness.
+
+At last it was Adčle herself who suggested the inquiry,--
+
+"Is it true, dear papa, what the Doctor tells me, that you may possibly
+take, me back to France with you?"
+
+"What say you, Adčle? Would you like to go?"
+
+"Dearly!"
+
+"But," said Maverick, "your friends here,--can you so easily cast them
+away?"
+
+"No, no, no!" said Adčle,--"not cast them away! Couldn't I come again
+some day? Besides, there is your home, papa; I should love any home of
+yours, and love your friends."
+
+"For instance, Adčle, there is my book-keeper, a lean Savoyard, who
+wears a red wig and spectacles,--and Lucille, a great, gaunt woman, with
+a golden crucifix about her neck, who keeps my little parlor in
+order,--and Papiol, a fat Frenchman, with a bristly moustache and
+iron-gray hair, who, I dare say, would want to kiss the pet of his dear
+friend,--and Jeannette, who washes the dishes for us, and wears great
+wooden sabots"----
+
+"Nonsense, papa! I am sure you have other friends; and then there's the
+good godmother."
+
+"Ah, yes,--she indeed," said Maverick; "what a precious hug she would
+give you, Adčle!"
+
+"And then--and then--should I see mamma?"
+
+The pleasant humor died out of the face of Maverick on the instant; and
+then, in a slow, measured tone,--
+
+"Impossible, Adčle,--impossible! Come here, darling!" and as he fondled
+her in a wild, passionate way, "I will love you for both, Adčle; she was
+not worthy of you, child."
+
+Adčle, too, is overcome with a sudden seriousness.
+
+"Is she living, papa?" And she gives him an appealing look that must be
+answered.
+
+And Maverick seems somehow appalled by that innocent, confiding
+expression of hers.
+
+"May-be, may-be, my darling; she was living not long since; yet it can
+never matter to you or me more. You will trust me in this, Adčle?" And
+he kisses her tenderly.
+
+And she, returning the caress, but bursting into tears as she does so,
+says,--
+
+"I will, I do, papa."
+
+"There, there, darling!"--as he folds her to him; "no more tears,--no
+more tears, _chérie_!"
+
+But even while he says it, he is nervously searching his pockets, since
+there is a little dew that must be wiped from his own eyes. Maverick's
+emotion, however, was but a little momentary contagious sympathy with
+the daughter,--he having no understanding of that unsatisfied yearning
+in her heart of which this sudden tumult of feeling was the passionate
+outbreak.
+
+Meantime Adčle is not without her little mementos of the life at
+Ashfield, which come in the shape of thick double letters from that good
+girl Rose,--her dear, dear friend, who has been advised by the little
+traveller to what towns she should direct these tender missives; and
+Adčle is no sooner arrived at these postal stations than she sends for
+the budget which she knows must be waiting for her. And of course she
+has her own little pen in a certain travelling-escritoire the good papa
+has given her; and she plies her white fingers with it often and often
+of an evening, after the day's sight-seeing is over, to tell Rose, in
+return, what a charming journey she is having, and how kind papa is, and
+what a world of strange things she is seeing; and there are descriptions
+of sunsets and sunrises, and of lakes and of mountains, on those
+close-written sheets of hers, which Rose, in her enthusiasm, declares to
+be equal to many descriptions in print. We dare say they were better
+than a great many such.
+
+Poor Rose feels that she has only very humdrum stories to tell in return
+for these; but she ekes out her letters pretty well, after all, and what
+they lack in novelty is made up in affection.
+
+"There is really nothing new to tell," she writes, "except it be that
+our old friend, Miss Almira Tourtelot, astonished us all with a new
+bonnet last Sunday, and with new saffron ribbons; and she has come out,
+too, in the new tight sleeves, in which she looks drolly enough. Phil is
+very uneasy, now that his schooling is done, and talks of going to the
+West Indies about some business in which papa is concerned. I hope he
+will go, if he doesn't stay too long. He is such a dear, good fellow!
+Madame Arles asks after you, when I see her, which is not very often
+now; for since the Doctor has come back from New York, he has had a new
+talk with mamma, and has quite won her over to _his view of the matter_.
+So good bye to French for the present! Heigho! But I don't know that I'm
+sorry, now that you are not here, dear Ady.
+
+"Another queer thing I had almost forgotten to tell you. The poor Boody
+girl,--you must remember her? Well, she has come back on a sudden; and
+they say her father would not receive her in his house,--there are
+_terrible stories_ about it!--and now she is living with an old woman
+far out upon the river-road,--only a little garret-chamber for herself
+and _the child she brought back with her_. Of course _nobody_ goes near
+her, or looks at her, if she comes on the street. But--the queerest
+thing!--when Madame Arles heard of it and of her story, what does she do
+but _walk far out to visit her_, and talked with her in her broken
+English for an hour, they say. Papa says she (Madame A.) must be a very
+bad woman or a very good woman. Miss Johns says _she always thought she
+was a bad woman_. The Bowriggs are, of course, very indignant, and I
+doubt if Madame A. comes to Ashfield again with them."
+
+And again, at a later date, Rose writes,--
+
+"The Bowriggs are all off for the winter, and the house closed. Reuben
+has been here on a flying visit to the parsonage; and how proud Miss
+Eliza was of _her nephew_! He came over to see Phil, I suppose; but Phil
+had gone two weeks before. Mamma thinks he is _fine-looking_. I fancy he
+will never live in the country again. When shall I see you again, _dear,
+dear_ Ady? I have _so much_ to talk to you about!"
+
+A month thereafter Maverick and his daughter find their way back to
+Ashfield. Of course Miss Johns has made magnificent preparations to
+receive them. She surpassed herself in her toilette on the day of their
+arrival, and fairly astonished Maverick with the warmth of her welcome
+to his child. Yet he could not help observing that Adčle met it more
+coolly than was her wont, and that her tenderest words were reserved for
+the good Doctor. And how proud she was to walk with her father upon the
+village street, glancing timidly up at the windows from which she knew
+those stiff old Miss Hapgoods must be peeping out! How proud to sit
+beside him in the parson's pew, feeling that the eyes of half the
+congregation were fastened on the tall gentleman beside her! Ah, happy
+daughter! may your beautiful filial pride never have a fall!
+
+Important business letters command Maverick's early presence abroad;
+and, after conference with the Doctor, he decides to leave Adčle once
+more under the roof of the parsonage.
+
+"Under God, I will do for her what I can," said the Doctor.
+
+"I know it, I know it, my good friend," says Maverick. "Teach her
+self-reliance; she may need it some day. And mind what I have said of
+this French woman. Adčle seems to have a _tendresse_ that way. Those
+French women are very insidious, Johns."
+
+"You know their ways better than I," said the Doctor, dryly.
+
+"Good! a smack of the old college humor there, Johns. Well, well, at
+least you don't doubt the sacredness of my love for Adčle?"
+
+"I trust, Maverick, I may never doubt the sacredness of your love in any
+direction. I only hope you may direct it where I fear you do not."
+
+"God bless you, Johns! I wish I were as good a man as you."
+
+A little afterwards Maverick was humming a snatch from an opera under
+the trees of the orchard; and Adčle went bounding toward him, to take
+the last walk with him for so long,--so long!
+
+
+XXXVI.
+
+Autumn and winter passed by, and the summer of 1838 opened upon the old
+quiet life of Ashfield. The stiff Miss Johns, busy with her household
+duties, or with her stately visitings. The Doctor's hat and cane in
+their usual place upon the little table within the door, and of a Sunday
+his voice is lifted up under the old meeting-house roof in earnest
+expostulation. The birds pipe their old songs, and the orchard has shown
+once more its wondrous glory of bloom. But all these things have lost
+their novelty for Adčle. Would it be strange, if the tranquil life of
+the little town had lost something of its early charm? That swift French
+blood of hers has been stirred by contact with the outside world. She
+has, perhaps, not been wholly insensible to those admiring glances which
+so quickened the pride of the father. Do not such things leave a hunger
+in the heart of a girl of seventeen which the sleepy streets of a
+country town can but poorly gratify?
+
+The young girl is, moreover, greatly disturbed at the thought of the new
+separation from her father for some indefinite period. Her affections
+have knitted themselves around him, during that delightful journey of
+the summer, in a way that has made her feel with new weight the parting.
+It is all the worse that she does not clearly perceive the necessity for
+it. Is she not of an age now to contribute to the cheer of whatever home
+he may have beyond the sea? Why, pray, has he given her such uninviting
+pictures of his companions there? Or what should she care for his
+companions, if only she could enjoy his tender watchfulness? Or is it
+that her religious education is not yet thoroughly complete, and that
+she still holds out against a full and public avowal of all the
+doctrines which the Doctor urges upon her acceptance? And the thought of
+this makes his kindly severities appear more irksome than ever.
+
+Another cause of grief to Adčle is the extreme disfavor in which she
+finds that Madame Arles is now regarded by the townspeople. Her
+sympathies had run out towards the unfortunate woman in some
+inexplicable way, and held there even now, so strongly that contemptuous
+mention of her stung like a reproach to herself. At least she was a
+countrywoman, and alone among strangers; and in this Adčle found
+abundant reason for a generous sympathy. As for her religion, was it not
+the religion of her mother and of her good godmother? And with this
+thought flaming in her, is it wonderful, if Adčle toys more fondly than
+ever, in the solitude of her chamber, with the little rosary she has
+guarded so long? Not, indeed, that she has much faith in its efficacy;
+but it is a silent protest against the harsh speeches of Miss Eliza, who
+had been specially jealous of the influence of the French teacher.
+
+"I never liked her countenance, Adčle," said the spinster, in her solemn
+manner; "and I am rejoiced that you will not be under her influence the
+present summer."
+
+"And I'm sorry," said Adčle, petulantly.
+
+"It is gratifying to me," continued Miss Eliza, without notice of
+Adčle's interruption, "that Mr. Maverick has confirmed my own
+impressions, and urged the Doctor against permitting so unwise
+association."
+
+"When? how?" said Adčle, sharply. "Papa has never seen her."
+
+"But he has seen other French women, Adčle, and he fears their
+influence."
+
+Adčle looked keenly at the spinster for a moment, as if to fathom the
+depth of this reply, then burst into tears.
+
+"Oh, why, why didn't he take me with him?" But this she says under
+breath, and to herself, as she rushes into the Doctor's study to
+question him.
+
+"Is it true, New Papa, that papa thought badly of Madame Arles?"
+
+"Not personally, my child, since he had never seen her. But, Adaly, your
+father, though I fear he is far away from the true path, wishes you to
+find it, my child. He has faith in the religion we teach so imperfectly;
+he wishes you to be exposed to no influences that will forbid your full
+acceptance of it."
+
+"But Madame Arles never talked of religion to me"; and Adčle taps
+impatiently upon the floor.
+
+"That may be true, Adaly,--it may be true; but we cannot be thrown into
+habits of intimacy with those reared in iniquity without fear of
+contracting stain. I could wish, my child, that you would so far subdue
+your rebellious heart, and put on the complete armor of righteousness,
+as to be able to resist all attacks."
+
+"And it was for this papa left me here?" And Adčle says it with a smile
+of mockery that alarms the good Doctor.
+
+"I trust, Adaly, that he had that hope."
+
+The good man does not know what swift antagonism to his pleadings he has
+suddenly kindled in her. The little foot taps more and more impatiently
+as he goes on to set forth (as he had so often done) the heinousness of
+her offences and the weight of her just condemnation. Yet the antagonism
+did not incline her to open doubt; but after she had said her evening
+prayer that night, (taught her by the parson,) she drew out her little
+rosary and kissed reverently the crucifix. It is so much easier at this
+juncture for her tried and distracted spirit to bolster its faith upon
+such material symbol than to find repose in any merely intellectual
+conviction of truth!
+
+Adčle's intimacy with Rose and with her family retained all its old
+tenderness, but that good fellow Phil was gone. A blithe and merry
+companion he had been! Adčle missed his kindly attentions more than she
+would have believed. The Bowriggs have come to Ashfield, but their
+clamorous friendship is more than ever distasteful to Adčle. Over and
+over she makes a feint of illness to escape the noisy hilarity. Nor,
+indeed, is it wholly a feint. Whether it were that her state of moral
+perturbation and unrest reacted upon the physical system, or that there
+were other disturbing causes, certain it was that the roses were fading
+from her cheeks, and that her step was losing day by day something of
+its old buoyancy. It is even thought best to summon the village doctor
+to the family council. He is a gossiping, kindly old gentleman, who
+spends an easy life, free from much mental strain, in trying to make his
+daily experiences tally with the little fund of medical science which he
+accumulated thirty years before.
+
+The serene old gentleman feels the pulse, with his head reflectively on
+one side,--tells his little jokelet about Sir Astley Cooper, or some
+other worthy of the profession,--shakes his fat sides with a cheery
+laugh,--"And now, my dear," he says, "let us look at the tongue. Ah, I
+see, I see,--the stomach lacks tone."
+
+"And there's dreadful lassitude, sometimes, Doctor," speaks up Miss
+Eliza.
+
+"Ah, I see,--a little exhaustion after a long walk,--isn't it so, Miss
+Maverick? I see, I see; we must brace up the system, Miss Johns,--brace
+up the system."
+
+And the kindly old gentleman prescribes his little tonics, of which
+Adčle takes some, and throws more out of the window.
+
+Adčle does not mend, and the rumor is presently current upon the street
+that "Miss Adeel is in a decline." The spinster shows a solicitude in
+the matter which almost touches the heart of the French girl. For Adčle
+had long before decided that there could be no permanent sympathy
+between them, and had indulged latterly in no little bitterness of
+speech toward her. But the acute spinster had forgiven all. Never once
+had she lost sight of her plan for the ultimate disposal of Adčle and of
+her father's fortune. Of course the life of Adčle was very dear to her,
+and the absence of Phil she looked upon as Providential.
+
+Weeks pass by, but still the tonics of the kindly old physician prove of
+little efficacy. One day the Bowriggs come blustering in, as is their
+wont.
+
+"Such assurance! Did you ever hear the like? Madame Arles writes us that
+she is coming to see Ashfield again, and of course coming to us. The air
+of the town agrees with her, and she hopes to find lodgings."
+
+The eyes of Adčle sparkle with satisfaction,--not so much, perhaps, by
+reason of her old sympathy with the poor woman, which is now almost
+forgotten, as because it will give some change at least to the dreary
+monotony of the town life.
+
+"Lodgings, indeed!" says the younger Miss Bowrigg. "I wonder where she
+will find them!"
+
+It is a matter of great doubt, to be sure,--since the sharp speech of
+the spinster has so spread the story of her demerits, that not a
+parishioner of the Doctor but would have feared to give the poor woman a
+home.
+
+Adčle still has strength enough for an occasional stroll with Rose, and,
+in the course of one of them, comes upon Madame Arles, whom she meets
+with a good deal of her old effusion. And Madame, touched by her
+apparent weakness, more than reciprocates it.
+
+"But you suffer, you are unhappy, my child,--pining at last for the sun
+of Provence. Isn't it so, _mon ange_? No, no, you were never meant to
+grow up among these cold people. You must see the vineyards, and the
+olives, and the sea, Adčle; you must! you must!"
+
+All this, uttered in a torrent, which, with its _tutoiements_, Rose can
+poorly comprehend.
+
+Yet it goes straight to the heart of Adčle, and her tongue is loosened
+to a little petulant, fiery _roulade_ against the severities of the life
+around her, which it would have greatly pained poor Rose to listen to in
+any speech of her own.
+
+But such interviews, once or twice repeated, come to the knowledge of
+the watchful spinster, who clearly perceives that Adčle is chafing more
+and more under the wonted family regimen. With an affectation of tender
+solicitude, she volunteers herself to attend Adčle upon her short
+morning strolls, and she learns presently, with great triumph, that
+Madame Arles has established herself at last under the same roof which
+gives refuge to the outcast Boody woman. Nothing more was needed to seal
+the opinion of the spinster, and to confirm the current village belief
+in the heathenish character of the French lady. Dame Tourtelot was
+shrewdly of the opinion that the woman represented some Popish plot for
+the abduction of Adčle, and for her incarceration in a nunnery,--a
+theory which Miss Almira, with her natural tendency to romance,
+industriously propagated.
+
+Meantime the potions of the village doctor have little effect, and
+before July is ended a serious illness has declared itself, and Adčle is
+confined to her chamber. Madame Arles is among the earliest who come
+with eager inquiries, and begs to see the sufferer. But she is
+confronted by the indefatigable spinster, who, cloaking her denial under
+ceremonious form, declares that her state of nervous prostration will
+not admit of it. Madame withdraws, sadly; but the visit and the claim
+are repeated from time to time, until the stately civility of Miss Johns
+arouses her suspicions.
+
+"You deny me, Madame. You do wrong. I love Adčle; she loves me. I know
+that I could comfort her. You do not understand her nature. She was born
+where the sky is soft and warm. You are all cold and harsh,--cold and
+harsh in your religion. She has told me as much. I know how she suffers.
+I wish I could carry her back to France with me. I pray you, let me see
+her, good Madame!"
+
+"It is quite impossible, I assure you," said the spinster, in her most
+aggravating manner. "It would be quite against the wishes of my brother,
+the Doctor, as well as of Mr. Maverick."
+
+"Monsieur Maverick! _Mon Dieu_, Madame! He is no father to her; he
+leaves her to die with strangers; he has no heart; I have better right:
+I love her. I must see her!"
+
+And with a passionate step,--those eyes of hers glaring in that strange
+double way upon the amazed Miss Eliza,--she strides toward the door, as
+if she would overcome all opposition. But before she has gone out, that
+cruel pain has seized her, and she sinks upon a chair, quite prostrated,
+and with hands clasped wildly over that burden of a heart.
+
+"Too hard! too hard!" she murmurs, scarce above her breath.
+
+The spinster is attentive, but is untouched. Her self-poise never
+deserts her. And not then, or at any later period, did poor Madame Arles
+succeed in overcoming the iron resolve of Miss Johns.
+
+The good Doctor is greatly troubled by the report of Miss Eliza. Can it
+be possible that Adčle has given a confidence to this strange woman that
+she has not given to them? Cold and harsh! Can Adčle, indeed, have said
+this? Has he not labored with a full heart? Has he not agonized in
+prayer to draw in this wandering lamb to the fold? He has seen, indeed,
+that the poor child has chafed much latterly, that the old serenity and
+gayety are gone. But is it not a chafing under the fetters of sin? Is it
+not that she begins to see more clearly the fiery judgments of God which
+will certainly overwhelm the wrongdoers, whatever may be the
+unsubstantial and evanescent graces of their mortal life?
+
+Yet, with all the rigidity of his doctrine, which he cannot in
+conscience mollify, even for the tender ears of Adčle, it disturbs him
+strangely to hear that she has qualified his regimen as harsh or severe.
+Has he not taught, in season and out of season, the fulness of God's
+promises? Has he not labored and prayed? Is it not the ungodly heart in
+her that finds his teaching a burden? Is not his conscience safe? Yet,
+for all this, it touches him to the quick to think that her childlike,
+trustful confidence is at last alienated from him,--that her affection
+for him is so distempered by dread and weariness. For, unconsciously, he
+has grown to love her as he loves no one save his boy Reuben;
+unconsciously his heart has mellowed under her influence. Through her
+winning, playful talk, he has taken up that old trail of worldly
+affections which he had thought buried forever in Rachel's grave. That
+tender touch of her little fingers upon his cheek has seemed to say,
+"Life has its joys, old man!" The patter of her feet along the house has
+kindled the memories of other gentle steps that tread now silently in
+the courts of air. Those songs of hers,--how he has loved them! Never
+confessing even to Miss Eliza, still less to himself, how much his heart
+is bound up in this little winsome stranger, who has shone upon his
+solitary parsonage like a sunbeam.
+
+And the good man, with such thoughts thronging on him, falls upon his
+knees, beseeching God to "be over the sick child, to comfort her, to
+heal her, to pour down His divine grace upon her, to open her blind eyes
+to the richness of His truth, to keep her from all the machinations and
+devices of Satan, to arm her with true holiness, to make her a golden
+light in the household, to give her a heart of love toward all, and most
+of all toward Him who so loved her that He gave His only begotten Son."
+
+And the Doctor, rising from his attitude of prayer, and going toward the
+little window of his study to arrange it for the night, sees a slight
+figure in black pacing up and down upon the opposite side of the way,
+and looking up from time to time to the light that is burning in the
+window of Adčle. He knows on the instant who it must be, and fears more
+than ever the possible influence which this strange woman, who is so
+persistent in her attention, may have upon the heart of the girl. The
+Doctor had heretofore been disposed to turn a deaf ear to the current
+reproaches of Madame Arles for her association with the poor outcast
+daughter of the village; but her appearance at this unseemly hour of the
+night, coupled with his traditional belief in the iniquities of the
+Romish Church, excited terrible suspicions in his mind. Like most holy
+men, ignorant of the crafts and devices of the world, he no sooner
+blundered into a suspicion of some deep Devil's cunning than every
+footfall and every floating zephyr seemed to confirm it. He bethought
+himself of Maverick's earnest caution; and before he went to bed that
+night, he prayed that no designing Jezebel might corrupt the poor child
+committed to his care.
+
+The next night the Doctor looked again from his window, after blowing
+out his lamp, and there once more was the figure in black, pacing up and
+down. What could it mean? Was it possible that some Satanic influence
+could pass over from this emissary of the Evil One, (as he firmly
+believed her to be,) for the corruption of the sick child who lay in the
+delirium of a fever above?
+
+The extreme illness of Adčle was subject of common talk in the village,
+and the sympathy was very great. On the following night Adčle was far
+worse, and the Doctor, at about his usual bedtime, went out to summon
+the physician. At a glance he saw in the shadow of the opposite houses
+the same figure pacing up and down. He hurried his steps, fearing she
+might seek occasion to dart in upon the sick-chamber before his return.
+But he had scarcely gone twenty paces from his door, when he heard a
+swift step behind, and in another instant there was a grip, as of a
+tigress, upon his arm.
+
+"Adčle,--how is she? Tell me!"
+
+"Ill,--very ill," said the Doctor, shaking himself from her grasp, and
+continued in his solemn manner, "it is an hour to be at home, woman!"
+
+But she, paying no heed to his admonition, says,--
+
+"I must see her,--I _must_!"--and dashes back toward the parsonage.
+
+The Doctor, terrified, follows after. But he can keep no manner of pace
+with that swift, dark figure that glides before him. He comes to the
+porch panting. The door is closed. Has the infuriated woman gone in? No,
+for presently her grasp is again upon his arm: for a moment she had
+sunk, exhausted by fatigue, or overcome by emotion, upon the porch. Her
+tone is more subdued.
+
+"I entreat you, good Doctor, let me see Adčle!--for Christ's sake, if
+you be His minister, let me see her!"
+
+"Impossible, woman, impossible!" says the Doctor, more than ever
+satisfied of her Satanic character by what he counts her blasphemous
+speech. "Adaly is delirious,--fearfully excited; it would destroy her.
+The only hope is in perfect quietude."
+
+The woman releases her grasp.
+
+"Please, Doctor, let me come to-morrow. I must see her! I will see her!"
+
+"You shall not," said the Doctor, with solemnity,--"never, with my
+permission. Go to your home, woman, and pray God to have mercy on you."
+
+"Monster!" exclaimed she, passionately, as she shook the Doctor's arm,
+still under her grasp; and murmuring other words in language the good
+man did not comprehend, she slipped silently down the yard,--away into
+the darkness.
+
+
+
+
+DOWN THE RIVER.
+
+
+She was of pure race, black as her first ancestor,--if, indeed, she ever
+had an ancestor, and were not an indigenous outcrop of African soil,--so
+black that the sun could gild her. Her countenance was as unlovely as it
+is possible for one to be that owns the cheeriest of smiles and the most
+dazzling of teeth. It would have been difficult to say how old she was,
+though she had the effect of being undersized, and, with sharp
+shoulders, elbows, and knees, seemed scarcely possessed of a rounded
+muscle in all her lithe and agile frame.
+
+Nevertheless, she was a dancer by profession,--if she could have
+dignified her most frequent occupation by the title of profession. With
+a thin blue scarf turbaned round her head in floating ends, and with
+scanty and clinging array otherwise, tossing a tambourine, and singing
+wild, meaningless songs, she used to whirl and spring on the grass-plot
+of an evening, the young masters and mistresses smiling and applauding
+from the verandah, while the wind-blown flame of a flaring pitch-pine
+knot, held by little Pluto, gave her strange careering shadows for
+partner.
+
+She had not yet been allotted to any particular task by day, now running
+errands of the house, now tending the sick, now, in punishment of
+misdemeanors, relieving an exhausted hand in the field,--for, though all
+along the upland lay the piny woods of the turpentine-orchards, she
+belonged to an estate whose rich lowlands were devoted to
+cotton-bearing. But whatever she did by day, she danced by night, with
+her wild gyration and gesture, as naturally as a moth flies; and when
+not in demand with the seigniory, was wont to perform in even keener
+force and fire at the quarters, to an admiring circle of her own kind,
+with ambitious imitators on the outskirts.
+
+It was not, however, an indiscriminate assemblage even there that
+encouraged her rude art. There are circles within circles, and the more
+decorous of the slaves gave small favor to the young posturer, although
+the patronage she received from the house enabled her to meet their
+disapprobation defiantly; while to the younger portion, in the vague
+sense that there was something wrong about it, her dance became
+surrounded by all the attraction and allurement of seeing life. It was
+not that the frowning ones did not go through many of the same motions
+themselves; but theirs were occasioned by the frenzy of the religious
+excitement, where pious rapture and ecstasy were to be expressed by
+nothing but the bodily exertion of the Shout: the objectless dance of
+the dancer was a thing beyond their comprehension, dimly at first, and
+then positively, associated with sin. But she laughed them down with a
+gibe; she felt triumphant in the possession of her secret, known to none
+of them: her dance was not objectless, but the perpetual expression of
+all emotions, whether of beauty or joy or gratitude or praise. Some one
+at the house had given her a pair of little hoops with bells attached,
+which she was wont to wear about her ankles, and it afforded her
+malicious enjoyment to scatter her opponents by the tintinnabulation of
+her step. For all that levity, she was not destitute of her peculiar
+mode of adoration. For the religion of the Shout she had no absorbents
+whatever; she furtively watched it, and openly ridiculed it; but she had
+a religion of her own, notwithstanding,--a sort of primitive and grand
+religion, Fetich though it was. She reasoned, that the kindly brown
+earth produces us, bears us along on its flight, nourishes us, gives us
+the delights of life, takes us back into its bosom at last. She
+worshipped the great dark earth, imparted to it her confidence, asked of
+it her boons. As she grew older, and her logic or her fancy
+strengthened, she might have felt the sun supplying the earth, and the
+beings of the earth, with all their force, and have become a
+fire-worshipper, until further light broke on her, and she sought and
+found the Power that feeds the very sun himself. But at present the dust
+of which she was made was what she could best comprehend. So, fortified
+by her inward faith, and feeling herself fast friends with the ancient
+earth, she continued to ring her silver bells and spin her bare
+twinkling feet with contented disregard of those, few of whom in their
+unseemly worship had the faintest idea of what it was that ailed them.
+
+Although known by various titles on the plantation, objurgatory among
+the hands, facetious among the heads, such as Dancing Devil, Spinning
+Jenny, Tarantella, Herodias's Daughter,--which last, simplifying itself
+into Salome, became in its diminutives the most prevalent,--the creature
+had a name of her own, the softest of syllables. Black and uncouth as
+she was, a word, one of those the whitest and most beautiful, named her;
+and since they tell us that every appellation has its significance for
+the wearer, we must suppose that somewhere in her soul that white and
+blossoming thing was to be found which answered to the name of Flor.
+
+She possessed a kind of freehold in the cabin of an old negress yclept
+Zoë; but she seldom claimed it, for Zoë was outspoken; she preferred,
+instead, to lie down by night on a mat in Miss Emma's room, in a corner
+of the staircase, on the hall-floor, oftenest fallen wherever sleep
+happened to overtake her;--having so many places in which to lay her
+head was very like having none at all. She was at the bidding of every
+one, but seldom received a heavy blow; as for a round of angry words,
+she liked nothing better. She fell heir to much flimsy finery, as a
+matter of course, and to many a tidbit, cake or sweetmeat; she made
+herself gaudy as a butterfly with the one, and never went into a corner
+with the other. Of late, however, the finery and the delicates had
+become more uncommon things: Miss Emma wore a homespun gingham, her
+muslins, and Miss Agatha's, draped the windows,--for curtains and
+carpets had all gone to camp; bacon had ceased to be given out to the
+hands, who lived now on corn-meal and yams; the people at the house were
+scarcely better off,--for, though, as no army had passed that way, the
+chickens still peopled the place, they were reserved for special
+occasions, and it was only at rare intervals that one indulged at table
+in the luxury of a fowl. This was no serious regret to Flor on her own
+account: the less viands, the less dishes, she could oftener pause in
+the act of wiping a plate and perform an original hornpipe by herself,
+tossing the thin translucent china, and rapping it with her knuckles
+till it rang again. She had, however, a pang once when she saw Miss
+Emma lunching with relish on cold sweet potato. She spent all the rest
+of the day floating on the tide in an old abandoned scow secured by a
+long rope to the bank, and afterwards wading up and down the bed of a
+brook that ran into the river, until, having left a portion of her
+provision, to be sure, at Aunt Zoë's cabin, she busied herself over a
+fire out-of-doors, and served up at last before Miss Emma as savory a
+little terrapin stew as ever simmered on coals, capering over her
+success, and standing on her head in the midst of all her scattered
+embers, afterwards, with pure delight. The next day she came in at noon
+from the woods, a mile down the river-bank, with her own dark lips cased
+and coated in golden sweets, and, after a wordy skirmish with the cook,
+presented to Miss Emma a great cake of brown and fragrant honey from a
+nest she had discovered and neglected in better seasons, and said
+nothing about her half-dozen swollen and smarting stings. Mas'r Rob
+having shouldered his gun and taken himself off, and Mas'r Andersen
+having followed his example, but not his footsteps, long ago, there was
+nobody to fill the deficiencies of the larder with game; and thus Flor,
+with her traps and nets and devices, making her value felt every day,
+became, for Miss Emma's sake, a petted person, was put on more generous
+terms with those above her, and allowed a freedom of action that no
+other servant on the place dreamed of desiring. Such consideration was
+very acceptable to the girl, who was well content to go fasting herself
+a whole day, provided Miss Emma condescended to her offerings, and, in
+turn, vouchsafed her her friendship. She had no such daring aspirations
+towards the beautiful Miss Agatha, young Mas'r Andersen's wife, and
+admired her at an awful distance, never venturing to offer her a bit of
+broiled lark, or set before her a dish of crabs,--beaming back with a
+grin from ear to ear, if Miss Agatha so much as smiled on her, breaking
+into the wildest of dances and shuffling out the shrillest of tunes
+after every such incident. Moreover, Miss Agatha was hedged about with a
+dignity of grief, and the indistinct pity given her made her safe from
+other intrusion; for Mas'r Andersen, in bringing home a Northern wife,
+had brought home Northern principles, and, in his sudden escape forced
+to leave her in the only home she had, was away fighting Northern
+battles. This was a dreadful thing, and Mas'r Andersen was a traitor to
+somebody,--so much Flor knew,--it might be the Government, it might be
+the South, it might be Miss Agatha; her ideas were nebulous. Whatever it
+was, Mas'r Rob and his gun were on the other side, and woe be to Mas'r
+Andersen when they met! Mas'r Rob and his friends were beating back the
+men that meant to take away Flor and all her kind to freeze and starve;
+'twas very good of him, Flor thought, and there ceased consideration.
+Meanwhile, wherever Mas'r Andersen might be, and whether he were so much
+as alive or not, Miss Agatha was not the one that knew; and Flor adapted
+many a rigadoon to her conjectured feelings, now swaying and bending
+with sorrow and longing, head fallen, arms outstretched, now hands
+clasped on bosom, exultant in welcome and possession.
+
+The importance to which Flor gradually rose by no means led her to the
+exhibition of any greater decorum; on the contrary, it seemed to impart
+to her the secret of perpetual motion; and, aware of her impunity, she
+danced with fresher vigor in the very teeth of her censurers and their
+reproaches.
+
+"Go 'long wid yer capers, ye Limb!" said Zoë to her, late one afternoon,
+as she entered with the half of a rabbit she had caught, and, having
+deposited it, went through the intricacies of her most elaborate figure
+in breathless listening to an unheard tune. "Ef I had dem sticks o'
+legs, dey'd do berrer work nor twirlin' me like I was a factotum."
+
+At this, Flor suddenly spun about on the tip of one toe for the space of
+three minutes, with a buzzing noise like that of a top in hot motion,
+pausing at last to inquire, "Well, Maum Zoë, an' w'at's dat?" and be
+off again in another whirl.
+
+"I'd red Mas'r Henry ob sich a wurfless nigger."
+
+"Wurfless?" inquired Flor, still spinning.
+
+"Wuss 'n wurfless."
+
+"How 'd y' do it?"
+
+"I'd jus' foller dat ar Sarp," said Zoë, turning over the rabbit, and
+considering whether a pepper-corn and a little onion out of her own
+patch wouldn't improve the broth she meant to make of it.
+
+"Into de swamps?" said Flor, in a high key. "Sarp's a fool. I heerd
+Mas'r Henry say so. Dey'll gib him a blue-pill, for sartain."
+
+"Humph!" said Aunt Zoë, as if she could say a great deal more.
+
+"Tell ye w'at, Maum Zoë," replied Flor, shaking her sidelong head at
+every syllable, and accentuating her remarks with her forefinger and
+both her little sparkling eyes, "I'll 'form on ye for 'ticin' Mas'r
+Henry's niggers run away."
+
+"None o' yer sass here!" said Maum Zoë, with a flashing glance.
+
+"You take my rabbit, you mus' _hab_ my sass," answered Flor, delicacy
+not being ingrain with her. "W'at 'ud I cut for to de swamps, d' ye
+s'pose?" she said, slapping the soles of her feet in her emphasis, and
+pausing for breath. "Dar neber was a lash laid on dat back"----
+
+"No fault o' dat back, dough," interposed Aunt Zoë.
+
+"Dar neber was a lash on dat back. Dar a'n't a person on de place hab
+sich treatem as dis yere Limb o' yourn. Miss Emma done gib me her red
+ribbins on'y Sa'd'y for my har. An' Mas'r Henry, he jus' pass an' say to
+me, 'Dono w'at Miss Emma 'd do widout ye, Lomy. Scairt, ye hussy!' So!"
+
+"'Zackly. We's 'mos' w'ite, we be! How much dey do make ob us up to de
+house! De leopard hab change him spots, an' we hab change our skin! W'at
+'s de use o' bein' free, w'en we's w'ite folks a'ready? Tell me dat!"
+said Aunt Zoë, turning on her witheringly, rising from a deep curtsy and
+smoothing down her apron. "Tell ye w'at, ye Debil's spinster!" added
+she, with a sudden change of tone, as Flor began to mimic one of Miss
+Agatha's opera-tunes and with her hands on her hips slowly balance up
+and down the room, and came at last, bending far on one side, to leer up
+in the face of her elder with such a smile as Cubas was wont to give her
+Spanish lover in the dance. "So mighty free wid yer dancin', 'pears like
+you'll come to dance at a rope's end! W'at's de use o' talkin' to you?
+'Mortal sperit, it 's my b'lief dat ar mockin'-bird in de branches hab
+as good a lookout!"
+
+"Heap better," said Flor acquiescently, and beginning to hold a
+whistling colloquy with the hidden voice.
+
+"You won't bring him down wid yer tunes. He knows w'en he's well off;
+he's free, he is,--swingin' onto de bough, an' 'gwine whar he like."
+
+"Leet de chil' alone, Zoë," said a superannuated old woman sitting in
+the corner by the fire always smouldering on Zoë's hearth, and leaning
+her white head on her cane. "You be berrer showin' her her duty in her
+place dan be makin' her discontented."
+
+"She doan' make me disconnected, Maum Susie," said Flor. "'F he's free,
+w'at's he stayin' here for? Dar 's law for dat. Doan' want none o' yer
+free niggers hangin' roun' dis yere. Chirrup!"
+
+"Dar's a right smart chance ob 'em, dough, jus' now," said Aunt Zoë,
+chuckling at first, and then breaking into the most boisterous of
+laughs, "Seems like we's all ob us, ebery one, free as Sarp hisse'f.
+Mas'r Linkum say so. Yah, ha, ha!"
+
+"Linkum!" said Flor. "Who dat ar? Some o' yer poor w'ite trash? Mas'r
+Henry doan' say so!"
+
+"W'a' 's de matter wid dat ar boy Sarp, Zoë?" recommenced Flor, after a
+pause. "Mus' hab wanted suffin,--powerful,--to lib in de swamp, hab de
+dogs after him, an' a bullet troo de head mos' likely."
+
+"Jus' dat. Wanted him freedom," said Zoë suddenly, with crackling
+stress, her eyes getting angry in their fervor, as she went on. "Wanted
+him body for him own. Tired o' usin' 'noder man's eyes, 'noder man's
+han's. Wanted him han's him own, wanted him heart him own! Had n' no
+breff to breathe 'cep' w'at Mas'r Henry gib out. Di'n' t'ink no t'oughts
+but Mas'r Henry's. Wanted him wife some day to hisse'f, wanted him
+chillen for him own property. Wanted to call no man mas'r but de Lord in
+heaben!"
+
+"Wy, Maum Zoë, how you talk! Sarp had n' no wife."
+
+"Neber would, w'ile he wor a slave."
+
+"Hist now, Zoë!" said the old woman.
+
+"I jus' done b'lieve you's a bobolitionist!" said Flor, with wide eyes
+and a battery of nods.
+
+"No 'casion, no 'casion," said Zoë, with the deep inner chuckle again.
+"We's done 'bolished,--dat's w'at we is! We's a free people now. No more
+work for de 'bominationists!" And on the point of uncontrollable
+hilarity, she checked herself with the dignity becoming her new
+position. "You's your own nigger now, Salome," said she.
+
+"We? No, t'ank you. I 'longs to Miss Emma."
+
+"You haan' no understandin' for liberty, chil'. Seems ef 'twas like
+religion"----
+
+"Ef I wor to tell Mas'r Henry, oh, wouldn' you cotch it?"
+
+"Go 'long!" cried Zoë, looking out for a missile. "Doan' ye bring no
+more o' yer rabbits here, ef ye 'r' gwine to fetch an' carry"----
+
+"Lors, Aunt Zoë, 'pears like you's out o' sorts. Haan' I got nof'n
+berrer to do dan be tellin' tales ob old women dat's a-waitin' for de
+Lord's salvation?" said Flor, with a twang of great gravity,--and
+proceeded thereat to make her exit in a series of lively somersaults
+through the room and over the threshold.
+
+Aunt Zoë, who, ever since she had lost the use of her feet, had been a
+little wild on the subject of freedom, knew very well within that Flor
+would make no mischief for her; but, except for the excited state into
+which the news brought by some mysterious plantation runner had thrown
+her, she would scarcely have been so incautious. As it was, she had
+dropped a thought into Flor's head to ferment there and do its work. It
+was almost the first time in her life that the girl had heard freedom
+discussed as anything but a doubtful privilege. First awakening to
+consciousness in this state, it was with effort and only lately she had
+comprehended that there could be any other: a different condition from
+one in which Miss Emma was mistress and she was maid seemed at first
+preposterous, then fabulous, and still unnatural: nevertheless, there
+was a flavor of wicked pleasure in the thought. Flor looked with a sort
+of contempt on the little tumbling darkies who had never entertained it.
+Ever since she was born, however, she had frequently fancied she would
+like the liberty of rambling that the little wild creatures of the wood
+possess, but had felt criminal in the desire, and recently she had found
+herself enjoying the immunity of the mocking-bird on the bough, and was
+nearly as free in her going and coming as the same bird on the wing.
+
+During the weeks that followed this conversation Flor's dances flagged.
+They existed, to be sure, but with an angularity that made them seem
+solutions of problems, rather than expressions of emotion; they were
+merely mechanical, for she had lost all interest in them. They became at
+last so listless as to exhibit, to more serious eyes, signs of grace in
+the girl. Flor wondered, if Zoë had spoken the truth, that nothing
+appeared changed on the plantation: all their own masters, why so
+obsequious to the driver still? This was one of the last of the great
+places; behind it, the small farms, with few hands, ran up the
+mountains; why was there no stampede of these unguarded slaves? She
+hardly understood. She listened outside the circle of the fire on the
+ground at night, where two or three old women mumbled together; she
+inferred, that, though no one of them would desert Mas'r Henry, they
+enjoyed the knowledge that they were at liberty to do so, if they
+wished. Flor laughed a bit at this, thinking where the poor things could
+possibly go, and how they could get there, if they would; but in her
+heart of hearts--though all the world but this one spot was a barren
+wilderness, and she never could desire to leave her dear Miss Emma, nor
+could find happiness away from her--it seemed a very pleasant thing to
+think that her devotion might be a voluntary affair, and she stayed
+because she chose. Still she was skeptical. The abstract question
+puzzled her a little, too. How came Mas'r Henry to be free? Because he
+was white; that explained itself. But Miss Emma--she was white, too, and
+yet somehow she seemed to belong to Mas'r Henry. She wondered if Mas'r
+Henry could sell Miss Emma; and then the thought occurred, and with the
+thought the fear, that, possibly, some day, he might sell her, Flor
+herself, away from Miss Emma and all these pleasant scenes. After such a
+thought had once come, it did not go readily. Flor let it
+linger,--turned it over in her mind; gradually familiarized with its
+hurt, it seemed as if she had half said farewell to the place. Better
+far to be a runaway than to be sold. But if it came to that, whither
+should she run? what was this world beyond? who was there in this sad
+wide world to take care of a little black image? And if she waited for
+it to come to that, could she get away at all? It was no wonder that in
+the midst of such new and grave speculations the girl's dance grew
+languid and her sharp tongue still. The earth was just as beautiful as
+ever, the skies were as deep, the flowers as intense in tint, the
+evening air laden with jasmine-scents as delicious as of old; but in
+these few weeks Flor had reached another standpoint. It seemed as if a
+film had fallen from her eyes, and she saw a blight on every blossom.
+
+It was about this time, spring being at its flush, that some passing
+guest mentioned the march of a regiment, the next day, from Cotesworth
+Court-House to the first railroad-station, on its way to the seat of
+war. The idea of the thing filled Miss Emma with enthusiasm. How they
+would look, so many together, in the beautiful gray uniform too, to any
+one standing on Longfer Hill! She longed to see the faces of men when
+they took their lives in their hand for a principle. She had practised
+the Bonny Blue Flag till there was nothing left of it; but if a band
+played it in the open air, with the rising and falling of the wind, and
+under waving banners and glittering guidons all the men with their pale
+faces and shining eyes went marching by----
+
+The end of it was, that, as her father would never have listened to
+anything of the kind, Flor privately informed her of a short cut down
+the river-bank and round the edge of the swamp to the foot of Longfer
+Hill,--a walk they could easily take in a couple of hours. And as nobody
+was in the habit of missing Flor much, and her young mistress would be
+supposed, after her custom, to be spending half the day in naps, they
+accordingly took it. Nevertheless, it was an exceedingly secret affair,
+for Mas'r Henry had always strictly forbidden his daughter to leave his
+own grounds without fit escort.
+
+This expedition seemed to Flor such a proud and gratifying confidence,
+that in her pleasure she forgot to think; she only danced round about
+her mistress, with a return of her old exuberance, till the more quiet
+path of the latter resembled a straight line surrounded by an arabesque
+of fantastic flourishes. But, in fact, the young patrician, unaccustomed
+to exertion, was well wearied before they reached the river-bank. They
+had yet the long border of the swamp to skirt, and there towered Longfer
+Hill. Why could they not go across, she wondered. They would sink, Flor
+answered her; and then the moccasins! But there were all those green
+hummocks,--skipping from one to another would be mere play,--and there
+were no moccasins for miles. And before Flor could gainsay her, she had
+sprung on, keeping steadily ahead, in a determination to have her own
+way; and with no other course left her, Flor followed, though, at every
+spring, alighting on the hummocks that Miss Emma had trodden, the water
+splashed up about her bare ankles, and her heart shook within her at the
+thought of fierce runaways haunting these inaccessible hollows, and the
+myths of the deeper district. Before long, she had overtaken her young
+mistress, and they paused a moment for parley. Miss Emma was convinced,
+that, if it were no worse than this, it would be delightful. Flor
+assured her that she did not know the way any longer, for their winding
+path between the tall cypresses veiled in their swinging tangles of
+funereal moss had confused her, and she could only guess at the
+direction of Longfer Hill. This, then, was an adventure. Miss Emma took
+the responsibility all upon herself, and plunged forward. Miss Emma must
+know best, of course, concerning everything. Nothing loth, and gayly,
+Flor plunged after.
+
+The hummocks on which they went were light, spongy masses of greenery.
+Their footprints filled at once behind them with clear dark water; there
+were glistening little pools everywhere about them; the ground was so
+covered with mats of brilliant blossoms that what appeared solid for the
+foot was oftenest the most treacherous place of all; and at last they
+stayed to take breath, planting themselves on the trunk of a fallen tree
+so twisted and twined with variegated vines and flowers, and deadly,
+damp fungi, that it was like some gorgeous daďs-seat. Behind them and
+beside them was the darkness of the cypress groves. Before them extended
+a smooth floor, a wide level region, carpeted in the most vivid verdure
+and sheeted with the sunshine, an immense bed of softest moss, underlaid
+with black bog, quaking at every step, and shaking a thousand diamonds
+into the light. Scarcely anything stirred through all the stretch; at
+some runnel along its nearer margin, where upon one side the more broken
+swamp recommenced, a rosy flamingo stood and fished, and, still remoter,
+the melancholy note of a bird tolled its refrain, answered by an echoing
+voice from some yet inner depth of forest far away. Save for this, the
+silence was as intense as the vastness and color of the scene, till it
+opened and resolved itself into one broad insect hum. The children took
+a couple of steps forward, under their feet the elastic sod sank and
+rose with a spurt of silver jets; they sprang back to their seats, and
+the shading tree above shook down a shining shower in rillets of silver
+rain. They remained for a minute, then, resting there. Singularly
+enough, Longfer Hill, which had previously been upon their left, now
+rose far away upon the right. When at length they comprehended its
+apparition, they looked at one another in complete bewilderment. Miss
+Emma began to cry; but Flor took it as only a fresh complication of this
+world, that was becoming for her feet a maze of intricacy.
+
+"We must go back," said Miss Emma, at last. "I'm sure, if I'd
+known----Of course we never can cross here. The very spoonbill wades.
+Oh, why didn't----Well, there's no blame to you, Floss. I've nobody to
+thank but myself; that's a comfort."
+
+"Lors, Miss Emma, it's my fault altogeder. I should n' neber told ye.
+An' as for gwine back, it's jus' as bad as torrer."
+
+"We can't stay here all night! Oh, I'm right tired out! If I could lie
+down"----
+
+"'Twouldn' do no way, Miss Emma," answered Flor, in a fright for her
+friend, as a quick, poisonous-looking lizard slid along the log, like a
+streak of light, in the wake of a spider which was one blotch of scarlet
+venom.
+
+Far ahead, the strong sun, piercing the marsh, drew up a vapor, that,
+blue as any distant haze in one part and lint-white in another, made
+itself aslant into low, delicious, broken prisms, melting all between.
+This, more than anything else, told the extent of the bog before them,
+and, hot as it was now, betrayed the deathly chill lurking under such a
+coverlet at night. In every other direction lay the cypress jungle; and
+whether they saw the front or back of Longfer Hill, and on which side
+the river ran, steering for which they could steer for home, they had
+not the skill to say. Thus, what way to go they still were undecided,
+when, at something moving near them, they started to their feet in a
+faint terror, delaying only a single instant to gaze at it,--a serpent,
+that, coiled round the stem above, had previously seemed nothing but a
+splendid parasite, and that just lifted its hooded head crusted with
+gems, and flickered a long cleft tongue of flame over them, while
+loosening in great loops from its basking-place. They vouchsafed it no
+second look, but, with one leap over the log, through the black mire,
+and from clump to clump of moss, sped away,--if that could be called
+speed which was hindered at each moment by waylaying briers and
+entangling ropes of blossoming vines, by delays in threatening quagmires
+and bewilderments in thickets beset by clouds of insects, by trips and
+stumbles and falls and bruises, and many a pause for tears and
+complaints and ejaculations of despair.
+
+Meanwhile the heat of the day was mitigated by thin clouds sliding over
+the sun and banking up the horizon, though the hot wind still blew
+sweetly and steadily from the open quarter of the sky.
+
+"Oh, what has become of us?" cried Miss Emma at length, when the shadows
+began to thicken, and out of the impenetrable forest and morass about
+them they could detect no path.
+
+"We's los' into de swamp, Miss Emma," answered Flor, in a kind of gloomy
+defiance of the worst of it,--"da' 's all."
+
+"And here we shall die!" cried the other.
+
+And she flung herself, face down, upon the floor.
+
+Flor was beside her instantly, taking her head upon her knee. Her own
+heart was sinking like lead; but she plucked it up, and for the other's
+sake snapped her fingers at Fortune.
+
+"Lors, Miss, dar's so many berries we caan' starve nowes. I's 'bout to
+build a fire soon's it's dark; dis yere's a dry spot, ye see now. An',
+bress you, dey'll be out after us afore mornin',--de whole farm-full."
+
+"With the dogs!" cried Miss Emma. "Oh, Floss, that I should live for
+that! to be hunted in the swamp with dogs!"
+
+Flor was silent a moment or two. The custom personally affected her for
+the first time; worse than the barbarity was the indignity.
+
+"Dey aren't trained to hunt for you, Miss Emma," she said, more gloomily
+than she had ever spoken before. "Dey knows de diff'unce 'tween de dark
+meat and de light."
+
+And then she laughed, as if her words meant nothing.
+
+"They never shall touch _you_, Flor, while I'm alive!" suddenly
+exclaimed Miss Emma, throwing her arms about her.
+
+"Lors, Miss, how you talk!" cried Flor, and then broke into a gust of
+tears. "To t'ink ob you a-carin' so much for a little darky, Miss!"--and
+she set up a loud howl of joyful sorrow.
+
+"You're the best friend I've got!" answered Miss Emma, hugging her with
+renewed warmth. "I love you worlds better than Agatha! And I'll never
+let you leave me! Oh, Flor! what shall we do?"
+
+Flor looked about her for reply, and then scrambled up a sycamore like a
+squirrel.
+
+It was apparently an island in the swamp on which they were: for the
+earth, though damp, was firm beneath them; and there was a thick growth
+of various trees about, although most were draped to the ground in the
+long, dark tresses of Spanish moss, waving dismally to and fro, with a
+dull, heavy motion of grief. On every other side from that by which they
+had come it appeared to be inaccessible, surrounded, as well as Flor
+could see, by glimmering sheets of water, which probably were too full
+of snags and broken stumps, still upright, for the navigation of boats
+by any hands but those thoroughly acquainted with their wide region of
+stagnant pools. This island was not, however, a small spot, but one that
+comprised a variety of surfaces, having not only marsh and upland within
+itself, but something that in the distance bore a fearful resemblance to
+a young patch of standing corn, a suspicion confirmed into certainty by
+a blue thread of smoke ascending a little way and falling again in a
+cloud. Once, upon seeing such a sight, Flor might have fallen to the
+ground herself,--this could be no less than the abode of those sad
+runaways, those mythical Goblins of the Swamp,--but it would have been
+because she had forgotten then that she was not one of the strong white
+race that reared her. Now, at this moment, she felt a thrill of kinship
+with these creatures, hunted for with bloodhounds, as she would be
+to-morrow, perhaps.
+
+"May-be I'll not go back," said Flor.
+
+She slipped down the tree, and went silently to work, heaping a bed of
+the hanging moss, less wet than the ground itself, for her young
+mistress. Miss Emma accepted it passively.
+
+"Oh, it's like sleeping on hearse-curtains!" was all she said.
+
+It was already evening, but growing darker with the clouds that went on
+piling their purple masses and awaiting their signal. Suddenly the
+sweet, soft breeze trembled and veered, there was a brief calm, and the
+wind had hauled round the other way. A silence of preparation, answered
+by a long, low note of thunder, and the war had begun in heaven.
+
+Miss Emma buried her face in the moss. But Flor, secretly relishing a
+good thunder-gust, drew up her knees and sat with equanimity, like a
+little black judge of the clouds; for, in the moment's dull, indifferent
+mood, she felt prepared for either fate. It was long before the rain
+came; then it plunged, a brief downfall, as if a cloud had been ripped
+and emptied,--a suffocating terror of rain, teeming with more appalling
+intimations than anything else in the world. But the wind was a blind
+tornado. The boughs swung over them and swept them; the swamp-water was
+lifted, and gluts of it slapped in Flor's face. She saw, not far away, a
+great solitary cypress rearing its head, and bearing aloft a broad
+eagle's nest, hurriedly seized in the grasp of the gale, twisted,
+raised, and snapped like a straw. The child began to shudder strangely
+at the breath of this blast that cried with such clamor out of the black
+vaults above, this unknown and tremendous power beneath which she was
+nothing but a mote; she suffered an unexplained awe, as if this fearful
+wind were some supernatural assemblage of souls fleeting through space
+and making the earth tremble under their wild rush. All the while the
+heavy thunders charged on high in one unbroken roar, across whose base
+sharp bolts broke and burst perpetually; and with the outer world
+wrapped in quivering curtains of blue flame, now and then a shaft of
+fire lanced its straight spear down the dense darkness of the woods
+behind in ghastly illumination, and a responsive spire shot up in some
+burning bush that blackened almost as instantly. Flor fancied that the
+lightning was searching for her, a runaway herself, and the burning bush
+answered, like a sentinel, that here she was. She cowered at length and
+sought the protection of the blind earth, full of awe and quaking, till
+by-and-by the last discharge, muffled and ponderous, rolled away, and,
+save for a muttered growl in some far distant den, the world was still
+and dark again.
+
+Flor spoke to her mistress, and found, that, utterly worn out with
+fatigue and fright and exhausted electricity, she was asleep. She then
+got up and wrung out the rain from portions of her own and Miss Emma's
+dress, and heaped fresh armfuls of moss upon the sleeper in an original
+attempt at the pack; then she proceeded to explore the neighborhood, to
+see if there were any exit in other directions from the terrors of the
+swamp.
+
+Stars began to struggle through and confuse their rays with the
+ravelled edges of the clouds. She groped along from tree to tree,
+looking constantly behind her at the clear, light opening of sky beneath
+which Miss Emma lay.
+
+Perhaps she had come farther than she knew; for all at once, in the
+dread stillness that nothing but the dripping dampness broke, a sound
+smote her like a pang. It was an innocent and simple sound enough, a
+man's voice, clear and sweet, though measured somewhat, and suppressed
+in volume, chanting a slow, sad hymn, that had yet a kind of rejoicing
+about it:--
+
+    "Oh, no longer bond in Egypt,
+    No longer bond in Egypt,
+    No longer bond in Egypt.
+      The Lord hath set him free!"
+
+It came from a hollow below her. Flor pushed aside the great, glistening
+leaves in silence, and looked tremblingly in. There were half-burnt
+brands on a broad stone, throwing out an uncertain red glimmer; there
+was an awning of plaited reeds reaching from bough to bough; there was
+an old man stretched upon the ground, and a stalwart man sitting beside
+him and chanting this song, as if it were a burial-service: for the old
+man was dead.
+
+Flor began to tremble again, with that instinctive animal antipathy to
+death and dissolution. But in an instant a rekindling gleam of the
+embers, hardly quenched, shot over the singer's face. In the same
+instant Flor shook before the secret she had learned, Sarp was a
+runaway, to be sure; and runaways ate little girls, she knew. But Flor,
+having lately encouraged incredulity, could hardly find it in her heart
+to believe that the fact of having stolen himself could have so utterly
+changed the old nature of Sarp, the kind butler, who always had a
+pleasant word for her when others had a cuff. Yet should she hail him?
+Ah, no, never! But then--Miss Emma! Her young mistress would die of
+starvation and the damp.
+
+"Sarp!" whispered Flor, huskily.
+
+The man started and sprang to his feet, alert and ready, waiting for his
+unseen enemy,--then half relapsed, thinking it might be nothing but the
+twitter of a bird.
+
+"It's me, Sarp."
+
+Who that was did not seem so plain to Sarp; he darted his swift glance
+in her direction, then at one step parted the bushes and dragged her
+through, as if it were game that he had trapped.
+
+"Oh, Sarp!" cried Flor, falling at his feet. "Doan' yer kill me now! I
+di'n' mean to ha' found yer. I's done los' in de swamp, wid"----
+
+But Flor thought better of that.
+
+The man raised her, but still held her out at arm's length, while he
+listened for further sound behind her.
+
+"Oh, jus' le' go, Sarp, an' I'll dance for you till I drap!" she cried.
+
+"Is it a time for dancing," he replied, "and the earth open for
+burying?"
+
+"Lors, Sarp!" cried Flor, shrinking from the shallow grave she had not
+seen, "how's I to know dat?"--and she gave herself safe distance.
+
+"Help me yere, then," said he.
+
+But Flor remained immovable, and Sarp was obliged to perform by himself
+the last offices for the old slave, who, living out his term of
+harassments and hungers, had grown gray and died in the swamps. He went
+at last and brought an armful of broken sweet-flowering boughs and
+spread them over the place.
+
+"Free among the dead," he said; then turned to Flor, who, having long
+since seen daylight through the darkness of her fears, proceeded glibly
+and volubly to pour out her troubles, on his beckoning her away, and to
+demand the help she had refused to render.
+
+"There's the boat," said Sarp, reflectively. "And the rain will float it
+'most anywheres to-night. But--come so far and troo so much to go back?"
+
+Flor flung up her face and held her head back proudly.
+
+"Yes, Sah! Doan' s'pose I'd be stealin' Mas'r Henry's niggers?"
+
+For, having meditated upon it an hour ago, she was able to repel the
+charge vigorously.
+
+"Go'n' to stay a slave all your life?"
+
+"All Miss Emma's life."
+
+"And--afterwards"----
+
+"Den I'll go back to de good brown earth wid her," said Flor, solving
+the problem promptly.--"I doan' see de boat."
+
+"Ah, she'll make as brown dust as you,--Miss Emma,--that's so! But the
+spirit, Lome!"
+
+"Sperit?" said Flor, looking uneasily over her shoulder with her
+twinkling eyes.
+
+"The part of you that doan' die, Lome."
+
+"I haan' nof'n ter do wid dat; dat 'longs to dem as made it; none o' my
+lookout; dono nof'n 'bout it, an' doan' want ter hear nof'n about it!"
+said Flor; for, reasoning on the old adage of a bird in the hand being
+worth two in the bush, she thought it more important just at present to
+save her body than to save her soul, admitting that she had one, and
+felt haste to be of more behoof than metaphysics.
+
+There was a moon up now, and Flor could see her companion's dark face
+above her, a mere mass of shade; it did not reassure her any to remember
+that her own was just as black.
+
+"Lome," said Sarp, setting his back against a tree like one determined
+to have attention, "never mind about the boat yet. You 've heard Aunt
+Zoë say how't the grace of the Lord was free?"
+
+"Yes, I's heerd her kerwhoopin'. I 's in a hurry, Sarp!"
+
+"But 's how't the man that refuses to accept it, when it's set before
+him, is done reckoned a sinner?"
+
+"S'pose I has?"--and in her impatience she began to dance outright.
+
+"It's jus' so with the present hour," he continued, not giving her time
+to interpose about escape again. "You have liberty offered you. If you
+refuses, how can you answer for it when your spirit 'pears afore the
+Judge? You choose him, and you choose righteousness, you chooses the
+chance to make yourself white in the Lord's eyes,--your spirit, Lome.
+Refuse, and you take sin and chains and darkness; you gets to deserve
+the place where they hab their share of fire and brimstone."
+
+"Take mine wid 'lasses," said Flor, who, though inwardly a trifle cowed,
+never meant to show it. "W'a' 's de use o' boderin' 'bout all dat ar,
+w'en dar 's Miss Emma a-cotchin' her deff, an' I 's jus' starved? Ef you
+'s go'n' to help us, Sarp"----
+
+"You don' know what chains means, chil'," said the imperturbable Sarp.
+"They're none the lighter because you can't see 'em. It a'n't jus' the
+power to sell your body and the work of your hands; it's the power to
+sell your soul! Ef Mas'r Henry hab de min',--ef Mas'r Henry have the
+mind, I say, to make you go wrong, can you help it while you 's a
+slave?"
+
+"'Taan' no fault o' mine ter be bad, ef I caan' help it. Come now," said
+Flor sullenly, seeing little hope of respite,--"should t'ink 'twas de
+Ol' Sarpint hisself!"
+
+"And 'taan' no virtue of yours to be good, ef you caan' help it; you 'd
+jus' stay put--jus' between--in de brown earth, as you said. You 'd
+never see that beautiful land beyond the grave, wid the river of light
+flowing troo der place, an' the people singing songs before the great
+white t'rone."
+
+"Tell me 'bout dat ar, Sarp," said Flor, forgetfully.
+
+"Dey 's all free there, Lome."
+
+"How was dis dey got dere? Could n' walk nowes, an' could n' fly"----
+
+"Haan' you seen into Miss Emma's prayer-book the angels with wings high
+and shining all from head to foot?"
+
+"Yes," said Flor,--"_Angels_."
+
+"And one of them you 'll be, Lome, ef you jus' choose,--ef, for
+instance, you choose liberty to-day."
+
+"Lors now, Sarp, I doan' b'lieb a word you say! Get out wid yer
+conundrums! Likely story, little black nigger like dis yere am be put
+into de groun' an' 'come out all so great an' w'ite an' shinin'-like!"
+
+"'For God shall deliver my soul from the power of the grave.'
+_'Shall.'_ That's a promise,--a promise in the Book. Di'n't yer eber
+plant a bean, Lome,--little hard black bean? And did a little hard black
+bean come up? No, but two wings of leaves, and a white blossom jus'
+ready to fly itself, and so sweet you could smell it acrost de field. So
+they plant your body in the earth, Lome"----
+
+"You go 'long, Sarp! Ef you plant beans, beans come up," said Flor,
+decisively.
+
+This direct and positive confutation rather nonplussed Sarp, his theory
+not being able at once to assimilate his fact, and he himself feeling,
+that, if he pushed the comparison farther, he would reach some such
+atrocity as that, if the white and shining flower produced in its season
+again the black bean from which it sprung, so the white and shining soul
+must once more clothe itself in the same sordid, unpurified body from
+which it first had sprung. He had a vague glimmer that perhaps his
+simile was too material, and that this very body was the clay in which
+the springing, germinating soul was planted to bloom out in heaven, but
+dared not pursue it unadvised, for fear of the quicksands into which it
+might betray him. He merely tied a knot in the thread of his discourse
+by answering,--
+
+"Jus' so. The bean planted, the bean comes up. You planted, and what
+follows?"
+
+"I come up," said Flor, consentingly, and quite as if he had got the
+better of the discussion.
+
+Then he rose, and Flor led the way back to Miss Emma,--having first,
+upon Sarp's serious hesitation, pledged herself for Miss Emma's secrecy
+and gratitude with tears and asseverations.
+
+In spite of the fact that he had never meant nor cared to see it again,
+there was something pleasant to Sarp in the face of the sleeper upturned
+in a moonbeam. He stooped and lifted her tenderly, and laid her head on
+his shoulder. The young girl opened her eyes vacantly, but heard Flor's
+voice beside her still,--
+
+"Doan' ye be scaret now, honey! Bress you, 's a true frien': he'll get
+us shet ob dis yere swamp mighty sudd'n!"
+
+And soothed by the dreamy motion, entirely fatigued, borne swiftly along
+in strong arms, under the low, waving boughs in the dim forest darkness,
+she was drowsed again with slumber, from which she woke only on being
+placed in the bottom of a skiff to turn over into a deeper dream than
+before. Flor nodded triumphantly to her companion, in the beginning,
+keeping pace beside him with short runs,--there could be no fear of
+babble about that of which one knew nothing,--and took her seat at last
+in the boat as he directed, while with a long pole he pushed out into
+the deeper water away from the shadow of the shore, and then went
+steering between the jags and gnarls, that, half protruding from the
+dark expanses, seemed the heads of strange and preternatural monsters.
+Now and then a current carried them; now and then their boatman sculled,
+now and then in shallower places poled along; sometimes he rested, and
+in the intervals took occasion to continue his missionary labor upon
+Flor,--his first object being to convince her she had a soul, and his
+second that in bondage every chance to save that soul alive was against
+her. Then he drew slight pictures of a different way of things, such as
+had solaced his own imagination, rude, but happy idyls of freedom: the
+small house, one's own; the red light in the window, a guiding star for
+weary feet at night coming home to comfort and smiles and cheer; no
+dark, haunting fear of a hand to reach between one and those loved
+dearest; no more branding like cattle, manhood and womanhood
+acknowledged, met with help and welcome and kind hands, cringing no
+more, but standing erect, drinking God's free sunshine, and growing
+nearer heaven. How much or how little of all his dream poor Sarp
+realized, if ever he reached the land of his desire at all, Heaven only
+knows. But Flor listened to him as if he recited some delightful
+fairy-tale,--charming indeed, but all as improbable as though one were
+telling her that black was white. Then, too, there was another dream of
+Sarp's,--the dream of a whole race loosening itself from the clinging
+clod. Flor got a glimmer of his meaning,--only a glimmer; it made her
+heart beat faster, but it was so grand she liked the other best.
+
+So, creeping through narrow creeks, now they skirted the edges of the
+long, low, flat morass,--now wound round the giant trunk of a fallen
+tree that nearly bridged the pool whose dark mantle they severed,--now
+pushed the boat's head up into a wall of weeds, that bent back and let
+it through the deep cut flooded by the rain, where the wild growth shut
+off everything but the high hollow of a luminous sky, with
+ribbon-grasses and long prickly leaves brushing across their faces from
+either side, here and there a sudden dwarf palmetto bristling all its
+bayonets against the peaceful night, and all the way singular uncouth
+shapes of vegetation, like conjurations of magic, cutting themselves out
+with minuteness upon the vast clear background so darkly and weirdly
+that the voyagers seemed to be sliding along the shores of some new,
+strange under-world,--now they got out, and, wading ankle-deep in plashy
+bog, drew the boat and its slumberer heavily after them,--now went
+slowly along, afloat again, on the broad lagoons, which the moon, from
+the deep far heaven, shot into silver reaches, and, with the trees, a
+phantom company of shadows, weeping in their veils along the farther
+shore, with all the quaint outlines of darkness, the gauzy wings that
+flitted by, the sweet, wild scents across whose lingering current they
+drifted, the broad silence disturbed only by the lazy wash of a seldom
+ripple, made their progress, through heavy gloom and vivid light, an
+enchanted journey.
+
+At length they lifted overhanging branches, and glided out upon a sheet
+of open water, a little lake fed by natural springs; and here, paddling
+over to the outlet, a tide took them down a swift brook to the river.
+Sarp stemmed this tide, made the opposite bank of the brook, and paused.
+
+"Have you chosen, Lome?" said he. "Will you go back with me, and so on
+to the Happy Land of Freedom? Not that I'll have my own liberty till
+I've earned it,--till I've won a country by fighting for it. But I'll
+see you safe; and if I'm spared, one day I'll come to you. Will you go?"
+
+Flor hung back a moment. "I'd like to go, Sarp, right well," said she,
+twisting up the corner of her little tatter of an apron. "But dar am
+Miss Emma, you see."
+
+"We can leave her on the bank here. She'll be all right when de day
+breaks, and fin' the house herself. There's as good as she without a
+roof this night."
+
+"She's neber been use' to it. She would n' know a step o' de way. Oh,
+no, Sarp! I 'longs to Miss Emma; she could n' do widout me. She'd jus'
+done cry her eyes out an' die,--'way here in de wood. No, Sarp, I mus'
+take her back. She's delicate, Miss Emma is. I'd like to go right well,
+Sarp,--'ta'n't much ob a 'sapp'intment,--I's use' to 'em,--I'd like for
+to go wid you."
+
+Lingering, irresolute, she stood up in the swaying skiff, keeping her
+balance as if she were dancing; then, the motion, perhaps, throwing her
+back into her old identity, she sprang to the shore like a cat. Sarp
+laid Miss Emma beside her, and then shot away, back over all the
+desolate reaches and lonely shining pools; and Flor, with a little wail
+of despair, hid her face on the ground, that her weakened and bewildered
+little mistress might not see the flood of tears that wet the grass
+beneath it.
+
+It was between two and three o'clock in the morning, when, chilled,
+draggled, and dripping wet, they reached the house. Lights were moving
+everywhere about it: no one had slept there that night. There was a
+great shout from high and low as the two forlorn little objects crept
+into the ray. Miss Emma was met with severe reproaches, afterwards with
+tears and embraces; and cordial drinks and hot flannels were made ready
+for her in a trice. As for Flor, she was warmed after another
+fashion,--being sent off for punishment; and, in spite of the
+implorations of Miss Emma and the interference of Miss Agatha, the order
+was executed. It was the first time she had ever received such reward of
+merit in form; and though it was a slight affair, after all, the hurt
+and wrong rankled for weeks, and, instead of the gay, dancing imp of
+former days, henceforth a silent, sullen shadow slipped about and
+haunted all the dark places of the house.
+
+Mas'r Henry, being a native of Charleston, was also a gentleman of
+culture, and fond of the fine arts to some extent. Indeed, looking at it
+in a poetical view, the feudality of slavery, even more than the
+inevitable relation of property, was his strong tie to the institution.
+He had a contempt for modern progress so deeply at the root of his
+opinions that he was only half aware of it; and any impossible scheme to
+restore the political condition of what we call the Dark Ages, and
+retain the comforts of the present one, would have found in him a hearty
+advocate. One of his favorite books was a little green-covered volume,
+printed on coarse paper, and smelling of the sea which it had crossed: a
+book that seemed to bring one period of those past centuries up like a
+pageant,--so vividly, with all the flying dust of their struggle in the
+sunbeam before him, did its opulent vitality reproduce, in their
+splendors and their sins, the actual presences of those dead men and
+women, now more unreal substance than the dust of their shrouds. He
+liked to carry this mediaeval Iliad round with him, and, taking it out
+at propitious places, go jotting his pencil down the page. He had heard
+it called an incomprehensible puzzle of poetry; it gave him pleasure,
+then, to unriddle and proclaim it plain as print. He was thus
+delectating himself one day, while Flor, still in her phase of
+moodiness, stood behind Miss Agatha's chair; and, the passage pleasing
+him, he read it aloud to Miss Agatha, whom, in the absence of his son,
+her husband, he was wont to consider his opponent in the abstract,
+however dear and precious in the concrete.
+
+    "As, shall I say, some Ethiop, past pursuit
+    Of all enslavers, dips a shackled foot,
+    Burnt to the blood, into the drowsy, black,
+    Enormous watercourse which guides him back
+    To his own tribe again, where he is king;
+    And laughs, because he guesses, numbering
+    The yellower poison-wattles on the pouch
+    Of the first lizard wrested from its couch
+    Under the slime, (whose skin, the while, he strips
+    To cure his nostril with, and festered lip,
+    And eyeballs bloodshot through the desert blast,)
+    That he has reached its boundary, at last
+    May breathe; thinks o'er enchantments of the South,
+    Sovereign to plague his enemies, their mouth,
+    Eyes, nails, and hair; but, these enchantments tried
+    In fancy, puts them soberly aside
+    For truth, projects a cool return with friends,
+    The likelihood of winning mere amends
+    Erelong; thinks that, takes comfort silently,
+    Then from the river's brink his wrongs and he,
+    Hugging revenge close to their hearts, are soon
+    Offstriding to the Mountains of the Moon."
+
+Flor stood listening, with eyes that shone strangely out of the gloom of
+her face.
+
+"Well, child," said her master to Miss Agatha, "how does that little
+monodrame strike you? Which do you find preferable, tell me, Ashantee at
+home or Ashantee abroad? civilized or barbarized? the institution or the
+savage? Eh, Blossom," turning to Flor, "what do you think of the
+condition of that ancestor of yours?"
+
+"Mas'r Henry," said Flor, gravely, "he was free."
+
+"Eh? Free? What! are you bitten, too?"
+
+And Mas'r Henry laughed at the thought, and pictured to himself his
+dancer dancing off altogether, like the swamp-fire she was. Then his
+tone changed.
+
+"Flor," said he, sternly, "who has been talking to you lately? Do you
+know, Agatha? I have seen this for some time. I must learn what one
+among the hands it is that in these times dares breed disaffection."
+
+"No one's talked to me, Sah," said Flor,--"no one onter der place."
+
+"Some one off of it, then."
+
+"Mas'r Henry, I's been havin' my own t'oughts. Mas'r knows I could n'
+lebe Miss Emma nowes. Could n' tief her property nowes. But ef Mas'r
+Henry 'd on'y jus' 'sider an' ask li'l' Missy for to make dis chil' a
+presen' ob myse'f"----
+
+"So that's what it means!" And Mas'r Henry smiled a moment at the
+ludicrous idea presented to him.
+
+"Flor," said he then, abruptly, "I have never heard the whole of that
+night in the swamp. It must be told."
+
+"Lors, Sah! So long ago, I's done forgot it!"
+
+"You may have till to-morrow morning to quicken your memory."
+
+"Haan' nof'n' more to 'member, Mas'r."
+
+"You heard me. You have your choice to repeat it either now or to-morrow
+morning."
+
+"Could n' make suf'n', whar nof'n' was. Could n' tink o' nof'n' all ter
+once. Could n' tell nof'n' at all in a hurry," said Flor, with a
+twinkle. "Guess I'll take tell de mornin', any-wes, Mas'r." And she was
+off.
+
+And Mas'r Henry went, back to his book,--the watcher nodding on his
+spear,--and all the stormy scenes he expected soon to realize in his own
+life, when the sword of conscription had numbered his old head with the
+others.
+
+Flor went out from the presence defiant, as became a rebel.
+
+Although that special mode of martyrdom was not proper to the
+plantation, and Flor felt in herself few particles of the stuff of which
+martyrs are made, she was determined, that, as to telling so much as
+that Sarp was still in the swamp, let alone betraying the way to his
+late habitat,--even were she able,--she never would do it, though burned
+at the stake. The determination had a dark look; nevertheless, two
+glimmers lighted it: one was the hope, in a mistrust of her own
+strength, that Sarp had already gone; the other was a perception that
+the best way to keep Sarp's secret was to make off with it. She began to
+question what authority Mas'r Henry had to demand this secret from her;
+she answered in her own mind, that he had no authority at all;--then she
+was doubly determined that he should not have it. She had heard talk of
+chivalry at table and among guests; she had half a comprehension of what
+it meant; she wondered if this were not a case in point,--if it were,
+after all, the color, and not the sex, that weighed. That aroused her
+indignation, aroused also a feeling of race: she would not have changed
+color that moment with the fairest Circassian of a harem, could the
+white slave have appeared in all the dazzle of her beauty.--Mas'r Henry
+had called that man, of whom he read aloud to-day, her ancestor. She
+knew what that was, for she had heard Miss Emma boast of her
+progenitors. But he was free; then it followed that she was not a slave
+by nature, only by vicious force of circumstance. Mas'r Henry had no
+right to her whatever; instead of her stealing herself, he was the thief
+who retained her against her will. What could be the name of the country
+where that man had lived? It was somewhere a long way from this place,
+down the river, perhaps beyond the sea;--there were others there, then,
+still, most likely. Flor had an idea that among them she might be a
+superior, possibly received with welcome, invested with honors;--she
+lingered over the pleasant vision. But how was one ever to find the
+spot? Ah, that book of Mas'r Henry's would tell, if she could but take
+it away to those kind people Sarp had told of. So she meditated awhile
+on the curious travels with Sordello for a guide-book, till old
+affections smote her for having thought of taking the thing, when "Mas'r
+Henry set so by it," and she put the vision aside, endeavoring to recall
+in its place all that Sarp had told her of the North. She realized then,
+personally, what a wide world it was. Why should she stay shut in this
+one point upon it all: a hill and the fir wood behind her; marshes on
+this side; woods again on the other; low hills far away before her; out
+of them all, the dark torrent of the river showing the swift way to
+freedom and the great sea? She drew in a full breath, as if close air
+oppressed her.--A bird flew over her then, high above her head,
+careering in fickle circles, and at length sailing down out of sight far
+into other heavens. Flor watched him bitterly; she comprehended Zoë's
+scorn of her past content;--if only she had wings to spread! But Sarp
+had told her, that, if she went away, she would one day have wings. None
+of Sarp's other arguments weighed a doit,--but wings to roam with over
+this beautiful world! The liberty of vagabondage! She watched the clouds
+chasing one another through the sunny heaven, watched their shadows
+chasing along the fields and hills below; her heart burned that
+everything in the world should be more free than she herself. She felt
+the wind fanning over her on its way, she took the rich odors that it
+brought, she looked after the flower-petal that fluttered away with it,
+she saw the strong sunshine penetrating among the shadows of a jungly
+spot and catching a thousand points of color in the gloom, she
+recognized the constant fluent interchange among all the atoms of the
+universe;--why was she alone, capable of flight, chained to one
+spot?--She gazed around her at the squalor and the want, the brutish
+shapes and faces, her own no better, at the narrow huts; thought of the
+dull routine of work never to enrich herself, the possibility of
+purchase and cruelty;--she sprung to her feet, all her blood boiling; it
+seemed out of the question for her to endure it another moment.--Mas'r
+Henry had told her once that he could make his fortune with her dancing,
+if he chose; she stood as much in need of a fortune as Mas'r Henry,--why
+not make it for herself? why not be off and away, her own mistress,
+earning and eating her own bread, sending some day for Zoë, finding Sarp
+in those far-off happy latitudes?--It occurred to her, like a discovery
+of her own, that, doing the work she was bidden, taking the food she was
+given, whipped at will, and bought and sold, she was no better than one
+among the cattle of the place;--the sudden sense of degradation made
+even her dark cheek burn. She laid a hand down on the earth, her great
+Teraph, to see if it were possible it could still be warm and such a
+wrong done to her its child. Then, all at once, she understood that wood
+and river were open to her fugitive feet, and if she stayed longer in
+slavery, it was the fault of no one but herself.--She stood up, for some
+one called her; she obeyed the call with alacrity, for she found it in
+her power to do so or not as she chose. She felt taller as she stepped
+along, and held up her head with the dignity of personality. She
+acknowledged, perhaps, that she was no equal of Miss Emma's,--that the
+creative hand, making its first essay on her, rounded its complete work
+in Miss Emma; but she declared herself now no mere offshoot of the
+sod,--she was a human being, a being of beating pulses and affections,
+and something within her, stifled here, longing to soar and away.
+
+It was dark before Flor had ceased her novel course of thinking, pursued
+through all her little tasks,--beautiful star-lighted dark, full of
+broken breezes, soft and warm, and loaded with passionate spices and
+flower-breaths; she was alone again, under the shadows of the trees,
+entirely surrendered to her whirling fancies. In these few hours she had
+lived to the effect of years. She was neither hungry nor tired; she was
+conscious of but a single thing,--her whole being seemed effervescing
+into one wild longing after liberty. It was not that she could no longer
+brook control and be at the beck of each; it was a natural instinct,
+awakened at last in all the strength of maturity, that would not let her
+breathe another breath in peace unless it were her own,--that made her
+feel as though her chains were chafing into the bone,--that taught her
+the unutterable vileness and loathliness of bonds,--that convicted her,
+in being a slave, of being something foul upon the fair face of
+creation. She sat casting about for ways of escape. It was absurd to
+think she could again blunder on that secure retreat of the swamp before
+being overtaken; no boats ever passed along down the foaming river; if
+she were some little mole to hide and burrow in the ground till danger
+were over,--but no, she would rather front fear and ruin than lose one
+iota of her newly recognized identity. But there was no other path of
+safety; she clutched the ground with both hands in her powerlessness; in
+all the heaven and earth there seemed to be nothing to help her.
+
+So at last Flor rose; since she could not get away, she must stay; as
+for the next day's punishment, she could laugh at it,--it was not its
+weight, but its wickedness, that troubled her; but escape, some time,
+she would. Lying in wait for method, ambushed for opportunity, it would
+go hard, if all failed. Of what value would life be then? she could but
+throw that after. So at some time, that was certain, she would
+go,--when, it was idle to say; it might be years before affairs were
+more propitious than now,--but then, at last, one day, the place that
+had known her should know her no more. Nevertheless, despite all this
+will and resolution, the heart of the child had sunk like a plummet at
+thought of leaving everything, at fear of future fortune; this
+deferring, after all, was half like respite.
+
+Flor drew near the out-door fire, where Zoë and one or two others busied
+themselves. Something excited them extremely, it was plain to see and
+hear. Flor, beyond the circle of the light, strained her ears to listen.
+It was only a crumb of comfort that she obtained, but one of those
+miraculous crumbs to which there are twelve baskets of fragments: the
+Linkum gunboats were down at the mouth of the river. Oh! heaven a boat's
+length off! A day and night's drifting and rowing; then climbing the
+side slaves, treading the deck freemen,--the shackles fallen, the hands
+loosened, the soul saved!
+
+But the boat? There was not such a thing along these banks. Improvise
+one. That was not possible. Flor listened, and the wild gasps of hope
+died out again into the dulness of despair. Some other time,--not this.
+As she stood still, idly and hopelessly hearkening to the mutter of the
+old women, with the patches of flickering fire-light falling on their
+faces in strange play and revelation, there stole upon her ear a sweeter
+and distincter sound, the voice of Miss Agatha, as, leaning out upon the
+night, she sang a plaint that consorted with her melancholy mood,
+learned in her Northern home in happier hours, without a thought of the
+moment of misery that might make it real.
+
+    Sooner or later the storms shall beat
+    Over my slumber from head to feet;
+    Sooner or later the winds shall rave
+    In the long grass above my grave.
+
+    I shall not heed them where I lie,
+    Nothing their sound shall signify,
+    Nothing the headstone's fret of rain,
+    Nothing to me the dark day's pain.
+
+    Sooner or later the sun shall shine
+    With tender warmth on that mound of mine;
+    Sooner or later, in summer air,
+    Clover and violet blossom there.
+
+    I shall not feel in that deep-laid rest
+    The sheeted light fall over my breast,
+    Nor ever note in those hidden hours
+    The wind-blown breath of the tossing flowers.
+
+    Sooner or later the stainless snows
+    Shall add their hush to my mute repose;
+    Sooner or later shall slant and shift
+    And heap my bed with their dazzling drift.
+
+    Chill though that frozen pall shall seem,
+    Its touch no colder can make the dream
+    That recks not the sweet and sacred dread
+    Shrouding the city of the dead.
+
+    Sooner or later the bee shall come
+    And fill the noon with his golden hum;
+    Sooner or later on half-paused wing
+    The blue-bird's warble about me ring,--
+
+    Ring and chirrup and whistle with glee,
+    Nothing his music means to me,
+    None of these beautiful things shall know
+    How soundly their lover sleeps below.
+
+    Sooner or later, far out in the night,
+    The stars shall over me wing their flight;
+    Sooner or later my darkling dews
+    Catch the white spark in their silent ooze.
+
+    Never a ray shall part the gloom
+    That wraps me round in the kindly tomb;
+    Peace shall be perfect for lip and brow
+    Sooner or later,--oh, why not now!
+
+Little of this wobegone song touched Flor even enough to let her know
+there was some one in the world more wretched than herself. The last
+word, the last phrase, rang in her ears like a command,--now, why not
+now?--waiting for times and chances, hesitating, delaying, since go she
+must,--then why not now? What more did she need than a board and two
+sticks? Here they were in plenty. And with that, a bright thought, a
+fortunate memory,--the old abandoned scow! And if, after all, she
+failed, and went to watery death, did not the singer tell in how little
+time all would be quiet and oblivious once again? Oh, why not now?
+
+Perhaps Flor would never have been entirely subjected to this state of
+mind but for an injury that she had suffered. Miss Emma had been
+rendered ill by the night's exposure in the swamp. In consequence of her
+complicity in this crime, Flor had been excluded from her young
+mistress's room during her indisposition, and ever since had not only
+been deprived of her companionship, but had not even been allowed to
+look upon her from a distance. A single week of that made life a desert.
+Too proud to complain, Flor saw in this the future, and so recognized,
+it may be, that it would be easy to part from the place, having already
+parted with Miss Emma. She drew nearer to the group now, and stood there
+long, while they wondered at her, gazing into the fire, her head fallen
+upon her breast. There was only one thing more to do: her little
+squirrel; nothing but her front of battle had kept it safe this many a
+day; were she once gone, it would be at the mercy of the first gridiron.
+Nobody saw the tears, in the dark and the distance, fast falling over
+the tiny sacrifice; but the cook might have guessed at them, when Flor
+brought her last offering, and begged that it might be prepared and
+taken in to Miss Emma.
+
+How many things there were to do that evening! One wanted water, and
+another wanted towels, and a third wanted everything there was to want.
+Last of all, little Pluto came running with his unkindled torch,--Mas'r
+Henry wanted dancing.
+
+Flor rummaged for her castanets, her tambourine, her ankle-rings,--they
+had all been thrown hither and thither,--and at length, as Pluto's torch
+flared up, ran tinkling along the turf, into the glow; and her voice
+broke, as she danced, into high, clear singing, triumphant singing, that
+welled up to the very sky, and made the air echo with sweetness. As she
+sang, all her slender form swayed to the tune, posturing, gesturing,
+bending now, now almost soaring, while, falling in showers of twinkling
+steps, her fleet feet seemed to weave their way on air. What ailed the
+girl? all asked;--such a play of emotion of mingled sorrow and ecstasy,
+never before had been interpreted by measure; so a disembodied spirit
+might have danced, and her dusky hue, the strange glancing lights thrown
+upon her here and there by the torch, going and coming and glittering at
+pleasure, made her appear like a shadow disporting before them. At
+length and slowly, note by note, with wild lingering turns to which the
+movement languished, her tone fell from its lofty jubilance to a happy
+flute-like humming; she waved her arms in the mimic tenderness of
+repeated and passionate farewells; then, still humming, faint and low
+and sweet, tripped off again, through the glow, along the turf, into the
+shadow, and out of sight; and it seemed to the beholders as if a
+fountain of gladness had gushed from the sod, and, playing in the light
+a moment, had run away down to join the river and the breaking sea.
+
+Mas'r Henry called after Flor to throw her a penny; but she failed to
+reappear, and he tossed it to Pluto instead, and forgot about her.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So, bailed out and stuffed with marsh-grass in its crazy cracks, the old
+scow was afloat, the rope was cut, and by midnight it went drifting down
+the river. Waist-deep in shoal water, its appropriator had dragged it
+round inside the channel's ledge of rocks, with their foam and
+commotion, to the somewhat more placid flow below, and now it shot away
+over the smooth, slippery surface of the stream, that gave back
+reflections of the starbeams like a polished mirror.
+
+Terrified by the course along the rapid river, the little creature
+crouched in the bottom of the scow, now breathless as it sped along the
+slope, now catching at the edge as in some chance eddy or flow it
+swirled from side to side, or, spinning quite round, went down the other
+way. But by-and-by gathering courage, she took her station, kneeling
+where with the long poles, previously provided, she could best direct
+her galley and avoid the dangers of a castaway. Peering this way and
+that through the darkness, carried along without labor, spying countless
+dangers where none existed, passing safely by them all, coming into a
+strange region of the river, she began to feel the exhilaration of
+venturous voyagers close upon unknown shores; the rush of the river and
+the rustle of the forest were all the sounds she heard; she was speeding
+alone through the darks of space to find another world. But, with time,
+a more material sensation called her back,--her feet were wet. What if
+the scow should founder! She flew to the old sun-dried gourd, and bailed
+away again till her arms were tired. When she dared leave the gourd, she
+was more calmly floating along and piercing an avenue of mighty gloom;
+the river-banks had reared themselves two walls of stone, and over them
+a hanging forest showed the heavens only like a scarf of stars caught
+upon its tree-tops and shaking in the wind. The deep loneliness made
+Flor tremble; the water that upbuoyed her was blackness itself; the way
+before her was impenetrable; far up above her opened that rent of
+sky,--so far, that she, a little dark waif among such tremendous
+shadows, was all unguessed by any guardian eye.
+
+But not for heaven itself bodily before her would she have turned about,
+she who was all but free. The thought of that rose in her heart like
+strong wings beating onward;--feverishly she followed.
+
+Flor perceived now that the old scow was being borne along with a
+strong, steady-motion, unlike its first fitful drift; it brought her
+heart to her throat,--for just so, it seemed to her, would a torrent set
+that was hastening to plunge over the side of the earth. She remembered,
+with a start of cold horror, Zoë's dim tradition of a fall far off in
+the river. She had never seen one, but Zoë had stamped its terrors
+deeply. Still down in the gloom itself she could see nothing but the
+slowly lightening sky overhead, the drowning stars, the rosy flush upon
+the dark old tips feathering against a dewy grayness that was like
+powdered light. But gradually she heard what conquered all necessity of
+seeing,--heard a continuous murmurous sound that filled all the air and
+grew to be a sullen roar. It seemed like the dread murmur from the world
+beyond the grave, the roar in earthly ears of that awful silence. Flor's
+quick senses were not long at fault. She seized her poles, and with all
+her might endeavored to push in towards the side and out of the main
+channel. Straws would have availed nearly as much; far faster than she
+went in shore she drove down stream. It was getting to be morning
+twilight all below; a soft, damp wind was blowing in her face; in the
+distance she could see, like the changing outline of a phantom, a low
+cloud of mist, wavering now on this side, now on that, but forever
+rising and falling and hovering before her. She knew what it was. If she
+could only bring her boat to that bank,--precipice though it was,--there
+must be some broken piece to catch by! She toiled with all her puny
+strength, and the great stream laughed at her and roared on. Suddenly,
+what her wildest efforts failed to do, the river did itself,--dividing
+into twenty currents for its plunge, some one of the eddies caught the
+old scow in its teeth and sent it whirling along the inmost current of
+all, close upon the shore. The rock, whose cleft the river had
+primevally chosen, was here more broken than above; various edges
+protruded maddeningly as Flor skimmed by almost within reach. Twice she
+plucked at them and missed. One flat shelf, over which the thin water
+slipped like a sheet of molten glass, remained and caught her eye; she
+was no longer cold or stiff with terror, but frantic to save herself; it
+was the only chance, the last; shooting by, she sprang forward, pole in
+hand, touched it, fell, caught a ledge with her hands while the fierce
+flow of the water lifted her off her feet, scrambled up breathlessly and
+was safe, while the scow swept past, two flashing furlongs, poised a few
+moments after on the brink of the fall, went majestically over, and came
+up to the surface below in pieces.
+
+Flor wrung her hands in dismay. She had not understood her situation
+before. There was no escape now, it seemed,--not even to return. Nothing
+was possible save starving to death on this ledge,--and after that, the
+vultures. She sat there for a little while in a kind of stupor. She saw
+the light falling slowly down, as it had fallen millions of mornings
+before, and bringing out all blue and purple shadows on the wet old
+rock; she saw the current ever hurrying by to join the tumult of the
+cataract; she heard the deep, sweet music of the waters like a noisy
+dream in her ears. With the shock of her wreck coming at the instant
+when she fancied herself so swiftly and securely speeding on towards
+safety and freedom, she felt indifferent to all succeeding fate. What if
+she did die? who was she? what was she? nothing but an atom. What odds,
+after all? The solution of her soliloquy was, that, before the first ray
+of sunshine reached down and smote the dark torrent into glancing
+emerald, she began to feel ravenously hungry, and found it a great deal
+of odds, after all. She rose to her feet, grasping cautiously at the
+slippery rock, and searched about her. There was another ledge close at
+hand, corresponding to the one on which she stood; she crept forward and
+transferred herself, with an infinitude of tremors, from this to that;
+there was a foothold just beyond; she gained it. Up and down and all
+along there were other projections, just enough for a hand, a foot: a
+wet and terrible pathway; to follow it might be death, to neglect it
+certainly was. What had she danced for all her days, if it had not made
+her sure and nimble footed? Under her the foam leaped up, the spectral
+mist crept like an icy breath, the spray sprinkled all about her,
+swinging herself along from ledge to ledge, from jag to jag, like a
+spider on a viewless thread. Now she hung just above the fall, looking
+down and longing to leap, with nothing but a shining laurel-branch
+between her and the boiling pits below; now, at last, a green hillside
+sloped to the water's edge, sparkling across all its solitude with ten
+thousand drops of dew, a broad, blue morning heaven bent and shone
+overhead, and having raced the river in the moment's light-heartedness
+of glee at her good hap, she sat some rods below, looking up at the fall
+and dipping her bleeding and blistered feet in and out of the cool and
+rapid-running river.
+
+What was there now to do? To go back,--to go back,--not if she were torn
+by lions! That was as impossible for her as to reverse a fiat of
+creation. God had said to her,--"Let there be light." How could she,
+then, return to darkness? To keep along on land,--it might be weeks
+before she reached the quarter of the gunboats,--she would be seized as
+a stray, and lodged in jail, and sold for whom it might concern. But
+with her scow gone to pieces, what other thing was there to do? So she
+sat looking up at the spurting cascades, with their horns of silver
+leaping into the light, and all the clear brown and beryl rush of their
+crystalline waters, and longing for her scow. If she had so much as the
+bit of bark on which the squirrels crossed the river! She looked again
+about her for relief. The rainbow at the foot of all the falls, in its
+luminous, steady arch, seemed a bridge solid enough for even her little
+black feet, had one side of the stream been any surer haven than the
+other; and as she sought out its bases, her eye lighted on something
+curiously like a weed swaying up and down. She picked her way to it, and
+found it wedged where she could loosen it,--two planks still nailed to a
+stout crossbar. She floated it, and held it fast a moment. What if she
+trusted to it,--with neither sail nor rudder, as before, but now with
+neither oar nor pole? On shore, for her there were only ravening wolves;
+waterfalls were no worse than they, and perhaps there were no more
+waterfalls. She stepped gingerly upon the fragment, seated and balanced
+herself, paddled with her two hands, and thought to slip away. In spite
+of everything, a kind of exultation bubbled up within her,--she felt as
+if she were defying Destiny itself.
+
+When, however, Flor intrusted herself to the stream, the stream received
+the trust and seemed inclined to keep it; for there she stayed: the
+planks tilted up and down, the water washed over her, but there were the
+falls at nearly the same distance as when she embarked, and there they
+stayed as well. The water, too, was no more fresh and sweet, but had a
+salt and brackish taste. The sun was nearly overhead, and she was in an
+agony of apprehension before she saw the falls slide slowly back, and in
+one of a fresh succession of wonders, understanding nothing of it, she
+found herself, with a strange sucking heave under her, falling on the
+ebb-tide as before she had fallen on the mountain-current.
+
+Gentle undulations of friendly hills seemed now to creep by; and through
+their openings she caught glimpses of cotton-fields. There was a wicked
+relish in her thoughts, as she pictured the dusky laborers at work
+there, and she gliding by unseen in the idle sunshine. She passed again
+between high banks of red earth, scored by land-slides, with springs
+oozing out half-way up, and now and then clad in a mantle of vivid
+growth and color,--a thicket of blossoming pomegranate darkening on a
+sunburst of creamy dogwood, or a wild fig-tree sending its roots down to
+drink, with a sweet-scented and gorgeous epiphyte weaving a flowery
+enchantment about-them, and making the whole atmosphere reel with
+richness. But all this verdant beauty, the lush luxuriance of
+grape-vines, of dark myrtle-masses, of swinging curtains of convolvuli
+almost brushing her head as she floated by,--nothing of this was new to
+Flor, nothing precious; she could have given all the beauty of earth and
+heaven for a crust of bread just then. She thought of the plantation
+with a dry sob, but would not turn her face. She could not move much,
+indeed, her position was so ticklish; hardy wretch as she was, she had
+already become faint and famished: she contrived, resting her arms on
+the crossbar, at last, to lay her head upon them; and thus lying,
+perpetually bathed by the soft, warm dip and rise of the water, the pain
+of hunger left her, and she saw the world waft by like a dream.
+
+Slowly the evening began to fall. Flor marked the bright waters dim and
+put on a bloomy purple along which rosy and golden shadows wandered and
+mingled, stars looked timidly up from beneath her, and just over her
+shoulder, as if all the daylight left had gathered in that one little
+curved line, lay the suspicion of the tenderest new moon, like some
+boatman of the skies essaying to encourage her with his apparition as he
+floated lightly down the west. Flor paid heed to the spectacle in its
+splendid quiet but briefly; her eyes were fixed on a great trail of
+passion-flowers that blew out a gale of sweetness from their broad blue
+disks. She had reached that hanging branch, lavishly blossoming here on
+the wilderness, and had hung upon the tide beneath it for a while, till
+she found herself gently moving back again; and now she swung slightly
+to and fro, neither making nor losing headway, and, fond of such
+sensuous delights, half content to lie thus and do nothing but breathe
+the delicious odor stealing towards her, and resting in broad airy
+swaths, it seemed, upon the bosom of the stream around her. By-and-by,
+when the great blue star, that last night at the zenith seemed to
+suspend all the tented drapery of the sky, hung there large and lovely
+again, Flor, gazing up at it with a confused sense of passion-flowers in
+heaven, half woke to find herself sliding down stream at last in
+earnest. Her brain was very light and giddy; all her powers of
+perception were momentarily heightened; she took notice of her seesawing
+upon the ebb and flow, and understood that washing up and down the
+shores, a mere piece of driftwood, life would long have left her ere she
+attained the river's mouth, if she were not stranded by the way. The
+branch of a cedar-tree came dallying by with that, brought down from
+above the falls; she half rose, and caught at it, and fell back, but she
+kept hold of it by just a twig, and, fatigued with the exertion, drowsed
+away awhile. Waking again, after a little, her fingers still fast upon
+it, she drew it over, fixed it upright as she could, and spread her
+petticoat about it at the risk of utter capsize. The soft sweet wind
+beat against the sail as happily as if it had been Cleopatra's weft of
+purple silk, and carried her on, while she lay back, one arm around her
+jury-mast, and half indifferently unconscious again. She had meant, on
+reaching the gunboats,--ah, inconceivable bliss!--to win her way with
+her feet; with willowy graces and eloquent pantomime, to have danced
+along the deck and into favor trippingly: now, if she should have
+strength enough left to fall on her knees, it would be strange. She
+clung to the crossbar in a little while from blind habit; the rest of
+her body seemed light and powerless. She was neither asleep nor awake
+now, suffering nothing save occasionally a wild flutter of hope which
+was joy and anguish together; but all things began mingling in her mind
+in a species of delirium while she gave them attention, afterwards slid
+by blank of all meaning but beauty. The lofty cypresses on the edge
+above loomed into obelisks, and stood like shafts of ebony against a
+glow of sunrise that stirred down deep in the night; dew-clouds, it
+seemed, hung on them, and lifted and lowered when their veils of moss
+waved here and there; the glistering laurel-leaves shivered in a network
+of light and shade like imprisoned spirits troubling to be free; but
+where the great magnolias stood were massed the white wings of angels
+fanning forth fragrances untold and heavenly, and one by one slowly
+revealing themselves in the dawn of another day. It seemed as if great
+and awful spirits must be leading this little being into light and
+freedom.
+
+So the river lapsed along, and the sun blazed, and a torture of thirst
+came and went as it had come and gone before; and sometimes swiftly,
+sometimes slowly, the veering winds and the pendulous tides carried the
+wreck and its burden along. Flor had planned, before she started, that
+all her progress should be made by night; by day she would haul up among
+the tall rushes or under the lee of some stump or rock, and so escape
+strange sail and spying eyes. But there had been no need of this, for no
+other boat had passed up or down the river since she sailed. If there
+had, she could no more have feared it. She stole by a high deserted
+garden, the paling broken half away. A tardy almond-tree was stirring
+its tower of bloom in the sunshine up there; oranges were reddening on
+an overhanging bough, whose wreaths of snowy sweetness made the air a
+passionate delight; a luscious fruit dropped, with all its royal gloss,
+into the river beside her, and she could not put out a hand to catch it.
+She saw now all that passed, but no longer with any afterthoughts of
+reference to herself; so sights might slip across the retina of a dead
+man's eye; her identity seemed fading from her, as from some substance
+on the point of dissolution into the wide universe. She felt like one
+who, under an ćsthetic influence, seems to himself careering through
+mid-air, conscious only of motion and vanishing forms. Cultured uplands
+and thick woods peopled with melodies all stole by, mere picture; the
+long snake of the river crept through green meadowy shores haunted by
+the cluck and clutter of the marsh-hen; from a bluff of the bank broke a
+blaze of fire and a yelping roar, and something slapped and skipped
+along the water,--a ball from a Rebel battery to bring the strange craft
+to,--others followed and danced like demons through the hissing tide
+that rocked under her and plunged up and down, tilting and turning and
+half drowning the wreck. Flor looked at them all with wide eyes, at the
+battery and at the bluff, and went by without any more sensation than
+that dazed quiet in which, at the time, she would have gone down to
+death with the soft waters laying their warm weight on her head, not
+even thanking Fortune that in giving her a slippery plank gave her
+something to elude either canister or catapult. Occasionally she felt a
+pain, a strange parched pain; it burned awhile, and left her once more
+oblivious. She slept a little, by fits and starts; sometimes the very
+stillness stirred her. She listened and heard the turtle plumping down
+into the stream, now and then the little fishes leaping and plashing,
+the eels slipping in and out among the reeds and sedges at the side; far
+away in the broad marshes, that, bathed in dim vapor, now lay all about
+her, the cry of a bittern boomed; she saw a pair of herons flapping
+inland over the gray swell of the water; there were some great purple
+phantoms, darkly imagined monsters; looming near at hand:--all the
+phantasmagoria drifted by,--and then, caught in the currents playing
+forever by noon or night round the low edges of sand-bars and islets,
+she was sweeping out to sea like chaff.
+
+The sun was going down, a mere redness in the curdling fleecy haze; the
+weltering seas rose and fell in broad sheets of burnished silver, the
+monotone of their music followed them, a cool salt wind blew over them
+and freshened them for storm. Flor rose on her arm and looked back,--the
+breeze roused her; pain and fear and hope rose with her and looked back
+too. Eager, feverish, fierce, recollecting and desiring and imprecating,
+her dry lips parted for a shriek that the dryer throat had at first no
+power to utter. In such wild longing pangs it seemed her heart would
+burst as it beat. The low land, the great gunboats, all were receding,
+and she was washing out to sea, a weed.--Well, then, wash!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The stem of the boat rose lightly, riding over the rollers; the sturdy
+arms kept flashing stroke; the great gulfs gaped for a life, no matter
+whose; night would darken down on them soon;--pull with a will!
+
+They heard her voice as they drew near: she had found it again, singing,
+as the swan sings his death-song, loud and clear,--singing to herself
+some song of her old happy dancing-days, while the spray powdered over
+her and one broad wave lifted and tossed her on to the next,--no note of
+sorrow in the song, and no regret.
+
+It was but brief delay beside her; then they pulled back, the wind
+piping behind them,--nearer to that purple cloud with its black plume of
+smoke, up the side and over; all the white faces crowding round her,
+pallid blots; one dark face smiling on her like Sarp's; friendship and
+succor everywhere about her; and over her, blowing out broadly upon the
+stormy wind, that flag whose starry shadow nowhere shelters a slave.
+
+
+
+
+ABRAHAM LINCOLN.
+
+SUMMER, 1865.
+
+
+    Dead is the roll of the drums,
+      And the distant thunders die,
+      They fade in the far-off sky;
+    And a lovely summer comes,
+      Like the smile of Him on high.
+
+    Lulled the storm and the onset.
+      Earth lies in a sunny swoon;
+      Stiller splendor of noon,
+    Softer glory of sunset,
+      Milder starlight and moon!
+
+    For the kindly Seasons love us;
+      They smile over trench and clod,
+    (Where we left the bravest of us,)--
+      There's a brighter green of the sod,
+    And a holier calm above us
+      In the blesséd Blue of God.
+
+    The roar and ravage were vain;
+      And Nature, that never yields,
+    Is busy with sun and rain
+    At her old sweet work again
+      On the lonely battle-fields.
+
+    How the tall white daisies grow
+      Where the grim artillery rolled!
+    (Was it only a moon ago?
+      It seems a century old,)--
+
+    And the bee hums in the clover,
+      As the pleasant June comes on;
+    Aye, the wars are all over,--
+      But our good Father is gone.
+
+    There was tumbling of traitor fort,
+      Flaming of traitor fleet,--
+    Lighting of city and port,
+      Clasping in square and street.
+
+    There was thunder of mine and gun,
+      Cheering by mast and tent,--
+    When--his dread work all done,
+    And his high fame full won--
+      Died the Good President.
+
+    In his quiet chair he sate,
+      Pure of malice or guile,
+    Stainless of fear or hate,--
+      And there played a pleasant smile
+    On the rough and careworn face;
+      For his heart was all the while
+    On means of mercy and grace.
+
+    The brave old Flag drooped o'er him,
+      (A fold in the hard hand lay,)--
+      He looked, perchance, on the play,--
+    But the scene was a shadow before him,
+      For his thoughts were far away.
+
+    'Twas but the morn, (yon fearful
+      Death-shade, gloomy and vast,
+      Lifting slowly at last,)
+      His household heard him say,
+    "'Tis long since I've been so cheerful,
+      So light of heart as to-day."
+
+    'Twas dying, the long dread clang,--
+      But, or ever the blesséd ray
+      Of peace could brighten to-day,
+      Murder stood by the way,--
+    Treason struck home his fang!
+    One throb--and, without a pang,
+      That pure soul passed away.
+
+    Idle, in this our blindness,
+      To marvel we cannot see
+      Wherefore such things should be,
+    Or to question Infinite Kindness
+      Of this or of that Decree,
+
+    Or to fear lest Nature bungle,
+      That in certain ways she errs:
+    The cobra in the jungle,
+        The crotalus in the sod,
+      Evil and good are hers;--
+      Murderers and torturers!
+        Ye, too, were made by God.
+
+    All slowly heaven is nighing,
+      Needs that offence must come;
+    Ever the Old Wrong dying
+    Will sting, in the death-coil lying,
+      And hiss till its fork be dumb.
+
+    But dare deny no further,
+      Black-hearted, brazen-cheeked!
+    Ye on whose lips yon murther
+      These fifty moons hath reeked,--
+
+    From the wretched scenic dunce,
+      Long a-hungered to rouse
+    A Nation's heart for the nonce,--
+    (Hugging his hell, so that once
+      He might yet bring down the house!)--
+
+    From the commons, gross and simple,
+      Of a blind and bloody land,
+        (Long fed on venomous lies!)--
+      To the horrid heart and hand
+        That sumless murder dyes,--
+    The hand that drew the wimple
+        Over those cruel eyes.
+
+    Pass on,--your deeds are done,
+    Forever sets your sun;
+      Vainly ye lived or died,
+    'Gainst Freedom and the Laws,--
+    And your memory and your cause
+      Shall haunt o'er the trophied tide
+
+    Like some Pirate Caravel floating
+      Dreadful, adrift--whose crew
+    From her yard-arms dangle rotting,--
+      The old Horror of the blue.
+
+    Avoid ye,--let the morrow
+      Sentence or mercy see.
+    Pass to your place: our sorrow
+    Is all too dark to borrow
+      One shade from such as ye.
+
+    But if one, with merciful eyes,
+    From the forgiving skies
+      Looks, 'mid our gloom, to see
+    Yonder where Murder lies,
+    Stripped of the woman guise,
+      And waiting the doom,--'tis he.
+
+    Kindly Spirit!--Ah, when did treason
+      Bid such a generous nature cease,
+    Mild by temper and strong by reason,
+      But ever leaning to love and peace?
+
+    A head how sober! a heart how spacious!
+      A manner equal with high or low;
+    Rough, but gentle; uncouth, but gracious;
+      And still inclining to lips of woe.
+
+    Patient when saddest, calm when sternest,
+      Grieved when rigid for justice' sake;
+    Given to jest, yet ever in earnest,
+      If aught of right or truth were at stake.
+
+    Simple of heart, yet shrewd therewith;
+      Slow to resolve, but firm to hold;
+    Still with parable and with myth
+      Seasoning truth, like Them of old;
+    Aptest humor and quaintest pith!
+      (Still we smile o'er the tales he told.)
+
+    And if, sometimes, in saddest stress,
+      That mind, over-meshed by fate,
+      (Ringed round with treason and hate,
+    And guiding the State by guess,)
+      Could doubt and could hesitate,--
+    Who, alas! had done less
+      In the world's most deadly strait?
+
+    But how true to the Common Cause!
+      Of his task how unweary!
+    How hard he worked, how good he was,
+      How kindly and cheery!
+
+    How, while it marked redouble
+      The howls and hisses and sneers,
+    That great heart bore our trouble
+      Through all these terrible years,--
+
+    And, cooling passion with state,
+      And ever counting the cost,
+    Kept the Twin World-Robbers in wait
+      Till the time for their clutch was lost!
+
+    How much he cared for the State,
+      How little for praise or pelf!
+    A man too simply great
+      To scheme for his proper self.
+
+    But in mirth that strong heart rested
+      From its strife with the false and violent,--
+    A jester!--So Henry jested,
+      So jested William the Silent.
+
+    Orange, shocking the dull
+      With careless conceit and quip,
+    Yet holding the dumb heart full
+      With Holland's life on his lip![D]
+
+    Navarre, bonhomme and pleasant,
+      Pitying the poor man's lot,
+    Wishing that every peasant
+      A chicken had in his pot;
+
+    Feeding the stubborn bourgeois,
+      Though Paris still held out;
+    Holding the League in awe,
+      But jolly with all about.
+
+    Out of an o'erflowed fulness
+      Those deep hearts seemed too light,--
+    (And so 'twas, murder's dulness
+      Was set with sullener spite.)
+
+    Yet whoso might pierce the guise
+      Of mirth in the man we mourn
+    Would mark, and with grieved surprise,
+      All the great soul had borne,
+    In the piteous lines, and the kind, sad eyes
+      So dreadfully wearied and worn.
+
+    And we trusted (the last dread page
+      Once turned of our Doomsday Scroll)
+      To have seen him, sunny of soul,
+    In a cheery, grand old age.
+
+    But, Father, 'tis well with thee!
+      And since ever, when God draws nigh,
+    Some grief for the good must be,
+      'Twas well, even so to die,--
+
+    'Mid the thunder of Treason's fall,
+      The yielding of haughty town,
+    The crashing of cruel wall,
+      The trembling of tyrant crown!
+
+    The ringing of hearth and pavement
+      To the clash of falling chains,--
+    The centuries of enslavement
+      Dead, with their blood-bought gains!
+
+    And through trouble weary and long
+      Well hadst thou seen the way,
+    Leaving the State so strong
+      It did not reel for a day;
+
+    And even in death couldst give
+      A token for Freedom's strife,--
+    A proof how republics live,
+      And not by a single life,
+
+    But the Right Divine of man,
+      And the many, trained to be free,--
+    And none, since the world began,
+      Ever was mourned like thee.
+
+    Dost thou feel it, O noble Heart!
+      (So grieved and so wronged below,)
+    From the rest wherein thou art?
+    Do they see it, those patient eyes?
+    Is there heed in the happy skies
+      For tokens of world-wide woe?
+
+    The Land's great lamentations,
+      The mighty mourning of cannon,
+        The myriad flags half-mast,--
+    The late remorse of the nations,
+      Grief from Volga to Shannon!
+        (Now they know thee at last.)
+
+    How, from gray Niagara's shore
+      To Canaveral's surfy shoal,--
+    From the rough Atlantic roar
+      To the long Pacific roll,--
+      For bereavement and for dole,
+    Every cottage wears its weed,
+      White as thine own pure soul,
+    And black as the traitor deed!
+
+    How, under a nation's pall,
+      The dust so dear in our sight
+        To its home on the prairie passed,--
+    The leagues of funeral,
+      The myriads, morn and night,
+        Pressing to look their last!
+
+    Nor alone the State's Eclipse;
+      But how tears in hard eyes gather,--
+    And on rough and bearded lips,
+    Of the regiments and the ships,--
+      "Oh, our dear Father!"
+
+    And methinks of all the million
+      That looked on the dark dead face,
+    'Neath its sable-plumed pavilion,
+      The crone of a humbler race
+    Is saddest of all to think on,
+      And the old swart lips that said,
+    Sobbing, "Abraham Lincoln!
+      Oh, he is dead, he is dead!"
+
+    Hush! let our heavy souls
+      To-day be glad; for agen
+    The stormy music swells and rolls
+      Stirring the hearts of men.
+
+    And under the Nation's Dome,
+      They've guarded so well and long,
+    Our boys come marching home,
+      Two hundred thousand strong.
+
+    All in the pleasant month of May,
+      With war-worn colors and drums,
+    Still, through the livelong summer's day,
+      Regiment, regiment comes.
+
+    Like the tide, yesty and barmy,
+      That sets on a wild lee-shore,
+    Surge the ranks of an army
+      Never reviewed before!
+
+    Who shall look on the like agen,
+      Or see such host of the brave?
+    A mighty River of marching men
+        Rolls the Capital through,--
+      Rank on rank, and wave on wave,
+        Of bayonet-crested blue!
+
+    How the chargers neigh and champ,
+    (Their riders weary of camp,)
+      With curvet and with caracole!--
+    The cavalry comes with thundrous tramp,
+      And the cannons heavily roll.
+
+    And ever, flowery and gay,
+    The Staff sweeps on in a spray
+      Of tossing forelocks and manes;
+    But each bridle-arm has a weed
+    Of funeral, black as the steed
+      That fiery Sheridan reins.
+
+    Grandest of mortal sights
+      The sun-browned ranks to view,---
+    The Colors ragg'd in a hundred fights,
+      And the dusty Frocks of Blue!
+
+    And all day, mile on mile,
+    With cheer, and waving, and smile,
+    The war-worn legions defile
+      Where the nation's noblest stand;
+    And the Great Lieutenant looks on,
+      With the Flower of a rescued Land,--
+    For the terrible work is done,
+    And the Good Fight is won
+      For God and for Fatherland.
+
+    So, from the fields they win,
+      Our men are marching home,
+      A million are marching home!
+    To the cannon's thundering din,
+      And banners on mast and dome,--
+    And the ships come sailing in
+      With all their ensigns dight,
+      As erst for a great sea-fight.
+
+    Let every color fly,
+      Every pennon flaunt in pride;
+    Wave, Starry Flag, on high!
+    Float in the sunny sky,
+      Stream o'er the stormy tide!
+    For every stripe of stainless hue,
+    And every star in the field of blue,
+    Ten thousand of the brave and true
+      Have laid them down and died.
+
+    And in all our pride to-day
+      We think, with a tender pain,
+    Of those so far away,
+      They will not come home again.
+
+    And our boys had fondly thought,
+      To-day, in marching by,
+    From the ground so dearly bought,
+    And the fields so bravely fought,
+      To have met their Father's eye.
+
+    But they may not see him in place,
+      Nor their ranks be seen of him;
+    We look for the well-known face,
+      And the splendor is strangely dim.
+
+    Perished?--who was it said
+      Our Leader had passed away?
+    Dead? Our President dead?--
+      He has not died for a day!
+
+    We mourn for a little breath,
+      Such as, late or soon, dust yields;
+    But the Dark Flower of Death
+      Blooms in the fadeless fields.
+
+    We looked on a cold, still brow:
+      But Lincoln could yet survive;
+      He never was more alive,
+    Never nearer than now.
+
+    For the pleasant season found him,
+      Guarded by faithful hands,
+      In the fairest of Summer Lands:
+    With his own brave Staff around him,
+      There our President stands.
+
+    There they are all at his side,
+      The noble hearts and true,
+      That did all men might do,--
+    Then slept, with their swords, and died.
+
+    Of little the storm has reft us
+      But the brave and kindly clay
+    ('Tis but dust where Lander left us,
+      And but turf where Lyon lay).
+
+    There's Winthrop, true to the end,
+      And Ellsworth of long ago,
+      (First fair young head laid low!)
+    There 's Baker, the brave old friend,
+      And Douglas, the friendly foe:
+
+    (Baker, that still stood up
+      When 'twas death on either hand:
+    "'Tis a soldier's part to stoop,
+      But the Senator must stand.")
+
+    The heroes gather and form:--
+      There's Cameron, with his scars,
+    Sedgwick, of siege and storm,
+      And Mitchell, that joined his stars.
+
+    Winthrop, of sword and pen,
+      Wadsworth, with silver hair,
+    Mansfield, ruler of men,
+      And brave McPherson are there.
+
+    Birney, who led so long,
+      Abbott, born to command,
+    Elliott the bold, and Strong,
+      Who fell on the hard-fought strand.
+
+    Lytle, soldier and bard,
+      And the Ellets, sire and son,
+    Ransom, all grandly scarred,
+    And Redfield, no more on guard,
+      (But Alatoona is won!)
+
+    Reno, of pure desert,
+      Kearney, with heart of flame,
+    And Russell, that hid his hurt
+      Till the final death-bolt came.
+
+    Terrill, dead where he fought,
+      Wallace, that would not yield,
+    And Sumner, who vainly sought
+      A grave on the foughten field
+
+    (But died ere the end he saw,
+      With years and battles outworn).
+    There's Harmon of Kenesaw,
+    And Ulric Dahlgren, and Shaw,
+      That slept with his Hope Forlorn.
+
+    Bayard, that knew not fear,
+      (True as the knight of yore,)
+    And Putnam, and Paul Revere,
+      Worthy the names they bore.
+    Allen, who died for others,
+      Bryan, of gentle fame,
+    And the brave New-England brothers
+      That have left us Lowell's name.
+
+    Home, at last, from the wars,--
+      Stedman, the staunch and mild,
+      And Janeway, our hero-child,
+    Home, with his fifteen scars!
+
+    There's Porter, ever in front,
+      True son of a sea-king sire,
+    And Christian Foote, and Dupont
+    (Dupont, who led his ships
+    Rounding the first Ellipse
+      Of thunder and of fire).
+
+    There's Ward, with his brave death-wounds,
+      And Cummings, of spotless name,
+    And Smith, who hurtled his rounds
+      When deck and hatch were aflame;
+
+    Wainwright, steadfast and true,
+      Rodgers, of brave sea-blood,
+    And Craven, with ship and crew
+      Sunk in the salt sea flood.
+
+    And, a little later to part,
+      Our Captain, noble and dear--
+      (Did they deem thee, then, austere?
+    Drayton!--O pure and kindly heart!
+      Thine is the seaman's tear.)
+
+    All such,--and many another,
+      (Ah, list how long to name!)
+    That stood like brother by brother,
+      And died on the field of fame.
+
+    And around--(for there can cease
+      This earthly trouble)--they throng,
+    The friends that had passed in peace,
+      The foes that have seen their wrong.
+
+    (But, a little from the rest,
+      With sad eyes looking down,
+      And brows of softened frown,
+    With stern arms on the chest,
+    Are two, standing abreast,--
+      Stonewall and Old John Brown.)
+
+    But the stainless and the true,
+      These by their President stand,
+    To look on his last review,
+      Or march with the old command.
+
+    And lo, from a thousand fields,
+      From all the old battle-haunts,
+    A greater Army than Sherman wields,
+      A grander Review than Grant's!
+
+    Gathered home from the grave,
+      Risen from sun and rain,--
+    Rescued from wind and wave,
+      Out of the stormy main,--
+    The Legions of our Brave
+      Are all in their lines again!
+
+    Many a stout Corps that went,
+    Full-ranked, from camp and tent,
+      And brought back a brigade;
+    Many a brave regiment,
+      That mustered only a squad.
+
+    The lost battalions,
+      That, when the fight went wrong,
+    Stood and died at their guns,--
+      The stormers steady and strong,
+
+    With their best blood that bought
+      Scarp, and ravelin, and wall,--
+    The companies that fought
+      Till a corporal's guard was all.
+
+    Many a valiant crew,
+      That passed in battle and wreck,--
+    Ah, so faithful and true!
+      They died on the bloody deck,
+    They sank in the soundless blue.
+
+    All the loyal and bold
+      That lay on a soldier's bier,--
+      The stretchers borne to the rear,
+    The hammocks lowered to the hold.
+
+    The shattered wreck we hurried,
+      In death-fight, from deck and port,--
+    The Blacks that Wagner buried,
+      That died in the Bloody Fort!
+
+    Comrades of camp and mess,
+      Left, as they lay, to die,
+    In the battle's sorest stress,
+      When the storm of fight swept by:
+    They lay in the Wilderness,--
+      Ah, where did they not lie?
+
+    In the tangled swamp they lay,
+      They lay so still on the sward!--
+    They rolled in the sick-bay,
+    Moaning their lives away;--
+      They flushed in the fevered ward.
+
+    They rotted in Libby yonder,
+      They starved in the foul stockade,--
+    Hearing afar the thunder
+      Of the Union cannonade!
+
+    But the old wounds all are healed,
+      And the dungeoned limbs are free,--
+    The Blue Frocks rise from the field,
+      The Blue Jackets out of the sea.
+
+    They've 'scaped from the torture-den,
+      They've broken the bloody sod,
+    They're all come to life agen!--
+    The Third of a Million men
+      That died for Thee and for God!
+
+    A tenderer green than May
+      The Eternal Season wears,--
+    The blue of our summer's day
+      Is dim and pallid to theirs,--
+    The Horror faded away,
+      And 'twas heaven all unawares!
+
+    Tents on the Infinite Shore!
+      Flags in the azuline sky,
+    Sails on the seas once more!
+      To-day, in the heaven on high,
+    All under arms once more!
+
+    The troops are all in their lines,
+      The guidons flutter and play;
+    But every bayonet shines,
+      For all must march to-day.
+
+    What lofty pennons flaunt?
+    What mighty echoes haunt,
+      As of great guns, o'er the main?
+      Hark to the sound again!
+    The Congress is all-ataunt!
+      The Cumberland's manned again!
+
+    All the ships and their men
+      Are in line of battle to-day,--
+    All at quarters, as when
+      Their last roll thundered away,--
+    All at their guns, as then,
+      For the Fleet salutes to-day.
+
+    The armies, have broken camp
+      On the vast and sunny plain,
+      The drums are rolling again;
+    With steady, measured tramp,
+      They're marching all again.
+
+    With alignment firm and solemn,
+      Once again they form
+    In mighty square and column,--
+      But never for charge and storm.
+
+    The Old Flag they died under
+      Floats above them on the shore,
+    And on the great ships yonder
+      The ensigns dip once more,--
+    And once again the thunder
+      Of the thirty guns and four!
+
+    In solid platoons of steel,
+      Under heaven's triumphal arch,
+    The long lines break and wheel;
+      And the word is, "Forward, march!"
+
+    The colors ripple o'erhead,
+      The drums roll up to the sky,
+    And with martial time and tread
+      The regiments all pass by,--
+    The ranks of our faithful Dead,
+      Meeting their President's eye.
+
+    With a soldier's quiet pride
+      They smile o'er the perished pain,
+      For their anguish was not vain,--
+    For thee, O Father, we died!
+      And we did not die in vain.
+
+    March on, your last brave mile!
+      Salute him, Star and Lace,
+    Form round him, rank and file,
+      And look on the kind, rough face;
+    But the quaint and homely smile
+      Has a glory and a grace
+    It never had known erewhile,--
+      Never, in time and space.
+
+    Close round him, hearts of pride!
+    Press near him, side by side,--
+      Our Father is not alone!
+    For the Holy Right ye died,
+    And Christ, the Crucified,
+      Waits to welcome his own.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[D] "His temperament was cheerful. At table, the pleasures of which in
+moderation were his only relaxation, he was always animated and merry;
+and this jocoseness was partly natural, partly intentional. In the
+darkest hours of his country's trial, he affected a serenity he was far
+from feeling; so that his apparent gayety at momentous epochs was even
+censured by dullards, who could not comprehend its philosophy, nor
+applaud the flippancy of William the Silent. He went through life
+bearing the load of a people's sorrows with a smiling face."--Motley's
+_Rise of the Dutch Republic_.
+
+Perhaps a lively national sense of humor is one of the surest exponents
+of advanced civilization. Certainly a grim sullenness and fierceness
+have been the leading traits of the Rebellion for Slavery; while
+Freedom, like a Brave at the stake, has gone through her long agony with
+a smile and a jest ever on her lips.
+
+
+
+
+REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
+
+
+_Letters to Various Persons_, By HENRY D. THOREAU. Boston:
+Ticknor & Fields.
+
+The prose of Thoreau is daily winning recognition as possessing some of
+the very highest qualities of thought and utterance, in a degree
+scarcely rivalled in contemporary literature. In spite of whim and
+frequent over-refining, and the entire omission of many important
+aspects of human life, these wondrous merits exercise their charm, and
+we value everything which lets us into the workshop of so rare a mind.
+These letters, most of which were addressed to a single confidential
+friend, give us Thoreau's thoughts in undress, and there has been no
+previous book in which we came so near him. It is like engraving the
+studies of an artist,--studies many of which were found too daring or
+difficult for final execution, and which must be shown in their original
+shape or not at all. To any one who was more artist than thinker this
+exhibition would be doing wrong; but to one like Thoreau, more thinker
+than artist, it is an act of justice.
+
+The public, being always eager for the details of personal life, and
+therefore especially hungry for private letters, will hardly make this
+distinction. All is held to be right which gives us more personality in
+print. One can fancy the exasperation of a gossip, however, on opening
+these profound and philosophic leaves. There is almost no private
+history in them; and even of Thoreau's beloved science of Natural
+History, very little. He does, indeed, begin one letter with "Dear
+Mother, ... Pray have you the seventeen-year locust in Concord?" which
+recalls Mendelssohn's birthday letter to his mother, opening with two
+bars of music. But even such mundane matters as these occur rarely in
+the book, which is chiefly made up of pure thought, and that of the
+highest and often of the most subtile quality.
+
+Thoreau had, in literature as in life, a code of his own, which, if
+sometimes lax where others were stringent, was always stringent in
+higher matters, where others were lax. Even the friendship of Emerson
+could not coerce him into that careful elaboration which gives dignity
+and sometimes a certain artistic monotony to the works of our great
+essayist. Emerson never wilfully leaves a point unguarded, never allows
+himself to be caught in undress. Thoreau spurns this punctiliousness,
+and thus impairs his average execution; while for the same reason he
+attains, in favored moments, a diction more flowing and a more lyric
+strain than his teacher ever allows himself, at least in prose. He also
+secures, through this daring, the occasional expression of more delicate
+as well as more fantastic thoughts. And there is an interesting passage
+in these letters where he rather unexpectedly recognizes the dignity of
+literary art as art, and states very finely its range of power. "To look
+at literature,--how many fine thoughts has every man had! how few fine
+thoughts are expressed! Yet we never have a fantasy so subtile and
+ethereal, but that _talent merely_, with more resolution and faithful
+persistency, after a thousand failures, might fix and engrave it in
+distinct and enduring words, and we should see that our dreams are the
+solidest facts that we know." The Italics are his own, and the glimpse
+at his literary method is very valuable.
+
+One sees also, in these letters, how innate in him was that grand
+simplicity of spiritual attitude, compared with which most confessions
+of faith seem to show something hackneyed and second-hand. It seems the
+first resumption--unless here again we must link his name with
+Emerson's--of that great strain of thought of which Epictetus the slave
+and Marcus Aurelius Antoninus the sovereign were the last previous
+examples. Amid the general _Miserere_, here is one hymn of lofty cheer.
+There is neither weak conceit nor weak contrition, but gratitude for
+existence, and a sublime aim. "My actual life," he says, "is a fact in
+view of which I have no occasion to congratulate myself; but for my
+faith and aspiration I have respect. It is from these that I speak.
+Every man's position is, in fact, too simple to be described.... I am
+simply what I am, or I begin to be that.... I know that I am. I know
+that another is who knows more than I, who takes interest in me, whose
+creature, and yet whose kindred, in one sense, am I. I know that the
+enterprise is worthy. I know that things work well. I have heard no bad
+news." (p. 45.)
+
+"Happy the man," he elsewhere nobly says, "who observes the heavenly
+and the terrestrial law in just proportion; whose every faculty, from
+the soles of his feet to the crown of his head, obeys the law of its
+level; who neither stoops nor goes on tiptoe, but lives a balanced life,
+acceptable to Nature and to God." And then he manfully adds,--"These
+things I say; other things I do." Manfully, not mournfully; for his
+life, though in many ways limited, was never, in any high sense,
+unsuccessful; nor did he ever assume for one moment the attitude of
+apology.
+
+These limitations of his life no doubt impaired his thought also, in
+certain directions. The letters might sometimes exhibit the record of
+Carlyle's lion, attempting to live on chicken-weed. Here is a man of
+vast digestive power, who, prizing the flavor of whortleberries and wild
+apples, insists on making these almost his only food. It is amazing to
+see what nutriment he extracts from them; yet would not, after all, an
+ampler bill of fare have done better? Is there not something to be got
+from the caucus and from the opera, which Thoreau abhorred, as well as
+from the swamps which he justly loved? Could he not have spent two hours
+rationally in Boston elsewhere than at the station-house of the railway
+that led to Concord? His habits suggest a perpetual feeling of privation
+and effort, and he has to be constantly on the alert to repel
+condolence. This one-sidedness of result is a constant drawback on the
+reader's enjoyment, and it is impossible to leave it out of sight. Yet
+all criticism seems like cavilling, when one comes upon a series of
+sentences like these:--
+
+"Do what you love.... Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good
+for something. All fables, indeed, have their morals; but the innocent
+enjoy the story. Let nothing come between you and the light. Respect men
+as brothers only. When you travel to the Celestial City, carry no letter
+of introduction. When you knock, ask to see God,--none of the servants.
+In what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions; know
+that you are alone in the world." (p. 46.)
+
+This suggests those wonderful strokes in the "Indenture" in "Wilhelm
+Meister," and Goethe cannot surpass it.
+
+His finest defence of his habitual solitude occurs in these letters
+also, and has some statements whose felicitousness can hardly be
+surpassed. "As for any dispute about solitude and society, any
+comparison is impertinent.... It is not that we love to be alone, but
+that we love to soar; and when we do soar, the company grows thinner and
+thinner, till there is none at all. It is either the tribune on the
+plain, a sermon on the mount, or a very private ecstasy still higher up.
+We are not the less to aim at the summits, though the multitude does not
+ascend them. Use all the society that will abet you." (p. 139.)
+
+And since the unsocial character of Thoreau's theory of life has been
+one of the most serious charges against it, his fine series of thoughts
+on love and marriage in this volume become peculiarly interesting. "Love
+must be as much a light as a flame." "Love is a severe critic. Hate can
+pardon more than love." "A man of fine perceptions is more truly
+feminine than a merely sentimental woman." "It is not enough that we are
+truthful; we must cherish and carry out high purposes to be truthful
+about." These are sentences on which one might spin commentaries and
+scholia to the end of life; and there are many others as admirable.
+
+His few verses close the volume,--few and choice, with a rare flavor of
+the seventeenth century in them. The best poem of all, "My life is like
+a stroll upon the beach," is not improved by its new and inadequate
+title, "The Fisher's Boy." The three poems near the end, "Smoke,"
+"Mist," and "Haze," are marvellous triumphs of language; the thoughts
+and fancies are as subtile as the themes, and yet are embodied as
+delicately and accurately as if uttered in Greek.
+
+
+_France and England in North America._ A Series of Historical
+Narratives. By FRANCIS PARKMAN, Author of "History of the
+Conspiracy of Pontiac," "Prairie and Rocky Mountain Life," etc. Part
+First. Pioneers of France in the New World. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co.
+
+It has been known for nearly a score of years within our literary
+circles, that one of the richest and least wrought themes of our
+American history had been appropriated by the zeal and research of a
+student eminently qualified by nature, culture, and personal experience
+to develop its wealth of interest. While very many among us may have
+been aware that Mr. Parkman had devoted himself to the task of which we
+have before us some of the results, only a narrower circle of friends
+have known under what severe physical embarrassments and disabilities he
+has been restrained from maturing those results. He has fully and sadly
+realized, within his own different range, the experience which he so
+aptly phrases as endured by his hero, the adventurous and dauntless
+Champlain. When that great pioneer, midway in his splendid career, was
+planning one of his almost annual voyages hitherward, at one of the most
+emergent periods of his enterprise, he was seized on board his vessel in
+France with a violent illness, and reduced, as Mr. Parkman says, to that
+"most miserable of all conflicts, the battle of the eager spirit against
+the treacherous and failing flesh." Mr. Parkman has known well what
+these words mean. In his case, as in that of Champlain, it was not from
+the burden of years and natural decay, but from the touch of disease in
+the period of life's full vigor in its midway course, that mental
+activity was restrained. When, besides the inflictions of a racked
+nervous system, the author suffered in addition a malady of the eyes,
+which limited him, as he says, to intervals of five minutes for reading
+or writing, when it did not wholly preclude them, we may well marvel at
+what he has accomplished. And the reader will marvel all the more that
+the hindrances and pains under which the matter of these pages has been
+wrought have left no traces or transfer of themselves here. It may be
+possible that an occasional twinge or pang may have concentrated the
+terse narrative, or pointed the sharp and shrewd moralizings of these
+pages; for there is an amazing conciseness and a keen epigrammatic
+sagacity in them. But there is no languor, no feebleness, no sleepy
+prosiness, to indicate where vivacity flagged, and where an episode or
+paragraph was finished after the glow had yielded to exhaustion.
+
+Mr. Parkman's theme is one of adventure on the grandest scale, with
+novel conditions and elements, and under the quickening of master
+passions of a sort to give to incidents and achievements a most romantic
+and soul-absorbing interest. Only incidentally, and then most slightly,
+does he have to deal with state affairs, with court intrigues, or with
+diplomatic complications. He has to follow men into regions and scenes
+in which there is so much raw material, and so much of the originality
+of human conditions and qualities, that no precedents are of avail, and
+it is even doubtful whether there are principles that have authority to
+guide or that may be safely recognized. Nor could he have treated his
+grand theme with that amazing facility and skill, which, as his work
+manifests them, will satisfy all his readers that the theme belongs to
+him and he to it, had not his native tastes, his training, and his
+actual experience brought him into a most intelligent sympathy with his
+subject-matter. Without being an adventurer, in the modern sense of the
+term, he has the spirit which filled the best old sense of the word. He
+has been a wide traveller and an explorer. Familiar by actual
+observation with the scenes through which he has to follow the track of
+the pioneers whom he chronicles, he has also acquainted himself by
+foot-journeys and canoe-navigation under Indian guides with scenes and
+regions still unspoiled of their wilderness features. He has crossed the
+Rocky Mountains by the war-path of the savages, and penetrated far
+beyond the borders of civilization in the direction of the northern ice
+on our continent. He is skilled in native woodcraft, in the phenomena of
+the forest and the lake, the winding river and the cataract. He has
+watched the aspects of Nature through all the seasons in regions far
+away from the havoc and the finish of culture. He has been alone as a
+white man in the squalid lodges of the Indians, has lived after their
+manner up to the edge of the restraints which a civilized man must
+always take with him, and has consented to forego all that is meant by
+the word comfort, that he might learn actually what our
+transcendentalists and sentimentalists are so taken with theoretically.
+He knows the inner make and furnishings of the savage brain and heart,
+the qualities of their thought and passions, their superstitions,
+follies, and vices; and while he deals with them and their ways with the
+right spirit and consideration of a high-toned Christian man, he yields
+to no silly inventiveness of fancy or romance in portraying them. They
+are barely human, and they are hideous and revolting in his pages, as
+they are in real life. Mr. Parkman knows them for just what they are,
+and as they are. Helped by natural adaptation and sympathy to put
+himself into communication with them sufficiently to analyze their
+composition and to scan their range of being, he has presented such a
+portraiture and estimate of them as will be increasingly valuable while
+they are wasting away, to be known to future generations only by the
+record.
+
+It is through Mr. Parkman's keen observation and discernment, as a
+traverser of wild regions and a student of aboriginal life and
+character, that his pages are made to abound with such vivid and
+vigorous delineations. He has great skill in description, whether on a
+grand scale or in the minutest details of adventure or of scenery. He
+can touch by a phrase, most delicately or massively, the outline and the
+features of what he would communicate. He can strip from field,
+river-bank, hill-top, and the partially cleared forests all the things
+and aspects which civilization has superinduced, and can restore to them
+their primitive, unsullied elements. He gives us the aroma of the wild
+woods, the tints of tree, shrub, and berry as the autumn paints them,
+the notes and screams and howls of the creatures which held these haunts
+before or with man; and though we were reading some of his pages on one
+of the hottest of our dog-days, we felt a grateful chill come over us as
+we were following his description of a Canadian winter.
+
+Mr. Parkman's subject required, for its competent treatment, a vast
+amount of research and a judicious use of authorities in documents
+printed or still in manuscript. Happily, there is abundance of material,
+and that, for the most part, of prime value. The period which his theme
+covers, though primeval in reference to the date of our own English
+beginnings here, opens within the era when pens and types were
+diligently employed to record all real occurrences, and when rival
+interests induced a multiplication of narratives of the same events, to
+the extent even of telling many important stories in two very different
+ways. The element of the marvellous and the superstitious is so
+inwrought with the documentary history and the personal narratives of
+the time, exaggeration and misrepresentation were then almost so
+consistent with honesty, that any one who essays to digest trustworthy
+history from them may be more embarrassed by the abundance than he would
+be by the paucity of his materials. Our author has spared no pains or
+expense in the gathering of plans, pamphlets, and solid volumes, in
+procuring copies of unpublished documents, and in consulting all the
+known sources of information. He discriminates with skill, and knows
+when to trust himself and to encourage his readers in relying upon them.
+
+It has been with all these means for faithful and profitable work in his
+possession, gathered around him in aggravating reminders of their
+unwrought wealth, and with a spirit of craving ardor to digest and
+reproduce them, that Mr. Parkman has been compelled to suffer the
+discipline of a form of invalidism which disables without destroying or
+even impairing the power and will for continuous intellectual
+employment. Brief intervals of relief and a recent period of promise and
+hopefulness of full restoration have been heroically devoted to the
+production of that instalment of his whole plan which we have in the
+volume before us.
+
+That plan, as his first and comprehensive title indicates, covers a
+narration of the initiatory schemes and measures for the exploration and
+settlement of the New World by France and England. As France had the
+precedence in that enterprise, this first volume is fitly devoted to its
+rehearsal. The French story is also far more picturesque, more brilliant
+and sombre, too, in its details. There is more of the wild, the
+romantic, and the tragic in it. Mr. Parkman briefly, but strikingly,
+contrasts the spirit which animated and the fortunes which befell the
+representatives of the two European nations,--the one of which has
+wrought the romance, the other of which has moulded the living
+development, of North America.
+
+Under the specific title of this volume,--the "Pioneers of France in the
+New World,"--the author gives us historical narratives of stirring and
+even heroic enterprise in two localities at extreme points of our
+present territory: first, the story of the sadly abortive attempt made
+by the Huguenots to effect a settlement in Florida; and second, the
+adventures, undertakings, and discoveries of Champlain, his predecessors
+and associates, in and near Canada. The volume is touchingly dedicated
+to three near kinsmen of the author,--young men who in the glory and
+beauty of their youth, the joy and hope of parents who yielded the
+costly sacrifice, gave themselves to the deliverance of our country from
+the ruin plotted for it by a slave despotism.
+
+Mr. Parkman mentions--allowing to it in his brief reference all the
+weight which it probably deserves--a vague tradition, which, had it been
+sustained by fact, would have introduced an entirely new element into
+the conditions involved in the rival claims to the right of colonizing
+and possessing America, as practically contested by European nations.
+The Pope's Bull which deeded the whole continent to Spain, as if it
+were a farm, reinforced the claim already conventionally yielded to her
+through right of discovery. For anything, however, to the knowledge of
+which Columbus came before his death, or even his immediate successors
+before their death, all the parts of America which he saw or knew might
+have been insulated spaces, like those in which he actually set up
+Spanish authority. What might have been the issue for this continent, or
+rather for the spaces which it covers, had it been really divided by the
+high seas into three immense islands like Australasia, so that Spain,
+France, and England might have made an amicable division between them,
+would afford curious matter for speculation. The tradition referred to
+is, that the continent had been actually discovered by a Frenchman four
+years before the first voyage of Columbus hitherward. A vessel from
+Dieppe, while at sea off the coast of Africa, was said to have been
+blown to sight of land across the ocean on our shores. A mariner,
+Pinzon, who was on board of her, being afterwards discharged from French
+service in disgrace, joined himself to Columbus, and was with him when
+he made his great discovery. It may have been so. But the story,
+slenderly rooted in itself, has no support. Spain was the claimant, and,
+so far as the bold and repeated attempt of the Huguenots to contest her
+claims in Florida was thwarted by a diabolical, yet not unavenged
+ruthlessness of resistance, Spain made good her asserted right.
+
+Mr. Parkman sketches rapidly some preliminary details relating to
+Huguenot colonization in Brazil and early Spanish adventures. The zeal
+of the French Huguenots had anticipated that of the English Puritans in
+seeking a Transatlantic field for its development. A philosophical
+historian might find an engaging theme, in tracing to diversities of
+national character, to the aims which stirred in human spirits, and to
+fickle circumstances of date or place, the contrasted issues of failure
+and success in the different enterprises. To human sight or foresight,
+the Huguenots had the more hopeful omens at the start. But religious
+zeal and avarice, combined in a way most cunningly adapted to
+contravene, if that were possible, the Saviour's profound warning, "No
+man can serve two masters," were, after all, only combined in a way to
+bring them into the most shameful conflict. The Huguenot at the South
+shared with the Spaniard the lust for gold; and the backers alike of
+Roman and Protestant zeal in Canada divided their interest between the
+souls of the Indians and the furs and skins of wild animals.
+
+The heroic and the chivalric elements in the spirit and prowess of these
+early adventurers give a charm even to the narratives which reveal to us
+their fearful sufferings and their atrocities. Physically and morally
+they must have been endowed unlike those who now hoe fields, make shoes,
+and watch the wheels of our thrifty mechanisms. Avarice and zeal, the
+latter being sometimes substituted by a daring passion for the romantic,
+nerved men, and women too, to undertakings and endurances which shame
+our enfeebled ways. The partners in these enterprises were never
+homogeneous in character, as were eminently the Colonists of New
+England. They were of most mixed and discordant materials. Prisons were
+ransacked for convicts and desperadoes; humble artisans and peasants
+were accepted as laborers; roving mariners, whose only sure port of rest
+would be in the abyss, were bribed for transient service, the condition
+always exacted being that they must be ready for the nonce to turn
+landsmen for fighting in swamp or bush. These, with a sprinkling of
+young and impoverished nobles, and one or two really towering and master
+spirits, in whom either of the two leading passions was the spur, and
+who could win through court patronage a patent or a commission, made in
+every case, either South or North, the staple material of French
+adventure.
+
+After a graphic sketch of the line of Spanish notables in the New
+World,--of Ponce de Leon, of Garay, Ayllon, De Narvaez, and De
+Soto,--Mr. Parkman concisely reviews the successive attempts at a
+settlement in Florida by Frenchmen. His central figures here are Admiral
+De Coligny and his agents, Villegagnon, Ribaut, and Laudonničre. They
+had no fixed policy towards the Indians, and they followed the worst
+possible course with them. They wholly neglected tillage, and so were in
+constant peril of starvation. They were lawless and disorderly in their
+fellowship, and were always at the mercy of conspirators among
+themselves.
+
+Beginning about the year 1550, and embracing the quarter of a century
+following, there transpired on the coast of Florida a series of acts of
+mingled heroism and barbarity not easily paralleled in any chapter of
+the world's history. Menendez, under his commission as Adelantado,
+having effected the first European settlement in North America at St.
+Augustine, and the French having established a river fort named
+Caroline, the struggle which could not long have been deferred was
+invited. We have here a double narrative. While the French commander,
+Ribaut, is shipwrecked in an enterprise by sea against St. Augustine,
+Menendez, by land, after a most harassing tramp through forest and
+swamp, successfully assails Fort Caroline. Though he has pledged his
+honor to spare those who surrendered to his mercy, he foully breaks his
+pledge, as no faith was to be kept with heretics. A brutal massacre,
+which shocked even his Indian allies, signalized his victory. An
+inscription on the trees under which he slaughtered his victims
+announced that vengeance was wreaked on them, "not as Frenchmen, but as
+heretics."
+
+These atrocities were in their turn avenged, after a similar fashion and
+in the same spirit, by Dominique de Gourgues. It is doubtful whether he
+was a Huguenot; but he felt, as the French monarch and court did not,
+the rankling disgrace of this bloody catastrophe. An intense hater of
+the Spaniards, he gave his whole spirit of chivalry and prowess, in the
+approved fashion of the age, to avenge the insult to France. Providing
+himself with three small vessels, navigable by sail or oar, he gathered
+a fit company for his enterprise; but not till well on his way did he
+reveal to them his real purpose, in which they proved willing
+coadjutors. He found the Spaniards at their forts had alienated the
+Indians, who readily leagued with him. By a bold combination and a
+fierce onslaught he carries the Spanish works, and retaliates on his
+fiendish and now cowering prisoners by hanging them, "not as Spaniards,
+but as traitors, robbers, and murderers." De Gourgues came to do this,
+not to make another attempt for a permanent settlement in the interest
+of France. He therefore destroyed the forts, and with a friendly parting
+from his red allies, much to their sorrow, returned home. Thus closes
+one episode in the world's tragic history.
+
+Turning now towards the North, Mr. Parkman takes a comprehensive review
+of the hazy period of history covered by traditions and imperfect
+records, with vague relations of adventure by Normans, Basques, and
+Bretons, on fishing expeditions to Newfoundland and the main coast.
+These were followed by three exploring enterprises and partial
+settlements, between 1506 and 1518. Verrazzano, with four ships, coasted
+along our shores, and was for fifteen days the guest of some friendly
+Indians at Newport, the centre of our modern fashionable summer-life.
+Jaques Cartier made two voyages in 1534-5, gave the name of St. Lawrence
+to the river, and visited the sites of Quebec and Montreal. A third
+voyage was planned for 1541, to be followed by a reinforcement by J. F.
+de la Roque, Sieur de Roberval. Its arrival being delayed, the famished
+settlers, wasted by the scurvy, and dreading another horrid winter of
+untold sufferings, returned home. Roberval renewed the occupancy of
+Quebec, and then there is a chasm and a broken story.
+
+La Roche, in 1598, left forty convicts, adventurers in his crew, on
+Sable Island, merely for a temporary sojourn while he should coast on.
+Being blown back to France in his vessel, these forlorn exiles were left
+for five years on that dreary waste, and only twelve survivors then
+remained to be rescued. Some wild cattle that had propagated from
+predecessors left by luckless wanderers on a previous voyage, or which
+had swum ashore from a wreck, had furnished them a partial supply.
+Pontgravé and Chauvin attempted a settlement at Tadoussac, the dismal
+wilderness at the mouth of the Saguenay, thenceforward the rendezvous of
+European and Indian traders. All these were preliminary anticipations of
+the real occupancy of New France. Champlain, Poutrincourt, and
+Lescarbot, in 1607, established at Port Royal the first agricultural
+colony in the New World. Then began that series of futile and vexatious
+dealings on the part of the French court, in granting and withdrawing
+monopolies, conflicting commissions and patents, with confused purposes
+of feudalism and restricted privilege, which embarrassed all effective
+progress, and visited chagrin and disappointment on every devoted
+adventurer.
+
+The great picture on Mr. Parkman's canvas is Champlain. That really
+noble-souled, heroic, and marvellous man, whom our author appreciates,
+yet with sagacious discrimination presents to the life, is a splendid
+subject for his admirable rehearsal. At the age of thirty-three he
+becomes the most conspicuous, and, on the whole, the most intelligent,
+agent of the French interest in these parts of the world. Dying at
+Quebec at the age of sixty-eight, and after twenty-seven years of
+service to the colony, he had probably drawn his life through more and
+a greater variety of perils than have ever been encountered by man. He
+was dauntless and all-enduring, fruitful in resource, self-controlled
+and persevering, and, though not wiser than his age, purer and more
+true. He was as lithesome as an Indian, and could outdo him in some
+physical efforts and endurance. His almost yearly voyages between France
+and Quebec led him through strange contrasts of court and wilderness
+life; but he was the same man in both. His discovery of the lake which
+bears his name, his journey to Lake Huron, under the lure of the
+impostor Vignau, encouraging his own dream of a passage through the
+continent to India, and his many tramps for Indian warfare or discovery,
+are most attractive episodes for our author.
+
+Mr. Parkman relates incidentally the massacre in Frenchman's Bay, the
+efforts and cross purposes of the Recollets and the Jesuit missionaries,
+and furnishes a vivid sketch of the fortunes of the settlement under
+threatened assaults from Indians and in a temporary surrender to the
+English. He intimates the matter which he has yet in store. May we enjoy
+the coveted pleasure of reading it!
+
+
+_Hesperus, or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days._ A Biography. From the German of
+J. P. Fr. Richter. Translated by CHARLES T. BROOKS. In Two
+Volumes. Boston: Ticknor and Fields.
+
+This romance, the first work of Jean Paul's which won the attention of
+his countrymen, is called "Hesperus," apparently for no reason more
+definite than that the heroine, like a fair evening-star, beams over the
+fortunes of the other personages, and becomes at length the morning-star
+of one. The supplementary title of "Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days" is a
+quaint subdivision of the volumes into as many chapters, each of which
+is a "Dog-Post-Day," because it purports to be dispatched in a bottle
+round a dog's neck to an island within the whimsical geography which the
+author loved to construct, and in which he pretended to dwell. Truly,
+the ordinary _terra-firma_ was of little consequence for home-keeping
+purposes to Jean Paul, as the reader will doubtless confess before he
+has proceeded far through the maze of Extra Leaves, Intercalary Days,
+Extra Lines, Extra Shoots, and Extorted Anti-critique. And the divisions
+which are busied with the story, instead of carrying it forward, stray
+with it in all directions, like a genuine summer vagabond to whom direct
+travel is a crime against the season. Many charming things are gathered
+by the way; but if the reader is in haste to arrive, or thinks it would
+not be amiss at least to put up somewhere, his patience will be severely
+tried. We do not recommend the volumes for railway-reading, nor to
+clergymen for the entertainment of sewing-bees, nor to the devourer of
+novels, in whose life the fiction that must be read at one sitting forms
+an epoch. It is a good _vade-mecum_ for a voyage round either Cape; its
+digressive character suits the listless mood of the sea-goer, and he can
+drop, we will not say the thread, but the entanglement, in whatever
+watch he pleases.
+
+Let no one expect the critic to sketch the plot of this romance. It is a
+grouping of motives and temperaments under the names of men and women,
+concerning whom many subtile things are said and hinted; and they are
+pushed into and out of complicated situations, by stress of brilliant
+authorship, without lifting their fingers. There is no necessary
+development nor movement: the people are like the bits of glass which
+shake into the surprising patterns of the kaleidoscope. The relation of
+the parties to each other is a great mystification, bunglingly managed:
+we cannot understand at last how Victor, the hero of the chief
+love-passage, turns out to be the son of a clergyman instead of a lord,
+and Flamin the son of a lord in spite of the plain declaration on the
+first page that he belongs to a clergyman. No key-notes of expectation
+and surmise are struck; the reader is as blind as the old lord who is
+Victor's reputed father, and not a glimmer of light reaches him till
+suddenly and causelessly he is dazed. The author has emphasized his
+sentiments, but has not shaded and brought out the features of his
+story. It is plain, that, when he began to write, not the faintest
+notion of a _dénouement_ had dawned upon his fancy. The best-defined
+action in the book results from Flamin's ignorance that he is Clotilde's
+brother, for he is thus jealous of his friend Victor's love for her. How
+break off Flamin's love for his unknown sister? How rescue Victor from
+his self-imposed delicacy and win for him a bride? This is the substance
+of the story, hampered by wild, spasmodic interpolations and intrigues
+and didactic explanations.
+
+The reader must also become inured, by a course of physical training, to
+resist the fiery onslaughts of a sentimentality which was the first
+ferment of Jean Paul's sincere and huge imagination. See, for instance,
+Vol. II. p. 229. And we cannot too much admire the tact which Mr. Brooks
+has brought to the decanting of these seething passages into tolerable
+vernacular limits. Sometimes, indeed, he misses a help which he might
+have procured for the reader, to lift him, with less danger of
+dislocation, to these pinnacles of passion, by transferring more of the
+elevated idiom of the style: for, in some of the complicated paragraphs,
+a too English rendering of the clauses gives the sentiment a dowdy and
+prosaic air. We should not object to an occasional inversion of the
+order, even where Jean Paul himself is more direct than usual; for this
+always appeared to us to lend a racy German flavor to the page. No doubt
+Jean Paul needs, first of all, to be made comprehensible; but if his
+style is too persistently Anglicized, many places will be reached where
+the sense itself must suffer for want of the picturesqueness of the
+German idiom. The quaintness will grow flat, the color of the sentiment
+will almost disappear, the rich paragraphs will run thinly clad,
+disenchanted like Cinderella at midnight. Some of Mr. Carlyle's
+translations from the German are invigorated by this Teutonicizing of
+the English, and by the sincerity of phrases transferred directly as
+they first came molten from the pen. This may be pushed to the point of
+affectation; but judiciously used, it is suited to Jean Paul's fervor
+and abandonment.
+
+There is also a rhythm in his exalted moments, a delicate and noble
+swing of the clauses, not easy to transfer: as in the Eighth
+Dog-Post-Day, the paragraph commencing, "Wehe gröszere Wellen auf mich
+zu, Morgenluft!" "Thou morning-air, break over me in greater waves!
+Bathe me in thy vast billows which roll above our woods and meadows, and
+bear me in blossom clouds past radiant gardens and glimmering streams,
+and let me die gently floating above the earth, rocked amid flying
+flowers and butterflies, and dissolving with outspread arms beneath the
+sun; while all my veins fall blended into red morning-flakes down to the
+flowers," etc. But this may appear finical to Mr. Brooks. We certainly
+do not press it critically against his great and general success. Such a
+paragraph as, for instance, the closing one upon page 340 of Vol. II. is
+very trying to the resources of the translator. Here Mr. Brooks has
+sacrificed to literalness an opportunity to sort the confused clauses
+and stop their jostling: this may be done without diluting the
+sentiment, and is within the translator's liberty.
+
+It always seemed to us that the finest part of "Hesperus," and one of
+the finest passages of German literature, is contained in the Ninth
+Dog-Post-Day and some pages of the Tenth. The Ninth, in particular,
+which is a perfect idyl, describes Victor's walk to Kussewitz: all the
+landscape is made to share and symbolize his rapture: the people in the
+fields, the framework of an unfinished house, the two-wheeled hut of the
+shepherd, are not only well painted, but turned most naturally to the
+help of interpreting his feeling. The chapter has also a direct and
+unembarrassed movement, which is rare in this romance. And it is
+beautifully translated.
+
+The reader must understand that Victor is called by various names; so
+that, if he merely dips into the book, as we suspect he will until his
+sympathy is enlisted by some fine thought, his ignorance will increase
+the frantic and dishevelled state of the story. Victor is Horion,
+Sebastian, and Bastian; a susceptible youth, profoundly affected by the
+presence of noble or handsome women, and brought into situations that
+test his delicacy. He smuggles a declaration of love into a watch which
+he sells, in the disguise of an Italian merchant, to the Princess
+Agnola, on occasion of her first reception at the court of her husband.
+He is ashamed of this after he begins to know Clotilde, who is one of
+Jean Paul's pure and noble women; and he is at one time full of dread
+lest the Princess had read his watch-paper, and at another full of pique
+at the suspicion that she had not. Being court-physician and oculist, he
+has frequent opportunities to visit Agnola, and there is one rather
+florid occasion which the midnight cry of the street-watch man
+interrupts. But all this time, the inflammable Victor was indulging a
+kind of tenderness for Joachime, maid-of-honor and attractive female. As
+the love for Clotilde deepens, he must destroy these partialities for
+Agnola and Joachime. This is no easy matter; what with the watch-paper
+and various emphatic passages of something more than friendship, the
+true love does not at once stand forth, that he may find "the
+partition-wall between love and friendship with women to be very visible
+and very thick." But one day the accursed watch-paper flutters into
+Joachime's hand, who at once takes it for a declaration of love to
+herself, and beams with appropriate tenderness. Victor, seized with
+sudden coldness and resolution, confesses all to Joachime; and the
+story, released from its feminine embarrassments, would soon reach a
+honeymoon, if it were not for the difficulty of deciding the parentage
+and relationship of the various characters. A wise child knows its own
+father; but no endowment of wisdom in the reader will harmonize the
+genealogy of this romance. A birth-mark of a Stettin apple, which is
+visible only in autumn when that fruit is ripening, plays the part of
+Box's strawberry in the farce, and with as much perspicuity.
+
+However, the characters are all respectably connected at last, and the
+reader does not care to understand how they were ever disconnected: for
+Lord Horion's motive in putting the children of the old Prince out of
+the way, and keeping up such an expensive mystification, can be
+justified only by an interesting plot. But American readers have learned
+by this time, much to their credit, not to apply to Jean Paul for the
+sensation of a cunningly woven narrative, like that of the English
+school, which furnishes verisimilitude to real life that is quite as
+improbable, though less glaringly so, than his departures from it.
+"Hesperus" is filled with pure and noble thought. The different types of
+female character are particularly well-defined; and if Jean Paul
+sometimes affects to say cynical things of women, he cannot veil his
+passionate regard for them, nor his profound appreciation of the
+elements of their influence in forming true society and refining the
+hearts of men. Notice the delicacy of the "Extra Leaf on Houses full of
+Daughters." It is chiefly with the women of his romances that Jean Paul
+succeeds in depicting individuals. And when we recollect the corrupt and
+decaying generation out of which his genius sprang, like a newly created
+species, to give a salutary shock to Gallic tastes, and lend a sturdy
+country vigor to the new literature, we reverence his faithfulness, his
+incorruptible humanity, his contempt for petty courts and faded manners,
+his passion for Nature, and his love of God. All these characteristics
+are so broadly printed upon his pages that the obsoleteness of the
+narrative does not hide them.
+
+In view of a second edition, we refer to Mr. Brooks's consideration a
+few places, with wonder at his general accuracy in the translation of
+obscure passages and the explanation of allusions.
+
+Vol. I. page 22. _Sakeph-Katon_ (Zaqueph Qaton) is an occasional
+pause-accent of the Hebrew, having the sense of "elevator minor," and is
+peculiar to prose.
+
+Page 68. The famous African Prince Le Boo deserves a note.
+
+Page 111. _Ripieno_ is an Italian musical term, meaning that which
+accompanies and strengthens.
+
+Page 114. _Gränswildpret_ does not mean "frontier wild-game," but game
+that, straying out of one precinct into another, gets captured: stray
+game, or impounded waif.
+
+Page 139. The note gives the sense, but the corresponding passage in the
+text would stand clearer thus: "not a noble heart, by any means; for
+such things Le Baut's golden key, though bored like a cannon, could
+fasten rather."
+
+Page 179. A note required: the passage of Shakspeare is, "Antony and
+Cleopatra," Act V., Scene 2:--
+
+    "His face was as the heavens; and therein stuck
+    A sun and moon; which kept their course, and lighted
+    The little O, the earth."
+
+_Territory of an old lady_ should be "prayer of an old lady." _Gebet_,
+not _Gebiet_.
+
+Page 209. _Eirunde Loch_ would be better represented by its anatomical
+equivalent, _foramen ovale_. It should be closed before birth; in the
+rare cases where it is left open after birth, the child lives half
+asphyxiated.
+
+Page 224, note. _Semperfreie_ is not from the Latin, but comes from
+_sendbarfreie_, that is, eligible, free to be sent or elected to
+offices, and consequently, immediately subject to the _Reich_, or Holy
+Roman Empire.
+
+Page 235. An _Odometer_ is an apparatus for measuring distances
+travelled by whatsoever vehicle.
+
+Page 275. _Incunabula_ means specimens of the first printed edition of a
+work; also the first impressions of the first edition, the firstlings of
+old editions.
+
+Page 317. _Wackelfiguren_ means figures made of _Wacke_, a greenish-gray
+mineral, soft and easily broken.
+
+Page 322. The note is equivocal, since the phrase is used by fast women
+who keep some one in their pay.
+
+Vol. II., page 122. _Columbine_ is not equivalent to ballet-dancer; it
+is the old historical personage of the pantomime, confederate and lover
+of Harlequin, who protects her from false love.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No.
+96, October 1865, by Various
+
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96,
+October 1865, by Various
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865
+
+Author: Various
+
+Release Date: December 2, 2006 [EBook #19996]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ATLANTIC MONTHLY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Joshua Hutchinson, Josephine Paolucci and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net.
+(This file was produced from images generously made
+available by Cornell University Digital Collections).
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<h4>THE</h4>
+
+<h1>ATLANTIC MONTHLY.</h1>
+
+<h2><i>A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics.</i></h2>
+
+<h3>VOL. XVI.&mdash;OCTOBER, 1865.&mdash;NO. XCVI.</h3>
+
+<p>Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1865, by <span class="smcap">Ticknor
+and Fields</span>, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the
+District of Massachusetts.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p>Transcriber's Note: Minor typos have been corrected and footnotes moved
+to the end of the article. Contents generated for the HTML version.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>Contents</h2>
+<!-- Autogenerated TOC. Modify or delete as required. -->
+<p>
+<a href="#SAINTS_WHO_HAVE_HAD_BODIES"><b>SAINTS WHO HAVE HAD BODIES.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#NO_TIME_LIKE_THE_OLD_TIME"><b>NO TIME LIKE THE OLD TIME.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#COUPON_BONDS"><b>COUPON BONDS.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#THE_AUTHOR_OF_SAULA"><b>THE AUTHOR OF "SAUL."</b></a><br />
+<a href="#NEEDLE_AND_GARDEN"><b>NEEDLE AND GARDEN.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#JOHN_JORDAN"><b>JOHN JORDAN,</b></a><br />
+<a href="#NOELC"><b>NO&Euml;L.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#WILHELM_MEISTERS_APPRENTICESHIP"><b>WILHELM MEISTER'S APPRENTICESHIP.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#DOCTOR_JOHNS"><b>DOCTOR JOHNS.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#DOWN_THE_RIVER"><b>DOWN THE RIVER.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#ABRAHAM_LINCOLN"><b>ABRAHAM LINCOLN.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#REVIEWS_AND_LITERARY_NOTICES"><b>REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.</b></a><br />
+</p>
+<!-- End Autogenerated TOC. -->
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_385" id="Page_385">[Pg 385]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="SAINTS_WHO_HAVE_HAD_BODIES" id="SAINTS_WHO_HAVE_HAD_BODIES"></a>SAINTS WHO HAVE HAD BODIES.</h2>
+
+
+<p>All doubtless remember the story which is told of the witty Charles II.
+and the Royal Society: How one day the King brought to the attention of
+its members a most curious and inexplicable phenomenon, which he stated
+thus: "When you put a trout into a pail full of water, why does not the
+water overflow?" The savans, naturally enough, were surprised, and
+suggested many wise, but fruitless explanations; until at last one of
+their number, having no proper reverence for royalty in his heart,
+demanded that the experiment should actually be tried. Then, of course,
+it was proved that there was no phenomenon to be explained. The water
+overflowed fast enough. Indeed, it is chronicled that the evolutions of
+this lively member of the piscatory tribe were so brisk, that the
+difficulty was the exact opposite of what was anticipated, namely, how
+to keep the water in.</p>
+
+<p>This story may be a pure fable, but the lesson it teaches is true and
+important. It illustrates forcibly the facility with which even wise men
+accept doubtful propositions, and then apply the whole power of their
+minds to explain them, and perhaps to defend them. Latterly one hears
+constantly of the physical decay which threatens the American people,
+because of their unwise and disproportioned stimulation of the brain. It
+is assumed, almost as an axiom, that there is "a deficiency of physical
+health in America." Especially is it assumed that great mental progress,
+either of races or of individuals, has been generally purchased at the
+expense of the physical frame. Indeed, it is one of the questions of the
+day, how the saints, that is, those devoted to literary and professional
+pursuits, shall obtain good and serviceable bodies; or, to widen the
+query, how the finest intellectual culture can exist side by side with
+the noblest physical development; or, to bring this question into a form
+that shall touch us most sharply, how our boys and girls can obtain all
+needful knowledge and mental discipline, and yet keep full of graceful
+and buoyant vitality.</p>
+
+<p>What do we say to the theories and convictions which are underneath this
+language? What answer shall we make to these questions? What answer
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_386" id="Page_386">[Pg 386]</a></span>ought we to make? Our first reply would be, We doubt the proposition.
+We ask for the broad and firm basis of undoubted facts upon which it
+rests. And we enter an opposite plea. We affirm that the saints have as
+good bodies as other people, and that they always did have. We deny that
+they need to be patched up or watched over any more than their
+neighbors. They live as long and enjoy as much as the rest of mankind.
+They can endure as many hard buffets, and come out as tough and strong,
+as the veriest dolt whose intellectual bark foundered in the unsounded
+depths of his primer. The world's history through, the races which are
+best taught have the best endowment of health. Nay, in our own New
+England, with just such influences, physical, mental, and moral, as
+actually exist, there is no deterioration in real vitality to weep over.</p>
+
+<p>We hold, then, on this subject very different opinions from those which
+prevail in many quarters. We believe in the essential healthfulness of
+literary culture, and in the invigorating power of sound knowledge.
+Emphatically do we believe that our common schools have been in the
+aggregate a positive physical benefit. We are confident, that, just to
+the degree that the unseen force within a man receives its rightful
+development, does vigorous life flow in every current that beats from
+heart to extremities. With entire respect for the opinions of others,
+even while we cannot concur with them, with a readiness to admit that
+the assertion of those opinions may have been indirectly beneficial, we
+wish to state the truth as it looks to us, to exhibit the facts which
+bear upon this subject in the shape and hue they have to our own minds,
+and to give the grounds of our conviction that a cultivated mind is the
+best friend and ally of the body.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Would it not be singular, if anything different were true? You say, and
+you say rightly, that the best part of a man is his mind and soul, those
+spiritual elements which divide him from all the rest of the creation,
+animate or inanimate, and make him lord and sovereign over them all. You
+say, and you say wisely, that the body, however strong and beautiful, is
+nothing,&mdash;that the senses, however keen and vigorous, are nothing,&mdash;that
+the outward glories, however much they may minister to sensual
+gratification, are nothing,&mdash;unless they all become the instruments for
+the upbuilding of the immortal part in man. But what a tremendous
+impeachment of the wisdom or power of the Creator you are bringing, if
+you assert that the development of this highest part, whether by its
+direct influence on the body, or indirectly by the habits of life which
+it creates, is destructive of all the rest, nay, self-destructive! You
+may show that every opening bud in spring, and every joint, nerve, and
+muscle in every animate creature, are full of proofs of wise designs
+accomplishing their purposes, and it shall all count for less than
+nothing, if you can demonstrate that the mind, in its highest, broadest
+development, brings anarchy into the system,&mdash;or, mark it well,
+produces, or tends to produce, habits of living ruinous to health, and
+so ruinous to true usefulness. At the outset, therefore, the very fact
+that the mind is the highest creation of Divine wisdom would force us to
+believe that that development of it, that increase of knowledge, that
+sharpening of the faculties, that feeding of intellectual hunger, which
+does not promote joy and health in every part, must be false and
+illegitimate indeed.</p>
+
+<p>And it is hardly too much to say, that, in a rational being, thought is
+almost synonymous with vitality of all sorts. The brain throws out its
+network of nerves to every part of the body; and those nerves are the
+pathways along which it sends, not alone physical volitions, but its
+mental force and high intelligence, to mingle by a subtile chemistry
+with every fibre, and give it a finer life and a more bounding
+elasticity. So one might foretell, before the study of a single fact of
+experience, that, other things being equal, he who had few or no
+thoughts would have not only a dormant mind, but also a sluggish and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_387" id="Page_387">[Pg 387]</a></span>
+inert body, less active than another, less enduring, and especially less
+defiant of physical ills. And one might prophesy, too, that he who had
+high thoughts and wealth of knowledge would have stored up in his brain
+a magazine of reserved power wherewith to support the faltering body: a
+prophecy not wide apart, perhaps, from any broad and candid observation
+of human life.</p>
+
+<p>And who can fail to remember what superior resources a cultivated mind
+has over one sunk in sloth and ignorance,&mdash;how much wider an outlook,
+how much larger and more varied interests, and how these things support
+when outward props fail, how they strengthen in misfortune and pain, and
+keep the heart from anxieties which might wear out the body? Scott,
+dictating "Ivanhoe" in the midst of a torturing sickness, and so rising,
+by force of a cultivated imagination, above all physical anguish, to
+revel in visions of chivalric splendor, is but the type of men
+everywhere, who, but for resources supplied by the mind, would have sunk
+beneath the blows of adverse fortune, or else sought forgetfulness in
+brutalizing and destructive pleasures. Sometimes a book is better far
+than medicine, and more truly soothing than the best anodyne. Sometimes
+a rich-freighted memory is more genial than many companions. Sometimes a
+firm mind, that has all it needs within itself, is a watchtower to which
+we may flee, and from which look down calmly upon our own losses and
+misfortunes. He who does not understand this has either had a most
+fortunate experience, or else has no culture, which is really a part of
+himself, woven into the very texture of the soul. So, if there were no
+facts, considering the mind, and who made it, and how it is related to
+the body, and how, when it is a good mind and a well-stored mind, it
+seems to stand for all else, to be food and shelter and comfort and
+friend and hope, who could believe anything else than that a
+well-instructed soul could do nought but good to its servant the body?</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>After all, we cannot evade, and we ought not to seek to evade, the
+testimony of facts. No cause can properly stand on any theory, however
+pleasant and cheering, or however plausible. What, then, of the facts,
+of the painful facts of experience, which are said to tell so different
+a tale? This,&mdash;that the physical value of education is in no way so
+clearly demonstrated as by these very facts. We know what is the
+traditional picture of the scholar,&mdash;pale, stooping, hectic, hurrying
+with unsteady feet to a predestined early grave; or else morbid,
+dyspeptic, cadaverous, putting into his works the dark tints of his own
+inward nature. At best, he is painted as a mere bookworm, bleached and
+almost mildewed in some learned retirement beneath the shadow of great
+folios, until he is out of joint with the world, and all fresh and
+hearty life has gone out of him. Who cannot recall just such pictures,
+wherein one knows not which predominates, the ludicrous or the pitiful?
+We protest against them all. In the name of truth and common-sense
+alike, we indignantly reject them. We have a vision of a sturdier
+manhood: of the genial, open countenance of an Irving; of the homely,
+honest strength that shone in every feature of a Walter Scott; of the
+massive vigor of a Goethe or a Humboldt. How much, too, is said of the
+physical degeneracy of our own people,&mdash;how the jaw is retreating, how
+the frame is growing slender and gaunt, how the chest flattens, and how
+tenderly we ought to cherish every octogenarian among us, for that we
+are seeing the last of them! If this is intended to be a piece of
+pleasant badinage, far be it from us to arrest a single smile it may
+awaken. But if it is given as a serious description, from which serious
+deductions can be drawn, then we say, that, as a delineation, it is, to
+a considerable extent, purely fanciful,&mdash;as an argument, utterly so. The
+facts, so far as they are ascertained, point unwaveringly to this
+conclusion,&mdash;that every advance of a people in knowledge and refinement
+is accompanied by as striking an advance in health and strength.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_388" id="Page_388">[Pg 388]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Try this question, if you please, on the largest possible scale. Compare
+the uneducated savage with his civilized brother. His form has never
+been bent by confinement in the school-room. Overburdening thoughts have
+never wasted his frame. And if unremitting exercise amid the free airs
+of heaven will alone make one strong, then he will be strong. Is the
+savage stronger? Does he live more years? Can he compete side by side
+with civilized races in the struggle for existence? Just the opposite is
+true. Our puny boys, as we sometimes call them, in our colleges, will
+weigh more, lift more, endure more than any barbarian race of them all.
+This day the gentle Sandwich-Islanders are wasting like snow-wreaths, in
+contact with educated races. This day our red men are being swept before
+advancing civilization like leaves before the breath of the hurricane.
+And it requires no prophet's eye to see, that, if we do not give the
+black man education as well as freedom, an unshackled mind as well as
+unshackled limbs, he, too, will share the same fate.</p>
+
+<p>To all this it may naturally be objected, that the reason so many savage
+races do not display the greatest physical stamina is not so much
+intellectual barrenness as their vices, native or acquired,&mdash;or because
+they bring no wisdom to the conduct of life, but dwell in smoky huts,
+eat unhealthy food, go from starvation to plethora and from plethora to
+starvation again, exchange the indolent lethargy which is the law of
+savage life for the frantic struggles of war or the chase which
+diversify and break up its monotony. Allow the objection; and then what
+have we accomplished, but carrying the argument one step back? For what
+are self-control and self-care, but the just fruits of intelligence? But
+in truth it is a combination of all these influences, and not any of
+them alone, that enables the civilized man to outlive and outrival his
+barbarian brother. He succeeds, not simply because of the superior
+address and sagacity which education gives him, though that, no doubt,
+has much to do with it; not altogether because his habits of life are
+better, though we would not underrate their value; but equally because
+the culture of the brain gives a finer life to every red drop in his
+arteries, and greater hardihood to every fibre which is woven into his
+flesh. If it is not so, how do you explain the fact that our colored
+soldier, fighting in his native climate, with the same exposure in
+health and the same care in sickness, succumbs to wounds and diseases
+over which his white comrade triumphs? Or how will you explain analogous
+facts in the history of disease among other uneducated races? Our
+explanation is simple. As the slightest interfusion of carbon may change
+the dull iron into trenchant steel, so intelligence working through
+invisible channels may add a new temper to the physical nature. And thus
+it may be strictly true that it is not only the mind and soul which
+slavery and ignorance wrong, but the body just as much.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>It may be said, and perhaps justly, that a comparison between races so
+unlike is not a fair comparison. Take, then, if you prefer, the
+intelligent and unintelligent periods in the history of the same race.
+The old knights! Those men with mail-clad bodies and iron natures, who
+stand out in imagination as symbols of masculine strength! The old
+knights! They were not scholars. Their constitutions were not ruined by
+study, or by superfluous sainthood of any kind. They were more at home
+with the sword than the pen. They loved better "to hear the lark sing
+than the mouse squeak." So their minds were sufficiently dormant. How
+was it with their bodies? Were they sturdier men? Did they stand heavier
+on their feet than their descendants? It is a familiar fact that the
+armor which inclosed them will not hold those whom we call their
+degenerate children. A friend tells me that in the armory of London
+Tower there are preserved scores, if not hundreds, of the swords of
+those terrible Northmen, those Vikings, who, ten centuries ago, swept<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_389" id="Page_389">[Pg 389]</a></span>
+the seas and were the dread of all Europe, and that scarcely one of them
+has a hilt large enough to be grasped by a man of this generation. Of
+races who have left behind them no methodical records, and whose story
+is preserved only in the rude rhymes of their poets and ruder
+chronicles, it is not safe to make positive affirmations; but all the
+indications are that the student of to-day is a larger and stronger man
+than the warrior of the Middle Ages.</p>
+
+<p>If we come down to periods of historical certainty, no one will doubt
+that the England of the present hour is more educated than the England
+of fifty years ago, or that the England of fifty years since had a
+broader diffusion of intelligence than the England of a century
+previous. Yet that very intelligence has prolonged life. An Englishman
+lives longer to-day than he did in 1800, and longer yet than in 1700.
+Here is a curious proof. Annuities calculated on a certain rate of life
+in 1694 would yield a fortune to those who issued them. Calculated at
+the same rate in 1794, they would ruin them; for the more general
+diffusion of knowledge and refinement had added, I am not able to say
+how many years to the average British life. Observe how this statement
+is confirmed by some wonderful statistics preserved at Geneva. From 1600
+to 1700 the average length of life in that city was 13 years 3 months.
+From 1700 to 1750 it was 27 years 9 months. From 1750 to 1800, 31 years
+3 months. From 1800 to 1833, 43 years 6 months.</p>
+
+<p>One more pertinent fact. Take in England any number of families you
+please, whose parents can read and write, and an equal number of
+families whose parents cannot read and write, and the number of children
+in the latter class of families who will die before the age of five
+years will greatly exceed that in the former class,&mdash;some thirty or
+forty per cent. So surely does a thoughtful ordering of life come in the
+train of intelligence. If faith is to be placed in statistics of any
+sort, then it holds true in foreign countries that human life is long in
+proportion to the degree that knowledge, refinement, and virtue are
+diffused. That is, sainthood, so far from destroying the body, preserves
+it.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>I anticipate the objection which may be made to our last argument.
+Abroad, we are told, there is such an element of healthy, out-door life,
+that any ill effects which might naturally follow in the train of
+general education are neutralized. Abroad, too, education with the
+masses is elementary, and advanced also with more moderation than with
+us. Abroad, moreover, the whole social being is not pervaded with the
+intense intellectual activity and fervor which are so characteristic
+especially of New England life.</p>
+
+<p>Come home, then, to our own Massachusetts, which some will have is
+school-mad. What do you find? Here, in a climate proverbially changeable
+and rigorous,&mdash;here, where mental and moral excitements rise to
+fever-heat,&mdash;here, where churches adorn every landscape, and
+school-houses greet us at every corner, and lyceums are established in
+every village,&mdash;here, where newspapers circulate by the hundred
+thousand, and magazines for our old folks, and "Our Young Folks," too,
+reach fifty thousand,&mdash;here, in Massachusetts, health is at its climax:
+greater and more enduring than in bonnie England, or vine-clad France,
+or sunny Italy. I read some statistics the other day, and I have ever
+since had a greater respect for the land of "east-winds, and salt-fish
+and school-houses," as scandalous people have termed Massachusetts. What
+do these statistics say? That, while in England the deaths reach
+annually 2.21 per cent of the whole population, and in France 2.36 per
+cent, and in Italy 2.94 per cent, and in Austria 3.34 per cent, in
+Massachusetts, the deaths are only 1.82 per cent annually. Even in
+Boston, with its large proportion of foreign elements, the percentage of
+deaths is only 2.35. It may be said, in criticism of these statements,
+that in our country statistics are not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_390" id="Page_390">[Pg 390]</a></span> kept with sufficient accuracy to
+furnish correct data. However this may be in our rural districts, it
+certainly is not true of the metropolis. The figures are not at hand,
+but they exist, and they prove conclusively that those wards in Boston
+which have a population most purely native reach a salubrity unexcelled.
+So that, with all the real drawbacks of climate, and the pretended
+drawbacks of unnatural or excessive mental stimulus, the health here is
+absolutely unequalled by that of any country in Europe. Certainly, if
+the mental and moral sainthood which we have does not build up the body,
+it cannot be said that it does any injury to it.</p>
+
+<p>Have we noted what a splendid testimony the war which has just closed
+has given to the physical results of our New England villages and put
+into the ranks of our army&mdash;young men who learned the alphabet at four,
+who all through boyhood had the advantages of our common-school system,
+who had felt to the full the excitement of the intellectual life about
+them&mdash;have stood taller, weighed heavier, fought more bravely and
+intelligently, won victory out of more adverse circumstances, and, what
+is more to the point, endured more hardship with less sickness, than a
+like number of any other race on earth. We care not where you look for
+comparison, whether to Britain, or to France, or to Russia, where the
+spelling-book has almost been tabooed, or to Spain, where in times past
+the capacity to read the Bible was scarcely less than rank heresy, at
+least for the common people. This war has been brought to a successful
+issue by the best educated army that ever fought on battle-field, or, as
+the new book has it, by "the thinking bayonet," by men whose physical
+manhood has received no detriment from their intellectual culture.</p>
+
+<p>These assertions are founded upon statistics which have been preserved
+regiments whose members were almost exclusively native-born. And the
+results are certainly in accordance with all candid observation. It may,
+indeed, be said that the better health of our army has been after all
+the result of the better care which the soldier has taken of himself. We
+answer, the better care was the product of his education. It may be said
+again that this health was owing in a great measure to the superior
+watchfulness exercised over the soldier by others, by the Government, by
+the Sanitary Commission, and by State agencies. Then we reply, that this
+tenderness of the soldier, if tenderness it be, and this sagacity, if
+sagacity prompted the care, were both the offspring of that high
+intelligence which is the proper result of popular education.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>There is but one possible mode of escape from such testimony. This whole
+train of argument is inconclusive, it may be asserted, because what is
+maintained is not that intellectual culture is unhealthful, where it is
+woven into the web of active life, but only where the pursuit of
+knowledge is one's business. It may be readily allowed, that, where the
+whole nature is kept alive by the breath of outward enterprise, when the
+great waves of this world's excitements are permitted to roll with
+purifying tides into the inmost recesses of the soul, the results of
+mental culture may be modified. But what of the saints? What of the
+literary men <i>par excellence</i>?</p>
+
+<p>Ah! if you restrain us to that line of inquiry, the argument will be
+trebly strong, and the facts grow overwhelmingly pertinent and
+conclusive. Will you examine the careful registry of deaths in
+Massachusetts which has been kept the last twenty years? It will inform
+you that the classes whose average of life is high up, almost the
+highest up, are with us the classes that work with the brain,&mdash;the
+judges, the lawyers, the physicians, the clergymen, the professors in
+your colleges. The very exception to this statement rather confirms than
+contradicts our general position, that intellectual culture is
+absolutely invigorating. The cultivators of the soil live longest. But
+note that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_391" id="Page_391">[Pg 391]</a></span> it is the educated, intelligent farmers, the farmers of
+Massachusetts, the farmers of a State of common schools, the farmers who
+link thought to labor, who live long. And doubtless, if they carried
+more thought into their labor, if they were more intelligent, if they
+were better educated, they would live yet longer. At any rate, in
+England the cultivators of her soil, her down-trodden peasantry,
+sluggish and uneducated, do not live out half their days. Very likely
+the farmer's lot, <i>plus</i> education and <i>plus</i> habits of mental activity,
+is the healthiest as it is the primal condition of man. Nevertheless,
+considering what is the general opinion, it is surprising how slight is
+the advantage which he has even then over the purely literary classes.</p>
+
+<p>Will you go to Harvard University and ascertain what becomes of her
+children? Take up, then, Dr. Palmer's Necrology of the Alumni of Harvard
+from 1851 to 1863. You will learn, that, while the average age of all
+persons who in Massachusetts die after they have attained the period of
+twenty years is but fifty years, the average age of Harvard graduates,
+who die in like manner, is fifty-eight years. Thus you have, in favor of
+the highest form of public education known in the State, a clear average
+of eight years. You may examine backward the Triennial Catalogue as far
+as you please, and you will not find the testimony essentially
+different. The statement will stand impregnable, that, from the time
+John Harvard founded our little College in the wilderness, to this hour,
+when it is fast becoming a great University, with its schools in every
+department, and its lectures covering the whole field of human
+knowledge, the graduates have always attained a longevity surpassing
+that of their generation.</p>
+
+<p>And you are to observe that this comparison is a strictly just
+comparison. We contrast not the whole community, old and young, with
+those who must necessarily have attained manhood before they are a class
+at all; but adults with adults, graduates with those of other avocations
+who have arrived at the period of twenty years. Neither do we compare
+the bright and peculiar luminaries of Harvard with the mass of
+men,&mdash;though, in fact, it is well known that the best scholars live the
+most years,&mdash;but we compare the whole body of the graduates, bright and
+dull, studious and unstudious, with the whole body of the community.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>To the array of evidence which may be brought from all the registries of
+all the states and universities under heaven, some may triumphantly
+exclaim, "Statistics are unworthy of trust." "To lie like statistics,"
+"false as a fact," these are the stalest of witticisms. But the
+objection to which they give point is practically frivolous. Grant that
+statistics are to a certain degree doubtful, are they not the most
+trustworthy evidence we have? And in the question at issue, are they not
+the only evidence which has real force? And allowing their general
+defectiveness, how shall we explain, that, though gathered from all
+sides and by all kinds of people, they so uniformly favor education?
+Why, if they must err, do they err so pertinaciously in one direction?
+How does it happen, that, summon as many witnesses as you please, and
+cross-question them as severely as you can, they never falter in this
+testimony, that, where intelligence abounds, there physical vigor does
+much more abound? that, where education is broad and generous, there the
+years are many and happy?</p>
+
+<p>If, therefore, facts can prove anything, it is that just such a
+condition of life as that which is growing more and more general among
+us, and which our common-school system directly fosters, where every man
+is becoming an educated man,&mdash;where the farmer upon his acres, the
+merchant at his desk, and the mechanic in his shop, no less than the
+scholar poring over his books shall be in the truest sense
+educated,&mdash;that such a condition is the one of all others which promotes
+habits of thought and action, an elasticity of temper and a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_392" id="Page_392">[Pg 392]</a></span> breadth of
+vision and interest most conducive to health and vigor. It is the
+fashion to talk of the appearance of superior robustness so
+characteristic of our English brethren. But we suspect that in this
+case, too, appearances are deceitful. That climate may produce in us a
+restless energy inconsistent with rounded forms and rosy cheeks we
+freely allow. But in strength and real endurance the New England
+constitution will yield to none. And the stern logic of facts shows
+beyond a peradventure, that here there are no influences, climatic or
+intellectual, which war with longevity. What may be hidden in the
+future, what results may come from a still wider diffusion of education,
+we cannot tell, but hitherto nothing but good has come of
+ever-increasing knowledge.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>We hasten now to inquire concerning the health and years of special
+classes of literary men: not, indeed, to prove that there is no real war
+between the mind and the body,&mdash;for we consider that point to be already
+demonstrated,&mdash;but rather to show that we need shrink from no field of
+inquiry, and that from every fresh field will come new evidence of the
+substantial truth of our position.</p>
+
+<p>We have taken the trouble to ascertain the average age of all the
+English poets of whom Johnson wrote lives, some fifty or sixty in all.
+Here are great men and small men, men with immortal names and men whose
+names were long since forgotten, men of good habits and men whose habits
+would undermine any constitution, flourishing, too, in a period when
+human life was certainly far shorter in England than now. And how long
+did they live? What do you think? Thirty, forty years? No; they endured
+their sainthood, or their want of it, for the comfortable period of
+fifty-six years. Nor is the case a particle different, if you take only
+the great and memorable names of English poetry. Chaucer, living at the
+dawn almost of English civilization; Shakspeare, whose varied and
+marvellous dramas might well have exhausted any vitality; Milton,
+struggling with domestic infelicity, with political hatred, and with
+blindness; Dryden, Pope, Swift: none of these burning and shining lights
+of English literature went out at mid-day. The result is not altered, if
+you come nearer our own time. That galaxy of talent and genius which
+shone with such brilliancy in the Scottish capital at the beginning of
+the century,&mdash;Sydney Smith, Lord Jeffrey, Christopher North, Macaulay,
+Mackintosh, De Quincey, Brougham,&mdash;all these, with scarcely an
+exception, have lived far beyond the average of human life. So was it
+with the great poets and romancers of that period. Wordsworth, living
+the life of a recluse near the beautiful lakes of Westmoreland, lasted
+to fourscore. Southey, after a life of unparalleled literary industry,
+broke down at sixty-six. Coleridge, with habits which ought to have
+destroyed him early, lingered till sixty-two. Scott, struggling to throw
+off a mountain-load of debt, endured superhuman labor till more than
+sixty. Even Byron and Burns, who did not live as men who desired length
+of days, died scarcely sooner than their generation.</p>
+
+<p>You are not willing, perhaps, to test this question by the longevity of
+purely literary men. You ask what can be said about the great preachers.
+You have always heard, that, while the ministers were, no doubt, men of
+excellent intentions and much sound learning, what with their morbid
+notions of life, and what with the weight of a rather heavy sort of
+erudition, they were saints with the very poorest kind of bodies. Just
+the contrary. No class lives longer. We once made out a list of the
+thirty most remarkable preachers of the last four centuries that we
+could call to mind. Of the age to which most of these attained we had at
+the outset no idea whatever. In that list were included the men who must
+figure in every candid account of preaching. The great men of the
+Reformation, Luther, Melancthon, Calvin, Beza, Knox, were there. That
+resplendent group which adorned the seventeenth century, and whose<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_393" id="Page_393">[Pg 393]</a></span>
+names are synonymes for pulpit eloquence, Barrow, South, Jeremy Taylor,
+and Tillotson, were prominent in it. The milder lights of the last
+century, Paley, Blair, Robertson, Priestley, were not forgotten. The
+Catholics were represented by Massillon, Bossuet, Bourdalou&euml;, and
+F&eacute;nelon. The Protestants as truly by Robert Hall and Chalmers, by Wesley
+and Channing. In short, it was a thoroughly fair list. We then proceeded
+to ascertain the average life of those included in it. It was just
+sixty-nine years. And we invite all persons who are wedded to the notion
+that the saints are always knights of the broken body, to take pen and
+paper and jot down the name of every remarkable preacher since the year
+1500 that they can recall, and add, if they wish, every man in their own
+vicinity who has risen in learning and talent above the mass of his
+profession. We will insure the result without any premium. They will
+produce a list that would delight the heart of a provident director of a
+life-insurance company. And their average will come as near the old
+Scripture pattern of threescore years and ten as that of any body of men
+who have lived since the days of Isaac and Jacob.</p>
+
+<p>If now any one has a lurking doubt of the physical value of an active
+and well-stored mind, let him pass from the preachers to the statesmen,
+from the men who teach the wisdom of the world to come to the men who
+administer the things of this world. Let him begin with the grand names
+of the Long Parliament,&mdash;Hampden, Pym, Vane, Cromwell,&mdash;and then gather
+up all the great administrators of the next two centuries, down to the
+octogenarians who are now foremost in the conduct of British affairs;
+and if he wishes to widen his observation, let him pass over the Channel
+to the Continent, and in France recall such names as Sully and
+Richelieu, Mazarin and Colbert, Talleyrand and Guizot; in Austria,
+Kaunitz and Metternich. And when he has made his list as broad, as
+inclusive of all really great statesmanship everywhere as he can, find
+his average; and if he can bring it much beneath seventy, he will be
+more fortunate than we were when we tried the experiment.</p>
+
+<p>Do not by any means omit the men of science. There are the astronomers.
+If any employment would seem to draw a man up to heaven, it would be
+this. Yet, of all men, astronomers apparently have had the most wedded
+attachment to earth. Galileo, Newton, La Place, Herschel,&mdash;these are the
+royal names, the fixed stars, set, as it were, in that very firmament
+which for so many years they searched with telescopic eye. And yet
+neither of them lived less than seventy-eight years. As for the men of
+natural science, it looks as though they were spared by some
+Providential provision, in order that they might observe and report for
+long epochs the changes of this old earth of ours. Cuvier dying at
+seventy-five, Sir Joseph Banks at seventy-seven, Buffon at eighty-one,
+Blumenbach at eighty-eight, and Humboldt at fourscore and ten, are some
+of the cases which make such a supposition altogether reasonable.</p>
+
+<p>Cross the ocean, and you will find the same testimony, that mental
+culture is absolutely favorable to physical endurance. The greatest men
+in our nation's history, whether in walks of statesmanship, science, or
+literature, almost without exception, have lived long. Franklin,
+Washington, Jefferson, Madison, the elder Adams, and Patrick Henry, in
+earlier periods,&mdash;the younger Adams, Clay, Calhoun, Webster, Choate, and
+Everett, Irving, Prescott, Cooper, and Hawthorne, in later times,&mdash;are
+cases in point. These men did not die prematurely. They grew strong by
+the toil of the brain. And to-day the quartette of our truest
+poets&mdash;Bryant, Whittier, Longfellow, and Holmes&mdash;are with us in the hale
+years of a green age, never singing sweeter songs, never harping more
+inspiring strains. Long may our ears hear their melodies!</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>If now we could enter the walks of private life, and study widely the
+experience of individual men, we should<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_394" id="Page_394">[Pg 394]</a></span> have an interesting record
+indeed, and a manifold and wellnigh irresistible testimony. Consider a
+few remarkable, yet widely differing cases.</p>
+
+<p>Who can read attentively the life of John Wesley, and not exclaim, if
+varied and exhausting labor, if perpetual excitement and constant drafts
+upon the brain, would ever wear a man out, he would have worn out? It
+was his creative energy that called into existence a denomination, his
+ardent piety that inspired it, his clear mind that legislated for it,
+his heroic industry that did no mean part of the incessant daily toil
+needful for its establishment. Yet this man of many labors, who through
+a long life never knew practically the meaning of the word <i>leisure</i>,
+says, at seventy-two, "How is it that I find the same strength that I
+did thirty years ago, that my nerves are firmer, that I have none of the
+infirmities of old age, and have lost several that I had in youth." And
+ten years later, he devoutly records, "Is anything too hard for God? It
+is now eleven years since I have felt such a thing as weariness." And he
+continued till eighty-eight in full possession of his faculties,
+laboring with body and mind alike to within a week of his death.</p>
+
+<p>Joseph Priestley was certainly a very different man, but scarcely less
+remarkable. No mean student in all branches of literature, a
+metaphysician, a theologian, a man of science, he began life with a
+feeble frame, and ended a hearty old age at seventy-one. He himself
+declares at fifty-four, that, "so far from suffering from application to
+study, I have found my health steadily improve from the age of eighteen
+to the present time."</p>
+
+<p>You would scarcely find a life more widely divided from these than that
+of Washington Irving. Nevertheless, it is like them in one respect, that
+it bears emphatic testimony to the real healthiness of mental exertion.
+He was the feeblest of striplings at eighteen. At nineteen, Judge Kent
+said, "He is not long for this world." His friends sent him abroad at
+twenty-one, to see if a sea voyage would not husband his strength. So
+pale, so broken, was he, that, when he stepped on board the ship, the
+captain whispered, "There is a chap who will be overboard before we are
+across!" Irving had, too, his share of misfortunes,&mdash;failure in
+business, loss of investments, in earlier life some anxiety as to the
+ways and means of support. Even his habits of study were hardly what the
+highest wisdom would direct. While he was always genial and social, and
+at times easy almost to indolence, when the mood seized him, he would
+write incessantly for weeks and even for months, sometimes fourteen,
+fifteen, or sixteen hours in a day. But he grew robust for half a
+century, and writes, at seventy-five, that he has now "a streak of old
+age."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The example of some of those who are said to have been worn out by
+intense mental application furnishes perhaps the most convincing proof
+of all that no reasonable activity of the mind ever warred with the best
+health of the body. Walter Scott, we are told, wore out. And very
+likely, to a certain extent, the statement is true. But what had he not
+accomplished before he wore out? He had astonished the world with that
+wonderful series of romances which place him scarcely second to any name
+in English literature. He had sung those border legends which delighted
+the ears of his generation. He had produced histories which show, that,
+had he chosen, he might have been as much a master in the region of
+historic fact as in the realm of imagination. He had edited other men's
+works; he had written essays; he had lent himself with a royal
+generosity to every one who asked his time or influence; and when,
+almost an old man, commercial bankruptcy overtook him, and he sought to
+lift the mountain of his debt by pure intellectual toil, he wore out.
+But declining years, disappointed hopes, desperate exertions, may wear
+anybody out. He wore out, but it was at more than threescore years, when
+nine tenths of his generation had long<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_395" id="Page_395">[Pg 395]</a></span> slept in quiet graves,&mdash;when the
+crowd of the thoughtless and indolent, who began life with him, had
+rusted out in inglorious repose. Yes, Walter Scott wore out, if you call
+that wearing out.</p>
+
+<p>John Calvin, all his biographers say, wore out. Perhaps so;&mdash;but not
+without a prolonged resistance. Commencing life with the frailest
+constitution, he was, as early as twenty-five, a model of erudition, and
+had already written his immortal work. For thirty years he was in the
+heat and ferment of a great religious revolution. For thirty years he
+was one of the controlling minds of his age. For thirty years he was the
+sternest soldier in the Church Militant, bearing down stubborn
+resistance by a yet more stubborn will. For thirty years neither his
+brain nor his pen knew rest. And so at fifty-six this man of broken body
+and many labors laid down the weapons of his warfare; but it was at
+Geneva, where the public registers tell us that the average of human
+life in that century was only nine years.</p>
+
+<p>One writes words like these:&mdash;"John Kitto died, and his death was the
+judgment for overwork, and overwork of a single organ,&mdash;the brain." And
+who was John Kitto? A poor boy, the son a drunken father, subject from
+infancy to agonizing headache. An unfortunate lad, who at thirteen fell
+from a scaffolding and was taken up for dead, and escaped only with
+total deafness and a supposed permanent injury to the brain. A hapless
+apprentice, who suffered at the hands of a cruel taskmaster all that
+brutality and drunken fury could suggest. A youth, thirsting for
+knowledge, but able to obtain it only by the hardest ways, peering into
+booksellers' windows, reading at book-stalls, purchasing cheap books
+with pennies stained all over with the sweat of his toil. An heroic
+student, who labored for more than twenty years with almost unparalleled
+industry, and with an equally unparalleled neglect of the laws of
+health; of whom it is scarcely too much to say literally, that he knew
+no change, but from his desk to his bed, and from his bed to his desk
+again. A voluminous writer, who, if he produced no work of positive
+genius, has done more than any other man to illustrate the Scriptures,
+and to make familiar and vivid the scenery, the life, the geography, and
+the natural history of the Holy Land. And he died in the harness,&mdash;but
+not so very early,&mdash;at fifty. And we say that he would have lived much
+longer, had he given his constitution a fair chance. But when we
+remember his passionate fondness for books, how they compensated him for
+the want of wealth, comforts, and the pleasant voices of wife and
+children that he could not hear, we grow doubtful. And we hear him
+exclaim almost in rhapsody,&mdash;"If I were blind as well as deaf, in what a
+wretched situation should I be! If I could not read, how deplorable
+would be my condition! What earthly pleasure equal to the reading of a
+good book? O dearest tomes! O princely and august folios! to obtain you,
+I would work night and day, and forbid myself every sensual joy!" When
+we behold the forlorn man, shut out by his misfortune from so many
+resources, and finding more than recompense for this privation within
+the four walls of his library, we are tempted to say, No, he would not
+have lived as long; had he studied less, he would have remembered his
+griefs more.</p>
+
+<p>Of course it is easy to take exception to all evidence drawn from the
+life and experience of individual men,&mdash;natural to say that one must
+needs be somewhat old before he can acquire a great name at all, and
+that our estimate considers those alone to whom mere prolongation of day
+has given reputation, and forgets "the village Hampdens, the mute,
+inglorious Miltons," the unrecorded Newtons, the voiceless orators,
+sages, or saints who have died and made no sign. To this the simple
+reply is, that individual cases, however numerous and striking, are not
+relied upon to prove any position, but only to illustrate and confirm
+one which general data have already demonstrated. Grant the full force
+of every criticism, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_396" id="Page_396">[Pg 396]</a></span> then it remains true that the widest record of
+literary life exhibits no tendency of mental culture to shorten human
+life or to create habits which would shorten it. Indeed, we do not know
+where to look for any broad range of facts which would indicate that
+education here or anywhere else has decreased or is likely to decrease
+health. And were it not for the respect which we cherish towards those
+who hold it, we should say that such a position was as nearly pure
+theory or prejudice or opinion founded on fragmentary data as any view
+well could be.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>But do you mean to assert that there is no such thing as intellectual
+excess? that intellectual activity never injures? that unremitting
+attention to mental pursuits, with an entire abstinence from proper
+exercise and recreation, is positively invigorating? that robbing the
+body of sleep, and bending it sixteen or eighteen hours over the desk,
+is the best way to build it up in grace and strength? Of course no one
+would say any such absurd things. There is a right and wrong use of
+everything. Any part of the system will wear out with excessive use.
+Overwork kills, but certainly not any quicker when it is overwork of the
+mind than when it is overwork of the body. Overwork in the study is just
+as healthful as overwork on the farm or at the ledger or in the smoky
+shop, toiling and moiling, with no rest and no quickening thoughts.
+Especially is it true that education does not peculiarly tempt a man to
+excess.</p>
+
+<p>But are you ready to maintain that there is no element of excess infused
+into our common-school system? Certainly. Most emphatically there is
+not. What, then, is there to put over against these terrible statements
+of excessive labor of six or seven hours a day, under which young brains
+are reeling and young spines are bending until there are no rosy-checked
+urchins and blooming maids left among us? The inexorable logic of facts.
+The public schools of Massachusetts were taught in the years 1863-4 on
+an average just thirty-two weeks, just five days in a week, and, making
+proper allowance for recesses and opening exercises, just five and a
+quarter hours in a day. Granting now that all the boys and girls studied
+during these hours faithfully, you have an average for the three hundred
+and thirteen working days of the year of two hours and forty-one minutes
+a day,&mdash;an amount of study that never injured any healthy child. But,
+going back a little to youthful recollections, and considering the
+amazing proclivity of the young mind to idleness, whispering, and fun
+and frolic in general, it seems doubtful whether our children ever yet
+attained to so high an average of actual study as two hours a day. As a
+modification of this statement, it may be granted that in the cities and
+larger towns the school term reaches forty weeks in a year. If you add
+one hour as the average amount of study at home, given by pupils of over
+twelve years, (and the allowance is certainly ample,) you have four
+hours as the utmost period ever given by any considerable class of
+children. That there is excess we freely admit. That there are easy
+committee-men who permit too high a pressure, and infatuated teachers
+who insist upon it, that there are ambitious children whom nobody can
+stop, and silly parents who fondly wish to see their children
+monstrosities of brightness, lisping Latin and Greek in their cradles,
+respiring mathematics as they would the atmosphere, and bristling all
+over with facts of natural science like porcupines, till every bit of
+childhood is worked out of them,&mdash;that such things are, we are not
+inclined to deny. But they are rare exceptions,&mdash;no more a part of the
+system than white crows are proper representatives of the dusky and
+cawing brotherhood.</p>
+
+<p>Or yet again, do we mean to assert that no attention need be given to
+the formation of right physical habits? or that bodily exercise ought
+not to be joined to mental toils? or that the walk in the woods, the row
+upon the quiet river, the stroll with rod in hand by the babbling brook,
+or with gun on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_397" id="Page_397">[Pg 397]</a></span> shoulder over the green prairies, or the skating in the
+crisp December air on the glistening lake, ought to be discouraged? Do
+we speak disrespectfully of dumb-bells and clubs and parallel bars, and
+all the paraphernalia of the gymnasium? Are we aggrieved at the mention
+of boxing-gloves or single-stick or foils? Would it shock our nervous
+sensibilities, if our next-door neighbor the philosopher, or some
+near-by grave and reverend doctor of divinity, or even the learned judge
+himself, should give unmistakable evidence that he had in his body the
+two hundred and odd bones and the five hundred and more muscles, with
+all their fit accompaniments of joints and sinews, of which the
+anatomists tell us? Not at all. Far from it. We exercise, no doubt, too
+little. We know of God's fair world too much by description, too little
+by the sight of our own eyes. Welcome anything which leads us out into
+this goodly and glorious universe! Welcome all that tends to give the
+human frame higher grace and symmetry! Welcome the gymnastics, too,
+heavy or light either, if they will guide us to a more harmonious
+physical development.</p>
+
+<p>We ourselves own a set of heavy Indian-clubs, of middling Indian-clubs,
+and of light Indian-clubs. We have iron dumb-bells and wooden
+dumb-bells. We recollect with considerable satisfaction a veritable
+bean-bag which did good service in the household until it unfortunately
+sprung a-leak. In an amateur way we have tried both systems, and felt
+the better for them. We have a dim remembrance of rowing sundry leagues,
+and even of dabbling with the rod and line. We always look with friendly
+eye upon the Harvard Gymnasium, whenever it looms up in actual or mental
+vision. Never yet could we get by an honest game of cricket or base-ball
+without losing some ten minutes in admiring contemplation. We bow with
+deep respect to Dr. Windship and his heavy weights. We bow, if anything,
+with a trifle more of cordiality to Dr. Lewis and his light weights.
+They both have our good word. We think that they would have our example,
+were it not for the fatal proclivity of solitary gymnastics to dulness.
+If we have not risen to the high degrees in this noble order of muscular
+Christians, we claim at least to be a humble craftsman and faithful
+brother.</p>
+
+<p>Speaking with all seriousness, we have no faith in mental activity
+purchased at the expense of physical sloth. It is well to introduce into
+the school, into the family, and into the neighborhood any movement
+system which will exercise all the muscles of the body. But the educated
+man is not any more likely to need this general physical development
+than anybody else. Establish your gymnasium in any village, and the
+farmer fresh from the plough, the mechanic from swinging the hammer or
+driving the plane, will be just as sure to find new muscles that he
+never dreamed of as the palest scholar of them all. And the diffusion of
+knowledge and refinement, so far from promoting inactivity and banishing
+recreations from life, directly feeds that craving for variety out of
+which healthful changes come, and awakens that noble curiosity which at
+fit seasons sends a man out to see how the wild-flower grows in the
+woods, how the green buds open in the spring, how the foliage takes on
+its painted autumn glory, which leads him to struggle through tangled
+thickets or through pathless woods that he may behold the brook laughing
+in cascade from rock to rock, or to breast the steep mountain that he
+may behold from a higher outlook the wonders of the visible creation.
+Other things being equal, the educated man in any vocation is quite as
+likely as another to be active, quick in every motion and free in every
+limb.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>But admit all that is claimed. Admit that increasing intelligence has
+changed the average of man's life from the twenty-five years of the
+seventeenth century to the thirty-five of the eighteenth or the
+forty-five years of the nineteenth century. Admit, too, that the best
+educated<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_398" id="Page_398">[Pg 398]</a></span> men of this generation will live five or ten years more than
+the least educated men. Ought we to be satisfied with things as they
+are? Should we not look for more than the forty or fifty years of human
+life? Assuredly. But it is not our superfluous sainthood which is
+destroying life. It is not that we have too much saintliness, but too
+little, too limited wisdom, too narrow intelligence, too small an
+endowment of virtue and conscience. It is our fierce absorption in
+outward plans which plants anxieties like thorns in the heart. It is out
+sloth and gluttony which eat out vitality. It is our unbridled appetites
+and passions which burn like a consuming fire in our breasts. It is our
+unwise exposure which saps the strength and gives energy and force to
+latent disease. These, tenfold more than any intense application of the
+brain to its legitimate work, limit and destroy human life. The truly
+cultivated mind tends to give just aims, moderate desires, and good
+habits.</p>
+
+<p>Ay, and when the true sainthood shall possess and rule humanity,&mdash;when
+the fields of knowledge with their wholesome fruits shall tempt every
+foot away from the forbidden paths of vice and sensual indulgence,&mdash;when
+a wise intelligence shall cool the hot passions which dry up the
+refreshing fountains of peace and joy in the heart,&mdash;when a heavenly
+wisdom shall lift us above any bondage to this world's fortunes, and
+when a good conscience and a lofty trust shall forbid us to be slaves to
+any occupation lower than the highest,&mdash;when we stand erect and free,
+clothed with a real saintliness,&mdash;then the years of our life may
+increase, and man may go down to his grave "in a full age, like as a
+shock of corn cometh in in his season."</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile we must stand firmly on this assertion, that, the more of
+mental and moral sainthood our people achieve, the more that sainthood
+will write fair inscriptions on their bodies, will shine out in
+intelligence in their faces, will exhibit itself in graceful form and
+motion, and thus add to the deeper and more lasting virtues physical
+power, a body which shall be at once a good servant and the proper
+representative of a refined and elevated soul.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="NO_TIME_LIKE_THE_OLD_TIME" id="NO_TIME_LIKE_THE_OLD_TIME"></a>NO TIME LIKE THE OLD TIME.</h2>
+
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">There is no time like the old time, when you and I were young,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When the buds of April blossomed, and the birds of spring-time sung!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The garden's brightest glories by summer suns are nursed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But, oh, the sweet, sweet violets, the flowers that opened first!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">There is no place like the old place where you and I were born,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where we lifted first our eyelids on the splendors of the morn<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From the milk-white breast that warmed us, from the clinging arms that bore,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where the dear eyes glistened o'er us that will look on us no more!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">There is no friend like the old friend who has shared our morning days,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No greeting like his welcome, no homage like his praise:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Fame is the scentless sunflower, with gaudy crown of gold;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But friendship is the breathing rose, with sweets in every fold.<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_399" id="Page_399">[Pg 399]</a></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">There is no love like the old love that we courted in our pride;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Though our leaves are falling, falling, and we're fading side by side,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There are blossoms all around us with the colors of our dawn,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And we live in borrowed sunshine when the light of day is gone.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">There are no times like the old times,&mdash;they shall never be forgot!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There is no place like the old place,&mdash;keep green the dear old spot!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There are no friends like our old friends,&mdash;may Heaven prolong their lives!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There are no loves like our old loves,&mdash;God bless our loving wives!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="COUPON_BONDS" id="COUPON_BONDS"></a>COUPON BONDS.</h2>
+
+
+<h3>PART II.</h3>
+
+<p>Mr. Ducklow had scarcely turned the corner of the street, when, looking
+anxiously in the direction of his homestead, he saw a column of smoke.
+It was directly over the spot where he knew his house to be situated. He
+guessed at a glance what had happened. The frightful catastrophe he
+foreboded had befallen. Taddy had set the house afire.</p>
+
+<p>"Them bonds! them bonds!" he exclaimed, distractedly. He did not think
+so much of the house: house and furniture were insured; if they were
+burned, the inconvenience would be great indeed, and at any other time
+the thought of such an event would have been a sufficient cause for
+trepidation,&mdash;but now his chief, his only anxiety was the bonds. They
+were not insured. They would be a dead loss. And what added sharpness to
+his pangs, they would be a loss which he must keep a secret, as he had
+kept their existence a secret,&mdash;a loss which he could not confess, and
+of which he could not complain. Had he not just given his neighbors to
+understand that he held no such property? And his wife,&mdash;was she not at
+that very moment, if not serving up a lie on the subject, at least
+paring the truth very thin indeed?</p>
+
+<p>"A man would think," observed Ferring, "that Ducklow had some o' them
+bonds on his hands, and got scaret, he took such a sudden start. He has,
+hasn't he, Mrs. Ducklow?"</p>
+
+<p>"Has what?" said Mrs. Ducklow, pretending ignorance.</p>
+
+<p>"Some o' them cowpon bonds. I ruther guess he's got some."</p>
+
+<p>"You mean Gov'ment bonds? Ducklow got some? 'Ta'n't at all likely he'd
+spec'late in them, without saying something to <i>me</i> about it! No, he
+couldn't have any without my knowing it, I'm sure!"</p>
+
+<p>How demure, how innocent she looked, plying her knitting-needles, and
+stopping to take up a stitch! How little at that moment she knew of
+Ducklow's trouble, and its terrible cause!</p>
+
+<p>Ducklow's first impulse was to drive on and endeavor at all hazards to
+snatch the bonds from the flames. His next was, to return and alarm his
+neighbors, and obtain their assistance. But a minute's delay might be
+fatal; so he drove on, screaming "Fire! fire!" at the top of his voice.</p>
+
+<p>But the old mare was a slow-footed animal; and Ducklow had no whip. He
+reached forward and struck her with the reins.</p>
+
+<p>"Git up! git up!&mdash;Fire! fire!" screamed Ducklow. "Oh, them bonds! them
+bonds! Why didn't I give the money to Reuben? Fire! fire! fire!"</p>
+
+<p>By dint of screaming and slapping, he urged her from a trot into a
+gallop,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_400" id="Page_400">[Pg 400]</a></span> which was scarcely an improvement as to speed, and certainly
+not as to grace. It was like the gallop of an old cow. "Why don't ye go
+'long!" he cried despairingly.</p>
+
+<p>Slap, slap! He knocked his own hat off with the loose ends of the reins.
+It fell under the wheels. He cast one look behind, to satisfy himself
+that it had been very thoroughly run over and crushed into the dirt, and
+left it to its fate.</p>
+
+<p>Slap, slap! "Fire, fire!" Canter, canter, canter! Neighbors looked out
+of their windows, and, recognizing Ducklow's wagon and old mare in such
+an astonishing plight, and Ducklow himself, without his hat, rising from
+his seat, and reaching forward in wild attitudes, brandishing the reins,
+at the same time rending the azure with yells, thought he must be
+insane.</p>
+
+<p>He drove to the top of the hill, and looking beyond, in expectation of
+seeing his house wrapped in flames, discovered that the smoke proceeded
+from a brush-heap which his neighbor Atkins was burning in a field near
+by.</p>
+
+<p>The revulsion of feeling that ensued was almost too much for the
+excitable Ducklow. His strength went out of him. For a little while
+there seemed to be nothing left of him but tremor and cold sweat.
+Difficult as it had been to get the old mare in motion, it was now even
+more difficult to stop her.</p>
+
+<p>"Why! what has got into Ducklow's old mare? She's running away with him!
+Who ever heard of such a thing!" And Atkins, watching the ludicrous
+spectacle from his field, became almost as weak from laughter as Ducklow
+was from the effects of fear.</p>
+
+<p>At length Ducklow succeeded in checking the old mare's speed, and in
+turning her about. It was necessary to drive back for his hat. By this
+time he could hear a chorus of shouts, "Fire! fire! fire!" over the
+hill. He had aroused the neighbors as he passed, and now they were
+flocking to extinguish the flames.</p>
+
+<p>"A false alarm! a false alarm!" said Ducklow, looking marvellously
+sheepish, as he met them. "Nothing but Atkins's brush-heap!"</p>
+
+<p>"Seems to me you ought to have found that out 'fore you raised all
+creation with your yells!" said one hyperbolical fellow. "You looked
+like the Flying Dutchman! This your hat? I thought 'twas a dead cat in
+the road. No fire, no fire!"&mdash;turning back to his comrades,&mdash;"only one
+of Ducklow's jokes."</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, two or three boys there were who would not be convinced,
+but continued to leap up, swing their caps, and scream "Fire!" against
+all remonstrance. Ducklow did not wait to enter into explanations, but,
+turning the old mare about again, drove home amid the laughter of the
+bystanders and the screams of the misguided youngsters. As he approached
+the house, he met Taddy rushing wildly up the street.</p>
+
+<p>"Thaddeus! Thaddeus! where ye goin', Thaddeus?"</p>
+
+<p>"Goin' to the fire!" cried Taddy.</p>
+
+<p>"There isn't any fire, boy!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, there is! Didn't ye hear 'em? They've been yellin' like fury."</p>
+
+<p>"It's nothin' but Atkins's brush."</p>
+
+<p>"That all?" And Taddy appeared very much disappointed. "I thought there
+was goin' to be some fun. I wonder who was such a fool as to yell fire
+jest for a darned old brush-heap!"</p>
+
+<p>Ducklow did not inform him.</p>
+
+<p>"I've got to drive over to town and git Reuben's trunk. You stand by the
+mare while I step in and brush my hat."</p>
+
+<p>Instead of applying himself at once to the restoration of his beaver, he
+hastened to the sitting-room, to see that the bonds were safe.</p>
+
+<p>"Heavens and 'arth!" said Ducklow.</p>
+
+<p>The chair, which had been carefully planted in the spot where they were
+concealed, had been removed. Three or four tacks had been taken out, and
+the carpet pushed from the wall. There was straw scattered about.
+Evidently Taddy had been interrupted, in the midst of his ransacking, by
+the alarm of fire. Indeed, he was even now creeping into the house to
+see what notice<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_401" id="Page_401">[Pg 401]</a></span> Ducklow would take of these evidences of his mischief.</p>
+
+<p>In great trepidation the farmer thrust in his hand here and there, and
+groped, until he found the envelope precisely where it had been placed
+the night before, with the tape tied around it, which his wife had put
+on to prevent its contents from slipping out and losing themselves.
+Great was the joy of Ducklow. Great also was the wrath of him, when he
+turned and discovered Taddy.</p>
+
+<p>"Didn't I tell you to stand by the old mare?"</p>
+
+<p>"She won't stir," said Taddy, shrinking away again.</p>
+
+<p>"Come here!" And Ducklow grasped him by the collar. "What have you been
+doin'? Look at that!"</p>
+
+<p>"'Twa'n't me!"&mdash;beginning to whimper, and ram his fists into his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't tell me 'twa'n't you!" Ducklow shook him till his teeth
+chattered. "What was you pullin' up the carpet for?"</p>
+
+<p>"Lost a marble!" snivelled Taddy.</p>
+
+<p>"Lost a marble! Ye didn't lose it under the carpet, did ye? Look at all
+that straw pulled out!"&mdash;shaking him again.</p>
+
+<p>"Didn't know but it might 'a' got under the carpet, marbles roll so,"
+explained Taddy, as soon as he could get his breath.</p>
+
+<p>"Wal, Sir!" Ducklow administered a resounding box on his ear. "Don't you
+do such a thing again, if you lose a million marbles!"</p>
+
+<p>"Ha'n't got a million!" Taddy wept, rubbing his cheek. "Ha'n't got but
+four! Won't ye buy me some to-day?"</p>
+
+<p>"Go to that mare, and don't you leave her again till I come, or I'll
+<i>marble</i> ye in a way you won't like!"</p>
+
+<p>Understanding, by this somewhat equivocal form of expression, that
+flagellation was threatened, Taddy obeyed, still feeling his smarting
+and burning ear.</p>
+
+<p>Ducklow was in trouble. What should he do with the bonds? The floor was
+no place for them, after what had happened; and he remembered too well
+the experience of yesterday to think for a moment of carrying them about
+his person. With unreasonable impatience, his mind reverted to Mrs.
+Ducklow.</p>
+
+<p>"Why a'n't she to home? These women are forever a-gaddin'! I wish
+Reuben's trunk was in Jericho!"</p>
+
+<p>Thinking of the trunk reminded him of one in the garret, filled with old
+papers of all sorts,&mdash;newspapers, letters, bills of sale, children's
+writing-books,&mdash;accumulations of the past quarter of a century. Neither
+fire nor burglar nor ransacking youngster had ever molested those
+ancient records during all those five-and-twenty years. A bright thought
+struck him.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll slip the bonds down into that wuthless heap o' rubbish, where no
+one 'u'd ever think o' lookin' for 'em, and resk 'em."</p>
+
+<p>Having assured himself that Taddy was standing by the wagon, he paid a
+hasty visit to the trunk in the garret, and concealed the envelope,
+still bound in its band of tape, among the papers. He then drove away,
+giving Taddy a final charge to beware of setting anything afire.</p>
+
+<p>He had driven about half a mile when he met a peddler. There was nothing
+unusual or alarming in such a circumstance, surely; but as Ducklow kept
+on, it troubled him.</p>
+
+<p>"He'll stop to the house now, most likely, and want to trade. Findin'
+nobody but Taddy, there's no knowin' what he'll be tempted to do. But I
+a'n't a-goin' to worry. I'll defy anybody to find them bonds. Besides,
+she may be home by this time. I guess she'll hear of the fire-alarm, and
+hurry home: it'll be jest like her. She'll be there, and&mdash;trade with the
+peddler?" thought Ducklow, uneasily. Then a frightful fancy possessed
+him. "She has threatened two or three times to sell that old trunkful of
+papers. He'll offer a big price for 'em, and ten to one she'll let him
+have 'em. Why <i>didn't</i> I think on 't? What a stupid blunderbuss I be!"</p>
+
+<p>As Ducklow thought of it, he felt almost<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_402" id="Page_402">[Pg 402]</a></span> certain that Mrs. Ducklow had
+returned home, and that she was bargaining with the peddler at that
+moment. He fancied her smilingly receiving bright tin-ware for the old
+papers; and he could see the tape-tied envelope going into the bag with
+the rest! The result was, that he turned about and whipped the old mare
+home again in terrific haste, to catch the departing peddler.</p>
+
+<p>Arriving, he found the house as he had left it, and Taddy occupied in
+making a kite-frame.</p>
+
+<p>"Did that peddler stop here?"</p>
+
+<p>"I ha'n't seen no peddler."</p>
+
+<p>"And ha'n't yer Ma Ducklow been home, neither?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>And with a guilty look, Taddy put the kite-frame behind him.</p>
+
+<p>Ducklow considered. The peddler had turned up a cross-street: he would
+probably turn down again and stop at the house, after all: Mrs. Ducklow
+might by that time be at home: then the sale of old papers would be very
+likely to take place. Ducklow thought of leaving word that he did not
+wish any old papers in the house to be sold, but feared lest the request
+might excite Taddy's suspicions.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't see no way but for me to take the bonds with me," thought he,
+with an inward groan.</p>
+
+<p>He accordingly went to the garret, took the envelope out of the trunk,
+and placed it in the breast-pocket of his overcoat, to which he pinned
+it, to prevent it by any chance from getting out. He used six large,
+strong pins for the purpose, and was afterwards sorry he did not use
+seven.</p>
+
+<p>"There's suthin' losin' out of yer pocket!" bawled Taddy, as he was once
+more mounting the wagon.</p>
+
+<p>Quick as lightning, Ducklow clapped his hand to his breast. In doing so,
+he loosed his hold of the wagon-box and fell, raking his shin badly on
+the wheel.</p>
+
+<p>"Yer side-pocket! it's one o' yer mittens!" said Taddy.</p>
+
+<p>"You rascal! how you scared me!"</p>
+
+<p>Seating himself in the wagon, Ducklow gently pulled up his trousers-leg
+to look at the bruised part.</p>
+
+<p>"Got anything in yer boot-leg to-day, Pa Ducklow?" asked Taddy,
+innocently.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, a barked shin!&mdash;all on your account, too! Go and put that straw
+back, and fix the carpet; and don't ye let me hear ye speak of my
+boot-leg again, or I'll <i>boot-leg</i> ye!"</p>
+
+<p>So saying, Ducklow departed.</p>
+
+<p>Instead of repairing the mischief he had done in the sitting-room, Taddy
+devoted his time and talents to the more interesting occupation of
+constructing his kite-frame. He worked at that, until Mr. Grantley, the
+minister, driving by, stopped to inquire how the folks were.</p>
+
+<p>"A'n't to home: may I ride?" cried Taddy, all in a breath.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Grantley was an indulgent old gentleman, fond of children; so he
+said, "Jump in"; and in a minute Taddy had scrambled to a seat by his
+side.</p>
+
+<p>And now occurred a circumstance which Ducklow had foreseen. The alarm of
+fire had reached Reuben's; and although the report of its falseness
+followed immediately, Mrs. Ducklow's inflammable fancy was so kindled by
+it that she could find no comfort in prolonging her visit.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Ducklow'll be going for the trunk, and I <i>must</i> go home and see to
+things, Taddy's <i>such</i> a fellow for mischief! I can foot it; I sha'n't
+mind it."</p>
+
+<p>And off she started, walking herself out of breath in her anxiety.</p>
+
+<p>She reached the brow of the hill just in time to see a chaise drive away
+from her own door.</p>
+
+<p>"Who <i>can</i> that be? I wonder if Taddy's there to guard the house! If
+anything should happen to them bonds!"</p>
+
+<p>Out of breath as she was, she quickened her pace, and trudged on,
+flushed, perspiring, panting, until she reached the house.</p>
+
+<p>"Thaddeus!" she called.</p>
+
+<p>No Taddy answered. She went in. The house was deserted. And lo! the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_403" id="Page_403">[Pg 403]</a></span>
+carpet torn up, and the bonds abstracted!</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Ducklow never would have made such work, removing the bonds. Then
+somebody else must have taken them, she reasoned.</p>
+
+<p>"The man in the chaise!" she exclaimed, or rather made an effort to
+exclaim, succeeding only in bringing forth a hoarse, gasping sound. Fear
+dried up articulation. <i>Vox faucibus h&#339;sit.</i></p>
+
+<p>And Taddy? He had disappeared; been murdered, perhaps,&mdash;or gagged and
+carried away by the man in the chaise.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ducklow flew hither and thither, (to use a favorite phrase of her
+own,) "like a hen with her head cut off"; then rushed out of the house,
+and up the street, screaming after the chaise,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Murder! murder! Stop thief! stop thief!"</p>
+
+<p>She waved her hands aloft in the air frantically. If she had trudged
+before, now she trotted, now she cantered; but if the cantering of the
+old mare was fitly likened to that of a cow, to what thing, to what
+manner of motion under the sun, shall we liken the cantering of Mrs.
+Ducklow? It was original; it was unique; it was prodigious. Now, with
+her frantically waving hands, and all her undulating and flapping
+skirts, she seemed a species of huge, unwieldy bird attempting to fly.
+Then she sank down into a heavy, dragging walk,&mdash;breath and strength all
+gone,&mdash;no voice left even to scream murder. Then the awful realization
+of the loss of the bonds once more rushing over her, she started up
+again. "Half running, half flying, what progress she made!" Then
+Atkins's dog saw her, and, naturally mistaking her for a prodigy, came
+out at her, bristling up and bounding and barking terrifically.</p>
+
+<p>"Come here!" cried Atkins, following the dog. "What's the matter? What's
+to pay, Mrs. Ducklow?"</p>
+
+<p>Attempting to speak, the good woman could only pant and wheeze.</p>
+
+<p>"Robbed!" she at last managed to whisper, amid the yelpings of the cur
+that refused to be silenced.</p>
+
+<p>"Robbed? How? Who?"</p>
+
+<p>"The chaise. Ketch it."</p>
+
+<p>Her gestures expressed more than her words; and Atkins's horse and
+wagon, with which he had been drawing out brush, being in the yard near
+by, he ran to them, leaped to the seat, drove into the road, took Mrs.
+Ducklow aboard, and set out in vigorous pursuit of the slow two-wheeled
+vehicle.</p>
+
+<p>"Stop, you, Sir! Stop, you, Sir!" shrieked Mrs. Ducklow, having
+recovered her breath by the time they came up with the chaise.</p>
+
+<p>It stopped, and Mr. Grantley the minister put out his good-natured,
+surprised face.</p>
+
+<p>"You've robbed my house! You've took"&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ducklow was going on in wild, accusatory accents, when she
+recognized the benign countenance.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you say? I have robbed you?" he exclaimed, very much
+astonished.</p>
+
+<p>"No, no! not you! You wouldn't do such a thing!" she stammered forth,
+while Atkins, who had laughed himself weak at Mr. Ducklow's plight
+earlier in the morning, now laughed himself into a side-ache at Mrs.
+Ducklow's ludicrous mistake. "But did you&mdash;did you stop at my house?
+Have you seen our Thaddeus?"</p>
+
+<p>"Here I be, Ma Ducklow!" piped a small voice; and Taddy, who had till
+then remained hidden, fearing punishment, peeped out of the chaise from
+behind the broad back of the minister.</p>
+
+<p>"Taddy! Taddy! how came the carpet"&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I pulled it up, huntin' for a marble," said Taddy, as she paused,
+overmastered by her emotions.</p>
+
+<p>"And the&mdash;the thing tied up in a brown wrapper?"</p>
+
+<p>"Pa Ducklow took it."</p>
+
+<p>"Ye sure?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I seen him!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, dear!" said Mrs. Ducklow, "I never was so beat! Mr. Grantley, I
+hope&mdash;excuse me&mdash;I didn't know what I was about! Taddy, you notty<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_404" id="Page_404">[Pg 404]</a></span> boy,
+what did you leave the house for? Be ye quite sure yer Pa Ducklow"&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Taddy repeated that he was quite sure, as he climbed from the chaise
+into Atkins's wagon. The minister smilingly remarked that he hoped she
+would find no robbery had been committed, and went his way. Atkins,
+driving back, and setting her and Taddy down at the Ducklow gate,
+answered her embarrassed "Much obleeged to ye," with a sincere "Not at
+all," considering the fun he had had a sufficient compensation for his
+trouble. And thus ended the morning's adventures, with the exception of
+an unimportant episode, in which Taddy, Mrs. Ducklow, and Mrs. Ducklow's
+rattan were the principal actors.</p>
+
+<p>At noon Mr. Ducklow returned.</p>
+
+<p>"Did ye take the bonds?" was his wife's first question.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course I did! Ye don't suppose I'd go away and leave 'em in the
+house, not knowin' when you'd be comin' home?"</p>
+
+<p>"Wal, I didn't know. And I didn't know whuther to believe Taddy or not.
+Oh, I've had such a fright!"</p>
+
+<p>And she related the story of her pursuit of the minister.</p>
+
+<p>"How could ye make such a fool of yerself? It'll git all over town, and
+I shall be mortified to death. Jest like a woman, to git frightened!"</p>
+
+<p>"If <i>you</i> hadn't got frightened, and made a fool of <i>yourself</i>, yelling
+fire, 'twouldn't have happened!" retorted Mrs. Ducklow.</p>
+
+<p>"Wal! wal! say no more about it! The bonds are safe."</p>
+
+<p>"I was in hopes you'd change 'em for them registered bonds Reuben spoke
+of."</p>
+
+<p>"I did try to, but they told me to the bank it couldn't be did. Then I
+asked 'em if they would keep 'em for me, and they said they wouldn't
+object to lockin' on 'em up in their safe; but they wouldn't give me no
+receipt, nor hold themselves responsible for 'em. I didn't know what
+else to do, so I handed 'em the bonds to keep."</p>
+
+<p>"I want to know if you did now!" exclaimed Mrs. Ducklow, disapprovingly.</p>
+
+<p>"Why not? What else could I do? I didn't want to lug 'em around with me
+forever. And as for keepin' 'em hid in the house, we've tried that!" and
+Ducklow unfolded his weekly newspaper.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Ducklow was placing the dinner on the table, with a look which
+seemed to say, "<i>I</i> wouldn't have left the bonds in the bank; <i>my</i>
+judgment would have been better than all that. If they are lost, <i>I</i>
+sha'n't be to blame!" when suddenly Ducklow started and uttered a cry of
+consternation over his newspaper.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, what have ye found?"</p>
+
+<p>"Bank robbery!"</p>
+
+<p>"Not <i>your</i> bank? Not the bank where <i>your bonds</i>"&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Of course not; but in the very next town! The safe blown open with
+gunpowder! Five thousand dollars in Gov'ment bonds stole!"</p>
+
+<p>"How strange!" said Mrs. Ducklow. "Now what did I tell ye?"</p>
+
+<p>"I believe you're right," cried Ducklow, starting to his feet. "They'll
+be safer in my own house, or even in my own pocket!"</p>
+
+<p>"If you was going to put 'em in any safe, why not put 'em in Josiah's?
+He's got a safe, ye know."</p>
+
+<p>"So he has! We might drive over there and make a visit Monday, and ask
+him to lock up&mdash;&mdash;yes, we might tell him and Laury all about it, and
+leave 'em in their charge."</p>
+
+<p>"So we might!" said Mrs. Ducklow.</p>
+
+<p>Laura was their daughter, and Josiah her husband, in whose honor and
+sagacity they placed unlimited confidence. The plan was resolved upon at
+once.</p>
+
+<p>"To-morrow's Sunday," said Ducklow, pacing the floor. "If we leave the
+bonds in the bank over night, they must stay there till Monday."</p>
+
+<p>"And Sunday is jest the day for burglars to operate!" added Mrs.
+Ducklow.</p>
+
+<p>"I've a good notion&mdash;let me see!" said Ducklow, looking at the clock.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_405" id="Page_405">[Pg 405]</a></span>
+"Twenty minutes after twelve! Bank closes at two! An hour and a half,&mdash;I
+believe I could git there in an hour and a half. I will. I'll take a
+bite and drive right back."</p>
+
+<p>Which he accordingly did, and brought the tape-tied envelope home with
+him again. That night he slept with it under his pillow. The next day
+was Sunday; and although Mr. Ducklow did not like to have the bonds on
+his mind during sermon-time, and Mrs. Ducklow "dreaded dreadfully," as
+she said, "to look the minister in the face," they concluded that it was
+best, on the whole, to go to meeting, and carry the bonds. With the
+envelope once more in his breast-pocket, (stitched in this time by Mrs.
+Ducklow's own hand,) the farmer sat under the droppings of the
+sanctuary, and stared up at the good minister, but without hearing a
+word of the discourse, his mind was so engrossed by worldly cares, until
+the preacher exclaimed vehemently, looking straight at Ducklow's pew,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"What said Paul? 'I would to God that not only thou, but also all that
+hear me this day, were both almost and altogether such as I am, <i>except
+these bonds</i>.' <i>'Except these bonds'!</i>" he repeated, striking the Bible.
+"Can you, my hearers,&mdash;can you say, with Paul, 'Would that all were as I
+am, <i>except these bonds</i>'?"</p>
+
+<p>A point which seemed for a moment so personal to himself, that Ducklow
+was filled with confusion, and would certainly have stammered out some
+foolish answer, had not the preacher passed on to other themes. As it
+was, Ducklow contented himself with glancing around to see if the
+congregation was looking at him, and carelessly passing his hand across
+his breast-pocket to make sure the bonds were still there.</p>
+
+<p>Early the next morning, the old mare was harnessed, and Taddy's adopted
+parents set out to visit their daughter,&mdash;Mrs. Ducklow having postponed
+her washing for the purpose. It was afternoon when they arrived at their
+journey's end. Laura received them joyfully, but Josiah was not expected
+home until evening. Mr. Ducklow put the old mare in the barn, and fed
+her, and then went in to dinner, feeling very comfortable indeed.</p>
+
+<p>"Josiah's got a nice place here. That's about as slick a little barn as
+ever I see. Always does me good to come over here and see you gittin'
+along so nicely, Laury."</p>
+
+<p>"I wish you'd come oftener, then," said Laura.</p>
+
+<p>"Wal, it's hard leavin' home, ye know. Have to git one of the Atkins
+boys to come and sleep with Taddy the night we're away."</p>
+
+<p>"We shouldn't have come to-day, if 't hadn't been for me," remarked Mrs.
+Ducklow. "Says I to your father, says I, 'I feel as if I wanted to go
+over and see Laury; it seems an age since I've seen her,' says I. 'Wal,'
+says he, 's'pos'n' we go!' says he. That was only last Saturday; and
+this morning we started."</p>
+
+<p>"And it's no fool of a job to make the journey with the old mare!" said
+Ducklow.</p>
+
+<p>"Why don't you drive a better horse?" said Laura, whose pride was always
+touched when her parents came to visit her with the old mare and the
+one-horse wagon.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, she answers my purpose. Hossflesh is high, Laury. Have to
+economize, these times."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sure there's no need of your economizing!" exclaimed Laura, leading
+the way to the dining-room. "Why don't you use your money, and have the
+good of it?"</p>
+
+<p>"So I tell him," said Mrs. Ducklow, faintly.&mdash;"Why, Laury! I didn't want
+you to be to so much trouble to git dinner jest for us! A bite would
+have answered. Do see, father!"</p>
+
+<p>At evening Josiah came home; and it was not until then that Ducklow
+mentioned the subject which was foremost in his thoughts.</p>
+
+<p>"What do ye think o' Gov'ment bonds, Josiah?" he incidentally inquired,
+after supper.</p>
+
+<p>"First-rate!" said Josiah.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_406" id="Page_406">[Pg 406]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"About as safe as anything, a'n't they?" said Ducklow, encouraged.</p>
+
+<p>"Safe?" cried Josiah. "Just look at the resources of this country!
+Nobody has begun yet to appreciate the power and undeveloped wealth of
+these United States. It's a big rebellion, I know; but we're going to
+put it down. It'll leave us a big debt, very sure; but we handle it now
+easy as that child lifts that stool. It makes him grunt and stagger a
+little, not because he isn't strong enough for it, but because he don't
+understand his own strength, or how to use it: he'll have twice the
+strength, and know just how to apply it, in a little while. Just so with
+this country. It makes me laugh to bear folks talk about repudiation and
+bankruptcy."</p>
+
+<p>"But s'pos'n' we do put down the Rebellion, and the States come back:
+then what's to hender the South, and Secesh sympathizers in the North,
+from j'inin' together and votin' that the debt sha'n't be paid?"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you worry about that! Do ye suppose we're going to be such fools
+as to give the Rebels, after we've whipped 'em, the same political power
+they had before the war? Not by a long chalk! Sooner than that, we'll
+put the ballot into the hands of the freedmen. They're our friends.
+They've fought on the right side, and they'll vote on the right side. I
+tell ye, spite of all the prejudice there is against black skins, we
+a'n't such a nation of ninnies as to give up all we're fighting for, and
+leave our best friends and allies, not to speak of our own interests, in
+the hands of our enemies."</p>
+
+<p>"You consider Gov'ments a good investment, then, do ye?" said Ducklow,
+growing radiant.</p>
+
+<p>"I do, decidedly,&mdash;the very best. Besides, you help the Government; and
+that's no small consideration."</p>
+
+<p>"So I thought. But how is it about the cowpon bonds? A'n't they rather
+ticklish property to have in the house?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I don't know. Think how many years you'll keep old bills and
+documents and never dream of such a thing as losing them! There's not a
+bit more danger with the bonds. I shouldn't want to carry 'em around
+with me, to any great amount,&mdash;though I did once carry three
+thousand-dollar bonds in my pocket for a week. I didn't mind it."</p>
+
+<p>"Curi's!" said Ducklow: "I've got three thousan'-dollar bonds in my
+pocket this minute!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it's so much good property," said Josiah, appearing not at all
+surprised at the circumstance.</p>
+
+<p>"Seems to me, though, if I had a safe, as you have, I should lock 'em up
+in it."</p>
+
+<p>"I was travelling that week. I locked 'em up pretty soon after I got
+home, though."</p>
+
+<p>"Suppose," said Ducklow, as if the thought had but just occurred to
+him,&mdash;"suppose you put my bonds into your safe: I shall feel easier."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course," replied Josiah. "I'll keep 'em for you, if you like."</p>
+
+<p>"It will be an accommodation. They'll be safe, will they?"</p>
+
+<p>"Safe as mine are; safe as anybody's: I'll insure 'em for twenty-five
+cents."</p>
+
+<p>Ducklow was happy. Mrs. Ducklow was happy. She took her husband's coat,
+and with a pair of scissors cut the threads that stitched the envelope
+to the pocket.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you torn off the May coupons?" asked Josiah.</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you'd better. They'll be payable now soon; and if you take them,
+you won't have to touch the bonds again till the interest on the
+November coupons is due."</p>
+
+<p>"A good idea!" said Ducklow.</p>
+
+<p>He took the envelope, untied the tape, and removed its contents.
+Suddenly the glow of comfort, the gleam of satisfaction, faded from his
+countenance.</p>
+
+<p>"Hello! What ye got there?" cried Josiah.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, father! massy sakes!" exclaimed Mrs. Ducklow.</p>
+
+<p>As for Ducklow himself, he could not utter a word; but, dumb with
+consternation, he looked again in the envelope, and opened and turned
+inside out, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_407" id="Page_407">[Pg 407]</a></span> shook, with trembling hands, its astonishing contents.
+The bonds were not there: they had been stolen, and three copies of the
+"Sunday Visitor" had been inserted in their place.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Very early on the following morning a dismal-faced middle-aged couple
+might have been seen riding away from Josiah's house. It was the
+Ducklows returning home, after their fruitless, their worse than
+fruitless, journey. No entreaties could prevail upon them to prolong
+their visit. It was with difficulty even that they had been prevented
+from setting off immediately on the discovery of their loss, and
+travelling all night, in their impatience to get upon the track of the
+missing bonds.</p>
+
+<p>"There'll be not the least use in going to-night," Josiah had said. "If
+they were stolen at the bank, you can't do anything about it till
+to-morrow. And even if they were taken from your own house, I don't see
+what's to be gained now by hurrying back. It isn't probable you'll ever
+see 'em again, and you may just as well take it easy,&mdash;go to bed and
+sleep on it, and get a fresh start in the morning."</p>
+
+<p>So, much against their inclination, the unfortunate owners of the
+abstracted bonds retired to the luxurious chamber Laura gave them, and
+lay awake all night, groaning and sighing, wondering and surmising, and
+(I regret to add) blaming each other. So true it is, that "modern
+conveniences," hot and cold water all over the house, a pier-glass, and
+the most magnificently canopied couch, avail nothing to give
+tranquillity to the harassed mind. Hitherto the Ducklows had felt great
+satisfaction in the style their daughter, by her marriage, was enabled
+to support. To brag of her nice house and furniture and two servants was
+almost as good as possessing them. Remembering her rich dining-room and
+silver service and porcelain, they were proud. Such things were enough
+for the honor of the family; and, asking nothing for themselves, they
+slept well in their humblest of bed-chambers, and sipped their tea
+contentedly out of clumsy earthen. But that night the boasted style in
+which their "darter" lived was less appreciated than formerly: fashion
+and splendor were no longer a consolation.</p>
+
+<p>"If we had only given the three thousan' dollars to Reuben!" said
+Ducklow, driving homewards with a countenance as long as his whip-lash.
+"'Twould have jest set him up, and been some compensation for his
+sufferin's and losses goin' to the war."</p>
+
+<p>"Wal, I had no objections," replied Mrs. Ducklow. "I always thought he
+ought to have the money eventooally. And, as Miss Beswick said, no doubt
+it would 'a' been ten times the comfort to him now it would be a number
+o' years from now. But you didn't seem willing."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know! 'twas you that wasn't willin'!"</p>
+
+<p>And they expatiated on Reuben's merits, and their benevolent intentions
+towards him, and, in imagination, endowed him with the price of the
+bonds over and over again: so easy is it to be generous with lost money!</p>
+
+<p>"But it's no use talkin'!" said Ducklow. "I've not the least idee we
+shall ever see the color o' them bonds again. If they was stole to the
+bank, I can't prove anything."</p>
+
+<p>"It does seem strange to me," Mrs. Ducklow replied, "that you should
+have had no more gumption than to trust the bonds with strangers, when
+they told you in so many words they wouldn't be responsible."</p>
+
+<p>"If you have flung that in my teeth once, you have fifty times!" And
+Ducklow lashed the old mare, as if she, and not Mrs. Ducklow, had
+exasperated him.</p>
+
+<p>"Wal," said the lady, "I don't see how we're going to work to find 'em,
+now they're lost, without making inquiries; and we can't make inquiries
+without letting it be known we had bought."</p>
+
+<p>"I been thinkin' about that," said her husband. "Oh, dear!" with a
+groan; "I wish the pesky cowpon bonds had never been invented!"</p>
+
+<p>They drove first to the bank, where they were of course told that the
+envelope<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_408" id="Page_408">[Pg 408]</a></span> had not been untied there. "Besides, it was sealed, wasn't
+it?" said the cashier. "Indeed!" He expressed great surprise, when
+informed that it was not. "It should have been: I supposed any child
+would know enough to look out for that!"</p>
+
+<p>And this was all the consolation Ducklow could obtain.</p>
+
+<p>"Just as I expected," said Mrs. Ducklow, as they resumed their journey.
+"I just as much believe that man stole your bonds as that you trusted
+'em in his hands in an unsealed wrapper! Beats all, how you could be so
+careless!"</p>
+
+<p>"Wal, wal! I s'pose I never shall hear the last on 't!"</p>
+
+<p>And again the poor old mare had to suffer for Mrs. Ducklow's offences.</p>
+
+<p>They had but one hope now,&mdash;that perhaps Taddy had tampered with the
+envelope, and that the bonds might be found somewhere about the house.
+But this hope was quickly extinguished on their arrival. Taddy, being
+accused, protested his innocence with a vehemence which convinced even
+Mr. Ducklow that the cashier was probably the guilty party.</p>
+
+<p>"Unless," said he, brandishing the rattan, "somebody got into the house
+that morning when the little scamp run off to ride with the minister!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, don't lick me for that! I've been licked for that once; ha'n't I,
+Ma Ducklow?" shrieked Taddy.</p>
+
+<p>The house was searched in vain. No clew to the purloined securities
+could be obtained,&mdash;the copies of the "Sunday Visitor," which had been
+substituted for them, affording not the least; for that valuable little
+paper was found in almost every household, except Ducklow's.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't see any way left but to advertise, as Josiah said," remarked
+the farmer, with a deep sigh of despondency.</p>
+
+<p>"And that'll bring it all out!" exclaimed Mrs. Ducklow. "If you only
+hadn't been so imprudent!"</p>
+
+<p>"Wal, wal!" said Ducklow, cutting her short.</p>
+
+<p>Before resorting to public measures for the recovery of the stolen
+property, it was deemed expedient to acquaint their friends with their
+loss in a private way. The next day, accordingly, they went to pay
+Reuben a visit. It was a very different meeting from that which took
+place a few mornings before. The returned soldier had gained in health,
+but not in spirits. The rapture of reaching home once more, the flush of
+hope and happiness, had passed away with the visitors who had flocked to
+offer their congratulations. He had had time to reflect: he had reached
+home, indeed; but now every moment reminded him how soon that home was
+to be taken from him. He looked at his wife and children, and clenched
+his teeth hard to stifle the emotions that arose at the thought of their
+future. The sweet serenity, the faith and patience and cheerfulness,
+which never ceased to illumine Sophronia's face as she moved about the
+house, pursuing her daily tasks, and tenderly waiting upon him, deepened
+at once his love and his solicitude. He was watching her thus when the
+Ducklows entered with countenances mournful as the grave.</p>
+
+<p>"How are you gittin' along, Reuben?" said Ducklow, while his wife
+murmured a solemn "good morning" to Sophronia.</p>
+
+<p>"I am doing well enough. Don't be at all concerned about me! It a'n't
+pleasant to lie here, and feel it may be months, months, before I'm able
+to be about my business; but I wouldn't mind it,&mdash;I could stand it
+first-rate,&mdash;I could stand anything, anything, but to see her working
+her life out for me and the children! To no purpose, either; that's the
+worst of it. We shall have to lose this place, spite of fate!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Reuben!" said Sophronia, hastening to him, and laying her soothing
+hands upon his hot forehead; "why won't you stop thinking about that? Do
+try to have more faith! We shall be taken care of, I'm sure!"</p>
+
+<p>"If I had three thousand dollars,&mdash;yes, or even two,&mdash;then I'd have
+faith!" said Reuben. "Miss Beswick has proposed to send a
+subscription-paper<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_409" id="Page_409">[Pg 409]</a></span> around town for us; but I'd rather die than have it
+done. Besides, nothing near that amount could be raised, I'm confident.
+You needn't groan so, Pa Ducklow, for I a'n't hinting at you. I don't
+expect you to help me out of my trouble. If you had felt called upon to
+do it, you'd have done it before now; and I don't ask, I don't beg of
+any man!" added the soldier, proudly.</p>
+
+<p>"That's right; I like your sperit!" said the miserable Ducklow. "But I
+was sighing to think of something,&mdash;something you haven't known anything
+about, Reuben."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, Reuben, we should have helped you," said Mrs. Ducklow, "and did,
+did take steps towards it"&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"In fact," resumed Ducklow, "you've met with a great misfortin', Reuben.
+Unbeknown to yourself, you've met with a great misfortin'! Yer Ma
+Ducklow knows."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, Reuben, the very day you came home, your Pa Ducklow made an
+investment for your benefit. We didn't mention it,&mdash;you know I wouldn't
+own up to it, though I didn't exactly say the contrary, the morning we
+was over here"&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Because," said Ducklow, as she faltered, "we wanted to surprise you; we
+was keepin' it a secret till the right time, then we was goin' to make
+it a pleasant surprise to ye."</p>
+
+<p>"What in the name of common-sense are you talking about?" cried Reuben,
+looking from one to the other of the wretched, prevaricating pair.</p>
+
+<p>"Cowpon bonds!" groaned Ducklow. "Three thousan'-dollar cowpon bonds!
+The money had been lent, but I wanted to make a good investment for you,
+and I thought there was nothin' so good as Gov'ments"&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"That's all right," said Reuben. "Only, if you had money to invest for
+my benefit, I should have preferred to pay off the mortgage the first
+thing."</p>
+
+<p>"Sartin! sartin!" said Ducklow; "and you could have turned the bonds
+right in, if you had so chosen, like so much cash. Or you could have
+drawed your interest on the bonds in gold, and paid the interest on your
+mortgage in currency, and made so much, as I rather thought you would."</p>
+
+<p>"But the bonds?" eagerly demanded Reuben, with trembling hopes, just as
+Miss Beswick, with her shawl over her head, entered the room.</p>
+
+<p>"We was jest telling about our loss, Reuben's loss," said Mrs. Ducklow
+in a manner which betrayed no little anxiety to conciliate that terrible
+woman.</p>
+
+<p>"Very well! don't let me interrupt." And Miss Beswick, slipping the
+shawl from her head, sat down.</p>
+
+<p>Her presence, stiff and prim and sarcastic, did not tend in the least to
+relieve Mr. Ducklow from the natural embarrassment he felt in giving his
+version of Reuben's loss. However, assisted occasionally by a judicious
+remark thrown in by Mrs. Ducklow, he succeeded in telling a sufficiently
+plausible and candid-seeming story.</p>
+
+<p>"I see! I see!" said Reuben, who had listened with astonishment and pain
+to the narrative. "You had kinder intentions towards me than I gave you
+credit for. Forgive me, if I wronged you!" He pressed the hand of his
+adopted father, and thanked him from a heart filled with gratitude and
+trouble. "But don't feel so bad about it. You did what you thought best
+I can only say, the fates are against me."</p>
+
+<p>"Hem!" coughing, Miss Beswick stretched up her long neck and cleared her
+throat "So them bonds you had bought for Reuben was in the house the
+very night I called!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, Miss Beswick," replied Mrs. Ducklow; "and that's what made it so
+uncomfortable to us to have you talk the way you did."</p>
+
+<p>"Hem!" The neck was stretched up still farther than before, and the
+redoubtable throat cleared again. "'Twas too bad! Ye ought to have told
+me. You'd actooally bought the bonds,&mdash;bought 'em for Reuben, had ye?"</p>
+
+<p>"Sartin! sartin!" said Ducklow.</p>
+
+<p>"To be sure!" said Mrs. Ducklow.</p>
+
+<p>"We designed 'em for his benefit, a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_410" id="Page_410">[Pg 410]</a></span> surprise, when the right time
+come," said both together.</p>
+
+<p>"Hem! well!" (It was evident that the Beswick was clearing her decks for
+action.) "When the right time come! yes! That right time wasn't
+somethin' indefinite, in the fur futur', of course! Yer losin' the bonds
+didn't hurry up yer benevolence the least grain, I s'pose! Hem! let in
+them boys, Sophrony!"</p>
+
+<p>Sophronia opened the door, and in walked Master Dick Atkins, (son of the
+brush-burner,) followed, not without reluctance and concern, by Master
+Taddy.</p>
+
+<p>"Thaddeus! what you here for?" demanded the adopted parents.</p>
+
+<p>"Because I said so," remarked Miss Beswick, arbitrarily. "Step along,
+boys, step along. Hold up yer head, Taddy, for ye a'n't goin' to be hurt
+while I'm around. Take yer fists out o' yer eyes, and stop blubberin'.
+Mr. Ducklow, that boy knows somethin' about Reuben's cowpon bonds."</p>
+
+<p>"Thaddeus!" ejaculated both Ducklows at once, "did you touch them
+bonds?"</p>
+
+<p>"Didn't know what they was!" whimpered Taddy.</p>
+
+<p>"Did you take them?" And the female Ducklow grasped his shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>"Hands off, if you please!" remarked Miss Beswick, with frightfully
+gleaming courtesy. "I told him, if he'd be a good boy, and come along
+with Richard, and tell the truth, he shouldn't be hurt. <i>If</i> you
+please," she repeated, with a majestic nod; and Mrs. Ducklow took her
+hands off.</p>
+
+<p>"Where are they now? where are they?" cried Ducklow, rushing headlong to
+the main question.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't know," said Taddy.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't know? you villain!" And Ducklow was rising in wrath. But Miss
+Beswick put up her hand deprecatingly.</p>
+
+<p>"If <i>you</i> please!" she said, with grim civility; and Ducklow sank down
+again.</p>
+
+<p>"What did you do with 'em? what did you want of 'em?" said Mrs. Ducklow,
+with difficulty restraining an impulse to wring his neck.</p>
+
+<p>"To cover my kite," confessed the miserable Taddy.</p>
+
+<p>"Cover your kite! your kite!" A chorus of groans from the Ducklows.
+"Didn't you know no better?"</p>
+
+<p>"Didn't think you'd care," said Taddy. "I had some newspapers Dick give
+me to cover it; but I thought them things 'u'd be pootier. So I took
+'em, and put the newspapers in the wrapper."</p>
+
+<p>"Did ye cover yer kite?"</p>
+
+<p>"No. When I found out you cared so much about 'em, I dars'n't; I was
+afraid you'd see 'em."</p>
+
+<p>"Then what <i>did</i> you do with 'em?"</p>
+
+<p>"When you was away, Dick come over to sleep with me, and I&mdash;I sold 'em
+to him."</p>
+
+<p>"Sold 'em to Dick!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," spoke up Dick, stoutly, "for six marbles, and one was a
+bull's-eye, and one agate, and two alleys. Then, when you come home and
+made such a fuss, he wanted 'em ag'in. But he wouldn't give me back but
+four, and I wa'n't going to agree to no such nonsense as that."</p>
+
+<p>"I'd lost the bull's-eye and one common," whined Taddy.</p>
+
+<p>"But the bonds! did you destroy 'em?"</p>
+
+<p>"Likely I'd destroy 'em, after I'd paid six marbles for 'em!" said Dick.
+"I wanted 'em to cover <i>my</i> kite with."</p>
+
+<p>"Cover <i>your</i>&mdash;oh! then <i>you</i>'ve made a kite of 'em?" said Ducklow.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I was going to, when Aunt Beswick ketched me at it. She made me
+tell where I got 'em, and took me over to your house jest now; and Taddy
+said you was over here, and so she put ahead, and made us follow her."</p>
+
+<p>Again, in an agony of impatience, Ducklow demanded to know where the
+bonds were at that moment.</p>
+
+<p>"If Taddy'll give me back the marbles," began Master Dick.</p>
+
+<p>"That'll do!" said Miss Beswick, silencing him with a gesture. "Reuben
+will give you twenty marbles; for I believe you said they was Reuben's
+bonds, Mr. Ducklow?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_411" id="Page_411">[Pg 411]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Yes, that is"&mdash;&mdash;stammered the adopted father.</p>
+
+<p>"Eventooally," struck in the adopted mother.</p>
+
+<p>"Now look here! What am I to understand? Be they Reuben's bonds, or be
+they not? That's the question!" And there was that in Miss Beswick's
+look which said, "If they are not Reuben's, then your eyes shall never
+behold them more!"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course they're Reuben's!" "We intended all the while"&mdash;&mdash;"His
+benefit"&mdash;&mdash;"To do jest what he pleases with 'em," chorused Pa and Ma
+Ducklow.</p>
+
+<p>"Wal! now it's understood! Here, Reuben, are your cowpon bonds!"</p>
+
+<p>And Miss Beswick, drawing them from her bosom, placed the precious
+documents, with formal politeness, in the glad soldier's agitated hands.</p>
+
+<p>"Glory!" cried Reuben, assuring himself that they were genuine and real.
+"Sophrony, you've got a home! Ruby, Carrie, you've got a home! Miss
+Beswick! you angel from the skies! order a bushel and a half of marbles
+for Dick, and have the bill sent to me! Oh, Pa Ducklow! you never did a
+nobler or more generous thing in your life. These will lift the
+mortgage, and leave me a nest-egg besides. Then when I get my back pay,
+and my pension, and my health again, we shall be independent."</p>
+
+<p>And the soldier, overcome by his feelings, sank back in the arms of his
+wife.</p>
+
+<p>"We always told you we'd do well by ye, you remember?" said the
+Ducklows, triumphantly.</p>
+
+<p>The news went abroad. Again congratulations poured in upon the returned
+volunteer. Everybody rejoiced in his good fortune,&mdash;especially certain
+rich ones who had been dreading to see Miss Beswick come round with her
+proposed subscription-paper.</p>
+
+<p>Among the rest, the Ducklows rejoiced not the least; for selfishness was
+with them, as it is with many, rather a thing of habit than a fault of
+the heart. The catastrophe of the bonds broke up that life-long habit,
+and revealed good hearts underneath. The consciousness of having done an
+act of justice, although by accident, proved very sweet to them: it was
+really a fresh sensation; and Reuben and his dear little family, saved
+from ruin and distress, happy, thankful, glad, was a sight to their old
+eyes such as they had never witnessed before. Not gold itself, in any
+quantity, at the highest premium, could have given them so much
+satisfaction; and as for coupon bonds, they are not to be mentioned in
+the comparison.</p>
+
+<p>"Won't you do well by me some time, too?" teased little Taddy, who
+overheard his adopted parents congratulating themselves on having acted
+so generously by Reuben. "I don't care for no cowpen bonds, but I do
+want a new drum!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, yes, my son!" said Ducklow, patting the boy's shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>And the drum was bought.</p>
+
+<p>Taddy was delighted. But he did not know what made the Ducklows so much
+happier, so much gentler and kinder, than formerly. Do you?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_412" id="Page_412">[Pg 412]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="THE_AUTHOR_OF_SAULA" id="THE_AUTHOR_OF_SAULA"></a>THE AUTHOR OF "SAUL."<a name="FNanchor_A_1" id="FNanchor_A_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_A_1" class="fnanchor">[A]</a></h2>
+
+
+<p>We are not one of those who believe that the manifestation of any
+native, vigorous faculty of the mind is dependent upon circumstances. It
+is true that education, in its largest sense, modifies development; but
+it cannot, to any serious extent, add to, or take from, the power to be
+developed. In the lack of encouragement and contemporary appreciation,
+certain of the finer faculties may not give forth their full and perfect
+fragrance; but the rose is always seen to be a rose, though never a bud
+come to flower. The "mute, inglorious Milton" is a pleasant poetic
+fiction. Against the "hands that the rod of empire <i>might</i> have swayed"
+we have nothing to object, knowing to what sort of hands the said rod
+has so often been intrusted.</p>
+
+<p>John Howard Payne once read to us&mdash;and it was something of an
+infliction&mdash;a long manuscript on "The Neglected Geniuses of America,"&mdash;a
+work which only death, we suspect, prevented him from giving to the
+world. There was not one name in the list which had ever before reached
+our ears. Nicholas Blauvelt and William Phillips and a number of other
+utterly forgotten rhymesters were described and eulogized at length, the
+quoted specimens of their poetry proving all the while their admirable
+right to the oblivion which Mr. Payne deprecated. They were men of
+culture, some of them wealthy, and we could detect no lack of
+opportunity in the story of their lives. Had they been mechanics, they
+would have planed boards and laid bricks from youth to age. The Ayrshire
+ploughman and the Bedford tinker were made of other stuff. Our inference
+then was, and still is, that unacknowledged (or at least unmanifested)
+genius is no genius at all, and that the lack of sympathy which many
+young authors so bitterly lament is a necessary test of their fitness
+for their assumed vocation.</p>
+
+<p>Gerald Massey is one of the most recent instances of the certainty with
+which a poetic faculty by no means of the highest order will enforce its
+own development, under seemingly fatal discouragements. The author of
+"Saul" is a better illustration of the same fact; for, although, in our
+ignorance of the circumstances of his early life, we are unable to
+affirm what particular difficulties he had to encounter, we know how
+long he was obliged to wait for the first word of recognition, and to
+what heights he aspired in the course of many long and solitary years.</p>
+
+<p>The existence of "Saul" was first made known to the world by an article
+in the "North British Review," in the year 1858, when the author had
+already attained his forty-second year. The fact that the work was
+published in Montreal called some attention to it on this side of the
+Atlantic, and a few critical notices appeared in our literary
+periodicals. It is still, however, comparatively unknown; and those into
+whose hands it may have fallen are, doubtless, ignorant of the author's
+name and history. An outline of the latter, so far as we have been able
+to ascertain its features, will help the reader to a more intelligent
+judgment, when we come to discuss the author's claim to a place in
+literature.</p>
+
+<p>Charles Heavysege was born in Liverpool, England, in the year 1816. We
+know nothing in regard to his parents, except that they were poor, yet
+able to send their son to an ordinary school. His passion for reading,
+especially such the poetry as fell into his hands, showed itself while
+he was yet a child. Milton seems to have been the first author who made
+a profound impression upon his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_413" id="Page_413">[Pg 413]</a></span> mind; but it is also reported that the
+schoolmaster once indignantly snatched Gray's "Elegy" from his hand,
+because he so frequently selected that poem for his reading-lesson.
+Somewhat later, he saw "Macbeth" performed, and was immediately seized
+with the ambition to become an actor,&mdash;a profession for which few
+persons could be less qualified. The impression produced by this
+tragedy, combined with the strict religious training which he appears to
+have received, undoubtedly fixed the character and manner of his
+subsequent literary efforts.</p>
+
+<p>There are but few other facts of his life which we can state with
+certainty. His chances of education were evidently very scanty, for he
+must have left school while yet a boy, in order to learn his
+trade,&mdash;that of a machinist. He had thenceforth little time and less
+opportunity for literary culture. His reading was desultory, and the
+poetic faculty, expending itself on whatever subjects came to hand,
+produced great quantities of manuscripts, which were destroyed almost as
+soon as written. The idea of publishing them does not seem to have
+presented itself to his mind. Either his life must have been devoid of
+every form of intellectual sympathy, or there was some external
+impediment formidable enough to keep down that ambition which always
+co-exists with the creative power.</p>
+
+<p>In the year 1843 he married, and in 1853 emigrated to Canada, and
+settled in Montreal. Even here his literary labor was at first performed
+in secrecy; he was nearly forty years old before a line from his pen
+appeared in type. He found employment in a machine-shop, and it was only
+very gradually&mdash;probably after much doubt and hesitation&mdash;that he came
+to the determination to subject his private creations to the ordeal of
+print. His first venture was a poem in blank verse, the title of which
+we have been unable to ascertain. A few copies were printed anonymously
+and distributed among personal friends. It was a premature birth, which
+never knew a moment's life, and the father of it would now be the last
+person to attempt a resuscitation.</p>
+
+<p>Soon afterwards appeared&mdash;also anonymously&mdash;a little pamphlet,
+containing fifty "so-called" sonnets. They are, in reality, fragmentary
+poems of fourteen lines each, bound to no metre or order of rhyme. In
+spite of occasional crudities of expression, the ideas are always poetic
+and elevated, and there are many vigorous couplets and quatrains. They
+do not, however, furnish any evidence of sustained power, and the
+reader, who should peruse them as the only productions of the author,
+would be far from inferring the latter's possession of that lofty epical
+utterance which he exhibits in "Saul" and "Jephthah's Daughter."</p>
+
+<p>We cannot learn that this second attempt to obtain a hearing was
+successful, so far as any public notice of the pamphlet is concerned;
+but it seems, at least, to have procured for Mr. Heavysege the first
+private recognition of his poetic abilities which he had ever received,
+and thereby given him courage for a more ambitious venture. "Saul," as
+an epical subject, must have haunted his mind for years. The greater
+portion of it, indeed, had been written before he had become familiar
+with the idea of publication; and even after the completion of the work,
+we can imagine the sacrifices which must have delayed its appearance in
+print. For a hard-working mechanic, in straitened circumstances, courage
+of another kind was required. It is no slight expense to produce an
+octavo volume of three hundred and thirty pages; there must have been
+much anxious self-consultation, a great call for patience, fortitude,
+and hope, with who may know what doubts and despondencies, before, in
+1857 "Saul" was given to the world.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing could have been more depressing than its reception, if, indeed,
+the term "reception" can be applied to complete indifference. A country
+like Canada, possessing no nationality, and looking across the Atlantic,
+not only for its political rule, but also (until very recently, at
+least) for its opinions, tastes,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_414" id="Page_414">[Pg 414]</a></span> and habits, is especially unfavorable
+to the growth of an independent literature. Although there are many men
+of learning and culture among the residents of Montreal, they do not
+form a class to whom a native author could look for encouragement or
+appreciation sufficient to stamp him as successful. The reading public
+there accept the decrees of England and the United States, and they did
+not detect the merits of "Saul," until the discovery had first been made
+in those countries.</p>
+
+<p>Several months had elapsed since the publication of the volume; it
+seemed to be already forgotten, when the notice to which we have
+referred appeared in the "North British Review." The author had sent a
+copy to Mr. Hawthorne, then residing in Liverpool, and that gentleman,
+being on friendly terms with some of the writers for the "North
+British," procured the insertion of an appreciative review of the poem.
+Up to that time, we believe, no favorable notice of the work had
+appeared in Canada. The little circulation it obtained was chiefly among
+the American residents. A few copies found their way across the border,
+and some of our authors (among whom we may mention Mr. Emerson and Mr.
+Longfellow) were the first to recognize the genius of the poet. With
+this double indorsement, his fellow-townsmen hastened to make amends for
+their neglect. They could not be expected to give any very enthusiastic
+welcome, nor was their patronage extensive enough to confer more than
+moderate success; but the remaining copies of the first small edition
+were sold, and a second edition&mdash;which has not yet been
+exhausted&mdash;issued in 1859.</p>
+
+<p>In February, 1860, we happened to visit Montreal. At that time we had
+never read the poem, and the bare fact of its existence had almost faded
+from memory, when it was recalled by an American resident who was
+acquainted with Mr. Heavysege, and whose account of his patience, his
+quiet energy, and serene faith in his poetic calling strongly interested
+us. It was but a few hours before our departure; there was a furious
+snow-storm; yet the gentleman ordered a sleigh, and we drove at once to
+a large machine-shop, in the outskirts of the city. Here, amid the noise
+of hammers, saws, and rasps, in a great grimy hall smelling of oil and
+iron-dust, we found the poet at his work-bench. A small, slender man,
+with a thin, sensitive face, bright blonde hair, and eyes of that
+peculiar blue which burns warm, instead of cold, under excitement,&mdash;in
+the few minutes of our interview the picture was fixed, and remains so.
+His manner was quiet, natural, and unassuming: he received us with the
+simple good-breeding which a gentleman always possesses, whether we find
+him on a throne or beside an anvil. Not a man to assert his claim
+loudly, or to notice injustice or neglect by a single spoken word; but
+one to take quietly success or failure, in the serenity of a mood
+habitually untouched by either extreme.</p>
+
+<p>In that one brief first and last interview, we discovered, at least, the
+simple, earnest sincerity of the man's nature,&mdash;a quality too rare, even
+among authors. When we took our seat in the train for Rouse's Point, we
+opened the volume of "Saul." The first part was finished as we
+approached St. Albans; the second at Vergennes; and twilight was falling
+as we closed the book between Bennington and Troy. Whatever crudities of
+expression, inaccuracies of rhythm, faults of arrangement, and
+violations of dramatic law met us from time to time, the earnest purpose
+of the writer carried us over them all. The book has a fine flavor of
+the Elizabethan age,&mdash;a sustained epic rather than dramatic character,
+an affluence of quaint, original images; yet the construction was
+frequently that of a school-boy. In opulence and maturity of ideas, and
+poverty of artistic skill, the work stands almost alone in literature.
+What little we have learned of the history of the author suggests an
+explanation of this peculiarity. Never was so much genuine power so long
+silent.</p>
+
+<p>"Saul" is yet so little known, that a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_415" id="Page_415">[Pg 415]</a></span> descriptive outline of the poem
+will be a twice-told tale to very few readers of the "Atlantic." The
+author strictly follows the history of the renowned Hebrew king, as it
+is related in I Samuel, commencing with the tenth chapter, but divides
+the subject into three dramas, after the manner of Schiller's
+"Wallenstein." The first part embraces the history of Saul, from his
+anointing by Samuel at Ramah to David's exorcism of the evil spirit,
+(xvi. 23,) and contains five acts. The second part opens with David as a
+guest in the palace at Gibeah. The defeat of the Philistines at Elah,
+Saul's jealousy of David, and the latter's marriage with Michal form the
+staple of the <i>four</i> acts of this part. The third part consists of <i>six</i>
+acts of unusual length, (some of them have thirteen scenes,) and is
+devoted to the pursuits and escapes of David, the Witch of Endor, and
+the final battle, wherein the king and his three sons are slain. No
+liberties have been taken with the order of the Scripture narrative,
+although a few subordinate characters have here and there been
+introduced to complete the action. The author seems either to lack the
+inventive faculty, or to have feared modifying the sacred record for the
+purposes of Art. In fact, no considerable modification was necessary.
+The simple narrative fulfils almost all the requirements of dramatic
+writing, in its succession of striking situations, and its cumulative
+interest. From beginning to end, however, Mr. Heavysege makes no attempt
+to produce a dramatic effect. It is true that he has availed himself of
+the phrase "an evil spirit from the Lord," to introduce a demoniac
+element, but, singularly enough, the demons seem to appear and to act
+unwillingly, and manifest great relief when they are allowed to retire
+from the stage.</p>
+
+<p>The work, therefore, cannot be measured by dramatic laws. It is an epic
+in dialogue; its chief charm lies in the march of the story and the
+detached individual monologues, rather than in contrast of characters or
+exciting situations. The sense of proportion&mdash;the latest developed
+quality of the poetic mind&mdash;is dimly manifested. The structure of the
+verse, sometimes so stately and majestic, is frequently disfigured by
+the commonest faults; yet the breath of a lofty purpose has been
+breathed upon every page. The personality of the author never pierces
+through his theme. The language is fresh, racy, vigorous, and utterly
+free from the impress of modern masters: much of it might have been
+written by a contemporary of Shakspeare.</p>
+
+<p>In the opening of the first part, Saul, recently anointed king, receives
+the messengers of Jabesh Gilead, and promises succor. A messenger
+says,&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i24">"The winds of heaven,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Behind thee blow: and on our enemies' eyes<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">May the sun smite to-morrow, and blind them for thee!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But, O Saul, do not fail us.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"<i>Saul.</i> Fail ye<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Let the morn fail to break; I will not break<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">My word. Haste, or I'm there before you. Fail?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Let the morn fail the east; I'll not fail you,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But, swift and silent as the streaming wind,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Unseen approach, then, gathering up my force<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">At dawning, sweep on Ammon, as Night's blast<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sweeps down the Carmel on the dusky sea."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>This is a fine picture of Saul steeling his nature to cruelty, when be
+has reluctantly resolved to obey Samuel's command "to trample out the
+living fire of Amalek":&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Now let me tighten every cruel sinew,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And gird the whole up in unfeeling hardness,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That my swollen heart, which bleeds within me tears,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">May choke itself to stillness. I am as<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A shivering bather, that, upon the shore,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Looking and shrinking from the cold, black waves,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Quick starting from his reverie, with a rush<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Abbreviates his horror."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And this of the satisfied lust of blood, uttered by a Hebrew soldier,
+after the slaughter:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"When I was killing, such thoughts came to me, like<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The sound of cleft-dropped waters to the ear<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of the hot mower, who thereat stops the oftener<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To whet his glittering scythe, and, while he smiles,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With the harsh, sharpening hone beats their fall's time,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And dancing to it in his heart's straight chamber,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Forgets that he is weary."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>After the execution of Agag by the hand of Samuel, the demons are
+introduced with more propriety than in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_416" id="Page_416">[Pg 416]</a></span> opening of the poem. The
+following passage has a subtle, sombre grandeur of its own:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"<i>First Demon.</i> Now let us down to hell: we've seen the last.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"<i>Second Demon.</i> Stay; for the road thereto is yet incumbered<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With the descending spectres of the killed.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>'Tis said they choke hell's gates, and stretch from thence</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Out like a tongue upon the silent gulf</i>;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Wherein our spirits&mdash;even as terrestrial ships<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That are detained by foul winds in an offing&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Linger perforce, <i>and feel broad gusts of sighs</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>That swing them on the dark and billowless waste</i>,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>O'er which come sounds more dismal than the boom,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>At midnight, of the salt flood's foaming surf,&mdash;</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Even dead Amalek's moan and lamentation."</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The reader will detect the rhythmical faults of the poem, even in these
+passages. But there is a vast difference between such blemishes of the
+unrhymed heroic measure as terminating a line with "and," "of," or
+"but," or inattention to the c&aelig;sural pauses, and that mathematical
+precision of foot and accent, which, after all, can scarcely be
+distinguished from prose. Whatever may be his shortcomings, Mr.
+Heavysege speaks in the dialect of poetry. Only rarely he drops into
+bald prose, as in these lines:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"But let us go abroad, and in the twilight's<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Cool, tranquillizing air discuss this matter."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>We remember, however, that Wordsworth wrote,&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i14">"A band of officers<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Then stationed in the city were among the chief<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of my associates."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>We had marked many other fine passages of "Saul" for quotation, but must
+be content with a few of those which are most readily separated from the
+context.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i14">"Ha! ha! the foe,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Having taken from us our warlike tools, yet leave us<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The little scarlet tongue to scratch and sting with."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Here's lad's-love, and the flower which even death<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Cannot unscent, the all-transcending rose."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i14">"The loud bugle,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the hard-rolling drum, and clashing cymbals,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Now reign the lords o' the air. These crises, David,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Bring with them their own music, as do storms<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Their thunders."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i14">"Ere the morn<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Shall tint the orient with the soldier's color,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We must be at the camp."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"But come, I'll disappoint thee; for, remember,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Samuel will not be roused for thee, although<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I knock with thunder at his resting-place."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The lyrical portions, of the work&mdash;introduced in connection with the
+demoniac characters&mdash;are inferior to the rest. They have occasionally a
+quaint, antique flavor, suggesting the diction of the Elizabethan
+lyrists, but without their delicate, elusive richness of melody. Here
+most we perceive the absence of that highest, ripest intellectual
+culture which can be acquired only through contact and conflict with
+other minds. It is not good for a poet to be alone. Even where the
+constructive faculty is absent, its place may be supplied through the
+development of that artistic sense which files, weighs, and
+adjusts,&mdash;which reconciles the utmost freedom and force of thought with
+the mechanical symmetries of language,&mdash;and which, first a fetter to the
+impatient mind, becomes at length a pinion, holding it serenely poised
+in the highest ether. Only the rudiment of the sense is born with the
+poet, and few literary lives are fortunate enough, or of sufficiently
+varied experience, to mature it.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, before closing the volume, we must quote what we consider
+to be the author's best lyrical passage. Zaph, one of the attendants of
+Malzah, the "evil spirit from the Lord," sings as follows to one of his
+fellows:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Zepho, the sun's descended beam<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Hath laid his rod on th' ocean stream,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And this o'erhanging wood-top nods<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Like golden helms of drowsy gods.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Methinks that now I'll stretch for rest,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With eyelids sloping toward the west;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That, through their half transparencies,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The rosy radiance passed and strained,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of mote and vapor duly drained,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I may believe, in hollow bliss,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">My rest in the empyrean is.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Watch thou; and when up comes the moon,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Atowards her turn me; and then, boon,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thyself compose, 'neath wavering leaves<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That hang these branched, majestic eaves:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That so, with self-imposed deceit,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Both, in this halcyon retreat,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By trance possessed, imagine may<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We couch in Heaven's night-argent ray."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>In 1860 Mr. Heavysege published by subscription a drama entitled "Count
+Filippo; or, the Unequal Marriage."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_417" id="Page_417">[Pg 417]</a></span> This work, of which we have seen
+but one critical notice, added nothing to his reputation. His genius, as
+we have already remarked, is not dramatic; and there is, moreover,
+internal evidence that "Count Philippo" did not grow, like "Saul," from
+an idea which took forcible possession of the author's mind. The plot is
+not original, the action languid, and the very names of the <i>dramatis
+person&aelig;</i> convey an impression of unreality. Though we know there never
+was a Duke of Pereza in Italy, this annoys us less than that he should
+bear such a fantastic name as "Tremohla"; nor does the feminine "Volina"
+inspire us with much respect for the heroine. The characters are
+intellectual abstractions, rather than creatures of flesh and blood; and
+their love, sorrow, and remorse fail to stir our sympathies. They have
+an incorrigible habit of speaking in conceits. As "Saul" is pervaded
+with the spirit of the Elizabethan writers, so "Count Filippo" suggests
+the artificial manner of the rivals of Dryden. It is the work of a poet,
+but of a poet working from a mechanical impulse. There are very fine
+single passages, but the general effect is marred by the constant
+recurrence of such forced metaphors as these:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Now shall the he-goat, black Adultery,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With the roused ram, Retaliation, twine<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Their horns in one to butt at Filippo."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">"As the salamander, cast in fire,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Exudes preserving mucus, so my mind,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Cased in thick satisfaction of success,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Shall be uninjured."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The work, nevertheless, appears to have had some share in improving its
+author's fortunes. From that time, he has received at least a partial
+recognition in Canada. Soon after its publication, he succeeded in
+procuring employment on the daily newspaper press of Montreal, which
+enabled him to give up his uncongenial labor at the work-bench. The
+Montreal Literary Club elected him one of its Fellows, and the
+short-lived literary periodicals of the Province no longer ignored his
+existence. In spite of a change of circumstances which must have given
+him greater leisure as well as better opportunities of culture, he has
+published but two poems in the last five years,&mdash;an Ode for the
+ter-centenary anniversary of Shakspeare's birth, and the sacred idyl of
+"Jephthah's Daughter." The former is a production the spirit of which is
+worthy of its occasion, although, in execution, it is weakened, by an
+overplus of imagery and epithet. It contains between seven and eight
+hundred lines. The grand, ever-changing music of the Ode will not bear
+to be prolonged beyond a certain point, as all the great Masters of Song
+have discovered: the ear must not be allowed to become <i>quite</i>
+accustomed to the surprises of the varying rhythm, before the closing
+Alexandrine.</p>
+
+<p>"Jephthah's Daughter" contains between thirteen and fourteen hundred
+lines. In careful finish, in sustained sweetness and grace, and solemn
+dignity of language, it is a marked advance upon any of the author's
+previous works. We notice, indeed, the same technical faults as in
+"Saul," but they occur less frequently, and may be altogether corrected
+in a later revision of the poem. Here, also, the Scriptural narrative is
+rigidly followed, and every temptation to adorn its rare simplicity
+resisted. Even that lament of the Hebrew girl, behind which there seems
+to lurk a romance, and which is so exquisitely paraphrased by Tennyson,
+in his "Dream of Fair Women,"&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"And I went, mourning: 'No fair Hebrew boy<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Shall smile away my maiden blame among<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The Hebrew mothers,'"&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>is barely mentioned in the words of the text. The passion of Jephthah,
+the horror, the piteous pleading of his wife and daughter, and the final
+submission of the latter to her doom, are elaborated with a careful and
+tender hand. From the opening to the closing line, the reader is lifted
+to the level of the tragic theme, and inspired, as in the Greek tragedy,
+with a pity which makes lovely the element of terror. The central
+sentiment of the poem, through all its touching and sorrowful changes,
+is that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_418" id="Page_418">[Pg 418]</a></span> of repose. Observe the grave harmony of the opening lines:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"'Twas in the olden days of Israel,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When from her people rose up mighty men<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To judge and to defend her: ere she knew,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or clamored for, her coming line of kings,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A father, rashly vowing, sacrificed<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His daughter on the altar of the Lord;&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">'Twas in those ancient days, coeval deemed<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With the song-famous and heroic ones,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When Agamemnon, taught divinely, doomed<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>His</i> daughter to expire at Dian's shrine,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So doomed, to free the chivalry of Greece,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In Aulis lingering for a favoring wind<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To waft them to the fated walls of Troy.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Two songs with but one burden, twin-like tales.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sad tales! but this the sadder of the twain,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">This song, a wail more desolately wild;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">More fraught this story with grim fate fulfilled."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The length to which this article has grown warns us to be sparing of
+quotations, but we all the more earnestly recommend those in whom we may
+have inspired some interest in the author to procure the poem for
+themselves. We have perused it several times, with increasing enjoyment
+of its solemn diction, its sad, monotonous music, and with the hope that
+the few repairing touches, which alone are wanting to make it a perfect
+work of its class, may yet be given. This passage, for example, where
+Jephthah prays to be absolved from his vow, would be faultlessly
+eloquent, but for the prosaic connection of the first and second
+lines:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"'Choose Tabor for thine altar: I will pile<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">It with the choice of Bashan's lusty herds,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And flocks of fallings, <i>and for fuel, thither</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Will bring umbrageous Lebanon to burn</i>.'<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"He said, and stood awaiting for the sign,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And heard, above the hoarse, bough-bending wind,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The hill-wolf howling on the neighboring height,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And bittern booming in the pool below.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Some drops of rain fell from the passing cloud<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That sudden hides the wanly shining moon,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And from the scabbard instant dropped his sword,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And, with long, living leaps, and rock-struck clang,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From side to side, and slope to sounding slope,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In gleaming whirls swept down the dim ravine."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The finest portion of the poem is the description of that transition of
+feeling, through which the maiden, warm with young life and clinging to
+life for its own unfulfilled promise, becomes the resigned and composed
+victim. No one but a true poet could have so conceived and represented
+the situation. The narrative flows in one unbroken current, detached
+parts whereof hint but imperfectly of the whole, as do goblets of water
+of the stream wherefrom they are dipped. We will only venture to present
+two brief passages. The daughter speaks:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Let me not need now disobey you, mother,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But give me leave to knock at Death's pale gate,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whereat indeed I must, by duty drawn,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By Nature shown the sacred way to yield.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Behold, the coasting cloud obeys the breeze;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The slanting smoke, the invisible sweet air;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">the towering tree its leafy limbs resigns<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To the embraces of the wilful wind:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Shall I, then, wrong, resist the hand of Heaven!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Take me, my father! take, accept me, Heaven!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Slay me or save me, even as you will!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Light, light, I leave thee!&mdash;yet am I a lamp,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Extinguished now, to be relit forever.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Life dies: but in its stead death lives."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>In "Jephthah's Daughter," we think, Mr. Heavysege has found that form of
+poetic utterance for which his genius is naturally qualified. It is
+difficult to guess the future of a literary life so exceptional
+hitherto,&mdash;difficult to affirm, without a more intimate knowledge of the
+man's nature, whether he is capable of achieving that rhythmical
+perfection (in the higher sense wherein sound becomes the symmetrical
+garment of thought) which, in poets, marks the line between imperfect
+and complete success. What he most needs, of <i>external</i> culture, we have
+already indicated: if we might be allowed any further suggestion, he
+supplies it himself, in one of his fragmentary poems:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Open, my heart, thy ruddy valves,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">It is thy master calls:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Let me go down, and, curious, trace<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Thy labyrinthine halls.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Open, O heart! and let me view<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The secrets of thy den:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Myself unto myself now show<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">With introspective ken.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Expose thyself, thou covered nest<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Of passions, and be seen:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Stir up thy brood, that in unrest<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Are ever piping keen:&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ah! what a motley multitude,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Magnanimous and mean!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_A_1" id="Footnote_A_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_A_1"><span class="label">[A]</span></a> <i>Saul.</i> A Drama, in Three Parts. Montreal: John Lovell.
+1850.
+</p><p>
+<i>Count Fillippo; or The Unequal Marriage.</i> By the Author of "Saul."
+Montreal: Printed for the Author. 1860.
+</p><p>
+<i>Jephthah's Daughter.</i> By Charles Heavysege, Author of "Saul." Montreal:
+Dawson Brothers. 1865.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_419" id="Page_419">[Pg 419]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="NEEDLE_AND_GARDEN" id="NEEDLE_AND_GARDEN"></a>NEEDLE AND GARDEN.</h2>
+
+<h3>THE STORY OF A SEAMSTRESS WHO LAID DOWN HER NEEDLE AND BECAME A
+STRAWBERRY-GIRL.</h3>
+
+<h4>WRITTEN BY HERSELF.</h4>
+
+
+<h3>CHAPTER X.</h3>
+
+<h3>CONCLUSION.</h3>
+
+<p>Although two thirds of our little patrimony had thus been devoted to the
+cultivation of fruit, yet the other third was far from being suffered to
+remain unproductive. We thoroughly understood the art of raising all the
+household vegetables, as we had been brought up to assist our father at
+intervals throughout the season. Then none of us were indifferent to
+flowers. There were little clumps and borders of them in numerous
+places. Nowhere did the crocus come gayly up into the soft atmosphere of
+early spring in advance of ours. The violets perfumed the air for us
+with the same rich profusion as in the carefully tended parterre of the
+wealthiest citizen. There were rows of flowering almonds, which were
+sought after by the bees as diligently as if holding up their delicate
+heads in the most patrician garden; and they flashed as gorgeously in
+the sun. The myrtle displayed its blue flowers in abundance, and the
+lilacs unfolded their paler clusters in a dozen places. Over a huge
+cedar in the fence-corner there clambered up a magnificent wistaria,
+whose great blue flowers, covering the entire tree, became a monument of
+floral beauty so striking, that the stranger, passing by the spot, would
+pause to wonder and admire. In the care of these flowers all of us
+united with a common fondness for the beautiful as well as the useful.
+It secured to us, from the advent of the earliest crocus to the
+departure of the last lingering rose that dropped its reluctant flowers
+only when the premonitory blasts of autumn swept across the garden, all
+that innocent enjoyment which comes of admiration for these bright
+creations of the Divine hand.</p>
+
+<p>These little incidental recompenses of the most perfect domestic harmony
+were realized in everything we undertook. That harmony was the animating
+as well as sustaining power of my horticultural enterprise. Had there
+been wrangling, opposition, or ridicule, it is probable that I should
+never have ventured on the planting of a single strawberry. Success,
+situated as I was, was dependent on united effort, the co&ouml;peration of
+all. This co&ouml;peration of the entire family must be still more necessary
+in agricultural undertakings on a large scale. A wife, taken reluctantly
+from the city to a farm, with no taste for rural life, no love of
+flowers, no fondness for the garden, no appreciation of the mysteries of
+seed-time and harvest, no sensibility to fields of clover, to green
+meadows, to the grateful silence of the woods, or to the voices of
+birds, and who pines for the unforgotten charms of city life, may mar
+the otherwise assured happiness of the household. One refractory inmate
+in ours would have been especially calamitous.</p>
+
+<p>The floral world is pervaded with miraculous sympathies. Another spring
+had opened on our garden, and flower after flower came out into gorgeous
+bloom. My strawberries, as if conscious of the display around them, and
+ambitious to increase it, opened their white blossoms toward the close
+of April. Those set the preceding autumn gave promise of an abundant
+yield, but not equal to that presented by the runners which crowded
+around the parent plants on the original half-acre. The winter had been
+unfriendly, sending no heavy covering of snow to shelter them; while<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_420" id="Page_420">[Pg 420]</a></span>
+the frost, in making its first escape from the earth, had loosened many
+plants, bringing some of them half-way out of the ground, while a few
+had been thrown entirely upon the surface, where they quickly perished.</p>
+
+<p>I had read that accidents of this kind would sometimes happen, and that,
+when plants were thus partially dislodged by frost, the roller must be
+passed over them to crowd back the roots into their proper places. I had
+discovered this derangement immediately on the frost escaping, but we
+had neither roller nor substitute. As pressure alone was needed, I set
+Fred to walking over the entire acre, and with his heavy winter boots to
+trample down each plant in its old place. The operation was every way as
+beneficial as if the ground had been well rolled. When performed before
+the roots have been many days exposed to the air, it not only does no
+injury, but effectually repairs all damage committed by the frost.</p>
+
+<p>Everything, this second season, was on a larger scale than before,
+requiring greater care and labor, but at the same time brightening my
+hopes and doubling my anticipations. I was compelled to hire a gardener
+occasionally to assist in keeping the ground clean and mellow, although
+among us we contrived to perform a large portion of the work ourselves.
+I found that constant watchfulness secured an immense economy of labor.
+It was far easier to cut off a weed when only an inch high than when
+grown up to the stature of a young tree. It was the same with the white
+clover or a grass-root. These two seem native to the soil, and will come
+in and take possession, smothering and routing out the strawberries,
+unless cut up as fast as they appear. When attacked early, before their
+rambling, but deeply penetrating roots obtain a strong hold, they are
+easily destroyed. I consider, therefore, that watchfulness may be made
+an effective substitute for labor, really preventing all necessity for
+hard work. This watchfulness we could generally exercise, though
+physically unable to perform much labor. Hence, when ladies undertake
+the management of an established strawberry-bed, a daily attention to
+it, with a light hoe, will be found as useful as a laborious clearing up
+by an able-bodied man, with the additional advantage of occasioning no
+injurious disturbance to the roots in removing great quantities of
+full-grown weeds.</p>
+
+<p>The blossoms fell to the ground, the berries set in thick clusters,
+turning downward as they increased in size, and changing, as they
+enlarged, from a pale green to a delicate white, then becoming suffused
+with a slight blush, which gradually deepened into an intense red. It
+was a joyful time, when, with my mother and sister, I made the first
+picking. All of us were struck with the improved appearance of the fruit
+on the first half-acre. This was natural, as well as what is commonly
+observed. The plants had acquired strength with age. They had had
+another season in which to send out new and longer roots; and these,
+rambling into wider and deeper fountains of nourishment, had drawn from
+them supplies so copious, that the berries were not only much more
+numerous than the year before, but they were every way larger and finer.
+The contrast between the fruit on these and the new plants was very
+decided. Hence we had a generous gathering to begin with. It was all
+carefully assorted, as before; but the quantity was so large that
+additional baskets were required, and Fred was obliged to employ an
+assistant to carry it to market.</p>
+
+<p>While engaged in making our second picking, carefully turning aside the
+luxuriant foliage to reach the berries which had ripened in concealment,
+with capacious sun-bonnets that shut out from observation all objects
+but those immediately before us, it was no wonder that a stranger could
+come directly up without being noticed. Thus intently occupied one
+afternoon, we were surprised at hearing a subdued and timid voice
+asking,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"May I sell some strawberries for you?"</p>
+
+<p>I looked round,&mdash;for the voice came<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_421" id="Page_421">[Pg 421]</a></span> from behind us,&mdash;and beheld a girl
+of some ten years old, having in her hand a basket, which she had
+probably found on the common, as, in place of the original bottom, a
+pasteboard substitute had been fitted into it. It was filled with little
+pasteboard boxes, stitched at the corners, but strong enough to hold
+fruit. I noticed, that, old as it was, it had been scoured up into
+absolute cleanness. The child's attire was in keeping with her basket.
+Though she had no shoes, and the merest apology for a bonnet, with a
+dress that was worn and faded, as well as frayed out into a ragged
+fringe about her feet, yet it was all scrupulously clean. Her features
+struck me as even beautiful, and her soft hazel eyes would command
+sympathy from all who might look into them. Her manner and appearance
+prepossessed me in her favor.</p>
+
+<p>"But did you ever sell strawberries?" I inquired.</p>
+
+<p>"No, Ma'am, but I can try," she answered.</p>
+
+<p>"But it will never do to trust her," interrupted my mother. "We do not
+know who she is, and may never see her again."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Ma'am, I will bring the money back to you. Dear lady, let me have
+some to sell," she entreated, with childish earnestness, her voice
+trembling and her eyes moistening with apprehension of refusal.</p>
+
+<p>"Mother," said I, "this child is a beginner. Is it right for us to
+refuse so trifling an encouragement? Who knows to what useful ends it
+may lead? You remember how difficult it was for me to procure the
+plants, and how keenly you felt my trouble. Will you inflict a keener
+one on this child, whose heart seems bent on doing something for
+herself, and on whom disappointment will fall even more painfully than
+it did on me? Are we not all bound to do something for those who are
+more destitute than ourselves? and even if we lose what we let her have,
+it will never be missed."</p>
+
+<p>The poor girl looked up imploringly into my face as I pleaded for her,
+her eyes brightened with returning hopefulness, and again she besought
+us,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Dear lady, let me have a few; my mother knows you."</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me your name," I replied.</p>
+
+<p>"Lucy Varick,&mdash;mother says she knows you," was the answer.</p>
+
+<p>"Varick!" replied my mother, quickly, surprised as well as evidently
+pleased. "You shall have all you can sell."</p>
+
+<p>She was the daughter of the miserable man whose terrible deathbed we had
+both witnessed, and my mother had no difficulty in trusting to her
+honesty. Her basket would contain but a few quarts, and these we had
+already gathered. I filled her little pasteboard boxes immediately, with
+the fruit just as picked from the vines. The poor child fairly capered
+with joy as she witnessed the operation. She saw her fortune in a few
+quarts of strawberries! I think that as she tripped nimbly through the
+gate, my gratification at seeing how cheerfully she thus began her life
+of toil was equal to all that she could have experienced herself.</p>
+
+<p>Before the afternoon was half gone, Lucy surprised us by returning with
+an empty basket. She had found customers wherever she went, and wanted a
+fresh supply of fruit. This was promptly given to her, for she had
+obtained even better prices than the widow was getting for us in the
+market. That afternoon she made the first half-dollar she ever earned,
+and during the entire season she continued to find plenty of the best of
+customers at their own doors.</p>
+
+<p>I had long since made up my mind that our pastor was entitled to some
+recognition of the substantial kindnesses he had extended to us at the
+time of our deep affliction. We had seen him regularly at the Sunday
+school, but he knew nothing of my conversion into a strawberry-girl.
+What else could we do, in remembrance of his friendship, but to make him
+a present of our choicest fruit? Never were strawberries more carefully
+selected than those with which I filled a new basket of ample size, as a
+gift for him. On my way to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_422" id="Page_422">[Pg 422]</a></span> the factory the next morning, I delivered
+the basket at his door, with a little note expressive of our continued
+gratitude, and begging him to accept its contents as being fruit which I
+had myself raised. I knew it was but a trifle, but what else than
+trifles had I to offer even to the kindest friend we had ever known?</p>
+
+<p>That very afternoon, while my mother and I were at our usual occupation
+of picking, I heard the gate open at the other end of the garden, and,
+looking up, saw two gentlemen approaching us. They advanced slowly
+around the strawberry-beds, apparently examining the plants and fruit,
+frequently stooping to turn over the great clusters on a portion of the
+ground which we had not yet picked. I saw that one of them was our
+pastor, but the other was a stranger. As they drew nearer, we rose to
+receive them. No words can describe the confusion which overcame me as I
+recognized in the stranger the same gentleman whom I had encountered,
+the preceding summer, as the first customer for my strawberries, at the
+widow's stand in the market-house. I had never forgotten his face. Mr.
+Seeley introduced him as his friend Mr. Logan. Somehow I felt certain
+that he also recognized me. I was confused enough at being thus taken by
+surprise. It is true that my sun-bonnet, though of prodigious size, was
+neatly cut and handsomely fashioned, even becoming, as I supposed, and
+that I was fortunately habited in a plain, but entirely new dress, that
+was more than nice enough for the work I was performing. But the hot
+sun, in spite of my bonnet, had already turned my face brown. My hands,
+exposed to its fiercest rays, were even more tanned, while the stain of
+fruit was visible on my fingers. I was in no condition to receive
+company of this unexpected description.</p>
+
+<p>But the gentlemen were affable, and I soon became at ease with them. Mr.
+Seeley had received my basket, and had come to thank me for it. Mr.
+Logan had been dining with him, and was enthusiastic over the quality of
+my strawberries. He had never seen them equalled, though devoting all
+his leisure to horticulture; and learning that they were raised by a
+lady, insisted on coming down, not only to look into her mode of
+culture, but to see the lady herself. It was pleasant thus to meet our
+friend the pastor, and I did my utmost to render the visit agreeable to
+him and his companion. My mother gave up the care of their entertainment
+to me; so, dropping my basket in the unfinished strawberry-row, I left
+her to continue the afternoon picking alone.</p>
+
+<p>The gentlemen seemed in no haste to leave us. I was surprised that they
+could find so much to interest them in a spot which I had supposed could
+be interesting only to ourselves. Mr. Seeley was pleased with all that
+he saw, but Mr. Logan was polite enough to be much more demonstrative in
+his admiration. I think the visit of the former would have been much
+briefer but for the presence of the latter, who seemed in no hurry to
+depart. He was generous in praise of my flowers, and was inquisitive
+about my strawberries. He had many of the most celebrated varieties, and
+was kind enough to offer me such as I might desire. He thought that I
+could teach him lessons in horticulture more valuable than any he had
+yet picked up, either in books or in his own garden, and asked
+permission to come down often during the fruit season, to see and learn.
+I was surprised that he should think it possible for a young
+strawberry-girl like myself to teach anything to one who was evidently
+so much better informed. Then I told him that what he saw was the result
+of an endeavor to determine whether there was not some better dependence
+for a woman than the needle, that I had accomplished all this by my own
+zeal and perseverance, and that this season promised complete success.</p>
+
+<p>"I cannot give you too much praise," he observed. "Your tastes harmonize
+admirably with my own. I have long believed that women are confined to
+too small a circle of useful occupations.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_423" id="Page_423">[Pg 423]</a></span> They too seldom teach
+themselves, and are too little taught by others whose duty it is to
+enlarge their sphere of action. All my sisters have learned what you may
+call trades,&mdash;that is, to support themselves, if ever required to do so,
+by employments particularly adapted to their talents. You have chosen
+the garden, and you seem in a fair way to succeed. I must know how much
+your strawberry-crop will yield you."</p>
+
+<p>On thus discovering the object I had in view, and that this was my own
+experiment, his interest in all that he saw appeared to increase. The
+very tones of his voice became softer and kinder. There was nothing
+patronizing in his manner; it was deferential, and so sympathetic as to
+impress me very strongly. I felt that he understood the train of thought
+that had been running through my mind, and that he heartily entered into
+and approved of my plans.</p>
+
+<p>My first false shame at being known as a strawberry-girl now gave place
+to a feeling of pride and emulation. Here was one who could appreciate
+as well as encourage. Hence my explanations were as full as it was
+proper to set before a stranger. Our pastor listened to them with
+surprise, as most of them were new even to him, nor did he fail to unite
+with his companion in encouragement and congratulation. Long
+acquaintance gave him the privilege to be familiar and inquisitive. It
+is possible that in place of being abashed and humble, I may now have
+been confident and boastful.</p>
+
+<p>Our visitors left us with promises to repeat their call; and with a
+lighter heart than ever, I went again to assist in picking.</p>
+
+<p>The fruit continued to turn out well, and our widow in the market-house
+proved true to the promises she had made,&mdash;there was no difficulty in
+finding a sale for it, and somehow it yielded even better prices than
+the year before. She said that others were complaining of a drought, and
+that the fruit in consequence was generally inferior in size, so that
+those who, like myself, had been lucky enough, or painstaking enough, to
+secure a full crop, were doing better than ever. Then our little
+strawberry-peddler, Lucy Varick, was doing a thriving business. She
+established a list of customers among the great ladies in the city, who
+bought large daily supplies from her, paying her the highest prices. Her
+young heart seemed overflowing with joyfulness at her unexpected
+success. It enabled her to take home many a dollar to her mother. Alas!
+she seemed to think&mdash;if, indeed, she thought at all upon the
+subject&mdash;that the strawberry season would be a perpetual harvest.</p>
+
+<p>We throve so satisfactorily that my mother seemed to have given up her
+cherished longing for a strawberry-garden. Now that we had a new class
+of visitors who were likely to be frequent in their calls, I think she
+felt a kind of pride in abandoning the project. There was a sort of
+dignity in the production of fruit, but something humiliating in the
+idea of keeping an eating-house. She even went so far as to decline all
+applications from transient callers who had mistaken our premises for
+those of our neighbors, thus leaving the latter in undisturbed
+possession of their long trains of customers. They were not slow in
+discovering that we had ceased to be rivals in this branch of their
+business; and finding themselves mistaken in supposing that my
+strawberry-crop would come into ruinous competition with theirs, they
+seemed disposed to be a little friendly toward us. Indeed, on one or two
+occasions, Mrs. Tetchy herself came to us for a large basketful of
+fruit, declaring that their own supply was not equal to the demand. She
+was unusually pleasant on those occasions, but at the same time insisted
+on having the fruit at less than we were getting for it. My mother could
+not contend with such a woman, and so submitted to her exactions. I feel
+satisfied, however, that her visits were to be attributed quite as much
+to a desire to gratify her curiosity as to any want of strawberries; for
+I noticed that she never came on these errands without impudently
+walking all over our garden, scrutinizing whatever we were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_424" id="Page_424">[Pg 424]</a></span> doing, how
+the beds were arranged, and particularly inspecting and even handling
+the fruit. Of course we had nothing to be ashamed of; but though
+everything about the garden was much neater than hers, she never dropped
+a word of commendation.</p>
+
+<p>Only a day or two after the gentlemen had been down to see us, we found
+it necessary to resume the task of weeding between the rows. The drought
+at the beginning of the season had been succeeded by copious rains, with
+warm southerly winds, under which the weeds were making an alarming
+growth, notwithstanding the trampling which they received from the
+pickers. I confess that our heavy hoes made this so laborious an
+operation that I rather dreaded its necessity; but a hot sun was now
+shining, which would be sure to kill the weeds, if we cut them off, so
+all hands were turned in to accomplish the work. While thus busily
+occupied, whom should I see coming into the gate but Mr. Logan?</p>
+
+<p>"Capital exercise, Miss, and a fine day for it!" he exclaimed, as he
+came up to me. "No successful gardening where the weeds are permitted to
+grow! I have the same pests to contend against, but I apply the same
+remedy. There is nothing like a sharp hoe."</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing indeed, if one only knew how to make it so," I replied.</p>
+
+<p>As he spoke, his eye glanced at the uncouth implement I was using, and
+reaching forth his hand he took it from me. Examining it carefully, a
+smile came over his handsome face, and he shook his head, as if thinking
+that would never do. It was one of the old tools my father had used,
+heavy and tiresome for a woman's hand, with a blade absurdly large for
+working among strawberries, and so dull as to hack off instead of
+cutting up a weed at one stroke. Fred had undertaken to keep our hoes
+sharp for us, but this season he had somehow neglected to put them in
+order.</p>
+
+<p>"This will never do, Miss," he observed. "Your hoe is heavy enough to
+break you down. This is not exercise such as a lady should take, but
+downright hard work. I must get you such as my sisters use; and now I
+mean to do your day's work for you."</p>
+
+<p>Then, taking my place, he proceeded during the entire morning to act as
+my substitute. We were surprised at his affability, as well as at his
+industry. It was evident that grubbing up weeds was no greater novelty
+to him than to us. All the time he had something pleasant to say, and
+thus conversation and work went on together: for, not thinking it polite
+to leave him to labor alone, I procured a rake, and contrived to keep
+him company in turning up the weeds to the sun, the more effectually to
+kill them.</p>
+
+<p>Now I had never been able to learn the botanical names of any of these
+pests of the garden, nor whether any of them were useful to man, nor how
+it was that the earth was so crowded with them. Neither did I know the
+annuals from the perennials, nor why one variety was invariably found
+flourishing in moist ground, while another preferred a drier situation.
+If I had had a desire to learn these interesting particulars of things
+that were my daily acquaintances, I had neither books to consult nor
+time to devote to them.</p>
+
+<p>But it was evident from Mr. Logan's conversation that he was not only a
+horticulturist, but an accomplished botanist. Both my mother and myself
+were surprised at the new light which he threw upon the subject. I was
+tugging with my fingers at a great dandelion which had come up directly
+between two strawberry-plants, trying to pull it up, when its brittle
+leaves broke off in my hand, leaving the root in the ground. Mr. Logan,
+seeing the operation, observed,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"No use in cutting it off; the root must come out, or it will grow
+thicker and stronger, and plague you every season"; and plying the
+corner of his hoe all round the neck of the dandelion, so as to loosen
+the earth a considerable depth, he thrust his fingers down, seized the
+root, and drew forth a thick white fibre at least a foot long.</p>
+
+<p>"That fellow must be three years old," said he, holding it up for me to
+examine. "Very likely you have cut<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_425" id="Page_425">[Pg 425]</a></span> off the top every season, supposing
+you were killing it. But the dandelion can be exterminated only by
+destroying the root.</p>
+
+<p>"Then," he continued, "there is the dock, more prolific of seeds than
+the dandelion, and the red-sorrel, worse than either, because its roots
+travel under ground in all directions, throwing up suckers at every
+inch, while its tops are hung with myriads of seeds,&mdash;the hoe will never
+exterminate these pests. You must get rid of the roots; throw them out
+to such a sun as this, and then you may hope to be somewhat clear of
+them."</p>
+
+<p>All this was entirely new to me, as well as the botanical names, with
+which he seemed to be as familiar as with the alphabet. I had often
+wondered how it was that the dandelions in our garden never diminished
+in number, though not one had usually been allowed to go to seed. I now
+saw, that, instead of destroying the plant itself, we had only been
+removing the tops.</p>
+
+<p>"But how is it, Mr. Logan," I inquired, "that the weeds are everywhere
+more numerous than the flowers?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, Miss," he replied, resting the hoe upon his shoulder, taking off
+his hat, and wiping the perspiration from his forehead, "I sometimes
+think the weeds are immortal, but that the flowers are not. Some one has
+said that the earth is mother of the weeds, but only step-mother to the
+flowers. I think it is really so. We who cultivate the soil must
+maintain against them, as against sin, a perpetual warfare."</p>
+
+<p>"This is hoeing made easy," said my sister, as Mr. Logan walked away
+toward the house for a glass of water. "A nice journeyman, Lizzie, eh?
+Don't seem as if he could ever be tired! Will you ask him to come
+again?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Jane, you are foolish!" I replied.</p>
+
+<p>But there was an arch smirk on her countenance, and she continued
+looking at me with so much latent meaning in the expression of her eye,
+that I was fairly compelled to turn away.</p>
+
+<p>Noon came, that witching time with all who labor in the fields or woods,
+and not until then did Mr. Logan lay down his clumsy hoe. I half pitied
+his condition as we came out of the hot sun into the shelter of a
+trellis which ran along the side of the house, over which a dozen
+grape-vines were hanging so thickly as to exclude even the noonday
+glare. It was a sweltering day for a gentleman to work among the weeds
+in a strawberry-field, in coat and cravat. But he made very light of it,
+and declared that he would come the next morning and see us through the
+job, and even another, if we thought there would be room for him. After
+he had gone, Jane reminded me of these offers; adding,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I felt quite sure he would be down again, even without your inviting
+him. He seems to admire something else here besides strawberries. What
+do you think it can be?"</p>
+
+<p>But I considered her inquiries too ridiculous to be worth replying to.</p>
+
+<p>After dinner we gave up hoeing for the day, and went to our usual
+afternoon occupation of picking the next morning's supply for the widow.
+She not only sold readily all we could gather, and at excellent prices,
+but even called for more. It seemed that her customers were also
+increasing, as well as those of our neighbors. Indeed, her urgency for
+more fruit was such, during the entire season, that the question
+repeatedly crossed my mind, whether we could not appropriate more ground
+to strawberries by getting rid of some of the flowers. They were
+beautiful things, but then they paid no profit.</p>
+
+<p>When one strikes a vein that happens to be profitable, he is apt to
+become impatient of doing well in a small way, and forthwith casts about
+for ways and means to increase its productiveness, as he thinks, by
+enlarging his operations. It was natural for me to conclude, that, if I
+were thus fortunate on one acre, I could do much better by cultivating
+more. I presume this hankering after additional acres must be a national
+weakness, as there were numerous disquisitions on the subject scattered
+through my agricultural papers,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_426" id="Page_426">[Pg 426]</a></span> in many of which I noticed that there
+was great fault-finding because men in this country undertook the
+cultivation of twice as much land as they could properly manage. The
+propensity for going on and enlarging their possessions seemed a very
+general one. Thus even I, in my small way, was insensibly becoming a
+disciple of these deluded people. But there was this comfort in my case,
+that, while others were able to enlarge, even to their ruin, there was a
+limit to my expansion, as it was impossible for me to go beyond an acre
+and a half.</p>
+
+<p>That afternoon we had just got well under way at picking, when a man
+came into the garden with a bundle of hoes and rakes on his shoulder,
+and coming up to us, took off his hat and bowed with the utmost
+deference, then drew from his pocket a letter, which, singularly enough,
+he handed to me, instead of giving it either to my mother or Jane. On
+opening it, I found it to be a note from Mr. Logan, in which he said he
+had noticed that our garden-tools were so heavy as to be entirely unfit
+for ladies' use, and he had therefore taken the liberty of sending me a
+variety of others that were made expressly for female gardeners, asking
+me to do him the great favor to accept them. Both my mother and Jane had
+stopped picking, as this unexpected donation was laid before us, so I
+read the note aloud to them, the messenger having previously taken his
+leave. I think, altogether, it was the greatest surprise we had ever
+had.</p>
+
+<p>"The next thing, I suppose," said Jane, "you'll have him down here to
+show you how to use them"; and she laughed so heartily as quite to
+mortify me. I understood her meaning, but my mother did not appear to
+comprehend it, for she replied, with the utmost gravity,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"No need of his coming to teach us; haven't we been hoeing all our
+lives?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not <i>us</i>, mother," interrupted Jane, in her peculiarly provoking way,
+"but <i>her</i>; he won't come to teach <i>us</i>,&mdash;one will be enough. As to the
+<i>need</i> of his coming, it looks to me to be growing stronger and
+stronger."</p>
+
+<p>She fairly screamed with laughter, as she said this. I was so provoked
+at her, that I was almost ready to cry; and as to answering her as she
+deserved, it seemed beyond my power. My mother could not understand what
+she meant; but while Jane was going on in this foolish way, she had
+untied the bundle and was examining the tools. There were three hoes,
+and as many rakes. Observing this, Jane again cried out,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"What! all for <i>you</i>? Well, Lizzie, you are making a nice beginning! I
+suppose you will now have more conversational topics than ever, though
+there seemed to be plenty of them this morning!"</p>
+
+<p>One would think that this was quite enough, but she went on with,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you wish the weeds would last all summer? for what is to become
+of you when they are gone?"</p>
+
+<p>Still I made no reply, and Jane persisted in her jokes and laughter. But
+I think one can always tell when one is blushing. So I held down my head
+and concealed my face in my sun-bonnet, as I felt the blood rushing up
+into my cheeks, and was determined that she should not have the
+satisfaction of discovering it.</p>
+
+<p>These garden-tools were the most beautiful I had ever seen, and there
+was evidently a hoe and a rake for each of us. They were made of
+polished steel, with slender handles, all rubbed so smooth as to make it
+a pleasure to take hold of them. The blades had been sharpened beyond
+anything that Fred had been able to achieve. Being semicircular in
+shape, they had points at the corners, adapted to reaching into
+out-of-the-way places,&mdash;as after a weed that had grown up in the middle
+of a strawberry-row, thinking, perhaps, that a shelter of that kind
+would preserve it from destruction. Then they were so light that even a
+child could ply them all day without their weight occasioning the least
+fatigue. The rakes were equally complete, with long and sharp teeth,
+which entered the ground with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_427" id="Page_427">[Pg 427]</a></span> far greater facility than the old-time
+implements we had been using. Indeed, they were the very tools we had
+been promising ourselves out of the profits of our second year. My
+mother was especially pleased with them, as she was not of very robust
+constitution, and found the old heavy tools a great drag upon her
+strength. I think no small present I have ever received was so
+acceptable as this.</p>
+
+<p>Whoever first manufactured and introduced these beautiful and
+appropriate garden-tools for ladies has probably done as much to make
+garden-work attractive to the sex as half the writers on fruits and
+flowers. It is vain to expect them to engage in horticulture, unless the
+most complete facilities are provided for them. Their physical strength
+is not equal to several hours' labor with implements made exclusively
+for the hands of strong men; and when garden-work, instead of proving a
+pleasant recreation, degenerates into drudgery, one is apt to become
+disgusted with it, and will thus give up an occupation truly feminine,
+invariably healthful, and in many cases highly profitable.</p>
+
+<p>True to his promise of the preceding day, Mr. Logan came down next
+morning to help us through with our job of hoeing, but rather better
+prepared to operate under a broiling June sun. My mother, seeing his
+determination to assist us, invited him to take off his coat, and
+brought out Fred's straw hat for him to wear. He seemed truly grateful
+for these marks of consideration for his comfort, and in consequence
+there sprung up quite a cordiality between them. There was of course a
+profusion of thanks given to him for the handsome and appropriate
+present he had made, but he seemed to consider it a very small affair.
+Still, I think he appeared as much gratified at finding he had thus
+anticipated our wishes as we were ourselves. It is singular how far a
+little act of kindness, especially when its value is enhanced by its
+appropriateness and the delicacy with which it is performed, will go
+toward establishing a bond of sympathy between giver and receiver.</p>
+
+<p>I may here say, that, the better we became acquainted with Mr. Logan,
+the more evident it was that his heart was made up of kindness. He
+seemed to consider himself as almost nothing, and his neighbor as
+everything. His spirit was of that character that wins its way through
+life, tincturing every action with good-will for others, and seeking to
+promote the happiness of all around him in preference to his own. He
+once remarked, that we must not look for happiness in the things of the
+world, but within ourselves, in our hearts, our tempers, and our
+dispositions. On another occasion he quoted to me something he had just
+been reading in an old author, who said that men's lives should be like
+the day, most beautiful at eventide,&mdash;or like the autumn rich with
+golden sheaves, where good works have ripened into an abundant harvest.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, at that time, we knew nothing of who or what he was, beyond
+an assurance incidentally given by our pastor, that he was the worthiest
+young man of his acquaintance, and that he hoped we would entertain him
+in the best way we could, as his passion for the pursuits he discovered
+me to be engaged in, coupled with what he had learned of the great
+object I had in view, had so much interested him in my behalf that he
+thought it likely Mr. Logan would often come down to watch my progress,
+and very possibly in some way assist me. This recommendation was quite
+sufficient to make him a welcome visitor at our little homestead. But
+even without that, we all felt he would have no difficulty in winning
+his way wherever he might think it desirable to make a favorable
+impression. Though he was evidently highly educated, and had been
+brought up in a superior circle to ours, and, for aught we knew, might
+be very wealthy, yet his whole manner was so free from pretension to
+superiority of any kind, that we never felt the least constraint in his
+company.</p>
+
+<p>Well, as I was saying, Mr. Logan<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_428" id="Page_428">[Pg 428]</a></span> came down to assist me in my weeding.
+Jane had gone to the factory, telling me that I should have help enough
+to do her share of the hoeing. I was really not sorry for her absence,
+as she seemed to have taken up some very strange notions, which led her
+into remarks that annoyed me. Besides, she was sometimes so impetuous in
+giving utterance to these notions, that I was afraid she might
+thoughtlessly break out where he would overhear. I might have had other
+reasons, not worth while to allude to, for not regretting her absence;
+but this dangerous propensity was quite sufficient. Hence that was a
+most agreeable morning. It is true that my mother was a good deal
+absent, having something extra to do within doors, thus leaving Mr.
+Logan and myself sole tenants of the garden for probably an hour at a
+time. But it did not occur to me that her presence would have made the
+time pass away any more quickly, or that any remarks from her would have
+made our interchange of ideas more interesting. There was abundance of
+conversation between us, as he seemed at no fault for either words or
+topics. Then there were long pauses in the work, when we would rest upon
+the handles of our hoes, and discuss some point that one of us had
+started. On these occasions I was struck with the extreme politeness and
+deference of his manner toward me. The very tones of his voice were
+different from any I had ever heard. How different, indeed, from those
+of the coarse and mercenary creatures it had been my fortune to
+encounter elsewhere! It was impossible to overlook the contrast. What
+wonder, then, that the softness with which they were modulated, when
+conversing with me, should fall with grateful impressiveness on my
+heart?</p>
+
+<p>But this pleasant acquaintance occasioned no interruption of my labors
+in harvesting my strawberry-crop. It was picked regularly every
+afternoon, and I went with Fred every morning by daylight to see it
+safely delivered to the widow. The sale kept up as briskly as ever,
+though the price gradually declined as the season advanced,&mdash;not, as the
+widow informed me, because the people had become tired of strawberries,
+but because the crops from distant fields were now crowding into market.
+Then, too, she said, as other delicacies came forward, buyers were
+disposed to change a little for something different.</p>
+
+<p>It was a striking feature of the business, that, however abundant the
+strawberries might be, selected fruit always commanded a higher price
+than that which went to market in a jumble just as it came from the
+vines. This is a matter which it is important for all cultivators to
+keep in remembrance, as attention to it is a source of considerable
+profit. We all know that the large berries are no better or sweeter than
+the smaller ones; but then we are the growers, not the consumers, and
+the public have set their hearts on having the largest that can be
+produced. In fruits, as in other things, it seems that "the world is
+still deceived by ornament." Moreover, people are willing to pay liberal
+prices for it, and thus the producer is sure of being rewarded for a
+choice article. I never discovered that a pumpkin or a turnip possessed
+any superior flavor because it had been stimulated to mammoth size. But
+such being the public craving for vegetable monsters, the shrewd
+cultivator is constantly on the alert to minister to it, knowing that it
+pays.</p>
+
+<p>Fred kept his usual tally of the number of baskets we took to market,
+and how much money each lot produced. His ridiculous miscalculation, the
+previous year, of what our profits would be, had so moderated his
+enthusiasm, that during all this season his anticipations were confined
+within very modest bounds. But as his column of figures lengthened, and
+he ciphered out for us the average price for each day's sales, it was
+remarkable how much higher it stood than that of most of the fruit I saw
+in the market. It was evident that our care in assorting our berries was
+giving a good account of itself. Besides, I saw that the widow had the
+jumbled-up berries of others on her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_429" id="Page_429">[Pg 429]</a></span> stand, and heard her complain that
+they remained on hand some hours after all mine had been sold. Then, was
+it not the superiority of mine that had drawn forth such strong
+commendation from my first customer, Mr. Logan? and had he not continued
+to admire all that I did in the strawberry way? Setting aside the high
+prices, I sometimes thought that this alone was worth all the pains we
+had taken.</p>
+
+<p>The season lasted about three weeks, during all which time our pastor
+was a frequent visitor at our garden. As both he and Mr. Logan had been
+made acquainted with my general object and plans, so from generals they
+were at last taken into confidence as to particulars. I showed them
+Fred's tally, and it appeared to me they entered into the study of it
+with almost as much interest as we did ourselves. Though in many
+respects a very small affair, yet it involved great results for me, and
+our visitors both thought it might be turned to the advantage of others
+also.</p>
+
+<p>"I am astonished," said Mr. Seeley, one day, after examining Fred's
+tally, and expressing himself in terms of admiration at the success of
+our enterprise,&mdash;"I am astonished at the wasteful lives which so many of
+our women are living. They seem utterly destitute of purpose. They make
+no effort to give them shape or plan, or to set up a goal in the
+distance, to be reached by some kind of industrious application. They
+drift along listlessly and mechanically, in the old well-worn tracks,
+trusting to accident to give them a new direction. It is a sad thing,
+this waste of human existence!"</p>
+
+<p>"But consider, Sir," I replied, "how limited are our opportunities, how
+circumscribed the circle in which we are compelled to move, and with how
+much jealousy the world stands guard upon its boundaries, as if it were
+determined we should not overstep them. When women succeed, is it not
+solely by accident, or, if there be such a thing, by luck?"</p>
+
+<p>"Accident, Miss," replied Mr. Logan, "undoubtedly has something to do
+with it. But observation, energy, and tact are much more important
+elements of success. More than sixty years ago a young New-England girl
+fell desperately in love with an imported straw bonnet which she
+accidentally met with in a shop. The price was too large for her slender
+purse, so she determined to make one for herself. With no guide but
+recollection of the charming novelty she had seen, no other pattern to
+work by, no opportunity of unbraiding it to see how it was made, no
+instruction whatever, she persevered until she had produced a bonnet
+that filled the hearts of her female friends with envy, as well as with
+ambition to copy it. This was the origin of the once famous Dunstable
+bonnet. From this accidental beginning there sprung up a manufacture
+which now employs ten thousand persons, most of whom are women, and the
+product of which, in Massachusetts alone, amounts to six millions of
+hats and bonnets annually. This girl thus became a public benefactor.
+She opened a new and profitable employment to women, and at the same
+time enriched herself."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," added Mr. Seeley, "and there are many other employments for
+female skill and labor that may yet be opened up. This that you are
+toiling in, Lizzie, may turn out something useful. I presume that even
+bonnets cannot be more popular than strawberries."</p>
+
+<p>"I should think so," interrupted Fred, "It is the women only who wear
+the one, but it looks to me as if the whole world wanted the other."</p>
+
+<p>Well, when our little crop had all been sold, I found that it amounted
+to nearly twelve hundred quarts, and that it produced three hundred and
+eighty dollars clear of expenses. This was quite as much as we expected;
+besides, it was enough to enable me to quit the factory altogether, and
+stay at home with my mother. And there was a fair prospect of this
+release being a permanent one, as it was very certain I now understood
+the whole art and mystery of cultivating strawberries. There was another
+encouraging incident connected with this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_430" id="Page_430">[Pg 430]</a></span> season's operations. It
+appeared that our pastor had mentioned me and my labors to a number of
+his friends, among whom was one who wanted to set out a large field with
+plants, all of which he purchased of me, amounting to sixty dollars.
+This was a most unexpected addition to our income.</p>
+
+<p>But my sister Jane did not seem at all anxious to give up the factory. I
+had, a good while before, let in an idea that there was some other
+attraction about the establishment besides the sewing-machine. I
+noticed, that, now we had so considerably increased our means, she was
+more dressy than ever, and spent a great deal more time at her toilet
+before leaving for the factory, as if there were some one there to whom
+she wanted to appear more captivating than usual. Poor girl! I know it
+was very natural for her to do so. Indeed, I must confess to some little
+weakness of the same description myself. We had drawn to us quite a new
+set of visitors, and it was natural that I should endeavor to make our
+house as attractive to them as possible. As all our previous earnings
+had gone into a common purse, from which my mother made distribution
+among us, so the new accession from the garden went into the same
+repository. Jane was much more set up with this flourishing condition of
+our finances than myself. In addition to beautiful new bonnets and very
+gay shawls which we bought, she began to tease my mother for a silk
+dress, an article which had never been seen in our house. But as the
+latter prudently insisted on treating us with equal indulgence, and as I
+thought my time for such finery had not come, I was unwilling to go to
+that expense, so Jane was obliged to do without it. But I was now to
+have a sewing-machine.</p>
+
+<p>Time passed more pleasantly than I had ever known. It was a great
+happiness to be able to devote an hour or two to reading every day, and
+leisure prompted me to some little enterprises for the improvement of
+the surroundings of the old homestead. It seemed to me the easiest thing
+in the world to invest even the rudest exterior with true elegance, and
+I found that the indulgence of a little taste in this way could be had
+for a very small outlay. A silk dress, in my opinion, was not to be
+compared with such an object.</p>
+
+<p>I scarcely know how it happened, but, instead of the end of the
+strawberry-season being the termination of Mr. Logan's visits, they
+continued full as frequent as when there was really pressing work for
+him to assist in. It could not have been because his curiosity to see
+how my crop would turn out was still ungratified, as he knew all about
+it, how much we had sold, and what money it produced. But he seemed to
+have quite fallen in love with the garden; and, indeed, he one day
+observed, that "there would ever be something in that garden to interest
+him." Then in my little improvements about the house, in fixing up some
+of our old trellises, in planting new vines and flowers, and in
+transplanting trees and shrubs, he insisted on helping me nearly half
+the week. He really performed far more work of this kind than Fred had
+ever done, and appeared to be perfectly familiar with such matters.
+Moreover, he approved so generally of my plans that I at last felt it
+would be difficult to do without him. But I could not help considering
+it strange that he should so frequently give up the higher society to
+which he was accustomed in the city, and spend so much of his time at
+our humble cottage.</p>
+
+<p>Thus the season went on until August came in, when the strawberry-ground
+was becoming thickly covered with runners, especially from the newly
+planted half-acre. I had intended bestowing no particular care on these,
+except to keep down the weeds so that the runners could take root. But
+when Mr. Logan learned this, he said it would never do. Besides, he
+said, the ground looked to him as if it were not rich enough. So, if he
+could have his own way, he would show me how the thing should be
+managed. Well, as by this time he really appeared to have as much to say
+about the garden as any of us, what could I do but consent? First,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_431" id="Page_431">[Pg 431]</a></span>
+then, with my assistance, he turned back the runners into the rows, and
+then had the spaces between covered with a thick coat of fine old
+compost, which he probably bought somewhere in the neighborhood,&mdash;but
+how much it cost we could never get him to say. Then he brought in a man
+with a plough, who broke up the ground, turning the manure thoroughly
+in, and then harrowing it until the surface was as finely pulverized as
+if done with a rake. Then we spread out the runners again, and he showed
+me how to fasten them by letting them down into the soft earth with the
+point of my hoe. I told him I never should have thought of taking so
+much trouble; but he said there was no other way by which the runners
+could be converted into robust plants, certain to produce a heavy crop
+the next season. They must have a freshly loosened soil to run over, and
+in which to form strong roots; and as to enriching the ground, it was
+absolutely indispensable. To be sure, I could produce fruit without it,
+but it would be of very inferior quality.</p>
+
+<p>One may well suppose that this intimate association, this almost daily
+companionship, this grateful interchange of thoughts and feelings that
+seemed to flow in one harmonious current from a common fountain, should
+have exerted a powerful influence over me. Such intercourse with one so
+singularly gifted with the faculty of winning favor from all who knew
+him gave birth to emotions within me such as I had never experienced. Am
+I to blame for being thus affected, or in confessing that every long
+October evening was doubly pleasant when it brought him down to see us?
+Indeed, I had insensibly begun to expect him. There was an indescribable
+something in his manner, especially when we happened to be alone, that I
+thought it impossible to misunderstand. Once, when strolling round the
+garden, I directed his attention to a group of charming autumn flowers.
+But, instead of noticing them, he looked at me, and replied,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, Miss Lizzie, I long since discovered that this garden contains a
+sweeter flower than any of these!"</p>
+
+<p>I turned away from him, abashed and silent, for I was confused and
+frightened by the idea that he was alluding to me, and it was a long
+time before I could venture to raise my eyes to his. I thought of what
+he had said, and of the studied tenderness of voice with which he had
+spoken, all through our lengthened walk, and until I rested upon my
+pillow; and the strange sensations it awakened came over my spirit in
+repeated dreams.</p>
+
+<p>Thus forewarned, as I thought, I was not slow in afterwards detecting
+fresh manifestations of a tenderer interest for me than I had supposed
+it possible for him to entertain.</p>
+
+<p>One evening in November, when the moon was shining with her softest
+lustre through the deep haze peculiar to our Indian summer, he came as
+usual to our little homestead. Somehow, I can scarcely tell why, I had
+been expecting him. He had dropped something the previous evening which
+had awakened in my mind the deepest feeling, and I was half sure that he
+would come. I felt that there were quicker pulses dancing through my
+veins, a flutter in my heart such as no previous experience had brought,
+a doubt, a fear, an expectation, as well as an alarm, which no
+reflection could analyze, no language could describe, all contending
+within me for ascendancy. Who that has human sympathies, who that is
+young as I was, diffident of herself, and comparatively alone and
+friendless, will wonder that I should be thus overcome, or reproach me
+for giving way to impulses which I felt it impossible to control? There
+was a terror of the future, which even recollection of the happy past
+was powerless to dissipate. Society, even books, became irksome, and I
+went out into the garden alone, there to have uninterrupted communion
+with myself.</p>
+
+<p>There was an old arbor in a by-place of the garden, covered with creeper
+and honeysuckle, and though rudely built, yet there was a quiet
+retirement about it that I felt would be grateful to my<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_432" id="Page_432">[Pg 432]</a></span> spirit. Its
+rustic fittings, its heavy old seats, its gravelled floor, had been the
+scene of a thousand childish gambols with my brother and sister. Old
+memories clung to it with a loving fondness. Even when the sports of
+childhood gave place to graver thoughts and occupations, the cool
+retirement of this rustic solitude had never failed to possess the
+strongest attractions for me. The songbirds built their little nests
+within the overhanging foliage, and swarms of bees gave melodious voices
+to the summer air as they hovered over its honey-yielding flowers. The
+past united with the present to direct my steps toward this favorite
+spot I entered, and, seating myself on one of the old low branches that
+encircled it, was looking up through the straggling vines that festooned
+the entrance, admiring the soft haze through, which the cloudless moon
+was shedding a peculiar brilliancy on all around, when I heard a step
+approaching from the house.</p>
+
+<p>I stopped the song which I had been humming, and listened. It is said
+that there are steps which have music in them. I am sure, the cadences
+of that music which the poet has so immortalized sounded distinctly in
+my listening ear. It was the melody of recognition. I knew instinctively
+the approaching step, and in a moment Mr. Logan stood before me.</p>
+
+<p>"What!" said he, extending his hand as I rose, and pressing mine with a
+warmth that was unusual, even retaining it until we were seated,&mdash;"ever
+happy! There must be a perpetual sunshine in your heart!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no!" I replied. "Happiness is a creation of the fireside. One does
+not find it in his neighbor's garden, and many times not even in his
+own."</p>
+
+<p>"For once, dear Lizzie, I only half agree with you," he replied, again
+taking my hand, and pressing it in both of his.</p>
+
+<p>I sought in vain to withdraw it, but he held it with an embarrassing
+tenacity. He had never spoken such words before, never used my name
+even, without the usual prefix which politeness exacts. I was glad that
+the moonlight found but feeble entrance into the arbor, as the blood
+mounted from my heart into my face, and I felt that I must be a
+spectacle of confusion. I cannot now remember how long this
+indescribable embarrassment kept possession of me, but I did summon
+strength to say,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Your language surprises me, Mr. Logan."</p>
+
+<p>"But, dear Lizzie," he rejoined, "my deportment toward you ought to
+lessen that surprise, and become the apology for my words. Others may
+find no happiness in their neighbor's garden, but I have discovered that
+mine is concentrated in yours. You, dear Lizzie, are its fairest,
+choicest flower, which I seek to transplant into my own, there to
+flourish in the warmth of an affection such as I have felt for no one
+but yourself. Never has woman been so loved as you. Let me add fresh
+blessings to the day on which I first met you here, by claiming you as
+my wife."</p>
+
+<p>Oh, how can I write all this? But memory covers every incident of the
+past with flowers. What I said in reply to that overwhelming declaration
+has all gone from me. I may have been silent,&mdash;I think I must have
+been,&mdash;under the crowd of conflicting sensations,&mdash;amazement, modesty, a
+happiness unspeakable,&mdash;which came thronging over my heart I cannot
+remember all, but I covered my face, and the tears came into my eyes.
+Still keeping my hand, he placed his arm around me, drew me yet closer
+to him,&mdash;my head fell upon his breast,&mdash;I think he must have kissed me.</p>
+
+<p>If other evenings fled on hasty wings, how rapid was the flight of what
+remained of this! I cannot repeat the thoughts we uttered to each other,
+the confidences we exchanged, the glimpses of the happy future that
+broke upon me. Joy seemed to fill my cup even to overflowing; happiness
+danced before my bewildered mind; the longing of my womanly nature was
+satisfied with the knowledge that my affection was returned. Out of all
+the world in which he had to choose, he had preferred <i>me</i>.</p>
+
+<p>That night was made restless by the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_433" id="Page_433">[Pg 433]</a></span> very fulness of my happiness. At
+breakfast the next morning, Jane questioned me on my somewhat haggard
+looks, and was inquisitive to know if anything had happened. Somehow she
+was unusually pertinacious; but I parried her inquiries. I was unwilling
+that others, as yet, should become sharers of my joy. But when she left
+upon her usual duties, I put on my best attire, with all the little
+novelties in dress which we had recently been able to purchase, making
+my appearance as genteel as possible. For the first time in my life I
+did think that silk would be becoming, and was vexed with myself for
+being without it. I was now anxious to be found agreeable. But it really
+made no difference.</p>
+
+<p>Presently a knock was heard at the front door; and on my mother's
+opening it, Mr. Logan entered, with a young lady whom he introduced as
+his sister. The room was so indifferently lighted that I could not at
+first distinguish her features, but, on her throwing up her veil, I
+instantly recognized in her my fellow-pupil at the sewing-school,&mdash;my
+"guide, philosopher, and friend," Miss Effie Logan!</p>
+
+<p>"Two years, dear Lizzie, since we met!" she exclaimed, "and what a
+meeting now! You see I know it all. Henry has told me everything. I am
+half as happy as yourself!"</p>
+
+<p>She took me in her arms, embraced me, kissed me with passionate
+tenderness, and called me "sister." What a recognition it was for me!
+Her beautiful face, lighted up with a new animation, appeared more
+lovely than ever. There was the same open-hearted manner of other days,
+now made doubly engaging by the warmest manifestation of genuine
+affection. I had never dreamed that Mr. Logan was the brother of whom
+this loving girl had so often spoken to me at the sewing-school, nor
+that the inexpressible happiness of calling her my sister was in store
+for me. But now I could readily discover resemblances which it was no
+wonder I had heretofore overlooked. If he, in sweetness of disposition,
+were to prove the counterpart of herself, what more could woman ask? It
+was not possible for a recognition to be more joyful than this.</p>
+
+<p>My mother stood by, witnessing these incomprehensible proceedings,
+silent, yet anxious as to their meaning. Effie took her into the
+adjoining room,&mdash;she was far readier of speech than myself,&mdash;and there
+explained to her the mystery of my new position with Mr. Logan. She told
+me that my mother was overcome with surprise, for, dearly as she loved
+her children, she had been strangely dull in her apprehension of what
+had been so long enacting within her own domestic circle. But why should
+I amplify these homely details? They are daily incidents the world over,
+varied, it is true, by circumstances; for everywhere the human heart is
+substantially the same mysterious fountain of emotion.</p>
+
+<p>A secret of this sort, once known, even to one's mother only, travels
+with miraculous rapidity, until the whole gaping neighborhood becomes
+confidentially intrusted with its keeping. It seems that ours had been
+more observant and suspicious than even my dear mother. But such eager
+care-takers of other people's affairs exist wherever human beings may
+chance to congregate. Humble life secured us no exemption.</p>
+
+<p>Our pastor was one of the first to hear of the interesting event. It may
+be that Mr. Logan had given him some inkling of it beforehand, for he
+was early in his congratulations. Jane, as might be expected, declared
+that it was no surprise to her, and was sure that my mother would not
+think of having the wedding without indulging her in her long-coveted
+silk. Fred took to Mr. Logan with almost as much kindliness as even
+myself. Throughout the neighborhood the affair created an immense
+sensation, as it was currently believed that Mr. Logan was exceedingly
+rich, and that now I was likely to become a lady. While poor, I was only
+a strawberry-girl; but rich, I would be a lady! Who is to account<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_434" id="Page_434">[Pg 434]</a></span> for
+these false estimates of human life? Who is mighty enough to correct
+them?</p>
+
+<p>Nothing had ever so melted down the rude stiffness of the Tetchy family
+as this wonderful revolution in my domestic prospects. They became
+amusingly disposed to sociability, as well as to inquisitiveness. But I
+was glad to see my mother stiffen up in proportion to their sudden
+condescension, for she would have nothing to do with them.</p>
+
+<p>Who, among casuists, can account for the contagious sympathy that seems
+to govern the affections? I had often heard it said that one wedding
+generally leads the way to another. Not a fortnight after these
+important events, Jane gave a new surprise to the household by
+introducing to us a lover of her own. It appeared that everything had
+been arranged between them before we knew a word about it. The happy
+young man in this case was a junior partner in the factory; and this, as
+I had long suspected, was the great secret of her attraction there. How
+my mother could have been so blind to the signs of coming events, such
+as were developing around her, I could not understand. But both affairs
+were real surprises to her. If we had depended on her genius as a
+matchmaker, I fear that both Jane and myself would have had a very
+discouraging experience!</p>
+
+<p>Thus the services of our pastor were likely to be in great request, for
+Jane insisted that he should officiate at her wedding, and Mr. Logan
+would think of no other for his own; and for myself, I thought it best,
+as this was the first time, not to let it be said that I had volunteered
+to make a difficulty by being contrary on such a point! Effie offered to
+be my bridesmaid, and Mr. Logan declared that Fred should be his first
+groomsman. It was a hazardous venture, Fred being as much a novice at
+such performances as myself,&mdash;who had never officiated even as bride!
+With a little tutoring, however, he turned out a surprising success.
+Lucy, no longer a little barefoot fruit-peddler, was promoted to be my
+waiting-maid.</p>
+
+<p>The new year came, bringing with it silks and jewels, and the double
+wedding. If I write that I am married, I must add that I am still
+without a sewing-machine. To me the garden has been better than the
+needle.</p>
+
+<p>There is a moral to be drawn from all that I have written, wherein it
+may be seen that the field of my choice is wide enough for many others.
+If I retire from market as a strawberry-girl, it must not be inferred
+that it is because the business has been overdone.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="JOHN_JORDAN" id="JOHN_JORDAN"></a>JOHN JORDAN,</h2>
+
+<h3>FROM THE HEAD OF BAINE.</h3>
+
+
+<p>Among the many brave men who have taken part in this war,&mdash;whose dying
+embers are now being trodden out by a "poor white man,"&mdash;none, perhaps,
+have done more service to the country, or won less glory for themselves,
+than the "poor whites" who have acted as scouts for the Union armies.
+The issue of battles, the result of campaigns, and the possession of
+wide districts of country, have often depended on their sagacity, or
+been determined by the information they have gathered; and yet they have
+seldom been heard of in the newspapers, and may never be read of in
+history.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_435" id="Page_435">[Pg 435]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Romantic, thrilling, and sometimes laughable adventures have attended
+the operations of the scouts of both sections; but more difficulty and
+danger have undoubtedly been encountered by the partisans of the North
+than of the South. Operating mostly within the circle of their own
+acquaintance, the latter have usually been aided and harbored by the
+Southern people, who, generally friendly to Secession, have themselves
+often acted as spies, and conveyed dispatches across districts occupied
+by our armies, and inaccessible to any but supposed loyal citizens.</p>
+
+<p>The service rendered the South by these volunteer scouts has often been
+of the most important character. One stormy night, early in the war, a
+young woman set out from a garrisoned town to visit a sick uncle
+residing a short distance in the country. The sick uncle, mounting his
+horse at midnight, rode twenty miles in the rain to Forrest's
+head-quarters. The result was, the important town of Murfreesboro' and a
+promising Major-General fell into the hands of the Confederates; and all
+because the said Major-General permitted a pretty woman to pass his
+lines on "a mission of mercy."</p>
+
+<p>At another time, a Rebel citizen, professing disgust with Secession for
+having the weakness to be on "its last legs," took the oath of
+allegiance and assumed the Union uniform. Informing himself fully of the
+disposition of our forces along the Nashville Railroad, he suddenly
+disappeared, to reappear with Basil Duke and John Morgan in a midnight
+raid on our slumbering outposts.</p>
+
+<p>Again, a column on the march came upon a wretched woman, with a child in
+her arms, seated by the dying embers of a burning homestead,&mdash;burning,
+she said, because her sole and only friend, her uncle, (these ladies
+seldom have any nearer kin,) "stood up stret fur the kentry." No
+American soldier ever refused a "lift" to a woman in distress. This
+woman was soon "lifted" into an empty saddle by the side of a
+staff-officer, who, with many wise winks and knowing nods, was
+discussing the intended route of the expedition with a brother
+simpleton. A little farther on the woman suddenly remembered that
+another uncle, who did not stand up quite so "stret fur the kentry,"
+and, consequently, had a house still standing up for him, lived "plumb
+up thet 'ar' hill ter the right o' the high-road." She was set down, the
+column moved on, and&mdash;Streight's well planned expedition miscarried. But
+no one wasted a thought on the forlorn woman and the sallow baby whose
+skinny faces were so long within earshot of the wooden-headed
+staff-officer.</p>
+
+<p>Means quite as ingenious and quite as curious were often adopted to
+conceal dispatches, when the messenger was in danger of capture by an
+enemy. A boot with a hollow heel, a fragment of corn-pone too stale to
+tempt a starving man, a strip of adhesive plaster over a festering
+wound, or a ball of cotton-wool stuffed into the ear to keep out the
+west wind, often hid a message whose discovery would cost a life, and
+perhaps endanger an army. The writer has himself seen the hollow
+half-eagle which bore to Burnside's beleaguered force the welcome
+tidings that in thirty hours Sherman would relieve Knoxville.</p>
+
+<p>The perils which even the "native" scout encountered can be estimated
+only by those familiar with the vigilance that surrounds an army. The
+casual meeting with an acquaintance, the slightest act inconsistent with
+his assumed character, or the smallest incongruity between his speech
+and that of the district to which he professed to belong, has sent many
+a good man to the gallows. One of the best of Rosecrans's scouts&mdash;a
+native of East Kentucky&mdash;lost his life because he would "bounce" (mount)
+his nag, "pack" (carry) his gun, eat his bread "dry so," (without
+butter,) and "guzzle his peck o' whiskey," in the midst of Bragg's camp,
+when no such things were done there, nor in the mountains of Alabama,
+whence he professed to come. Acquainted only with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_436" id="Page_436">[Pg 436]</a></span> a narrow region, the
+poor fellow did not know that every Southern district has its own
+dialect, and that the travelled ear of a close observer can detect the
+slightest deviation from its customary phrases. But he was not alone in
+this ignorance. Almost every Northern writer who has undertaken to
+describe Southern life has fallen into the same error. Even Olmstead,
+who has caught the idioms wonderfully, confounds the dialects of
+different regions, and makes a Northern Georgian "right smart," when he
+had been only "powerful stupid" all his life.</p>
+
+<p>The professional scout generally was a native of the South,&mdash;some
+illiterate and simple-minded, but brave and self-devoted "poor white
+man," who, if he had worn shoulder-straps, and been able to write
+"interesting" dispatches, might now be known as a hero half the world
+over. Some of these men, had they been born at the North, where free
+schools are open to all, would have led armies, and left a name to live
+after them. But they were born at the South, had their minds cramped and
+their souls stunted by a system which dwarfs every noble thing; and so,
+their humble mission over, they have gone down unknown and unhonored,
+amid the silence and darkness of their native woods.</p>
+
+<p>I hope to rescue the memory of one of these men&mdash;John Jordan, from the
+head of Baine&mdash;from utter oblivion by writing this article. He is now
+beyond the hearing of my words; but I would record one act in his short
+career, that his pure patriotism may lead some of us to know better and
+love more the much-abused and misunderstood class to which he belonged.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Early in the war the command of an important military expedition was
+intrusted to the president of a Western college. Though a young man,
+this scholar had already achieved a "character" and a history. Beginning
+life a widow's son, his first sixteen years were passed between a farm,
+a canal, and a black-saltern. Being an intelligent, energetic lad, his
+friends formed the usual hopes of him; but when he apprenticed himself
+to a canal-boat, their faith failed, and, after the fashion of Job's
+friends, they comforted his mother with the assurance that her son had
+taken the swift train to the Devil. But, like Job, she knew in whom she
+believed, and the boy soon justified her confidence. An event shortly
+occurred which changed the current of his life, gave him a purpose, and
+made him a man.</p>
+
+<p>One dark midnight, as the boat on which he was employed was leaving one
+of those long reaches of slackwater which abound in the Ohio and
+Pennsylvania Canal, he was called up to take his turn at the bow.
+Tumbling out of bed, his eyes heavy with sleep, he took his stand on the
+narrow platform below the bow-deck, and began uncoiling a rope to steady
+the boat through a lock it was approaching. Slowly and sleepily he
+unwound it, till it knotted, and caught in a narrow cleft in the edge of
+the deck. He gave it a sudden pull, but it held fast; then another and a
+stronger pull, and it gave way, but sent him over the bow into the
+water. Down he went into the dark night and the still darker river; and
+the boat glided on to bury him among the fishes. No human help was near.
+God only could save him, and He only by a miracle. So the boy thought,
+as he went down saying the prayer his mother had taught him.
+Instinctively clutching the rope, he sunk below the surface; but then it
+tightened in his grasp, and held firmly. Seizing it hand over hand, he
+drew himself up on deck, and was again a live boy among the living.
+Another kink had caught in another crevice, and saved him! Was it that
+prayer, or the love of his praying mother, which wrought this miracle?
+He did not know, but, long after the boat had passed the lock, he stood
+there, in his dripping clothes, pondering the question.</p>
+
+<p>Coiling the rope, he tried to throw it again into the crevice; but it
+had lost the knack of kinking. Many times<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_437" id="Page_437">[Pg 437]</a></span> he tried,&mdash;six hundred, says
+my informant,&mdash;and then sat down and reflected. "I have thrown this
+rope," he thought, "six hundred times; I might throw it ten times as
+many without its catching. Ten times six hundred are six thousand,&mdash;so,
+there were six thousand chances against my life. Against such odds,
+Providence only could have saved it. Providence, therefore, thinks it
+worth saving; and if that's so, I won't throw it away on a canal-boat.
+I'll go home, get an education, and be a man."</p>
+
+<p>He acted on this resolution, and not long afterwards stood before a
+little log cottage in the depths of the Ohio wilderness. It was late at
+night; the stars were out, and the moon was down; but by the fire-light
+that came through the window, he saw his mother kneeling before an open
+book which lay on a chair in the corner. She was reading; but her eyes
+were off the page, looking up to the Invisible. "Oh, turn unto me," she
+said, "and have mercy upon me! give Thy strength unto Thy servant, and
+save the son of Thine handmaid!" More she read, which sounded like a
+prayer, but this is all that the boy remembers. He opened the door, put
+his arm about her neck, and his head upon her bosom. What words he said
+I do not know; but there, by her side, he gave back to God the life
+which He had given. So the mother's prayer was answered. So sprang up
+the seed which in toil and tears she had planted.</p>
+
+<p>The boy worked, the world rolled round, and twelve years later Governor
+Dennison offered him command of a regiment. He went home, opened his
+mother's Bible, and pondered upon the subject. He had a wife, a child,
+and a few thousand dollars. If he gave his life to the country, would
+God and the few thousand dollars provide for his wife and child? He
+consulted the Book about it. It seemed to answer in the affirmative; and
+before morning he wrote to a friend,&mdash;"I regard my life as given to the
+country. I am only anxious to make as much of it as possible before the
+mortgage on it is foreclosed."</p>
+
+<p>To this man, who thus went into the war with a life not his own, was
+given, on the 16th of December, 1861, command of the little army which
+held Kentucky to her moorings in the Union.</p>
+
+<p>He knew nothing of war beyond its fundamental principles,&mdash;which are, I
+believe, that a big boy can whip a little boy, and that one big boy can
+whip two little boys, if he take them singly, one after the other. He
+knew no more about it; yet he was called upon to solve a military
+problem which has puzzled the heads of the greatest generals: namely,
+how two small bodies of men, stationed widely apart, can unite in the
+presence of an enemy, and beat him, when he is of twice their united
+strength, and strongly posted behind intrenchments. With the help of
+many "good men and true," he solved this problem; and in telling how he
+solved it, I shall come naturally to speak of John Jordan, from the head
+of Baine.</p>
+
+<p>Humphrey Marshall with five thousand men had invaded Kentucky. Entering
+it at Pound Gap, he had fortified a strong natural position near
+Paintville, and, with small bands, was overrunning the whole Piedmont
+region. This region, containing an area larger than the whole of
+Massachusetts, was occupied by about four thousand blacks and one
+hundred thousand whites,&mdash;a brave, hardy, rural population, with few
+schools, scarcely any churches, and only one newspaper, but with that
+sort of patriotism which grows among mountains and clings to its barren
+hillsides as if they were the greenest spots in the universe. Among this
+simple people Marshall was scattering firebrands. Stump-orators were
+blazing away at every cross-road, lighting a fire which threatened to
+sweep Kentucky from the Union. That done,&mdash;so early in the
+war,&mdash;dissolution might have followed. To the Ohio canal-boy was
+committed the task of extinguishing this conflagration. It was a
+difficult task, one which, with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_438" id="Page_438">[Pg 438]</a></span> the means at command, would have
+appalled any man not made equal to it by early struggles with hardship
+and poverty, and entire trust in the Providence that guards his country.</p>
+
+<p>The means at command were twenty-five hundred men, divided into two
+bodies, and separated by a hundred miles of mountain country. This
+country was infested with guerrillas, and occupied by a disloyal people.
+The sending of dispatches across it was next to impossible; but
+communication being opened, and the two columns set in motion, there was
+danger that they would be fallen on and beaten in detail before they
+could form a junction. This was the great danger. What remained&mdash;the
+beating of five thousand Rebels, posted behind intrenchments, by half
+their number of Yankees, operating in the open field&mdash;seemed to the
+young Colonel less difficult of accomplishment.</p>
+
+<p>Evidently, the first thing to be done was to find a trustworthy
+messenger to convey dispatches between the two halves of the Union army.
+To this end, the Yankee commander applied to the Colonel of the
+Fourteenth Kentucky.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you a man," he asked, "who will die, rather than fail or betray
+us?"</p>
+
+<p>The Kentuckian reflected a moment, then answered: "I think I have,&mdash;John
+Jordan, from the head of Baine."<a name="FNanchor_B_2" id="FNanchor_B_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_B_2" class="fnanchor">[B]</a></p>
+
+<p>Jordan was sent for. He was a tall, gaunt, sallow man of about thirty,
+with small gray eyes, a fine, falsetto voice, pitched in the minor key,
+and his speech the rude dialect of the mountains. His face had as many
+expressions as could be found in a regiment, and he seemed a strange
+combination of cunning, simplicity, undaunted courage, and undoubting
+faith; yet, though he might pass for a simpleton, he talked a quaint
+sort of wisdom which ought to have given him to history.</p>
+
+<p>The young Colonel sounded him thoroughly; for the fate of the little
+army might depend on his fidelity. The man's soul was as clear as
+crystal, and in ten minutes the Yankee saw through it. His history is
+stereotyped in that region. Born among the hills, where the crops are
+stones, and sheep's noses are sharpened before they can nibble the thin
+grass between them, his life had been one of the hardest toil and
+privation. He knew nothing but what Nature, the Bible, the "Course of
+Time," and two or three of Shakspeare's plays had taught him; but
+somehow in the mountain air he had grown to be a man,&mdash;a man as
+civilized nations account manhood.</p>
+
+<p>"Why did you come into the war?" at last asked the Colonel.</p>
+
+<p>"To do my sheer fur the kentry, Gin'ral," answered the man. "And I
+didn't druv no barg'in wi' th' Lord. I guv Him my life squar' out; and
+ef He's a mind ter tuck it on this tramp, why, it's a His'n; I've
+nothin' ter say agin it."</p>
+
+<p>"You mean that you've come into the war not expecting to get out of it?"</p>
+
+<p>"That's so, Gin'ral."</p>
+
+<p>"Will you die rather than let the dispatch be taken?"</p>
+
+<p>"I wull."</p>
+
+<p>The Colonel recalled what had passed in his own mind when poring over
+his mother's Bible that night at his home in Ohio; and it decided him.
+"Very well," he said; "I will trust you."</p>
+
+<p>The dispatch was written on tissue paper, rolled into the form of a
+bullet, coated with warm lead, and put into the hand of the Kentuckian.
+He was given a carbine, a brace of revolvers, and the fleetest horse in
+his regiment, and, when the moon was down, started on his perilous
+journey. He was to ride at night, and hide in the woods or in the houses
+of loyal men in the day-time.</p>
+
+<p>It was pitch-dark when he set out; but he knew every inch of the way,
+having travelled it often, driving mules to market. He had gone twenty
+miles by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_439" id="Page_439">[Pg 439]</a></span> early dawn, and the house of a friend was only a few miles
+beyond him. The man himself was away; but his wife was at home, and she
+would harbor him till nightfall. He pushed on, and tethered his horse in
+the timber; but it was broad day when he rapped at the door, and was
+admitted. The good woman gave him breakfast, and showed him to the
+guest-chamber, where, lying down in his boots, he was soon in a deep
+slumber.</p>
+
+<p>The house was a log cabin in the midst of a few acres of
+deadening,&mdash;ground from which trees have been cleared by girdling. Dense
+woods were all about it; but the nearest forest was a quarter of a mile
+distant, and should the scout be tracked, it would be hard to get away
+over this open space, unless he had warning of the approach of his
+pursuers. The woman thought of this, and sent up the road, on a mule,
+her whole worldly possessions, an old negro, dark as the night, but
+faithful as the sun in the heavens. It was high noon when the mule came
+back, his heels striking fire, and his rider's eyes flashing, as if
+ignited from the sparks the steel had emitted.</p>
+
+<p>"Dey 'm comin', Missus!" he cried,&mdash;"not haff a mile away,&mdash;twenty
+Secesh,&mdash;ridin' as ef de Debil wus arter 'em!"</p>
+
+<p>She barred the door, and hastened to the guest-chamber.</p>
+
+<p>"Go," she cried, "through the winder,&mdash;ter the woods! They'll be here in
+a minute."</p>
+
+<p>"How many is thar?" asked the scout.</p>
+
+<p>"Twenty,&mdash;go,&mdash;go at once,&mdash;or you'll be taken!"</p>
+
+<p>The scout did not move; but, fixing his eyes on her face, he said,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I yere 'em. Thar's a sorry chance for my life a'ready. But,
+Rachel, I've thet 'bout me thet's wuth more 'n my life,&mdash;thet, may-be,
+'ll save Kaintuck. If I'm killed, wull ye tuck it ter Cunnel Cranor, at
+Paris?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, yes, I will. But go: you've not a minnit to lose, I tell you."</p>
+
+<p>"I know, but wull ye swar it,&mdash;swar ter tuck this ter Cunnel Cranor
+'fore th' Lord thet yeres us?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, yes, I will," she said, taking the bullet. But horses' hoofs were
+already sounding in the door-yard. "It's too late," cried the woman.
+"Oh, why did you stop to parley?"</p>
+
+<p>"Never mind, Rachel," answered the scout. "Don't tuck on. Tuck ye keer
+o' th' dispatch. Valu' it loike yer life,&mdash;loike Kaintuck. The Lord's
+callin' fur me, and I'm a'ready."</p>
+
+<p>But the scout was mistaken. It was not the Lord, but a dozen devils at
+the door-way.</p>
+
+<p>"What does ye want?" asked the woman, going to the door.</p>
+
+<p>"The man as come from Garfield's camp at sun-up,&mdash;John Jordan, from the
+head o' Baine," answered a voice from the outside.</p>
+
+<p>"Ye karn't hev him fur th' axin'," said the scout. "Go away, or I'll
+send some o' ye whar the weather is warm, I reckon."</p>
+
+<p>"Pshaw!" said another voice,&mdash;from his speech one of the chivalry.
+"There are twenty of us. We'll spare your life, if you give up the
+dispatch; if you don't, we'll hang you higher than Haman."</p>
+
+<p>The reader will bear in mind that this was in the beginning of the war,
+when swarms of spies infested every Union camp, and treason was only a
+gentlemanly pastime, not the serious business it has grown to be since
+traitors are no longer dangerous.</p>
+
+<p>"I've nothin' but my life thet I'll guv up," answered the scout; "and ef
+ye tuck thet, ye'll hev ter pay the price,&mdash;six o' yourn."</p>
+
+<p>"Fire the house!" shouted one.</p>
+
+<p>"No, don't do thet," said another. "I know him,&mdash;he's cl'ar grit,&mdash;he'll
+die in the ashes; and we won't git the dispatch."</p>
+
+<p>This sort of talk went on for half an hour; then there was a dead
+silence, and the woman went to the loft, whence she could see all that
+was passing outside. About a dozen of the horsemen were posted around
+the house; but the remainder, dismounted, had gone to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_440" id="Page_440">[Pg 440]</a></span> edge of the
+woods, and were felling a well-grown sapling, with the evident intention
+of using it as a battering-ram to break down the front door.</p>
+
+<p>The woman, in a low tone, explained the situation; and the scout said,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"It 'r' my only chance. I must run fur it. Bring me yer red shawl,
+Rachel."</p>
+
+<p>She had none, but she had a petticoat of flaming red and yellow.
+Handling it as if he knew how such articles can be made to spread, the
+scout softly unbarred the door, and, grasping the hand of the woman,
+said,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Good bye, Rachel. It 'r' a right sorry chance; but I may git through.
+Ef I do, I'll come ter night; ef I don't, git ye the dispatch ter the
+Cunnel. Good bye."</p>
+
+<p>To the right of the house, midway between it and the woods, stood the
+barn. That way lay the route of the scout. If he could elude the two
+mounted men at the door-way, he might escape the other horsemen; for
+they would have to spring the barn-yard fences, and their horses might
+refuse the leap. But it was foot of man against leg of horse, and "a
+right sorry chance."</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly he opened the door, and dashed at the two horses with the
+petticoat. They reared, wheeled, and bounded away like lightning just
+let out of harness. In the time that it takes to tell it, the scout was
+over the first fence, and scaling the second; but a horse was making the
+leap with him. The scout's pistol went off, and the rider's earthly
+journey was over. Another followed, and his horse fell mortally wounded.
+The rest made the circuit of the barn-yard, and were rods behind when
+the scout reached the edge of the forest. Once among those thick
+laurels, nor horse nor rider can reach a man, if he lies low, and says
+his prayer in a whisper.</p>
+
+<p>The Rebels bore the body of their comrade back to the house, and said to
+the woman,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"We'll be revenged for this. We know the route he'll take, and will have
+his life before to-morrow; and you&mdash;we'd burn your house over your head,
+if you were not the wife of Jack Brown."</p>
+
+<p>Brown was a loyal man, who was serving his country in the ranks of
+Marshall. Thereby hangs a tale, but this is not the time to tell it.
+Soon the men rode away, taking the poor woman's only wagon as a hearse
+for their dead comrade.</p>
+
+<p>Night came, and the owls cried in the woods in a way they had not cried
+for a fortnight. "T'whoot! t'whoot!" they went, as if they thought there
+was music in hooting. The woman listened, put on a dark mantle, and
+followed the sound of their voices. Entering the woods, she crept in
+among the bushes, and talked with the owls as if they had been human.</p>
+
+<p>"They know the road ye'll take," she said; "ye must change yer route.
+Here ar' the bullet."</p>
+
+<p>"God bless ye, Rachel!" responded the owl, "ye 'r' a true 'ooman!"&mdash;and
+he hooted louder than before, to deceive pursuers, and keep up the
+music.</p>
+
+<p>"Ar' yer nag safe?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, and good for forty mile afore sun-up."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, here ar' suthin' ter eat: ye'll need it. Good bye, and God go wi'
+ye!"</p>
+
+<p>"He'll go wi' ye, fur He loves noble wimmin."</p>
+
+<p>Their hands clasped, and then they parted: he to his long ride; she to
+the quiet sleep of those who, out of a true heart, serve their country.</p>
+
+<p>The night was dark and drizzly; but before morning the clouds cleared
+away, leaving a thick mist hanging low on the meadows. The scout's mare
+was fleet, but the road was rough, and a slosh of snow impeded the
+travel. He had come by a strange way, and did not know how far he had
+travelled by sunrise; but lights were ahead, shivering in the haze of
+the cold, gray morning. Were they the early candles of some sleepy
+village, or the camp-fires of a band of guerrillas? He did not know, and
+it would not be safe to go on till he did<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_441" id="Page_441">[Pg 441]</a></span> know. The road was lined with
+trees, but they would give no shelter; for they were far apart, and the
+snow lay white between them. He was in the blue grass region. Tethering
+his horse in the timber, he climbed a tall oak by the roadside; but the
+mist was too thick to admit of his discerning anything distinctly. It
+seemed, however, to be breaking away, and he would wait until his way
+was clear; so he sat there, an hour, two hours, and ate his breakfast
+from the satchel John's wife had slung over his shoulder. At last the
+fog lifted a little, and he saw close at hand a small hamlet,&mdash;a few
+rude huts gathered round a cross-road. No danger could lurk in such a
+place, and he was about to descend, and pursue his journey, when
+suddenly he heard, up the road by which he came, the rapid tramp of a
+body of horsemen. The mist was thicker below; so half-way down the tree
+he went, and waited their coming. They moved at an irregular pace,
+carrying lanterns, and pausing every now and then to inspect the road,
+as if they had missed their way or lost something. Soon they came near,
+and were dimly outlined in the gray mist, so the scout could make out
+their number. There were thirty of them,&mdash;the original band, and a
+reinforcement. Again they halted when abreast of the tree, and searched
+the road narrowly.</p>
+
+<p>"He must have come this way," said one,&mdash;he of the chivalry. "The other
+road is six miles longer, and he would take the shortest route. It's an
+awful pity we didn't head him on both roads."</p>
+
+<p>"We kin come up with him yit, ef we turn plumb round, and foller on
+t'other road,&mdash;whar we lost the trail,&mdash;back thar, three miles ter the
+deadnin'."</p>
+
+<p>Now another spoke, and his voice the scout remembered. He belonged to
+his own company in the Fourteenth Kentucky. "It 'so," he said; "he has
+tuck t' other road. I tell ye, I'd know thet mar's shoe 'mong a million.
+Nary one loike it wus uver seed in all Kaintuck,&mdash;only a d&mdash;&mdash;d Yankee
+could ha' invented it."</p>
+
+<p>"And yere it ar'," shouted a man with one of the lanterns, "plain as
+sun-up."</p>
+
+<p>The Fourteenth Kentuckian clutched the light, and, while a dozen
+dismounted and gathered round, closely examined the shoe-track. The
+ground was bare on the spot, and the print of the horse's hoof was
+clearly cut in the half-frozen mud. Narrowly the man looked, and life
+and death hung on his eyesight. The scout took out the bullet, and
+placed it in a crotch of the tree. If they took him, the Devil should
+not take the dispatch. Then he drew a revolver. The mist was breaking
+away, and he would surely be discovered, if the men lingered much
+longer; but he would have the value of his life to the uttermost
+farthing.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, the horsemen crowded around the foot-print, and one of them
+inadvertently trod upon it. The Kentuckian looked long and earnestly,
+but at last he said,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'Ta'n't the track. Thet 'ar' mar' has a sand-crack on her right
+fore-foot. She didn't take kindly to a round shoe; so the Yank, he guv
+her one with the cork right in the middle o' the quarter. 'Twas a durned
+smart contrivance; fur ye see, it eased the strain, and let the nag go
+nimble as a squirrel. The cork ha'n't yere,&mdash;'ta'n't her track,&mdash;and
+we're wastin,' time in luckin'."</p>
+
+<p>The cork was not there, because the trooper's tread had obliterated it.
+Reader, let us thank him for that one good step, if he never take
+another; for it saved the scout, and, may-be, it saved Kentucky. When
+the scout returned that way, he halted abreast of that tree, and
+examined the ground about it. Right there, in the road, was the mare's
+track, with the print of the man's foot still upon the inner quarter! He
+uncovered his head, and from his heart went up a simple thanksgiving.</p>
+
+<p>The horsemen gone, the scout came down from the tree, and pushed on into
+the misty morning. There might be danger ahead, but there surely was
+danger behind him. His pursuers were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_442" id="Page_442">[Pg 442]</a></span> only half convinced that they had
+struck his trail; and some sensible fiend might put it into their heads
+to divide and follow, part by one route, part by the other.</p>
+
+<p>He pushed on over the sloshy road, his mare every step going slower and
+slower. The poor beast was jaded out; for she had travelled sixty miles,
+eaten nothing, and been stabled in the timber. She would have given out
+long before, had her blood not been the best in Kentucky. As it was, she
+staggered along as if she had taken a barrel of whiskey. Five miles
+farther on was the house of a Union man. She must reach it, or die by
+the wayside; for the merciful man regardeth not the life of his beast,
+when he carries dispatches.</p>
+
+<p>The loyalist did not know the scout, but his honest face secured him a
+cordial welcome. He explained that he was from the Union camp on the Big
+Sandy, and offered any price for a horse to go on with.</p>
+
+<p>"Yer nag is wuth ary two o' my critters," said the man. "Ye kin take the
+best beast I've got; and when ye 'r' ag'in this way, we'll swop back
+even."</p>
+
+<p>The scout thanked him, mounted the horse, and rode off into the mist
+again, without the warm breakfast which the good woman had, half-cooked,
+in the kitchen. It was eleven o'clock; and at twelve that night he
+entered Colonel Cranor's quarters at Paris,&mdash;having ridden a hundred
+miles with a rope round his neck, for thirteen dollars a month,
+hard-tack, and a shoddy uniform.</p>
+
+<p>The Colonel opened the dispatch. It was dated, Louisa, Kentucky,
+December 24th, midnight; and directed him to move at once with his
+regiment, (the Fortieth Ohio, eight hundred strong,) by the way of Mount
+Sterling and McCormick's Gap, to Prestonburg. He would incumber his men
+with as few rations and as little luggage as possible, bearing in mind
+that the safety of his command depended on his expedition. He would also
+convey the dispatch to Lieutenant-Colonel Woolford, at Stamford, and
+direct him to join the march with his three hundred cavalry.</p>
+
+<p>Hours now were worth months of common time, and on the following morning
+Cranor's column began to move. The scout lay by till night, then set out
+on his return, and at daybreak swapped his now jaded horse for the fresh
+Kentucky mare, even. He ate the housewife's breakfast, too, and took his
+ease with the good man till dark, when he again set out, and rode
+through the night in safety. After that his route was beset with perils.
+The Providence which so wonderfully guarded his way out seemed to leave
+him to find his own way in; or, as he expressed it, "Ye see, the Lord,
+He keered more fur the dispatch nor He keered fur me: and 'twas nateral
+He should; 'case my life only counted one, while the dispatch, it stood
+fur all Kaintuck."</p>
+
+<p>Be that as it may, he found his road a hard one to travel. The same gang
+which followed him out waylaid him back, and one starry midnight he fell
+among them. They lined the road forty deep, and seeing he could not run
+the gauntlet, he wheeled his mare and fled backwards. The noble beast
+did her part; but a bullet struck her, and she fell in the road dying.
+Then&mdash;it was Hobson's choice&mdash;he took to his legs, and, leaping a fence,
+was at last out of danger. Two days he lay in the woods, not daring to
+come out; but hunger finally forced him to ask food at a negro shanty.
+The dusky patriot loaded him with bacon, brown bread, and blessings, and
+at night piloted him to a Rebel barn, where he enforced the Confiscation
+Act, to him then "the higher law,"&mdash;necessity.</p>
+
+<p>With his fresh horse he set out again; and after various adventures and
+hair-breadth escapes, too numerous to mention,&mdash;and too incredible to
+believe, had not similar things occurred all through the war,&mdash;he
+entered, one rainy midnight, (the 6th of January,) the little log hut,
+seven miles from Paintville, where Colonel Garfield was sleeping.</p>
+
+<p>The Colonel rubbed his eyes, and raised himself upon his elbow.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_443" id="Page_443">[Pg 443]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Back safe?" he asked. "Have you seen Cranor?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, Gin'ral. He can't be more 'n two days ahind o' me, nohow."</p>
+
+<p>"God bless you, Jordan! You have done us great service," said Garfield,
+warmly.</p>
+
+<p>"I thanks ye, Gin'ral," said the scout, his voice trembling, "Thet's
+more pay 'n I expected."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>To give the reader a full understanding of the result of the scout's
+ride, I must now move on with the little army. They are only fourteen
+hundred men, worn out with marching, but boldly they move down upon
+Marshall. False scouts have made him believe they are as strong as he:
+and they are; for every one is a hero, and they are led by a general.
+The Rebel has five thousand men,&mdash;forty-four hundred infantry and six
+hundred cavalry,&mdash;besides twelve pieces of artillery,&mdash;so he says in a
+letter to his wife, which Buell has intercepted and Garfield has in his
+pocket. Three roads lead to Marshall's position: one at the east,
+bearing down to the river, and along its western bank; another, a
+circuitous one, to the west, coming in on Paint Creek, at the mouth of
+Jenny's Creek, on the right of the village; and a third between the
+others, a more direct route, but climbing a succession of almost
+impassable ridges. These three roads are held by strong Rebel pickets,
+and a regiment is outlying at the village of Paintville.</p>
+
+<p>To deceive Marshall as to his real strength and designs, Garfield orders
+a small force of infantry and cavalry to advance along the river, drive
+in the Rebel pickets, and move rapidly after them as if to attack
+Paintville. Two hours after this force goes off, a similar one, with the
+same orders, sets out on the road to the westward; and two hours later
+still, another small body takes the middle road. The effect is, that the
+pickets on the first route, being vigorously attacked and driven,
+retreat in confusion to Paintville, and dispatch word to Marshall that
+the Union army is advancing along the river. He hurries off a thousand
+infantry and a battery to resist the advance of this imaginary column.
+When this detachment has been gone an hour and a half, he hears, from
+the routed pickets on the right, that the Federals are advancing along
+the western road. Countermanding his first order, he now directs the
+thousand men and the battery to check the new danger; and hurries off
+the troops at Paintville to the mouth of Jenny's Creek to make a stand
+there. Two hours later the pickets on the central route are driven in,
+and, finding Paintville abandoned, flee precipitately to the fortified
+camp, with the story that the Union army is close at their heels and
+occupying the town. Conceiving that he has thus lost Paintville,
+Marshall hastily withdraws the detachment of one thousand men to his
+fortified camp; and Garfield, moving rapidly over the ridges of the
+central route, occupies the abandoned position.</p>
+
+<p>So affairs stand on the evening of the 8th of January, when a spy enters
+the camp of Marshall, with tidings that Cranor, with thirty-three
+hundred (!) men, is within twelve hours' march at the westward. On
+receipt of these tidings, the "big boy,"&mdash;he weighs three hundred pounds
+by the Louisville hay-scales,&mdash;conceiving himself outnumbered, breaks up
+his camp, and retreats precipitately, abandoning or burning a large
+portion of his supplies. Seeing the fires, Garfield mounts his horse,
+and, with a thousand men, enters the deserted camp at nine in the
+evening, while the blazing stores are yet unconsumed. He sends off a
+detachment to harass the retreat, and waits the arrival of Cranor, with
+whom he means to follow and bring Marshall to battle in the morning.</p>
+
+<p>In the morning Cranor comes, but his men are footsore, without rations,
+and completely exhausted. They cannot move one leg after the other. But
+the canal-boy is bound to have a fight; so every man who has strength to
+march is ordered to come forward. Eleven hundred&mdash;among them four
+hundred of Cranor's tired heroes&mdash;step from the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_444" id="Page_444">[Pg 444]</a></span> ranks, and with them,
+at noon of the 9th, Garfield sets out for Prestonburg, sending all his
+available cavalry to follow the line of the enemy's retreat and harass
+and delay him.</p>
+
+<p>Marching eighteen miles, he reaches at nine o'clock that night the mouth
+of Abbott's Creek, three miles below Prestonburg,&mdash;he and the eleven
+hundred. There he hears that Marshall is encamped on the same stream,
+three miles higher up; and throwing his men into bivouac, in the midst
+of a sleety rain, he sends an order back to Lieutenant-Colonel Sheldon,
+who is left in command at Paintville, to bring up every available man,
+with all possible dispatch, for he shall force the enemy to battle in
+the morning. He spends the night in learning the character of the
+surrounding country and the disposition of Marshall's forces; and now
+again John Jordan comes into action.</p>
+
+<p>A dozen Rebels are grinding at a mill, and a dozen honest men come upon
+them, steal their corn, and make them prisoners. The miller is a tall,
+gaunt man, and his clothes fit the scout as if they were made for him.
+He is a Disunionist, too, and his very raiment should bear witness
+against this feeding of his enemies. It does. It goes back to the Rebel
+camp, and&mdash;the scout goes in it. That chameleon face of his is smeared
+with meal, and looks the miller so well that the miller's own wife might
+not detect the difference. The night is dark and rainy, and that lessens
+the danger; but still he is picking his teeth in the very jaws of the
+lion,&mdash;if he can be called a lion, who does nothing but roar like unto
+Marshall.</p>
+
+<p>Space will not permit me to detail this midnight ramble; but it gave
+Garfield the exact position of the enemy. They had made a stand, and
+laid an ambuscade for him. Strongly posted on a semicircular hill, at
+the forks of Middle Creek, on both sides of the road, with cannon
+commanding its whole length, and hidden by the trees, they were waiting
+his coming.</p>
+
+<p>The Union commander broke up his bivouac at four in the morning and
+began to move forward. Reaching the valley of Middle Creek, he
+encountered some of the enemy's mounted men, and captured a quantity of
+stores they were trying to withdraw from Prestonburg. Skirmishing went
+on until about noon, when the Rebel pickets were driven back upon their
+main body, and then began the battle. It is not my purpose to describe
+it; for that has already been ably done, in thirty lines, by the man who
+won it.</p>
+
+<p>It was a wonderful battle. In the history of this war there is not
+another like it. Measured by the forces engaged, the valor displayed,
+and the results which followed, it throws into the shade even the
+achievements of the mighty hosts which saved the nation. Eleven hundred
+men, without cannon, charge up a rocky hill, over stumps, over stones,
+over fallen trees, over high intrenchments, right into the face of five
+thousand, and twelve pieces of artillery!</p>
+
+<p>For five hours the contest rages. Now the Union forces are driven back;
+then, charging up the hill, they regain the lost ground, and from behind
+rocks and trees pour in their murderous volleys. Then again they are
+driven back, and again they charge up the hill, strewing the ground with
+corpses. So the bloody work goes on; so the battle wavers, till the
+setting sun, wheeling below the hills, glances along the dense lines of
+Rebel steel moving down to envelop the weary eleven hundred. It is an
+awful moment, big with the fate of Kentucky. At its very crisis two
+figures stand out against the fading sky, boldly defined in the
+foreground.</p>
+
+<p>One is in Union blue. With a little band of heroes about him, he is
+posted on a projecting rock, which is scarred with bullets, and in full
+view of both armies. His head is uncovered, his hair streaming in the
+wind, his face upturned in the darkening daylight, and from his soul is
+going up a prayer,&mdash;a prayer for Sheldon and Cranor. He turns his eyes
+to the northward, and his lip tightens, as he throws off his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_445" id="Page_445">[Pg 445]</a></span> coat, and
+says to his hundred men,&mdash;"Boys, <i>we</i> must go at them!"</p>
+
+<p>The other is in Rebel gray. Moving out to the brow of the opposite hill,
+and placing a glass to his eye, he, too, takes a long look to the
+northward. He starts, for he sees something which the other, on lower
+ground, does not distinguish. Soon he wheels his horse, and the word
+"<span class="smcap">Retreat</span>" echoes along the valley between them. It is his last
+word; for six rifles crack, and the Rebel Major lies on the ground
+quivering.</p>
+
+<p>The one in blue looks to the north again, and now, floating proudly
+among the trees, he sees the starry banner. It is Sheldon and Cranor!
+The long ride of the scout is at last doing its work for the nation. On
+they come like the rushing wind, filling the air with their shouting.
+The rescued eleven hundred take up the strain, and then, above the swift
+pursuit, above the lessening conflict, above the last boom of the
+wheeling cannon, goes up the wild huzza of Victory. The gallant Garfield
+has won the day, and rolled back the disastrous tide which has been
+sweeping on ever since Big Bethel. In ten days Thomas routs Zollicoffer,
+and then we have and hold Kentucky.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Every one remembers a certain artist, who, after painting a "neighing
+steed," wrote underneath the picture, "This is a horse," lest it should
+be mistaken for an alligator. I am tempted to imitate his example, lest
+the reader, otherwise, may not detect the rambling parallel I have
+herein drawn between a Northern and a Southern "poor white man."</p>
+
+<p>President Lincoln, when he heard of the Battle of Middle Creek, said to
+a distinguished officer, who happened to be with him,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Why did Garfield in two weeks do what would have taken one of you
+Regular folks two months to accomplish?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because he was not educated at West Point," answered the West-Pointer,
+laughing.</p>
+
+<p>"No," replied Mr. Lincoln. "That wasn't the reason. It was because, when
+he was a boy, he had to work for a living."</p>
+
+<p>But our good President, for once, was wrong,&mdash;for once, he did not get
+at the core of the matter. Jordan, as well as Garfield, "had, when a
+boy, to work for a living." The two men were, perhaps, of about equal
+natural abilities,&mdash;both were born in log huts, both worked their own
+way to manhood, and both went into the war consecrating their very lives
+to their country: but one came out of it with a brace of stars on his
+shoulder, and honored by all the nation; the other never rose from the
+ranks, and went down to an unknown grave, mourned only among his native
+mountains. Something more than <i>work</i> was at the bottom of this contrast
+in their lives and their destinies. It was <span class="smcap">Free Schools</span>, which
+the North gave the one, and of which the South robbed the other. Plant a
+free school at every Southern cross-road, and every Southern Jordan will
+become a Garfield. Then, and not till then, will this Union be
+"reconstructed."</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_B_2" id="Footnote_B_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_B_2"><span class="label">[B]</span></a> The Baine is a small stream which puts into the Big Sandy,
+a short distance from the town of Louisa, Ky.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_446" id="Page_446">[Pg 446]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="NOELC" id="NOELC"></a>NO&Euml;L.<a name="FNanchor_C_3" id="FNanchor_C_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_C_3" class="fnanchor">[C]</a></h2>
+
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">L'Acad&eacute;mie en respect,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nonobstant l'incorrection,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A la faveur du sujet,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Ture-lure,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">N'y fera point de rature;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No&euml;l! ture-lure-lure.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i20"><span class="smcap">Gui-Bar&ocirc;zai.</span><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i12">1.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Quand les astres de No&euml;l<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Brillaient, palpitaient au ciel,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Six gaillards, et chacun ivre,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Chantaient ga&icirc;ment dans le givre,<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">"Bons amis,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Allons done chez Agassiz!"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i12">2.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Ces illustres P&egrave;lerins<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">D'Outre-Mer, adroits et fins,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Se donnant des airs de pr&ecirc;tre,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A l'envi se vantaient d'&ecirc;tre<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">"Bons amis<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">De Jean Rudolphe Agassiz!"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i11">3.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">&#338;il-de-Perdrix, grand farceur,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sans reproche et sans pudeur,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Dans son patois de Bourgogne,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Bredouillait comme un ivrogne,<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">"Bons amis,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">J'ai dans&eacute; chez Agassiz!"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i11">4.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Verzenay le Champenois,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Bon Fran&ccedil;ais, point New-Yorquois,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Mais des environs d'Avize,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Fredonne, &agrave; mainte reprise,<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">"Bons amis,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">J'ai chant&eacute; chez Agassiz!"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">5.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">A c&ocirc;t&eacute; marchait un vieux<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Hidalgo, mais non mousseux;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Dans le temps de Charlemagne<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Fut son p&egrave;re Grand d'Espagne!<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">"Bons amis,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">J'ai d&icirc;n&eacute; chez Agassiz!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_447" id="Page_447">[Pg 447]</a></span><br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i11">6.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Derri&egrave;re eux un Bordelais,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Gascon, s'il en fut jamais,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Parfum&eacute; de po&eacute;sie<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Riait, chantait plein de vie,<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">"Bons amis,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">J'ai soup&eacute; chez Agassiz!"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i11">7.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Avec ce beau cadet roux,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Bras dessus et bras dessous,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Mine alti&egrave;re et couleur terne,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Vint le Sire de Sauterne:<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">"Bons amis,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">J'ai couch&eacute; chez Agassiz!"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i11">8.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Mais le dernier de ces preux<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&Eacute;tait un pauvre Chartreux,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Qui disait, d'un ton robuste,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">"B&eacute;n&eacute;dictions sur le Juste!<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">Bons amis,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">B&eacute;nissons P&egrave;re Agassiz!"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i11">9.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Ils arrivent trois &agrave; trois,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Montent l'escalier de bois<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Clopin-clopant! quel gendarme<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Peut permettre ce vacarme,<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">Bons amis,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A la porte d'Agassiz!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">10.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Ouvrez donc, mon bon Seigneur,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ouvrez vite et n'ayez peur;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ouvrez, ouvrez, car nous sommes<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Gens de bien et gentilshommes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">Bons amis<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">De la famille Agassiz!"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i9">11.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Chut, ganaches! taisez-vous!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">C'en est trop de vos glouglous;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&Eacute;pargnez aux Philosophes<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Vos abominables strophes!<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">Bons amis,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Respectez mon Agassiz!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_C_3" id="Footnote_C_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_C_3"><span class="label">[C]</span></a> Sent to Mr. Agassiz, with a basket of wine, on Christmas
+Eve, 1864.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_448" id="Page_448">[Pg 448]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="WILHELM_MEISTERS_APPRENTICESHIP" id="WILHELM_MEISTERS_APPRENTICESHIP"></a>WILHELM MEISTER'S APPRENTICESHIP.</h2>
+
+<h3>SECOND PAPER.</h3>
+
+
+<p>In a preceding paper I have sought to trace the main lines of spiritual
+growth, as these appear in Goethe's great picture. But is such growth
+possible in this world? Do the circumstances in which modern men are
+placed comport with it? Or is it, perhaps, a cherub only <i>painted</i> with
+wings, and despite the laws of anatomy? These questions are pertinent.
+It concerns us little to know what results the crescent powers of life
+might produce, if, by good luck, Eden rather than our struggling
+century, another world instead of this world, were here. This world, it
+happens, is here undoubtedly; our century and our place in it are facts,
+which decline to take their leave, bid them good morning and show them
+the door how one may. Let us know, then, what of good sufficing may be
+achieved in their company. If Goethe's picture be only a picture, and
+not a possibility, we will be pleased with him, provided his work prove
+pleasant; we will partake of his literary dessert, and give him his meed
+of languid praise. But if, on the other hand, his book be written in
+full, unblinking view of all that is fixed and limitary in man and
+around him, and if, in face of this, it conduct growth to its
+consummation, then we may give him something better than any
+praise,&mdash;namely, heed.</p>
+
+<p>Is it, then, written in this spirit of reality? In proof that it is so,
+I call to witness the most poignant reproach, save one, ever uttered
+against it by a superior man. Novalis censured it as "thoroughly modern
+and prosaic." Well, <i>on one side</i>, it is so,&mdash;just as modern and prosaic
+as the modern world and actual European civilization. What is this but
+to say that Goethe faces the facts? What is it but to say that he
+accepts the conditions of his problem? He is to show that the high
+possibilities of growth can be realized <i>here</i>. To run off, get up a
+fancy world, and then picture these possibilities as coming to fruition
+<i>there</i>, would be a mere toying with his readers. Here is modern
+civilization, with its fixed forms, its rigid limits, its traditional
+mechanisms. Here is this life, where men make, execute, and obey laws,
+own and manage property, buy and sell, plant, sail, build, marry and
+beget children and maintain households, pay taxes, keep out of debt, if
+they are wise, and go to the poorhouse, or beg, or do worse, if they are
+unwise or unfortunate. Here such trivialities as starched collars,
+blacked boots, and coats according to the mode compel attention. Society
+has its fixed rules, by which it enforces social continuity and
+connection. To neglect these throws one off the ring; and, with rare
+exceptions, isolation is barrenness and death. One cannot even go into
+the street in a wilfully strange costume, without establishing
+repulsions and balking relations between him and his neighbors which
+destroy their use to each other. Every man is bound to the actual form
+of society by his necessities at least, if not by his good-will.</p>
+
+<p>To step violently out of all this puts one in a social vacuum,&mdash;a
+position in which few respire well, while most either perish or become
+in some degree monstrous. It is necessary that one should live and work
+with his fellows, if he is to obtain the largest growth. On the other
+hand, to be merely in and of this&mdash;a wheel, spoke, or screw, in this
+vast social mechanism&mdash;makes one, not a man, but a thing, and precludes
+all growth but such as is obscure and indirect. Thousands, indeed, have
+no desire but to obtain some advantageous place in this machinery.
+Meanwhile this enormous conventional civilization strives, and must
+strive, to make every soul its puppet. Let each fall into the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_449" id="Page_449">[Pg 449]</a></span> routine,
+pursue it in some shining manner, asking no radical questions, and he
+shall have his heart's desire. "Blessed is he," it cries, "who
+handsomely and with his whole soul reads upwards from man to position
+and estate,&mdash;from man to millionnaire, judge, lord, bishop! Cursed is he
+who questions, who aims to strike down beneath this great mechanism, and
+to connect himself with the primal resources of his being! There are no
+such resources. It is a wickedness to dream of them. Man has no root but
+in tradition and custom, no blessing but in serving them."</p>
+
+<p>As that assurance is taken, and as that spirit prevails, man forfeits
+his manhood. His life becomes mechanical. Ideas disappear in the forms
+that once embodied them; imagination is buried beneath symbol; belief
+dies of creed, and morality of custom. Nothing remains but a world-wide
+pantomime. Worship itself becomes only a more extended place-hunting,
+and man the walking dummy of society. And then, since man no longer is
+properly vitalized, disease sets in, consumption, decay, putrefaction,
+filling all the air with the breath of their foulness.</p>
+
+<p>The earlier part of the eighteenth century found all Europe in this
+stage. Then came a stir in the heart of man: for Nature would not let
+him die altogether. First came recoil, complaint, reproach, mockery.
+Voltaire's light, piercing, taunting laugh&mdash;with a screaming wail inside
+it, if one can hear well&mdash;rang over Europe. "Aha, you are found out! Up,
+toad, in your true shape!" Then came wild, shallow theories, half true;
+then wild attempt to make the theories real; then carnage and chaos.</p>
+
+<p>Accompanying and following this comes another and purer phase of
+reaction. "Let us get out of this dead, conventional world!" cry a few
+noble spirits, in whose hearts throbs newly the divine blood of life.
+"Leave it behind; it is dead. Leave behind all formal civilization; let
+us live only from within, and let the outward be formless,&mdash;momentarily
+created by our souls, momentarily vanishing."</p>
+
+<p>The noblest type I have ever known of this <i>extra-vagance</i>, this
+wandering outside of actual civilization, was Thoreau. With his purity,
+as of a newborn babe,&mdash;with his moral steadiness, unsurpassed in my
+observation,&mdash;with his indomitable persistency,&mdash;by the aid also of that
+all-fertilizing imaginative sympathy with outward Nature which was his
+priceless gift,&mdash;he did, indeed, lend to his mode of life an
+indescribable charm. In him it came at once to beauty and to
+consecration.</p>
+
+<p>Yet even he must leave out marriage, to make his scheme of life
+practicable. He must ignore Nature's demand that humanity continue, or
+recognize it only with loathing. "Marriage is that!" said he to a
+friend,&mdash;and held up a carrion-flower.</p>
+
+<p>Moreover, the success of his life&mdash;nay, the very quality of his
+being&mdash;implied New England and its civilization. To suppose him born
+among the Flathead Indians were to suppose <i>him</i>, the Thoreau of our
+love and pride, unborn still. The civilization he slighted was an air
+that he breathed; it was implied, as impulse and audience, in those
+books of his, wherein he enshrined his spirit, and whereby he kept its
+health.</p>
+
+<p>A fixed social order is indirectly necessary even to him who, by rare
+gifts of Nature, can stand nobly and unfalteringly aside from it. And it
+is directly, instantly necessary to him who, either by less power of
+self-support or by a more flowing human sympathy, <i>must</i> live with men,
+and <i>must</i> comply with the conditions by which social connection is
+preserved.</p>
+
+<p>The problem, therefore, recurs. Here are the two terms: the soul, the
+primal, immortal imagination of man, on the one side; the enormous,
+engrossing, dehumanizing mechanism of society, on the other. A noble few
+elect the one; an ignoble multitude pray to its opposite. The
+reconciling word,&mdash;is there a reconciling word?</p>
+
+<p>Here, now, comes one who answers,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_450" id="Page_450">[Pg 450]</a></span> Yes. And he answers thus, not by a
+bald assertion, but by a picture wherein these opposites lose their
+antagonism,&mdash;by a picture which is true to both, yet embraces both, and
+shapes them into a unity. That is Goethe. This attempt represents the
+grand <i>nisus</i> of his life. It is most fully made in "Wilhelm Meister."</p>
+
+<p>Above the world he places the growing spirit of man, the vessel of all
+uses, with his resource in eternal Nature. Then he seizes with a
+sovereign hand upon actual society, upon formal civilization, and of it
+all makes food and service for man's spirit. This prosaic civilization,
+he says, is prosaic only in itself, not when put in relation to its true
+end. So he first recognizes it with remorseless verity, depicts it in
+all its littleness and limitation; then strikes its connection with
+growth: and lo, the littleness becomes great in serving the greater; the
+harsh prosaicism begins to move in melodious measure; and out of that
+jarring, creaking mechanism of conventional society arise the grand
+rolling organ-harmonies of life.</p>
+
+<p>That he succeeds to perfection I do not say. I could find fault enough
+with his book, if there were either time or need. There is no need: its
+faults are obvious. In binding himself by such unsparing oaths to
+recognize and admit all the outward truth of society, he has, indeed,
+grappled with the whole problem, but also made its solution a little
+cumbrous and incomplete. Nay, this which he so admits in his picture was
+also sufficiently, perhaps a touch more than sufficiently, admitted in
+his own being. He would have been a conventionalist and epicurean,
+unless he had been a seer. He would have been a mere man of the world,
+had he not been Goethe. But whereas a man of the world reads up from man
+to dignity, estate, and social advantage, he reverses the process, and
+reads up from these to man. Say that he does it with some stammering,
+with some want of the last nicety. What then? It were enough, if he set
+forth upon the true road, though his own strength fail before the end is
+reached. It is enough, if, falling midway, even though it be by excess
+of the earthly weight he bears, he still point forward, and his voice
+out of the dust whisper, "There lies your way!" This alone makes him a
+benefactor of mankind.</p>
+
+<p>This specific aim of Goethe's work makes it, indeed, a novel.
+Conventional society and the actual conditions of life are, with respect
+to eternal truth, but the <i>novelties</i> of time. The novelist is to
+picture these, and, in picturing, subordinate them to that which is
+perpetual and inspiring. Just so far as he opens the ravishing
+possibilities of life in commanding reconciliation with the formal
+civilization of a particular time, he does his true work.</p>
+
+<p>The function of the poet is different. His business it is simply to
+<i>refresh</i> the spirit of man. To its lip he holds the purest ichors of
+existence; with ennobling draughts of awe, pity, sympathy, and joy, he
+quickens its blood and strengthens its vital assimilations. The
+particular circumstances he uses are merely the cup wherein this wine of
+life is contained. This he may obtain as most easily he can; the world
+is all before him where to choose.</p>
+
+<p>The novelist has no such liberty. His business it is to find the ideal
+possibilities of man <i>here</i>, in the midst of actual society. He shall
+teach us to free the heart, while respecting the bonds of circumstance.
+And the more strictly he clings to that which is central in man on the
+one hand, and the more broadly and faithfully he embraces the existing
+prosaic limitations on the other, the more his work answers to the whole
+nature of his function. Goethe has done the latter thoroughly, his
+accusers themselves being judges; that he has done the other, and how he
+has done it, I have sought to show in a preceding paper. He looks on
+actual men and actual society with an eye of piercing observation; he
+depicts them with remorseless verity; and through and by all builds,
+builds at the great architectures of spiritual growth.</p>
+
+<p>Hence the difference between him and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_451" id="Page_451">[Pg 451]</a></span> satirists like Thackeray, who
+equal him in keenness of observation, are not behind him in verity of
+report, while surpassing him often in pictorial effect,&mdash;but who bring
+to the picture out of themselves only a noble indignation against
+baseness. They contemn; he uses. They cry, "Fie!" upon unclean
+substances; he ploughs the offence into the soil, and sows wheat over
+it. They see the world as it is; he sees it, and through it. They probe
+sores; he leads forth into the air and the sunshine. They tinge the
+cheek with blushes of honorable shame; he paints it with the glow of
+wholesome activity. Their point of view is that of pathology; his, that
+of physiology. The great satirists, at best, give a medicine to
+sickness; Goethe gives a task to health. They open a door into a
+hospital; he opens a door <i>out</i> of one, and cries, "Lo, the green earth
+and blue heaven, the fields of labor, the skies of growth!"</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, by this relentless fidelity to observation, by his
+stern refusal to give men supposititious qualities and characters, by
+his resolute acceptance of European civilization, by his unalterable
+determination to practicable results, by always limiting himself <i>to
+that which all superior men might be expected not merely to read of with
+gusto, but to do</i>, he is widely differenced from novelists like the
+authoress of "Consuelo." He does not propose to furnish a moral luxury,
+over which at the close one may smack the lips, and cry, "How sweet!" No
+gardener's manual ever looked more simply to results. His aim is, to get
+something <i>done</i>, to get <i>all</i> done which he suggests. Accordingly, he
+does not gratify us with vasty magnanimities, holy beggaries voluntarily
+assumed, Bouddhistic "missions"; he shows us no more than high-minded,
+incorruptible men, fixed in their regards upon the high ends of life,
+established in noble, fruitful fellowship, willing and glad to help
+others so far as they can clearly see their way, not making public
+distribution of their property, but managing it so that it shall in
+themselves and others serve culture, health, and all well-being of body
+and mind. Wealth here is a trust; it is held for use; its uses are, to
+subserve the high ends of Nature in the spirit of man. Lothario seeks
+association with all who can aid him in these applications. So intent is
+he, that he <i>loves</i> Theresa because she has a genius at once for
+economizing means and for seeing where they may be applied to the
+service of the more common natures. He keeps the great-minded,
+penetrating, providential Abb&eacute; in his pay, that this inevitable eye may
+distinguish for him the more capable natures, and find out whether or
+how they may be forwarded on their proper paths. Here are no sublime
+professions, but a steady, modest, resolute, discriminate doing.</p>
+
+<p>For suggestion of what one may really <i>do</i>, and for impelling one toward
+the practicable best, I find this book worth a moonful of "Consuelos."
+The latter work has, indeed, beautiful pictures; and simply as a picture
+of a fresh, sweet, young life, it is charming. But in its aim at a
+higher import I find it simply an arrow shot into the air, going <i>so</i>
+high, but at&mdash;nothing! If one crave a moral luxury, it is here. If he
+desire a lash for egoism, this, perhaps, is also here. If he is already
+praying the heavens for a sufficing worth and work in life, and is
+asking only the <i>what</i> and <i>how</i>, this book, taken in connection with
+its sequel, says, "Distribute your property, and begin wandering about
+and 'doing good.'"</p>
+
+<p>I decline. After due consideration, I have fully determined to own a
+house, and provide each day a respectable dinner for my table, if the
+fates agree; to secure, still in submission to the fates, such a
+competency as will give me leisure for the best work I can do; to
+further justice and general well-being, so far as is in me to further or
+hinder, but always on the basis of the existing civilization; to cherish
+sympathy and good-will in myself, and in others by cherishing them in
+myself; to help another when I clearly can; and to give, when what I
+give will obviously do more service toward the high ends of life, in
+the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_452" id="Page_452">[Pg 452]</a></span> hands of another than in my own. Toward carrying out these purposes
+"Consuelo" has not given me a hint, not one; "Wilhelm Meister" has given
+me invaluable hints. Therefore I feel no great gratitude to the one, and
+am profoundly grateful to the other.</p>
+
+<p>It is not the mere absence of suffering, it is not a pound of beef on
+every peasant's plate, that makes life worth living. Health, happiness,
+even education, however diffused, do not alone make life worth living.
+Tell me the quality of a man's happiness before I can very rapturously
+congratulate him upon it; tell me the quality of his suffering before I
+can grieve over it without solace. Noble pain is worth more than ignoble
+pleasure; and there is a health in the <i>dying</i> Schiller which beggars in
+comparison that of the fat cattle on a thousand hills. All the world
+might be well fed, well clothed, well sheltered, and very properly
+behaved, and be a pitiful world nevertheless, were this all.</p>
+
+<p>Let us get out of this business of merely improving <i>conditions</i>. There
+are two things which make life worth living. First, the absolute worth
+and significance of man's spirit in its harmonious completeness; and
+hence the absolute value of culture and growth in the deepest sense of
+the words. Secondly, the relevancy of actual experience and the actual
+world to these ends. Goethe attends to both these, and to both in a
+spirit of great sanity. He fixes his eye with imperturbable steadiness
+on the central fact, then with serene, intrepid modesty suggests the
+relevancy to this of the world as it is around us, and <i>then trusts the
+healthy attraction of the higher to modify and better the lower</i>. Give
+man, he says, something to work <i>for</i>, namely, the high uses of his
+spirit; give him next something to work <i>with</i>, namely, actual
+civilization, the powers, limits, and conditions which actually exist in
+and around him; and if these instruments be poor, be sure he will begin
+to improve upon them, the moment he has found somewhat inspiring and
+sufficing to do with them. Actual conditions will improve precisely in
+proportion as <i>all</i> conditions are utilized, are placed in relations of
+service to a result which contents the soul of men. And to establish in
+this relation all the existing conditions of life, natural and
+artificial, is the task which Goethe has undertaken.</p>
+
+<p>I invite the reader to dwell upon this fact, that, the moment life has
+an inspiring significance, and the moment also the men, industries, and
+conditions around us become instrumental toward resolving that, in this
+moment one must begin, so far as he may, bettering these conditions. If
+I hire a man to work in my garden, how much is it worth to me, if he
+bring not merely his hands and gardening skill, but also an appreciable
+soul, with him! So soon as that fact is apparent, fruitful relations are
+established between us, and sympathies begin to fly like bees, bearing
+pollen and winning honey, from each heart to the other. To let a man be
+degraded, or stupid, or thwarted in all his inward life, when I <i>can</i>
+make it otherwise? Not unless I am insensate. To allow anywhere a
+disserviceable condition, when I could make it serviceable? Not in full
+view of the fact that all which thwarts the inward being of another
+thwarts me. If there be in the world a man who might write a grand book,
+but through ill conditions cannot write it, then in me and you a door
+will remain closed, which might have opened&mdash;who knows upon what
+treasure? With the high ends of life before him, no man can <i>afford</i> to
+be selfish. With the fact before him that formal civilization is
+instrumental, no man can afford to run away from it. With the fact in
+view that each man needs every other, and needs that every other should
+do and be the best he can, no one can afford to withhold help, where it
+can be rendered. Finally, seeing that means are limited, and that the
+means and services which are crammed into others, without being
+spiritually assimilated, breed only indigestion, no one must throw his
+services about at random, but see where Nature has prepared the way for
+him, and there in modesty do what he can.</p>
+
+<p>To strike the connection, then, between<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_453" id="Page_453">[Pg 453]</a></span> the inward and the outward,
+between the spiritual and the conventional, between man and society,
+between moral possibility and formal civilization,&mdash;to give growth, with
+all its immortal issues, a place, and means, and opportunity,&mdash;this was
+Goethe's aim; and if the execution be less than perfect, as I admit, it
+yet suggests the whole; and if the shortcoming be due in part to his
+personal imperfections, which doubtless may be affirmed, it yet does not
+mar the sincerity of his effort. His hand trembles, his aim is not
+nicely sure, but it is an aim at the right object nevertheless.</p>
+
+<p>There are limits and conditions in man, as well as around him, to which
+the like justice is done. Such are Special Character, Natural Degree and
+Vocation, Moral Imperfection, and Limitation of Self-Knowledge. Each of
+these plays a part of vast importance in life; each is portrayed and
+used in Goethe's picture. But, though with reluctance, I must merely
+name and pass them by. Enough to say here, that he sees them and sees
+through them. Enough that they appear, and as means and material. Nor
+does he merely distinguish and harp upon them, after the hard analytic
+fashion one would use here; but, as the violinist sweeps all the strings
+of his instrument, not to show that one sounds <i>so</i> and another <i>so</i>,
+but out of all to bring a complete melody, so does this master touch the
+chords of life, and, in thus recognizing, bring out of them the
+melodious completeness of a human soul.</p>
+
+<p>One inquiry remains. What of inspirational impulse does Goethe bring to
+his work? He depicts growth; what leads him to do so? Is it nothing but
+cold curiosity? and does he leave the reader in a like mood? Or is he
+commanded by some imperial inward necessity? and does he awaken in the
+reader a like noble necessity, not indeed to write, but to <i>live</i>?</p>
+
+<p>The inspiration which he feels and communicates is art infinite,
+unspeakable reverence for Personality, for the completed, spiritual
+reality of man. Literally unspeakable, it is the silent spirit in which
+he writes, sovereign in him and in his work,&mdash;the soul of every
+sentence, and professed in none. You find it scarcely otherwise than in
+his manner of treating his material. But there you <i>may</i> find it: the
+silent, majestic homage that he pays to every <i>real</i> grace and spiritual
+accomplishment of man or woman. Any smallest trait of this is delineated
+with a heed that makes no account of time or pains, with a venerating
+fidelity and religious care that <i>unutterably</i> imply its preciousness.
+Indeed, it is one point of his art to bestow elaborate, reverential
+attention upon some minor grace of manhood or womanhood, that one may
+say, "If this be of such price, how priceless is the whole!" He resorts
+habitually to this inferential suggestion,&mdash;puzzling hasty readers, who
+think him frivolously exalting little things, rather than hinting beyond
+all power of direct speech at the worth of the greater. In landscape
+paintings a bush in the foreground may occupy more space than a whole
+range of mountains in the distance: perhaps the bush is there to show
+the scale of the drawing, and intimate the greatness, rather than
+littleness, of the mountains.</p>
+
+<p>The undertone of every page, should we mask its force in hortatives,
+would be,&mdash;"Buy manhood; buy verity and completeness of being; buy
+spiritual endowment and accomplishment; buy insight and clearness of
+heart and wholeness of spirit; pay ease, estimation, estate,&mdash;never
+consider what you pay: for though pleasure is not despicable, though
+wealth, leisure, and social regard are good, yet there is no tint of
+inherent grace, no grain nor atom of man's spiritual substance, but it
+outweighs kingdoms, outweighs all that is external to itself."</p>
+
+<p>But hortatives and assertions represent feebly, and without truth of
+tone, the subtile, sovereign persuasion of the book. This is said
+sovereignly by <i>not</i> being said expressly. We are at pains to affirm
+only that which may be conceived of as doubtful, therefore admit a
+certain doubtfulness by the act of asserting. When one begins to
+asseverate his honesty, his hearers begin to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_454" id="Page_454">[Pg 454]</a></span> question it. The last
+persuasion lies in assumptions,&mdash;not in assumptions made consciously and
+with effort, but in those which one makes because he cannot help it, and
+even without being too much aware what he does. All that a man of power
+assumes utterly, so that he were not himself without assuming it, he
+will impress upon others with a persuasion that has in it somewhat of
+the infinite. Jesus never said, "There is a God,"&mdash;nor even, "God is our
+Father,"&mdash;nor even, "Man is immortal"; he took all this as implicit
+basis of labor and prayer. Implicit assumptions rule the world; they
+build and destroy cities, make and unmake empires, open and close
+epochs; and whenever Destiny in any powerful soul has ripened a new
+truth to this degree,&mdash;made it for him an <i>inevitable</i> assumption&mdash;then
+there is in history an end and a beginning. Goethe's homage to
+Personality, to the full spiritual being of man, is of this degree, and
+is a soul of eloquence in his book.</p>
+
+<p>Nor can we set this aside as a piece of blind and gratuitous sentiment.
+Blind and gratuitous sentiment is clearly not his forte. Every line of
+every page exhibits to us a man who has betaken himself, once for all,
+to the use of his eyes. All sentiment, as such, he ruled back, with a
+sovereign energy, into his heart,&mdash;and then, as it were, compelling his
+heart into his eyes, made it an organ for discerning truth. His head was
+an observatory, and every power of his soul did duty there. He enjoyed,
+he suffered, intensely; but behind joy and pain alike lay the sleepless
+questioner, demanding of each its message. And this, the supreme
+function, the exceeding praise and preciousness of the man, the one
+thing that he was born to do, and religiously did, this has been made
+his chief reproach.</p>
+
+<p>No zealot, then, no sentimentalist, no devotee of the god Wish, have we
+here; but an imperturbable beholder, whose dauntless and relentless
+eyeballs, telescopic and microscopic by turns, can and will see what the
+fact <i>is</i>. If the universe be bad, as some dream, he will see how bad;
+if good, he will perceive and respect its goodness. A man, for once,
+equal to the act of seeing! Having, as the indispensable preliminary,
+encountered himself, and victoriously fought on all the fields of his
+being the battle against self-deception, he now comes armed with new and
+strange powers of vision to encounter life and the world,&mdash;ready either
+to soar of dive,&mdash;above no fact, beneath none, by none appalled, by none
+dazzled,&mdash;a falcon, whose prey is truth, and whose wing and eye are well
+mated. And <i>he</i> it is who sets that ineffable price on the being of a
+real man.</p>
+
+<p>This is manifested in many ways, all of them silent, rather than
+obstreperous and obtrusive. It is shown by a certain gracious, ineffable
+expectation with which for the first time he approaches any human soul,
+as if unknown and incalculable possibilities were opening here; by a
+noble ceremonial which he ever observes toward his higher characters,
+standing uncovered in their presence; by the space in his eye, not
+altogether measurable, which a man of worth is perceived to fill. Each
+of his principal characters has an atmosphere about him, like the earth
+itself; each has a vast perspective, and rounds off into mystery and
+depths of including sky.</p>
+
+<p>The common novelist holds his characters in the palm of his hand, as he
+would his watch; winds them up, regulates, pockets them, is exceedingly
+handy with them. He may continue some little, pitiful puzzle about them
+for his readers; but <i>he</i> can see over, under, around them, and can make
+them stop or go, tick or be silent, altogether at pleasure. To Goethe
+his characters are as intelligible and as mysterious as Nature herself.
+He sees them, studies them, and with an eye how penetrating, how subtile
+and sure! But over, under, and around them he would hold it for no less
+than a profanity to pretend that he sees. They come upon the scene to
+prove what they are; he and the reader study them together; and when
+best known, their possibilities are obviously unexhausted, the unknown
+remains<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_455" id="Page_455">[Pg 455]</a></span> in them still. They go forward into their future, with a real
+future before them, with an unexplained life to live: not goblets whose
+contents have been drained, but fountains that still flow when the
+traveller who drank from them has passed on. Jarno, for example, a man
+of firm and definite outlines, and drawn here with masterly
+distinctness, without a blur or a wavering of the hand in the whole
+delineation, is yet the unexplained, unexhausted Jarno, when the book
+closes. He goes forward with the rest, known and yet unknown, a man of
+very definite limitations, and yet also of possibilities which the
+future will ever be defining.</p>
+
+<p>In this sense, the book, almost alone among novels, consists with the
+hope of immortality. In average novels, there is nothing left of the
+hero when the book ends. "He is utterly married," as "Eothen" says.
+Utterly, sure enough! He ends at the altar, like a burnt-out candle over
+which the priest puts an extinguisher to keep it from smoking. One yawns
+over the last page, not considering himself any longer in company. Think
+of giving perpetuity to such lives! What could they do but get
+unmarried, and begin fussing at courtship again? But when Goethe's
+characters leave the stage, they seem to be rather entering upon life
+than quitting it; possibility opens, expectation runs before them, and
+our interest grows where observation ceases.</p>
+
+<p>Goethe looks at Personality as through a telescope, and sees it shade
+away, beyond its cosmic systems, into star-dust and shining nebul&aelig;; he
+inspects it as with a microscope, and on that side also resolves it only
+in part. He brings to it all the most spacious, all the most delicate
+interpretations of his wit, yet confessedly leaves more beyond.</p>
+
+<p>Now it is this large-eyed, liberal regard of man, this grand, childlike,
+all-credent appreciation, which distinguishes the earlier and Scriptural
+literatures. Abraham fills up all the space between earth and heaven.
+Later, we arrive at limitations and secondary laws; we heap these up
+till the primal fact is obscured, is hidden by them. Then ensues an
+impression of man's littleness, emptiness, insignificance, utter,
+mechanical limitation. Then sharp-eyed gentlemen discover that man has a
+trick of dressing up his littleness in large terms,&mdash;liberty, intuition,
+inspiration, immortality,&mdash;and that he only is a philosopher, who cannot
+be deceived by this shallow stratagem. Your "philosopher" sees what men
+are made of. Populaces may fancy that man is central in the world, that
+he is the all-containing vessel of its uses: but your philosopher,
+admirable gentleman, sees through all that; he is superior to any such
+vulgar partiality for that particular species of insect to which he
+happens to belong. "A fly thinks himself the greatest of created
+beings," says philosopher; "man flatters himself in the same way; but I,
+I am not merely man, I am philosopher, and know better."</p>
+
+<p>The early seers and poets had not attained to this sublime
+superciliousness of self-contempt; for this, of course, is a fruit to be
+borne only by the "progress of the species." They are still weak enough
+to believe in gods and godlike men, in spirit and inspiration, in the
+ineffable fulness and meaning of a noble life, in the cosmic
+relationship of man, in the <i>divineness</i> of speech and thought. In their
+books man is placed in a large light; honor and estimation come to him
+out of the heavens; what he does, if it be in any profound way
+characteristic, is told without misgiving, without fear to be
+superfluous; he is the care, or even the companion, of the immortals. To
+go forth, therefore, from our little cells of criticism and controversy,
+and to enter upon the pages where man's being appears so spacious and
+significant,&mdash;where, at length, it is really <i>imagined</i>,&mdash;is like
+leaving stove-heated, paper-walled rooms, and passing out beneath the
+blue cope and into the sweet air of heaven.</p>
+
+<p>Quite this epic boldness and wholeness we cannot attribute to Goethe. He
+is still a little straitened, a little pestered by the doubting and
+critical optics which our time turns upon man, a little victimized<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_456" id="Page_456">[Pg 456]</a></span> by
+his knowledge of limitary conditions and secondary laws. Nevertheless, a
+noble man is not to his eye "contained between hat and boots," but is of
+untold depth and dimension. He indicates traits of the soul with that
+repose in his facts and respect for them which Lyell shows in spelling
+out terrestrial history, or Herschel in tracing that of the solar
+system. Observe how he relates the plays of a child,&mdash;with what grave,
+imperial respect, with what undoubting, reverential minuteness! He does
+not say, "Bear with me, ladies and gentlemen; I will come to something
+of importance soon." This is important,&mdash;the formation of suns not more
+so.</p>
+
+<p>In this respect he stands in wide contrast to the prevailing tone of the
+time. It seems right and admirable that Tyndale should risk life and
+limb in learning the laws of glaciers, that large-brained Agassiz should
+pursue for years, if need be, his microscopic researches into the
+natural history of turtles; and were life or eyesight lost so, we should
+all say, "Lost, but well and worthily." But ask a conclave of sober
+<i>savans</i> to listen to reports on the natural-spiritual history of babies
+and little children,&mdash;ask them to join, one and all, in this piece of
+discovery, spending labor and lifetime in watching the sports, the
+moods, the imaginations, the fanciful loves and fears, the whole baby
+unfolding of these budding revelations of divine uses in Nature,&mdash;and
+see what they will think of your sanity. You may, indeed, if such be
+your humor, observe these matters, nay, even write books upon them, and
+still escape the lunatic asylum,&mdash;<i>provided</i> you do so in the way of
+pleasantry. In this case, the gravest <i>savant</i>, if he have children, may
+condescend to listen, and even to smile. But ask him to attend to this
+<i>in his quality of man of science</i>, and no less seriously than he would
+investigate the history of mud-worms, and you become ridiculous in his
+eyes.</p>
+
+<p>Goethe is guiltless of this inversion of interest. Truth of outward
+Nature he respects; truth of the soul he reverences. He can really
+<i>imagine</i> men,&mdash;that is, can so depict them that they shall not be mere
+bundles of finite quantities, a yard of this and a pound of that, but so
+that the illimitable possibilities and immortal ancestries of man shall
+look forth from their eyes, shall show in their features, and give to
+them a certain grace of the infinite. The powers which created for the
+Greeks their gods are active in him, even in his observation of men; and
+this gives him that other eye, without which the effigies of men are
+seen, but never man himself. And because he has this divine eye for the
+inner reality of personal being, and yet also that eagle eye of his for
+conditions and limits,&mdash;because he can see man as central in Nature, the
+sum of all uses, the vessel of all significance, and yet has no
+"carpenter theory" of the universe,&mdash;and because he can discern the
+substance and the <i>revealing</i> form of man, while yet no satirist sees
+more clearly man's accidental and concealing form,&mdash;because of this,
+history comes in him to new blood, regaining its inspirations without
+forfeiture of its experience.</p>
+
+<p>Carlyle has the same eye, but less creative, and tinctured always with
+the special humors of his temperament; yet the attitude he can hold
+toward a human personality, the spirit in which he can contemplate it,
+gives that to his books which will keep them alive, I think, while the
+world lasts.</p>
+
+<p>Among the recent writers of prose fiction in England, I know of but one
+who, in a degree worth naming in this connection, has regarded and
+delineated persons in the large, old, believing way. That one is the
+author of "Counterparts." In many respects her book seems to me weak;
+its theories are crude, its tone extravagant. But man and woman are
+wonderful to her; and when she names them in full voice of admiration,
+one thinks he has never heard the words before. And this merit is so
+commanding, that, despite faults and imbecilities, it renders the book
+almost unique in excellence. Sarona is impossible: thanks for that noble
+impossibility!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_457" id="Page_457">[Pg 457]</a></span> Impossible, he yet embodies more reality, more true
+suggestion of human possibility and resource, than a whole swarming
+limbo of the ordinary heroes of fiction,&mdash;very credible, and the more's
+the pity! He is finely <i>imagined</i>, and poorly <i>conceived</i>,&mdash;true, that
+is, to the inspiring substance of man, but not true to his limitary
+form: for imagination gives the revealing form, conception the form
+which limits and conceals.</p>
+
+<p>In spite, therefore, of marked infirmities and extravagances, the book
+remains a superior, perhaps a great work. The writer can look at a human
+existence with childlike, all-believing, Homeric eyes. That creative
+vision which of old peopled Olympus still peoples the world for her,
+beholding gods where the skeptic, critical eye sees only a medical
+doctor and a sick woman. So is she stamped a true child of the Muse,
+descended on the one side from Memory, or superficial fact, but on the
+other from Zeus, the <i>soul</i> of fact; and being gifted to discern the
+divine halo on the brows of humanity, she rightly obtains the laurel
+upon her own.</p>
+
+<p>Goethe, at least, rivals her in this Olympic intelligence, while he
+combines it with a practical wisdom far profounder, with a survey and
+fulness of knowledge incomparably wider and more various, with a tone
+tempered to the last sobriety, for the whole of actual life, which no
+man of the world ever surpassed, and no seer ever equalled. And thus I
+must abide in my opinion, that he has given us the one prose epic of the
+world, up to this date. In other words, he has best reconciled World
+with the final vessel of its uses, Man,&mdash;and best reconciled actual
+civilization and the fixed conditions of man with the uses of that in
+which all the meaning of his existence is summed, his seeing and unseen
+spirit.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="DOCTOR_JOHNS" id="DOCTOR_JOHNS"></a>DOCTOR JOHNS.</h2>
+
+
+<h3>XXXIV.</h3>
+
+<p>Reuben has in many respects vastly improved under his city education. It
+would be wrong to say that the good Doctor did not take a very human
+pride in his increased alertness of mind, in his vivacity, in his
+self-possession,&mdash;nay, even in that very air of world-acquaintance which
+now covered entirely the old homely manner of the country lad. He
+thought within himself, what a glad smile of triumph would have been
+kindled upon the face of the lost Rachel, could she but have seen this
+tall youth with his kindly attentions and his graceful speech. May-be
+she did see it all,&mdash;but with far other eyes, now. Was the child
+ripening into fellowship with the sainted mother?</p>
+
+<p>The Doctor underneath all his pride carried a great deal of anxious
+doubt; and as he walked beside his boy upon the thronged street, elated
+in some strange way by the touch of that strong arm of the youth, whose
+blood was his own,&mdash;so dearly his own,&mdash;he pondered gravely with
+himself, if the mocking delusions of the Evil One were not the occasion
+of his pride? Was not Satan setting himself artfully to the work of
+quieting all sense of responsibility in regard to the lad's future, by
+thus kindling in his old heart anew the vanities of the flesh and the
+pride of life?</p>
+
+<p>"I say, father, I want to put you through now. It'll do you a great deal
+of good to see some of our wonders here in the city."</p>
+
+<p>"The very voice,&mdash;the very voice of Rachel!" says the Doctor to himself,
+quickening his laggard step to keep pace with Reuben.</p>
+
+<p>"There are such lots of things to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_458" id="Page_458">[Pg 458]</a></span> show you, father! Look in this store,
+now. You can step in, if you like. It's the largest carpet-store in the
+United States, three stories packed full. There's the head man of the
+firm,&mdash;the stout man in a white choker; with half a million, they say:
+he's a deacon in Mowry's church."</p>
+
+<p>"I hope, then, Reuben, that he makes a worthy use of his wealth."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, he gives thunderingly to the missionary societies," said Reuben,
+with a glibness that grated on the father's ear.</p>
+
+<p>"You see that building yonder? That's Gothic. They've got the finest
+bowling-alleys in the world there."</p>
+
+<p>"I hope, my son, you never go to such places?"</p>
+
+<p>"Bowl? Oh, yes, I bowl sometimes: the physicians recommend it; good
+exercise for the chest. Besides, it's kept by a fine man, and he's got
+one of the prettiest little trotting horses you ever saw in your life."</p>
+
+<p>"Why, my son, you don't mean to tell me that you know the keeper of this
+bowling-alley?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes, father,&mdash;we fellows all know him; and he gave me a splendid
+cigar the last time I was there."</p>
+
+<p>"You don't mean to say that you smoke, Reuben?" said the old gentleman,
+gravely.</p>
+
+<p>"Not much, father: but then everybody smokes now and then. Mowry&mdash;Dr.
+Mowry smokes, you know; and they say he has prime cigars."</p>
+
+<p>"Is it possible? Well, well!"</p>
+
+<p>"You see that fine building over there?" said Reuben, as they passed on.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, my son."</p>
+
+<p>"That's the theatre,&mdash;the Old Park."</p>
+
+<p>The Doctor ran his eye over it, and its effigy of Shakspeare upon the
+niche in the wall, as Gabriel might have looked upon the armor of
+Beelzebub.</p>
+
+<p>"I hope, Reuben, you never enter those doors?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, father, since Kean and Mathews are gone, there's really nothing
+worth the seeing."</p>
+
+<p>"Kean! Mathews!" said the Doctor, stopping in his walk and confronting
+Reuben with a stern brow,&mdash;"is it possible, my son, that I hear you
+talking in this familiar way of play-actors? You don't tell me that you
+have been a participant in such orgies of Satan?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, father," says Reuben, a little startled by the Doctor's
+earnestness, "the truth is, Aunt Mabel goes occasionally, like 'most all
+the ladies; but we go, you know, to see the moral pieces, generally."</p>
+
+<p>"Moral pieces! moral pieces!" says the Doctor, with a withering scowl.
+"Reuben! those who go thither take hold on the door-posts of hell!"</p>
+
+<p>"That's the Tract Society building yonder," said Reuben, wishing to
+divert the Doctor, if possible, from the special object of his
+reflections.</p>
+
+<p>"Rachel's voice!&mdash;always Rachel's voice!"&mdash;said the Doctor to himself.</p>
+
+<p>"Would you like to go in, father?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, my son, we have no time; and yet"&mdash;meditating, and thrusting his
+hand in his pocket&mdash;"there is a tract or two I would like to buy for
+you, Reuben."</p>
+
+<p>"Go in, then," says Reuben. "Let me tell them who you are, father, and
+you can get them at wholesale prices. It's the merest song."</p>
+
+<p>"No, my son, no," said the Doctor, disheartened by the blithe air of
+Reuben. "I fear it would be wasted effort. Yet I trust that you do not
+wholly neglect the opportunities for religious instruction on the
+Sabbath?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no," says Reuben, gayly. "I see Dr. Mowry off and on, pretty often.
+He's a clever old gentleman,&mdash;Dr. Mowry."</p>
+
+<p>Clever old gentleman!</p>
+
+<p>The Doctor walked on oppressed with grief,&mdash;silent, but with lips moving
+in prayer,&mdash;beseeching God to take away the stony heart from this poor
+child of his, and to give him a heart of flesh.</p>
+
+<p>Reuben had improved, as we said, by his New York schooling. He was quick
+of apprehension, well informed; and his familiarity with the
+counting-room of Mr. Brindlock had given him<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_459" id="Page_459">[Pg 459]</a></span> a business promptitude
+that was specially agreeable to the Doctor, whose habits in that regard
+were of woful slackness. But religiously, the good man looked upon his
+son as a castaway. It was only too apparent that Reuben had not derived
+the desired improvement from attendance at the Fulton-Street Church.
+That attendance had been punctual, indeed, for nearly all the first year
+of his city life, in virtue of the inexorable habit of his education;
+but Dr. Mowry had not won upon him by any personal magnetism. The city
+Doctor was a ponderously good man, preaching for the most part ponderous
+sermons, and possessed of a most imposing friendliness of manner. When
+Reuben had presented to him the credentials from his father, (which he
+could hardly have done, save for the urgency of the Brindlocks,) the
+ponderous Doctor had patted him upon the shoulder, and said,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"My young friend, your father is a most worthy man,&mdash;most worthy. I
+should be delighted to see you following in his steps. I shall be most
+glad to be of service to you. Our meetings for Bible instruction are on
+Wednesdays, at seven: the young men upon the left, the young ladies on
+the right."</p>
+
+<p>The Doctor appeared to Reuben a man solemnly preoccupied with the
+immensity of his charge; and it seemed to him (though it was doubtless a
+wicked thought of the boy) that the ponderous minister would have
+counted it a matter of far smaller merit to instruct, and guide, and
+save a wanderer from the country, than to perform the same offices for a
+good fat sinner of the city.</p>
+
+<p>As we have said, the memory of old teachings for a year or more made any
+divergence from the severe path of boyhood seem to Reuben a sin; and
+these divergencies so multiplied by easy accessions as to have made him,
+after a time, look upon himself very confidently, and almost cheerily,
+as a reprobate. And if a reprobate, why not taste the Devil's cup to the
+full?</p>
+
+<p>That first visit to the theatre was like a bold push into the very
+domain of Satan. Even the ticket-seller at the door seemed to him on
+that eventful night an understrapper of Beelzebub, who looked out at him
+with the goggle eyes of a demon. That such a man could have a family, or
+family affections, or friendships, or any sense of duty or honor, was to
+him a thing incomprehensible; and when he passed the wicket for the
+first time into the vestibule of the old Park Theatre, the very usher in
+the corridor had to his eye a look like the Giant Dagon, and he
+conceived of him as mumbling, in his leisure moments, the flesh from
+human bones. And when at last the curtain rose, and the damp air came
+out upon him from behind the scenes as he sat in the pit, and the play
+began with some wonderful creature in tight bodice and painted cheeks,
+sailing across the stage, it seemed to him that the flames of Divine
+wrath might presently be bursting out over the house, or a great
+judgment of God break down the roof and destroy them all.</p>
+
+<p>But it did not; and he took courage. It is so easy to find courage in
+those battles where we take no bodily harm! If conscience, sharpened by
+the severe discipline he had known, pricked him awkwardly at the first,
+he bore the stings with a good deal of sturdiness. A sinner, no
+doubt,&mdash;that he knew long ago: a little slip, or indeed no slip at all,
+had ranked him with the unregenerate. Once a sinner, (thus he pleasantly
+reasoned,) and a fellow may as well be ten times a sinner: a bad job
+anyhow. If in his moments of reflection&mdash;these being not yet wholly
+crowded out from his life&mdash;there comes a shadowy hope of better things,
+of some moral poise that should be in keeping with the tenderer
+recollections of his boyhood,&mdash;all this can never come, (he bethinks
+himself, in view of his old teaching,) except on the heel of some
+terrible conviction of sin; and the conviction will hardly come without
+some deeper and more damning weight of it than he feels as yet. A heavy
+cumulation of the weight may some day serve him a good turn. Thus<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_460" id="Page_460">[Pg 460]</a></span> the
+Devil twists his vague yearning for a condition of spiritual repose into
+a pleasantly smacking lash with which to scourge his grosser appetites;
+so that, upon the whole, Reuben drives a fine, showy team along the
+high-road of indulgence.</p>
+
+<p>Yet the minister's son had no love for gross vices; there were human
+instincts in him (if it maybe said) that rebelled against his more
+deliberate sinnings. Nay, he affected with his boon companions an
+enjoyment of wanton excesses that he only half felt. A certain
+adventurous, dare-devil reach in him craved exercise. The character of
+Reuben at this stage would surely have offered a good subject for the
+study and the handling of Dr. Mowry, if that worthy gentleman could have
+won his way to the lad's confidence; but the ponderous methods of the
+city parson showed no fineness of touch. Even the father, as we have
+seen, could not reach down to any religious convictions of the son; and
+Reuben keeps him at bay with a banter, and an exaggerated attention to
+the personal comforts of the old gentleman, that utterly baffle him.
+Reuben holds too much in dread the old catechismal dogmas and the
+ultimate "anathema maran-atha."</p>
+
+<p>So it was with a profound sigh that the father bade his son adieu after
+this city visit.</p>
+
+<p>"Good bye, father! Love to them all in Ashfield."</p>
+
+<p>So like Rachel's voice! So like Rachel's! And the heart of the old man
+yearned toward him and ached bitterly for him. <i>"O my son Absalom! my
+son! my son Absalom!"</i></p>
+
+
+<h3>XXXV.</h3>
+
+<p>Maverick hurried his departure from the city; and Ad&egrave;le, writing to Rose
+to announce the programme of her journey, says only this much of
+Reuben:&mdash;"We have of course seen R&mdash;&mdash;, who was very attentive and kind.
+He has grown tall,&mdash;taller, I should think, than Phil; and he is quite
+well-looking and gentlemanly. I think he has a very good opinion of
+himself."</p>
+
+<p>The summer's travel offered a season of rare enjoyment to Ad&egrave;le. The
+lively sentiment of girlhood was not yet wholly gone, and the
+thoughtfulness of womanhood was just beginning to tone, without
+controlling, her sensibilities. The delicate attentions of Maverick were
+more like those of a lover than of a father. Through his ever watchful
+eyes, Ad&egrave;le looked upon the beauties of Nature with a new halo on them.
+How the water sparkled to her vision! How the days came and went like
+golden dreams!</p>
+
+<p>Ah, happy youth-time! The Hudson, Lake George, Saratoga, the Mountains,
+the Beach,&mdash;to us old stagers, who have breasted the tide of so many
+years, and flung off long ago all the iridescent sparkles of our
+sentiment, these are only names of summer thronging-places. Upon the
+river we watch the growth of the crops, or ask our neighbors about the
+cost of our friend Faro's new country-seat; we lounge upon the piazzas
+of the hotels, reading price-lists, or (if not too old) an editorial; we
+complain of the windy currents upon the lake, and find our chiefest
+pleasure in a trout boiled plain, with a dressing of Champagne sauce; we
+linger at Fabian's on a sunny porch, talking politics with a rheumatic
+old gentleman in his overcoat, while the youngsters go ambling through
+the fir woods and up the mountains with shouts and laughter. Yet it was
+not always thus. There were times in the lives of us old travellers&mdash;let
+us say from sixteen to twenty&mdash;when the great river was a glorious
+legend trailing its storied length through the Highlands; when in every
+opening valley there lay purple shadows whereon we painted castles; when
+the corridors and shaded walks of the "United States" were like a fairy
+land, with flitting skirts and waving plumes, and some delicately gloved
+hand beating its reveille upon the heart; and when every floating film
+of mist along the sea, whether at Newport or Nahant, tenderly entreated
+the fancy.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_461" id="Page_461">[Pg 461]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But we forget ourselves, and we forget Ad&egrave;le. In her wild exuberance of
+joy Maverick shares with a spirit that he had believed to be dead in him
+utterly. And if he finds it necessary to check from time to time the
+noisy effervescence of her pleasure, as he certainly does at the first,
+he does it in the most tender and considerate way; and Ad&egrave;le learns,
+what many of her warm-hearted sisters never do learn, that a well-bred
+control over our enthusiasms in no way diminishes the exquisiteness of
+their savor.</p>
+
+<p>Maverick should be something over fifty now, and his keenness of
+observation in respect to feminine charms is not perhaps so great as it
+once was; but even he cannot fail to see, with a pride that he makes no
+great effort to conceal, the admiring looks that follow the lithe,
+graceful figure of Ad&egrave;le, wherever their journey may lead them. Nor,
+indeed, were there any more comely toilettes for a young girl to be met
+with anywhere than those which had been provided for the young traveller
+under the advice of Mrs. Brindlock.</p>
+
+<p>It may be true&mdash;what his friend Papiol had predicted&mdash;that Maverick will
+be too proud of his child to keep her in a secluded corner of New
+England. For his pride there is certainly abundant reason; and what
+father does not love to see the child of whom he is proud admired?</p>
+
+<p>Yet weeks had run by and Maverick had never once broached the question
+of a return. The truth was, that the new experience was so charming and
+so engrossing for him, the sweet, intelligent face ever at his side was
+so full of eager wonder, and he so delightfully intent upon providing
+new sources of pleasure and calling out again and again the gushes of
+her girlish enthusiasm, that he shrunk instinctively from a decision in
+which must be involved so largely her future happiness.</p>
+
+<p>At last it was Ad&egrave;le herself who suggested the inquiry,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Is it true, dear papa, what the Doctor tells me, that you may possibly
+take, me back to France with you?"</p>
+
+<p>"What say you, Ad&egrave;le? Would you like to go?"</p>
+
+<p>"Dearly!"</p>
+
+<p>"But," said Maverick, "your friends here,&mdash;can you so easily cast them
+away?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, no, no!" said Ad&egrave;le,&mdash;"not cast them away! Couldn't I come again
+some day? Besides, there is your home, papa; I should love any home of
+yours, and love your friends."</p>
+
+<p>"For instance, Ad&egrave;le, there is my book-keeper, a lean Savoyard, who
+wears a red wig and spectacles,&mdash;and Lucille, a great, gaunt woman, with
+a golden crucifix about her neck, who keeps my little parlor in
+order,&mdash;and Papiol, a fat Frenchman, with a bristly moustache and
+iron-gray hair, who, I dare say, would want to kiss the pet of his dear
+friend,&mdash;and Jeannette, who washes the dishes for us, and wears great
+wooden sabots"&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Nonsense, papa! I am sure you have other friends; and then there's the
+good godmother."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, yes,&mdash;she indeed," said Maverick; "what a precious hug she would
+give you, Ad&egrave;le!"</p>
+
+<p>"And then&mdash;and then&mdash;should I see mamma?"</p>
+
+<p>The pleasant humor died out of the face of Maverick on the instant; and
+then, in a slow, measured tone,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Impossible, Ad&egrave;le,&mdash;impossible! Come here, darling!" and as he fondled
+her in a wild, passionate way, "I will love you for both, Ad&egrave;le; she was
+not worthy of you, child."</p>
+
+<p>Ad&egrave;le, too, is overcome with a sudden seriousness.</p>
+
+<p>"Is she living, papa?" And she gives him an appealing look that must be
+answered.</p>
+
+<p>And Maverick seems somehow appalled by that innocent, confiding
+expression of hers.</p>
+
+<p>"May-be, may-be, my darling; she was living not long since; yet it can
+never matter to you or me more. You will trust me in this, Ad&egrave;le?" And
+he kisses her tenderly.</p>
+
+<p>And she, returning the caress, but bursting into tears as she does so,
+says,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_462" id="Page_462">[Pg 462]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I will, I do, papa."</p>
+
+<p>"There, there, darling!"&mdash;as he folds her to him; "no more tears,&mdash;no
+more tears, <i>ch&eacute;rie</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>But even while he says it, he is nervously searching his pockets, since
+there is a little dew that must be wiped from his own eyes. Maverick's
+emotion, however, was but a little momentary contagious sympathy with
+the daughter,&mdash;he having no understanding of that unsatisfied yearning
+in her heart of which this sudden tumult of feeling was the passionate
+outbreak.</p>
+
+<p>Meantime Ad&egrave;le is not without her little mementos of the life at
+Ashfield, which come in the shape of thick double letters from that good
+girl Rose,&mdash;her dear, dear friend, who has been advised by the little
+traveller to what towns she should direct these tender missives; and
+Ad&egrave;le is no sooner arrived at these postal stations than she sends for
+the budget which she knows must be waiting for her. And of course she
+has her own little pen in a certain travelling-escritoire the good papa
+has given her; and she plies her white fingers with it often and often
+of an evening, after the day's sight-seeing is over, to tell Rose, in
+return, what a charming journey she is having, and how kind papa is, and
+what a world of strange things she is seeing; and there are descriptions
+of sunsets and sunrises, and of lakes and of mountains, on those
+close-written sheets of hers, which Rose, in her enthusiasm, declares to
+be equal to many descriptions in print. We dare say they were better
+than a great many such.</p>
+
+<p>Poor Rose feels that she has only very humdrum stories to tell in return
+for these; but she ekes out her letters pretty well, after all, and what
+they lack in novelty is made up in affection.</p>
+
+<p>"There is really nothing new to tell," she writes, "except it be that
+our old friend, Miss Almira Tourtelot, astonished us all with a new
+bonnet last Sunday, and with new saffron ribbons; and she has come out,
+too, in the new tight sleeves, in which she looks drolly enough. Phil is
+very uneasy, now that his schooling is done, and talks of going to the
+West Indies about some business in which papa is concerned. I hope he
+will go, if he doesn't stay too long. He is such a dear, good fellow!
+Madame Arles asks after you, when I see her, which is not very often
+now; for since the Doctor has come back from New York, he has had a new
+talk with mamma, and has quite won her over to <i>his view of the matter</i>.
+So good bye to French for the present! Heigho! But I don't know that I'm
+sorry, now that you are not here, dear Ady.</p>
+
+<p>"Another queer thing I had almost forgotten to tell you. The poor Boody
+girl,&mdash;you must remember her? Well, she has come back on a sudden; and
+they say her father would not receive her in his house,&mdash;there are
+<i>terrible stories</i> about it!&mdash;and now she is living with an old woman
+far out upon the river-road,&mdash;only a little garret-chamber for herself
+and <i>the child she brought back with her</i>. Of course <i>nobody</i> goes near
+her, or looks at her, if she comes on the street. But&mdash;the queerest
+thing!&mdash;when Madame Arles heard of it and of her story, what does she do
+but <i>walk far out to visit her</i>, and talked with her in her broken
+English for an hour, they say. Papa says she (Madame A.) must be a very
+bad woman or a very good woman. Miss Johns says <i>she always thought she
+was a bad woman</i>. The Bowriggs are, of course, very indignant, and I
+doubt if Madame A. comes to Ashfield again with them."</p>
+
+<p>And again, at a later date, Rose writes,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"The Bowriggs are all off for the winter, and the house closed. Reuben
+has been here on a flying visit to the parsonage; and how proud Miss
+Eliza was of <i>her nephew</i>! He came over to see Phil, I suppose; but Phil
+had gone two weeks before. Mamma thinks he is <i>fine-looking</i>. I fancy he
+will never live in the country again. When shall I see you again, <i>dear,
+dear</i> Ady? I have <i>so much</i> to talk to you about!"</p>
+
+<p>A month thereafter Maverick and his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_463" id="Page_463">[Pg 463]</a></span> daughter find their way back to
+Ashfield. Of course Miss Johns has made magnificent preparations to
+receive them. She surpassed herself in her toilette on the day of their
+arrival, and fairly astonished Maverick with the warmth of her welcome
+to his child. Yet he could not help observing that Ad&egrave;le met it more
+coolly than was her wont, and that her tenderest words were reserved for
+the good Doctor. And how proud she was to walk with her father upon the
+village street, glancing timidly up at the windows from which she knew
+those stiff old Miss Hapgoods must be peeping out! How proud to sit
+beside him in the parson's pew, feeling that the eyes of half the
+congregation were fastened on the tall gentleman beside her! Ah, happy
+daughter! may your beautiful filial pride never have a fall!</p>
+
+<p>Important business letters command Maverick's early presence abroad;
+and, after conference with the Doctor, he decides to leave Ad&egrave;le once
+more under the roof of the parsonage.</p>
+
+<p>"Under God, I will do for her what I can," said the Doctor.</p>
+
+<p>"I know it, I know it, my good friend," says Maverick. "Teach her
+self-reliance; she may need it some day. And mind what I have said of
+this French woman. Ad&egrave;le seems to have a <i>tendresse</i> that way. Those
+French women are very insidious, Johns."</p>
+
+<p>"You know their ways better than I," said the Doctor, dryly.</p>
+
+<p>"Good! a smack of the old college humor there, Johns. Well, well, at
+least you don't doubt the sacredness of my love for Ad&egrave;le?"</p>
+
+<p>"I trust, Maverick, I may never doubt the sacredness of your love in any
+direction. I only hope you may direct it where I fear you do not."</p>
+
+<p>"God bless you, Johns! I wish I were as good a man as you."</p>
+
+<p>A little afterwards Maverick was humming a snatch from an opera under
+the trees of the orchard; and Ad&egrave;le went bounding toward him, to take
+the last walk with him for so long,&mdash;so long!</p>
+
+
+<h3>XXXVI.</h3>
+
+<p>Autumn and winter passed by, and the summer of 1838 opened upon the old
+quiet life of Ashfield. The stiff Miss Johns, busy with her household
+duties, or with her stately visitings. The Doctor's hat and cane in
+their usual place upon the little table within the door, and of a Sunday
+his voice is lifted up under the old meeting-house roof in earnest
+expostulation. The birds pipe their old songs, and the orchard has shown
+once more its wondrous glory of bloom. But all these things have lost
+their novelty for Ad&egrave;le. Would it be strange, if the tranquil life of
+the little town had lost something of its early charm? That swift French
+blood of hers has been stirred by contact with the outside world. She
+has, perhaps, not been wholly insensible to those admiring glances which
+so quickened the pride of the father. Do not such things leave a hunger
+in the heart of a girl of seventeen which the sleepy streets of a
+country town can but poorly gratify?</p>
+
+<p>The young girl is, moreover, greatly disturbed at the thought of the new
+separation from her father for some indefinite period. Her affections
+have knitted themselves around him, during that delightful journey of
+the summer, in a way that has made her feel with new weight the parting.
+It is all the worse that she does not clearly perceive the necessity for
+it. Is she not of an age now to contribute to the cheer of whatever home
+he may have beyond the sea? Why, pray, has he given her such uninviting
+pictures of his companions there? Or what should she care for his
+companions, if only she could enjoy his tender watchfulness? Or is it
+that her religious education is not yet thoroughly complete, and that
+she still holds out against a full and public avowal of all the
+doctrines which the Doctor urges upon her acceptance? And the thought of
+this makes his kindly severities appear more irksome than ever.</p>
+
+<p>Another cause of grief to Ad&egrave;le is the extreme disfavor in which she
+finds<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_464" id="Page_464">[Pg 464]</a></span> that Madame Arles is now regarded by the townspeople. Her
+sympathies had run out towards the unfortunate woman in some
+inexplicable way, and held there even now, so strongly that contemptuous
+mention of her stung like a reproach to herself. At least she was a
+countrywoman, and alone among strangers; and in this Ad&egrave;le found
+abundant reason for a generous sympathy. As for her religion, was it not
+the religion of her mother and of her good godmother? And with this
+thought flaming in her, is it wonderful, if Ad&egrave;le toys more fondly than
+ever, in the solitude of her chamber, with the little rosary she has
+guarded so long? Not, indeed, that she has much faith in its efficacy;
+but it is a silent protest against the harsh speeches of Miss Eliza, who
+had been specially jealous of the influence of the French teacher.</p>
+
+<p>"I never liked her countenance, Ad&egrave;le," said the spinster, in her solemn
+manner; "and I am rejoiced that you will not be under her influence the
+present summer."</p>
+
+<p>"And I'm sorry," said Ad&egrave;le, petulantly.</p>
+
+<p>"It is gratifying to me," continued Miss Eliza, without notice of
+Ad&egrave;le's interruption, "that Mr. Maverick has confirmed my own
+impressions, and urged the Doctor against permitting so unwise
+association."</p>
+
+<p>"When? how?" said Ad&egrave;le, sharply. "Papa has never seen her."</p>
+
+<p>"But he has seen other French women, Ad&egrave;le, and he fears their
+influence."</p>
+
+<p>Ad&egrave;le looked keenly at the spinster for a moment, as if to fathom the
+depth of this reply, then burst into tears.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, why, why didn't he take me with him?" But this she says under
+breath, and to herself, as she rushes into the Doctor's study to
+question him.</p>
+
+<p>"Is it true, New Papa, that papa thought badly of Madame Arles?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not personally, my child, since he had never seen her. But, Adaly, your
+father, though I fear he is far away from the true path, wishes you to
+find it, my child. He has faith in the religion we teach so imperfectly;
+he wishes you to be exposed to no influences that will forbid your full
+acceptance of it."</p>
+
+<p>"But Madame Arles never talked of religion to me"; and Ad&egrave;le taps
+impatiently upon the floor.</p>
+
+<p>"That may be true, Adaly,&mdash;it may be true; but we cannot be thrown into
+habits of intimacy with those reared in iniquity without fear of
+contracting stain. I could wish, my child, that you would so far subdue
+your rebellious heart, and put on the complete armor of righteousness,
+as to be able to resist all attacks."</p>
+
+<p>"And it was for this papa left me here?" And Ad&egrave;le says it with a smile
+of mockery that alarms the good Doctor.</p>
+
+<p>"I trust, Adaly, that he had that hope."</p>
+
+<p>The good man does not know what swift antagonism to his pleadings he has
+suddenly kindled in her. The little foot taps more and more impatiently
+as he goes on to set forth (as he had so often done) the heinousness of
+her offences and the weight of her just condemnation. Yet the antagonism
+did not incline her to open doubt; but after she had said her evening
+prayer that night, (taught her by the parson,) she drew out her little
+rosary and kissed reverently the crucifix. It is so much easier at this
+juncture for her tried and distracted spirit to bolster its faith upon
+such material symbol than to find repose in any merely intellectual
+conviction of truth!</p>
+
+<p>Ad&egrave;le's intimacy with Rose and with her family retained all its old
+tenderness, but that good fellow Phil was gone. A blithe and merry
+companion he had been! Ad&egrave;le missed his kindly attentions more than she
+would have believed. The Bowriggs have come to Ashfield, but their
+clamorous friendship is more than ever distasteful to Ad&egrave;le. Over and
+over she makes a feint of illness to escape the noisy hilarity. Nor,
+indeed, is it wholly a feint. Whether it were that her state of moral
+perturbation and unrest reacted upon the physical system, or that there
+were other disturbing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_465" id="Page_465">[Pg 465]</a></span> causes, certain it was that the roses were fading
+from her cheeks, and that her step was losing day by day something of
+its old buoyancy. It is even thought best to summon the village doctor
+to the family council. He is a gossiping, kindly old gentleman, who
+spends an easy life, free from much mental strain, in trying to make his
+daily experiences tally with the little fund of medical science which he
+accumulated thirty years before.</p>
+
+<p>The serene old gentleman feels the pulse, with his head reflectively on
+one side,&mdash;tells his little jokelet about Sir Astley Cooper, or some
+other worthy of the profession,&mdash;shakes his fat sides with a cheery
+laugh,&mdash;"And now, my dear," he says, "let us look at the tongue. Ah, I
+see, I see,&mdash;the stomach lacks tone."</p>
+
+<p>"And there's dreadful lassitude, sometimes, Doctor," speaks up Miss
+Eliza.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, I see,&mdash;a little exhaustion after a long walk,&mdash;isn't it so, Miss
+Maverick? I see, I see; we must brace up the system, Miss Johns,&mdash;brace
+up the system."</p>
+
+<p>And the kindly old gentleman prescribes his little tonics, of which
+Ad&egrave;le takes some, and throws more out of the window.</p>
+
+<p>Ad&egrave;le does not mend, and the rumor is presently current upon the street
+that "Miss Adeel is in a decline." The spinster shows a solicitude in
+the matter which almost touches the heart of the French girl. For Ad&egrave;le
+had long before decided that there could be no permanent sympathy
+between them, and had indulged latterly in no little bitterness of
+speech toward her. But the acute spinster had forgiven all. Never once
+had she lost sight of her plan for the ultimate disposal of Ad&egrave;le and of
+her father's fortune. Of course the life of Ad&egrave;le was very dear to her,
+and the absence of Phil she looked upon as Providential.</p>
+
+<p>Weeks pass by, but still the tonics of the kindly old physician prove of
+little efficacy. One day the Bowriggs come blustering in, as is their
+wont.</p>
+
+<p>"Such assurance! Did you ever hear the like? Madame Arles writes us that
+she is coming to see Ashfield again, and of course coming to us. The air
+of the town agrees with her, and she hopes to find lodgings."</p>
+
+<p>The eyes of Ad&egrave;le sparkle with satisfaction,&mdash;not so much, perhaps, by
+reason of her old sympathy with the poor woman, which is now almost
+forgotten, as because it will give some change at least to the dreary
+monotony of the town life.</p>
+
+<p>"Lodgings, indeed!" says the younger Miss Bowrigg. "I wonder where she
+will find them!"</p>
+
+<p>It is a matter of great doubt, to be sure,&mdash;since the sharp speech of
+the spinster has so spread the story of her demerits, that not a
+parishioner of the Doctor but would have feared to give the poor woman a
+home.</p>
+
+<p>Ad&egrave;le still has strength enough for an occasional stroll with Rose, and,
+in the course of one of them, comes upon Madame Arles, whom she meets
+with a good deal of her old effusion. And Madame, touched by her
+apparent weakness, more than reciprocates it.</p>
+
+<p>"But you suffer, you are unhappy, my child,&mdash;pining at last for the sun
+of Provence. Isn't it so, <i>mon ange</i>? No, no, you were never meant to
+grow up among these cold people. You must see the vineyards, and the
+olives, and the sea, Ad&egrave;le; you must! you must!"</p>
+
+<p>All this, uttered in a torrent, which, with its <i>tutoiements</i>, Rose can
+poorly comprehend.</p>
+
+<p>Yet it goes straight to the heart of Ad&egrave;le, and her tongue is loosened
+to a little petulant, fiery <i>roulade</i> against the severities of the life
+around her, which it would have greatly pained poor Rose to listen to in
+any speech of her own.</p>
+
+<p>But such interviews, once or twice repeated, come to the knowledge of
+the watchful spinster, who clearly perceives that Ad&egrave;le is chafing more
+and more under the wonted family regimen. With an affectation of tender
+solicitude, she volunteers herself to attend Ad&egrave;le upon her short
+morning strolls, and she learns presently, with great triumph, that
+Madame<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_466" id="Page_466">[Pg 466]</a></span> Arles has established herself at last under the same roof which
+gives refuge to the outcast Boody woman. Nothing more was needed to seal
+the opinion of the spinster, and to confirm the current village belief
+in the heathenish character of the French lady. Dame Tourtelot was
+shrewdly of the opinion that the woman represented some Popish plot for
+the abduction of Ad&egrave;le, and for her incarceration in a nunnery,&mdash;a
+theory which Miss Almira, with her natural tendency to romance,
+industriously propagated.</p>
+
+<p>Meantime the potions of the village doctor have little effect, and
+before July is ended a serious illness has declared itself, and Ad&egrave;le is
+confined to her chamber. Madame Arles is among the earliest who come
+with eager inquiries, and begs to see the sufferer. But she is
+confronted by the indefatigable spinster, who, cloaking her denial under
+ceremonious form, declares that her state of nervous prostration will
+not admit of it. Madame withdraws, sadly; but the visit and the claim
+are repeated from time to time, until the stately civility of Miss Johns
+arouses her suspicions.</p>
+
+<p>"You deny me, Madame. You do wrong. I love Ad&egrave;le; she loves me. I know
+that I could comfort her. You do not understand her nature. She was born
+where the sky is soft and warm. You are all cold and harsh,&mdash;cold and
+harsh in your religion. She has told me as much. I know how she suffers.
+I wish I could carry her back to France with me. I pray you, let me see
+her, good Madame!"</p>
+
+<p>"It is quite impossible, I assure you," said the spinster, in her most
+aggravating manner. "It would be quite against the wishes of my brother,
+the Doctor, as well as of Mr. Maverick."</p>
+
+<p>"Monsieur Maverick! <i>Mon Dieu</i>, Madame! He is no father to her; he
+leaves her to die with strangers; he has no heart; I have better right:
+I love her. I must see her!"</p>
+
+<p>And with a passionate step,&mdash;those eyes of hers glaring in that strange
+double way upon the amazed Miss Eliza,&mdash;she strides toward the door, as
+if she would overcome all opposition. But before she has gone out, that
+cruel pain has seized her, and she sinks upon a chair, quite prostrated,
+and with hands clasped wildly over that burden of a heart.</p>
+
+<p>"Too hard! too hard!" she murmurs, scarce above her breath.</p>
+
+<p>The spinster is attentive, but is untouched. Her self-poise never
+deserts her. And not then, or at any later period, did poor Madame Arles
+succeed in overcoming the iron resolve of Miss Johns.</p>
+
+<p>The good Doctor is greatly troubled by the report of Miss Eliza. Can it
+be possible that Ad&egrave;le has given a confidence to this strange woman that
+she has not given to them? Cold and harsh! Can Ad&egrave;le, indeed, have said
+this? Has he not labored with a full heart? Has he not agonized in
+prayer to draw in this wandering lamb to the fold? He has seen, indeed,
+that the poor child has chafed much latterly, that the old serenity and
+gayety are gone. But is it not a chafing under the fetters of sin? Is it
+not that she begins to see more clearly the fiery judgments of God which
+will certainly overwhelm the wrongdoers, whatever may be the
+unsubstantial and evanescent graces of their mortal life?</p>
+
+<p>Yet, with all the rigidity of his doctrine, which he cannot in
+conscience mollify, even for the tender ears of Ad&egrave;le, it disturbs him
+strangely to hear that she has qualified his regimen as harsh or severe.
+Has he not taught, in season and out of season, the fulness of God's
+promises? Has he not labored and prayed? Is it not the ungodly heart in
+her that finds his teaching a burden? Is not his conscience safe? Yet,
+for all this, it touches him to the quick to think that her childlike,
+trustful confidence is at last alienated from him,&mdash;that her affection
+for him is so distempered by dread and weariness. For, unconsciously, he
+has grown to love her as he loves no one save his boy Reuben;
+unconsciously his heart has mellowed under her influence. Through<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_467" id="Page_467">[Pg 467]</a></span> her
+winning, playful talk, he has taken up that old trail of worldly
+affections which he had thought buried forever in Rachel's grave. That
+tender touch of her little fingers upon his cheek has seemed to say,
+"Life has its joys, old man!" The patter of her feet along the house has
+kindled the memories of other gentle steps that tread now silently in
+the courts of air. Those songs of hers,&mdash;how he has loved them! Never
+confessing even to Miss Eliza, still less to himself, how much his heart
+is bound up in this little winsome stranger, who has shone upon his
+solitary parsonage like a sunbeam.</p>
+
+<p>And the good man, with such thoughts thronging on him, falls upon his
+knees, beseeching God to "be over the sick child, to comfort her, to
+heal her, to pour down His divine grace upon her, to open her blind eyes
+to the richness of His truth, to keep her from all the machinations and
+devices of Satan, to arm her with true holiness, to make her a golden
+light in the household, to give her a heart of love toward all, and most
+of all toward Him who so loved her that He gave His only begotten Son."</p>
+
+<p>And the Doctor, rising from his attitude of prayer, and going toward the
+little window of his study to arrange it for the night, sees a slight
+figure in black pacing up and down upon the opposite side of the way,
+and looking up from time to time to the light that is burning in the
+window of Ad&egrave;le. He knows on the instant who it must be, and fears more
+than ever the possible influence which this strange woman, who is so
+persistent in her attention, may have upon the heart of the girl. The
+Doctor had heretofore been disposed to turn a deaf ear to the current
+reproaches of Madame Arles for her association with the poor outcast
+daughter of the village; but her appearance at this unseemly hour of the
+night, coupled with his traditional belief in the iniquities of the
+Romish Church, excited terrible suspicions in his mind. Like most holy
+men, ignorant of the crafts and devices of the world, he no sooner
+blundered into a suspicion of some deep Devil's cunning than every
+footfall and every floating zephyr seemed to confirm it. He bethought
+himself of Maverick's earnest caution; and before he went to bed that
+night, he prayed that no designing Jezebel might corrupt the poor child
+committed to his care.</p>
+
+<p>The next night the Doctor looked again from his window, after blowing
+out his lamp, and there once more was the figure in black, pacing up and
+down. What could it mean? Was it possible that some Satanic influence
+could pass over from this emissary of the Evil One, (as he firmly
+believed her to be,) for the corruption of the sick child who lay in the
+delirium of a fever above?</p>
+
+<p>The extreme illness of Ad&egrave;le was subject of common talk in the village,
+and the sympathy was very great. On the following night Ad&egrave;le was far
+worse, and the Doctor, at about his usual bedtime, went out to summon
+the physician. At a glance he saw in the shadow of the opposite houses
+the same figure pacing up and down. He hurried his steps, fearing she
+might seek occasion to dart in upon the sick-chamber before his return.
+But he had scarcely gone twenty paces from his door, when he heard a
+swift step behind, and in another instant there was a grip, as of a
+tigress, upon his arm.</p>
+
+<p>"Ad&egrave;le,&mdash;how is she? Tell me!"</p>
+
+<p>"Ill,&mdash;very ill," said the Doctor, shaking himself from her grasp, and
+continued in his solemn manner, "it is an hour to be at home, woman!"</p>
+
+<p>But she, paying no heed to his admonition, says,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I must see her,&mdash;I <i>must</i>!"&mdash;and dashes back toward the parsonage.</p>
+
+<p>The Doctor, terrified, follows after. But he can keep no manner of pace
+with that swift, dark figure that glides before him. He comes to the
+porch panting. The door is closed. Has the infuriated woman gone in? No,
+for presently her grasp is again upon his arm: for a moment she had
+sunk, exhausted by fatigue, or overcome by emotion, upon the porch. Her
+tone is more subdued.</p>
+
+<p>"I entreat you, good Doctor, let me<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_468" id="Page_468">[Pg 468]</a></span> see Ad&egrave;le!&mdash;for Christ's sake, if
+you be His minister, let me see her!"</p>
+
+<p>"Impossible, woman, impossible!" says the Doctor, more than ever
+satisfied of her Satanic character by what he counts her blasphemous
+speech. "Adaly is delirious,&mdash;fearfully excited; it would destroy her.
+The only hope is in perfect quietude."</p>
+
+<p>The woman releases her grasp.</p>
+
+<p>"Please, Doctor, let me come to-morrow. I must see her! I will see her!"</p>
+
+<p>"You shall not," said the Doctor, with solemnity,&mdash;"never, with my
+permission. Go to your home, woman, and pray God to have mercy on you."</p>
+
+<p>"Monster!" exclaimed she, passionately, as she shook the Doctor's arm,
+still under her grasp; and murmuring other words in language the good
+man did not comprehend, she slipped silently down the yard,&mdash;away into
+the darkness.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="DOWN_THE_RIVER" id="DOWN_THE_RIVER"></a>DOWN THE RIVER.</h2>
+
+
+<p>She was of pure race, black as her first ancestor,&mdash;if, indeed, she ever
+had an ancestor, and were not an indigenous outcrop of African soil,&mdash;so
+black that the sun could gild her. Her countenance was as unlovely as it
+is possible for one to be that owns the cheeriest of smiles and the most
+dazzling of teeth. It would have been difficult to say how old she was,
+though she had the effect of being undersized, and, with sharp
+shoulders, elbows, and knees, seemed scarcely possessed of a rounded
+muscle in all her lithe and agile frame.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, she was a dancer by profession,&mdash;if she could have
+dignified her most frequent occupation by the title of profession. With
+a thin blue scarf turbaned round her head in floating ends, and with
+scanty and clinging array otherwise, tossing a tambourine, and singing
+wild, meaningless songs, she used to whirl and spring on the grass-plot
+of an evening, the young masters and mistresses smiling and applauding
+from the verandah, while the wind-blown flame of a flaring pitch-pine
+knot, held by little Pluto, gave her strange careering shadows for
+partner.</p>
+
+<p>She had not yet been allotted to any particular task by day, now running
+errands of the house, now tending the sick, now, in punishment of
+misdemeanors, relieving an exhausted hand in the field,&mdash;for, though all
+along the upland lay the piny woods of the turpentine-orchards, she
+belonged to an estate whose rich lowlands were devoted to
+cotton-bearing. But whatever she did by day, she danced by night, with
+her wild gyration and gesture, as naturally as a moth flies; and when
+not in demand with the seigniory, was wont to perform in even keener
+force and fire at the quarters, to an admiring circle of her own kind,
+with ambitious imitators on the outskirts.</p>
+
+<p>It was not, however, an indiscriminate assemblage even there that
+encouraged her rude art. There are circles within circles, and the more
+decorous of the slaves gave small favor to the young posturer, although
+the patronage she received from the house enabled her to meet their
+disapprobation defiantly; while to the younger portion, in the vague
+sense that there was something wrong about it, her dance became
+surrounded by all the attraction and allurement of seeing life. It was
+not that the frowning ones did not go through many of the same motions
+themselves; but theirs were occasioned by the frenzy of the religious
+excitement, where pious rapture<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_469" id="Page_469">[Pg 469]</a></span> and ecstasy were to be expressed by
+nothing but the bodily exertion of the Shout: the objectless dance of
+the dancer was a thing beyond their comprehension, dimly at first, and
+then positively, associated with sin. But she laughed them down with a
+gibe; she felt triumphant in the possession of her secret, known to none
+of them: her dance was not objectless, but the perpetual expression of
+all emotions, whether of beauty or joy or gratitude or praise. Some one
+at the house had given her a pair of little hoops with bells attached,
+which she was wont to wear about her ankles, and it afforded her
+malicious enjoyment to scatter her opponents by the tintinnabulation of
+her step. For all that levity, she was not destitute of her peculiar
+mode of adoration. For the religion of the Shout she had no absorbents
+whatever; she furtively watched it, and openly ridiculed it; but she had
+a religion of her own, notwithstanding,&mdash;a sort of primitive and grand
+religion, Fetich though it was. She reasoned, that the kindly brown
+earth produces us, bears us along on its flight, nourishes us, gives us
+the delights of life, takes us back into its bosom at last. She
+worshipped the great dark earth, imparted to it her confidence, asked of
+it her boons. As she grew older, and her logic or her fancy
+strengthened, she might have felt the sun supplying the earth, and the
+beings of the earth, with all their force, and have become a
+fire-worshipper, until further light broke on her, and she sought and
+found the Power that feeds the very sun himself. But at present the dust
+of which she was made was what she could best comprehend. So, fortified
+by her inward faith, and feeling herself fast friends with the ancient
+earth, she continued to ring her silver bells and spin her bare
+twinkling feet with contented disregard of those, few of whom in their
+unseemly worship had the faintest idea of what it was that ailed them.</p>
+
+<p>Although known by various titles on the plantation, objurgatory among
+the hands, facetious among the heads, such as Dancing Devil, Spinning
+Jenny, Tarantella, Herodias's Daughter,&mdash;which last, simplifying itself
+into Salome, became in its diminutives the most prevalent,&mdash;the creature
+had a name of her own, the softest of syllables. Black and uncouth as
+she was, a word, one of those the whitest and most beautiful, named her;
+and since they tell us that every appellation has its significance for
+the wearer, we must suppose that somewhere in her soul that white and
+blossoming thing was to be found which answered to the name of Flor.</p>
+
+<p>She possessed a kind of freehold in the cabin of an old negress yclept
+Zo&euml;; but she seldom claimed it, for Zo&euml; was outspoken; she preferred,
+instead, to lie down by night on a mat in Miss Emma's room, in a corner
+of the staircase, on the hall-floor, oftenest fallen wherever sleep
+happened to overtake her;&mdash;having so many places in which to lay her
+head was very like having none at all. She was at the bidding of every
+one, but seldom received a heavy blow; as for a round of angry words,
+she liked nothing better. She fell heir to much flimsy finery, as a
+matter of course, and to many a tidbit, cake or sweetmeat; she made
+herself gaudy as a butterfly with the one, and never went into a corner
+with the other. Of late, however, the finery and the delicates had
+become more uncommon things: Miss Emma wore a homespun gingham, her
+muslins, and Miss Agatha's, draped the windows,&mdash;for curtains and
+carpets had all gone to camp; bacon had ceased to be given out to the
+hands, who lived now on corn-meal and yams; the people at the house were
+scarcely better off,&mdash;for, though, as no army had passed that way, the
+chickens still peopled the place, they were reserved for special
+occasions, and it was only at rare intervals that one indulged at table
+in the luxury of a fowl. This was no serious regret to Flor on her own
+account: the less viands, the less dishes, she could oftener pause in
+the act of wiping a plate and perform an original hornpipe by herself,
+tossing the thin translucent china, and rapping it with her knuckles
+till it rang again. She had, however, a pang once when<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_470" id="Page_470">[Pg 470]</a></span> she saw Miss
+Emma lunching with relish on cold sweet potato. She spent all the rest
+of the day floating on the tide in an old abandoned scow secured by a
+long rope to the bank, and afterwards wading up and down the bed of a
+brook that ran into the river, until, having left a portion of her
+provision, to be sure, at Aunt Zo&euml;'s cabin, she busied herself over a
+fire out-of-doors, and served up at last before Miss Emma as savory a
+little terrapin stew as ever simmered on coals, capering over her
+success, and standing on her head in the midst of all her scattered
+embers, afterwards, with pure delight. The next day she came in at noon
+from the woods, a mile down the river-bank, with her own dark lips cased
+and coated in golden sweets, and, after a wordy skirmish with the cook,
+presented to Miss Emma a great cake of brown and fragrant honey from a
+nest she had discovered and neglected in better seasons, and said
+nothing about her half-dozen swollen and smarting stings. Mas'r Rob
+having shouldered his gun and taken himself off, and Mas'r Andersen
+having followed his example, but not his footsteps, long ago, there was
+nobody to fill the deficiencies of the larder with game; and thus Flor,
+with her traps and nets and devices, making her value felt every day,
+became, for Miss Emma's sake, a petted person, was put on more generous
+terms with those above her, and allowed a freedom of action that no
+other servant on the place dreamed of desiring. Such consideration was
+very acceptable to the girl, who was well content to go fasting herself
+a whole day, provided Miss Emma condescended to her offerings, and, in
+turn, vouchsafed her her friendship. She had no such daring aspirations
+towards the beautiful Miss Agatha, young Mas'r Andersen's wife, and
+admired her at an awful distance, never venturing to offer her a bit of
+broiled lark, or set before her a dish of crabs,&mdash;beaming back with a
+grin from ear to ear, if Miss Agatha so much as smiled on her, breaking
+into the wildest of dances and shuffling out the shrillest of tunes
+after every such incident. Moreover, Miss Agatha was hedged about with a
+dignity of grief, and the indistinct pity given her made her safe from
+other intrusion; for Mas'r Andersen, in bringing home a Northern wife,
+had brought home Northern principles, and, in his sudden escape forced
+to leave her in the only home she had, was away fighting Northern
+battles. This was a dreadful thing, and Mas'r Andersen was a traitor to
+somebody,&mdash;so much Flor knew,&mdash;it might be the Government, it might be
+the South, it might be Miss Agatha; her ideas were nebulous. Whatever it
+was, Mas'r Rob and his gun were on the other side, and woe be to Mas'r
+Andersen when they met! Mas'r Rob and his friends were beating back the
+men that meant to take away Flor and all her kind to freeze and starve;
+'twas very good of him, Flor thought, and there ceased consideration.
+Meanwhile, wherever Mas'r Andersen might be, and whether he were so much
+as alive or not, Miss Agatha was not the one that knew; and Flor adapted
+many a rigadoon to her conjectured feelings, now swaying and bending
+with sorrow and longing, head fallen, arms outstretched, now hands
+clasped on bosom, exultant in welcome and possession.</p>
+
+<p>The importance to which Flor gradually rose by no means led her to the
+exhibition of any greater decorum; on the contrary, it seemed to impart
+to her the secret of perpetual motion; and, aware of her impunity, she
+danced with fresher vigor in the very teeth of her censurers and their
+reproaches.</p>
+
+<p>"Go 'long wid yer capers, ye Limb!" said Zo&euml; to her, late one afternoon,
+as she entered with the half of a rabbit she had caught, and, having
+deposited it, went through the intricacies of her most elaborate figure
+in breathless listening to an unheard tune. "Ef I had dem sticks o'
+legs, dey'd do berrer work nor twirlin' me like I was a factotum."</p>
+
+<p>At this, Flor suddenly spun about on the tip of one toe for the space of
+three minutes, with a buzzing noise like that of a top in hot motion,
+pausing at last to inquire, "Well, Maum Zo&euml;, an'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_471" id="Page_471">[Pg 471]</a></span> w'at's dat?" and be
+off again in another whirl.</p>
+
+<p>"I'd red Mas'r Henry ob sich a wurfless nigger."</p>
+
+<p>"Wurfless?" inquired Flor, still spinning.</p>
+
+<p>"Wuss 'n wurfless."</p>
+
+<p>"How 'd y' do it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'd jus' foller dat ar Sarp," said Zo&euml;, turning over the rabbit, and
+considering whether a pepper-corn and a little onion out of her own
+patch wouldn't improve the broth she meant to make of it.</p>
+
+<p>"Into de swamps?" said Flor, in a high key. "Sarp's a fool. I heerd
+Mas'r Henry say so. Dey'll gib him a blue-pill, for sartain."</p>
+
+<p>"Humph!" said Aunt Zo&euml;, as if she could say a great deal more.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell ye w'at, Maum Zo&euml;," replied Flor, shaking her sidelong head at
+every syllable, and accentuating her remarks with her forefinger and
+both her little sparkling eyes, "I'll 'form on ye for 'ticin' Mas'r
+Henry's niggers run away."</p>
+
+<p>"None o' yer sass here!" said Maum Zo&euml;, with a flashing glance.</p>
+
+<p>"You take my rabbit, you mus' <i>hab</i> my sass," answered Flor, delicacy
+not being ingrain with her. "W'at 'ud I cut for to de swamps, d' ye
+s'pose?" she said, slapping the soles of her feet in her emphasis, and
+pausing for breath. "Dar neber was a lash laid on dat back"&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"No fault o' dat back, dough," interposed Aunt Zo&euml;.</p>
+
+<p>"Dar neber was a lash on dat back. Dar a'n't a person on de place hab
+sich treatem as dis yere Limb o' yourn. Miss Emma done gib me her red
+ribbins on'y Sa'd'y for my har. An' Mas'r Henry, he jus' pass an' say to
+me, 'Dono w'at Miss Emma 'd do widout ye, Lomy. Scairt, ye hussy!' So!"</p>
+
+<p>"'Zackly. We's 'mos' w'ite, we be! How much dey do make ob us up to de
+house! De leopard hab change him spots, an' we hab change our skin! W'at
+'s de use o' bein' free, w'en we's w'ite folks a'ready? Tell me dat!"
+said Aunt Zo&euml;, turning on her witheringly, rising from a deep curtsy and
+smoothing down her apron. "Tell ye w'at, ye Debil's spinster!" added
+she, with a sudden change of tone, as Flor began to mimic one of Miss
+Agatha's opera-tunes and with her hands on her hips slowly balance up
+and down the room, and came at last, bending far on one side, to leer up
+in the face of her elder with such a smile as Cubas was wont to give her
+Spanish lover in the dance. "So mighty free wid yer dancin', 'pears like
+you'll come to dance at a rope's end! W'at's de use o' talkin' to you?
+'Mortal sperit, it 's my b'lief dat ar mockin'-bird in de branches hab
+as good a lookout!"</p>
+
+<p>"Heap better," said Flor acquiescently, and beginning to hold a
+whistling colloquy with the hidden voice.</p>
+
+<p>"You won't bring him down wid yer tunes. He knows w'en he's well off;
+he's free, he is,&mdash;swingin' onto de bough, an' 'gwine whar he like."</p>
+
+<p>"Leet de chil' alone, Zo&euml;," said a superannuated old woman sitting in
+the corner by the fire always smouldering on Zo&euml;'s hearth, and leaning
+her white head on her cane. "You be berrer showin' her her duty in her
+place dan be makin' her discontented."</p>
+
+<p>"She doan' make me disconnected, Maum Susie," said Flor. "'F he's free,
+w'at's he stayin' here for? Dar 's law for dat. Doan' want none o' yer
+free niggers hangin' roun' dis yere. Chirrup!"</p>
+
+<p>"Dar's a right smart chance ob 'em, dough, jus' now," said Aunt Zo&euml;,
+chuckling at first, and then breaking into the most boisterous of
+laughs, "Seems like we's all ob us, ebery one, free as Sarp hisse'f.
+Mas'r Linkum say so. Yah, ha, ha!"</p>
+
+<p>"Linkum!" said Flor. "Who dat ar? Some o' yer poor w'ite trash? Mas'r
+Henry doan' say so!"</p>
+
+<p>"W'a' 's de matter wid dat ar boy Sarp, Zo&euml;?" recommenced Flor, after a
+pause. "Mus' hab wanted suffin,&mdash;powerful,&mdash;to lib in de swamp, hab de
+dogs after him, an' a bullet troo de head mos' likely."</p>
+
+<p>"Jus' dat. Wanted him freedom,"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_472" id="Page_472">[Pg 472]</a></span> said Zo&euml; suddenly, with crackling
+stress, her eyes getting angry in their fervor, as she went on. "Wanted
+him body for him own. Tired o' usin' 'noder man's eyes, 'noder man's
+han's. Wanted him han's him own, wanted him heart him own! Had n' no
+breff to breathe 'cep' w'at Mas'r Henry gib out. Di'n' t'ink no t'oughts
+but Mas'r Henry's. Wanted him wife some day to hisse'f, wanted him
+chillen for him own property. Wanted to call no man mas'r but de Lord in
+heaben!"</p>
+
+<p>"Wy, Maum Zo&euml;, how you talk! Sarp had n' no wife."</p>
+
+<p>"Neber would, w'ile he wor a slave."</p>
+
+<p>"Hist now, Zo&euml;!" said the old woman.</p>
+
+<p>"I jus' done b'lieve you's a bobolitionist!" said Flor, with wide eyes
+and a battery of nods.</p>
+
+<p>"No 'casion, no 'casion," said Zo&euml;, with the deep inner chuckle again.
+"We's done 'bolished,&mdash;dat's w'at we is! We's a free people now. No more
+work for de 'bominationists!" And on the point of uncontrollable
+hilarity, she checked herself with the dignity becoming her new
+position. "You's your own nigger now, Salome," said she.</p>
+
+<p>"We? No, t'ank you. I 'longs to Miss Emma."</p>
+
+<p>"You haan' no understandin' for liberty, chil'. Seems ef 'twas like
+religion"&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Ef I wor to tell Mas'r Henry, oh, wouldn' you cotch it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Go 'long!" cried Zo&euml;, looking out for a missile. "Doan' ye bring no
+more o' yer rabbits here, ef ye 'r' gwine to fetch an' carry"&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Lors, Aunt Zo&euml;, 'pears like you's out o' sorts. Haan' I got nof'n
+berrer to do dan be tellin' tales ob old women dat's a-waitin' for de
+Lord's salvation?" said Flor, with a twang of great gravity,&mdash;and
+proceeded thereat to make her exit in a series of lively somersaults
+through the room and over the threshold.</p>
+
+<p>Aunt Zo&euml;, who, ever since she had lost the use of her feet, had been a
+little wild on the subject of freedom, knew very well within that Flor
+would make no mischief for her; but, except for the excited state into
+which the news brought by some mysterious plantation runner had thrown
+her, she would scarcely have been so incautious. As it was, she had
+dropped a thought into Flor's head to ferment there and do its work. It
+was almost the first time in her life that the girl had heard freedom
+discussed as anything but a doubtful privilege. First awakening to
+consciousness in this state, it was with effort and only lately she had
+comprehended that there could be any other: a different condition from
+one in which Miss Emma was mistress and she was maid seemed at first
+preposterous, then fabulous, and still unnatural: nevertheless, there
+was a flavor of wicked pleasure in the thought. Flor looked with a sort
+of contempt on the little tumbling darkies who had never entertained it.
+Ever since she was born, however, she had frequently fancied she would
+like the liberty of rambling that the little wild creatures of the wood
+possess, but had felt criminal in the desire, and recently she had found
+herself enjoying the immunity of the mocking-bird on the bough, and was
+nearly as free in her going and coming as the same bird on the wing.</p>
+
+<p>During the weeks that followed this conversation Flor's dances flagged.
+They existed, to be sure, but with an angularity that made them seem
+solutions of problems, rather than expressions of emotion; they were
+merely mechanical, for she had lost all interest in them. They became at
+last so listless as to exhibit, to more serious eyes, signs of grace in
+the girl. Flor wondered, if Zo&euml; had spoken the truth, that nothing
+appeared changed on the plantation: all their own masters, why so
+obsequious to the driver still? This was one of the last of the great
+places; behind it, the small farms, with few hands, ran up the
+mountains; why was there no stampede of these unguarded slaves? She
+hardly understood. She listened outside the circle of the fire on the
+ground at night, where two or three old women mumbled together; she
+inferred,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_473" id="Page_473">[Pg 473]</a></span> that, though no one of them would desert Mas'r Henry, they
+enjoyed the knowledge that they were at liberty to do so, if they
+wished. Flor laughed a bit at this, thinking where the poor things could
+possibly go, and how they could get there, if they would; but in her
+heart of hearts&mdash;though all the world but this one spot was a barren
+wilderness, and she never could desire to leave her dear Miss Emma, nor
+could find happiness away from her&mdash;it seemed a very pleasant thing to
+think that her devotion might be a voluntary affair, and she stayed
+because she chose. Still she was skeptical. The abstract question
+puzzled her a little, too. How came Mas'r Henry to be free? Because he
+was white; that explained itself. But Miss Emma&mdash;she was white, too, and
+yet somehow she seemed to belong to Mas'r Henry. She wondered if Mas'r
+Henry could sell Miss Emma; and then the thought occurred, and with the
+thought the fear, that, possibly, some day, he might sell her, Flor
+herself, away from Miss Emma and all these pleasant scenes. After such a
+thought had once come, it did not go readily. Flor let it
+linger,&mdash;turned it over in her mind; gradually familiarized with its
+hurt, it seemed as if she had half said farewell to the place. Better
+far to be a runaway than to be sold. But if it came to that, whither
+should she run? what was this world beyond? who was there in this sad
+wide world to take care of a little black image? And if she waited for
+it to come to that, could she get away at all? It was no wonder that in
+the midst of such new and grave speculations the girl's dance grew
+languid and her sharp tongue still. The earth was just as beautiful as
+ever, the skies were as deep, the flowers as intense in tint, the
+evening air laden with jasmine-scents as delicious as of old; but in
+these few weeks Flor had reached another standpoint. It seemed as if a
+film had fallen from her eyes, and she saw a blight on every blossom.</p>
+
+<p>It was about this time, spring being at its flush, that some passing
+guest mentioned the march of a regiment, the next day, from Cotesworth
+Court-House to the first railroad-station, on its way to the seat of
+war. The idea of the thing filled Miss Emma with enthusiasm. How they
+would look, so many together, in the beautiful gray uniform too, to any
+one standing on Longfer Hill! She longed to see the faces of men when
+they took their lives in their hand for a principle. She had practised
+the Bonny Blue Flag till there was nothing left of it; but if a band
+played it in the open air, with the rising and falling of the wind, and
+under waving banners and glittering guidons all the men with their pale
+faces and shining eyes went marching by&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>The end of it was, that, as her father would never have listened to
+anything of the kind, Flor privately informed her of a short cut down
+the river-bank and round the edge of the swamp to the foot of Longfer
+Hill,&mdash;a walk they could easily take in a couple of hours. And as nobody
+was in the habit of missing Flor much, and her young mistress would be
+supposed, after her custom, to be spending half the day in naps, they
+accordingly took it. Nevertheless, it was an exceedingly secret affair,
+for Mas'r Henry had always strictly forbidden his daughter to leave his
+own grounds without fit escort.</p>
+
+<p>This expedition seemed to Flor such a proud and gratifying confidence,
+that in her pleasure she forgot to think; she only danced round about
+her mistress, with a return of her old exuberance, till the more quiet
+path of the latter resembled a straight line surrounded by an arabesque
+of fantastic flourishes. But, in fact, the young patrician, unaccustomed
+to exertion, was well wearied before they reached the river-bank. They
+had yet the long border of the swamp to skirt, and there towered Longfer
+Hill. Why could they not go across, she wondered. They would sink, Flor
+answered her; and then the moccasins! But there were all those green
+hummocks,&mdash;skipping from one to another would be mere play,&mdash;and there
+were no moccasins for miles. And before Flor could gainsay her, she had
+sprung on, keeping<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_474" id="Page_474">[Pg 474]</a></span> steadily ahead, in a determination to have her own
+way; and with no other course left her, Flor followed, though, at every
+spring, alighting on the hummocks that Miss Emma had trodden, the water
+splashed up about her bare ankles, and her heart shook within her at the
+thought of fierce runaways haunting these inaccessible hollows, and the
+myths of the deeper district. Before long, she had overtaken her young
+mistress, and they paused a moment for parley. Miss Emma was convinced,
+that, if it were no worse than this, it would be delightful. Flor
+assured her that she did not know the way any longer, for their winding
+path between the tall cypresses veiled in their swinging tangles of
+funereal moss had confused her, and she could only guess at the
+direction of Longfer Hill. This, then, was an adventure. Miss Emma took
+the responsibility all upon herself, and plunged forward. Miss Emma must
+know best, of course, concerning everything. Nothing loth, and gayly,
+Flor plunged after.</p>
+
+<p>The hummocks on which they went were light, spongy masses of greenery.
+Their footprints filled at once behind them with clear dark water; there
+were glistening little pools everywhere about them; the ground was so
+covered with mats of brilliant blossoms that what appeared solid for the
+foot was oftenest the most treacherous place of all; and at last they
+stayed to take breath, planting themselves on the trunk of a fallen tree
+so twisted and twined with variegated vines and flowers, and deadly,
+damp fungi, that it was like some gorgeous da&iuml;s-seat. Behind them and
+beside them was the darkness of the cypress groves. Before them extended
+a smooth floor, a wide level region, carpeted in the most vivid verdure
+and sheeted with the sunshine, an immense bed of softest moss, underlaid
+with black bog, quaking at every step, and shaking a thousand diamonds
+into the light. Scarcely anything stirred through all the stretch; at
+some runnel along its nearer margin, where upon one side the more broken
+swamp recommenced, a rosy flamingo stood and fished, and, still remoter,
+the melancholy note of a bird tolled its refrain, answered by an echoing
+voice from some yet inner depth of forest far away. Save for this, the
+silence was as intense as the vastness and color of the scene, till it
+opened and resolved itself into one broad insect hum. The children took
+a couple of steps forward, under their feet the elastic sod sank and
+rose with a spurt of silver jets; they sprang back to their seats, and
+the shading tree above shook down a shining shower in rillets of silver
+rain. They remained for a minute, then, resting there. Singularly
+enough, Longfer Hill, which had previously been upon their left, now
+rose far away upon the right. When at length they comprehended its
+apparition, they looked at one another in complete bewilderment. Miss
+Emma began to cry; but Flor took it as only a fresh complication of this
+world, that was becoming for her feet a maze of intricacy.</p>
+
+<p>"We must go back," said Miss Emma, at last. "I'm sure, if I'd
+known&mdash;&mdash;Of course we never can cross here. The very spoonbill wades.
+Oh, why didn't&mdash;&mdash;Well, there's no blame to you, Floss. I've nobody to
+thank but myself; that's a comfort."</p>
+
+<p>"Lors, Miss Emma, it's my fault altogeder. I should n' neber told ye.
+An' as for gwine back, it's jus' as bad as torrer."</p>
+
+<p>"We can't stay here all night! Oh, I'm right tired out! If I could lie
+down"&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'Twouldn' do no way, Miss Emma," answered Flor, in a fright for her
+friend, as a quick, poisonous-looking lizard slid along the log, like a
+streak of light, in the wake of a spider which was one blotch of scarlet
+venom.</p>
+
+<p>Far ahead, the strong sun, piercing the marsh, drew up a vapor, that,
+blue as any distant haze in one part and lint-white in another, made
+itself aslant into low, delicious, broken prisms, melting all between.
+This, more than anything else, told the extent of the bog before them,
+and, hot as it was now, betrayed the deathly chill lurking under such a
+coverlet at night. In every other<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_475" id="Page_475">[Pg 475]</a></span> direction lay the cypress jungle; and
+whether they saw the front or back of Longfer Hill, and on which side
+the river ran, steering for which they could steer for home, they had
+not the skill to say. Thus, what way to go they still were undecided,
+when, at something moving near them, they started to their feet in a
+faint terror, delaying only a single instant to gaze at it,&mdash;a serpent,
+that, coiled round the stem above, had previously seemed nothing but a
+splendid parasite, and that just lifted its hooded head crusted with
+gems, and flickered a long cleft tongue of flame over them, while
+loosening in great loops from its basking-place. They vouchsafed it no
+second look, but, with one leap over the log, through the black mire,
+and from clump to clump of moss, sped away,&mdash;if that could be called
+speed which was hindered at each moment by waylaying briers and
+entangling ropes of blossoming vines, by delays in threatening quagmires
+and bewilderments in thickets beset by clouds of insects, by trips and
+stumbles and falls and bruises, and many a pause for tears and
+complaints and ejaculations of despair.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile the heat of the day was mitigated by thin clouds sliding over
+the sun and banking up the horizon, though the hot wind still blew
+sweetly and steadily from the open quarter of the sky.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, what has become of us?" cried Miss Emma at length, when the shadows
+began to thicken, and out of the impenetrable forest and morass about
+them they could detect no path.</p>
+
+<p>"We's los' into de swamp, Miss Emma," answered Flor, in a kind of gloomy
+defiance of the worst of it,&mdash;"da' 's all."</p>
+
+<p>"And here we shall die!" cried the other.</p>
+
+<p>And she flung herself, face down, upon the floor.</p>
+
+<p>Flor was beside her instantly, taking her head upon her knee. Her own
+heart was sinking like lead; but she plucked it up, and for the other's
+sake snapped her fingers at Fortune.</p>
+
+<p>"Lors, Miss, dar's so many berries we caan' starve nowes. I's 'bout to
+build a fire soon's it's dark; dis yere's a dry spot, ye see now. An',
+bress you, dey'll be out after us afore mornin',&mdash;de whole farm-full."</p>
+
+<p>"With the dogs!" cried Miss Emma. "Oh, Floss, that I should live for
+that! to be hunted in the swamp with dogs!"</p>
+
+<p>Flor was silent a moment or two. The custom personally affected her for
+the first time; worse than the barbarity was the indignity.</p>
+
+<p>"Dey aren't trained to hunt for you, Miss Emma," she said, more gloomily
+than she had ever spoken before. "Dey knows de diff'unce 'tween de dark
+meat and de light."</p>
+
+<p>And then she laughed, as if her words meant nothing.</p>
+
+<p>"They never shall touch <i>you</i>, Flor, while I'm alive!" suddenly
+exclaimed Miss Emma, throwing her arms about her.</p>
+
+<p>"Lors, Miss, how you talk!" cried Flor, and then broke into a gust of
+tears. "To t'ink ob you a-carin' so much for a little darky, Miss!"&mdash;and
+she set up a loud howl of joyful sorrow.</p>
+
+<p>"You're the best friend I've got!" answered Miss Emma, hugging her with
+renewed warmth. "I love you worlds better than Agatha! And I'll never
+let you leave me! Oh, Flor! what shall we do?"</p>
+
+<p>Flor looked about her for reply, and then scrambled up a sycamore like a
+squirrel.</p>
+
+<p>It was apparently an island in the swamp on which they were: for the
+earth, though damp, was firm beneath them; and there was a thick growth
+of various trees about, although most were draped to the ground in the
+long, dark tresses of Spanish moss, waving dismally to and fro, with a
+dull, heavy motion of grief. On every other side from that by which they
+had come it appeared to be inaccessible, surrounded, as well as Flor
+could see, by glimmering sheets of water, which probably were too full
+of snags and broken stumps, still upright, for the navigation of boats<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_476" id="Page_476">[Pg 476]</a></span>
+by any hands but those thoroughly acquainted with their wide region of
+stagnant pools. This island was not, however, a small spot, but one that
+comprised a variety of surfaces, having not only marsh and upland within
+itself, but something that in the distance bore a fearful resemblance to
+a young patch of standing corn, a suspicion confirmed into certainty by
+a blue thread of smoke ascending a little way and falling again in a
+cloud. Once, upon seeing such a sight, Flor might have fallen to the
+ground herself,&mdash;this could be no less than the abode of those sad
+runaways, those mythical Goblins of the Swamp,&mdash;but it would have been
+because she had forgotten then that she was not one of the strong white
+race that reared her. Now, at this moment, she felt a thrill of kinship
+with these creatures, hunted for with bloodhounds, as she would be
+to-morrow, perhaps.</p>
+
+<p>"May-be I'll not go back," said Flor.</p>
+
+<p>She slipped down the tree, and went silently to work, heaping a bed of
+the hanging moss, less wet than the ground itself, for her young
+mistress. Miss Emma accepted it passively.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, it's like sleeping on hearse-curtains!" was all she said.</p>
+
+<p>It was already evening, but growing darker with the clouds that went on
+piling their purple masses and awaiting their signal. Suddenly the
+sweet, soft breeze trembled and veered, there was a brief calm, and the
+wind had hauled round the other way. A silence of preparation, answered
+by a long, low note of thunder, and the war had begun in heaven.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Emma buried her face in the moss. But Flor, secretly relishing a
+good thunder-gust, drew up her knees and sat with equanimity, like a
+little black judge of the clouds; for, in the moment's dull, indifferent
+mood, she felt prepared for either fate. It was long before the rain
+came; then it plunged, a brief downfall, as if a cloud had been ripped
+and emptied,&mdash;a suffocating terror of rain, teeming with more appalling
+intimations than anything else in the world. But the wind was a blind
+tornado. The boughs swung over them and swept them; the swamp-water was
+lifted, and gluts of it slapped in Flor's face. She saw, not far away, a
+great solitary cypress rearing its head, and bearing aloft a broad
+eagle's nest, hurriedly seized in the grasp of the gale, twisted,
+raised, and snapped like a straw. The child began to shudder strangely
+at the breath of this blast that cried with such clamor out of the black
+vaults above, this unknown and tremendous power beneath which she was
+nothing but a mote; she suffered an unexplained awe, as if this fearful
+wind were some supernatural assemblage of souls fleeting through space
+and making the earth tremble under their wild rush. All the while the
+heavy thunders charged on high in one unbroken roar, across whose base
+sharp bolts broke and burst perpetually; and with the outer world
+wrapped in quivering curtains of blue flame, now and then a shaft of
+fire lanced its straight spear down the dense darkness of the woods
+behind in ghastly illumination, and a responsive spire shot up in some
+burning bush that blackened almost as instantly. Flor fancied that the
+lightning was searching for her, a runaway herself, and the burning bush
+answered, like a sentinel, that here she was. She cowered at length and
+sought the protection of the blind earth, full of awe and quaking, till
+by-and-by the last discharge, muffled and ponderous, rolled away, and,
+save for a muttered growl in some far distant den, the world was still
+and dark again.</p>
+
+<p>Flor spoke to her mistress, and found, that, utterly worn out with
+fatigue and fright and exhausted electricity, she was asleep. She then
+got up and wrung out the rain from portions of her own and Miss Emma's
+dress, and heaped fresh armfuls of moss upon the sleeper in an original
+attempt at the pack; then she proceeded to explore the neighborhood, to
+see if there were any exit in other directions from the terrors of the
+swamp.</p>
+
+<p>Stars began to struggle through and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_477" id="Page_477">[Pg 477]</a></span> confuse their rays with the
+ravelled edges of the clouds. She groped along from tree to tree,
+looking constantly behind her at the clear, light opening of sky beneath
+which Miss Emma lay.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps she had come farther than she knew; for all at once, in the
+dread stillness that nothing but the dripping dampness broke, a sound
+smote her like a pang. It was an innocent and simple sound enough, a
+man's voice, clear and sweet, though measured somewhat, and suppressed
+in volume, chanting a slow, sad hymn, that had yet a kind of rejoicing
+about it:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Oh, no longer bond in Egypt,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No longer bond in Egypt,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No longer bond in Egypt.<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The Lord hath set him free!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It came from a hollow below her. Flor pushed aside the great, glistening
+leaves in silence, and looked tremblingly in. There were half-burnt
+brands on a broad stone, throwing out an uncertain red glimmer; there
+was an awning of plaited reeds reaching from bough to bough; there was
+an old man stretched upon the ground, and a stalwart man sitting beside
+him and chanting this song, as if it were a burial-service: for the old
+man was dead.</p>
+
+<p>Flor began to tremble again, with that instinctive animal antipathy to
+death and dissolution. But in an instant a rekindling gleam of the
+embers, hardly quenched, shot over the singer's face. In the same
+instant Flor shook before the secret she had learned, Sarp was a
+runaway, to be sure; and runaways ate little girls, she knew. But Flor,
+having lately encouraged incredulity, could hardly find it in her heart
+to believe that the fact of having stolen himself could have so utterly
+changed the old nature of Sarp, the kind butler, who always had a
+pleasant word for her when others had a cuff. Yet should she hail him?
+Ah, no, never! But then&mdash;Miss Emma! Her young mistress would die of
+starvation and the damp.</p>
+
+<p>"Sarp!" whispered Flor, huskily.</p>
+
+<p>The man started and sprang to his feet, alert and ready, waiting for his
+unseen enemy,&mdash;then half relapsed, thinking it might be nothing but the
+twitter of a bird.</p>
+
+<p>"It's me, Sarp."</p>
+
+<p>Who that was did not seem so plain to Sarp; he darted his swift glance
+in her direction, then at one step parted the bushes and dragged her
+through, as if it were game that he had trapped.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Sarp!" cried Flor, falling at his feet. "Doan' yer kill me now! I
+di'n' mean to ha' found yer. I's done los' in de swamp, wid"&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>But Flor thought better of that.</p>
+
+<p>The man raised her, but still held her out at arm's length, while he
+listened for further sound behind her.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, jus' le' go, Sarp, an' I'll dance for you till I drap!" she cried.</p>
+
+<p>"Is it a time for dancing," he replied, "and the earth open for
+burying?"</p>
+
+<p>"Lors, Sarp!" cried Flor, shrinking from the shallow grave she had not
+seen, "how's I to know dat?"&mdash;and she gave herself safe distance.</p>
+
+<p>"Help me yere, then," said he.</p>
+
+<p>But Flor remained immovable, and Sarp was obliged to perform by himself
+the last offices for the old slave, who, living out his term of
+harassments and hungers, had grown gray and died in the swamps. He went
+at last and brought an armful of broken sweet-flowering boughs and
+spread them over the place.</p>
+
+<p>"Free among the dead," he said; then turned to Flor, who, having long
+since seen daylight through the darkness of her fears, proceeded glibly
+and volubly to pour out her troubles, on his beckoning her away, and to
+demand the help she had refused to render.</p>
+
+<p>"There's the boat," said Sarp, reflectively. "And the rain will float it
+'most anywheres to-night. But&mdash;come so far and troo so much to go back?"</p>
+
+<p>Flor flung up her face and held her head back proudly.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, Sah! Doan' s'pose I'd be stealin' Mas'r Henry's niggers?"</p>
+
+<p>For, having meditated upon it an hour<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_478" id="Page_478">[Pg 478]</a></span> ago, she was able to repel the
+charge vigorously.</p>
+
+<p>"Go'n' to stay a slave all your life?"</p>
+
+<p>"All Miss Emma's life."</p>
+
+<p>"And&mdash;afterwards"&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Den I'll go back to de good brown earth wid her," said Flor, solving
+the problem promptly.&mdash;"I doan' see de boat."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, she'll make as brown dust as you,&mdash;Miss Emma,&mdash;that's so! But the
+spirit, Lome!"</p>
+
+<p>"Sperit?" said Flor, looking uneasily over her shoulder with her
+twinkling eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"The part of you that doan' die, Lome."</p>
+
+<p>"I haan' nof'n ter do wid dat; dat 'longs to dem as made it; none o' my
+lookout; dono nof'n 'bout it, an' doan' want ter hear nof'n about it!"
+said Flor; for, reasoning on the old adage of a bird in the hand being
+worth two in the bush, she thought it more important just at present to
+save her body than to save her soul, admitting that she had one, and
+felt haste to be of more behoof than metaphysics.</p>
+
+<p>There was a moon up now, and Flor could see her companion's dark face
+above her, a mere mass of shade; it did not reassure her any to remember
+that her own was just as black.</p>
+
+<p>"Lome," said Sarp, setting his back against a tree like one determined
+to have attention, "never mind about the boat yet. You 've heard Aunt
+Zo&euml; say how't the grace of the Lord was free?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I's heerd her kerwhoopin'. I 's in a hurry, Sarp!"</p>
+
+<p>"But 's how't the man that refuses to accept it, when it's set before
+him, is done reckoned a sinner?"</p>
+
+<p>"S'pose I has?"&mdash;and in her impatience she began to dance outright.</p>
+
+<p>"It's jus' so with the present hour," he continued, not giving her time
+to interpose about escape again. "You have liberty offered you. If you
+refuses, how can you answer for it when your spirit 'pears afore the
+Judge? You choose him, and you choose righteousness, you chooses the
+chance to make yourself white in the Lord's eyes,&mdash;your spirit, Lome.
+Refuse, and you take sin and chains and darkness; you gets to deserve
+the place where they hab their share of fire and brimstone."</p>
+
+<p>"Take mine wid 'lasses," said Flor, who, though inwardly a trifle cowed,
+never meant to show it. "W'a' 's de use o' boderin' 'bout all dat ar,
+w'en dar 's Miss Emma a-cotchin' her deff, an' I 's jus' starved? Ef you
+'s go'n' to help us, Sarp"&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"You don' know what chains means, chil'," said the imperturbable Sarp.
+"They're none the lighter because you can't see 'em. It a'n't jus' the
+power to sell your body and the work of your hands; it's the power to
+sell your soul! Ef Mas'r Henry hab de min',&mdash;ef Mas'r Henry have the
+mind, I say, to make you go wrong, can you help it while you 's a
+slave?"</p>
+
+<p>"'Taan' no fault o' mine ter be bad, ef I caan' help it. Come now," said
+Flor sullenly, seeing little hope of respite,&mdash;"should t'ink 'twas de
+Ol' Sarpint hisself!"</p>
+
+<p>"And 'taan' no virtue of yours to be good, ef you caan' help it; you 'd
+jus' stay put&mdash;jus' between&mdash;in de brown earth, as you said. You 'd
+never see that beautiful land beyond the grave, wid the river of light
+flowing troo der place, an' the people singing songs before the great
+white t'rone."</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me 'bout dat ar, Sarp," said Flor, forgetfully.</p>
+
+<p>"Dey 's all free there, Lome."</p>
+
+<p>"How was dis dey got dere? Could n' walk nowes, an' could n' fly"&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Haan' you seen into Miss Emma's prayer-book the angels with wings high
+and shining all from head to foot?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Flor,&mdash;"<i>Angels</i>."</p>
+
+<p>"And one of them you 'll be, Lome, ef you jus' choose,&mdash;ef, for
+instance, you choose liberty to-day."</p>
+
+<p>"Lors now, Sarp, I doan' b'lieb a word you say! Get out wid yer
+conundrums! Likely story, little black nigger like dis yere am be put
+into de groun' an' 'come out all so great an' w'ite an' shinin'-like!"</p>
+
+<p>"'For God shall deliver my soul from the power of the grave.'
+<i>'Shall.'</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_479" id="Page_479">[Pg 479]</a></span> That's a promise,&mdash;a promise in the Book. Di'n't yer eber
+plant a bean, Lome,&mdash;little hard black bean? And did a little hard black
+bean come up? No, but two wings of leaves, and a white blossom jus'
+ready to fly itself, and so sweet you could smell it acrost de field. So
+they plant your body in the earth, Lome"&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"You go 'long, Sarp! Ef you plant beans, beans come up," said Flor,
+decisively.</p>
+
+<p>This direct and positive confutation rather nonplussed Sarp, his theory
+not being able at once to assimilate his fact, and he himself feeling,
+that, if he pushed the comparison farther, he would reach some such
+atrocity as that, if the white and shining flower produced in its season
+again the black bean from which it sprung, so the white and shining soul
+must once more clothe itself in the same sordid, unpurified body from
+which it first had sprung. He had a vague glimmer that perhaps his
+simile was too material, and that this very body was the clay in which
+the springing, germinating soul was planted to bloom out in heaven, but
+dared not pursue it unadvised, for fear of the quicksands into which it
+might betray him. He merely tied a knot in the thread of his discourse
+by answering,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Jus' so. The bean planted, the bean comes up. You planted, and what
+follows?"</p>
+
+<p>"I come up," said Flor, consentingly, and quite as if he had got the
+better of the discussion.</p>
+
+<p>Then he rose, and Flor led the way back to Miss Emma,&mdash;having first,
+upon Sarp's serious hesitation, pledged herself for Miss Emma's secrecy
+and gratitude with tears and asseverations.</p>
+
+<p>In spite of the fact that he had never meant nor cared to see it again,
+there was something pleasant to Sarp in the face of the sleeper upturned
+in a moonbeam. He stooped and lifted her tenderly, and laid her head on
+his shoulder. The young girl opened her eyes vacantly, but heard Flor's
+voice beside her still,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Doan' ye be scaret now, honey! Bress you, 's a true frien': he'll get
+us shet ob dis yere swamp mighty sudd'n!"</p>
+
+<p>And soothed by the dreamy motion, entirely fatigued, borne swiftly along
+in strong arms, under the low, waving boughs in the dim forest darkness,
+she was drowsed again with slumber, from which she woke only on being
+placed in the bottom of a skiff to turn over into a deeper dream than
+before. Flor nodded triumphantly to her companion, in the beginning,
+keeping pace beside him with short runs,&mdash;there could be no fear of
+babble about that of which one knew nothing,&mdash;and took her seat at last
+in the boat as he directed, while with a long pole he pushed out into
+the deeper water away from the shadow of the shore, and then went
+steering between the jags and gnarls, that, half protruding from the
+dark expanses, seemed the heads of strange and preternatural monsters.
+Now and then a current carried them; now and then their boatman sculled,
+now and then in shallower places poled along; sometimes he rested, and
+in the intervals took occasion to continue his missionary labor upon
+Flor,&mdash;his first object being to convince her she had a soul, and his
+second that in bondage every chance to save that soul alive was against
+her. Then he drew slight pictures of a different way of things, such as
+had solaced his own imagination, rude, but happy idyls of freedom: the
+small house, one's own; the red light in the window, a guiding star for
+weary feet at night coming home to comfort and smiles and cheer; no
+dark, haunting fear of a hand to reach between one and those loved
+dearest; no more branding like cattle, manhood and womanhood
+acknowledged, met with help and welcome and kind hands, cringing no
+more, but standing erect, drinking God's free sunshine, and growing
+nearer heaven. How much or how little of all his dream poor Sarp
+realized, if ever he reached the land of his desire at all, Heaven only
+knows. But Flor listened to him as if he recited some delightful
+fairy-tale,&mdash;charming<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_480" id="Page_480">[Pg 480]</a></span> indeed, but all as improbable as though one were
+telling her that black was white. Then, too, there was another dream of
+Sarp's,&mdash;the dream of a whole race loosening itself from the clinging
+clod. Flor got a glimmer of his meaning,&mdash;only a glimmer; it made her
+heart beat faster, but it was so grand she liked the other best.</p>
+
+<p>So, creeping through narrow creeks, now they skirted the edges of the
+long, low, flat morass,&mdash;now wound round the giant trunk of a fallen
+tree that nearly bridged the pool whose dark mantle they severed,&mdash;now
+pushed the boat's head up into a wall of weeds, that bent back and let
+it through the deep cut flooded by the rain, where the wild growth shut
+off everything but the high hollow of a luminous sky, with
+ribbon-grasses and long prickly leaves brushing across their faces from
+either side, here and there a sudden dwarf palmetto bristling all its
+bayonets against the peaceful night, and all the way singular uncouth
+shapes of vegetation, like conjurations of magic, cutting themselves out
+with minuteness upon the vast clear background so darkly and weirdly
+that the voyagers seemed to be sliding along the shores of some new,
+strange under-world,&mdash;now they got out, and, wading ankle-deep in plashy
+bog, drew the boat and its slumberer heavily after them,&mdash;now went
+slowly along, afloat again, on the broad lagoons, which the moon, from
+the deep far heaven, shot into silver reaches, and, with the trees, a
+phantom company of shadows, weeping in their veils along the farther
+shore, with all the quaint outlines of darkness, the gauzy wings that
+flitted by, the sweet, wild scents across whose lingering current they
+drifted, the broad silence disturbed only by the lazy wash of a seldom
+ripple, made their progress, through heavy gloom and vivid light, an
+enchanted journey.</p>
+
+<p>At length they lifted overhanging branches, and glided out upon a sheet
+of open water, a little lake fed by natural springs; and here, paddling
+over to the outlet, a tide took them down a swift brook to the river.
+Sarp stemmed this tide, made the opposite bank of the brook, and paused.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you chosen, Lome?" said he. "Will you go back with me, and so on
+to the Happy Land of Freedom? Not that I'll have my own liberty till
+I've earned it,&mdash;till I've won a country by fighting for it. But I'll
+see you safe; and if I'm spared, one day I'll come to you. Will you go?"</p>
+
+<p>Flor hung back a moment. "I'd like to go, Sarp, right well," said she,
+twisting up the corner of her little tatter of an apron. "But dar am
+Miss Emma, you see."</p>
+
+<p>"We can leave her on the bank here. She'll be all right when de day
+breaks, and fin' the house herself. There's as good as she without a
+roof this night."</p>
+
+<p>"She's neber been use' to it. She would n' know a step o' de way. Oh,
+no, Sarp! I 'longs to Miss Emma; she could n' do widout me. She'd jus'
+done cry her eyes out an' die,&mdash;'way here in de wood. No, Sarp, I mus'
+take her back. She's delicate, Miss Emma is. I'd like to go right well,
+Sarp,&mdash;'ta'n't much ob a 'sapp'intment,&mdash;I's use' to 'em,&mdash;I'd like for
+to go wid you."</p>
+
+<p>Lingering, irresolute, she stood up in the swaying skiff, keeping her
+balance as if she were dancing; then, the motion, perhaps, throwing her
+back into her old identity, she sprang to the shore like a cat. Sarp
+laid Miss Emma beside her, and then shot away, back over all the
+desolate reaches and lonely shining pools; and Flor, with a little wail
+of despair, hid her face on the ground, that her weakened and bewildered
+little mistress might not see the flood of tears that wet the grass
+beneath it.</p>
+
+<p>It was between two and three o'clock in the morning, when, chilled,
+draggled, and dripping wet, they reached the house. Lights were moving
+everywhere about it: no one had slept there that night. There was a
+great shout from high and low as the two forlorn little objects crept
+into the ray. Miss Emma was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_481" id="Page_481">[Pg 481]</a></span> met with severe reproaches, afterwards with
+tears and embraces; and cordial drinks and hot flannels were made ready
+for her in a trice. As for Flor, she was warmed after another
+fashion,&mdash;being sent off for punishment; and, in spite of the
+implorations of Miss Emma and the interference of Miss Agatha, the order
+was executed. It was the first time she had ever received such reward of
+merit in form; and though it was a slight affair, after all, the hurt
+and wrong rankled for weeks, and, instead of the gay, dancing imp of
+former days, henceforth a silent, sullen shadow slipped about and
+haunted all the dark places of the house.</p>
+
+<p>Mas'r Henry, being a native of Charleston, was also a gentleman of
+culture, and fond of the fine arts to some extent. Indeed, looking at it
+in a poetical view, the feudality of slavery, even more than the
+inevitable relation of property, was his strong tie to the institution.
+He had a contempt for modern progress so deeply at the root of his
+opinions that he was only half aware of it; and any impossible scheme to
+restore the political condition of what we call the Dark Ages, and
+retain the comforts of the present one, would have found in him a hearty
+advocate. One of his favorite books was a little green-covered volume,
+printed on coarse paper, and smelling of the sea which it had crossed: a
+book that seemed to bring one period of those past centuries up like a
+pageant,&mdash;so vividly, with all the flying dust of their struggle in the
+sunbeam before him, did its opulent vitality reproduce, in their
+splendors and their sins, the actual presences of those dead men and
+women, now more unreal substance than the dust of their shrouds. He
+liked to carry this mediaeval Iliad round with him, and, taking it out
+at propitious places, go jotting his pencil down the page. He had heard
+it called an incomprehensible puzzle of poetry; it gave him pleasure,
+then, to unriddle and proclaim it plain as print. He was thus
+delectating himself one day, while Flor, still in her phase of
+moodiness, stood behind Miss Agatha's chair; and, the passage pleasing
+him, he read it aloud to Miss Agatha, whom, in the absence of his son,
+her husband, he was wont to consider his opponent in the abstract,
+however dear and precious in the concrete.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"As, shall I say, some Ethiop, past pursuit<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of all enslavers, dips a shackled foot,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Burnt to the blood, into the drowsy, black,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Enormous watercourse which guides him back<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To his own tribe again, where he is king;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And laughs, because he guesses, numbering<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The yellower poison-wattles on the pouch<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of the first lizard wrested from its couch<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Under the slime, (whose skin, the while, he strips<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To cure his nostril with, and festered lip,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And eyeballs bloodshot through the desert blast,)<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That he has reached its boundary, at last<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">May breathe; thinks o'er enchantments of the South,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sovereign to plague his enemies, their mouth,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Eyes, nails, and hair; but, these enchantments tried<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In fancy, puts them soberly aside<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For truth, projects a cool return with friends,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The likelihood of winning mere amends<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Erelong; thinks that, takes comfort silently,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Then from the river's brink his wrongs and he,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Hugging revenge close to their hearts, are soon<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Offstriding to the Mountains of the Moon."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Flor stood listening, with eyes that shone strangely out of the gloom of
+her face.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, child," said her master to Miss Agatha, "how does that little
+monodrame strike you? Which do you find preferable, tell me, Ashantee at
+home or Ashantee abroad? civilized or barbarized? the institution or the
+savage? Eh, Blossom," turning to Flor, "what do you think of the
+condition of that ancestor of yours?"</p>
+
+<p>"Mas'r Henry," said Flor, gravely, "he was free."</p>
+
+<p>"Eh? Free? What! are you bitten, too?"</p>
+
+<p>And Mas'r Henry laughed at the thought, and pictured to himself his
+dancer dancing off altogether, like the swamp-fire she was. Then his
+tone changed.</p>
+
+<p>"Flor," said he, sternly, "who has been talking to you lately? Do you
+know, Agatha? I have seen this for some time. I must learn what one
+among the hands it is that in these times dares breed disaffection."</p>
+
+<p>"No one's talked to me, Sah," said Flor,&mdash;"no one onter der place."</p>
+
+<p>"Some one off of it, then."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_482" id="Page_482">[Pg 482]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Mas'r Henry, I's been havin' my own t'oughts. Mas'r knows I could n'
+lebe Miss Emma nowes. Could n' tief her property nowes. But ef Mas'r
+Henry 'd on'y jus' 'sider an' ask li'l' Missy for to make dis chil' a
+presen' ob myse'f"&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"So that's what it means!" And Mas'r Henry smiled a moment at the
+ludicrous idea presented to him.</p>
+
+<p>"Flor," said he then, abruptly, "I have never heard the whole of that
+night in the swamp. It must be told."</p>
+
+<p>"Lors, Sah! So long ago, I's done forgot it!"</p>
+
+<p>"You may have till to-morrow morning to quicken your memory."</p>
+
+<p>"Haan' nof'n' more to 'member, Mas'r."</p>
+
+<p>"You heard me. You have your choice to repeat it either now or to-morrow
+morning."</p>
+
+<p>"Could n' make suf'n', whar nof'n' was. Could n' tink o' nof'n' all ter
+once. Could n' tell nof'n' at all in a hurry," said Flor, with a
+twinkle. "Guess I'll take tell de mornin', any-wes, Mas'r." And she was
+off.</p>
+
+<p>And Mas'r Henry went, back to his book,&mdash;the watcher nodding on his
+spear,&mdash;and all the stormy scenes he expected soon to realize in his own
+life, when the sword of conscription had numbered his old head with the
+others.</p>
+
+<p>Flor went out from the presence defiant, as became a rebel.</p>
+
+<p>Although that special mode of martyrdom was not proper to the
+plantation, and Flor felt in herself few particles of the stuff of which
+martyrs are made, she was determined, that, as to telling so much as
+that Sarp was still in the swamp, let alone betraying the way to his
+late habitat,&mdash;even were she able,&mdash;she never would do it, though burned
+at the stake. The determination had a dark look; nevertheless, two
+glimmers lighted it: one was the hope, in a mistrust of her own
+strength, that Sarp had already gone; the other was a perception that
+the best way to keep Sarp's secret was to make off with it. She began to
+question what authority Mas'r Henry had to demand this secret from her;
+she answered in her own mind, that he had no authority at all;&mdash;then she
+was doubly determined that he should not have it. She had heard talk of
+chivalry at table and among guests; she had half a comprehension of what
+it meant; she wondered if this were not a case in point,&mdash;if it were,
+after all, the color, and not the sex, that weighed. That aroused her
+indignation, aroused also a feeling of race: she would not have changed
+color that moment with the fairest Circassian of a harem, could the
+white slave have appeared in all the dazzle of her beauty.&mdash;Mas'r Henry
+had called that man, of whom he read aloud to-day, her ancestor. She
+knew what that was, for she had heard Miss Emma boast of her
+progenitors. But he was free; then it followed that she was not a slave
+by nature, only by vicious force of circumstance. Mas'r Henry had no
+right to her whatever; instead of her stealing herself, he was the thief
+who retained her against her will. What could be the name of the country
+where that man had lived? It was somewhere a long way from this place,
+down the river, perhaps beyond the sea;&mdash;there were others there, then,
+still, most likely. Flor had an idea that among them she might be a
+superior, possibly received with welcome, invested with honors;&mdash;she
+lingered over the pleasant vision. But how was one ever to find the
+spot? Ah, that book of Mas'r Henry's would tell, if she could but take
+it away to those kind people Sarp had told of. So she meditated awhile
+on the curious travels with Sordello for a guide-book, till old
+affections smote her for having thought of taking the thing, when "Mas'r
+Henry set so by it," and she put the vision aside, endeavoring to recall
+in its place all that Sarp had told her of the North. She realized then,
+personally, what a wide world it was. Why should she stay shut in this
+one point upon it all: a hill and the fir wood behind her; marshes on
+this side; woods again on the other; low hills far away before her; out
+of them all, the dark torrent of the river showing the swift way to
+freedom and the great sea? She drew<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_483" id="Page_483">[Pg 483]</a></span> in a full breath, as if close air
+oppressed her.&mdash;A bird flew over her then, high above her head,
+careering in fickle circles, and at length sailing down out of sight far
+into other heavens. Flor watched him bitterly; she comprehended Zo&euml;'s
+scorn of her past content;&mdash;if only she had wings to spread! But Sarp
+had told her, that, if she went away, she would one day have wings. None
+of Sarp's other arguments weighed a doit,&mdash;but wings to roam with over
+this beautiful world! The liberty of vagabondage! She watched the clouds
+chasing one another through the sunny heaven, watched their shadows
+chasing along the fields and hills below; her heart burned that
+everything in the world should be more free than she herself. She felt
+the wind fanning over her on its way, she took the rich odors that it
+brought, she looked after the flower-petal that fluttered away with it,
+she saw the strong sunshine penetrating among the shadows of a jungly
+spot and catching a thousand points of color in the gloom, she
+recognized the constant fluent interchange among all the atoms of the
+universe;&mdash;why was she alone, capable of flight, chained to one
+spot?&mdash;She gazed around her at the squalor and the want, the brutish
+shapes and faces, her own no better, at the narrow huts; thought of the
+dull routine of work never to enrich herself, the possibility of
+purchase and cruelty;&mdash;she sprung to her feet, all her blood boiling; it
+seemed out of the question for her to endure it another moment.&mdash;Mas'r
+Henry had told her once that he could make his fortune with her dancing,
+if he chose; she stood as much in need of a fortune as Mas'r Henry,&mdash;why
+not make it for herself? why not be off and away, her own mistress,
+earning and eating her own bread, sending some day for Zo&euml;, finding Sarp
+in those far-off happy latitudes?&mdash;It occurred to her, like a discovery
+of her own, that, doing the work she was bidden, taking the food she was
+given, whipped at will, and bought and sold, she was no better than one
+among the cattle of the place;&mdash;the sudden sense of degradation made
+even her dark cheek burn. She laid a hand down on the earth, her great
+Teraph, to see if it were possible it could still be warm and such a
+wrong done to her its child. Then, all at once, she understood that wood
+and river were open to her fugitive feet, and if she stayed longer in
+slavery, it was the fault of no one but herself.&mdash;She stood up, for some
+one called her; she obeyed the call with alacrity, for she found it in
+her power to do so or not as she chose. She felt taller as she stepped
+along, and held up her head with the dignity of personality. She
+acknowledged, perhaps, that she was no equal of Miss Emma's,&mdash;that the
+creative hand, making its first essay on her, rounded its complete work
+in Miss Emma; but she declared herself now no mere offshoot of the
+sod,&mdash;she was a human being, a being of beating pulses and affections,
+and something within her, stifled here, longing to soar and away.</p>
+
+<p>It was dark before Flor had ceased her novel course of thinking, pursued
+through all her little tasks,&mdash;beautiful star-lighted dark, full of
+broken breezes, soft and warm, and loaded with passionate spices and
+flower-breaths; she was alone again, under the shadows of the trees,
+entirely surrendered to her whirling fancies. In these few hours she had
+lived to the effect of years. She was neither hungry nor tired; she was
+conscious of but a single thing,&mdash;her whole being seemed effervescing
+into one wild longing after liberty. It was not that she could no longer
+brook control and be at the beck of each; it was a natural instinct,
+awakened at last in all the strength of maturity, that would not let her
+breathe another breath in peace unless it were her own,&mdash;that made her
+feel as though her chains were chafing into the bone,&mdash;that taught her
+the unutterable vileness and loathliness of bonds,&mdash;that convicted her,
+in being a slave, of being something foul upon the fair face of
+creation. She sat casting about for ways of escape. It was absurd to
+think she could again blunder on that secure retreat of the swamp before
+being overtaken; no boats ever passed along down the foaming river;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_484" id="Page_484">[Pg 484]</a></span> if
+she were some little mole to hide and burrow in the ground till danger
+were over,&mdash;but no, she would rather front fear and ruin than lose one
+iota of her newly recognized identity. But there was no other path of
+safety; she clutched the ground with both hands in her powerlessness; in
+all the heaven and earth there seemed to be nothing to help her.</p>
+
+<p>So at last Flor rose; since she could not get away, she must stay; as
+for the next day's punishment, she could laugh at it,&mdash;it was not its
+weight, but its wickedness, that troubled her; but escape, some time,
+she would. Lying in wait for method, ambushed for opportunity, it would
+go hard, if all failed. Of what value would life be then? she could but
+throw that after. So at some time, that was certain, she would
+go,&mdash;when, it was idle to say; it might be years before affairs were
+more propitious than now,&mdash;but then, at last, one day, the place that
+had known her should know her no more. Nevertheless, despite all this
+will and resolution, the heart of the child had sunk like a plummet at
+thought of leaving everything, at fear of future fortune; this
+deferring, after all, was half like respite.</p>
+
+<p>Flor drew near the out-door fire, where Zo&euml; and one or two others busied
+themselves. Something excited them extremely, it was plain to see and
+hear. Flor, beyond the circle of the light, strained her ears to listen.
+It was only a crumb of comfort that she obtained, but one of those
+miraculous crumbs to which there are twelve baskets of fragments: the
+Linkum gunboats were down at the mouth of the river. Oh! heaven a boat's
+length off! A day and night's drifting and rowing; then climbing the
+side slaves, treading the deck freemen,&mdash;the shackles fallen, the hands
+loosened, the soul saved!</p>
+
+<p>But the boat? There was not such a thing along these banks. Improvise
+one. That was not possible. Flor listened, and the wild gasps of hope
+died out again into the dulness of despair. Some other time,&mdash;not this.
+As she stood still, idly and hopelessly hearkening to the mutter of the
+old women, with the patches of flickering fire-light falling on their
+faces in strange play and revelation, there stole upon her ear a sweeter
+and distincter sound, the voice of Miss Agatha, as, leaning out upon the
+night, she sang a plaint that consorted with her melancholy mood,
+learned in her Northern home in happier hours, without a thought of the
+moment of misery that might make it real.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Sooner or later the storms shall beat<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Over my slumber from head to feet;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sooner or later the winds shall rave<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In the long grass above my grave.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I shall not heed them where I lie,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nothing their sound shall signify,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nothing the headstone's fret of rain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nothing to me the dark day's pain.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Sooner or later the sun shall shine<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With tender warmth on that mound of mine;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sooner or later, in summer air,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Clover and violet blossom there.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I shall not feel in that deep-laid rest<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The sheeted light fall over my breast,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nor ever note in those hidden hours<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The wind-blown breath of the tossing flowers.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Sooner or later the stainless snows<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Shall add their hush to my mute repose;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sooner or later shall slant and shift<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And heap my bed with their dazzling drift.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Chill though that frozen pall shall seem,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Its touch no colder can make the dream<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That recks not the sweet and sacred dread<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Shrouding the city of the dead.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Sooner or later the bee shall come<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And fill the noon with his golden hum;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sooner or later on half-paused wing<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The blue-bird's warble about me ring,&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Ring and chirrup and whistle with glee,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nothing his music means to me,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">None of these beautiful things shall know<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">How soundly their lover sleeps below.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Sooner or later, far out in the night,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The stars shall over me wing their flight;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sooner or later my darkling dews<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Catch the white spark in their silent ooze.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Never a ray shall part the gloom<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That wraps me round in the kindly tomb;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Peace shall be perfect for lip and brow<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sooner or later,&mdash;oh, why not now!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Little of this wobegone song touched Flor even enough to let her know
+there was some one in the world more wretched than herself. The last
+word, the last<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_485" id="Page_485">[Pg 485]</a></span> phrase, rang in her ears like a command,&mdash;now, why not
+now?&mdash;waiting for times and chances, hesitating, delaying, since go she
+must,&mdash;then why not now? What more did she need than a board and two
+sticks? Here they were in plenty. And with that, a bright thought, a
+fortunate memory,&mdash;the old abandoned scow! And if, after all, she
+failed, and went to watery death, did not the singer tell in how little
+time all would be quiet and oblivious once again? Oh, why not now?</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps Flor would never have been entirely subjected to this state of
+mind but for an injury that she had suffered. Miss Emma had been
+rendered ill by the night's exposure in the swamp. In consequence of her
+complicity in this crime, Flor had been excluded from her young
+mistress's room during her indisposition, and ever since had not only
+been deprived of her companionship, but had not even been allowed to
+look upon her from a distance. A single week of that made life a desert.
+Too proud to complain, Flor saw in this the future, and so recognized,
+it may be, that it would be easy to part from the place, having already
+parted with Miss Emma. She drew nearer to the group now, and stood there
+long, while they wondered at her, gazing into the fire, her head fallen
+upon her breast. There was only one thing more to do: her little
+squirrel; nothing but her front of battle had kept it safe this many a
+day; were she once gone, it would be at the mercy of the first gridiron.
+Nobody saw the tears, in the dark and the distance, fast falling over
+the tiny sacrifice; but the cook might have guessed at them, when Flor
+brought her last offering, and begged that it might be prepared and
+taken in to Miss Emma.</p>
+
+<p>How many things there were to do that evening! One wanted water, and
+another wanted towels, and a third wanted everything there was to want.
+Last of all, little Pluto came running with his unkindled torch,&mdash;Mas'r
+Henry wanted dancing.</p>
+
+<p>Flor rummaged for her castanets, her tambourine, her ankle-rings,&mdash;they
+had all been thrown hither and thither,&mdash;and at length, as Pluto's torch
+flared up, ran tinkling along the turf, into the glow; and her voice
+broke, as she danced, into high, clear singing, triumphant singing, that
+welled up to the very sky, and made the air echo with sweetness. As she
+sang, all her slender form swayed to the tune, posturing, gesturing,
+bending now, now almost soaring, while, falling in showers of twinkling
+steps, her fleet feet seemed to weave their way on air. What ailed the
+girl? all asked;&mdash;such a play of emotion of mingled sorrow and ecstasy,
+never before had been interpreted by measure; so a disembodied spirit
+might have danced, and her dusky hue, the strange glancing lights thrown
+upon her here and there by the torch, going and coming and glittering at
+pleasure, made her appear like a shadow disporting before them. At
+length and slowly, note by note, with wild lingering turns to which the
+movement languished, her tone fell from its lofty jubilance to a happy
+flute-like humming; she waved her arms in the mimic tenderness of
+repeated and passionate farewells; then, still humming, faint and low
+and sweet, tripped off again, through the glow, along the turf, into the
+shadow, and out of sight; and it seemed to the beholders as if a
+fountain of gladness had gushed from the sod, and, playing in the light
+a moment, had run away down to join the river and the breaking sea.</p>
+
+<p>Mas'r Henry called after Flor to throw her a penny; but she failed to
+reappear, and he tossed it to Pluto instead, and forgot about her.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>So, bailed out and stuffed with marsh-grass in its crazy cracks, the old
+scow was afloat, the rope was cut, and by midnight it went drifting down
+the river. Waist-deep in shoal water, its appropriator had dragged it
+round inside the channel's ledge of rocks, with their foam and
+commotion, to the somewhat more placid flow below, and now it shot away
+over the smooth, slippery surface of the stream, that gave back
+reflections of the starbeams like a polished mirror.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_486" id="Page_486">[Pg 486]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Terrified by the course along the rapid river, the little creature
+crouched in the bottom of the scow, now breathless as it sped along the
+slope, now catching at the edge as in some chance eddy or flow it
+swirled from side to side, or, spinning quite round, went down the other
+way. But by-and-by gathering courage, she took her station, kneeling
+where with the long poles, previously provided, she could best direct
+her galley and avoid the dangers of a castaway. Peering this way and
+that through the darkness, carried along without labor, spying countless
+dangers where none existed, passing safely by them all, coming into a
+strange region of the river, she began to feel the exhilaration of
+venturous voyagers close upon unknown shores; the rush of the river and
+the rustle of the forest were all the sounds she heard; she was speeding
+alone through the darks of space to find another world. But, with time,
+a more material sensation called her back,&mdash;her feet were wet. What if
+the scow should founder! She flew to the old sun-dried gourd, and bailed
+away again till her arms were tired. When she dared leave the gourd, she
+was more calmly floating along and piercing an avenue of mighty gloom;
+the river-banks had reared themselves two walls of stone, and over them
+a hanging forest showed the heavens only like a scarf of stars caught
+upon its tree-tops and shaking in the wind. The deep loneliness made
+Flor tremble; the water that upbuoyed her was blackness itself; the way
+before her was impenetrable; far up above her opened that rent of
+sky,&mdash;so far, that she, a little dark waif among such tremendous
+shadows, was all unguessed by any guardian eye.</p>
+
+<p>But not for heaven itself bodily before her would she have turned about,
+she who was all but free. The thought of that rose in her heart like
+strong wings beating onward;&mdash;feverishly she followed.</p>
+
+<p>Flor perceived now that the old scow was being borne along with a
+strong, steady-motion, unlike its first fitful drift; it brought her
+heart to her throat,&mdash;for just so, it seemed to her, would a torrent set
+that was hastening to plunge over the side of the earth. She remembered,
+with a start of cold horror, Zo&euml;'s dim tradition of a fall far off in
+the river. She had never seen one, but Zo&euml; had stamped its terrors
+deeply. Still down in the gloom itself she could see nothing but the
+slowly lightening sky overhead, the drowning stars, the rosy flush upon
+the dark old tips feathering against a dewy grayness that was like
+powdered light. But gradually she heard what conquered all necessity of
+seeing,&mdash;heard a continuous murmurous sound that filled all the air and
+grew to be a sullen roar. It seemed like the dread murmur from the world
+beyond the grave, the roar in earthly ears of that awful silence. Flor's
+quick senses were not long at fault. She seized her poles, and with all
+her might endeavored to push in towards the side and out of the main
+channel. Straws would have availed nearly as much; far faster than she
+went in shore she drove down stream. It was getting to be morning
+twilight all below; a soft, damp wind was blowing in her face; in the
+distance she could see, like the changing outline of a phantom, a low
+cloud of mist, wavering now on this side, now on that, but forever
+rising and falling and hovering before her. She knew what it was. If she
+could only bring her boat to that bank,&mdash;precipice though it was,&mdash;there
+must be some broken piece to catch by! She toiled with all her puny
+strength, and the great stream laughed at her and roared on. Suddenly,
+what her wildest efforts failed to do, the river did itself,&mdash;dividing
+into twenty currents for its plunge, some one of the eddies caught the
+old scow in its teeth and sent it whirling along the inmost current of
+all, close upon the shore. The rock, whose cleft the river had
+primevally chosen, was here more broken than above; various edges
+protruded maddeningly as Flor skimmed by almost within reach. Twice she
+plucked at them and missed. One flat shelf, over which the thin water
+slipped like a sheet of molten glass, remained<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_487" id="Page_487">[Pg 487]</a></span> and caught her eye; she
+was no longer cold or stiff with terror, but frantic to save herself; it
+was the only chance, the last; shooting by, she sprang forward, pole in
+hand, touched it, fell, caught a ledge with her hands while the fierce
+flow of the water lifted her off her feet, scrambled up breathlessly and
+was safe, while the scow swept past, two flashing furlongs, poised a few
+moments after on the brink of the fall, went majestically over, and came
+up to the surface below in pieces.</p>
+
+<p>Flor wrung her hands in dismay. She had not understood her situation
+before. There was no escape now, it seemed,&mdash;not even to return. Nothing
+was possible save starving to death on this ledge,&mdash;and after that, the
+vultures. She sat there for a little while in a kind of stupor. She saw
+the light falling slowly down, as it had fallen millions of mornings
+before, and bringing out all blue and purple shadows on the wet old
+rock; she saw the current ever hurrying by to join the tumult of the
+cataract; she heard the deep, sweet music of the waters like a noisy
+dream in her ears. With the shock of her wreck coming at the instant
+when she fancied herself so swiftly and securely speeding on towards
+safety and freedom, she felt indifferent to all succeeding fate. What if
+she did die? who was she? what was she? nothing but an atom. What odds,
+after all? The solution of her soliloquy was, that, before the first ray
+of sunshine reached down and smote the dark torrent into glancing
+emerald, she began to feel ravenously hungry, and found it a great deal
+of odds, after all. She rose to her feet, grasping cautiously at the
+slippery rock, and searched about her. There was another ledge close at
+hand, corresponding to the one on which she stood; she crept forward and
+transferred herself, with an infinitude of tremors, from this to that;
+there was a foothold just beyond; she gained it. Up and down and all
+along there were other projections, just enough for a hand, a foot: a
+wet and terrible pathway; to follow it might be death, to neglect it
+certainly was. What had she danced for all her days, if it had not made
+her sure and nimble footed? Under her the foam leaped up, the spectral
+mist crept like an icy breath, the spray sprinkled all about her,
+swinging herself along from ledge to ledge, from jag to jag, like a
+spider on a viewless thread. Now she hung just above the fall, looking
+down and longing to leap, with nothing but a shining laurel-branch
+between her and the boiling pits below; now, at last, a green hillside
+sloped to the water's edge, sparkling across all its solitude with ten
+thousand drops of dew, a broad, blue morning heaven bent and shone
+overhead, and having raced the river in the moment's light-heartedness
+of glee at her good hap, she sat some rods below, looking up at the fall
+and dipping her bleeding and blistered feet in and out of the cool and
+rapid-running river.</p>
+
+<p>What was there now to do? To go back,&mdash;to go back,&mdash;not if she were torn
+by lions! That was as impossible for her as to reverse a fiat of
+creation. God had said to her,&mdash;"Let there be light." How could she,
+then, return to darkness? To keep along on land,&mdash;it might be weeks
+before she reached the quarter of the gunboats,&mdash;she would be seized as
+a stray, and lodged in jail, and sold for whom it might concern. But
+with her scow gone to pieces, what other thing was there to do? So she
+sat looking up at the spurting cascades, with their horns of silver
+leaping into the light, and all the clear brown and beryl rush of their
+crystalline waters, and longing for her scow. If she had so much as the
+bit of bark on which the squirrels crossed the river! She looked again
+about her for relief. The rainbow at the foot of all the falls, in its
+luminous, steady arch, seemed a bridge solid enough for even her little
+black feet, had one side of the stream been any surer haven than the
+other; and as she sought out its bases, her eye lighted on something
+curiously like a weed swaying up and down. She picked her way to it, and
+found it wedged where she could loosen it,&mdash;two planks still nailed to a
+stout crossbar.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_488" id="Page_488">[Pg 488]</a></span> She floated it, and held it fast a moment. What if she
+trusted to it,&mdash;with neither sail nor rudder, as before, but now with
+neither oar nor pole? On shore, for her there were only ravening wolves;
+waterfalls were no worse than they, and perhaps there were no more
+waterfalls. She stepped gingerly upon the fragment, seated and balanced
+herself, paddled with her two hands, and thought to slip away. In spite
+of everything, a kind of exultation bubbled up within her,&mdash;she felt as
+if she were defying Destiny itself.</p>
+
+<p>When, however, Flor intrusted herself to the stream, the stream received
+the trust and seemed inclined to keep it; for there she stayed: the
+planks tilted up and down, the water washed over her, but there were the
+falls at nearly the same distance as when she embarked, and there they
+stayed as well. The water, too, was no more fresh and sweet, but had a
+salt and brackish taste. The sun was nearly overhead, and she was in an
+agony of apprehension before she saw the falls slide slowly back, and in
+one of a fresh succession of wonders, understanding nothing of it, she
+found herself, with a strange sucking heave under her, falling on the
+ebb-tide as before she had fallen on the mountain-current.</p>
+
+<p>Gentle undulations of friendly hills seemed now to creep by; and through
+their openings she caught glimpses of cotton-fields. There was a wicked
+relish in her thoughts, as she pictured the dusky laborers at work
+there, and she gliding by unseen in the idle sunshine. She passed again
+between high banks of red earth, scored by land-slides, with springs
+oozing out half-way up, and now and then clad in a mantle of vivid
+growth and color,&mdash;a thicket of blossoming pomegranate darkening on a
+sunburst of creamy dogwood, or a wild fig-tree sending its roots down to
+drink, with a sweet-scented and gorgeous epiphyte weaving a flowery
+enchantment about-them, and making the whole atmosphere reel with
+richness. But all this verdant beauty, the lush luxuriance of
+grape-vines, of dark myrtle-masses, of swinging curtains of convolvuli
+almost brushing her head as she floated by,&mdash;nothing of this was new to
+Flor, nothing precious; she could have given all the beauty of earth and
+heaven for a crust of bread just then. She thought of the plantation
+with a dry sob, but would not turn her face. She could not move much,
+indeed, her position was so ticklish; hardy wretch as she was, she had
+already become faint and famished: she contrived, resting her arms on
+the crossbar, at last, to lay her head upon them; and thus lying,
+perpetually bathed by the soft, warm dip and rise of the water, the pain
+of hunger left her, and she saw the world waft by like a dream.</p>
+
+<p>Slowly the evening began to fall. Flor marked the bright waters dim and
+put on a bloomy purple along which rosy and golden shadows wandered and
+mingled, stars looked timidly up from beneath her, and just over her
+shoulder, as if all the daylight left had gathered in that one little
+curved line, lay the suspicion of the tenderest new moon, like some
+boatman of the skies essaying to encourage her with his apparition as he
+floated lightly down the west. Flor paid heed to the spectacle in its
+splendid quiet but briefly; her eyes were fixed on a great trail of
+passion-flowers that blew out a gale of sweetness from their broad blue
+disks. She had reached that hanging branch, lavishly blossoming here on
+the wilderness, and had hung upon the tide beneath it for a while, till
+she found herself gently moving back again; and now she swung slightly
+to and fro, neither making nor losing headway, and, fond of such
+sensuous delights, half content to lie thus and do nothing but breathe
+the delicious odor stealing towards her, and resting in broad airy
+swaths, it seemed, upon the bosom of the stream around her. By-and-by,
+when the great blue star, that last night at the zenith seemed to
+suspend all the tented drapery of the sky, hung there large and lovely
+again, Flor, gazing up at it with a confused sense of passion-flowers in
+heaven, half woke to find herself sliding down stream<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_489" id="Page_489">[Pg 489]</a></span> at last in
+earnest. Her brain was very light and giddy; all her powers of
+perception were momentarily heightened; she took notice of her seesawing
+upon the ebb and flow, and understood that washing up and down the
+shores, a mere piece of driftwood, life would long have left her ere she
+attained the river's mouth, if she were not stranded by the way. The
+branch of a cedar-tree came dallying by with that, brought down from
+above the falls; she half rose, and caught at it, and fell back, but she
+kept hold of it by just a twig, and, fatigued with the exertion, drowsed
+away awhile. Waking again, after a little, her fingers still fast upon
+it, she drew it over, fixed it upright as she could, and spread her
+petticoat about it at the risk of utter capsize. The soft sweet wind
+beat against the sail as happily as if it had been Cleopatra's weft of
+purple silk, and carried her on, while she lay back, one arm around her
+jury-mast, and half indifferently unconscious again. She had meant, on
+reaching the gunboats,&mdash;ah, inconceivable bliss!&mdash;to win her way with
+her feet; with willowy graces and eloquent pantomime, to have danced
+along the deck and into favor trippingly: now, if she should have
+strength enough left to fall on her knees, it would be strange. She
+clung to the crossbar in a little while from blind habit; the rest of
+her body seemed light and powerless. She was neither asleep nor awake
+now, suffering nothing save occasionally a wild flutter of hope which
+was joy and anguish together; but all things began mingling in her mind
+in a species of delirium while she gave them attention, afterwards slid
+by blank of all meaning but beauty. The lofty cypresses on the edge
+above loomed into obelisks, and stood like shafts of ebony against a
+glow of sunrise that stirred down deep in the night; dew-clouds, it
+seemed, hung on them, and lifted and lowered when their veils of moss
+waved here and there; the glistering laurel-leaves shivered in a network
+of light and shade like imprisoned spirits troubling to be free; but
+where the great magnolias stood were massed the white wings of angels
+fanning forth fragrances untold and heavenly, and one by one slowly
+revealing themselves in the dawn of another day. It seemed as if great
+and awful spirits must be leading this little being into light and
+freedom.</p>
+
+<p>So the river lapsed along, and the sun blazed, and a torture of thirst
+came and went as it had come and gone before; and sometimes swiftly,
+sometimes slowly, the veering winds and the pendulous tides carried the
+wreck and its burden along. Flor had planned, before she started, that
+all her progress should be made by night; by day she would haul up among
+the tall rushes or under the lee of some stump or rock, and so escape
+strange sail and spying eyes. But there had been no need of this, for no
+other boat had passed up or down the river since she sailed. If there
+had, she could no more have feared it. She stole by a high deserted
+garden, the paling broken half away. A tardy almond-tree was stirring
+its tower of bloom in the sunshine up there; oranges were reddening on
+an overhanging bough, whose wreaths of snowy sweetness made the air a
+passionate delight; a luscious fruit dropped, with all its royal gloss,
+into the river beside her, and she could not put out a hand to catch it.
+She saw now all that passed, but no longer with any afterthoughts of
+reference to herself; so sights might slip across the retina of a dead
+man's eye; her identity seemed fading from her, as from some substance
+on the point of dissolution into the wide universe. She felt like one
+who, under an &aelig;sthetic influence, seems to himself careering through
+mid-air, conscious only of motion and vanishing forms. Cultured uplands
+and thick woods peopled with melodies all stole by, mere picture; the
+long snake of the river crept through green meadowy shores haunted by
+the cluck and clutter of the marsh-hen; from a bluff of the bank broke a
+blaze of fire and a yelping roar, and something slapped and skipped
+along the water,&mdash;a ball from a Rebel battery to bring the strange craft
+to,&mdash;others<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_490" id="Page_490">[Pg 490]</a></span> followed and danced like demons through the hissing tide
+that rocked under her and plunged up and down, tilting and turning and
+half drowning the wreck. Flor looked at them all with wide eyes, at the
+battery and at the bluff, and went by without any more sensation than
+that dazed quiet in which, at the time, she would have gone down to
+death with the soft waters laying their warm weight on her head, not
+even thanking Fortune that in giving her a slippery plank gave her
+something to elude either canister or catapult. Occasionally she felt a
+pain, a strange parched pain; it burned awhile, and left her once more
+oblivious. She slept a little, by fits and starts; sometimes the very
+stillness stirred her. She listened and heard the turtle plumping down
+into the stream, now and then the little fishes leaping and plashing,
+the eels slipping in and out among the reeds and sedges at the side; far
+away in the broad marshes, that, bathed in dim vapor, now lay all about
+her, the cry of a bittern boomed; she saw a pair of herons flapping
+inland over the gray swell of the water; there were some great purple
+phantoms, darkly imagined monsters; looming near at hand:&mdash;all the
+phantasmagoria drifted by,&mdash;and then, caught in the currents playing
+forever by noon or night round the low edges of sand-bars and islets,
+she was sweeping out to sea like chaff.</p>
+
+<p>The sun was going down, a mere redness in the curdling fleecy haze; the
+weltering seas rose and fell in broad sheets of burnished silver, the
+monotone of their music followed them, a cool salt wind blew over them
+and freshened them for storm. Flor rose on her arm and looked back,&mdash;the
+breeze roused her; pain and fear and hope rose with her and looked back
+too. Eager, feverish, fierce, recollecting and desiring and imprecating,
+her dry lips parted for a shriek that the dryer throat had at first no
+power to utter. In such wild longing pangs it seemed her heart would
+burst as it beat. The low land, the great gunboats, all were receding,
+and she was washing out to sea, a weed.&mdash;Well, then, wash!</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The stem of the boat rose lightly, riding over the rollers; the sturdy
+arms kept flashing stroke; the great gulfs gaped for a life, no matter
+whose; night would darken down on them soon;&mdash;pull with a will!</p>
+
+<p>They heard her voice as they drew near: she had found it again, singing,
+as the swan sings his death-song, loud and clear,&mdash;singing to herself
+some song of her old happy dancing-days, while the spray powdered over
+her and one broad wave lifted and tossed her on to the next,&mdash;no note of
+sorrow in the song, and no regret.</p>
+
+<p>It was but brief delay beside her; then they pulled back, the wind
+piping behind them,&mdash;nearer to that purple cloud with its black plume of
+smoke, up the side and over; all the white faces crowding round her,
+pallid blots; one dark face smiling on her like Sarp's; friendship and
+succor everywhere about her; and over her, blowing out broadly upon the
+stormy wind, that flag whose starry shadow nowhere shelters a slave.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_491" id="Page_491">[Pg 491]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="ABRAHAM_LINCOLN" id="ABRAHAM_LINCOLN"></a>ABRAHAM LINCOLN.</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Summer</span>, 1865.</h3>
+
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Dead is the roll of the drums,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And the distant thunders die,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">They fade in the far-off sky;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And a lovely summer comes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Like the smile of Him on high.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Lulled the storm and the onset.<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Earth lies in a sunny swoon;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Stiller splendor of noon,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Softer glory of sunset,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Milder starlight and moon!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">For the kindly Seasons love us;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">They smile over trench and clod,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">(Where we left the bravest of us,)&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">There's a brighter green of the sod,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And a holier calm above us<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">In the bless&eacute;d Blue of God.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The roar and ravage were vain;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And Nature, that never yields,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Is busy with sun and rain<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">At her old sweet work again<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">On the lonely battle-fields.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">How the tall white daisies grow<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Where the grim artillery rolled!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">(Was it only a moon ago?<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">It seems a century old,)&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And the bee hums in the clover,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">As the pleasant June comes on;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Aye, the wars are all over,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">But our good Father is gone.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">There was tumbling of traitor fort,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Flaming of traitor fleet,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Lighting of city and port,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Clasping in square and street.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">There was thunder of mine and gun,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Cheering by mast and tent,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When&mdash;his dread work all done,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And his high fame full won&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Died the Good President.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">In his quiet chair he sate,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Pure of malice or guile,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Stainless of fear or hate,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And there played a pleasant smile<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_492" id="Page_492">[Pg 492]</a></span>
+<span class="i0">On the rough and careworn face;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">For his heart was all the while<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">On means of mercy and grace.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The brave old Flag drooped o'er him,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">(A fold in the hard hand lay,)&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">He looked, perchance, on the play,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But the scene was a shadow before him,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">For his thoughts were far away.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'Twas but the morn, (yon fearful<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Death-shade, gloomy and vast,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Lifting slowly at last,)<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">His household heard him say,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">"'Tis long since I've been so cheerful,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">So light of heart as to-day."<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'Twas dying, the long dread clang,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">But, or ever the bless&eacute;d ray<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Of peace could brighten to-day,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Murder stood by the way,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Treason struck home his fang!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">One throb&mdash;and, without a pang,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">That pure soul passed away.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Idle, in this our blindness,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To marvel we cannot see<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Wherefore such things should be,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or to question Infinite Kindness<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Of this or of that Decree,<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Or to fear lest Nature bungle,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">That in certain ways she errs:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The cobra in the jungle,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">The crotalus in the sod,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Evil and good are hers;&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Murderers and torturers!<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Ye, too, were made by God.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">All slowly heaven is nighing,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Needs that offence must come;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ever the Old Wrong dying<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Will sting, in the death-coil lying,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And hiss till its fork be dumb.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">But dare deny no further,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Black-hearted, brazen-cheeked!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ye on whose lips yon murther<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">These fifty moons hath reeked,&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">From the wretched scenic dunce,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Long a-hungered to rouse<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A Nation's heart for the nonce,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">(Hugging his hell, so that once<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">He might yet bring down the house!)&mdash;<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_493" id="Page_493">[Pg 493]</a></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">From the commons, gross and simple,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Of a blind and bloody land,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">(Long fed on venomous lies!)&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To the horrid heart and hand<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">That sumless murder dyes,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The hand that drew the wimple<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Over those cruel eyes.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Pass on,&mdash;your deeds are done,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Forever sets your sun;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Vainly ye lived or died,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">'Gainst Freedom and the Laws,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And your memory and your cause<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Shall haunt o'er the trophied tide<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Like some Pirate Caravel floating<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Dreadful, adrift&mdash;whose crew<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From her yard-arms dangle rotting,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The old Horror of the blue.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Avoid ye,&mdash;let the morrow<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Sentence or mercy see.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Pass to your place: our sorrow<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Is all too dark to borrow<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">One shade from such as ye.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">But if one, with merciful eyes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From the forgiving skies<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Looks, 'mid our gloom, to see<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yonder where Murder lies,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Stripped of the woman guise,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And waiting the doom,&mdash;'tis he.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Kindly Spirit!&mdash;Ah, when did treason<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Bid such a generous nature cease,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Mild by temper and strong by reason,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">But ever leaning to love and peace?<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">A head how sober! a heart how spacious!<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">A manner equal with high or low;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Rough, but gentle; uncouth, but gracious;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And still inclining to lips of woe.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Patient when saddest, calm when sternest,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Grieved when rigid for justice' sake;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Given to jest, yet ever in earnest,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">If aught of right or truth were at stake.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Simple of heart, yet shrewd therewith;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Slow to resolve, but firm to hold;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Still with parable and with myth<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Seasoning truth, like Them of old;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Aptest humor and quaintest pith!<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">(Still we smile o'er the tales he told.)<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_494" id="Page_494">[Pg 494]</a></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And if, sometimes, in saddest stress,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">That mind, over-meshed by fate,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">(Ringed round with treason and hate,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And guiding the State by guess,)<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Could doubt and could hesitate,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who, alas! had done less<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">In the world's most deadly strait?<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">But how true to the Common Cause!<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Of his task how unweary!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">How hard he worked, how good he was,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">How kindly and cheery!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">How, while it marked redouble<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The howls and hisses and sneers,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That great heart bore our trouble<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Through all these terrible years,&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And, cooling passion with state,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And ever counting the cost,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Kept the Twin World-Robbers in wait<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Till the time for their clutch was lost!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">How much he cared for the State,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">How little for praise or pelf!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A man too simply great<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To scheme for his proper self.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">But in mirth that strong heart rested<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">From its strife with the false and violent,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A jester!&mdash;So Henry jested,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">So jested William the Silent.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Orange, shocking the dull<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">With careless conceit and quip,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yet holding the dumb heart full<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">With Holland's life on his lip!<a name="FNanchor_D_4" id="FNanchor_D_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_D_4" class="fnanchor">[D]</a><br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Navarre, bonhomme and pleasant,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Pitying the poor man's lot,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Wishing that every peasant<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">A chicken had in his pot;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Feeding the stubborn bourgeois,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Though Paris still held out;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Holding the League in awe,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">But jolly with all about.<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_495" id="Page_495">[Pg 495]</a></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Out of an o'erflowed fulness<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Those deep hearts seemed too light,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">(And so 'twas, murder's dulness<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Was set with sullener spite.)<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Yet whoso might pierce the guise<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Of mirth in the man we mourn<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Would mark, and with grieved surprise,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">All the great soul had borne,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In the piteous lines, and the kind, sad eyes<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">So dreadfully wearied and worn.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And we trusted (the last dread page<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Once turned of our Doomsday Scroll)<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To have seen him, sunny of soul,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In a cheery, grand old age.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">But, Father, 'tis well with thee!<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And since ever, when God draws nigh,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Some grief for the good must be,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">'Twas well, even so to die,&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'Mid the thunder of Treason's fall,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The yielding of haughty town,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The crashing of cruel wall,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The trembling of tyrant crown!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The ringing of hearth and pavement<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To the clash of falling chains,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The centuries of enslavement<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Dead, with their blood-bought gains!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And through trouble weary and long<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Well hadst thou seen the way,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Leaving the State so strong<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">It did not reel for a day;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And even in death couldst give<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">A token for Freedom's strife,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A proof how republics live,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And not by a single life,<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">But the Right Divine of man,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And the many, trained to be free,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And none, since the world began,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Ever was mourned like thee.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Dost thou feel it, O noble Heart!<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">(So grieved and so wronged below,)<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From the rest wherein thou art?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Do they see it, those patient eyes?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Is there heed in the happy skies<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">For tokens of world-wide woe?<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_496" id="Page_496">[Pg 496]</a></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The Land's great lamentations,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The mighty mourning of cannon,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">The myriad flags half-mast,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The late remorse of the nations,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Grief from Volga to Shannon!<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">(Now they know thee at last.)<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">How, from gray Niagara's shore<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To Canaveral's surfy shoal,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From the rough Atlantic roar<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To the long Pacific roll,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">For bereavement and for dole,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Every cottage wears its weed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">White as thine own pure soul,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And black as the traitor deed!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">How, under a nation's pall,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The dust so dear in our sight<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">To its home on the prairie passed,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The leagues of funeral,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The myriads, morn and night,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Pressing to look their last!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Nor alone the State's Eclipse;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">But how tears in hard eyes gather,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And on rough and bearded lips,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of the regiments and the ships,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">"Oh, our dear Father!"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And methinks of all the million<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">That looked on the dark dead face,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">'Neath its sable-plumed pavilion,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The crone of a humbler race<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Is saddest of all to think on,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And the old swart lips that said,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sobbing, "Abraham Lincoln!<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Oh, he is dead, he is dead!"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Hush! let our heavy souls<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To-day be glad; for agen<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The stormy music swells and rolls<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Stirring the hearts of men.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And under the Nation's Dome,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">They've guarded so well and long,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Our boys come marching home,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Two hundred thousand strong.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">All in the pleasant month of May,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">With war-worn colors and drums,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Still, through the livelong summer's day,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Regiment, regiment comes.<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_497" id="Page_497">[Pg 497]</a></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Like the tide, yesty and barmy,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">That sets on a wild lee-shore,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Surge the ranks of an army<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Never reviewed before!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Who shall look on the like agen,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Or see such host of the brave?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A mighty River of marching men<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Rolls the Capital through,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Rank on rank, and wave on wave,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Of bayonet-crested blue!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">How the chargers neigh and champ,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">(Their riders weary of camp,)<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">With curvet and with caracole!&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The cavalry comes with thundrous tramp,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And the cannons heavily roll.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And ever, flowery and gay,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The Staff sweeps on in a spray<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Of tossing forelocks and manes;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But each bridle-arm has a weed<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of funeral, black as the steed<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">That fiery Sheridan reins.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Grandest of mortal sights<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The sun-browned ranks to view,&mdash;-<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The Colors ragg'd in a hundred fights,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And the dusty Frocks of Blue!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And all day, mile on mile,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With cheer, and waving, and smile,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The war-worn legions defile<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Where the nation's noblest stand;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the Great Lieutenant looks on,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">With the Flower of a rescued Land,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For the terrible work is done,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the Good Fight is won<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">For God and for Fatherland.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">So, from the fields they win,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Our men are marching home,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">A million are marching home!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To the cannon's thundering din,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And banners on mast and dome,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the ships come sailing in<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">With all their ensigns dight,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">As erst for a great sea-fight.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Let every color fly,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Every pennon flaunt in pride;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Wave, Starry Flag, on high!<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_498" id="Page_498">[Pg 498]</a></span>
+<span class="i0">Float in the sunny sky,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Stream o'er the stormy tide!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For every stripe of stainless hue,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And every star in the field of blue,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ten thousand of the brave and true<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Have laid them down and died.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And in all our pride to-day<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">We think, with a tender pain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of those so far away,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">They will not come home again.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And our boys had fondly thought,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To-day, in marching by,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From the ground so dearly bought,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the fields so bravely fought,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To have met their Father's eye.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">But they may not see him in place,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Nor their ranks be seen of him;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We look for the well-known face,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And the splendor is strangely dim.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Perished?&mdash;who was it said<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Our Leader had passed away?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Dead? Our President dead?&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">He has not died for a day!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">We mourn for a little breath,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Such as, late or soon, dust yields;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But the Dark Flower of Death<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Blooms in the fadeless fields.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">We looked on a cold, still brow:<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">But Lincoln could yet survive;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">He never was more alive,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Never nearer than now.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">For the pleasant season found him,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Guarded by faithful hands,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">In the fairest of Summer Lands:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With his own brave Staff around him,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">There our President stands.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">There they are all at his side,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The noble hearts and true,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">That did all men might do,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Then slept, with their swords, and died.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Of little the storm has reft us<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">But the brave and kindly clay<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">('Tis but dust where Lander left us,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And but turf where Lyon lay).<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_499" id="Page_499">[Pg 499]</a></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">There's Winthrop, true to the end,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And Ellsworth of long ago,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">(First fair young head laid low!)<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There 's Baker, the brave old friend,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And Douglas, the friendly foe:<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">(Baker, that still stood up<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">When 'twas death on either hand:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">"'Tis a soldier's part to stoop,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">But the Senator must stand.")<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The heroes gather and form:&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">There's Cameron, with his scars,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sedgwick, of siege and storm,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And Mitchell, that joined his stars.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Winthrop, of sword and pen,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Wadsworth, with silver hair,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Mansfield, ruler of men,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And brave McPherson are there.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Birney, who led so long,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Abbott, born to command,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Elliott the bold, and Strong,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Who fell on the hard-fought strand.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Lytle, soldier and bard,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And the Ellets, sire and son,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ransom, all grandly scarred,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And Redfield, no more on guard,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">(But Alatoona is won!)<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Reno, of pure desert,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Kearney, with heart of flame,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And Russell, that hid his hurt<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Till the final death-bolt came.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Terrill, dead where he fought,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Wallace, that would not yield,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And Sumner, who vainly sought<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">A grave on the foughten field<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">(But died ere the end he saw,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">With years and battles outworn).<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There's Harmon of Kenesaw,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And Ulric Dahlgren, and Shaw,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">That slept with his Hope Forlorn.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Bayard, that knew not fear,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">(True as the knight of yore,)<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And Putnam, and Paul Revere,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Worthy the names they bore.<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_500" id="Page_500">[Pg 500]</a></span>
+<span class="i0">Allen, who died for others,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Bryan, of gentle fame,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the brave New-England brothers<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">That have left us Lowell's name.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Home, at last, from the wars,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Stedman, the staunch and mild,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And Janeway, our hero-child,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Home, with his fifteen scars!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">There's Porter, ever in front,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">True son of a sea-king sire,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And Christian Foote, and Dupont<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">(Dupont, who led his ships<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Rounding the first Ellipse<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Of thunder and of fire).<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">There's Ward, with his brave death-wounds,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And Cummings, of spotless name,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And Smith, who hurtled his rounds<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">When deck and hatch were aflame;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Wainwright, steadfast and true,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Rodgers, of brave sea-blood,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And Craven, with ship and crew<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Sunk in the salt sea flood.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And, a little later to part,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Our Captain, noble and dear&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">(Did they deem thee, then, austere?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Drayton!&mdash;O pure and kindly heart!<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Thine is the seaman's tear.)<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">All such,&mdash;and many another,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">(Ah, list how long to name!)<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That stood like brother by brother,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And died on the field of fame.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And around&mdash;(for there can cease<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">This earthly trouble)&mdash;they throng,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The friends that had passed in peace,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The foes that have seen their wrong.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">(But, a little from the rest,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">With sad eyes looking down,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And brows of softened frown,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With stern arms on the chest,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Are two, standing abreast,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Stonewall and Old John Brown.)<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">But the stainless and the true,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">These by their President stand,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To look on his last review,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Or march with the old command.<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_501" id="Page_501">[Pg 501]</a></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And lo, from a thousand fields,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">From all the old battle-haunts,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A greater Army than Sherman wields,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">A grander Review than Grant's!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Gathered home from the grave,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Risen from sun and rain,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Rescued from wind and wave,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Out of the stormy main,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The Legions of our Brave<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Are all in their lines again!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Many a stout Corps that went,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Full-ranked, from camp and tent,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And brought back a brigade;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Many a brave regiment,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">That mustered only a squad.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The lost battalions,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">That, when the fight went wrong,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Stood and died at their guns,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The stormers steady and strong,<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">With their best blood that bought<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Scarp, and ravelin, and wall,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The companies that fought<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Till a corporal's guard was all.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Many a valiant crew,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">That passed in battle and wreck,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ah, so faithful and true!<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">They died on the bloody deck,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They sank in the soundless blue.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">All the loyal and bold<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">That lay on a soldier's bier,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The stretchers borne to the rear,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The hammocks lowered to the hold.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The shattered wreck we hurried,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">In death-fight, from deck and port,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The Blacks that Wagner buried,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">That died in the Bloody Fort!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Comrades of camp and mess,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Left, as they lay, to die,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In the battle's sorest stress,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">When the storm of fight swept by:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They lay in the Wilderness,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Ah, where did they not lie?<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">In the tangled swamp they lay,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">They lay so still on the sward!&mdash;<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_502" id="Page_502">[Pg 502]</a></span>
+<span class="i0">They rolled in the sick-bay,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Moaning their lives away;&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">They flushed in the fevered ward.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">They rotted in Libby yonder,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">They starved in the foul stockade,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Hearing afar the thunder<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Of the Union cannonade!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">But the old wounds all are healed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And the dungeoned limbs are free,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The Blue Frocks rise from the field,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The Blue Jackets out of the sea.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">They've 'scaped from the torture-den,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">They've broken the bloody sod,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They're all come to life agen!&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The Third of a Million men<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">That died for Thee and for God!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">A tenderer green than May<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The Eternal Season wears,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The blue of our summer's day<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Is dim and pallid to theirs,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The Horror faded away,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And 'twas heaven all unawares!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Tents on the Infinite Shore!<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Flags in the azuline sky,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sails on the seas once more!<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To-day, in the heaven on high,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All under arms once more!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The troops are all in their lines,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The guidons flutter and play;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But every bayonet shines,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">For all must march to-day.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">What lofty pennons flaunt?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What mighty echoes haunt,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">As of great guns, o'er the main?<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Hark to the sound again!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The Congress is all-ataunt!<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The Cumberland's manned again!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">All the ships and their men<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Are in line of battle to-day,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All at quarters, as when<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Their last roll thundered away,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All at their guns, as then,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">For the Fleet salutes to-day.<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_503" id="Page_503">[Pg 503]</a></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The armies, have broken camp<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">On the vast and sunny plain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The drums are rolling again;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With steady, measured tramp,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">They're marching all again.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">With alignment firm and solemn,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Once again they form<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In mighty square and column,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">But never for charge and storm.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The Old Flag they died under<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Floats above them on the shore,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And on the great ships yonder<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The ensigns dip once more,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And once again the thunder<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Of the thirty guns and four!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">In solid platoons of steel,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Under heaven's triumphal arch,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The long lines break and wheel;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And the word is, "Forward, march!"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The colors ripple o'erhead,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The drums roll up to the sky,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And with martial time and tread<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The regiments all pass by,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The ranks of our faithful Dead,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Meeting their President's eye.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">With a soldier's quiet pride<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">They smile o'er the perished pain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">For their anguish was not vain,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For thee, O Father, we died!<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And we did not die in vain.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">March on, your last brave mile!<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Salute him, Star and Lace,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Form round him, rank and file,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And look on the kind, rough face;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But the quaint and homely smile<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Has a glory and a grace<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">It never had known erewhile,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Never, in time and space.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Close round him, hearts of pride!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Press near him, side by side,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Our Father is not alone!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For the Holy Right ye died,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And Christ, the Crucified,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Waits to welcome his own.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_D_4" id="Footnote_D_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_D_4"><span class="label">[D]</span></a> "His temperament was cheerful. At table, the pleasures of
+which in moderation were his only relaxation, he was always animated and
+merry; and this jocoseness was partly natural, partly intentional. In
+the darkest hours of his country's trial, he affected a serenity he was
+far from feeling; so that his apparent gayety at momentous epochs was
+even censured by dullards, who could not comprehend its philosophy, nor
+applaud the flippancy of William the Silent. He went through life
+bearing the load of a people's sorrows with a smiling face."&mdash;Motley's
+<i>Rise of the Dutch Republic</i>.
+</p><p>
+Perhaps a lively national sense of humor is one of the surest exponents
+of advanced civilization. Certainly a grim sullenness and fierceness
+have been the leading traits of the Rebellion for Slavery; while
+Freedom, like a Brave at the stake, has gone through her long agony with
+a smile and a jest ever on her lips.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_504" id="Page_504">[Pg 504]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="REVIEWS_AND_LITERARY_NOTICES" id="REVIEWS_AND_LITERARY_NOTICES"></a>REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.</h2>
+
+
+<p><i>Letters to Various Persons</i>, By <span class="smcap">Henry D. Thoreau</span>. Boston:
+Ticknor &amp; Fields.</p>
+
+<p>The prose of Thoreau is daily winning recognition as possessing some of
+the very highest qualities of thought and utterance, in a degree
+scarcely rivalled in contemporary literature. In spite of whim and
+frequent over-refining, and the entire omission of many important
+aspects of human life, these wondrous merits exercise their charm, and
+we value everything which lets us into the workshop of so rare a mind.
+These letters, most of which were addressed to a single confidential
+friend, give us Thoreau's thoughts in undress, and there has been no
+previous book in which we came so near him. It is like engraving the
+studies of an artist,&mdash;studies many of which were found too daring or
+difficult for final execution, and which must be shown in their original
+shape or not at all. To any one who was more artist than thinker this
+exhibition would be doing wrong; but to one like Thoreau, more thinker
+than artist, it is an act of justice.</p>
+
+<p>The public, being always eager for the details of personal life, and
+therefore especially hungry for private letters, will hardly make this
+distinction. All is held to be right which gives us more personality in
+print. One can fancy the exasperation of a gossip, however, on opening
+these profound and philosophic leaves. There is almost no private
+history in them; and even of Thoreau's beloved science of Natural
+History, very little. He does, indeed, begin one letter with "Dear
+Mother, ... Pray have you the seventeen-year locust in Concord?" which
+recalls Mendelssohn's birthday letter to his mother, opening with two
+bars of music. But even such mundane matters as these occur rarely in
+the book, which is chiefly made up of pure thought, and that of the
+highest and often of the most subtile quality.</p>
+
+<p>Thoreau had, in literature as in life, a code of his own, which, if
+sometimes lax where others were stringent, was always stringent in
+higher matters, where others were lax. Even the friendship of Emerson
+could not coerce him into that careful elaboration which gives dignity
+and sometimes a certain artistic monotony to the works of our great
+essayist. Emerson never wilfully leaves a point unguarded, never allows
+himself to be caught in undress. Thoreau spurns this punctiliousness,
+and thus impairs his average execution; while for the same reason he
+attains, in favored moments, a diction more flowing and a more lyric
+strain than his teacher ever allows himself, at least in prose. He also
+secures, through this daring, the occasional expression of more delicate
+as well as more fantastic thoughts. And there is an interesting passage
+in these letters where he rather unexpectedly recognizes the dignity of
+literary art as art, and states very finely its range of power. "To look
+at literature,&mdash;how many fine thoughts has every man had! how few fine
+thoughts are expressed! Yet we never have a fantasy so subtile and
+ethereal, but that <i>talent merely</i>, with more resolution and faithful
+persistency, after a thousand failures, might fix and engrave it in
+distinct and enduring words, and we should see that our dreams are the
+solidest facts that we know." The Italics are his own, and the glimpse
+at his literary method is very valuable.</p>
+
+<p>One sees also, in these letters, how innate in him was that grand
+simplicity of spiritual attitude, compared with which most confessions
+of faith seem to show something hackneyed and second-hand. It seems the
+first resumption&mdash;unless here again we must link his name with
+Emerson's&mdash;of that great strain of thought of which Epictetus the slave
+and Marcus Aurelius Antoninus the sovereign were the last previous
+examples. Amid the general <i>Miserere</i>, here is one hymn of lofty cheer.
+There is neither weak conceit nor weak contrition, but gratitude for
+existence, and a sublime aim. "My actual life," he says, "is a fact in
+view of which I have no occasion to congratulate myself; but for my
+faith and aspiration I have respect. It is from these that I speak.
+Every man's position is, in fact, too simple to be described.... I am
+simply what I am, or I begin to be that.... I know that I am. I know
+that another is who knows more than I, who takes interest in me, whose
+creature, and yet whose kindred, in one sense, am I. I know that the
+enterprise is worthy. I know that things work well. I have heard no bad
+news." (p. 45.)</p>
+
+<p>"Happy the man," he elsewhere nobly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_505" id="Page_505">[Pg 505]</a></span> says, "who observes the heavenly
+and the terrestrial law in just proportion; whose every faculty, from
+the soles of his feet to the crown of his head, obeys the law of its
+level; who neither stoops nor goes on tiptoe, but lives a balanced life,
+acceptable to Nature and to God." And then he manfully adds,&mdash;"These
+things I say; other things I do." Manfully, not mournfully; for his
+life, though in many ways limited, was never, in any high sense,
+unsuccessful; nor did he ever assume for one moment the attitude of
+apology.</p>
+
+<p>These limitations of his life no doubt impaired his thought also, in
+certain directions. The letters might sometimes exhibit the record of
+Carlyle's lion, attempting to live on chicken-weed. Here is a man of
+vast digestive power, who, prizing the flavor of whortleberries and wild
+apples, insists on making these almost his only food. It is amazing to
+see what nutriment he extracts from them; yet would not, after all, an
+ampler bill of fare have done better? Is there not something to be got
+from the caucus and from the opera, which Thoreau abhorred, as well as
+from the swamps which he justly loved? Could he not have spent two hours
+rationally in Boston elsewhere than at the station-house of the railway
+that led to Concord? His habits suggest a perpetual feeling of privation
+and effort, and he has to be constantly on the alert to repel
+condolence. This one-sidedness of result is a constant drawback on the
+reader's enjoyment, and it is impossible to leave it out of sight. Yet
+all criticism seems like cavilling, when one comes upon a series of
+sentences like these:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Do what you love.... Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good
+for something. All fables, indeed, have their morals; but the innocent
+enjoy the story. Let nothing come between you and the light. Respect men
+as brothers only. When you travel to the Celestial City, carry no letter
+of introduction. When you knock, ask to see God,&mdash;none of the servants.
+In what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions; know
+that you are alone in the world." (p. 46.)</p>
+
+<p>This suggests those wonderful strokes in the "Indenture" in "Wilhelm
+Meister," and Goethe cannot surpass it.</p>
+
+<p>His finest defence of his habitual solitude occurs in these letters
+also, and has some statements whose felicitousness can hardly be
+surpassed. "As for any dispute about solitude and society, any
+comparison is impertinent.... It is not that we love to be alone, but
+that we love to soar; and when we do soar, the company grows thinner and
+thinner, till there is none at all. It is either the tribune on the
+plain, a sermon on the mount, or a very private ecstasy still higher up.
+We are not the less to aim at the summits, though the multitude does not
+ascend them. Use all the society that will abet you." (p. 139.)</p>
+
+<p>And since the unsocial character of Thoreau's theory of life has been
+one of the most serious charges against it, his fine series of thoughts
+on love and marriage in this volume become peculiarly interesting. "Love
+must be as much a light as a flame." "Love is a severe critic. Hate can
+pardon more than love." "A man of fine perceptions is more truly
+feminine than a merely sentimental woman." "It is not enough that we are
+truthful; we must cherish and carry out high purposes to be truthful
+about." These are sentences on which one might spin commentaries and
+scholia to the end of life; and there are many others as admirable.</p>
+
+<p>His few verses close the volume,&mdash;few and choice, with a rare flavor of
+the seventeenth century in them. The best poem of all, "My life is like
+a stroll upon the beach," is not improved by its new and inadequate
+title, "The Fisher's Boy." The three poems near the end, "Smoke,"
+"Mist," and "Haze," are marvellous triumphs of language; the thoughts
+and fancies are as subtile as the themes, and yet are embodied as
+delicately and accurately as if uttered in Greek.</p>
+
+
+<p><i>France and England in North America.</i> A Series of Historical
+Narratives. By <span class="smcap">Francis Parkman</span>, Author of "History of the
+Conspiracy of Pontiac," "Prairie and Rocky Mountain Life," etc. Part
+First. Pioneers of France in the New World. Boston: Little, Brown, &amp; Co.</p>
+
+<p>It has been known for nearly a score of years within our literary
+circles, that one of the richest and least wrought themes of our
+American history had been appropriated by the zeal and research of a
+student eminently qualified by nature, culture, and personal experience
+to develop its wealth of interest. While very many among us may have
+been aware that Mr. Parkman had devoted himself<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_506" id="Page_506">[Pg 506]</a></span> to the task of which we
+have before us some of the results, only a narrower circle of friends
+have known under what severe physical embarrassments and disabilities he
+has been restrained from maturing those results. He has fully and sadly
+realized, within his own different range, the experience which he so
+aptly phrases as endured by his hero, the adventurous and dauntless
+Champlain. When that great pioneer, midway in his splendid career, was
+planning one of his almost annual voyages hitherward, at one of the most
+emergent periods of his enterprise, he was seized on board his vessel in
+France with a violent illness, and reduced, as Mr. Parkman says, to that
+"most miserable of all conflicts, the battle of the eager spirit against
+the treacherous and failing flesh." Mr. Parkman has known well what
+these words mean. In his case, as in that of Champlain, it was not from
+the burden of years and natural decay, but from the touch of disease in
+the period of life's full vigor in its midway course, that mental
+activity was restrained. When, besides the inflictions of a racked
+nervous system, the author suffered in addition a malady of the eyes,
+which limited him, as he says, to intervals of five minutes for reading
+or writing, when it did not wholly preclude them, we may well marvel at
+what he has accomplished. And the reader will marvel all the more that
+the hindrances and pains under which the matter of these pages has been
+wrought have left no traces or transfer of themselves here. It may be
+possible that an occasional twinge or pang may have concentrated the
+terse narrative, or pointed the sharp and shrewd moralizings of these
+pages; for there is an amazing conciseness and a keen epigrammatic
+sagacity in them. But there is no languor, no feebleness, no sleepy
+prosiness, to indicate where vivacity flagged, and where an episode or
+paragraph was finished after the glow had yielded to exhaustion.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Parkman's theme is one of adventure on the grandest scale, with
+novel conditions and elements, and under the quickening of master
+passions of a sort to give to incidents and achievements a most romantic
+and soul-absorbing interest. Only incidentally, and then most slightly,
+does he have to deal with state affairs, with court intrigues, or with
+diplomatic complications. He has to follow men into regions and scenes
+in which there is so much raw material, and so much of the originality
+of human conditions and qualities, that no precedents are of avail, and
+it is even doubtful whether there are principles that have authority to
+guide or that may be safely recognized. Nor could he have treated his
+grand theme with that amazing facility and skill, which, as his work
+manifests them, will satisfy all his readers that the theme belongs to
+him and he to it, had not his native tastes, his training, and his
+actual experience brought him into a most intelligent sympathy with his
+subject-matter. Without being an adventurer, in the modern sense of the
+term, he has the spirit which filled the best old sense of the word. He
+has been a wide traveller and an explorer. Familiar by actual
+observation with the scenes through which he has to follow the track of
+the pioneers whom he chronicles, he has also acquainted himself by
+foot-journeys and canoe-navigation under Indian guides with scenes and
+regions still unspoiled of their wilderness features. He has crossed the
+Rocky Mountains by the war-path of the savages, and penetrated far
+beyond the borders of civilization in the direction of the northern ice
+on our continent. He is skilled in native woodcraft, in the phenomena of
+the forest and the lake, the winding river and the cataract. He has
+watched the aspects of Nature through all the seasons in regions far
+away from the havoc and the finish of culture. He has been alone as a
+white man in the squalid lodges of the Indians, has lived after their
+manner up to the edge of the restraints which a civilized man must
+always take with him, and has consented to forego all that is meant by
+the word comfort, that he might learn actually what our
+transcendentalists and sentimentalists are so taken with theoretically.
+He knows the inner make and furnishings of the savage brain and heart,
+the qualities of their thought and passions, their superstitions,
+follies, and vices; and while he deals with them and their ways with the
+right spirit and consideration of a high-toned Christian man, he yields
+to no silly inventiveness of fancy or romance in portraying them. They
+are barely human, and they are hideous and revolting in his pages, as
+they are in real life. Mr. Parkman knows them for just what they are,
+and as they are. Helped by natural adaptation and sympathy to put
+himself into communication with them sufficiently to analyze their
+composition and to scan their range of being, he has presented such a
+portraiture and estimate of them as will be increasingly valuable while
+they are wasting away, to be known to future generations only by the
+record.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_507" id="Page_507">[Pg 507]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It is through Mr. Parkman's keen observation and discernment, as a
+traverser of wild regions and a student of aboriginal life and
+character, that his pages are made to abound with such vivid and
+vigorous delineations. He has great skill in description, whether on a
+grand scale or in the minutest details of adventure or of scenery. He
+can touch by a phrase, most delicately or massively, the outline and the
+features of what he would communicate. He can strip from field,
+river-bank, hill-top, and the partially cleared forests all the things
+and aspects which civilization has superinduced, and can restore to them
+their primitive, unsullied elements. He gives us the aroma of the wild
+woods, the tints of tree, shrub, and berry as the autumn paints them,
+the notes and screams and howls of the creatures which held these haunts
+before or with man; and though we were reading some of his pages on one
+of the hottest of our dog-days, we felt a grateful chill come over us as
+we were following his description of a Canadian winter.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Parkman's subject required, for its competent treatment, a vast
+amount of research and a judicious use of authorities in documents
+printed or still in manuscript. Happily, there is abundance of material,
+and that, for the most part, of prime value. The period which his theme
+covers, though primeval in reference to the date of our own English
+beginnings here, opens within the era when pens and types were
+diligently employed to record all real occurrences, and when rival
+interests induced a multiplication of narratives of the same events, to
+the extent even of telling many important stories in two very different
+ways. The element of the marvellous and the superstitious is so
+inwrought with the documentary history and the personal narratives of
+the time, exaggeration and misrepresentation were then almost so
+consistent with honesty, that any one who essays to digest trustworthy
+history from them may be more embarrassed by the abundance than he would
+be by the paucity of his materials. Our author has spared no pains or
+expense in the gathering of plans, pamphlets, and solid volumes, in
+procuring copies of unpublished documents, and in consulting all the
+known sources of information. He discriminates with skill, and knows
+when to trust himself and to encourage his readers in relying upon them.</p>
+
+<p>It has been with all these means for faithful and profitable work in his
+possession, gathered around him in aggravating reminders of their
+unwrought wealth, and with a spirit of craving ardor to digest and
+reproduce them, that Mr. Parkman has been compelled to suffer the
+discipline of a form of invalidism which disables without destroying or
+even impairing the power and will for continuous intellectual
+employment. Brief intervals of relief and a recent period of promise and
+hopefulness of full restoration have been heroically devoted to the
+production of that instalment of his whole plan which we have in the
+volume before us.</p>
+
+<p>That plan, as his first and comprehensive title indicates, covers a
+narration of the initiatory schemes and measures for the exploration and
+settlement of the New World by France and England. As France had the
+precedence in that enterprise, this first volume is fitly devoted to its
+rehearsal. The French story is also far more picturesque, more brilliant
+and sombre, too, in its details. There is more of the wild, the
+romantic, and the tragic in it. Mr. Parkman briefly, but strikingly,
+contrasts the spirit which animated and the fortunes which befell the
+representatives of the two European nations,&mdash;the one of which has
+wrought the romance, the other of which has moulded the living
+development, of North America.</p>
+
+<p>Under the specific title of this volume,&mdash;the "Pioneers of France in the
+New World,"&mdash;the author gives us historical narratives of stirring and
+even heroic enterprise in two localities at extreme points of our
+present territory: first, the story of the sadly abortive attempt made
+by the Huguenots to effect a settlement in Florida; and second, the
+adventures, undertakings, and discoveries of Champlain, his predecessors
+and associates, in and near Canada. The volume is touchingly dedicated
+to three near kinsmen of the author,&mdash;young men who in the glory and
+beauty of their youth, the joy and hope of parents who yielded the
+costly sacrifice, gave themselves to the deliverance of our country from
+the ruin plotted for it by a slave despotism.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Parkman mentions&mdash;allowing to it in his brief reference all the
+weight which it probably deserves&mdash;a vague tradition, which, had it been
+sustained by fact, would have introduced an entirely new element into
+the conditions involved in the rival claims to the right of colonizing
+and possessing America, as practically contested by European nations.
+The Pope's Bull which deeded the whole continent to Spain, as if it
+were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_508" id="Page_508">[Pg 508]</a></span> a farm, reinforced the claim already conventionally yielded to her
+through right of discovery. For anything, however, to the knowledge of
+which Columbus came before his death, or even his immediate successors
+before their death, all the parts of America which he saw or knew might
+have been insulated spaces, like those in which he actually set up
+Spanish authority. What might have been the issue for this continent, or
+rather for the spaces which it covers, had it been really divided by the
+high seas into three immense islands like Australasia, so that Spain,
+France, and England might have made an amicable division between them,
+would afford curious matter for speculation. The tradition referred to
+is, that the continent had been actually discovered by a Frenchman four
+years before the first voyage of Columbus hitherward. A vessel from
+Dieppe, while at sea off the coast of Africa, was said to have been
+blown to sight of land across the ocean on our shores. A mariner,
+Pinzon, who was on board of her, being afterwards discharged from French
+service in disgrace, joined himself to Columbus, and was with him when
+he made his great discovery. It may have been so. But the story,
+slenderly rooted in itself, has no support. Spain was the claimant, and,
+so far as the bold and repeated attempt of the Huguenots to contest her
+claims in Florida was thwarted by a diabolical, yet not unavenged
+ruthlessness of resistance, Spain made good her asserted right.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Parkman sketches rapidly some preliminary details relating to
+Huguenot colonization in Brazil and early Spanish adventures. The zeal
+of the French Huguenots had anticipated that of the English Puritans in
+seeking a Transatlantic field for its development. A philosophical
+historian might find an engaging theme, in tracing to diversities of
+national character, to the aims which stirred in human spirits, and to
+fickle circumstances of date or place, the contrasted issues of failure
+and success in the different enterprises. To human sight or foresight,
+the Huguenots had the more hopeful omens at the start. But religious
+zeal and avarice, combined in a way most cunningly adapted to
+contravene, if that were possible, the Saviour's profound warning, "No
+man can serve two masters," were, after all, only combined in a way to
+bring them into the most shameful conflict. The Huguenot at the South
+shared with the Spaniard the lust for gold; and the backers alike of
+Roman and Protestant zeal in Canada divided their interest between the
+souls of the Indians and the furs and skins of wild animals.</p>
+
+<p>The heroic and the chivalric elements in the spirit and prowess of these
+early adventurers give a charm even to the narratives which reveal to us
+their fearful sufferings and their atrocities. Physically and morally
+they must have been endowed unlike those who now hoe fields, make shoes,
+and watch the wheels of our thrifty mechanisms. Avarice and zeal, the
+latter being sometimes substituted by a daring passion for the romantic,
+nerved men, and women too, to undertakings and endurances which shame
+our enfeebled ways. The partners in these enterprises were never
+homogeneous in character, as were eminently the Colonists of New
+England. They were of most mixed and discordant materials. Prisons were
+ransacked for convicts and desperadoes; humble artisans and peasants
+were accepted as laborers; roving mariners, whose only sure port of rest
+would be in the abyss, were bribed for transient service, the condition
+always exacted being that they must be ready for the nonce to turn
+landsmen for fighting in swamp or bush. These, with a sprinkling of
+young and impoverished nobles, and one or two really towering and master
+spirits, in whom either of the two leading passions was the spur, and
+who could win through court patronage a patent or a commission, made in
+every case, either South or North, the staple material of French
+adventure.</p>
+
+<p>After a graphic sketch of the line of Spanish notables in the New
+World,&mdash;of Ponce de Leon, of Garay, Ayllon, De Narvaez, and De
+Soto,&mdash;Mr. Parkman concisely reviews the successive attempts at a
+settlement in Florida by Frenchmen. His central figures here are Admiral
+De Coligny and his agents, Villegagnon, Ribaut, and Laudonni&egrave;re. They
+had no fixed policy towards the Indians, and they followed the worst
+possible course with them. They wholly neglected tillage, and so were in
+constant peril of starvation. They were lawless and disorderly in their
+fellowship, and were always at the mercy of conspirators among
+themselves.</p>
+
+<p>Beginning about the year 1550, and embracing the quarter of a century
+following, there transpired on the coast of Florida a series of acts of
+mingled heroism and barbarity not easily paralleled in any chapter of
+the world's history. Menendez, under his commission as Adelantado,
+having effected<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_509" id="Page_509">[Pg 509]</a></span> the first European settlement in North America at St.
+Augustine, and the French having established a river fort named
+Caroline, the struggle which could not long have been deferred was
+invited. We have here a double narrative. While the French commander,
+Ribaut, is shipwrecked in an enterprise by sea against St. Augustine,
+Menendez, by land, after a most harassing tramp through forest and
+swamp, successfully assails Fort Caroline. Though he has pledged his
+honor to spare those who surrendered to his mercy, he foully breaks his
+pledge, as no faith was to be kept with heretics. A brutal massacre,
+which shocked even his Indian allies, signalized his victory. An
+inscription on the trees under which he slaughtered his victims
+announced that vengeance was wreaked on them, "not as Frenchmen, but as
+heretics."</p>
+
+<p>These atrocities were in their turn avenged, after a similar fashion and
+in the same spirit, by Dominique de Gourgues. It is doubtful whether he
+was a Huguenot; but he felt, as the French monarch and court did not,
+the rankling disgrace of this bloody catastrophe. An intense hater of
+the Spaniards, he gave his whole spirit of chivalry and prowess, in the
+approved fashion of the age, to avenge the insult to France. Providing
+himself with three small vessels, navigable by sail or oar, he gathered
+a fit company for his enterprise; but not till well on his way did he
+reveal to them his real purpose, in which they proved willing
+coadjutors. He found the Spaniards at their forts had alienated the
+Indians, who readily leagued with him. By a bold combination and a
+fierce onslaught he carries the Spanish works, and retaliates on his
+fiendish and now cowering prisoners by hanging them, "not as Spaniards,
+but as traitors, robbers, and murderers." De Gourgues came to do this,
+not to make another attempt for a permanent settlement in the interest
+of France. He therefore destroyed the forts, and with a friendly parting
+from his red allies, much to their sorrow, returned home. Thus closes
+one episode in the world's tragic history.</p>
+
+<p>Turning now towards the North, Mr. Parkman takes a comprehensive review
+of the hazy period of history covered by traditions and imperfect
+records, with vague relations of adventure by Normans, Basques, and
+Bretons, on fishing expeditions to Newfoundland and the main coast.
+These were followed by three exploring enterprises and partial
+settlements, between 1506 and 1518. Verrazzano, with four ships, coasted
+along our shores, and was for fifteen days the guest of some friendly
+Indians at Newport, the centre of our modern fashionable summer-life.
+Jaques Cartier made two voyages in 1534-5, gave the name of St. Lawrence
+to the river, and visited the sites of Quebec and Montreal. A third
+voyage was planned for 1541, to be followed by a reinforcement by J. F.
+de la Roque, Sieur de Roberval. Its arrival being delayed, the famished
+settlers, wasted by the scurvy, and dreading another horrid winter of
+untold sufferings, returned home. Roberval renewed the occupancy of
+Quebec, and then there is a chasm and a broken story.</p>
+
+<p>La Roche, in 1598, left forty convicts, adventurers in his crew, on
+Sable Island, merely for a temporary sojourn while he should coast on.
+Being blown back to France in his vessel, these forlorn exiles were left
+for five years on that dreary waste, and only twelve survivors then
+remained to be rescued. Some wild cattle that had propagated from
+predecessors left by luckless wanderers on a previous voyage, or which
+had swum ashore from a wreck, had furnished them a partial supply.
+Pontgrav&eacute; and Chauvin attempted a settlement at Tadoussac, the dismal
+wilderness at the mouth of the Saguenay, thenceforward the rendezvous of
+European and Indian traders. All these were preliminary anticipations of
+the real occupancy of New France. Champlain, Poutrincourt, and
+Lescarbot, in 1607, established at Port Royal the first agricultural
+colony in the New World. Then began that series of futile and vexatious
+dealings on the part of the French court, in granting and withdrawing
+monopolies, conflicting commissions and patents, with confused purposes
+of feudalism and restricted privilege, which embarrassed all effective
+progress, and visited chagrin and disappointment on every devoted
+adventurer.</p>
+
+<p>The great picture on Mr. Parkman's canvas is Champlain. That really
+noble-souled, heroic, and marvellous man, whom our author appreciates,
+yet with sagacious discrimination presents to the life, is a splendid
+subject for his admirable rehearsal. At the age of thirty-three he
+becomes the most conspicuous, and, on the whole, the most intelligent,
+agent of the French interest in these parts of the world. Dying at
+Quebec at the age of sixty-eight, and after twenty-seven years of
+service to the colony, he had probably drawn his life through more and
+a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_510" id="Page_510">[Pg 510]</a></span> greater variety of perils than have ever been encountered by man. He
+was dauntless and all-enduring, fruitful in resource, self-controlled
+and persevering, and, though not wiser than his age, purer and more
+true. He was as lithesome as an Indian, and could outdo him in some
+physical efforts and endurance. His almost yearly voyages between France
+and Quebec led him through strange contrasts of court and wilderness
+life; but he was the same man in both. His discovery of the lake which
+bears his name, his journey to Lake Huron, under the lure of the
+impostor Vignau, encouraging his own dream of a passage through the
+continent to India, and his many tramps for Indian warfare or discovery,
+are most attractive episodes for our author.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Parkman relates incidentally the massacre in Frenchman's Bay, the
+efforts and cross purposes of the Recollets and the Jesuit missionaries,
+and furnishes a vivid sketch of the fortunes of the settlement under
+threatened assaults from Indians and in a temporary surrender to the
+English. He intimates the matter which he has yet in store. May we enjoy
+the coveted pleasure of reading it!</p>
+
+
+<p><i>Hesperus, or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days.</i> A Biography. From the German of
+J. P. Fr. Richter. Translated by <span class="smcap">Charles T. Brooks</span>. In Two
+Volumes. Boston: Ticknor and Fields.</p>
+
+<p>This romance, the first work of Jean Paul's which won the attention of
+his countrymen, is called "Hesperus," apparently for no reason more
+definite than that the heroine, like a fair evening-star, beams over the
+fortunes of the other personages, and becomes at length the morning-star
+of one. The supplementary title of "Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days" is a
+quaint subdivision of the volumes into as many chapters, each of which
+is a "Dog-Post-Day," because it purports to be dispatched in a bottle
+round a dog's neck to an island within the whimsical geography which the
+author loved to construct, and in which he pretended to dwell. Truly,
+the ordinary <i>terra-firma</i> was of little consequence for home-keeping
+purposes to Jean Paul, as the reader will doubtless confess before he
+has proceeded far through the maze of Extra Leaves, Intercalary Days,
+Extra Lines, Extra Shoots, and Extorted Anti-critique. And the divisions
+which are busied with the story, instead of carrying it forward, stray
+with it in all directions, like a genuine summer vagabond to whom direct
+travel is a crime against the season. Many charming things are gathered
+by the way; but if the reader is in haste to arrive, or thinks it would
+not be amiss at least to put up somewhere, his patience will be severely
+tried. We do not recommend the volumes for railway-reading, nor to
+clergymen for the entertainment of sewing-bees, nor to the devourer of
+novels, in whose life the fiction that must be read at one sitting forms
+an epoch. It is a good <i>vade-mecum</i> for a voyage round either Cape; its
+digressive character suits the listless mood of the sea-goer, and he can
+drop, we will not say the thread, but the entanglement, in whatever
+watch he pleases.</p>
+
+<p>Let no one expect the critic to sketch the plot of this romance. It is a
+grouping of motives and temperaments under the names of men and women,
+concerning whom many subtile things are said and hinted; and they are
+pushed into and out of complicated situations, by stress of brilliant
+authorship, without lifting their fingers. There is no necessary
+development nor movement: the people are like the bits of glass which
+shake into the surprising patterns of the kaleidoscope. The relation of
+the parties to each other is a great mystification, bunglingly managed:
+we cannot understand at last how Victor, the hero of the chief
+love-passage, turns out to be the son of a clergyman instead of a lord,
+and Flamin the son of a lord in spite of the plain declaration on the
+first page that he belongs to a clergyman. No key-notes of expectation
+and surmise are struck; the reader is as blind as the old lord who is
+Victor's reputed father, and not a glimmer of light reaches him till
+suddenly and causelessly he is dazed. The author has emphasized his
+sentiments, but has not shaded and brought out the features of his
+story. It is plain, that, when he began to write, not the faintest
+notion of a <i>d&eacute;nouement</i> had dawned upon his fancy. The best-defined
+action in the book results from Flamin's ignorance that he is Clotilde's
+brother, for he is thus jealous of his friend Victor's love for her. How
+break off Flamin's love for his unknown sister? How rescue Victor from
+his self-imposed delicacy and win for him a bride? This is the substance
+of the story, hampered by wild, spasmodic interpolations and intrigues
+and didactic explanations.</p>
+
+<p>The reader must also become inured, by a course of physical training, to
+resist the fiery onslaughts of a sentimentality which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_511" id="Page_511">[Pg 511]</a></span> was the first
+ferment of Jean Paul's sincere and huge imagination. See, for instance,
+Vol. II. p. 229. And we cannot too much admire the tact which Mr. Brooks
+has brought to the decanting of these seething passages into tolerable
+vernacular limits. Sometimes, indeed, he misses a help which he might
+have procured for the reader, to lift him, with less danger of
+dislocation, to these pinnacles of passion, by transferring more of the
+elevated idiom of the style: for, in some of the complicated paragraphs,
+a too English rendering of the clauses gives the sentiment a dowdy and
+prosaic air. We should not object to an occasional inversion of the
+order, even where Jean Paul himself is more direct than usual; for this
+always appeared to us to lend a racy German flavor to the page. No doubt
+Jean Paul needs, first of all, to be made comprehensible; but if his
+style is too persistently Anglicized, many places will be reached where
+the sense itself must suffer for want of the picturesqueness of the
+German idiom. The quaintness will grow flat, the color of the sentiment
+will almost disappear, the rich paragraphs will run thinly clad,
+disenchanted like Cinderella at midnight. Some of Mr. Carlyle's
+translations from the German are invigorated by this Teutonicizing of
+the English, and by the sincerity of phrases transferred directly as
+they first came molten from the pen. This may be pushed to the point of
+affectation; but judiciously used, it is suited to Jean Paul's fervor
+and abandonment.</p>
+
+<p>There is also a rhythm in his exalted moments, a delicate and noble
+swing of the clauses, not easy to transfer: as in the Eighth
+Dog-Post-Day, the paragraph commencing, "Wehe gr&ouml;szere Wellen auf mich
+zu, Morgenluft!" "Thou morning-air, break over me in greater waves!
+Bathe me in thy vast billows which roll above our woods and meadows, and
+bear me in blossom clouds past radiant gardens and glimmering streams,
+and let me die gently floating above the earth, rocked amid flying
+flowers and butterflies, and dissolving with outspread arms beneath the
+sun; while all my veins fall blended into red morning-flakes down to the
+flowers," etc. But this may appear finical to Mr. Brooks. We certainly
+do not press it critically against his great and general success. Such a
+paragraph as, for instance, the closing one upon page 340 of Vol. II. is
+very trying to the resources of the translator. Here Mr. Brooks has
+sacrificed to literalness an opportunity to sort the confused clauses
+and stop their jostling: this may be done without diluting the
+sentiment, and is within the translator's liberty.</p>
+
+<p>It always seemed to us that the finest part of "Hesperus," and one of
+the finest passages of German literature, is contained in the Ninth
+Dog-Post-Day and some pages of the Tenth. The Ninth, in particular,
+which is a perfect idyl, describes Victor's walk to Kussewitz: all the
+landscape is made to share and symbolize his rapture: the people in the
+fields, the framework of an unfinished house, the two-wheeled hut of the
+shepherd, are not only well painted, but turned most naturally to the
+help of interpreting his feeling. The chapter has also a direct and
+unembarrassed movement, which is rare in this romance. And it is
+beautifully translated.</p>
+
+<p>The reader must understand that Victor is called by various names; so
+that, if he merely dips into the book, as we suspect he will until his
+sympathy is enlisted by some fine thought, his ignorance will increase
+the frantic and dishevelled state of the story. Victor is Horion,
+Sebastian, and Bastian; a susceptible youth, profoundly affected by the
+presence of noble or handsome women, and brought into situations that
+test his delicacy. He smuggles a declaration of love into a watch which
+he sells, in the disguise of an Italian merchant, to the Princess
+Agnola, on occasion of her first reception at the court of her husband.
+He is ashamed of this after he begins to know Clotilde, who is one of
+Jean Paul's pure and noble women; and he is at one time full of dread
+lest the Princess had read his watch-paper, and at another full of pique
+at the suspicion that she had not. Being court-physician and oculist, he
+has frequent opportunities to visit Agnola, and there is one rather
+florid occasion which the midnight cry of the street-watch man
+interrupts. But all this time, the inflammable Victor was indulging a
+kind of tenderness for Joachime, maid-of-honor and attractive female. As
+the love for Clotilde deepens, he must destroy these partialities for
+Agnola and Joachime. This is no easy matter; what with the watch-paper
+and various emphatic passages of something more than friendship, the
+true love does not at once stand forth, that he may find "the
+partition-wall between love and friendship with women to be very visible
+and very thick." But one day the accursed watch-paper flutters into
+Joachime's hand, who at once takes it for a declaration of love to
+herself, and beams with appropriate tenderness. Victor, seized with
+sudden<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_512" id="Page_512">[Pg 512]</a></span> coldness and resolution, confesses all to Joachime; and the
+story, released from its feminine embarrassments, would soon reach a
+honeymoon, if it were not for the difficulty of deciding the parentage
+and relationship of the various characters. A wise child knows its own
+father; but no endowment of wisdom in the reader will harmonize the
+genealogy of this romance. A birth-mark of a Stettin apple, which is
+visible only in autumn when that fruit is ripening, plays the part of
+Box's strawberry in the farce, and with as much perspicuity.</p>
+
+<p>However, the characters are all respectably connected at last, and the
+reader does not care to understand how they were ever disconnected: for
+Lord Horion's motive in putting the children of the old Prince out of
+the way, and keeping up such an expensive mystification, can be
+justified only by an interesting plot. But American readers have learned
+by this time, much to their credit, not to apply to Jean Paul for the
+sensation of a cunningly woven narrative, like that of the English
+school, which furnishes verisimilitude to real life that is quite as
+improbable, though less glaringly so, than his departures from it.
+"Hesperus" is filled with pure and noble thought. The different types of
+female character are particularly well-defined; and if Jean Paul
+sometimes affects to say cynical things of women, he cannot veil his
+passionate regard for them, nor his profound appreciation of the
+elements of their influence in forming true society and refining the
+hearts of men. Notice the delicacy of the "Extra Leaf on Houses full of
+Daughters." It is chiefly with the women of his romances that Jean Paul
+succeeds in depicting individuals. And when we recollect the corrupt and
+decaying generation out of which his genius sprang, like a newly created
+species, to give a salutary shock to Gallic tastes, and lend a sturdy
+country vigor to the new literature, we reverence his faithfulness, his
+incorruptible humanity, his contempt for petty courts and faded manners,
+his passion for Nature, and his love of God. All these characteristics
+are so broadly printed upon his pages that the obsoleteness of the
+narrative does not hide them.</p>
+
+<p>In view of a second edition, we refer to Mr. Brooks's consideration a
+few places, with wonder at his general accuracy in the translation of
+obscure passages and the explanation of allusions.</p>
+
+<p>Vol. I. page 22. <i>Sakeph-Katon</i> (Zaqueph Qaton) is an occasional
+pause-accent of the Hebrew, having the sense of "elevator minor," and is
+peculiar to prose.</p>
+
+<p>Page 68. The famous African Prince Le Boo deserves a note.</p>
+
+<p>Page 111. <i>Ripieno</i> is an Italian musical term, meaning that which
+accompanies and strengthens.</p>
+
+<p>Page 114. <i>Gr&auml;nswildpret</i> does not mean "frontier wild-game," but game
+that, straying out of one precinct into another, gets captured: stray
+game, or impounded waif.</p>
+
+<p>Page 139. The note gives the sense, but the corresponding passage in the
+text would stand clearer thus: "not a noble heart, by any means; for
+such things Le Baut's golden key, though bored like a cannon, could
+fasten rather."</p>
+
+<p>Page 179. A note required: the passage of Shakspeare is, "Antony and
+Cleopatra," Act V., Scene 2:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"His face was as the heavens; and therein stuck<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A sun and moon; which kept their course, and lighted<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The little O, the earth."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><i>Territory of an old lady</i> should be "prayer of an old lady." <i>Gebet</i>,
+not <i>Gebiet</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Page 209. <i>Eirunde Loch</i> would be better represented by its anatomical
+equivalent, <i>foramen ovale</i>. It should be closed before birth; in the
+rare cases where it is left open after birth, the child lives half
+asphyxiated.</p>
+
+<p>Page 224, note. <i>Semperfreie</i> is not from the Latin, but comes from
+<i>sendbarfreie</i>, that is, eligible, free to be sent or elected to
+offices, and consequently, immediately subject to the <i>Reich</i>, or Holy
+Roman Empire.</p>
+
+<p>Page 235. An <i>Odometer</i> is an apparatus for measuring distances
+travelled by whatsoever vehicle.</p>
+
+<p>Page 275. <i>Incunabula</i> means specimens of the first printed edition of a
+work; also the first impressions of the first edition, the firstlings of
+old editions.</p>
+
+<p>Page 317. <i>Wackelfiguren</i> means figures made of <i>Wacke</i>, a greenish-gray
+mineral, soft and easily broken.</p>
+
+<p>Page 322. The note is equivocal, since the phrase is used by fast women
+who keep some one in their pay.</p>
+
+<p>Vol. II., page 122. <i>Columbine</i> is not equivalent to ballet-dancer; it
+is the old historical personage of the pantomime, confederate and lover
+of Harlequin, who protects her from false love.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No.
+96, October 1865, by Various
+
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+</body>
+</html>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96,
+October 1865, by Various
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865
+
+Author: Various
+
+Release Date: December 2, 2006 [EBook #19996]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ATLANTIC MONTHLY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Joshua Hutchinson, Josephine Paolucci and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net.
+(This file was produced from images generously made
+available by Cornell University Digital Collections).
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE
+
+ATLANTIC MONTHLY.
+
+_A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics._
+
+VOL. XVI.--OCTOBER, 1865.--NO. XCVI.
+
+Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1865, by TICKNOR
+AND FIELDS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the
+District of Massachusetts.
+
+
+Transcriber's Note: Minor typos have been corrected and footnotes moved
+to the end of the article.
+
+
+
+
+SAINTS WHO HAVE HAD BODIES.
+
+
+All doubtless remember the story which is told of the witty Charles II.
+and the Royal Society: How one day the King brought to the attention of
+its members a most curious and inexplicable phenomenon, which he stated
+thus: "When you put a trout into a pail full of water, why does not the
+water overflow?" The savans, naturally enough, were surprised, and
+suggested many wise, but fruitless explanations; until at last one of
+their number, having no proper reverence for royalty in his heart,
+demanded that the experiment should actually be tried. Then, of course,
+it was proved that there was no phenomenon to be explained. The water
+overflowed fast enough. Indeed, it is chronicled that the evolutions of
+this lively member of the piscatory tribe were so brisk, that the
+difficulty was the exact opposite of what was anticipated, namely, how
+to keep the water in.
+
+This story may be a pure fable, but the lesson it teaches is true and
+important. It illustrates forcibly the facility with which even wise men
+accept doubtful propositions, and then apply the whole power of their
+minds to explain them, and perhaps to defend them. Latterly one hears
+constantly of the physical decay which threatens the American people,
+because of their unwise and disproportioned stimulation of the brain. It
+is assumed, almost as an axiom, that there is "a deficiency of physical
+health in America." Especially is it assumed that great mental progress,
+either of races or of individuals, has been generally purchased at the
+expense of the physical frame. Indeed, it is one of the questions of the
+day, how the saints, that is, those devoted to literary and professional
+pursuits, shall obtain good and serviceable bodies; or, to widen the
+query, how the finest intellectual culture can exist side by side with
+the noblest physical development; or, to bring this question into a form
+that shall touch us most sharply, how our boys and girls can obtain all
+needful knowledge and mental discipline, and yet keep full of graceful
+and buoyant vitality.
+
+What do we say to the theories and convictions which are underneath this
+language? What answer shall we make to these questions? What answer
+ought we to make? Our first reply would be, We doubt the proposition.
+We ask for the broad and firm basis of undoubted facts upon which it
+rests. And we enter an opposite plea. We affirm that the saints have as
+good bodies as other people, and that they always did have. We deny that
+they need to be patched up or watched over any more than their
+neighbors. They live as long and enjoy as much as the rest of mankind.
+They can endure as many hard buffets, and come out as tough and strong,
+as the veriest dolt whose intellectual bark foundered in the unsounded
+depths of his primer. The world's history through, the races which are
+best taught have the best endowment of health. Nay, in our own New
+England, with just such influences, physical, mental, and moral, as
+actually exist, there is no deterioration in real vitality to weep over.
+
+We hold, then, on this subject very different opinions from those which
+prevail in many quarters. We believe in the essential healthfulness of
+literary culture, and in the invigorating power of sound knowledge.
+Emphatically do we believe that our common schools have been in the
+aggregate a positive physical benefit. We are confident, that, just to
+the degree that the unseen force within a man receives its rightful
+development, does vigorous life flow in every current that beats from
+heart to extremities. With entire respect for the opinions of others,
+even while we cannot concur with them, with a readiness to admit that
+the assertion of those opinions may have been indirectly beneficial, we
+wish to state the truth as it looks to us, to exhibit the facts which
+bear upon this subject in the shape and hue they have to our own minds,
+and to give the grounds of our conviction that a cultivated mind is the
+best friend and ally of the body.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Would it not be singular, if anything different were true? You say, and
+you say rightly, that the best part of a man is his mind and soul, those
+spiritual elements which divide him from all the rest of the creation,
+animate or inanimate, and make him lord and sovereign over them all. You
+say, and you say wisely, that the body, however strong and beautiful, is
+nothing,--that the senses, however keen and vigorous, are nothing,--that
+the outward glories, however much they may minister to sensual
+gratification, are nothing,--unless they all become the instruments for
+the upbuilding of the immortal part in man. But what a tremendous
+impeachment of the wisdom or power of the Creator you are bringing, if
+you assert that the development of this highest part, whether by its
+direct influence on the body, or indirectly by the habits of life which
+it creates, is destructive of all the rest, nay, self-destructive! You
+may show that every opening bud in spring, and every joint, nerve, and
+muscle in every animate creature, are full of proofs of wise designs
+accomplishing their purposes, and it shall all count for less than
+nothing, if you can demonstrate that the mind, in its highest, broadest
+development, brings anarchy into the system,--or, mark it well,
+produces, or tends to produce, habits of living ruinous to health, and
+so ruinous to true usefulness. At the outset, therefore, the very fact
+that the mind is the highest creation of Divine wisdom would force us to
+believe that that development of it, that increase of knowledge, that
+sharpening of the faculties, that feeding of intellectual hunger, which
+does not promote joy and health in every part, must be false and
+illegitimate indeed.
+
+And it is hardly too much to say, that, in a rational being, thought is
+almost synonymous with vitality of all sorts. The brain throws out its
+network of nerves to every part of the body; and those nerves are the
+pathways along which it sends, not alone physical volitions, but its
+mental force and high intelligence, to mingle by a subtile chemistry
+with every fibre, and give it a finer life and a more bounding
+elasticity. So one might foretell, before the study of a single fact of
+experience, that, other things being equal, he who had few or no
+thoughts would have not only a dormant mind, but also a sluggish and
+inert body, less active than another, less enduring, and especially less
+defiant of physical ills. And one might prophesy, too, that he who had
+high thoughts and wealth of knowledge would have stored up in his brain
+a magazine of reserved power wherewith to support the faltering body: a
+prophecy not wide apart, perhaps, from any broad and candid observation
+of human life.
+
+And who can fail to remember what superior resources a cultivated mind
+has over one sunk in sloth and ignorance,--how much wider an outlook,
+how much larger and more varied interests, and how these things support
+when outward props fail, how they strengthen in misfortune and pain, and
+keep the heart from anxieties which might wear out the body? Scott,
+dictating "Ivanhoe" in the midst of a torturing sickness, and so rising,
+by force of a cultivated imagination, above all physical anguish, to
+revel in visions of chivalric splendor, is but the type of men
+everywhere, who, but for resources supplied by the mind, would have sunk
+beneath the blows of adverse fortune, or else sought forgetfulness in
+brutalizing and destructive pleasures. Sometimes a book is better far
+than medicine, and more truly soothing than the best anodyne. Sometimes
+a rich-freighted memory is more genial than many companions. Sometimes a
+firm mind, that has all it needs within itself, is a watchtower to which
+we may flee, and from which look down calmly upon our own losses and
+misfortunes. He who does not understand this has either had a most
+fortunate experience, or else has no culture, which is really a part of
+himself, woven into the very texture of the soul. So, if there were no
+facts, considering the mind, and who made it, and how it is related to
+the body, and how, when it is a good mind and a well-stored mind, it
+seems to stand for all else, to be food and shelter and comfort and
+friend and hope, who could believe anything else than that a
+well-instructed soul could do nought but good to its servant the body?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After all, we cannot evade, and we ought not to seek to evade, the
+testimony of facts. No cause can properly stand on any theory, however
+pleasant and cheering, or however plausible. What, then, of the facts,
+of the painful facts of experience, which are said to tell so different
+a tale? This,--that the physical value of education is in no way so
+clearly demonstrated as by these very facts. We know what is the
+traditional picture of the scholar,--pale, stooping, hectic, hurrying
+with unsteady feet to a predestined early grave; or else morbid,
+dyspeptic, cadaverous, putting into his works the dark tints of his own
+inward nature. At best, he is painted as a mere bookworm, bleached and
+almost mildewed in some learned retirement beneath the shadow of great
+folios, until he is out of joint with the world, and all fresh and
+hearty life has gone out of him. Who cannot recall just such pictures,
+wherein one knows not which predominates, the ludicrous or the pitiful?
+We protest against them all. In the name of truth and common-sense
+alike, we indignantly reject them. We have a vision of a sturdier
+manhood: of the genial, open countenance of an Irving; of the homely,
+honest strength that shone in every feature of a Walter Scott; of the
+massive vigor of a Goethe or a Humboldt. How much, too, is said of the
+physical degeneracy of our own people,--how the jaw is retreating, how
+the frame is growing slender and gaunt, how the chest flattens, and how
+tenderly we ought to cherish every octogenarian among us, for that we
+are seeing the last of them! If this is intended to be a piece of
+pleasant badinage, far be it from us to arrest a single smile it may
+awaken. But if it is given as a serious description, from which serious
+deductions can be drawn, then we say, that, as a delineation, it is, to
+a considerable extent, purely fanciful,--as an argument, utterly so. The
+facts, so far as they are ascertained, point unwaveringly to this
+conclusion,--that every advance of a people in knowledge and refinement
+is accompanied by as striking an advance in health and strength.
+
+Try this question, if you please, on the largest possible scale. Compare
+the uneducated savage with his civilized brother. His form has never
+been bent by confinement in the school-room. Overburdening thoughts have
+never wasted his frame. And if unremitting exercise amid the free airs
+of heaven will alone make one strong, then he will be strong. Is the
+savage stronger? Does he live more years? Can he compete side by side
+with civilized races in the struggle for existence? Just the opposite is
+true. Our puny boys, as we sometimes call them, in our colleges, will
+weigh more, lift more, endure more than any barbarian race of them all.
+This day the gentle Sandwich-Islanders are wasting like snow-wreaths, in
+contact with educated races. This day our red men are being swept before
+advancing civilization like leaves before the breath of the hurricane.
+And it requires no prophet's eye to see, that, if we do not give the
+black man education as well as freedom, an unshackled mind as well as
+unshackled limbs, he, too, will share the same fate.
+
+To all this it may naturally be objected, that the reason so many savage
+races do not display the greatest physical stamina is not so much
+intellectual barrenness as their vices, native or acquired,--or because
+they bring no wisdom to the conduct of life, but dwell in smoky huts,
+eat unhealthy food, go from starvation to plethora and from plethora to
+starvation again, exchange the indolent lethargy which is the law of
+savage life for the frantic struggles of war or the chase which
+diversify and break up its monotony. Allow the objection; and then what
+have we accomplished, but carrying the argument one step back? For what
+are self-control and self-care, but the just fruits of intelligence? But
+in truth it is a combination of all these influences, and not any of
+them alone, that enables the civilized man to outlive and outrival his
+barbarian brother. He succeeds, not simply because of the superior
+address and sagacity which education gives him, though that, no doubt,
+has much to do with it; not altogether because his habits of life are
+better, though we would not underrate their value; but equally because
+the culture of the brain gives a finer life to every red drop in his
+arteries, and greater hardihood to every fibre which is woven into his
+flesh. If it is not so, how do you explain the fact that our colored
+soldier, fighting in his native climate, with the same exposure in
+health and the same care in sickness, succumbs to wounds and diseases
+over which his white comrade triumphs? Or how will you explain analogous
+facts in the history of disease among other uneducated races? Our
+explanation is simple. As the slightest interfusion of carbon may change
+the dull iron into trenchant steel, so intelligence working through
+invisible channels may add a new temper to the physical nature. And thus
+it may be strictly true that it is not only the mind and soul which
+slavery and ignorance wrong, but the body just as much.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It may be said, and perhaps justly, that a comparison between races so
+unlike is not a fair comparison. Take, then, if you prefer, the
+intelligent and unintelligent periods in the history of the same race.
+The old knights! Those men with mail-clad bodies and iron natures, who
+stand out in imagination as symbols of masculine strength! The old
+knights! They were not scholars. Their constitutions were not ruined by
+study, or by superfluous sainthood of any kind. They were more at home
+with the sword than the pen. They loved better "to hear the lark sing
+than the mouse squeak." So their minds were sufficiently dormant. How
+was it with their bodies? Were they sturdier men? Did they stand heavier
+on their feet than their descendants? It is a familiar fact that the
+armor which inclosed them will not hold those whom we call their
+degenerate children. A friend tells me that in the armory of London
+Tower there are preserved scores, if not hundreds, of the swords of
+those terrible Northmen, those Vikings, who, ten centuries ago, swept
+the seas and were the dread of all Europe, and that scarcely one of them
+has a hilt large enough to be grasped by a man of this generation. Of
+races who have left behind them no methodical records, and whose story
+is preserved only in the rude rhymes of their poets and ruder
+chronicles, it is not safe to make positive affirmations; but all the
+indications are that the student of to-day is a larger and stronger man
+than the warrior of the Middle Ages.
+
+If we come down to periods of historical certainty, no one will doubt
+that the England of the present hour is more educated than the England
+of fifty years ago, or that the England of fifty years since had a
+broader diffusion of intelligence than the England of a century
+previous. Yet that very intelligence has prolonged life. An Englishman
+lives longer to-day than he did in 1800, and longer yet than in 1700.
+Here is a curious proof. Annuities calculated on a certain rate of life
+in 1694 would yield a fortune to those who issued them. Calculated at
+the same rate in 1794, they would ruin them; for the more general
+diffusion of knowledge and refinement had added, I am not able to say
+how many years to the average British life. Observe how this statement
+is confirmed by some wonderful statistics preserved at Geneva. From 1600
+to 1700 the average length of life in that city was 13 years 3 months.
+From 1700 to 1750 it was 27 years 9 months. From 1750 to 1800, 31 years
+3 months. From 1800 to 1833, 43 years 6 months.
+
+One more pertinent fact. Take in England any number of families you
+please, whose parents can read and write, and an equal number of
+families whose parents cannot read and write, and the number of children
+in the latter class of families who will die before the age of five
+years will greatly exceed that in the former class,--some thirty or
+forty per cent. So surely does a thoughtful ordering of life come in the
+train of intelligence. If faith is to be placed in statistics of any
+sort, then it holds true in foreign countries that human life is long in
+proportion to the degree that knowledge, refinement, and virtue are
+diffused. That is, sainthood, so far from destroying the body, preserves
+it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I anticipate the objection which may be made to our last argument.
+Abroad, we are told, there is such an element of healthy, out-door life,
+that any ill effects which might naturally follow in the train of
+general education are neutralized. Abroad, too, education with the
+masses is elementary, and advanced also with more moderation than with
+us. Abroad, moreover, the whole social being is not pervaded with the
+intense intellectual activity and fervor which are so characteristic
+especially of New England life.
+
+Come home, then, to our own Massachusetts, which some will have is
+school-mad. What do you find? Here, in a climate proverbially changeable
+and rigorous,--here, where mental and moral excitements rise to
+fever-heat,--here, where churches adorn every landscape, and
+school-houses greet us at every corner, and lyceums are established in
+every village,--here, where newspapers circulate by the hundred
+thousand, and magazines for our old folks, and "Our Young Folks," too,
+reach fifty thousand,--here, in Massachusetts, health is at its climax:
+greater and more enduring than in bonnie England, or vine-clad France,
+or sunny Italy. I read some statistics the other day, and I have ever
+since had a greater respect for the land of "east-winds, and salt-fish
+and school-houses," as scandalous people have termed Massachusetts. What
+do these statistics say? That, while in England the deaths reach
+annually 2.21 per cent of the whole population, and in France 2.36 per
+cent, and in Italy 2.94 per cent, and in Austria 3.34 per cent, in
+Massachusetts, the deaths are only 1.82 per cent annually. Even in
+Boston, with its large proportion of foreign elements, the percentage of
+deaths is only 2.35. It may be said, in criticism of these statements,
+that in our country statistics are not kept with sufficient accuracy to
+furnish correct data. However this may be in our rural districts, it
+certainly is not true of the metropolis. The figures are not at hand,
+but they exist, and they prove conclusively that those wards in Boston
+which have a population most purely native reach a salubrity unexcelled.
+So that, with all the real drawbacks of climate, and the pretended
+drawbacks of unnatural or excessive mental stimulus, the health here is
+absolutely unequalled by that of any country in Europe. Certainly, if
+the mental and moral sainthood which we have does not build up the body,
+it cannot be said that it does any injury to it.
+
+Have we noted what a splendid testimony the war which has just closed
+has given to the physical results of our New England villages and put
+into the ranks of our army--young men who learned the alphabet at four,
+who all through boyhood had the advantages of our common-school system,
+who had felt to the full the excitement of the intellectual life about
+them--have stood taller, weighed heavier, fought more bravely and
+intelligently, won victory out of more adverse circumstances, and, what
+is more to the point, endured more hardship with less sickness, than a
+like number of any other race on earth. We care not where you look for
+comparison, whether to Britain, or to France, or to Russia, where the
+spelling-book has almost been tabooed, or to Spain, where in times past
+the capacity to read the Bible was scarcely less than rank heresy, at
+least for the common people. This war has been brought to a successful
+issue by the best educated army that ever fought on battle-field, or, as
+the new book has it, by "the thinking bayonet," by men whose physical
+manhood has received no detriment from their intellectual culture.
+
+These assertions are founded upon statistics which have been preserved
+regiments whose members were almost exclusively native-born. And the
+results are certainly in accordance with all candid observation. It may,
+indeed, be said that the better health of our army has been after all
+the result of the better care which the soldier has taken of himself. We
+answer, the better care was the product of his education. It may be said
+again that this health was owing in a great measure to the superior
+watchfulness exercised over the soldier by others, by the Government, by
+the Sanitary Commission, and by State agencies. Then we reply, that this
+tenderness of the soldier, if tenderness it be, and this sagacity, if
+sagacity prompted the care, were both the offspring of that high
+intelligence which is the proper result of popular education.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There is but one possible mode of escape from such testimony. This whole
+train of argument is inconclusive, it may be asserted, because what is
+maintained is not that intellectual culture is unhealthful, where it is
+woven into the web of active life, but only where the pursuit of
+knowledge is one's business. It may be readily allowed, that, where the
+whole nature is kept alive by the breath of outward enterprise, when the
+great waves of this world's excitements are permitted to roll with
+purifying tides into the inmost recesses of the soul, the results of
+mental culture may be modified. But what of the saints? What of the
+literary men _par excellence_?
+
+Ah! if you restrain us to that line of inquiry, the argument will be
+trebly strong, and the facts grow overwhelmingly pertinent and
+conclusive. Will you examine the careful registry of deaths in
+Massachusetts which has been kept the last twenty years? It will inform
+you that the classes whose average of life is high up, almost the
+highest up, are with us the classes that work with the brain,--the
+judges, the lawyers, the physicians, the clergymen, the professors in
+your colleges. The very exception to this statement rather confirms than
+contradicts our general position, that intellectual culture is
+absolutely invigorating. The cultivators of the soil live longest. But
+note that it is the educated, intelligent farmers, the farmers of
+Massachusetts, the farmers of a State of common schools, the farmers who
+link thought to labor, who live long. And doubtless, if they carried
+more thought into their labor, if they were more intelligent, if they
+were better educated, they would live yet longer. At any rate, in
+England the cultivators of her soil, her down-trodden peasantry,
+sluggish and uneducated, do not live out half their days. Very likely
+the farmer's lot, _plus_ education and _plus_ habits of mental activity,
+is the healthiest as it is the primal condition of man. Nevertheless,
+considering what is the general opinion, it is surprising how slight is
+the advantage which he has even then over the purely literary classes.
+
+Will you go to Harvard University and ascertain what becomes of her
+children? Take up, then, Dr. Palmer's Necrology of the Alumni of Harvard
+from 1851 to 1863. You will learn, that, while the average age of all
+persons who in Massachusetts die after they have attained the period of
+twenty years is but fifty years, the average age of Harvard graduates,
+who die in like manner, is fifty-eight years. Thus you have, in favor of
+the highest form of public education known in the State, a clear average
+of eight years. You may examine backward the Triennial Catalogue as far
+as you please, and you will not find the testimony essentially
+different. The statement will stand impregnable, that, from the time
+John Harvard founded our little College in the wilderness, to this hour,
+when it is fast becoming a great University, with its schools in every
+department, and its lectures covering the whole field of human
+knowledge, the graduates have always attained a longevity surpassing
+that of their generation.
+
+And you are to observe that this comparison is a strictly just
+comparison. We contrast not the whole community, old and young, with
+those who must necessarily have attained manhood before they are a class
+at all; but adults with adults, graduates with those of other avocations
+who have arrived at the period of twenty years. Neither do we compare
+the bright and peculiar luminaries of Harvard with the mass of
+men,--though, in fact, it is well known that the best scholars live the
+most years,--but we compare the whole body of the graduates, bright and
+dull, studious and unstudious, with the whole body of the community.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To the array of evidence which may be brought from all the registries of
+all the states and universities under heaven, some may triumphantly
+exclaim, "Statistics are unworthy of trust." "To lie like statistics,"
+"false as a fact," these are the stalest of witticisms. But the
+objection to which they give point is practically frivolous. Grant that
+statistics are to a certain degree doubtful, are they not the most
+trustworthy evidence we have? And in the question at issue, are they not
+the only evidence which has real force? And allowing their general
+defectiveness, how shall we explain, that, though gathered from all
+sides and by all kinds of people, they so uniformly favor education?
+Why, if they must err, do they err so pertinaciously in one direction?
+How does it happen, that, summon as many witnesses as you please, and
+cross-question them as severely as you can, they never falter in this
+testimony, that, where intelligence abounds, there physical vigor does
+much more abound? that, where education is broad and generous, there the
+years are many and happy?
+
+If, therefore, facts can prove anything, it is that just such a
+condition of life as that which is growing more and more general among
+us, and which our common-school system directly fosters, where every man
+is becoming an educated man,--where the farmer upon his acres, the
+merchant at his desk, and the mechanic in his shop, no less than the
+scholar poring over his books shall be in the truest sense
+educated,--that such a condition is the one of all others which promotes
+habits of thought and action, an elasticity of temper and a breadth of
+vision and interest most conducive to health and vigor. It is the
+fashion to talk of the appearance of superior robustness so
+characteristic of our English brethren. But we suspect that in this
+case, too, appearances are deceitful. That climate may produce in us a
+restless energy inconsistent with rounded forms and rosy cheeks we
+freely allow. But in strength and real endurance the New England
+constitution will yield to none. And the stern logic of facts shows
+beyond a peradventure, that here there are no influences, climatic or
+intellectual, which war with longevity. What may be hidden in the
+future, what results may come from a still wider diffusion of education,
+we cannot tell, but hitherto nothing but good has come of
+ever-increasing knowledge.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We hasten now to inquire concerning the health and years of special
+classes of literary men: not, indeed, to prove that there is no real war
+between the mind and the body,--for we consider that point to be already
+demonstrated,--but rather to show that we need shrink from no field of
+inquiry, and that from every fresh field will come new evidence of the
+substantial truth of our position.
+
+We have taken the trouble to ascertain the average age of all the
+English poets of whom Johnson wrote lives, some fifty or sixty in all.
+Here are great men and small men, men with immortal names and men whose
+names were long since forgotten, men of good habits and men whose habits
+would undermine any constitution, flourishing, too, in a period when
+human life was certainly far shorter in England than now. And how long
+did they live? What do you think? Thirty, forty years? No; they endured
+their sainthood, or their want of it, for the comfortable period of
+fifty-six years. Nor is the case a particle different, if you take only
+the great and memorable names of English poetry. Chaucer, living at the
+dawn almost of English civilization; Shakspeare, whose varied and
+marvellous dramas might well have exhausted any vitality; Milton,
+struggling with domestic infelicity, with political hatred, and with
+blindness; Dryden, Pope, Swift: none of these burning and shining lights
+of English literature went out at mid-day. The result is not altered, if
+you come nearer our own time. That galaxy of talent and genius which
+shone with such brilliancy in the Scottish capital at the beginning of
+the century,--Sydney Smith, Lord Jeffrey, Christopher North, Macaulay,
+Mackintosh, De Quincey, Brougham,--all these, with scarcely an
+exception, have lived far beyond the average of human life. So was it
+with the great poets and romancers of that period. Wordsworth, living
+the life of a recluse near the beautiful lakes of Westmoreland, lasted
+to fourscore. Southey, after a life of unparalleled literary industry,
+broke down at sixty-six. Coleridge, with habits which ought to have
+destroyed him early, lingered till sixty-two. Scott, struggling to throw
+off a mountain-load of debt, endured superhuman labor till more than
+sixty. Even Byron and Burns, who did not live as men who desired length
+of days, died scarcely sooner than their generation.
+
+You are not willing, perhaps, to test this question by the longevity of
+purely literary men. You ask what can be said about the great preachers.
+You have always heard, that, while the ministers were, no doubt, men of
+excellent intentions and much sound learning, what with their morbid
+notions of life, and what with the weight of a rather heavy sort of
+erudition, they were saints with the very poorest kind of bodies. Just
+the contrary. No class lives longer. We once made out a list of the
+thirty most remarkable preachers of the last four centuries that we
+could call to mind. Of the age to which most of these attained we had at
+the outset no idea whatever. In that list were included the men who must
+figure in every candid account of preaching. The great men of the
+Reformation, Luther, Melancthon, Calvin, Beza, Knox, were there. That
+resplendent group which adorned the seventeenth century, and whose
+names are synonymes for pulpit eloquence, Barrow, South, Jeremy Taylor,
+and Tillotson, were prominent in it. The milder lights of the last
+century, Paley, Blair, Robertson, Priestley, were not forgotten. The
+Catholics were represented by Massillon, Bossuet, Bourdaloue, and
+Fenelon. The Protestants as truly by Robert Hall and Chalmers, by Wesley
+and Channing. In short, it was a thoroughly fair list. We then proceeded
+to ascertain the average life of those included in it. It was just
+sixty-nine years. And we invite all persons who are wedded to the notion
+that the saints are always knights of the broken body, to take pen and
+paper and jot down the name of every remarkable preacher since the year
+1500 that they can recall, and add, if they wish, every man in their own
+vicinity who has risen in learning and talent above the mass of his
+profession. We will insure the result without any premium. They will
+produce a list that would delight the heart of a provident director of a
+life-insurance company. And their average will come as near the old
+Scripture pattern of threescore years and ten as that of any body of men
+who have lived since the days of Isaac and Jacob.
+
+If now any one has a lurking doubt of the physical value of an active
+and well-stored mind, let him pass from the preachers to the statesmen,
+from the men who teach the wisdom of the world to come to the men who
+administer the things of this world. Let him begin with the grand names
+of the Long Parliament,--Hampden, Pym, Vane, Cromwell,--and then gather
+up all the great administrators of the next two centuries, down to the
+octogenarians who are now foremost in the conduct of British affairs;
+and if he wishes to widen his observation, let him pass over the Channel
+to the Continent, and in France recall such names as Sully and
+Richelieu, Mazarin and Colbert, Talleyrand and Guizot; in Austria,
+Kaunitz and Metternich. And when he has made his list as broad, as
+inclusive of all really great statesmanship everywhere as he can, find
+his average; and if he can bring it much beneath seventy, he will be
+more fortunate than we were when we tried the experiment.
+
+Do not by any means omit the men of science. There are the astronomers.
+If any employment would seem to draw a man up to heaven, it would be
+this. Yet, of all men, astronomers apparently have had the most wedded
+attachment to earth. Galileo, Newton, La Place, Herschel,--these are the
+royal names, the fixed stars, set, as it were, in that very firmament
+which for so many years they searched with telescopic eye. And yet
+neither of them lived less than seventy-eight years. As for the men of
+natural science, it looks as though they were spared by some
+Providential provision, in order that they might observe and report for
+long epochs the changes of this old earth of ours. Cuvier dying at
+seventy-five, Sir Joseph Banks at seventy-seven, Buffon at eighty-one,
+Blumenbach at eighty-eight, and Humboldt at fourscore and ten, are some
+of the cases which make such a supposition altogether reasonable.
+
+Cross the ocean, and you will find the same testimony, that mental
+culture is absolutely favorable to physical endurance. The greatest men
+in our nation's history, whether in walks of statesmanship, science, or
+literature, almost without exception, have lived long. Franklin,
+Washington, Jefferson, Madison, the elder Adams, and Patrick Henry, in
+earlier periods,--the younger Adams, Clay, Calhoun, Webster, Choate, and
+Everett, Irving, Prescott, Cooper, and Hawthorne, in later times,--are
+cases in point. These men did not die prematurely. They grew strong by
+the toil of the brain. And to-day the quartette of our truest
+poets--Bryant, Whittier, Longfellow, and Holmes--are with us in the hale
+years of a green age, never singing sweeter songs, never harping more
+inspiring strains. Long may our ears hear their melodies!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If now we could enter the walks of private life, and study widely the
+experience of individual men, we should have an interesting record
+indeed, and a manifold and wellnigh irresistible testimony. Consider a
+few remarkable, yet widely differing cases.
+
+Who can read attentively the life of John Wesley, and not exclaim, if
+varied and exhausting labor, if perpetual excitement and constant drafts
+upon the brain, would ever wear a man out, he would have worn out? It
+was his creative energy that called into existence a denomination, his
+ardent piety that inspired it, his clear mind that legislated for it,
+his heroic industry that did no mean part of the incessant daily toil
+needful for its establishment. Yet this man of many labors, who through
+a long life never knew practically the meaning of the word _leisure_,
+says, at seventy-two, "How is it that I find the same strength that I
+did thirty years ago, that my nerves are firmer, that I have none of the
+infirmities of old age, and have lost several that I had in youth." And
+ten years later, he devoutly records, "Is anything too hard for God? It
+is now eleven years since I have felt such a thing as weariness." And he
+continued till eighty-eight in full possession of his faculties,
+laboring with body and mind alike to within a week of his death.
+
+Joseph Priestley was certainly a very different man, but scarcely less
+remarkable. No mean student in all branches of literature, a
+metaphysician, a theologian, a man of science, he began life with a
+feeble frame, and ended a hearty old age at seventy-one. He himself
+declares at fifty-four, that, "so far from suffering from application to
+study, I have found my health steadily improve from the age of eighteen
+to the present time."
+
+You would scarcely find a life more widely divided from these than that
+of Washington Irving. Nevertheless, it is like them in one respect, that
+it bears emphatic testimony to the real healthiness of mental exertion.
+He was the feeblest of striplings at eighteen. At nineteen, Judge Kent
+said, "He is not long for this world." His friends sent him abroad at
+twenty-one, to see if a sea voyage would not husband his strength. So
+pale, so broken, was he, that, when he stepped on board the ship, the
+captain whispered, "There is a chap who will be overboard before we are
+across!" Irving had, too, his share of misfortunes,--failure in
+business, loss of investments, in earlier life some anxiety as to the
+ways and means of support. Even his habits of study were hardly what the
+highest wisdom would direct. While he was always genial and social, and
+at times easy almost to indolence, when the mood seized him, he would
+write incessantly for weeks and even for months, sometimes fourteen,
+fifteen, or sixteen hours in a day. But he grew robust for half a
+century, and writes, at seventy-five, that he has now "a streak of old
+age."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The example of some of those who are said to have been worn out by
+intense mental application furnishes perhaps the most convincing proof
+of all that no reasonable activity of the mind ever warred with the best
+health of the body. Walter Scott, we are told, wore out. And very
+likely, to a certain extent, the statement is true. But what had he not
+accomplished before he wore out? He had astonished the world with that
+wonderful series of romances which place him scarcely second to any name
+in English literature. He had sung those border legends which delighted
+the ears of his generation. He had produced histories which show, that,
+had he chosen, he might have been as much a master in the region of
+historic fact as in the realm of imagination. He had edited other men's
+works; he had written essays; he had lent himself with a royal
+generosity to every one who asked his time or influence; and when,
+almost an old man, commercial bankruptcy overtook him, and he sought to
+lift the mountain of his debt by pure intellectual toil, he wore out.
+But declining years, disappointed hopes, desperate exertions, may wear
+anybody out. He wore out, but it was at more than threescore years, when
+nine tenths of his generation had long slept in quiet graves,--when the
+crowd of the thoughtless and indolent, who began life with him, had
+rusted out in inglorious repose. Yes, Walter Scott wore out, if you call
+that wearing out.
+
+John Calvin, all his biographers say, wore out. Perhaps so;--but not
+without a prolonged resistance. Commencing life with the frailest
+constitution, he was, as early as twenty-five, a model of erudition, and
+had already written his immortal work. For thirty years he was in the
+heat and ferment of a great religious revolution. For thirty years he
+was one of the controlling minds of his age. For thirty years he was the
+sternest soldier in the Church Militant, bearing down stubborn
+resistance by a yet more stubborn will. For thirty years neither his
+brain nor his pen knew rest. And so at fifty-six this man of broken body
+and many labors laid down the weapons of his warfare; but it was at
+Geneva, where the public registers tell us that the average of human
+life in that century was only nine years.
+
+One writes words like these:--"John Kitto died, and his death was the
+judgment for overwork, and overwork of a single organ,--the brain." And
+who was John Kitto? A poor boy, the son a drunken father, subject from
+infancy to agonizing headache. An unfortunate lad, who at thirteen fell
+from a scaffolding and was taken up for dead, and escaped only with
+total deafness and a supposed permanent injury to the brain. A hapless
+apprentice, who suffered at the hands of a cruel taskmaster all that
+brutality and drunken fury could suggest. A youth, thirsting for
+knowledge, but able to obtain it only by the hardest ways, peering into
+booksellers' windows, reading at book-stalls, purchasing cheap books
+with pennies stained all over with the sweat of his toil. An heroic
+student, who labored for more than twenty years with almost unparalleled
+industry, and with an equally unparalleled neglect of the laws of
+health; of whom it is scarcely too much to say literally, that he knew
+no change, but from his desk to his bed, and from his bed to his desk
+again. A voluminous writer, who, if he produced no work of positive
+genius, has done more than any other man to illustrate the Scriptures,
+and to make familiar and vivid the scenery, the life, the geography, and
+the natural history of the Holy Land. And he died in the harness,--but
+not so very early,--at fifty. And we say that he would have lived much
+longer, had he given his constitution a fair chance. But when we
+remember his passionate fondness for books, how they compensated him for
+the want of wealth, comforts, and the pleasant voices of wife and
+children that he could not hear, we grow doubtful. And we hear him
+exclaim almost in rhapsody,--"If I were blind as well as deaf, in what a
+wretched situation should I be! If I could not read, how deplorable
+would be my condition! What earthly pleasure equal to the reading of a
+good book? O dearest tomes! O princely and august folios! to obtain you,
+I would work night and day, and forbid myself every sensual joy!" When
+we behold the forlorn man, shut out by his misfortune from so many
+resources, and finding more than recompense for this privation within
+the four walls of his library, we are tempted to say, No, he would not
+have lived as long; had he studied less, he would have remembered his
+griefs more.
+
+Of course it is easy to take exception to all evidence drawn from the
+life and experience of individual men,--natural to say that one must
+needs be somewhat old before he can acquire a great name at all, and
+that our estimate considers those alone to whom mere prolongation of day
+has given reputation, and forgets "the village Hampdens, the mute,
+inglorious Miltons," the unrecorded Newtons, the voiceless orators,
+sages, or saints who have died and made no sign. To this the simple
+reply is, that individual cases, however numerous and striking, are not
+relied upon to prove any position, but only to illustrate and confirm
+one which general data have already demonstrated. Grant the full force
+of every criticism, and then it remains true that the widest record of
+literary life exhibits no tendency of mental culture to shorten human
+life or to create habits which would shorten it. Indeed, we do not know
+where to look for any broad range of facts which would indicate that
+education here or anywhere else has decreased or is likely to decrease
+health. And were it not for the respect which we cherish towards those
+who hold it, we should say that such a position was as nearly pure
+theory or prejudice or opinion founded on fragmentary data as any view
+well could be.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But do you mean to assert that there is no such thing as intellectual
+excess? that intellectual activity never injures? that unremitting
+attention to mental pursuits, with an entire abstinence from proper
+exercise and recreation, is positively invigorating? that robbing the
+body of sleep, and bending it sixteen or eighteen hours over the desk,
+is the best way to build it up in grace and strength? Of course no one
+would say any such absurd things. There is a right and wrong use of
+everything. Any part of the system will wear out with excessive use.
+Overwork kills, but certainly not any quicker when it is overwork of the
+mind than when it is overwork of the body. Overwork in the study is just
+as healthful as overwork on the farm or at the ledger or in the smoky
+shop, toiling and moiling, with no rest and no quickening thoughts.
+Especially is it true that education does not peculiarly tempt a man to
+excess.
+
+But are you ready to maintain that there is no element of excess infused
+into our common-school system? Certainly. Most emphatically there is
+not. What, then, is there to put over against these terrible statements
+of excessive labor of six or seven hours a day, under which young brains
+are reeling and young spines are bending until there are no rosy-checked
+urchins and blooming maids left among us? The inexorable logic of facts.
+The public schools of Massachusetts were taught in the years 1863-4 on
+an average just thirty-two weeks, just five days in a week, and, making
+proper allowance for recesses and opening exercises, just five and a
+quarter hours in a day. Granting now that all the boys and girls studied
+during these hours faithfully, you have an average for the three hundred
+and thirteen working days of the year of two hours and forty-one minutes
+a day,--an amount of study that never injured any healthy child. But,
+going back a little to youthful recollections, and considering the
+amazing proclivity of the young mind to idleness, whispering, and fun
+and frolic in general, it seems doubtful whether our children ever yet
+attained to so high an average of actual study as two hours a day. As a
+modification of this statement, it may be granted that in the cities and
+larger towns the school term reaches forty weeks in a year. If you add
+one hour as the average amount of study at home, given by pupils of over
+twelve years, (and the allowance is certainly ample,) you have four
+hours as the utmost period ever given by any considerable class of
+children. That there is excess we freely admit. That there are easy
+committee-men who permit too high a pressure, and infatuated teachers
+who insist upon it, that there are ambitious children whom nobody can
+stop, and silly parents who fondly wish to see their children
+monstrosities of brightness, lisping Latin and Greek in their cradles,
+respiring mathematics as they would the atmosphere, and bristling all
+over with facts of natural science like porcupines, till every bit of
+childhood is worked out of them,--that such things are, we are not
+inclined to deny. But they are rare exceptions,--no more a part of the
+system than white crows are proper representatives of the dusky and
+cawing brotherhood.
+
+Or yet again, do we mean to assert that no attention need be given to
+the formation of right physical habits? or that bodily exercise ought
+not to be joined to mental toils? or that the walk in the woods, the row
+upon the quiet river, the stroll with rod in hand by the babbling brook,
+or with gun on shoulder over the green prairies, or the skating in the
+crisp December air on the glistening lake, ought to be discouraged? Do
+we speak disrespectfully of dumb-bells and clubs and parallel bars, and
+all the paraphernalia of the gymnasium? Are we aggrieved at the mention
+of boxing-gloves or single-stick or foils? Would it shock our nervous
+sensibilities, if our next-door neighbor the philosopher, or some
+near-by grave and reverend doctor of divinity, or even the learned judge
+himself, should give unmistakable evidence that he had in his body the
+two hundred and odd bones and the five hundred and more muscles, with
+all their fit accompaniments of joints and sinews, of which the
+anatomists tell us? Not at all. Far from it. We exercise, no doubt, too
+little. We know of God's fair world too much by description, too little
+by the sight of our own eyes. Welcome anything which leads us out into
+this goodly and glorious universe! Welcome all that tends to give the
+human frame higher grace and symmetry! Welcome the gymnastics, too,
+heavy or light either, if they will guide us to a more harmonious
+physical development.
+
+We ourselves own a set of heavy Indian-clubs, of middling Indian-clubs,
+and of light Indian-clubs. We have iron dumb-bells and wooden
+dumb-bells. We recollect with considerable satisfaction a veritable
+bean-bag which did good service in the household until it unfortunately
+sprung a-leak. In an amateur way we have tried both systems, and felt
+the better for them. We have a dim remembrance of rowing sundry leagues,
+and even of dabbling with the rod and line. We always look with friendly
+eye upon the Harvard Gymnasium, whenever it looms up in actual or mental
+vision. Never yet could we get by an honest game of cricket or base-ball
+without losing some ten minutes in admiring contemplation. We bow with
+deep respect to Dr. Windship and his heavy weights. We bow, if anything,
+with a trifle more of cordiality to Dr. Lewis and his light weights.
+They both have our good word. We think that they would have our example,
+were it not for the fatal proclivity of solitary gymnastics to dulness.
+If we have not risen to the high degrees in this noble order of muscular
+Christians, we claim at least to be a humble craftsman and faithful
+brother.
+
+Speaking with all seriousness, we have no faith in mental activity
+purchased at the expense of physical sloth. It is well to introduce into
+the school, into the family, and into the neighborhood any movement
+system which will exercise all the muscles of the body. But the educated
+man is not any more likely to need this general physical development
+than anybody else. Establish your gymnasium in any village, and the
+farmer fresh from the plough, the mechanic from swinging the hammer or
+driving the plane, will be just as sure to find new muscles that he
+never dreamed of as the palest scholar of them all. And the diffusion of
+knowledge and refinement, so far from promoting inactivity and banishing
+recreations from life, directly feeds that craving for variety out of
+which healthful changes come, and awakens that noble curiosity which at
+fit seasons sends a man out to see how the wild-flower grows in the
+woods, how the green buds open in the spring, how the foliage takes on
+its painted autumn glory, which leads him to struggle through tangled
+thickets or through pathless woods that he may behold the brook laughing
+in cascade from rock to rock, or to breast the steep mountain that he
+may behold from a higher outlook the wonders of the visible creation.
+Other things being equal, the educated man in any vocation is quite as
+likely as another to be active, quick in every motion and free in every
+limb.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But admit all that is claimed. Admit that increasing intelligence has
+changed the average of man's life from the twenty-five years of the
+seventeenth century to the thirty-five of the eighteenth or the
+forty-five years of the nineteenth century. Admit, too, that the best
+educated men of this generation will live five or ten years more than
+the least educated men. Ought we to be satisfied with things as they
+are? Should we not look for more than the forty or fifty years of human
+life? Assuredly. But it is not our superfluous sainthood which is
+destroying life. It is not that we have too much saintliness, but too
+little, too limited wisdom, too narrow intelligence, too small an
+endowment of virtue and conscience. It is our fierce absorption in
+outward plans which plants anxieties like thorns in the heart. It is out
+sloth and gluttony which eat out vitality. It is our unbridled appetites
+and passions which burn like a consuming fire in our breasts. It is our
+unwise exposure which saps the strength and gives energy and force to
+latent disease. These, tenfold more than any intense application of the
+brain to its legitimate work, limit and destroy human life. The truly
+cultivated mind tends to give just aims, moderate desires, and good
+habits.
+
+Ay, and when the true sainthood shall possess and rule humanity,--when
+the fields of knowledge with their wholesome fruits shall tempt every
+foot away from the forbidden paths of vice and sensual indulgence,--when
+a wise intelligence shall cool the hot passions which dry up the
+refreshing fountains of peace and joy in the heart,--when a heavenly
+wisdom shall lift us above any bondage to this world's fortunes, and
+when a good conscience and a lofty trust shall forbid us to be slaves to
+any occupation lower than the highest,--when we stand erect and free,
+clothed with a real saintliness,--then the years of our life may
+increase, and man may go down to his grave "in a full age, like as a
+shock of corn cometh in in his season."
+
+Meanwhile we must stand firmly on this assertion, that, the more of
+mental and moral sainthood our people achieve, the more that sainthood
+will write fair inscriptions on their bodies, will shine out in
+intelligence in their faces, will exhibit itself in graceful form and
+motion, and thus add to the deeper and more lasting virtues physical
+power, a body which shall be at once a good servant and the proper
+representative of a refined and elevated soul.
+
+
+
+
+NO TIME LIKE THE OLD TIME.
+
+
+    There is no time like the old time, when you and I were young,
+    When the buds of April blossomed, and the birds of spring-time sung!
+    The garden's brightest glories by summer suns are nursed,
+    But, oh, the sweet, sweet violets, the flowers that opened first!
+
+    There is no place like the old place where you and I were born,
+    Where we lifted first our eyelids on the splendors of the morn
+    From the milk-white breast that warmed us, from the clinging arms that bore,
+    Where the dear eyes glistened o'er us that will look on us no more!
+
+    There is no friend like the old friend who has shared our morning days,
+    No greeting like his welcome, no homage like his praise:
+    Fame is the scentless sunflower, with gaudy crown of gold;
+    But friendship is the breathing rose, with sweets in every fold.
+
+    There is no love like the old love that we courted in our pride;
+    Though our leaves are falling, falling, and we're fading side by side,
+    There are blossoms all around us with the colors of our dawn,
+    And we live in borrowed sunshine when the light of day is gone.
+
+    There are no times like the old times,--they shall never be forgot!
+    There is no place like the old place,--keep green the dear old spot!
+    There are no friends like our old friends,--may Heaven prolong their lives!
+    There are no loves like our old loves,--God bless our loving wives!
+
+
+
+
+COUPON BONDS.
+
+
+PART II.
+
+Mr. Ducklow had scarcely turned the corner of the street, when, looking
+anxiously in the direction of his homestead, he saw a column of smoke.
+It was directly over the spot where he knew his house to be situated. He
+guessed at a glance what had happened. The frightful catastrophe he
+foreboded had befallen. Taddy had set the house afire.
+
+"Them bonds! them bonds!" he exclaimed, distractedly. He did not think
+so much of the house: house and furniture were insured; if they were
+burned, the inconvenience would be great indeed, and at any other time
+the thought of such an event would have been a sufficient cause for
+trepidation,--but now his chief, his only anxiety was the bonds. They
+were not insured. They would be a dead loss. And what added sharpness to
+his pangs, they would be a loss which he must keep a secret, as he had
+kept their existence a secret,--a loss which he could not confess, and
+of which he could not complain. Had he not just given his neighbors to
+understand that he held no such property? And his wife,--was she not at
+that very moment, if not serving up a lie on the subject, at least
+paring the truth very thin indeed?
+
+"A man would think," observed Ferring, "that Ducklow had some o' them
+bonds on his hands, and got scaret, he took such a sudden start. He has,
+hasn't he, Mrs. Ducklow?"
+
+"Has what?" said Mrs. Ducklow, pretending ignorance.
+
+"Some o' them cowpon bonds. I ruther guess he's got some."
+
+"You mean Gov'ment bonds? Ducklow got some? 'Ta'n't at all likely he'd
+spec'late in them, without saying something to _me_ about it! No, he
+couldn't have any without my knowing it, I'm sure!"
+
+How demure, how innocent she looked, plying her knitting-needles, and
+stopping to take up a stitch! How little at that moment she knew of
+Ducklow's trouble, and its terrible cause!
+
+Ducklow's first impulse was to drive on and endeavor at all hazards to
+snatch the bonds from the flames. His next was, to return and alarm his
+neighbors, and obtain their assistance. But a minute's delay might be
+fatal; so he drove on, screaming "Fire! fire!" at the top of his voice.
+
+But the old mare was a slow-footed animal; and Ducklow had no whip. He
+reached forward and struck her with the reins.
+
+"Git up! git up!--Fire! fire!" screamed Ducklow. "Oh, them bonds! them
+bonds! Why didn't I give the money to Reuben? Fire! fire! fire!"
+
+By dint of screaming and slapping, he urged her from a trot into a
+gallop, which was scarcely an improvement as to speed, and certainly
+not as to grace. It was like the gallop of an old cow. "Why don't ye go
+'long!" he cried despairingly.
+
+Slap, slap! He knocked his own hat off with the loose ends of the reins.
+It fell under the wheels. He cast one look behind, to satisfy himself
+that it had been very thoroughly run over and crushed into the dirt, and
+left it to its fate.
+
+Slap, slap! "Fire, fire!" Canter, canter, canter! Neighbors looked out
+of their windows, and, recognizing Ducklow's wagon and old mare in such
+an astonishing plight, and Ducklow himself, without his hat, rising from
+his seat, and reaching forward in wild attitudes, brandishing the reins,
+at the same time rending the azure with yells, thought he must be
+insane.
+
+He drove to the top of the hill, and looking beyond, in expectation of
+seeing his house wrapped in flames, discovered that the smoke proceeded
+from a brush-heap which his neighbor Atkins was burning in a field near
+by.
+
+The revulsion of feeling that ensued was almost too much for the
+excitable Ducklow. His strength went out of him. For a little while
+there seemed to be nothing left of him but tremor and cold sweat.
+Difficult as it had been to get the old mare in motion, it was now even
+more difficult to stop her.
+
+"Why! what has got into Ducklow's old mare? She's running away with him!
+Who ever heard of such a thing!" And Atkins, watching the ludicrous
+spectacle from his field, became almost as weak from laughter as Ducklow
+was from the effects of fear.
+
+At length Ducklow succeeded in checking the old mare's speed, and in
+turning her about. It was necessary to drive back for his hat. By this
+time he could hear a chorus of shouts, "Fire! fire! fire!" over the
+hill. He had aroused the neighbors as he passed, and now they were
+flocking to extinguish the flames.
+
+"A false alarm! a false alarm!" said Ducklow, looking marvellously
+sheepish, as he met them. "Nothing but Atkins's brush-heap!"
+
+"Seems to me you ought to have found that out 'fore you raised all
+creation with your yells!" said one hyperbolical fellow. "You looked
+like the Flying Dutchman! This your hat? I thought 'twas a dead cat in
+the road. No fire, no fire!"--turning back to his comrades,--"only one
+of Ducklow's jokes."
+
+Nevertheless, two or three boys there were who would not be convinced,
+but continued to leap up, swing their caps, and scream "Fire!" against
+all remonstrance. Ducklow did not wait to enter into explanations, but,
+turning the old mare about again, drove home amid the laughter of the
+bystanders and the screams of the misguided youngsters. As he approached
+the house, he met Taddy rushing wildly up the street.
+
+"Thaddeus! Thaddeus! where ye goin', Thaddeus?"
+
+"Goin' to the fire!" cried Taddy.
+
+"There isn't any fire, boy!"
+
+"Yes, there is! Didn't ye hear 'em? They've been yellin' like fury."
+
+"It's nothin' but Atkins's brush."
+
+"That all?" And Taddy appeared very much disappointed. "I thought there
+was goin' to be some fun. I wonder who was such a fool as to yell fire
+jest for a darned old brush-heap!"
+
+Ducklow did not inform him.
+
+"I've got to drive over to town and git Reuben's trunk. You stand by the
+mare while I step in and brush my hat."
+
+Instead of applying himself at once to the restoration of his beaver, he
+hastened to the sitting-room, to see that the bonds were safe.
+
+"Heavens and 'arth!" said Ducklow.
+
+The chair, which had been carefully planted in the spot where they were
+concealed, had been removed. Three or four tacks had been taken out, and
+the carpet pushed from the wall. There was straw scattered about.
+Evidently Taddy had been interrupted, in the midst of his ransacking, by
+the alarm of fire. Indeed, he was even now creeping into the house to
+see what notice Ducklow would take of these evidences of his mischief.
+
+In great trepidation the farmer thrust in his hand here and there, and
+groped, until he found the envelope precisely where it had been placed
+the night before, with the tape tied around it, which his wife had put
+on to prevent its contents from slipping out and losing themselves.
+Great was the joy of Ducklow. Great also was the wrath of him, when he
+turned and discovered Taddy.
+
+"Didn't I tell you to stand by the old mare?"
+
+"She won't stir," said Taddy, shrinking away again.
+
+"Come here!" And Ducklow grasped him by the collar. "What have you been
+doin'? Look at that!"
+
+"'Twa'n't me!"--beginning to whimper, and ram his fists into his eyes.
+
+"Don't tell me 'twa'n't you!" Ducklow shook him till his teeth
+chattered. "What was you pullin' up the carpet for?"
+
+"Lost a marble!" snivelled Taddy.
+
+"Lost a marble! Ye didn't lose it under the carpet, did ye? Look at all
+that straw pulled out!"--shaking him again.
+
+"Didn't know but it might 'a' got under the carpet, marbles roll so,"
+explained Taddy, as soon as he could get his breath.
+
+"Wal, Sir!" Ducklow administered a resounding box on his ear. "Don't you
+do such a thing again, if you lose a million marbles!"
+
+"Ha'n't got a million!" Taddy wept, rubbing his cheek. "Ha'n't got but
+four! Won't ye buy me some to-day?"
+
+"Go to that mare, and don't you leave her again till I come, or I'll
+_marble_ ye in a way you won't like!"
+
+Understanding, by this somewhat equivocal form of expression, that
+flagellation was threatened, Taddy obeyed, still feeling his smarting
+and burning ear.
+
+Ducklow was in trouble. What should he do with the bonds? The floor was
+no place for them, after what had happened; and he remembered too well
+the experience of yesterday to think for a moment of carrying them about
+his person. With unreasonable impatience, his mind reverted to Mrs.
+Ducklow.
+
+"Why a'n't she to home? These women are forever a-gaddin'! I wish
+Reuben's trunk was in Jericho!"
+
+Thinking of the trunk reminded him of one in the garret, filled with old
+papers of all sorts,--newspapers, letters, bills of sale, children's
+writing-books,--accumulations of the past quarter of a century. Neither
+fire nor burglar nor ransacking youngster had ever molested those
+ancient records during all those five-and-twenty years. A bright thought
+struck him.
+
+"I'll slip the bonds down into that wuthless heap o' rubbish, where no
+one 'u'd ever think o' lookin' for 'em, and resk 'em."
+
+Having assured himself that Taddy was standing by the wagon, he paid a
+hasty visit to the trunk in the garret, and concealed the envelope,
+still bound in its band of tape, among the papers. He then drove away,
+giving Taddy a final charge to beware of setting anything afire.
+
+He had driven about half a mile when he met a peddler. There was nothing
+unusual or alarming in such a circumstance, surely; but as Ducklow kept
+on, it troubled him.
+
+"He'll stop to the house now, most likely, and want to trade. Findin'
+nobody but Taddy, there's no knowin' what he'll be tempted to do. But I
+a'n't a-goin' to worry. I'll defy anybody to find them bonds. Besides,
+she may be home by this time. I guess she'll hear of the fire-alarm, and
+hurry home: it'll be jest like her. She'll be there, and--trade with the
+peddler?" thought Ducklow, uneasily. Then a frightful fancy possessed
+him. "She has threatened two or three times to sell that old trunkful of
+papers. He'll offer a big price for 'em, and ten to one she'll let him
+have 'em. Why _didn't_ I think on 't? What a stupid blunderbuss I be!"
+
+As Ducklow thought of it, he felt almost certain that Mrs. Ducklow had
+returned home, and that she was bargaining with the peddler at that
+moment. He fancied her smilingly receiving bright tin-ware for the old
+papers; and he could see the tape-tied envelope going into the bag with
+the rest! The result was, that he turned about and whipped the old mare
+home again in terrific haste, to catch the departing peddler.
+
+Arriving, he found the house as he had left it, and Taddy occupied in
+making a kite-frame.
+
+"Did that peddler stop here?"
+
+"I ha'n't seen no peddler."
+
+"And ha'n't yer Ma Ducklow been home, neither?"
+
+"No."
+
+And with a guilty look, Taddy put the kite-frame behind him.
+
+Ducklow considered. The peddler had turned up a cross-street: he would
+probably turn down again and stop at the house, after all: Mrs. Ducklow
+might by that time be at home: then the sale of old papers would be very
+likely to take place. Ducklow thought of leaving word that he did not
+wish any old papers in the house to be sold, but feared lest the request
+might excite Taddy's suspicions.
+
+"I don't see no way but for me to take the bonds with me," thought he,
+with an inward groan.
+
+He accordingly went to the garret, took the envelope out of the trunk,
+and placed it in the breast-pocket of his overcoat, to which he pinned
+it, to prevent it by any chance from getting out. He used six large,
+strong pins for the purpose, and was afterwards sorry he did not use
+seven.
+
+"There's suthin' losin' out of yer pocket!" bawled Taddy, as he was once
+more mounting the wagon.
+
+Quick as lightning, Ducklow clapped his hand to his breast. In doing so,
+he loosed his hold of the wagon-box and fell, raking his shin badly on
+the wheel.
+
+"Yer side-pocket! it's one o' yer mittens!" said Taddy.
+
+"You rascal! how you scared me!"
+
+Seating himself in the wagon, Ducklow gently pulled up his trousers-leg
+to look at the bruised part.
+
+"Got anything in yer boot-leg to-day, Pa Ducklow?" asked Taddy,
+innocently.
+
+"Yes, a barked shin!--all on your account, too! Go and put that straw
+back, and fix the carpet; and don't ye let me hear ye speak of my
+boot-leg again, or I'll _boot-leg_ ye!"
+
+So saying, Ducklow departed.
+
+Instead of repairing the mischief he had done in the sitting-room, Taddy
+devoted his time and talents to the more interesting occupation of
+constructing his kite-frame. He worked at that, until Mr. Grantley, the
+minister, driving by, stopped to inquire how the folks were.
+
+"A'n't to home: may I ride?" cried Taddy, all in a breath.
+
+Mr. Grantley was an indulgent old gentleman, fond of children; so he
+said, "Jump in"; and in a minute Taddy had scrambled to a seat by his
+side.
+
+And now occurred a circumstance which Ducklow had foreseen. The alarm of
+fire had reached Reuben's; and although the report of its falseness
+followed immediately, Mrs. Ducklow's inflammable fancy was so kindled by
+it that she could find no comfort in prolonging her visit.
+
+"Mr. Ducklow'll be going for the trunk, and I _must_ go home and see to
+things, Taddy's _such_ a fellow for mischief! I can foot it; I sha'n't
+mind it."
+
+And off she started, walking herself out of breath in her anxiety.
+
+She reached the brow of the hill just in time to see a chaise drive away
+from her own door.
+
+"Who _can_ that be? I wonder if Taddy's there to guard the house! If
+anything should happen to them bonds!"
+
+Out of breath as she was, she quickened her pace, and trudged on,
+flushed, perspiring, panting, until she reached the house.
+
+"Thaddeus!" she called.
+
+No Taddy answered. She went in. The house was deserted. And lo! the
+carpet torn up, and the bonds abstracted!
+
+Mr. Ducklow never would have made such work, removing the bonds. Then
+somebody else must have taken them, she reasoned.
+
+"The man in the chaise!" she exclaimed, or rather made an effort to
+exclaim, succeeding only in bringing forth a hoarse, gasping sound. Fear
+dried up articulation. _Vox faucibus hoesit._
+
+And Taddy? He had disappeared; been murdered, perhaps,--or gagged and
+carried away by the man in the chaise.
+
+Mrs. Ducklow flew hither and thither, (to use a favorite phrase of her
+own,) "like a hen with her head cut off"; then rushed out of the house,
+and up the street, screaming after the chaise,--
+
+"Murder! murder! Stop thief! stop thief!"
+
+She waved her hands aloft in the air frantically. If she had trudged
+before, now she trotted, now she cantered; but if the cantering of the
+old mare was fitly likened to that of a cow, to what thing, to what
+manner of motion under the sun, shall we liken the cantering of Mrs.
+Ducklow? It was original; it was unique; it was prodigious. Now, with
+her frantically waving hands, and all her undulating and flapping
+skirts, she seemed a species of huge, unwieldy bird attempting to fly.
+Then she sank down into a heavy, dragging walk,--breath and strength all
+gone,--no voice left even to scream murder. Then the awful realization
+of the loss of the bonds once more rushing over her, she started up
+again. "Half running, half flying, what progress she made!" Then
+Atkins's dog saw her, and, naturally mistaking her for a prodigy, came
+out at her, bristling up and bounding and barking terrifically.
+
+"Come here!" cried Atkins, following the dog. "What's the matter? What's
+to pay, Mrs. Ducklow?"
+
+Attempting to speak, the good woman could only pant and wheeze.
+
+"Robbed!" she at last managed to whisper, amid the yelpings of the cur
+that refused to be silenced.
+
+"Robbed? How? Who?"
+
+"The chaise. Ketch it."
+
+Her gestures expressed more than her words; and Atkins's horse and
+wagon, with which he had been drawing out brush, being in the yard near
+by, he ran to them, leaped to the seat, drove into the road, took Mrs.
+Ducklow aboard, and set out in vigorous pursuit of the slow two-wheeled
+vehicle.
+
+"Stop, you, Sir! Stop, you, Sir!" shrieked Mrs. Ducklow, having
+recovered her breath by the time they came up with the chaise.
+
+It stopped, and Mr. Grantley the minister put out his good-natured,
+surprised face.
+
+"You've robbed my house! You've took"----
+
+Mrs. Ducklow was going on in wild, accusatory accents, when she
+recognized the benign countenance.
+
+"What do you say? I have robbed you?" he exclaimed, very much
+astonished.
+
+"No, no! not you! You wouldn't do such a thing!" she stammered forth,
+while Atkins, who had laughed himself weak at Mr. Ducklow's plight
+earlier in the morning, now laughed himself into a side-ache at Mrs.
+Ducklow's ludicrous mistake. "But did you--did you stop at my house?
+Have you seen our Thaddeus?"
+
+"Here I be, Ma Ducklow!" piped a small voice; and Taddy, who had till
+then remained hidden, fearing punishment, peeped out of the chaise from
+behind the broad back of the minister.
+
+"Taddy! Taddy! how came the carpet"----
+
+"I pulled it up, huntin' for a marble," said Taddy, as she paused,
+overmastered by her emotions.
+
+"And the--the thing tied up in a brown wrapper?"
+
+"Pa Ducklow took it."
+
+"Ye sure?"
+
+"Yes, I seen him!"
+
+"Oh, dear!" said Mrs. Ducklow, "I never was so beat! Mr. Grantley, I
+hope--excuse me--I didn't know what I was about! Taddy, you notty boy,
+what did you leave the house for? Be ye quite sure yer Pa Ducklow"----
+
+Taddy repeated that he was quite sure, as he climbed from the chaise
+into Atkins's wagon. The minister smilingly remarked that he hoped she
+would find no robbery had been committed, and went his way. Atkins,
+driving back, and setting her and Taddy down at the Ducklow gate,
+answered her embarrassed "Much obleeged to ye," with a sincere "Not at
+all," considering the fun he had had a sufficient compensation for his
+trouble. And thus ended the morning's adventures, with the exception of
+an unimportant episode, in which Taddy, Mrs. Ducklow, and Mrs. Ducklow's
+rattan were the principal actors.
+
+At noon Mr. Ducklow returned.
+
+"Did ye take the bonds?" was his wife's first question.
+
+"Of course I did! Ye don't suppose I'd go away and leave 'em in the
+house, not knowin' when you'd be comin' home?"
+
+"Wal, I didn't know. And I didn't know whuther to believe Taddy or not.
+Oh, I've had such a fright!"
+
+And she related the story of her pursuit of the minister.
+
+"How could ye make such a fool of yerself? It'll git all over town, and
+I shall be mortified to death. Jest like a woman, to git frightened!"
+
+"If _you_ hadn't got frightened, and made a fool of _yourself_, yelling
+fire, 'twouldn't have happened!" retorted Mrs. Ducklow.
+
+"Wal! wal! say no more about it! The bonds are safe."
+
+"I was in hopes you'd change 'em for them registered bonds Reuben spoke
+of."
+
+"I did try to, but they told me to the bank it couldn't be did. Then I
+asked 'em if they would keep 'em for me, and they said they wouldn't
+object to lockin' on 'em up in their safe; but they wouldn't give me no
+receipt, nor hold themselves responsible for 'em. I didn't know what
+else to do, so I handed 'em the bonds to keep."
+
+"I want to know if you did now!" exclaimed Mrs. Ducklow, disapprovingly.
+
+"Why not? What else could I do? I didn't want to lug 'em around with me
+forever. And as for keepin' 'em hid in the house, we've tried that!" and
+Ducklow unfolded his weekly newspaper.
+
+Mrs. Ducklow was placing the dinner on the table, with a look which
+seemed to say, "_I_ wouldn't have left the bonds in the bank; _my_
+judgment would have been better than all that. If they are lost, _I_
+sha'n't be to blame!" when suddenly Ducklow started and uttered a cry of
+consternation over his newspaper.
+
+"Why, what have ye found?"
+
+"Bank robbery!"
+
+"Not _your_ bank? Not the bank where _your bonds_"----
+
+"Of course not; but in the very next town! The safe blown open with
+gunpowder! Five thousand dollars in Gov'ment bonds stole!"
+
+"How strange!" said Mrs. Ducklow. "Now what did I tell ye?"
+
+"I believe you're right," cried Ducklow, starting to his feet. "They'll
+be safer in my own house, or even in my own pocket!"
+
+"If you was going to put 'em in any safe, why not put 'em in Josiah's?
+He's got a safe, ye know."
+
+"So he has! We might drive over there and make a visit Monday, and ask
+him to lock up----yes, we might tell him and Laury all about it, and
+leave 'em in their charge."
+
+"So we might!" said Mrs. Ducklow.
+
+Laura was their daughter, and Josiah her husband, in whose honor and
+sagacity they placed unlimited confidence. The plan was resolved upon at
+once.
+
+"To-morrow's Sunday," said Ducklow, pacing the floor. "If we leave the
+bonds in the bank over night, they must stay there till Monday."
+
+"And Sunday is jest the day for burglars to operate!" added Mrs.
+Ducklow.
+
+"I've a good notion--let me see!" said Ducklow, looking at the clock.
+"Twenty minutes after twelve! Bank closes at two! An hour and a half,--I
+believe I could git there in an hour and a half. I will. I'll take a
+bite and drive right back."
+
+Which he accordingly did, and brought the tape-tied envelope home with
+him again. That night he slept with it under his pillow. The next day
+was Sunday; and although Mr. Ducklow did not like to have the bonds on
+his mind during sermon-time, and Mrs. Ducklow "dreaded dreadfully," as
+she said, "to look the minister in the face," they concluded that it was
+best, on the whole, to go to meeting, and carry the bonds. With the
+envelope once more in his breast-pocket, (stitched in this time by Mrs.
+Ducklow's own hand,) the farmer sat under the droppings of the
+sanctuary, and stared up at the good minister, but without hearing a
+word of the discourse, his mind was so engrossed by worldly cares, until
+the preacher exclaimed vehemently, looking straight at Ducklow's pew,--
+
+"What said Paul? 'I would to God that not only thou, but also all that
+hear me this day, were both almost and altogether such as I am, _except
+these bonds_.' _'Except these bonds'!_" he repeated, striking the Bible.
+"Can you, my hearers,--can you say, with Paul, 'Would that all were as I
+am, _except these bonds_'?"
+
+A point which seemed for a moment so personal to himself, that Ducklow
+was filled with confusion, and would certainly have stammered out some
+foolish answer, had not the preacher passed on to other themes. As it
+was, Ducklow contented himself with glancing around to see if the
+congregation was looking at him, and carelessly passing his hand across
+his breast-pocket to make sure the bonds were still there.
+
+Early the next morning, the old mare was harnessed, and Taddy's adopted
+parents set out to visit their daughter,--Mrs. Ducklow having postponed
+her washing for the purpose. It was afternoon when they arrived at their
+journey's end. Laura received them joyfully, but Josiah was not expected
+home until evening. Mr. Ducklow put the old mare in the barn, and fed
+her, and then went in to dinner, feeling very comfortable indeed.
+
+"Josiah's got a nice place here. That's about as slick a little barn as
+ever I see. Always does me good to come over here and see you gittin'
+along so nicely, Laury."
+
+"I wish you'd come oftener, then," said Laura.
+
+"Wal, it's hard leavin' home, ye know. Have to git one of the Atkins
+boys to come and sleep with Taddy the night we're away."
+
+"We shouldn't have come to-day, if 't hadn't been for me," remarked Mrs.
+Ducklow. "Says I to your father, says I, 'I feel as if I wanted to go
+over and see Laury; it seems an age since I've seen her,' says I. 'Wal,'
+says he, 's'pos'n' we go!' says he. That was only last Saturday; and
+this morning we started."
+
+"And it's no fool of a job to make the journey with the old mare!" said
+Ducklow.
+
+"Why don't you drive a better horse?" said Laura, whose pride was always
+touched when her parents came to visit her with the old mare and the
+one-horse wagon.
+
+"Oh, she answers my purpose. Hossflesh is high, Laury. Have to
+economize, these times."
+
+"I'm sure there's no need of your economizing!" exclaimed Laura, leading
+the way to the dining-room. "Why don't you use your money, and have the
+good of it?"
+
+"So I tell him," said Mrs. Ducklow, faintly.--"Why, Laury! I didn't want
+you to be to so much trouble to git dinner jest for us! A bite would
+have answered. Do see, father!"
+
+At evening Josiah came home; and it was not until then that Ducklow
+mentioned the subject which was foremost in his thoughts.
+
+"What do ye think o' Gov'ment bonds, Josiah?" he incidentally inquired,
+after supper.
+
+"First-rate!" said Josiah.
+
+"About as safe as anything, a'n't they?" said Ducklow, encouraged.
+
+"Safe?" cried Josiah. "Just look at the resources of this country!
+Nobody has begun yet to appreciate the power and undeveloped wealth of
+these United States. It's a big rebellion, I know; but we're going to
+put it down. It'll leave us a big debt, very sure; but we handle it now
+easy as that child lifts that stool. It makes him grunt and stagger a
+little, not because he isn't strong enough for it, but because he don't
+understand his own strength, or how to use it: he'll have twice the
+strength, and know just how to apply it, in a little while. Just so with
+this country. It makes me laugh to bear folks talk about repudiation and
+bankruptcy."
+
+"But s'pos'n' we do put down the Rebellion, and the States come back:
+then what's to hender the South, and Secesh sympathizers in the North,
+from j'inin' together and votin' that the debt sha'n't be paid?"
+
+"Don't you worry about that! Do ye suppose we're going to be such fools
+as to give the Rebels, after we've whipped 'em, the same political power
+they had before the war? Not by a long chalk! Sooner than that, we'll
+put the ballot into the hands of the freedmen. They're our friends.
+They've fought on the right side, and they'll vote on the right side. I
+tell ye, spite of all the prejudice there is against black skins, we
+a'n't such a nation of ninnies as to give up all we're fighting for, and
+leave our best friends and allies, not to speak of our own interests, in
+the hands of our enemies."
+
+"You consider Gov'ments a good investment, then, do ye?" said Ducklow,
+growing radiant.
+
+"I do, decidedly,--the very best. Besides, you help the Government; and
+that's no small consideration."
+
+"So I thought. But how is it about the cowpon bonds? A'n't they rather
+ticklish property to have in the house?"
+
+"Well, I don't know. Think how many years you'll keep old bills and
+documents and never dream of such a thing as losing them! There's not a
+bit more danger with the bonds. I shouldn't want to carry 'em around
+with me, to any great amount,--though I did once carry three
+thousand-dollar bonds in my pocket for a week. I didn't mind it."
+
+"Curi's!" said Ducklow: "I've got three thousan'-dollar bonds in my
+pocket this minute!"
+
+"Well, it's so much good property," said Josiah, appearing not at all
+surprised at the circumstance.
+
+"Seems to me, though, if I had a safe, as you have, I should lock 'em up
+in it."
+
+"I was travelling that week. I locked 'em up pretty soon after I got
+home, though."
+
+"Suppose," said Ducklow, as if the thought had but just occurred to
+him,--"suppose you put my bonds into your safe: I shall feel easier."
+
+"Of course," replied Josiah. "I'll keep 'em for you, if you like."
+
+"It will be an accommodation. They'll be safe, will they?"
+
+"Safe as mine are; safe as anybody's: I'll insure 'em for twenty-five
+cents."
+
+Ducklow was happy. Mrs. Ducklow was happy. She took her husband's coat,
+and with a pair of scissors cut the threads that stitched the envelope
+to the pocket.
+
+"Have you torn off the May coupons?" asked Josiah.
+
+"No."
+
+"Well, you'd better. They'll be payable now soon; and if you take them,
+you won't have to touch the bonds again till the interest on the
+November coupons is due."
+
+"A good idea!" said Ducklow.
+
+He took the envelope, untied the tape, and removed its contents.
+Suddenly the glow of comfort, the gleam of satisfaction, faded from his
+countenance.
+
+"Hello! What ye got there?" cried Josiah.
+
+"Why, father! massy sakes!" exclaimed Mrs. Ducklow.
+
+As for Ducklow himself, he could not utter a word; but, dumb with
+consternation, he looked again in the envelope, and opened and turned
+inside out, and shook, with trembling hands, its astonishing contents.
+The bonds were not there: they had been stolen, and three copies of the
+"Sunday Visitor" had been inserted in their place.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Very early on the following morning a dismal-faced middle-aged couple
+might have been seen riding away from Josiah's house. It was the
+Ducklows returning home, after their fruitless, their worse than
+fruitless, journey. No entreaties could prevail upon them to prolong
+their visit. It was with difficulty even that they had been prevented
+from setting off immediately on the discovery of their loss, and
+travelling all night, in their impatience to get upon the track of the
+missing bonds.
+
+"There'll be not the least use in going to-night," Josiah had said. "If
+they were stolen at the bank, you can't do anything about it till
+to-morrow. And even if they were taken from your own house, I don't see
+what's to be gained now by hurrying back. It isn't probable you'll ever
+see 'em again, and you may just as well take it easy,--go to bed and
+sleep on it, and get a fresh start in the morning."
+
+So, much against their inclination, the unfortunate owners of the
+abstracted bonds retired to the luxurious chamber Laura gave them, and
+lay awake all night, groaning and sighing, wondering and surmising, and
+(I regret to add) blaming each other. So true it is, that "modern
+conveniences," hot and cold water all over the house, a pier-glass, and
+the most magnificently canopied couch, avail nothing to give
+tranquillity to the harassed mind. Hitherto the Ducklows had felt great
+satisfaction in the style their daughter, by her marriage, was enabled
+to support. To brag of her nice house and furniture and two servants was
+almost as good as possessing them. Remembering her rich dining-room and
+silver service and porcelain, they were proud. Such things were enough
+for the honor of the family; and, asking nothing for themselves, they
+slept well in their humblest of bed-chambers, and sipped their tea
+contentedly out of clumsy earthen. But that night the boasted style in
+which their "darter" lived was less appreciated than formerly: fashion
+and splendor were no longer a consolation.
+
+"If we had only given the three thousan' dollars to Reuben!" said
+Ducklow, driving homewards with a countenance as long as his whip-lash.
+"'Twould have jest set him up, and been some compensation for his
+sufferin's and losses goin' to the war."
+
+"Wal, I had no objections," replied Mrs. Ducklow. "I always thought he
+ought to have the money eventooally. And, as Miss Beswick said, no doubt
+it would 'a' been ten times the comfort to him now it would be a number
+o' years from now. But you didn't seem willing."
+
+"I don't know! 'twas you that wasn't willin'!"
+
+And they expatiated on Reuben's merits, and their benevolent intentions
+towards him, and, in imagination, endowed him with the price of the
+bonds over and over again: so easy is it to be generous with lost money!
+
+"But it's no use talkin'!" said Ducklow. "I've not the least idee we
+shall ever see the color o' them bonds again. If they was stole to the
+bank, I can't prove anything."
+
+"It does seem strange to me," Mrs. Ducklow replied, "that you should
+have had no more gumption than to trust the bonds with strangers, when
+they told you in so many words they wouldn't be responsible."
+
+"If you have flung that in my teeth once, you have fifty times!" And
+Ducklow lashed the old mare, as if she, and not Mrs. Ducklow, had
+exasperated him.
+
+"Wal," said the lady, "I don't see how we're going to work to find 'em,
+now they're lost, without making inquiries; and we can't make inquiries
+without letting it be known we had bought."
+
+"I been thinkin' about that," said her husband. "Oh, dear!" with a
+groan; "I wish the pesky cowpon bonds had never been invented!"
+
+They drove first to the bank, where they were of course told that the
+envelope had not been untied there. "Besides, it was sealed, wasn't
+it?" said the cashier. "Indeed!" He expressed great surprise, when
+informed that it was not. "It should have been: I supposed any child
+would know enough to look out for that!"
+
+And this was all the consolation Ducklow could obtain.
+
+"Just as I expected," said Mrs. Ducklow, as they resumed their journey.
+"I just as much believe that man stole your bonds as that you trusted
+'em in his hands in an unsealed wrapper! Beats all, how you could be so
+careless!"
+
+"Wal, wal! I s'pose I never shall hear the last on 't!"
+
+And again the poor old mare had to suffer for Mrs. Ducklow's offences.
+
+They had but one hope now,--that perhaps Taddy had tampered with the
+envelope, and that the bonds might be found somewhere about the house.
+But this hope was quickly extinguished on their arrival. Taddy, being
+accused, protested his innocence with a vehemence which convinced even
+Mr. Ducklow that the cashier was probably the guilty party.
+
+"Unless," said he, brandishing the rattan, "somebody got into the house
+that morning when the little scamp run off to ride with the minister!"
+
+"Oh, don't lick me for that! I've been licked for that once; ha'n't I,
+Ma Ducklow?" shrieked Taddy.
+
+The house was searched in vain. No clew to the purloined securities
+could be obtained,--the copies of the "Sunday Visitor," which had been
+substituted for them, affording not the least; for that valuable little
+paper was found in almost every household, except Ducklow's.
+
+"I don't see any way left but to advertise, as Josiah said," remarked
+the farmer, with a deep sigh of despondency.
+
+"And that'll bring it all out!" exclaimed Mrs. Ducklow. "If you only
+hadn't been so imprudent!"
+
+"Wal, wal!" said Ducklow, cutting her short.
+
+Before resorting to public measures for the recovery of the stolen
+property, it was deemed expedient to acquaint their friends with their
+loss in a private way. The next day, accordingly, they went to pay
+Reuben a visit. It was a very different meeting from that which took
+place a few mornings before. The returned soldier had gained in health,
+but not in spirits. The rapture of reaching home once more, the flush of
+hope and happiness, had passed away with the visitors who had flocked to
+offer their congratulations. He had had time to reflect: he had reached
+home, indeed; but now every moment reminded him how soon that home was
+to be taken from him. He looked at his wife and children, and clenched
+his teeth hard to stifle the emotions that arose at the thought of their
+future. The sweet serenity, the faith and patience and cheerfulness,
+which never ceased to illumine Sophronia's face as she moved about the
+house, pursuing her daily tasks, and tenderly waiting upon him, deepened
+at once his love and his solicitude. He was watching her thus when the
+Ducklows entered with countenances mournful as the grave.
+
+"How are you gittin' along, Reuben?" said Ducklow, while his wife
+murmured a solemn "good morning" to Sophronia.
+
+"I am doing well enough. Don't be at all concerned about me! It a'n't
+pleasant to lie here, and feel it may be months, months, before I'm able
+to be about my business; but I wouldn't mind it,--I could stand it
+first-rate,--I could stand anything, anything, but to see her working
+her life out for me and the children! To no purpose, either; that's the
+worst of it. We shall have to lose this place, spite of fate!"
+
+"Oh, Reuben!" said Sophronia, hastening to him, and laying her soothing
+hands upon his hot forehead; "why won't you stop thinking about that? Do
+try to have more faith! We shall be taken care of, I'm sure!"
+
+"If I had three thousand dollars,--yes, or even two,--then I'd have
+faith!" said Reuben. "Miss Beswick has proposed to send a
+subscription-paper around town for us; but I'd rather die than have it
+done. Besides, nothing near that amount could be raised, I'm confident.
+You needn't groan so, Pa Ducklow, for I a'n't hinting at you. I don't
+expect you to help me out of my trouble. If you had felt called upon to
+do it, you'd have done it before now; and I don't ask, I don't beg of
+any man!" added the soldier, proudly.
+
+"That's right; I like your sperit!" said the miserable Ducklow. "But I
+was sighing to think of something,--something you haven't known anything
+about, Reuben."
+
+"Yes, Reuben, we should have helped you," said Mrs. Ducklow, "and did,
+did take steps towards it"----
+
+"In fact," resumed Ducklow, "you've met with a great misfortin', Reuben.
+Unbeknown to yourself, you've met with a great misfortin'! Yer Ma
+Ducklow knows."
+
+"Yes, Reuben, the very day you came home, your Pa Ducklow made an
+investment for your benefit. We didn't mention it,--you know I wouldn't
+own up to it, though I didn't exactly say the contrary, the morning we
+was over here"----
+
+"Because," said Ducklow, as she faltered, "we wanted to surprise you; we
+was keepin' it a secret till the right time, then we was goin' to make
+it a pleasant surprise to ye."
+
+"What in the name of common-sense are you talking about?" cried Reuben,
+looking from one to the other of the wretched, prevaricating pair.
+
+"Cowpon bonds!" groaned Ducklow. "Three thousan'-dollar cowpon bonds!
+The money had been lent, but I wanted to make a good investment for you,
+and I thought there was nothin' so good as Gov'ments"----
+
+"That's all right," said Reuben. "Only, if you had money to invest for
+my benefit, I should have preferred to pay off the mortgage the first
+thing."
+
+"Sartin! sartin!" said Ducklow; "and you could have turned the bonds
+right in, if you had so chosen, like so much cash. Or you could have
+drawed your interest on the bonds in gold, and paid the interest on your
+mortgage in currency, and made so much, as I rather thought you would."
+
+"But the bonds?" eagerly demanded Reuben, with trembling hopes, just as
+Miss Beswick, with her shawl over her head, entered the room.
+
+"We was jest telling about our loss, Reuben's loss," said Mrs. Ducklow
+in a manner which betrayed no little anxiety to conciliate that terrible
+woman.
+
+"Very well! don't let me interrupt." And Miss Beswick, slipping the
+shawl from her head, sat down.
+
+Her presence, stiff and prim and sarcastic, did not tend in the least to
+relieve Mr. Ducklow from the natural embarrassment he felt in giving his
+version of Reuben's loss. However, assisted occasionally by a judicious
+remark thrown in by Mrs. Ducklow, he succeeded in telling a sufficiently
+plausible and candid-seeming story.
+
+"I see! I see!" said Reuben, who had listened with astonishment and pain
+to the narrative. "You had kinder intentions towards me than I gave you
+credit for. Forgive me, if I wronged you!" He pressed the hand of his
+adopted father, and thanked him from a heart filled with gratitude and
+trouble. "But don't feel so bad about it. You did what you thought best
+I can only say, the fates are against me."
+
+"Hem!" coughing, Miss Beswick stretched up her long neck and cleared her
+throat "So them bonds you had bought for Reuben was in the house the
+very night I called!"
+
+"Yes, Miss Beswick," replied Mrs. Ducklow; "and that's what made it so
+uncomfortable to us to have you talk the way you did."
+
+"Hem!" The neck was stretched up still farther than before, and the
+redoubtable throat cleared again. "'Twas too bad! Ye ought to have told
+me. You'd actooally bought the bonds,--bought 'em for Reuben, had ye?"
+
+"Sartin! sartin!" said Ducklow.
+
+"To be sure!" said Mrs. Ducklow.
+
+"We designed 'em for his benefit, a surprise, when the right time
+come," said both together.
+
+"Hem! well!" (It was evident that the Beswick was clearing her decks for
+action.) "When the right time come! yes! That right time wasn't
+somethin' indefinite, in the fur futur', of course! Yer losin' the bonds
+didn't hurry up yer benevolence the least grain, I s'pose! Hem! let in
+them boys, Sophrony!"
+
+Sophronia opened the door, and in walked Master Dick Atkins, (son of the
+brush-burner,) followed, not without reluctance and concern, by Master
+Taddy.
+
+"Thaddeus! what you here for?" demanded the adopted parents.
+
+"Because I said so," remarked Miss Beswick, arbitrarily. "Step along,
+boys, step along. Hold up yer head, Taddy, for ye a'n't goin' to be hurt
+while I'm around. Take yer fists out o' yer eyes, and stop blubberin'.
+Mr. Ducklow, that boy knows somethin' about Reuben's cowpon bonds."
+
+"Thaddeus!" ejaculated both Ducklows at once, "did you touch them
+bonds?"
+
+"Didn't know what they was!" whimpered Taddy.
+
+"Did you take them?" And the female Ducklow grasped his shoulder.
+
+"Hands off, if you please!" remarked Miss Beswick, with frightfully
+gleaming courtesy. "I told him, if he'd be a good boy, and come along
+with Richard, and tell the truth, he shouldn't be hurt. _If_ you
+please," she repeated, with a majestic nod; and Mrs. Ducklow took her
+hands off.
+
+"Where are they now? where are they?" cried Ducklow, rushing headlong to
+the main question.
+
+"Don't know," said Taddy.
+
+"Don't know? you villain!" And Ducklow was rising in wrath. But Miss
+Beswick put up her hand deprecatingly.
+
+"If _you_ please!" she said, with grim civility; and Ducklow sank down
+again.
+
+"What did you do with 'em? what did you want of 'em?" said Mrs. Ducklow,
+with difficulty restraining an impulse to wring his neck.
+
+"To cover my kite," confessed the miserable Taddy.
+
+"Cover your kite! your kite!" A chorus of groans from the Ducklows.
+"Didn't you know no better?"
+
+"Didn't think you'd care," said Taddy. "I had some newspapers Dick give
+me to cover it; but I thought them things 'u'd be pootier. So I took
+'em, and put the newspapers in the wrapper."
+
+"Did ye cover yer kite?"
+
+"No. When I found out you cared so much about 'em, I dars'n't; I was
+afraid you'd see 'em."
+
+"Then what _did_ you do with 'em?"
+
+"When you was away, Dick come over to sleep with me, and I--I sold 'em
+to him."
+
+"Sold 'em to Dick!"
+
+"Yes," spoke up Dick, stoutly, "for six marbles, and one was a
+bull's-eye, and one agate, and two alleys. Then, when you come home and
+made such a fuss, he wanted 'em ag'in. But he wouldn't give me back but
+four, and I wa'n't going to agree to no such nonsense as that."
+
+"I'd lost the bull's-eye and one common," whined Taddy.
+
+"But the bonds! did you destroy 'em?"
+
+"Likely I'd destroy 'em, after I'd paid six marbles for 'em!" said Dick.
+"I wanted 'em to cover _my_ kite with."
+
+"Cover _your_--oh! then _you_'ve made a kite of 'em?" said Ducklow.
+
+"Well, I was going to, when Aunt Beswick ketched me at it. She made me
+tell where I got 'em, and took me over to your house jest now; and Taddy
+said you was over here, and so she put ahead, and made us follow her."
+
+Again, in an agony of impatience, Ducklow demanded to know where the
+bonds were at that moment.
+
+"If Taddy'll give me back the marbles," began Master Dick.
+
+"That'll do!" said Miss Beswick, silencing him with a gesture. "Reuben
+will give you twenty marbles; for I believe you said they was Reuben's
+bonds, Mr. Ducklow?"
+
+"Yes, that is"----stammered the adopted father.
+
+"Eventooally," struck in the adopted mother.
+
+"Now look here! What am I to understand? Be they Reuben's bonds, or be
+they not? That's the question!" And there was that in Miss Beswick's
+look which said, "If they are not Reuben's, then your eyes shall never
+behold them more!"
+
+"Of course they're Reuben's!" "We intended all the while"----"His
+benefit"----"To do jest what he pleases with 'em," chorused Pa and Ma
+Ducklow.
+
+"Wal! now it's understood! Here, Reuben, are your cowpon bonds!"
+
+And Miss Beswick, drawing them from her bosom, placed the precious
+documents, with formal politeness, in the glad soldier's agitated hands.
+
+"Glory!" cried Reuben, assuring himself that they were genuine and real.
+"Sophrony, you've got a home! Ruby, Carrie, you've got a home! Miss
+Beswick! you angel from the skies! order a bushel and a half of marbles
+for Dick, and have the bill sent to me! Oh, Pa Ducklow! you never did a
+nobler or more generous thing in your life. These will lift the
+mortgage, and leave me a nest-egg besides. Then when I get my back pay,
+and my pension, and my health again, we shall be independent."
+
+And the soldier, overcome by his feelings, sank back in the arms of his
+wife.
+
+"We always told you we'd do well by ye, you remember?" said the
+Ducklows, triumphantly.
+
+The news went abroad. Again congratulations poured in upon the returned
+volunteer. Everybody rejoiced in his good fortune,--especially certain
+rich ones who had been dreading to see Miss Beswick come round with her
+proposed subscription-paper.
+
+Among the rest, the Ducklows rejoiced not the least; for selfishness was
+with them, as it is with many, rather a thing of habit than a fault of
+the heart. The catastrophe of the bonds broke up that life-long habit,
+and revealed good hearts underneath. The consciousness of having done an
+act of justice, although by accident, proved very sweet to them: it was
+really a fresh sensation; and Reuben and his dear little family, saved
+from ruin and distress, happy, thankful, glad, was a sight to their old
+eyes such as they had never witnessed before. Not gold itself, in any
+quantity, at the highest premium, could have given them so much
+satisfaction; and as for coupon bonds, they are not to be mentioned in
+the comparison.
+
+"Won't you do well by me some time, too?" teased little Taddy, who
+overheard his adopted parents congratulating themselves on having acted
+so generously by Reuben. "I don't care for no cowpen bonds, but I do
+want a new drum!"
+
+"Yes, yes, my son!" said Ducklow, patting the boy's shoulder.
+
+And the drum was bought.
+
+Taddy was delighted. But he did not know what made the Ducklows so much
+happier, so much gentler and kinder, than formerly. Do you?
+
+
+
+
+THE AUTHOR OF "SAUL."[A]
+
+
+We are not one of those who believe that the manifestation of any
+native, vigorous faculty of the mind is dependent upon circumstances. It
+is true that education, in its largest sense, modifies development; but
+it cannot, to any serious extent, add to, or take from, the power to be
+developed. In the lack of encouragement and contemporary appreciation,
+certain of the finer faculties may not give forth their full and perfect
+fragrance; but the rose is always seen to be a rose, though never a bud
+come to flower. The "mute, inglorious Milton" is a pleasant poetic
+fiction. Against the "hands that the rod of empire _might_ have swayed"
+we have nothing to object, knowing to what sort of hands the said rod
+has so often been intrusted.
+
+John Howard Payne once read to us--and it was something of an
+infliction--a long manuscript on "The Neglected Geniuses of America,"--a
+work which only death, we suspect, prevented him from giving to the
+world. There was not one name in the list which had ever before reached
+our ears. Nicholas Blauvelt and William Phillips and a number of other
+utterly forgotten rhymesters were described and eulogized at length, the
+quoted specimens of their poetry proving all the while their admirable
+right to the oblivion which Mr. Payne deprecated. They were men of
+culture, some of them wealthy, and we could detect no lack of
+opportunity in the story of their lives. Had they been mechanics, they
+would have planed boards and laid bricks from youth to age. The Ayrshire
+ploughman and the Bedford tinker were made of other stuff. Our inference
+then was, and still is, that unacknowledged (or at least unmanifested)
+genius is no genius at all, and that the lack of sympathy which many
+young authors so bitterly lament is a necessary test of their fitness
+for their assumed vocation.
+
+Gerald Massey is one of the most recent instances of the certainty with
+which a poetic faculty by no means of the highest order will enforce its
+own development, under seemingly fatal discouragements. The author of
+"Saul" is a better illustration of the same fact; for, although, in our
+ignorance of the circumstances of his early life, we are unable to
+affirm what particular difficulties he had to encounter, we know how
+long he was obliged to wait for the first word of recognition, and to
+what heights he aspired in the course of many long and solitary years.
+
+The existence of "Saul" was first made known to the world by an article
+in the "North British Review," in the year 1858, when the author had
+already attained his forty-second year. The fact that the work was
+published in Montreal called some attention to it on this side of the
+Atlantic, and a few critical notices appeared in our literary
+periodicals. It is still, however, comparatively unknown; and those into
+whose hands it may have fallen are, doubtless, ignorant of the author's
+name and history. An outline of the latter, so far as we have been able
+to ascertain its features, will help the reader to a more intelligent
+judgment, when we come to discuss the author's claim to a place in
+literature.
+
+Charles Heavysege was born in Liverpool, England, in the year 1816. We
+know nothing in regard to his parents, except that they were poor, yet
+able to send their son to an ordinary school. His passion for reading,
+especially such the poetry as fell into his hands, showed itself while
+he was yet a child. Milton seems to have been the first author who made
+a profound impression upon his mind; but it is also reported that the
+schoolmaster once indignantly snatched Gray's "Elegy" from his hand,
+because he so frequently selected that poem for his reading-lesson.
+Somewhat later, he saw "Macbeth" performed, and was immediately seized
+with the ambition to become an actor,--a profession for which few
+persons could be less qualified. The impression produced by this
+tragedy, combined with the strict religious training which he appears to
+have received, undoubtedly fixed the character and manner of his
+subsequent literary efforts.
+
+There are but few other facts of his life which we can state with
+certainty. His chances of education were evidently very scanty, for he
+must have left school while yet a boy, in order to learn his
+trade,--that of a machinist. He had thenceforth little time and less
+opportunity for literary culture. His reading was desultory, and the
+poetic faculty, expending itself on whatever subjects came to hand,
+produced great quantities of manuscripts, which were destroyed almost as
+soon as written. The idea of publishing them does not seem to have
+presented itself to his mind. Either his life must have been devoid of
+every form of intellectual sympathy, or there was some external
+impediment formidable enough to keep down that ambition which always
+co-exists with the creative power.
+
+In the year 1843 he married, and in 1853 emigrated to Canada, and
+settled in Montreal. Even here his literary labor was at first performed
+in secrecy; he was nearly forty years old before a line from his pen
+appeared in type. He found employment in a machine-shop, and it was only
+very gradually--probably after much doubt and hesitation--that he came
+to the determination to subject his private creations to the ordeal of
+print. His first venture was a poem in blank verse, the title of which
+we have been unable to ascertain. A few copies were printed anonymously
+and distributed among personal friends. It was a premature birth, which
+never knew a moment's life, and the father of it would now be the last
+person to attempt a resuscitation.
+
+Soon afterwards appeared--also anonymously--a little pamphlet,
+containing fifty "so-called" sonnets. They are, in reality, fragmentary
+poems of fourteen lines each, bound to no metre or order of rhyme. In
+spite of occasional crudities of expression, the ideas are always poetic
+and elevated, and there are many vigorous couplets and quatrains. They
+do not, however, furnish any evidence of sustained power, and the
+reader, who should peruse them as the only productions of the author,
+would be far from inferring the latter's possession of that lofty epical
+utterance which he exhibits in "Saul" and "Jephthah's Daughter."
+
+We cannot learn that this second attempt to obtain a hearing was
+successful, so far as any public notice of the pamphlet is concerned;
+but it seems, at least, to have procured for Mr. Heavysege the first
+private recognition of his poetic abilities which he had ever received,
+and thereby given him courage for a more ambitious venture. "Saul," as
+an epical subject, must have haunted his mind for years. The greater
+portion of it, indeed, had been written before he had become familiar
+with the idea of publication; and even after the completion of the work,
+we can imagine the sacrifices which must have delayed its appearance in
+print. For a hard-working mechanic, in straitened circumstances, courage
+of another kind was required. It is no slight expense to produce an
+octavo volume of three hundred and thirty pages; there must have been
+much anxious self-consultation, a great call for patience, fortitude,
+and hope, with who may know what doubts and despondencies, before, in
+1857 "Saul" was given to the world.
+
+Nothing could have been more depressing than its reception, if, indeed,
+the term "reception" can be applied to complete indifference. A country
+like Canada, possessing no nationality, and looking across the Atlantic,
+not only for its political rule, but also (until very recently, at
+least) for its opinions, tastes, and habits, is especially unfavorable
+to the growth of an independent literature. Although there are many men
+of learning and culture among the residents of Montreal, they do not
+form a class to whom a native author could look for encouragement or
+appreciation sufficient to stamp him as successful. The reading public
+there accept the decrees of England and the United States, and they did
+not detect the merits of "Saul," until the discovery had first been made
+in those countries.
+
+Several months had elapsed since the publication of the volume; it
+seemed to be already forgotten, when the notice to which we have
+referred appeared in the "North British Review." The author had sent a
+copy to Mr. Hawthorne, then residing in Liverpool, and that gentleman,
+being on friendly terms with some of the writers for the "North
+British," procured the insertion of an appreciative review of the poem.
+Up to that time, we believe, no favorable notice of the work had
+appeared in Canada. The little circulation it obtained was chiefly among
+the American residents. A few copies found their way across the border,
+and some of our authors (among whom we may mention Mr. Emerson and Mr.
+Longfellow) were the first to recognize the genius of the poet. With
+this double indorsement, his fellow-townsmen hastened to make amends for
+their neglect. They could not be expected to give any very enthusiastic
+welcome, nor was their patronage extensive enough to confer more than
+moderate success; but the remaining copies of the first small edition
+were sold, and a second edition--which has not yet been
+exhausted--issued in 1859.
+
+In February, 1860, we happened to visit Montreal. At that time we had
+never read the poem, and the bare fact of its existence had almost faded
+from memory, when it was recalled by an American resident who was
+acquainted with Mr. Heavysege, and whose account of his patience, his
+quiet energy, and serene faith in his poetic calling strongly interested
+us. It was but a few hours before our departure; there was a furious
+snow-storm; yet the gentleman ordered a sleigh, and we drove at once to
+a large machine-shop, in the outskirts of the city. Here, amid the noise
+of hammers, saws, and rasps, in a great grimy hall smelling of oil and
+iron-dust, we found the poet at his work-bench. A small, slender man,
+with a thin, sensitive face, bright blonde hair, and eyes of that
+peculiar blue which burns warm, instead of cold, under excitement,--in
+the few minutes of our interview the picture was fixed, and remains so.
+His manner was quiet, natural, and unassuming: he received us with the
+simple good-breeding which a gentleman always possesses, whether we find
+him on a throne or beside an anvil. Not a man to assert his claim
+loudly, or to notice injustice or neglect by a single spoken word; but
+one to take quietly success or failure, in the serenity of a mood
+habitually untouched by either extreme.
+
+In that one brief first and last interview, we discovered, at least, the
+simple, earnest sincerity of the man's nature,--a quality too rare, even
+among authors. When we took our seat in the train for Rouse's Point, we
+opened the volume of "Saul." The first part was finished as we
+approached St. Albans; the second at Vergennes; and twilight was falling
+as we closed the book between Bennington and Troy. Whatever crudities of
+expression, inaccuracies of rhythm, faults of arrangement, and
+violations of dramatic law met us from time to time, the earnest purpose
+of the writer carried us over them all. The book has a fine flavor of
+the Elizabethan age,--a sustained epic rather than dramatic character,
+an affluence of quaint, original images; yet the construction was
+frequently that of a school-boy. In opulence and maturity of ideas, and
+poverty of artistic skill, the work stands almost alone in literature.
+What little we have learned of the history of the author suggests an
+explanation of this peculiarity. Never was so much genuine power so long
+silent.
+
+"Saul" is yet so little known, that a descriptive outline of the poem
+will be a twice-told tale to very few readers of the "Atlantic." The
+author strictly follows the history of the renowned Hebrew king, as it
+is related in I Samuel, commencing with the tenth chapter, but divides
+the subject into three dramas, after the manner of Schiller's
+"Wallenstein." The first part embraces the history of Saul, from his
+anointing by Samuel at Ramah to David's exorcism of the evil spirit,
+(xvi. 23,) and contains five acts. The second part opens with David as a
+guest in the palace at Gibeah. The defeat of the Philistines at Elah,
+Saul's jealousy of David, and the latter's marriage with Michal form the
+staple of the _four_ acts of this part. The third part consists of _six_
+acts of unusual length, (some of them have thirteen scenes,) and is
+devoted to the pursuits and escapes of David, the Witch of Endor, and
+the final battle, wherein the king and his three sons are slain. No
+liberties have been taken with the order of the Scripture narrative,
+although a few subordinate characters have here and there been
+introduced to complete the action. The author seems either to lack the
+inventive faculty, or to have feared modifying the sacred record for the
+purposes of Art. In fact, no considerable modification was necessary.
+The simple narrative fulfils almost all the requirements of dramatic
+writing, in its succession of striking situations, and its cumulative
+interest. From beginning to end, however, Mr. Heavysege makes no attempt
+to produce a dramatic effect. It is true that he has availed himself of
+the phrase "an evil spirit from the Lord," to introduce a demoniac
+element, but, singularly enough, the demons seem to appear and to act
+unwillingly, and manifest great relief when they are allowed to retire
+from the stage.
+
+The work, therefore, cannot be measured by dramatic laws. It is an epic
+in dialogue; its chief charm lies in the march of the story and the
+detached individual monologues, rather than in contrast of characters or
+exciting situations. The sense of proportion--the latest developed
+quality of the poetic mind--is dimly manifested. The structure of the
+verse, sometimes so stately and majestic, is frequently disfigured by
+the commonest faults; yet the breath of a lofty purpose has been
+breathed upon every page. The personality of the author never pierces
+through his theme. The language is fresh, racy, vigorous, and utterly
+free from the impress of modern masters: much of it might have been
+written by a contemporary of Shakspeare.
+
+In the opening of the first part, Saul, recently anointed king, receives
+the messengers of Jabesh Gilead, and promises succor. A messenger
+says,--
+
+                            "The winds of heaven,
+    Behind thee blow: and on our enemies' eyes
+    May the sun smite to-morrow, and blind them for thee!
+    But, O Saul, do not fail us.
+
+    "_Saul._ Fail ye
+    Let the morn fail to break; I will not break
+    My word. Haste, or I'm there before you. Fail?
+    Let the morn fail the east; I'll not fail you,
+    But, swift and silent as the streaming wind,
+    Unseen approach, then, gathering up my force
+    At dawning, sweep on Ammon, as Night's blast
+    Sweeps down the Carmel on the dusky sea."
+
+This is a fine picture of Saul steeling his nature to cruelty, when be
+has reluctantly resolved to obey Samuel's command "to trample out the
+living fire of Amalek":--
+
+    "Now let me tighten every cruel sinew,
+    And gird the whole up in unfeeling hardness,
+    That my swollen heart, which bleeds within me tears,
+    May choke itself to stillness. I am as
+    A shivering bather, that, upon the shore,
+    Looking and shrinking from the cold, black waves,
+    Quick starting from his reverie, with a rush
+    Abbreviates his horror."
+
+And this of the satisfied lust of blood, uttered by a Hebrew soldier,
+after the slaughter:--
+
+    "When I was killing, such thoughts came to me, like
+    The sound of cleft-dropped waters to the ear
+    Of the hot mower, who thereat stops the oftener
+    To whet his glittering scythe, and, while he smiles,
+    With the harsh, sharpening hone beats their fall's time,
+    And dancing to it in his heart's straight chamber,
+    Forgets that he is weary."
+
+After the execution of Agag by the hand of Samuel, the demons are
+introduced with more propriety than in the opening of the poem. The
+following passage has a subtle, sombre grandeur of its own:--
+
+    "_First Demon._ Now let us down to hell: we've seen the last.
+
+    "_Second Demon._ Stay; for the road thereto is yet incumbered
+    With the descending spectres of the killed.
+    _'Tis said they choke hell's gates, and stretch from thence
+    Out like a tongue upon the silent gulf_;
+    Wherein our spirits--even as terrestrial ships
+    That are detained by foul winds in an offing--
+    Linger perforce, _and feel broad gusts of sighs
+    That swing them on the dark and billowless waste_,
+    O'er which come sounds more dismal than the boom,
+    At midnight, of the salt flood's foaming surf,--
+    Even dead Amalek's moan and lamentation."
+
+The reader will detect the rhythmical faults of the poem, even in these
+passages. But there is a vast difference between such blemishes of the
+unrhymed heroic measure as terminating a line with "and," "of," or
+"but," or inattention to the caesural pauses, and that mathematical
+precision of foot and accent, which, after all, can scarcely be
+distinguished from prose. Whatever may be his shortcomings, Mr.
+Heavysege speaks in the dialect of poetry. Only rarely he drops into
+bald prose, as in these lines:--
+
+    "But let us go abroad, and in the twilight's
+    Cool, tranquillizing air discuss this matter."
+
+We remember, however, that Wordsworth wrote,--
+
+                  "A band of officers
+    Then stationed in the city were among the chief
+    Of my associates."
+
+We had marked many other fine passages of "Saul" for quotation, but must
+be content with a few of those which are most readily separated from the
+context.
+
+                  "Ha! ha! the foe,
+    Having taken from us our warlike tools, yet leave us
+    The little scarlet tongue to scratch and sting with."
+
+    "Here's lad's-love, and the flower which even death
+    Cannot unscent, the all-transcending rose."
+
+                  "The loud bugle,
+    And the hard-rolling drum, and clashing cymbals,
+    Now reign the lords o' the air. These crises, David,
+    Bring with them their own music, as do storms
+    Their thunders."
+
+                  "Ere the morn
+    Shall tint the orient with the soldier's color,
+    We must be at the camp."
+
+    "But come, I'll disappoint thee; for, remember,
+    Samuel will not be roused for thee, although
+    I knock with thunder at his resting-place."
+
+The lyrical portions, of the work--introduced in connection with the
+demoniac characters--are inferior to the rest. They have occasionally a
+quaint, antique flavor, suggesting the diction of the Elizabethan
+lyrists, but without their delicate, elusive richness of melody. Here
+most we perceive the absence of that highest, ripest intellectual
+culture which can be acquired only through contact and conflict with
+other minds. It is not good for a poet to be alone. Even where the
+constructive faculty is absent, its place may be supplied through the
+development of that artistic sense which files, weighs, and
+adjusts,--which reconciles the utmost freedom and force of thought with
+the mechanical symmetries of language,--and which, first a fetter to the
+impatient mind, becomes at length a pinion, holding it serenely poised
+in the highest ether. Only the rudiment of the sense is born with the
+poet, and few literary lives are fortunate enough, or of sufficiently
+varied experience, to mature it.
+
+Nevertheless, before closing the volume, we must quote what we consider
+to be the author's best lyrical passage. Zaph, one of the attendants of
+Malzah, the "evil spirit from the Lord," sings as follows to one of his
+fellows:--
+
+    "Zepho, the sun's descended beam
+    Hath laid his rod on th' ocean stream,
+    And this o'erhanging wood-top nods
+    Like golden helms of drowsy gods.
+    Methinks that now I'll stretch for rest,
+    With eyelids sloping toward the west;
+    That, through their half transparencies,
+    The rosy radiance passed and strained,
+    Of mote and vapor duly drained,
+    I may believe, in hollow bliss,
+    My rest in the empyrean is.
+    Watch thou; and when up comes the moon,
+    Atowards her turn me; and then, boon,
+    Thyself compose, 'neath wavering leaves
+    That hang these branched, majestic eaves:
+    That so, with self-imposed deceit,
+    Both, in this halcyon retreat,
+    By trance possessed, imagine may
+    We couch in Heaven's night-argent ray."
+
+In 1860 Mr. Heavysege published by subscription a drama entitled "Count
+Filippo; or, the Unequal Marriage." This work, of which we have seen
+but one critical notice, added nothing to his reputation. His genius, as
+we have already remarked, is not dramatic; and there is, moreover,
+internal evidence that "Count Philippo" did not grow, like "Saul," from
+an idea which took forcible possession of the author's mind. The plot is
+not original, the action languid, and the very names of the _dramatis
+personae_ convey an impression of unreality. Though we know there never
+was a Duke of Pereza in Italy, this annoys us less than that he should
+bear such a fantastic name as "Tremohla"; nor does the feminine "Volina"
+inspire us with much respect for the heroine. The characters are
+intellectual abstractions, rather than creatures of flesh and blood; and
+their love, sorrow, and remorse fail to stir our sympathies. They have
+an incorrigible habit of speaking in conceits. As "Saul" is pervaded
+with the spirit of the Elizabethan writers, so "Count Filippo" suggests
+the artificial manner of the rivals of Dryden. It is the work of a poet,
+but of a poet working from a mechanical impulse. There are very fine
+single passages, but the general effect is marred by the constant
+recurrence of such forced metaphors as these:--
+
+    "Now shall the he-goat, black Adultery,
+    With the roused ram, Retaliation, twine
+    Their horns in one to butt at Filippo."
+
+          "As the salamander, cast in fire,
+    Exudes preserving mucus, so my mind,
+    Cased in thick satisfaction of success,
+    Shall be uninjured."
+
+The work, nevertheless, appears to have had some share in improving its
+author's fortunes. From that time, he has received at least a partial
+recognition in Canada. Soon after its publication, he succeeded in
+procuring employment on the daily newspaper press of Montreal, which
+enabled him to give up his uncongenial labor at the work-bench. The
+Montreal Literary Club elected him one of its Fellows, and the
+short-lived literary periodicals of the Province no longer ignored his
+existence. In spite of a change of circumstances which must have given
+him greater leisure as well as better opportunities of culture, he has
+published but two poems in the last five years,--an Ode for the
+ter-centenary anniversary of Shakspeare's birth, and the sacred idyl of
+"Jephthah's Daughter." The former is a production the spirit of which is
+worthy of its occasion, although, in execution, it is weakened, by an
+overplus of imagery and epithet. It contains between seven and eight
+hundred lines. The grand, ever-changing music of the Ode will not bear
+to be prolonged beyond a certain point, as all the great Masters of Song
+have discovered: the ear must not be allowed to become _quite_
+accustomed to the surprises of the varying rhythm, before the closing
+Alexandrine.
+
+"Jephthah's Daughter" contains between thirteen and fourteen hundred
+lines. In careful finish, in sustained sweetness and grace, and solemn
+dignity of language, it is a marked advance upon any of the author's
+previous works. We notice, indeed, the same technical faults as in
+"Saul," but they occur less frequently, and may be altogether corrected
+in a later revision of the poem. Here, also, the Scriptural narrative is
+rigidly followed, and every temptation to adorn its rare simplicity
+resisted. Even that lament of the Hebrew girl, behind which there seems
+to lurk a romance, and which is so exquisitely paraphrased by Tennyson,
+in his "Dream of Fair Women,"--
+
+    "And I went, mourning: 'No fair Hebrew boy
+      Shall smile away my maiden blame among
+    The Hebrew mothers,'"--
+
+is barely mentioned in the words of the text. The passion of Jephthah,
+the horror, the piteous pleading of his wife and daughter, and the final
+submission of the latter to her doom, are elaborated with a careful and
+tender hand. From the opening to the closing line, the reader is lifted
+to the level of the tragic theme, and inspired, as in the Greek tragedy,
+with a pity which makes lovely the element of terror. The central
+sentiment of the poem, through all its touching and sorrowful changes,
+is that of repose. Observe the grave harmony of the opening lines:--
+
+    "'Twas in the olden days of Israel,
+    When from her people rose up mighty men
+    To judge and to defend her: ere she knew,
+    Or clamored for, her coming line of kings,
+    A father, rashly vowing, sacrificed
+    His daughter on the altar of the Lord;--
+    'Twas in those ancient days, coeval deemed
+    With the song-famous and heroic ones,
+    When Agamemnon, taught divinely, doomed
+    _His_ daughter to expire at Dian's shrine,--
+    So doomed, to free the chivalry of Greece,
+    In Aulis lingering for a favoring wind
+    To waft them to the fated walls of Troy.
+    Two songs with but one burden, twin-like tales.
+    Sad tales! but this the sadder of the twain,--
+    This song, a wail more desolately wild;
+    More fraught this story with grim fate fulfilled."
+
+The length to which this article has grown warns us to be sparing of
+quotations, but we all the more earnestly recommend those in whom we may
+have inspired some interest in the author to procure the poem for
+themselves. We have perused it several times, with increasing enjoyment
+of its solemn diction, its sad, monotonous music, and with the hope that
+the few repairing touches, which alone are wanting to make it a perfect
+work of its class, may yet be given. This passage, for example, where
+Jephthah prays to be absolved from his vow, would be faultlessly
+eloquent, but for the prosaic connection of the first and second
+lines:--
+
+    "'Choose Tabor for thine altar: I will pile
+    It with the choice of Bashan's lusty herds,
+    And flocks of fallings, _and for fuel, thither
+    Will bring umbrageous Lebanon to burn_.'
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+    "He said, and stood awaiting for the sign,
+    And heard, above the hoarse, bough-bending wind,
+    The hill-wolf howling on the neighboring height,
+    And bittern booming in the pool below.
+    Some drops of rain fell from the passing cloud
+    That sudden hides the wanly shining moon,
+    And from the scabbard instant dropped his sword,
+    And, with long, living leaps, and rock-struck clang,
+    From side to side, and slope to sounding slope,
+    In gleaming whirls swept down the dim ravine."
+
+The finest portion of the poem is the description of that transition of
+feeling, through which the maiden, warm with young life and clinging to
+life for its own unfulfilled promise, becomes the resigned and composed
+victim. No one but a true poet could have so conceived and represented
+the situation. The narrative flows in one unbroken current, detached
+parts whereof hint but imperfectly of the whole, as do goblets of water
+of the stream wherefrom they are dipped. We will only venture to present
+two brief passages. The daughter speaks:--
+
+    "Let me not need now disobey you, mother,
+    But give me leave to knock at Death's pale gate,
+    Whereat indeed I must, by duty drawn,
+    By Nature shown the sacred way to yield.
+    Behold, the coasting cloud obeys the breeze;
+    The slanting smoke, the invisible sweet air;
+    the towering tree its leafy limbs resigns
+    To the embraces of the wilful wind:
+    Shall I, then, wrong, resist the hand of Heaven!
+    Take me, my father! take, accept me, Heaven!
+    Slay me or save me, even as you will!"
+
+    "Light, light, I leave thee!--yet am I a lamp,
+    Extinguished now, to be relit forever.
+    Life dies: but in its stead death lives."
+
+In "Jephthah's Daughter," we think, Mr. Heavysege has found that form of
+poetic utterance for which his genius is naturally qualified. It is
+difficult to guess the future of a literary life so exceptional
+hitherto,--difficult to affirm, without a more intimate knowledge of the
+man's nature, whether he is capable of achieving that rhythmical
+perfection (in the higher sense wherein sound becomes the symmetrical
+garment of thought) which, in poets, marks the line between imperfect
+and complete success. What he most needs, of _external_ culture, we have
+already indicated: if we might be allowed any further suggestion, he
+supplies it himself, in one of his fragmentary poems:--
+
+    "Open, my heart, thy ruddy valves,--
+      It is thy master calls:
+    Let me go down, and, curious, trace
+      Thy labyrinthine halls.
+    Open, O heart! and let me view
+      The secrets of thy den:
+    Myself unto myself now show
+      With introspective ken.
+    Expose thyself, thou covered nest
+      Of passions, and be seen:
+    Stir up thy brood, that in unrest
+      Are ever piping keen:--
+    Ah! what a motley multitude,
+      Magnanimous and mean!"
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[A] _Saul._ A Drama, in Three Parts. Montreal: John Lovell. 1850.
+
+_Count Fillippo; or The Unequal Marriage._ By the Author of "Saul."
+Montreal: Printed for the Author. 1860.
+
+_Jephthah's Daughter._ By Charles Heavysege, Author of "Saul." Montreal:
+Dawson Brothers. 1865.
+
+
+
+
+NEEDLE AND GARDEN.
+
+THE STORY OF A SEAMSTRESS WHO LAID DOWN HER NEEDLE AND BECAME A
+STRAWBERRY-GIRL.
+
+WRITTEN BY HERSELF.
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+CONCLUSION.
+
+Although two thirds of our little patrimony had thus been devoted to the
+cultivation of fruit, yet the other third was far from being suffered to
+remain unproductive. We thoroughly understood the art of raising all the
+household vegetables, as we had been brought up to assist our father at
+intervals throughout the season. Then none of us were indifferent to
+flowers. There were little clumps and borders of them in numerous
+places. Nowhere did the crocus come gayly up into the soft atmosphere of
+early spring in advance of ours. The violets perfumed the air for us
+with the same rich profusion as in the carefully tended parterre of the
+wealthiest citizen. There were rows of flowering almonds, which were
+sought after by the bees as diligently as if holding up their delicate
+heads in the most patrician garden; and they flashed as gorgeously in
+the sun. The myrtle displayed its blue flowers in abundance, and the
+lilacs unfolded their paler clusters in a dozen places. Over a huge
+cedar in the fence-corner there clambered up a magnificent wistaria,
+whose great blue flowers, covering the entire tree, became a monument of
+floral beauty so striking, that the stranger, passing by the spot, would
+pause to wonder and admire. In the care of these flowers all of us
+united with a common fondness for the beautiful as well as the useful.
+It secured to us, from the advent of the earliest crocus to the
+departure of the last lingering rose that dropped its reluctant flowers
+only when the premonitory blasts of autumn swept across the garden, all
+that innocent enjoyment which comes of admiration for these bright
+creations of the Divine hand.
+
+These little incidental recompenses of the most perfect domestic harmony
+were realized in everything we undertook. That harmony was the animating
+as well as sustaining power of my horticultural enterprise. Had there
+been wrangling, opposition, or ridicule, it is probable that I should
+never have ventured on the planting of a single strawberry. Success,
+situated as I was, was dependent on united effort, the cooeperation of
+all. This cooeperation of the entire family must be still more necessary
+in agricultural undertakings on a large scale. A wife, taken reluctantly
+from the city to a farm, with no taste for rural life, no love of
+flowers, no fondness for the garden, no appreciation of the mysteries of
+seed-time and harvest, no sensibility to fields of clover, to green
+meadows, to the grateful silence of the woods, or to the voices of
+birds, and who pines for the unforgotten charms of city life, may mar
+the otherwise assured happiness of the household. One refractory inmate
+in ours would have been especially calamitous.
+
+The floral world is pervaded with miraculous sympathies. Another spring
+had opened on our garden, and flower after flower came out into gorgeous
+bloom. My strawberries, as if conscious of the display around them, and
+ambitious to increase it, opened their white blossoms toward the close
+of April. Those set the preceding autumn gave promise of an abundant
+yield, but not equal to that presented by the runners which crowded
+around the parent plants on the original half-acre. The winter had been
+unfriendly, sending no heavy covering of snow to shelter them; while
+the frost, in making its first escape from the earth, had loosened many
+plants, bringing some of them half-way out of the ground, while a few
+had been thrown entirely upon the surface, where they quickly perished.
+
+I had read that accidents of this kind would sometimes happen, and that,
+when plants were thus partially dislodged by frost, the roller must be
+passed over them to crowd back the roots into their proper places. I had
+discovered this derangement immediately on the frost escaping, but we
+had neither roller nor substitute. As pressure alone was needed, I set
+Fred to walking over the entire acre, and with his heavy winter boots to
+trample down each plant in its old place. The operation was every way as
+beneficial as if the ground had been well rolled. When performed before
+the roots have been many days exposed to the air, it not only does no
+injury, but effectually repairs all damage committed by the frost.
+
+Everything, this second season, was on a larger scale than before,
+requiring greater care and labor, but at the same time brightening my
+hopes and doubling my anticipations. I was compelled to hire a gardener
+occasionally to assist in keeping the ground clean and mellow, although
+among us we contrived to perform a large portion of the work ourselves.
+I found that constant watchfulness secured an immense economy of labor.
+It was far easier to cut off a weed when only an inch high than when
+grown up to the stature of a young tree. It was the same with the white
+clover or a grass-root. These two seem native to the soil, and will come
+in and take possession, smothering and routing out the strawberries,
+unless cut up as fast as they appear. When attacked early, before their
+rambling, but deeply penetrating roots obtain a strong hold, they are
+easily destroyed. I consider, therefore, that watchfulness may be made
+an effective substitute for labor, really preventing all necessity for
+hard work. This watchfulness we could generally exercise, though
+physically unable to perform much labor. Hence, when ladies undertake
+the management of an established strawberry-bed, a daily attention to
+it, with a light hoe, will be found as useful as a laborious clearing up
+by an able-bodied man, with the additional advantage of occasioning no
+injurious disturbance to the roots in removing great quantities of
+full-grown weeds.
+
+The blossoms fell to the ground, the berries set in thick clusters,
+turning downward as they increased in size, and changing, as they
+enlarged, from a pale green to a delicate white, then becoming suffused
+with a slight blush, which gradually deepened into an intense red. It
+was a joyful time, when, with my mother and sister, I made the first
+picking. All of us were struck with the improved appearance of the fruit
+on the first half-acre. This was natural, as well as what is commonly
+observed. The plants had acquired strength with age. They had had
+another season in which to send out new and longer roots; and these,
+rambling into wider and deeper fountains of nourishment, had drawn from
+them supplies so copious, that the berries were not only much more
+numerous than the year before, but they were every way larger and finer.
+The contrast between the fruit on these and the new plants was very
+decided. Hence we had a generous gathering to begin with. It was all
+carefully assorted, as before; but the quantity was so large that
+additional baskets were required, and Fred was obliged to employ an
+assistant to carry it to market.
+
+While engaged in making our second picking, carefully turning aside the
+luxuriant foliage to reach the berries which had ripened in concealment,
+with capacious sun-bonnets that shut out from observation all objects
+but those immediately before us, it was no wonder that a stranger could
+come directly up without being noticed. Thus intently occupied one
+afternoon, we were surprised at hearing a subdued and timid voice
+asking,--
+
+"May I sell some strawberries for you?"
+
+I looked round,--for the voice came from behind us,--and beheld a girl
+of some ten years old, having in her hand a basket, which she had
+probably found on the common, as, in place of the original bottom, a
+pasteboard substitute had been fitted into it. It was filled with little
+pasteboard boxes, stitched at the corners, but strong enough to hold
+fruit. I noticed, that, old as it was, it had been scoured up into
+absolute cleanness. The child's attire was in keeping with her basket.
+Though she had no shoes, and the merest apology for a bonnet, with a
+dress that was worn and faded, as well as frayed out into a ragged
+fringe about her feet, yet it was all scrupulously clean. Her features
+struck me as even beautiful, and her soft hazel eyes would command
+sympathy from all who might look into them. Her manner and appearance
+prepossessed me in her favor.
+
+"But did you ever sell strawberries?" I inquired.
+
+"No, Ma'am, but I can try," she answered.
+
+"But it will never do to trust her," interrupted my mother. "We do not
+know who she is, and may never see her again."
+
+"Oh, Ma'am, I will bring the money back to you. Dear lady, let me have
+some to sell," she entreated, with childish earnestness, her voice
+trembling and her eyes moistening with apprehension of refusal.
+
+"Mother," said I, "this child is a beginner. Is it right for us to
+refuse so trifling an encouragement? Who knows to what useful ends it
+may lead? You remember how difficult it was for me to procure the
+plants, and how keenly you felt my trouble. Will you inflict a keener
+one on this child, whose heart seems bent on doing something for
+herself, and on whom disappointment will fall even more painfully than
+it did on me? Are we not all bound to do something for those who are
+more destitute than ourselves? and even if we lose what we let her have,
+it will never be missed."
+
+The poor girl looked up imploringly into my face as I pleaded for her,
+her eyes brightened with returning hopefulness, and again she besought
+us,--
+
+"Dear lady, let me have a few; my mother knows you."
+
+"Tell me your name," I replied.
+
+"Lucy Varick,--mother says she knows you," was the answer.
+
+"Varick!" replied my mother, quickly, surprised as well as evidently
+pleased. "You shall have all you can sell."
+
+She was the daughter of the miserable man whose terrible deathbed we had
+both witnessed, and my mother had no difficulty in trusting to her
+honesty. Her basket would contain but a few quarts, and these we had
+already gathered. I filled her little pasteboard boxes immediately, with
+the fruit just as picked from the vines. The poor child fairly capered
+with joy as she witnessed the operation. She saw her fortune in a few
+quarts of strawberries! I think that as she tripped nimbly through the
+gate, my gratification at seeing how cheerfully she thus began her life
+of toil was equal to all that she could have experienced herself.
+
+Before the afternoon was half gone, Lucy surprised us by returning with
+an empty basket. She had found customers wherever she went, and wanted a
+fresh supply of fruit. This was promptly given to her, for she had
+obtained even better prices than the widow was getting for us in the
+market. That afternoon she made the first half-dollar she ever earned,
+and during the entire season she continued to find plenty of the best of
+customers at their own doors.
+
+I had long since made up my mind that our pastor was entitled to some
+recognition of the substantial kindnesses he had extended to us at the
+time of our deep affliction. We had seen him regularly at the Sunday
+school, but he knew nothing of my conversion into a strawberry-girl.
+What else could we do, in remembrance of his friendship, but to make him
+a present of our choicest fruit? Never were strawberries more carefully
+selected than those with which I filled a new basket of ample size, as a
+gift for him. On my way to the factory the next morning, I delivered
+the basket at his door, with a little note expressive of our continued
+gratitude, and begging him to accept its contents as being fruit which I
+had myself raised. I knew it was but a trifle, but what else than
+trifles had I to offer even to the kindest friend we had ever known?
+
+That very afternoon, while my mother and I were at our usual occupation
+of picking, I heard the gate open at the other end of the garden, and,
+looking up, saw two gentlemen approaching us. They advanced slowly
+around the strawberry-beds, apparently examining the plants and fruit,
+frequently stooping to turn over the great clusters on a portion of the
+ground which we had not yet picked. I saw that one of them was our
+pastor, but the other was a stranger. As they drew nearer, we rose to
+receive them. No words can describe the confusion which overcame me as I
+recognized in the stranger the same gentleman whom I had encountered,
+the preceding summer, as the first customer for my strawberries, at the
+widow's stand in the market-house. I had never forgotten his face. Mr.
+Seeley introduced him as his friend Mr. Logan. Somehow I felt certain
+that he also recognized me. I was confused enough at being thus taken by
+surprise. It is true that my sun-bonnet, though of prodigious size, was
+neatly cut and handsomely fashioned, even becoming, as I supposed, and
+that I was fortunately habited in a plain, but entirely new dress, that
+was more than nice enough for the work I was performing. But the hot
+sun, in spite of my bonnet, had already turned my face brown. My hands,
+exposed to its fiercest rays, were even more tanned, while the stain of
+fruit was visible on my fingers. I was in no condition to receive
+company of this unexpected description.
+
+But the gentlemen were affable, and I soon became at ease with them. Mr.
+Seeley had received my basket, and had come to thank me for it. Mr.
+Logan had been dining with him, and was enthusiastic over the quality of
+my strawberries. He had never seen them equalled, though devoting all
+his leisure to horticulture; and learning that they were raised by a
+lady, insisted on coming down, not only to look into her mode of
+culture, but to see the lady herself. It was pleasant thus to meet our
+friend the pastor, and I did my utmost to render the visit agreeable to
+him and his companion. My mother gave up the care of their entertainment
+to me; so, dropping my basket in the unfinished strawberry-row, I left
+her to continue the afternoon picking alone.
+
+The gentlemen seemed in no haste to leave us. I was surprised that they
+could find so much to interest them in a spot which I had supposed could
+be interesting only to ourselves. Mr. Seeley was pleased with all that
+he saw, but Mr. Logan was polite enough to be much more demonstrative in
+his admiration. I think the visit of the former would have been much
+briefer but for the presence of the latter, who seemed in no hurry to
+depart. He was generous in praise of my flowers, and was inquisitive
+about my strawberries. He had many of the most celebrated varieties, and
+was kind enough to offer me such as I might desire. He thought that I
+could teach him lessons in horticulture more valuable than any he had
+yet picked up, either in books or in his own garden, and asked
+permission to come down often during the fruit season, to see and learn.
+I was surprised that he should think it possible for a young
+strawberry-girl like myself to teach anything to one who was evidently
+so much better informed. Then I told him that what he saw was the result
+of an endeavor to determine whether there was not some better dependence
+for a woman than the needle, that I had accomplished all this by my own
+zeal and perseverance, and that this season promised complete success.
+
+"I cannot give you too much praise," he observed. "Your tastes harmonize
+admirably with my own. I have long believed that women are confined to
+too small a circle of useful occupations. They too seldom teach
+themselves, and are too little taught by others whose duty it is to
+enlarge their sphere of action. All my sisters have learned what you may
+call trades,--that is, to support themselves, if ever required to do so,
+by employments particularly adapted to their talents. You have chosen
+the garden, and you seem in a fair way to succeed. I must know how much
+your strawberry-crop will yield you."
+
+On thus discovering the object I had in view, and that this was my own
+experiment, his interest in all that he saw appeared to increase. The
+very tones of his voice became softer and kinder. There was nothing
+patronizing in his manner; it was deferential, and so sympathetic as to
+impress me very strongly. I felt that he understood the train of thought
+that had been running through my mind, and that he heartily entered into
+and approved of my plans.
+
+My first false shame at being known as a strawberry-girl now gave place
+to a feeling of pride and emulation. Here was one who could appreciate
+as well as encourage. Hence my explanations were as full as it was
+proper to set before a stranger. Our pastor listened to them with
+surprise, as most of them were new even to him, nor did he fail to unite
+with his companion in encouragement and congratulation. Long
+acquaintance gave him the privilege to be familiar and inquisitive. It
+is possible that in place of being abashed and humble, I may now have
+been confident and boastful.
+
+Our visitors left us with promises to repeat their call; and with a
+lighter heart than ever, I went again to assist in picking.
+
+The fruit continued to turn out well, and our widow in the market-house
+proved true to the promises she had made,--there was no difficulty in
+finding a sale for it, and somehow it yielded even better prices than
+the year before. She said that others were complaining of a drought, and
+that the fruit in consequence was generally inferior in size, so that
+those who, like myself, had been lucky enough, or painstaking enough, to
+secure a full crop, were doing better than ever. Then our little
+strawberry-peddler, Lucy Varick, was doing a thriving business. She
+established a list of customers among the great ladies in the city, who
+bought large daily supplies from her, paying her the highest prices. Her
+young heart seemed overflowing with joyfulness at her unexpected
+success. It enabled her to take home many a dollar to her mother. Alas!
+she seemed to think--if, indeed, she thought at all upon the
+subject--that the strawberry season would be a perpetual harvest.
+
+We throve so satisfactorily that my mother seemed to have given up her
+cherished longing for a strawberry-garden. Now that we had a new class
+of visitors who were likely to be frequent in their calls, I think she
+felt a kind of pride in abandoning the project. There was a sort of
+dignity in the production of fruit, but something humiliating in the
+idea of keeping an eating-house. She even went so far as to decline all
+applications from transient callers who had mistaken our premises for
+those of our neighbors, thus leaving the latter in undisturbed
+possession of their long trains of customers. They were not slow in
+discovering that we had ceased to be rivals in this branch of their
+business; and finding themselves mistaken in supposing that my
+strawberry-crop would come into ruinous competition with theirs, they
+seemed disposed to be a little friendly toward us. Indeed, on one or two
+occasions, Mrs. Tetchy herself came to us for a large basketful of
+fruit, declaring that their own supply was not equal to the demand. She
+was unusually pleasant on those occasions, but at the same time insisted
+on having the fruit at less than we were getting for it. My mother could
+not contend with such a woman, and so submitted to her exactions. I feel
+satisfied, however, that her visits were to be attributed quite as much
+to a desire to gratify her curiosity as to any want of strawberries; for
+I noticed that she never came on these errands without impudently
+walking all over our garden, scrutinizing whatever we were doing, how
+the beds were arranged, and particularly inspecting and even handling
+the fruit. Of course we had nothing to be ashamed of; but though
+everything about the garden was much neater than hers, she never dropped
+a word of commendation.
+
+Only a day or two after the gentlemen had been down to see us, we found
+it necessary to resume the task of weeding between the rows. The drought
+at the beginning of the season had been succeeded by copious rains, with
+warm southerly winds, under which the weeds were making an alarming
+growth, notwithstanding the trampling which they received from the
+pickers. I confess that our heavy hoes made this so laborious an
+operation that I rather dreaded its necessity; but a hot sun was now
+shining, which would be sure to kill the weeds, if we cut them off, so
+all hands were turned in to accomplish the work. While thus busily
+occupied, whom should I see coming into the gate but Mr. Logan?
+
+"Capital exercise, Miss, and a fine day for it!" he exclaimed, as he
+came up to me. "No successful gardening where the weeds are permitted to
+grow! I have the same pests to contend against, but I apply the same
+remedy. There is nothing like a sharp hoe."
+
+"Nothing indeed, if one only knew how to make it so," I replied.
+
+As he spoke, his eye glanced at the uncouth implement I was using, and
+reaching forth his hand he took it from me. Examining it carefully, a
+smile came over his handsome face, and he shook his head, as if thinking
+that would never do. It was one of the old tools my father had used,
+heavy and tiresome for a woman's hand, with a blade absurdly large for
+working among strawberries, and so dull as to hack off instead of
+cutting up a weed at one stroke. Fred had undertaken to keep our hoes
+sharp for us, but this season he had somehow neglected to put them in
+order.
+
+"This will never do, Miss," he observed. "Your hoe is heavy enough to
+break you down. This is not exercise such as a lady should take, but
+downright hard work. I must get you such as my sisters use; and now I
+mean to do your day's work for you."
+
+Then, taking my place, he proceeded during the entire morning to act as
+my substitute. We were surprised at his affability, as well as at his
+industry. It was evident that grubbing up weeds was no greater novelty
+to him than to us. All the time he had something pleasant to say, and
+thus conversation and work went on together: for, not thinking it polite
+to leave him to labor alone, I procured a rake, and contrived to keep
+him company in turning up the weeds to the sun, the more effectually to
+kill them.
+
+Now I had never been able to learn the botanical names of any of these
+pests of the garden, nor whether any of them were useful to man, nor how
+it was that the earth was so crowded with them. Neither did I know the
+annuals from the perennials, nor why one variety was invariably found
+flourishing in moist ground, while another preferred a drier situation.
+If I had had a desire to learn these interesting particulars of things
+that were my daily acquaintances, I had neither books to consult nor
+time to devote to them.
+
+But it was evident from Mr. Logan's conversation that he was not only a
+horticulturist, but an accomplished botanist. Both my mother and myself
+were surprised at the new light which he threw upon the subject. I was
+tugging with my fingers at a great dandelion which had come up directly
+between two strawberry-plants, trying to pull it up, when its brittle
+leaves broke off in my hand, leaving the root in the ground. Mr. Logan,
+seeing the operation, observed,--
+
+"No use in cutting it off; the root must come out, or it will grow
+thicker and stronger, and plague you every season"; and plying the
+corner of his hoe all round the neck of the dandelion, so as to loosen
+the earth a considerable depth, he thrust his fingers down, seized the
+root, and drew forth a thick white fibre at least a foot long.
+
+"That fellow must be three years old," said he, holding it up for me to
+examine. "Very likely you have cut off the top every season, supposing
+you were killing it. But the dandelion can be exterminated only by
+destroying the root.
+
+"Then," he continued, "there is the dock, more prolific of seeds than
+the dandelion, and the red-sorrel, worse than either, because its roots
+travel under ground in all directions, throwing up suckers at every
+inch, while its tops are hung with myriads of seeds,--the hoe will never
+exterminate these pests. You must get rid of the roots; throw them out
+to such a sun as this, and then you may hope to be somewhat clear of
+them."
+
+All this was entirely new to me, as well as the botanical names, with
+which he seemed to be as familiar as with the alphabet. I had often
+wondered how it was that the dandelions in our garden never diminished
+in number, though not one had usually been allowed to go to seed. I now
+saw, that, instead of destroying the plant itself, we had only been
+removing the tops.
+
+"But how is it, Mr. Logan," I inquired, "that the weeds are everywhere
+more numerous than the flowers?"
+
+"Ah, Miss," he replied, resting the hoe upon his shoulder, taking off
+his hat, and wiping the perspiration from his forehead, "I sometimes
+think the weeds are immortal, but that the flowers are not. Some one has
+said that the earth is mother of the weeds, but only step-mother to the
+flowers. I think it is really so. We who cultivate the soil must
+maintain against them, as against sin, a perpetual warfare."
+
+"This is hoeing made easy," said my sister, as Mr. Logan walked away
+toward the house for a glass of water. "A nice journeyman, Lizzie, eh?
+Don't seem as if he could ever be tired! Will you ask him to come
+again?"
+
+"Why, Jane, you are foolish!" I replied.
+
+But there was an arch smirk on her countenance, and she continued
+looking at me with so much latent meaning in the expression of her eye,
+that I was fairly compelled to turn away.
+
+Noon came, that witching time with all who labor in the fields or woods,
+and not until then did Mr. Logan lay down his clumsy hoe. I half pitied
+his condition as we came out of the hot sun into the shelter of a
+trellis which ran along the side of the house, over which a dozen
+grape-vines were hanging so thickly as to exclude even the noonday
+glare. It was a sweltering day for a gentleman to work among the weeds
+in a strawberry-field, in coat and cravat. But he made very light of it,
+and declared that he would come the next morning and see us through the
+job, and even another, if we thought there would be room for him. After
+he had gone, Jane reminded me of these offers; adding,--
+
+"I felt quite sure he would be down again, even without your inviting
+him. He seems to admire something else here besides strawberries. What
+do you think it can be?"
+
+But I considered her inquiries too ridiculous to be worth replying to.
+
+After dinner we gave up hoeing for the day, and went to our usual
+afternoon occupation of picking the next morning's supply for the widow.
+She not only sold readily all we could gather, and at excellent prices,
+but even called for more. It seemed that her customers were also
+increasing, as well as those of our neighbors. Indeed, her urgency for
+more fruit was such, during the entire season, that the question
+repeatedly crossed my mind, whether we could not appropriate more ground
+to strawberries by getting rid of some of the flowers. They were
+beautiful things, but then they paid no profit.
+
+When one strikes a vein that happens to be profitable, he is apt to
+become impatient of doing well in a small way, and forthwith casts about
+for ways and means to increase its productiveness, as he thinks, by
+enlarging his operations. It was natural for me to conclude, that, if I
+were thus fortunate on one acre, I could do much better by cultivating
+more. I presume this hankering after additional acres must be a national
+weakness, as there were numerous disquisitions on the subject scattered
+through my agricultural papers, in many of which I noticed that there
+was great fault-finding because men in this country undertook the
+cultivation of twice as much land as they could properly manage. The
+propensity for going on and enlarging their possessions seemed a very
+general one. Thus even I, in my small way, was insensibly becoming a
+disciple of these deluded people. But there was this comfort in my case,
+that, while others were able to enlarge, even to their ruin, there was a
+limit to my expansion, as it was impossible for me to go beyond an acre
+and a half.
+
+That afternoon we had just got well under way at picking, when a man
+came into the garden with a bundle of hoes and rakes on his shoulder,
+and coming up to us, took off his hat and bowed with the utmost
+deference, then drew from his pocket a letter, which, singularly enough,
+he handed to me, instead of giving it either to my mother or Jane. On
+opening it, I found it to be a note from Mr. Logan, in which he said he
+had noticed that our garden-tools were so heavy as to be entirely unfit
+for ladies' use, and he had therefore taken the liberty of sending me a
+variety of others that were made expressly for female gardeners, asking
+me to do him the great favor to accept them. Both my mother and Jane had
+stopped picking, as this unexpected donation was laid before us, so I
+read the note aloud to them, the messenger having previously taken his
+leave. I think, altogether, it was the greatest surprise we had ever
+had.
+
+"The next thing, I suppose," said Jane, "you'll have him down here to
+show you how to use them"; and she laughed so heartily as quite to
+mortify me. I understood her meaning, but my mother did not appear to
+comprehend it, for she replied, with the utmost gravity,--
+
+"No need of his coming to teach us; haven't we been hoeing all our
+lives?"
+
+"Not _us_, mother," interrupted Jane, in her peculiarly provoking way,
+"but _her_; he won't come to teach _us_,--one will be enough. As to the
+_need_ of his coming, it looks to me to be growing stronger and
+stronger."
+
+She fairly screamed with laughter, as she said this. I was so provoked
+at her, that I was almost ready to cry; and as to answering her as she
+deserved, it seemed beyond my power. My mother could not understand what
+she meant; but while Jane was going on in this foolish way, she had
+untied the bundle and was examining the tools. There were three hoes,
+and as many rakes. Observing this, Jane again cried out,--
+
+"What! all for _you_? Well, Lizzie, you are making a nice beginning! I
+suppose you will now have more conversational topics than ever, though
+there seemed to be plenty of them this morning!"
+
+One would think that this was quite enough, but she went on with,--
+
+"Don't you wish the weeds would last all summer? for what is to become
+of you when they are gone?"
+
+Still I made no reply, and Jane persisted in her jokes and laughter. But
+I think one can always tell when one is blushing. So I held down my head
+and concealed my face in my sun-bonnet, as I felt the blood rushing up
+into my cheeks, and was determined that she should not have the
+satisfaction of discovering it.
+
+These garden-tools were the most beautiful I had ever seen, and there
+was evidently a hoe and a rake for each of us. They were made of
+polished steel, with slender handles, all rubbed so smooth as to make it
+a pleasure to take hold of them. The blades had been sharpened beyond
+anything that Fred had been able to achieve. Being semicircular in
+shape, they had points at the corners, adapted to reaching into
+out-of-the-way places,--as after a weed that had grown up in the middle
+of a strawberry-row, thinking, perhaps, that a shelter of that kind
+would preserve it from destruction. Then they were so light that even a
+child could ply them all day without their weight occasioning the least
+fatigue. The rakes were equally complete, with long and sharp teeth,
+which entered the ground with far greater facility than the old-time
+implements we had been using. Indeed, they were the very tools we had
+been promising ourselves out of the profits of our second year. My
+mother was especially pleased with them, as she was not of very robust
+constitution, and found the old heavy tools a great drag upon her
+strength. I think no small present I have ever received was so
+acceptable as this.
+
+Whoever first manufactured and introduced these beautiful and
+appropriate garden-tools for ladies has probably done as much to make
+garden-work attractive to the sex as half the writers on fruits and
+flowers. It is vain to expect them to engage in horticulture, unless the
+most complete facilities are provided for them. Their physical strength
+is not equal to several hours' labor with implements made exclusively
+for the hands of strong men; and when garden-work, instead of proving a
+pleasant recreation, degenerates into drudgery, one is apt to become
+disgusted with it, and will thus give up an occupation truly feminine,
+invariably healthful, and in many cases highly profitable.
+
+True to his promise of the preceding day, Mr. Logan came down next
+morning to help us through with our job of hoeing, but rather better
+prepared to operate under a broiling June sun. My mother, seeing his
+determination to assist us, invited him to take off his coat, and
+brought out Fred's straw hat for him to wear. He seemed truly grateful
+for these marks of consideration for his comfort, and in consequence
+there sprung up quite a cordiality between them. There was of course a
+profusion of thanks given to him for the handsome and appropriate
+present he had made, but he seemed to consider it a very small affair.
+Still, I think he appeared as much gratified at finding he had thus
+anticipated our wishes as we were ourselves. It is singular how far a
+little act of kindness, especially when its value is enhanced by its
+appropriateness and the delicacy with which it is performed, will go
+toward establishing a bond of sympathy between giver and receiver.
+
+I may here say, that, the better we became acquainted with Mr. Logan,
+the more evident it was that his heart was made up of kindness. He
+seemed to consider himself as almost nothing, and his neighbor as
+everything. His spirit was of that character that wins its way through
+life, tincturing every action with good-will for others, and seeking to
+promote the happiness of all around him in preference to his own. He
+once remarked, that we must not look for happiness in the things of the
+world, but within ourselves, in our hearts, our tempers, and our
+dispositions. On another occasion he quoted to me something he had just
+been reading in an old author, who said that men's lives should be like
+the day, most beautiful at eventide,--or like the autumn rich with
+golden sheaves, where good works have ripened into an abundant harvest.
+
+Of course, at that time, we knew nothing of who or what he was, beyond
+an assurance incidentally given by our pastor, that he was the worthiest
+young man of his acquaintance, and that he hoped we would entertain him
+in the best way we could, as his passion for the pursuits he discovered
+me to be engaged in, coupled with what he had learned of the great
+object I had in view, had so much interested him in my behalf that he
+thought it likely Mr. Logan would often come down to watch my progress,
+and very possibly in some way assist me. This recommendation was quite
+sufficient to make him a welcome visitor at our little homestead. But
+even without that, we all felt he would have no difficulty in winning
+his way wherever he might think it desirable to make a favorable
+impression. Though he was evidently highly educated, and had been
+brought up in a superior circle to ours, and, for aught we knew, might
+be very wealthy, yet his whole manner was so free from pretension to
+superiority of any kind, that we never felt the least constraint in his
+company.
+
+Well, as I was saying, Mr. Logan came down to assist me in my weeding.
+Jane had gone to the factory, telling me that I should have help enough
+to do her share of the hoeing. I was really not sorry for her absence,
+as she seemed to have taken up some very strange notions, which led her
+into remarks that annoyed me. Besides, she was sometimes so impetuous in
+giving utterance to these notions, that I was afraid she might
+thoughtlessly break out where he would overhear. I might have had other
+reasons, not worth while to allude to, for not regretting her absence;
+but this dangerous propensity was quite sufficient. Hence that was a
+most agreeable morning. It is true that my mother was a good deal
+absent, having something extra to do within doors, thus leaving Mr.
+Logan and myself sole tenants of the garden for probably an hour at a
+time. But it did not occur to me that her presence would have made the
+time pass away any more quickly, or that any remarks from her would have
+made our interchange of ideas more interesting. There was abundance of
+conversation between us, as he seemed at no fault for either words or
+topics. Then there were long pauses in the work, when we would rest upon
+the handles of our hoes, and discuss some point that one of us had
+started. On these occasions I was struck with the extreme politeness and
+deference of his manner toward me. The very tones of his voice were
+different from any I had ever heard. How different, indeed, from those
+of the coarse and mercenary creatures it had been my fortune to
+encounter elsewhere! It was impossible to overlook the contrast. What
+wonder, then, that the softness with which they were modulated, when
+conversing with me, should fall with grateful impressiveness on my
+heart?
+
+But this pleasant acquaintance occasioned no interruption of my labors
+in harvesting my strawberry-crop. It was picked regularly every
+afternoon, and I went with Fred every morning by daylight to see it
+safely delivered to the widow. The sale kept up as briskly as ever,
+though the price gradually declined as the season advanced,--not, as the
+widow informed me, because the people had become tired of strawberries,
+but because the crops from distant fields were now crowding into market.
+Then, too, she said, as other delicacies came forward, buyers were
+disposed to change a little for something different.
+
+It was a striking feature of the business, that, however abundant the
+strawberries might be, selected fruit always commanded a higher price
+than that which went to market in a jumble just as it came from the
+vines. This is a matter which it is important for all cultivators to
+keep in remembrance, as attention to it is a source of considerable
+profit. We all know that the large berries are no better or sweeter than
+the smaller ones; but then we are the growers, not the consumers, and
+the public have set their hearts on having the largest that can be
+produced. In fruits, as in other things, it seems that "the world is
+still deceived by ornament." Moreover, people are willing to pay liberal
+prices for it, and thus the producer is sure of being rewarded for a
+choice article. I never discovered that a pumpkin or a turnip possessed
+any superior flavor because it had been stimulated to mammoth size. But
+such being the public craving for vegetable monsters, the shrewd
+cultivator is constantly on the alert to minister to it, knowing that it
+pays.
+
+Fred kept his usual tally of the number of baskets we took to market,
+and how much money each lot produced. His ridiculous miscalculation, the
+previous year, of what our profits would be, had so moderated his
+enthusiasm, that during all this season his anticipations were confined
+within very modest bounds. But as his column of figures lengthened, and
+he ciphered out for us the average price for each day's sales, it was
+remarkable how much higher it stood than that of most of the fruit I saw
+in the market. It was evident that our care in assorting our berries was
+giving a good account of itself. Besides, I saw that the widow had the
+jumbled-up berries of others on her stand, and heard her complain that
+they remained on hand some hours after all mine had been sold. Then, was
+it not the superiority of mine that had drawn forth such strong
+commendation from my first customer, Mr. Logan? and had he not continued
+to admire all that I did in the strawberry way? Setting aside the high
+prices, I sometimes thought that this alone was worth all the pains we
+had taken.
+
+The season lasted about three weeks, during all which time our pastor
+was a frequent visitor at our garden. As both he and Mr. Logan had been
+made acquainted with my general object and plans, so from generals they
+were at last taken into confidence as to particulars. I showed them
+Fred's tally, and it appeared to me they entered into the study of it
+with almost as much interest as we did ourselves. Though in many
+respects a very small affair, yet it involved great results for me, and
+our visitors both thought it might be turned to the advantage of others
+also.
+
+"I am astonished," said Mr. Seeley, one day, after examining Fred's
+tally, and expressing himself in terms of admiration at the success of
+our enterprise,--"I am astonished at the wasteful lives which so many of
+our women are living. They seem utterly destitute of purpose. They make
+no effort to give them shape or plan, or to set up a goal in the
+distance, to be reached by some kind of industrious application. They
+drift along listlessly and mechanically, in the old well-worn tracks,
+trusting to accident to give them a new direction. It is a sad thing,
+this waste of human existence!"
+
+"But consider, Sir," I replied, "how limited are our opportunities, how
+circumscribed the circle in which we are compelled to move, and with how
+much jealousy the world stands guard upon its boundaries, as if it were
+determined we should not overstep them. When women succeed, is it not
+solely by accident, or, if there be such a thing, by luck?"
+
+"Accident, Miss," replied Mr. Logan, "undoubtedly has something to do
+with it. But observation, energy, and tact are much more important
+elements of success. More than sixty years ago a young New-England girl
+fell desperately in love with an imported straw bonnet which she
+accidentally met with in a shop. The price was too large for her slender
+purse, so she determined to make one for herself. With no guide but
+recollection of the charming novelty she had seen, no other pattern to
+work by, no opportunity of unbraiding it to see how it was made, no
+instruction whatever, she persevered until she had produced a bonnet
+that filled the hearts of her female friends with envy, as well as with
+ambition to copy it. This was the origin of the once famous Dunstable
+bonnet. From this accidental beginning there sprung up a manufacture
+which now employs ten thousand persons, most of whom are women, and the
+product of which, in Massachusetts alone, amounts to six millions of
+hats and bonnets annually. This girl thus became a public benefactor.
+She opened a new and profitable employment to women, and at the same
+time enriched herself."
+
+"Yes," added Mr. Seeley, "and there are many other employments for
+female skill and labor that may yet be opened up. This that you are
+toiling in, Lizzie, may turn out something useful. I presume that even
+bonnets cannot be more popular than strawberries."
+
+"I should think so," interrupted Fred, "It is the women only who wear
+the one, but it looks to me as if the whole world wanted the other."
+
+Well, when our little crop had all been sold, I found that it amounted
+to nearly twelve hundred quarts, and that it produced three hundred and
+eighty dollars clear of expenses. This was quite as much as we expected;
+besides, it was enough to enable me to quit the factory altogether, and
+stay at home with my mother. And there was a fair prospect of this
+release being a permanent one, as it was very certain I now understood
+the whole art and mystery of cultivating strawberries. There was another
+encouraging incident connected with this season's operations. It
+appeared that our pastor had mentioned me and my labors to a number of
+his friends, among whom was one who wanted to set out a large field with
+plants, all of which he purchased of me, amounting to sixty dollars.
+This was a most unexpected addition to our income.
+
+But my sister Jane did not seem at all anxious to give up the factory. I
+had, a good while before, let in an idea that there was some other
+attraction about the establishment besides the sewing-machine. I
+noticed, that, now we had so considerably increased our means, she was
+more dressy than ever, and spent a great deal more time at her toilet
+before leaving for the factory, as if there were some one there to whom
+she wanted to appear more captivating than usual. Poor girl! I know it
+was very natural for her to do so. Indeed, I must confess to some little
+weakness of the same description myself. We had drawn to us quite a new
+set of visitors, and it was natural that I should endeavor to make our
+house as attractive to them as possible. As all our previous earnings
+had gone into a common purse, from which my mother made distribution
+among us, so the new accession from the garden went into the same
+repository. Jane was much more set up with this flourishing condition of
+our finances than myself. In addition to beautiful new bonnets and very
+gay shawls which we bought, she began to tease my mother for a silk
+dress, an article which had never been seen in our house. But as the
+latter prudently insisted on treating us with equal indulgence, and as I
+thought my time for such finery had not come, I was unwilling to go to
+that expense, so Jane was obliged to do without it. But I was now to
+have a sewing-machine.
+
+Time passed more pleasantly than I had ever known. It was a great
+happiness to be able to devote an hour or two to reading every day, and
+leisure prompted me to some little enterprises for the improvement of
+the surroundings of the old homestead. It seemed to me the easiest thing
+in the world to invest even the rudest exterior with true elegance, and
+I found that the indulgence of a little taste in this way could be had
+for a very small outlay. A silk dress, in my opinion, was not to be
+compared with such an object.
+
+I scarcely know how it happened, but, instead of the end of the
+strawberry-season being the termination of Mr. Logan's visits, they
+continued full as frequent as when there was really pressing work for
+him to assist in. It could not have been because his curiosity to see
+how my crop would turn out was still ungratified, as he knew all about
+it, how much we had sold, and what money it produced. But he seemed to
+have quite fallen in love with the garden; and, indeed, he one day
+observed, that "there would ever be something in that garden to interest
+him." Then in my little improvements about the house, in fixing up some
+of our old trellises, in planting new vines and flowers, and in
+transplanting trees and shrubs, he insisted on helping me nearly half
+the week. He really performed far more work of this kind than Fred had
+ever done, and appeared to be perfectly familiar with such matters.
+Moreover, he approved so generally of my plans that I at last felt it
+would be difficult to do without him. But I could not help considering
+it strange that he should so frequently give up the higher society to
+which he was accustomed in the city, and spend so much of his time at
+our humble cottage.
+
+Thus the season went on until August came in, when the strawberry-ground
+was becoming thickly covered with runners, especially from the newly
+planted half-acre. I had intended bestowing no particular care on these,
+except to keep down the weeds so that the runners could take root. But
+when Mr. Logan learned this, he said it would never do. Besides, he
+said, the ground looked to him as if it were not rich enough. So, if he
+could have his own way, he would show me how the thing should be
+managed. Well, as by this time he really appeared to have as much to say
+about the garden as any of us, what could I do but consent? First,
+then, with my assistance, he turned back the runners into the rows, and
+then had the spaces between covered with a thick coat of fine old
+compost, which he probably bought somewhere in the neighborhood,--but
+how much it cost we could never get him to say. Then he brought in a man
+with a plough, who broke up the ground, turning the manure thoroughly
+in, and then harrowing it until the surface was as finely pulverized as
+if done with a rake. Then we spread out the runners again, and he showed
+me how to fasten them by letting them down into the soft earth with the
+point of my hoe. I told him I never should have thought of taking so
+much trouble; but he said there was no other way by which the runners
+could be converted into robust plants, certain to produce a heavy crop
+the next season. They must have a freshly loosened soil to run over, and
+in which to form strong roots; and as to enriching the ground, it was
+absolutely indispensable. To be sure, I could produce fruit without it,
+but it would be of very inferior quality.
+
+One may well suppose that this intimate association, this almost daily
+companionship, this grateful interchange of thoughts and feelings that
+seemed to flow in one harmonious current from a common fountain, should
+have exerted a powerful influence over me. Such intercourse with one so
+singularly gifted with the faculty of winning favor from all who knew
+him gave birth to emotions within me such as I had never experienced. Am
+I to blame for being thus affected, or in confessing that every long
+October evening was doubly pleasant when it brought him down to see us?
+Indeed, I had insensibly begun to expect him. There was an indescribable
+something in his manner, especially when we happened to be alone, that I
+thought it impossible to misunderstand. Once, when strolling round the
+garden, I directed his attention to a group of charming autumn flowers.
+But, instead of noticing them, he looked at me, and replied,--
+
+"Ah, Miss Lizzie, I long since discovered that this garden contains a
+sweeter flower than any of these!"
+
+I turned away from him, abashed and silent, for I was confused and
+frightened by the idea that he was alluding to me, and it was a long
+time before I could venture to raise my eyes to his. I thought of what
+he had said, and of the studied tenderness of voice with which he had
+spoken, all through our lengthened walk, and until I rested upon my
+pillow; and the strange sensations it awakened came over my spirit in
+repeated dreams.
+
+Thus forewarned, as I thought, I was not slow in afterwards detecting
+fresh manifestations of a tenderer interest for me than I had supposed
+it possible for him to entertain.
+
+One evening in November, when the moon was shining with her softest
+lustre through the deep haze peculiar to our Indian summer, he came as
+usual to our little homestead. Somehow, I can scarcely tell why, I had
+been expecting him. He had dropped something the previous evening which
+had awakened in my mind the deepest feeling, and I was half sure that he
+would come. I felt that there were quicker pulses dancing through my
+veins, a flutter in my heart such as no previous experience had brought,
+a doubt, a fear, an expectation, as well as an alarm, which no
+reflection could analyze, no language could describe, all contending
+within me for ascendancy. Who that has human sympathies, who that is
+young as I was, diffident of herself, and comparatively alone and
+friendless, will wonder that I should be thus overcome, or reproach me
+for giving way to impulses which I felt it impossible to control? There
+was a terror of the future, which even recollection of the happy past
+was powerless to dissipate. Society, even books, became irksome, and I
+went out into the garden alone, there to have uninterrupted communion
+with myself.
+
+There was an old arbor in a by-place of the garden, covered with creeper
+and honeysuckle, and though rudely built, yet there was a quiet
+retirement about it that I felt would be grateful to my spirit. Its
+rustic fittings, its heavy old seats, its gravelled floor, had been the
+scene of a thousand childish gambols with my brother and sister. Old
+memories clung to it with a loving fondness. Even when the sports of
+childhood gave place to graver thoughts and occupations, the cool
+retirement of this rustic solitude had never failed to possess the
+strongest attractions for me. The songbirds built their little nests
+within the overhanging foliage, and swarms of bees gave melodious voices
+to the summer air as they hovered over its honey-yielding flowers. The
+past united with the present to direct my steps toward this favorite
+spot I entered, and, seating myself on one of the old low branches that
+encircled it, was looking up through the straggling vines that festooned
+the entrance, admiring the soft haze through, which the cloudless moon
+was shedding a peculiar brilliancy on all around, when I heard a step
+approaching from the house.
+
+I stopped the song which I had been humming, and listened. It is said
+that there are steps which have music in them. I am sure, the cadences
+of that music which the poet has so immortalized sounded distinctly in
+my listening ear. It was the melody of recognition. I knew instinctively
+the approaching step, and in a moment Mr. Logan stood before me.
+
+"What!" said he, extending his hand as I rose, and pressing mine with a
+warmth that was unusual, even retaining it until we were seated,--"ever
+happy! There must be a perpetual sunshine in your heart!"
+
+"Oh, no!" I replied. "Happiness is a creation of the fireside. One does
+not find it in his neighbor's garden, and many times not even in his
+own."
+
+"For once, dear Lizzie, I only half agree with you," he replied, again
+taking my hand, and pressing it in both of his.
+
+I sought in vain to withdraw it, but he held it with an embarrassing
+tenacity. He had never spoken such words before, never used my name
+even, without the usual prefix which politeness exacts. I was glad that
+the moonlight found but feeble entrance into the arbor, as the blood
+mounted from my heart into my face, and I felt that I must be a
+spectacle of confusion. I cannot now remember how long this
+indescribable embarrassment kept possession of me, but I did summon
+strength to say,--
+
+"Your language surprises me, Mr. Logan."
+
+"But, dear Lizzie," he rejoined, "my deportment toward you ought to
+lessen that surprise, and become the apology for my words. Others may
+find no happiness in their neighbor's garden, but I have discovered that
+mine is concentrated in yours. You, dear Lizzie, are its fairest,
+choicest flower, which I seek to transplant into my own, there to
+flourish in the warmth of an affection such as I have felt for no one
+but yourself. Never has woman been so loved as you. Let me add fresh
+blessings to the day on which I first met you here, by claiming you as
+my wife."
+
+Oh, how can I write all this? But memory covers every incident of the
+past with flowers. What I said in reply to that overwhelming declaration
+has all gone from me. I may have been silent,--I think I must have
+been,--under the crowd of conflicting sensations,--amazement, modesty, a
+happiness unspeakable,--which came thronging over my heart I cannot
+remember all, but I covered my face, and the tears came into my eyes.
+Still keeping my hand, he placed his arm around me, drew me yet closer
+to him,--my head fell upon his breast,--I think he must have kissed me.
+
+If other evenings fled on hasty wings, how rapid was the flight of what
+remained of this! I cannot repeat the thoughts we uttered to each other,
+the confidences we exchanged, the glimpses of the happy future that
+broke upon me. Joy seemed to fill my cup even to overflowing; happiness
+danced before my bewildered mind; the longing of my womanly nature was
+satisfied with the knowledge that my affection was returned. Out of all
+the world in which he had to choose, he had preferred _me_.
+
+That night was made restless by the very fulness of my happiness. At
+breakfast the next morning, Jane questioned me on my somewhat haggard
+looks, and was inquisitive to know if anything had happened. Somehow she
+was unusually pertinacious; but I parried her inquiries. I was unwilling
+that others, as yet, should become sharers of my joy. But when she left
+upon her usual duties, I put on my best attire, with all the little
+novelties in dress which we had recently been able to purchase, making
+my appearance as genteel as possible. For the first time in my life I
+did think that silk would be becoming, and was vexed with myself for
+being without it. I was now anxious to be found agreeable. But it really
+made no difference.
+
+Presently a knock was heard at the front door; and on my mother's
+opening it, Mr. Logan entered, with a young lady whom he introduced as
+his sister. The room was so indifferently lighted that I could not at
+first distinguish her features, but, on her throwing up her veil, I
+instantly recognized in her my fellow-pupil at the sewing-school,--my
+"guide, philosopher, and friend," Miss Effie Logan!
+
+"Two years, dear Lizzie, since we met!" she exclaimed, "and what a
+meeting now! You see I know it all. Henry has told me everything. I am
+half as happy as yourself!"
+
+She took me in her arms, embraced me, kissed me with passionate
+tenderness, and called me "sister." What a recognition it was for me!
+Her beautiful face, lighted up with a new animation, appeared more
+lovely than ever. There was the same open-hearted manner of other days,
+now made doubly engaging by the warmest manifestation of genuine
+affection. I had never dreamed that Mr. Logan was the brother of whom
+this loving girl had so often spoken to me at the sewing-school, nor
+that the inexpressible happiness of calling her my sister was in store
+for me. But now I could readily discover resemblances which it was no
+wonder I had heretofore overlooked. If he, in sweetness of disposition,
+were to prove the counterpart of herself, what more could woman ask? It
+was not possible for a recognition to be more joyful than this.
+
+My mother stood by, witnessing these incomprehensible proceedings,
+silent, yet anxious as to their meaning. Effie took her into the
+adjoining room,--she was far readier of speech than myself,--and there
+explained to her the mystery of my new position with Mr. Logan. She told
+me that my mother was overcome with surprise, for, dearly as she loved
+her children, she had been strangely dull in her apprehension of what
+had been so long enacting within her own domestic circle. But why should
+I amplify these homely details? They are daily incidents the world over,
+varied, it is true, by circumstances; for everywhere the human heart is
+substantially the same mysterious fountain of emotion.
+
+A secret of this sort, once known, even to one's mother only, travels
+with miraculous rapidity, until the whole gaping neighborhood becomes
+confidentially intrusted with its keeping. It seems that ours had been
+more observant and suspicious than even my dear mother. But such eager
+care-takers of other people's affairs exist wherever human beings may
+chance to congregate. Humble life secured us no exemption.
+
+Our pastor was one of the first to hear of the interesting event. It may
+be that Mr. Logan had given him some inkling of it beforehand, for he
+was early in his congratulations. Jane, as might be expected, declared
+that it was no surprise to her, and was sure that my mother would not
+think of having the wedding without indulging her in her long-coveted
+silk. Fred took to Mr. Logan with almost as much kindliness as even
+myself. Throughout the neighborhood the affair created an immense
+sensation, as it was currently believed that Mr. Logan was exceedingly
+rich, and that now I was likely to become a lady. While poor, I was only
+a strawberry-girl; but rich, I would be a lady! Who is to account for
+these false estimates of human life? Who is mighty enough to correct
+them?
+
+Nothing had ever so melted down the rude stiffness of the Tetchy family
+as this wonderful revolution in my domestic prospects. They became
+amusingly disposed to sociability, as well as to inquisitiveness. But I
+was glad to see my mother stiffen up in proportion to their sudden
+condescension, for she would have nothing to do with them.
+
+Who, among casuists, can account for the contagious sympathy that seems
+to govern the affections? I had often heard it said that one wedding
+generally leads the way to another. Not a fortnight after these
+important events, Jane gave a new surprise to the household by
+introducing to us a lover of her own. It appeared that everything had
+been arranged between them before we knew a word about it. The happy
+young man in this case was a junior partner in the factory; and this, as
+I had long suspected, was the great secret of her attraction there. How
+my mother could have been so blind to the signs of coming events, such
+as were developing around her, I could not understand. But both affairs
+were real surprises to her. If we had depended on her genius as a
+matchmaker, I fear that both Jane and myself would have had a very
+discouraging experience!
+
+Thus the services of our pastor were likely to be in great request, for
+Jane insisted that he should officiate at her wedding, and Mr. Logan
+would think of no other for his own; and for myself, I thought it best,
+as this was the first time, not to let it be said that I had volunteered
+to make a difficulty by being contrary on such a point! Effie offered to
+be my bridesmaid, and Mr. Logan declared that Fred should be his first
+groomsman. It was a hazardous venture, Fred being as much a novice at
+such performances as myself,--who had never officiated even as bride!
+With a little tutoring, however, he turned out a surprising success.
+Lucy, no longer a little barefoot fruit-peddler, was promoted to be my
+waiting-maid.
+
+The new year came, bringing with it silks and jewels, and the double
+wedding. If I write that I am married, I must add that I am still
+without a sewing-machine. To me the garden has been better than the
+needle.
+
+There is a moral to be drawn from all that I have written, wherein it
+may be seen that the field of my choice is wide enough for many others.
+If I retire from market as a strawberry-girl, it must not be inferred
+that it is because the business has been overdone.
+
+
+
+
+JOHN JORDAN,
+
+FROM THE HEAD OF BAINE.
+
+
+Among the many brave men who have taken part in this war,--whose dying
+embers are now being trodden out by a "poor white man,"--none, perhaps,
+have done more service to the country, or won less glory for themselves,
+than the "poor whites" who have acted as scouts for the Union armies.
+The issue of battles, the result of campaigns, and the possession of
+wide districts of country, have often depended on their sagacity, or
+been determined by the information they have gathered; and yet they have
+seldom been heard of in the newspapers, and may never be read of in
+history.
+
+Romantic, thrilling, and sometimes laughable adventures have attended
+the operations of the scouts of both sections; but more difficulty and
+danger have undoubtedly been encountered by the partisans of the North
+than of the South. Operating mostly within the circle of their own
+acquaintance, the latter have usually been aided and harbored by the
+Southern people, who, generally friendly to Secession, have themselves
+often acted as spies, and conveyed dispatches across districts occupied
+by our armies, and inaccessible to any but supposed loyal citizens.
+
+The service rendered the South by these volunteer scouts has often been
+of the most important character. One stormy night, early in the war, a
+young woman set out from a garrisoned town to visit a sick uncle
+residing a short distance in the country. The sick uncle, mounting his
+horse at midnight, rode twenty miles in the rain to Forrest's
+head-quarters. The result was, the important town of Murfreesboro' and a
+promising Major-General fell into the hands of the Confederates; and all
+because the said Major-General permitted a pretty woman to pass his
+lines on "a mission of mercy."
+
+At another time, a Rebel citizen, professing disgust with Secession for
+having the weakness to be on "its last legs," took the oath of
+allegiance and assumed the Union uniform. Informing himself fully of the
+disposition of our forces along the Nashville Railroad, he suddenly
+disappeared, to reappear with Basil Duke and John Morgan in a midnight
+raid on our slumbering outposts.
+
+Again, a column on the march came upon a wretched woman, with a child in
+her arms, seated by the dying embers of a burning homestead,--burning,
+she said, because her sole and only friend, her uncle, (these ladies
+seldom have any nearer kin,) "stood up stret fur the kentry." No
+American soldier ever refused a "lift" to a woman in distress. This
+woman was soon "lifted" into an empty saddle by the side of a
+staff-officer, who, with many wise winks and knowing nods, was
+discussing the intended route of the expedition with a brother
+simpleton. A little farther on the woman suddenly remembered that
+another uncle, who did not stand up quite so "stret fur the kentry,"
+and, consequently, had a house still standing up for him, lived "plumb
+up thet 'ar' hill ter the right o' the high-road." She was set down, the
+column moved on, and--Streight's well planned expedition miscarried. But
+no one wasted a thought on the forlorn woman and the sallow baby whose
+skinny faces were so long within earshot of the wooden-headed
+staff-officer.
+
+Means quite as ingenious and quite as curious were often adopted to
+conceal dispatches, when the messenger was in danger of capture by an
+enemy. A boot with a hollow heel, a fragment of corn-pone too stale to
+tempt a starving man, a strip of adhesive plaster over a festering
+wound, or a ball of cotton-wool stuffed into the ear to keep out the
+west wind, often hid a message whose discovery would cost a life, and
+perhaps endanger an army. The writer has himself seen the hollow
+half-eagle which bore to Burnside's beleaguered force the welcome
+tidings that in thirty hours Sherman would relieve Knoxville.
+
+The perils which even the "native" scout encountered can be estimated
+only by those familiar with the vigilance that surrounds an army. The
+casual meeting with an acquaintance, the slightest act inconsistent with
+his assumed character, or the smallest incongruity between his speech
+and that of the district to which he professed to belong, has sent many
+a good man to the gallows. One of the best of Rosecrans's scouts--a
+native of East Kentucky--lost his life because he would "bounce" (mount)
+his nag, "pack" (carry) his gun, eat his bread "dry so," (without
+butter,) and "guzzle his peck o' whiskey," in the midst of Bragg's camp,
+when no such things were done there, nor in the mountains of Alabama,
+whence he professed to come. Acquainted only with a narrow region, the
+poor fellow did not know that every Southern district has its own
+dialect, and that the travelled ear of a close observer can detect the
+slightest deviation from its customary phrases. But he was not alone in
+this ignorance. Almost every Northern writer who has undertaken to
+describe Southern life has fallen into the same error. Even Olmstead,
+who has caught the idioms wonderfully, confounds the dialects of
+different regions, and makes a Northern Georgian "right smart," when he
+had been only "powerful stupid" all his life.
+
+The professional scout generally was a native of the South,--some
+illiterate and simple-minded, but brave and self-devoted "poor white
+man," who, if he had worn shoulder-straps, and been able to write
+"interesting" dispatches, might now be known as a hero half the world
+over. Some of these men, had they been born at the North, where free
+schools are open to all, would have led armies, and left a name to live
+after them. But they were born at the South, had their minds cramped and
+their souls stunted by a system which dwarfs every noble thing; and so,
+their humble mission over, they have gone down unknown and unhonored,
+amid the silence and darkness of their native woods.
+
+I hope to rescue the memory of one of these men--John Jordan, from the
+head of Baine--from utter oblivion by writing this article. He is now
+beyond the hearing of my words; but I would record one act in his short
+career, that his pure patriotism may lead some of us to know better and
+love more the much-abused and misunderstood class to which he belonged.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Early in the war the command of an important military expedition was
+intrusted to the president of a Western college. Though a young man,
+this scholar had already achieved a "character" and a history. Beginning
+life a widow's son, his first sixteen years were passed between a farm,
+a canal, and a black-saltern. Being an intelligent, energetic lad, his
+friends formed the usual hopes of him; but when he apprenticed himself
+to a canal-boat, their faith failed, and, after the fashion of Job's
+friends, they comforted his mother with the assurance that her son had
+taken the swift train to the Devil. But, like Job, she knew in whom she
+believed, and the boy soon justified her confidence. An event shortly
+occurred which changed the current of his life, gave him a purpose, and
+made him a man.
+
+One dark midnight, as the boat on which he was employed was leaving one
+of those long reaches of slackwater which abound in the Ohio and
+Pennsylvania Canal, he was called up to take his turn at the bow.
+Tumbling out of bed, his eyes heavy with sleep, he took his stand on the
+narrow platform below the bow-deck, and began uncoiling a rope to steady
+the boat through a lock it was approaching. Slowly and sleepily he
+unwound it, till it knotted, and caught in a narrow cleft in the edge of
+the deck. He gave it a sudden pull, but it held fast; then another and a
+stronger pull, and it gave way, but sent him over the bow into the
+water. Down he went into the dark night and the still darker river; and
+the boat glided on to bury him among the fishes. No human help was near.
+God only could save him, and He only by a miracle. So the boy thought,
+as he went down saying the prayer his mother had taught him.
+Instinctively clutching the rope, he sunk below the surface; but then it
+tightened in his grasp, and held firmly. Seizing it hand over hand, he
+drew himself up on deck, and was again a live boy among the living.
+Another kink had caught in another crevice, and saved him! Was it that
+prayer, or the love of his praying mother, which wrought this miracle?
+He did not know, but, long after the boat had passed the lock, he stood
+there, in his dripping clothes, pondering the question.
+
+Coiling the rope, he tried to throw it again into the crevice; but it
+had lost the knack of kinking. Many times he tried,--six hundred, says
+my informant,--and then sat down and reflected. "I have thrown this
+rope," he thought, "six hundred times; I might throw it ten times as
+many without its catching. Ten times six hundred are six thousand,--so,
+there were six thousand chances against my life. Against such odds,
+Providence only could have saved it. Providence, therefore, thinks it
+worth saving; and if that's so, I won't throw it away on a canal-boat.
+I'll go home, get an education, and be a man."
+
+He acted on this resolution, and not long afterwards stood before a
+little log cottage in the depths of the Ohio wilderness. It was late at
+night; the stars were out, and the moon was down; but by the fire-light
+that came through the window, he saw his mother kneeling before an open
+book which lay on a chair in the corner. She was reading; but her eyes
+were off the page, looking up to the Invisible. "Oh, turn unto me," she
+said, "and have mercy upon me! give Thy strength unto Thy servant, and
+save the son of Thine handmaid!" More she read, which sounded like a
+prayer, but this is all that the boy remembers. He opened the door, put
+his arm about her neck, and his head upon her bosom. What words he said
+I do not know; but there, by her side, he gave back to God the life
+which He had given. So the mother's prayer was answered. So sprang up
+the seed which in toil and tears she had planted.
+
+The boy worked, the world rolled round, and twelve years later Governor
+Dennison offered him command of a regiment. He went home, opened his
+mother's Bible, and pondered upon the subject. He had a wife, a child,
+and a few thousand dollars. If he gave his life to the country, would
+God and the few thousand dollars provide for his wife and child? He
+consulted the Book about it. It seemed to answer in the affirmative; and
+before morning he wrote to a friend,--"I regard my life as given to the
+country. I am only anxious to make as much of it as possible before the
+mortgage on it is foreclosed."
+
+To this man, who thus went into the war with a life not his own, was
+given, on the 16th of December, 1861, command of the little army which
+held Kentucky to her moorings in the Union.
+
+He knew nothing of war beyond its fundamental principles,--which are, I
+believe, that a big boy can whip a little boy, and that one big boy can
+whip two little boys, if he take them singly, one after the other. He
+knew no more about it; yet he was called upon to solve a military
+problem which has puzzled the heads of the greatest generals: namely,
+how two small bodies of men, stationed widely apart, can unite in the
+presence of an enemy, and beat him, when he is of twice their united
+strength, and strongly posted behind intrenchments. With the help of
+many "good men and true," he solved this problem; and in telling how he
+solved it, I shall come naturally to speak of John Jordan, from the head
+of Baine.
+
+Humphrey Marshall with five thousand men had invaded Kentucky. Entering
+it at Pound Gap, he had fortified a strong natural position near
+Paintville, and, with small bands, was overrunning the whole Piedmont
+region. This region, containing an area larger than the whole of
+Massachusetts, was occupied by about four thousand blacks and one
+hundred thousand whites,--a brave, hardy, rural population, with few
+schools, scarcely any churches, and only one newspaper, but with that
+sort of patriotism which grows among mountains and clings to its barren
+hillsides as if they were the greenest spots in the universe. Among this
+simple people Marshall was scattering firebrands. Stump-orators were
+blazing away at every cross-road, lighting a fire which threatened to
+sweep Kentucky from the Union. That done,--so early in the
+war,--dissolution might have followed. To the Ohio canal-boy was
+committed the task of extinguishing this conflagration. It was a
+difficult task, one which, with the means at command, would have
+appalled any man not made equal to it by early struggles with hardship
+and poverty, and entire trust in the Providence that guards his country.
+
+The means at command were twenty-five hundred men, divided into two
+bodies, and separated by a hundred miles of mountain country. This
+country was infested with guerrillas, and occupied by a disloyal people.
+The sending of dispatches across it was next to impossible; but
+communication being opened, and the two columns set in motion, there was
+danger that they would be fallen on and beaten in detail before they
+could form a junction. This was the great danger. What remained--the
+beating of five thousand Rebels, posted behind intrenchments, by half
+their number of Yankees, operating in the open field--seemed to the
+young Colonel less difficult of accomplishment.
+
+Evidently, the first thing to be done was to find a trustworthy
+messenger to convey dispatches between the two halves of the Union army.
+To this end, the Yankee commander applied to the Colonel of the
+Fourteenth Kentucky.
+
+"Have you a man," he asked, "who will die, rather than fail or betray
+us?"
+
+The Kentuckian reflected a moment, then answered: "I think I have,--John
+Jordan, from the head of Baine."[B]
+
+Jordan was sent for. He was a tall, gaunt, sallow man of about thirty,
+with small gray eyes, a fine, falsetto voice, pitched in the minor key,
+and his speech the rude dialect of the mountains. His face had as many
+expressions as could be found in a regiment, and he seemed a strange
+combination of cunning, simplicity, undaunted courage, and undoubting
+faith; yet, though he might pass for a simpleton, he talked a quaint
+sort of wisdom which ought to have given him to history.
+
+The young Colonel sounded him thoroughly; for the fate of the little
+army might depend on his fidelity. The man's soul was as clear as
+crystal, and in ten minutes the Yankee saw through it. His history is
+stereotyped in that region. Born among the hills, where the crops are
+stones, and sheep's noses are sharpened before they can nibble the thin
+grass between them, his life had been one of the hardest toil and
+privation. He knew nothing but what Nature, the Bible, the "Course of
+Time," and two or three of Shakspeare's plays had taught him; but
+somehow in the mountain air he had grown to be a man,--a man as
+civilized nations account manhood.
+
+"Why did you come into the war?" at last asked the Colonel.
+
+"To do my sheer fur the kentry, Gin'ral," answered the man. "And I
+didn't druv no barg'in wi' th' Lord. I guv Him my life squar' out; and
+ef He's a mind ter tuck it on this tramp, why, it's a His'n; I've
+nothin' ter say agin it."
+
+"You mean that you've come into the war not expecting to get out of it?"
+
+"That's so, Gin'ral."
+
+"Will you die rather than let the dispatch be taken?"
+
+"I wull."
+
+The Colonel recalled what had passed in his own mind when poring over
+his mother's Bible that night at his home in Ohio; and it decided him.
+"Very well," he said; "I will trust you."
+
+The dispatch was written on tissue paper, rolled into the form of a
+bullet, coated with warm lead, and put into the hand of the Kentuckian.
+He was given a carbine, a brace of revolvers, and the fleetest horse in
+his regiment, and, when the moon was down, started on his perilous
+journey. He was to ride at night, and hide in the woods or in the houses
+of loyal men in the day-time.
+
+It was pitch-dark when he set out; but he knew every inch of the way,
+having travelled it often, driving mules to market. He had gone twenty
+miles by early dawn, and the house of a friend was only a few miles
+beyond him. The man himself was away; but his wife was at home, and she
+would harbor him till nightfall. He pushed on, and tethered his horse in
+the timber; but it was broad day when he rapped at the door, and was
+admitted. The good woman gave him breakfast, and showed him to the
+guest-chamber, where, lying down in his boots, he was soon in a deep
+slumber.
+
+The house was a log cabin in the midst of a few acres of
+deadening,--ground from which trees have been cleared by girdling. Dense
+woods were all about it; but the nearest forest was a quarter of a mile
+distant, and should the scout be tracked, it would be hard to get away
+over this open space, unless he had warning of the approach of his
+pursuers. The woman thought of this, and sent up the road, on a mule,
+her whole worldly possessions, an old negro, dark as the night, but
+faithful as the sun in the heavens. It was high noon when the mule came
+back, his heels striking fire, and his rider's eyes flashing, as if
+ignited from the sparks the steel had emitted.
+
+"Dey 'm comin', Missus!" he cried,--"not haff a mile away,--twenty
+Secesh,--ridin' as ef de Debil wus arter 'em!"
+
+She barred the door, and hastened to the guest-chamber.
+
+"Go," she cried, "through the winder,--ter the woods! They'll be here in
+a minute."
+
+"How many is thar?" asked the scout.
+
+"Twenty,--go,--go at once,--or you'll be taken!"
+
+The scout did not move; but, fixing his eyes on her face, he said,--
+
+"Yes, I yere 'em. Thar's a sorry chance for my life a'ready. But,
+Rachel, I've thet 'bout me thet's wuth more 'n my life,--thet, may-be,
+'ll save Kaintuck. If I'm killed, wull ye tuck it ter Cunnel Cranor, at
+Paris?"
+
+"Yes, yes, I will. But go: you've not a minnit to lose, I tell you."
+
+"I know, but wull ye swar it,--swar ter tuck this ter Cunnel Cranor
+'fore th' Lord thet yeres us?"
+
+"Yes, yes, I will," she said, taking the bullet. But horses' hoofs were
+already sounding in the door-yard. "It's too late," cried the woman.
+"Oh, why did you stop to parley?"
+
+"Never mind, Rachel," answered the scout. "Don't tuck on. Tuck ye keer
+o' th' dispatch. Valu' it loike yer life,--loike Kaintuck. The Lord's
+callin' fur me, and I'm a'ready."
+
+But the scout was mistaken. It was not the Lord, but a dozen devils at
+the door-way.
+
+"What does ye want?" asked the woman, going to the door.
+
+"The man as come from Garfield's camp at sun-up,--John Jordan, from the
+head o' Baine," answered a voice from the outside.
+
+"Ye karn't hev him fur th' axin'," said the scout. "Go away, or I'll
+send some o' ye whar the weather is warm, I reckon."
+
+"Pshaw!" said another voice,--from his speech one of the chivalry.
+"There are twenty of us. We'll spare your life, if you give up the
+dispatch; if you don't, we'll hang you higher than Haman."
+
+The reader will bear in mind that this was in the beginning of the war,
+when swarms of spies infested every Union camp, and treason was only a
+gentlemanly pastime, not the serious business it has grown to be since
+traitors are no longer dangerous.
+
+"I've nothin' but my life thet I'll guv up," answered the scout; "and ef
+ye tuck thet, ye'll hev ter pay the price,--six o' yourn."
+
+"Fire the house!" shouted one.
+
+"No, don't do thet," said another. "I know him,--he's cl'ar grit,--he'll
+die in the ashes; and we won't git the dispatch."
+
+This sort of talk went on for half an hour; then there was a dead
+silence, and the woman went to the loft, whence she could see all that
+was passing outside. About a dozen of the horsemen were posted around
+the house; but the remainder, dismounted, had gone to the edge of the
+woods, and were felling a well-grown sapling, with the evident intention
+of using it as a battering-ram to break down the front door.
+
+The woman, in a low tone, explained the situation; and the scout said,--
+
+"It 'r' my only chance. I must run fur it. Bring me yer red shawl,
+Rachel."
+
+She had none, but she had a petticoat of flaming red and yellow.
+Handling it as if he knew how such articles can be made to spread, the
+scout softly unbarred the door, and, grasping the hand of the woman,
+said,--
+
+"Good bye, Rachel. It 'r' a right sorry chance; but I may git through.
+Ef I do, I'll come ter night; ef I don't, git ye the dispatch ter the
+Cunnel. Good bye."
+
+To the right of the house, midway between it and the woods, stood the
+barn. That way lay the route of the scout. If he could elude the two
+mounted men at the door-way, he might escape the other horsemen; for
+they would have to spring the barn-yard fences, and their horses might
+refuse the leap. But it was foot of man against leg of horse, and "a
+right sorry chance."
+
+Suddenly he opened the door, and dashed at the two horses with the
+petticoat. They reared, wheeled, and bounded away like lightning just
+let out of harness. In the time that it takes to tell it, the scout was
+over the first fence, and scaling the second; but a horse was making the
+leap with him. The scout's pistol went off, and the rider's earthly
+journey was over. Another followed, and his horse fell mortally wounded.
+The rest made the circuit of the barn-yard, and were rods behind when
+the scout reached the edge of the forest. Once among those thick
+laurels, nor horse nor rider can reach a man, if he lies low, and says
+his prayer in a whisper.
+
+The Rebels bore the body of their comrade back to the house, and said to
+the woman,--
+
+"We'll be revenged for this. We know the route he'll take, and will have
+his life before to-morrow; and you--we'd burn your house over your head,
+if you were not the wife of Jack Brown."
+
+Brown was a loyal man, who was serving his country in the ranks of
+Marshall. Thereby hangs a tale, but this is not the time to tell it.
+Soon the men rode away, taking the poor woman's only wagon as a hearse
+for their dead comrade.
+
+Night came, and the owls cried in the woods in a way they had not cried
+for a fortnight. "T'whoot! t'whoot!" they went, as if they thought there
+was music in hooting. The woman listened, put on a dark mantle, and
+followed the sound of their voices. Entering the woods, she crept in
+among the bushes, and talked with the owls as if they had been human.
+
+"They know the road ye'll take," she said; "ye must change yer route.
+Here ar' the bullet."
+
+"God bless ye, Rachel!" responded the owl, "ye 'r' a true 'ooman!"--and
+he hooted louder than before, to deceive pursuers, and keep up the
+music.
+
+"Ar' yer nag safe?" she asked.
+
+"Yes, and good for forty mile afore sun-up."
+
+"Well, here ar' suthin' ter eat: ye'll need it. Good bye, and God go wi'
+ye!"
+
+"He'll go wi' ye, fur He loves noble wimmin."
+
+Their hands clasped, and then they parted: he to his long ride; she to
+the quiet sleep of those who, out of a true heart, serve their country.
+
+The night was dark and drizzly; but before morning the clouds cleared
+away, leaving a thick mist hanging low on the meadows. The scout's mare
+was fleet, but the road was rough, and a slosh of snow impeded the
+travel. He had come by a strange way, and did not know how far he had
+travelled by sunrise; but lights were ahead, shivering in the haze of
+the cold, gray morning. Were they the early candles of some sleepy
+village, or the camp-fires of a band of guerrillas? He did not know, and
+it would not be safe to go on till he did know. The road was lined with
+trees, but they would give no shelter; for they were far apart, and the
+snow lay white between them. He was in the blue grass region. Tethering
+his horse in the timber, he climbed a tall oak by the roadside; but the
+mist was too thick to admit of his discerning anything distinctly. It
+seemed, however, to be breaking away, and he would wait until his way
+was clear; so he sat there, an hour, two hours, and ate his breakfast
+from the satchel John's wife had slung over his shoulder. At last the
+fog lifted a little, and he saw close at hand a small hamlet,--a few
+rude huts gathered round a cross-road. No danger could lurk in such a
+place, and he was about to descend, and pursue his journey, when
+suddenly he heard, up the road by which he came, the rapid tramp of a
+body of horsemen. The mist was thicker below; so half-way down the tree
+he went, and waited their coming. They moved at an irregular pace,
+carrying lanterns, and pausing every now and then to inspect the road,
+as if they had missed their way or lost something. Soon they came near,
+and were dimly outlined in the gray mist, so the scout could make out
+their number. There were thirty of them,--the original band, and a
+reinforcement. Again they halted when abreast of the tree, and searched
+the road narrowly.
+
+"He must have come this way," said one,--he of the chivalry. "The other
+road is six miles longer, and he would take the shortest route. It's an
+awful pity we didn't head him on both roads."
+
+"We kin come up with him yit, ef we turn plumb round, and foller on
+t'other road,--whar we lost the trail,--back thar, three miles ter the
+deadnin'."
+
+Now another spoke, and his voice the scout remembered. He belonged to
+his own company in the Fourteenth Kentucky. "It 'so," he said; "he has
+tuck t' other road. I tell ye, I'd know thet mar's shoe 'mong a million.
+Nary one loike it wus uver seed in all Kaintuck,--only a d----d Yankee
+could ha' invented it."
+
+"And yere it ar'," shouted a man with one of the lanterns, "plain as
+sun-up."
+
+The Fourteenth Kentuckian clutched the light, and, while a dozen
+dismounted and gathered round, closely examined the shoe-track. The
+ground was bare on the spot, and the print of the horse's hoof was
+clearly cut in the half-frozen mud. Narrowly the man looked, and life
+and death hung on his eyesight. The scout took out the bullet, and
+placed it in a crotch of the tree. If they took him, the Devil should
+not take the dispatch. Then he drew a revolver. The mist was breaking
+away, and he would surely be discovered, if the men lingered much
+longer; but he would have the value of his life to the uttermost
+farthing.
+
+Meanwhile, the horsemen crowded around the foot-print, and one of them
+inadvertently trod upon it. The Kentuckian looked long and earnestly,
+but at last he said,--
+
+"'Ta'n't the track. Thet 'ar' mar' has a sand-crack on her right
+fore-foot. She didn't take kindly to a round shoe; so the Yank, he guv
+her one with the cork right in the middle o' the quarter. 'Twas a durned
+smart contrivance; fur ye see, it eased the strain, and let the nag go
+nimble as a squirrel. The cork ha'n't yere,--'ta'n't her track,--and
+we're wastin,' time in luckin'."
+
+The cork was not there, because the trooper's tread had obliterated it.
+Reader, let us thank him for that one good step, if he never take
+another; for it saved the scout, and, may-be, it saved Kentucky. When
+the scout returned that way, he halted abreast of that tree, and
+examined the ground about it. Right there, in the road, was the mare's
+track, with the print of the man's foot still upon the inner quarter! He
+uncovered his head, and from his heart went up a simple thanksgiving.
+
+The horsemen gone, the scout came down from the tree, and pushed on into
+the misty morning. There might be danger ahead, but there surely was
+danger behind him. His pursuers were only half convinced that they had
+struck his trail; and some sensible fiend might put it into their heads
+to divide and follow, part by one route, part by the other.
+
+He pushed on over the sloshy road, his mare every step going slower and
+slower. The poor beast was jaded out; for she had travelled sixty miles,
+eaten nothing, and been stabled in the timber. She would have given out
+long before, had her blood not been the best in Kentucky. As it was, she
+staggered along as if she had taken a barrel of whiskey. Five miles
+farther on was the house of a Union man. She must reach it, or die by
+the wayside; for the merciful man regardeth not the life of his beast,
+when he carries dispatches.
+
+The loyalist did not know the scout, but his honest face secured him a
+cordial welcome. He explained that he was from the Union camp on the Big
+Sandy, and offered any price for a horse to go on with.
+
+"Yer nag is wuth ary two o' my critters," said the man. "Ye kin take the
+best beast I've got; and when ye 'r' ag'in this way, we'll swop back
+even."
+
+The scout thanked him, mounted the horse, and rode off into the mist
+again, without the warm breakfast which the good woman had, half-cooked,
+in the kitchen. It was eleven o'clock; and at twelve that night he
+entered Colonel Cranor's quarters at Paris,--having ridden a hundred
+miles with a rope round his neck, for thirteen dollars a month,
+hard-tack, and a shoddy uniform.
+
+The Colonel opened the dispatch. It was dated, Louisa, Kentucky,
+December 24th, midnight; and directed him to move at once with his
+regiment, (the Fortieth Ohio, eight hundred strong,) by the way of Mount
+Sterling and McCormick's Gap, to Prestonburg. He would incumber his men
+with as few rations and as little luggage as possible, bearing in mind
+that the safety of his command depended on his expedition. He would also
+convey the dispatch to Lieutenant-Colonel Woolford, at Stamford, and
+direct him to join the march with his three hundred cavalry.
+
+Hours now were worth months of common time, and on the following morning
+Cranor's column began to move. The scout lay by till night, then set out
+on his return, and at daybreak swapped his now jaded horse for the fresh
+Kentucky mare, even. He ate the housewife's breakfast, too, and took his
+ease with the good man till dark, when he again set out, and rode
+through the night in safety. After that his route was beset with perils.
+The Providence which so wonderfully guarded his way out seemed to leave
+him to find his own way in; or, as he expressed it, "Ye see, the Lord,
+He keered more fur the dispatch nor He keered fur me: and 'twas nateral
+He should; 'case my life only counted one, while the dispatch, it stood
+fur all Kaintuck."
+
+Be that as it may, he found his road a hard one to travel. The same gang
+which followed him out waylaid him back, and one starry midnight he fell
+among them. They lined the road forty deep, and seeing he could not run
+the gauntlet, he wheeled his mare and fled backwards. The noble beast
+did her part; but a bullet struck her, and she fell in the road dying.
+Then--it was Hobson's choice--he took to his legs, and, leaping a fence,
+was at last out of danger. Two days he lay in the woods, not daring to
+come out; but hunger finally forced him to ask food at a negro shanty.
+The dusky patriot loaded him with bacon, brown bread, and blessings, and
+at night piloted him to a Rebel barn, where he enforced the Confiscation
+Act, to him then "the higher law,"--necessity.
+
+With his fresh horse he set out again; and after various adventures and
+hair-breadth escapes, too numerous to mention,--and too incredible to
+believe, had not similar things occurred all through the war,--he
+entered, one rainy midnight, (the 6th of January,) the little log hut,
+seven miles from Paintville, where Colonel Garfield was sleeping.
+
+The Colonel rubbed his eyes, and raised himself upon his elbow.
+
+"Back safe?" he asked. "Have you seen Cranor?"
+
+"Yes, Gin'ral. He can't be more 'n two days ahind o' me, nohow."
+
+"God bless you, Jordan! You have done us great service," said Garfield,
+warmly.
+
+"I thanks ye, Gin'ral," said the scout, his voice trembling, "Thet's
+more pay 'n I expected."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To give the reader a full understanding of the result of the scout's
+ride, I must now move on with the little army. They are only fourteen
+hundred men, worn out with marching, but boldly they move down upon
+Marshall. False scouts have made him believe they are as strong as he:
+and they are; for every one is a hero, and they are led by a general.
+The Rebel has five thousand men,--forty-four hundred infantry and six
+hundred cavalry,--besides twelve pieces of artillery,--so he says in a
+letter to his wife, which Buell has intercepted and Garfield has in his
+pocket. Three roads lead to Marshall's position: one at the east,
+bearing down to the river, and along its western bank; another, a
+circuitous one, to the west, coming in on Paint Creek, at the mouth of
+Jenny's Creek, on the right of the village; and a third between the
+others, a more direct route, but climbing a succession of almost
+impassable ridges. These three roads are held by strong Rebel pickets,
+and a regiment is outlying at the village of Paintville.
+
+To deceive Marshall as to his real strength and designs, Garfield orders
+a small force of infantry and cavalry to advance along the river, drive
+in the Rebel pickets, and move rapidly after them as if to attack
+Paintville. Two hours after this force goes off, a similar one, with the
+same orders, sets out on the road to the westward; and two hours later
+still, another small body takes the middle road. The effect is, that the
+pickets on the first route, being vigorously attacked and driven,
+retreat in confusion to Paintville, and dispatch word to Marshall that
+the Union army is advancing along the river. He hurries off a thousand
+infantry and a battery to resist the advance of this imaginary column.
+When this detachment has been gone an hour and a half, he hears, from
+the routed pickets on the right, that the Federals are advancing along
+the western road. Countermanding his first order, he now directs the
+thousand men and the battery to check the new danger; and hurries off
+the troops at Paintville to the mouth of Jenny's Creek to make a stand
+there. Two hours later the pickets on the central route are driven in,
+and, finding Paintville abandoned, flee precipitately to the fortified
+camp, with the story that the Union army is close at their heels and
+occupying the town. Conceiving that he has thus lost Paintville,
+Marshall hastily withdraws the detachment of one thousand men to his
+fortified camp; and Garfield, moving rapidly over the ridges of the
+central route, occupies the abandoned position.
+
+So affairs stand on the evening of the 8th of January, when a spy enters
+the camp of Marshall, with tidings that Cranor, with thirty-three
+hundred (!) men, is within twelve hours' march at the westward. On
+receipt of these tidings, the "big boy,"--he weighs three hundred pounds
+by the Louisville hay-scales,--conceiving himself outnumbered, breaks up
+his camp, and retreats precipitately, abandoning or burning a large
+portion of his supplies. Seeing the fires, Garfield mounts his horse,
+and, with a thousand men, enters the deserted camp at nine in the
+evening, while the blazing stores are yet unconsumed. He sends off a
+detachment to harass the retreat, and waits the arrival of Cranor, with
+whom he means to follow and bring Marshall to battle in the morning.
+
+In the morning Cranor comes, but his men are footsore, without rations,
+and completely exhausted. They cannot move one leg after the other. But
+the canal-boy is bound to have a fight; so every man who has strength to
+march is ordered to come forward. Eleven hundred--among them four
+hundred of Cranor's tired heroes--step from the ranks, and with them,
+at noon of the 9th, Garfield sets out for Prestonburg, sending all his
+available cavalry to follow the line of the enemy's retreat and harass
+and delay him.
+
+Marching eighteen miles, he reaches at nine o'clock that night the mouth
+of Abbott's Creek, three miles below Prestonburg,--he and the eleven
+hundred. There he hears that Marshall is encamped on the same stream,
+three miles higher up; and throwing his men into bivouac, in the midst
+of a sleety rain, he sends an order back to Lieutenant-Colonel Sheldon,
+who is left in command at Paintville, to bring up every available man,
+with all possible dispatch, for he shall force the enemy to battle in
+the morning. He spends the night in learning the character of the
+surrounding country and the disposition of Marshall's forces; and now
+again John Jordan comes into action.
+
+A dozen Rebels are grinding at a mill, and a dozen honest men come upon
+them, steal their corn, and make them prisoners. The miller is a tall,
+gaunt man, and his clothes fit the scout as if they were made for him.
+He is a Disunionist, too, and his very raiment should bear witness
+against this feeding of his enemies. It does. It goes back to the Rebel
+camp, and--the scout goes in it. That chameleon face of his is smeared
+with meal, and looks the miller so well that the miller's own wife might
+not detect the difference. The night is dark and rainy, and that lessens
+the danger; but still he is picking his teeth in the very jaws of the
+lion,--if he can be called a lion, who does nothing but roar like unto
+Marshall.
+
+Space will not permit me to detail this midnight ramble; but it gave
+Garfield the exact position of the enemy. They had made a stand, and
+laid an ambuscade for him. Strongly posted on a semicircular hill, at
+the forks of Middle Creek, on both sides of the road, with cannon
+commanding its whole length, and hidden by the trees, they were waiting
+his coming.
+
+The Union commander broke up his bivouac at four in the morning and
+began to move forward. Reaching the valley of Middle Creek, he
+encountered some of the enemy's mounted men, and captured a quantity of
+stores they were trying to withdraw from Prestonburg. Skirmishing went
+on until about noon, when the Rebel pickets were driven back upon their
+main body, and then began the battle. It is not my purpose to describe
+it; for that has already been ably done, in thirty lines, by the man who
+won it.
+
+It was a wonderful battle. In the history of this war there is not
+another like it. Measured by the forces engaged, the valor displayed,
+and the results which followed, it throws into the shade even the
+achievements of the mighty hosts which saved the nation. Eleven hundred
+men, without cannon, charge up a rocky hill, over stumps, over stones,
+over fallen trees, over high intrenchments, right into the face of five
+thousand, and twelve pieces of artillery!
+
+For five hours the contest rages. Now the Union forces are driven back;
+then, charging up the hill, they regain the lost ground, and from behind
+rocks and trees pour in their murderous volleys. Then again they are
+driven back, and again they charge up the hill, strewing the ground with
+corpses. So the bloody work goes on; so the battle wavers, till the
+setting sun, wheeling below the hills, glances along the dense lines of
+Rebel steel moving down to envelop the weary eleven hundred. It is an
+awful moment, big with the fate of Kentucky. At its very crisis two
+figures stand out against the fading sky, boldly defined in the
+foreground.
+
+One is in Union blue. With a little band of heroes about him, he is
+posted on a projecting rock, which is scarred with bullets, and in full
+view of both armies. His head is uncovered, his hair streaming in the
+wind, his face upturned in the darkening daylight, and from his soul is
+going up a prayer,--a prayer for Sheldon and Cranor. He turns his eyes
+to the northward, and his lip tightens, as he throws off his coat, and
+says to his hundred men,--"Boys, _we_ must go at them!"
+
+The other is in Rebel gray. Moving out to the brow of the opposite hill,
+and placing a glass to his eye, he, too, takes a long look to the
+northward. He starts, for he sees something which the other, on lower
+ground, does not distinguish. Soon he wheels his horse, and the word
+"RETREAT" echoes along the valley between them. It is his last
+word; for six rifles crack, and the Rebel Major lies on the ground
+quivering.
+
+The one in blue looks to the north again, and now, floating proudly
+among the trees, he sees the starry banner. It is Sheldon and Cranor!
+The long ride of the scout is at last doing its work for the nation. On
+they come like the rushing wind, filling the air with their shouting.
+The rescued eleven hundred take up the strain, and then, above the swift
+pursuit, above the lessening conflict, above the last boom of the
+wheeling cannon, goes up the wild huzza of Victory. The gallant Garfield
+has won the day, and rolled back the disastrous tide which has been
+sweeping on ever since Big Bethel. In ten days Thomas routs Zollicoffer,
+and then we have and hold Kentucky.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Every one remembers a certain artist, who, after painting a "neighing
+steed," wrote underneath the picture, "This is a horse," lest it should
+be mistaken for an alligator. I am tempted to imitate his example, lest
+the reader, otherwise, may not detect the rambling parallel I have
+herein drawn between a Northern and a Southern "poor white man."
+
+President Lincoln, when he heard of the Battle of Middle Creek, said to
+a distinguished officer, who happened to be with him,--
+
+"Why did Garfield in two weeks do what would have taken one of you
+Regular folks two months to accomplish?"
+
+"Because he was not educated at West Point," answered the West-Pointer,
+laughing.
+
+"No," replied Mr. Lincoln. "That wasn't the reason. It was because, when
+he was a boy, he had to work for a living."
+
+But our good President, for once, was wrong,--for once, he did not get
+at the core of the matter. Jordan, as well as Garfield, "had, when a
+boy, to work for a living." The two men were, perhaps, of about equal
+natural abilities,--both were born in log huts, both worked their own
+way to manhood, and both went into the war consecrating their very lives
+to their country: but one came out of it with a brace of stars on his
+shoulder, and honored by all the nation; the other never rose from the
+ranks, and went down to an unknown grave, mourned only among his native
+mountains. Something more than _work_ was at the bottom of this contrast
+in their lives and their destinies. It was FREE SCHOOLS, which
+the North gave the one, and of which the South robbed the other. Plant a
+free school at every Southern cross-road, and every Southern Jordan will
+become a Garfield. Then, and not till then, will this Union be
+"reconstructed."
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[B] The Baine is a small stream which puts into the Big Sandy, a short
+distance from the town of Louisa, Ky.
+
+
+
+
+NOEL.[C]
+
+
+    L'Academie en respect,
+    Nonobstant l'incorrection,
+    A la faveur du sujet,
+      Ture-lure,
+    N'y fera point de rature;
+    Noel! ture-lure-lure.
+
+                        GUI-BAROZAI.
+
+
+                1.
+
+    Quand les astres de Noel
+    Brillaient, palpitaient au ciel,
+    Six gaillards, et chacun ivre,
+    Chantaient gaiment dans le givre,
+          "Bons amis,
+    Allons done chez Agassiz!"
+
+                2.
+
+    Ces illustres Pelerins
+    D'Outre-Mer, adroits et fins,
+    Se donnant des airs de pretre,
+    A l'envi se vantaient d'etre
+          "Bons amis
+    De Jean Rudolphe Agassiz!"
+
+               3.
+
+    Oeil-de-Perdrix, grand farceur,
+    Sans reproche et sans pudeur,
+    Dans son patois de Bourgogne,
+    Bredouillait comme un ivrogne,
+          "Bons amis,
+    J'ai danse chez Agassiz!"
+
+               4.
+
+    Verzenay le Champenois,
+    Bon Francais, point New-Yorquois,
+    Mais des environs d'Avize,
+    Fredonne, a mainte reprise,
+          "Bons amis,
+    J'ai chante chez Agassiz!"
+
+              5.
+
+    A cote marchait un vieux
+    Hidalgo, mais non mousseux;
+    Dans le temps de Charlemagne
+    Fut son pere Grand d'Espagne!
+          "Bons amis,
+    J'ai dine chez Agassiz!"
+
+               6.
+
+    Derriere eux un Bordelais,
+    Gascon, s'il en fut jamais,
+    Parfume de poesie
+    Riait, chantait plein de vie,
+          "Bons amis,
+    J'ai soupe chez Agassiz!"
+
+               7.
+
+    Avec ce beau cadet roux,
+    Bras dessus et bras dessous,
+    Mine altiere et couleur terne,
+    Vint le Sire de Sauterne:
+          "Bons amis,
+    J'ai couche chez Agassiz!"
+
+               8.
+
+    Mais le dernier de ces preux
+    Etait un pauvre Chartreux,
+    Qui disait, d'un ton robuste,
+    "Benedictions sur le Juste!
+          Bons amis,
+    Benissons Pere Agassiz!"
+
+               9.
+
+    Ils arrivent trois a trois,
+    Montent l'escalier de bois
+    Clopin-clopant! quel gendarme
+    Peut permettre ce vacarme,
+          Bons amis,
+    A la porte d'Agassiz!
+
+              10.
+
+    "Ouvrez donc, mon bon Seigneur,
+    Ouvrez vite et n'ayez peur;
+    Ouvrez, ouvrez, car nous sommes
+    Gens de bien et gentilshommes,
+          Bons amis
+    De la famille Agassiz!"
+
+             11.
+
+    Chut, ganaches! taisez-vous!
+    C'en est trop de vos glouglous;
+    Epargnez aux Philosophes
+    Vos abominables strophes!
+          Bons amis,
+    Respectez mon Agassiz!
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[C] Sent to Mr. Agassiz, with a basket of wine, on Christmas Eve, 1864.
+
+
+
+
+WILHELM MEISTER'S APPRENTICESHIP.
+
+SECOND PAPER.
+
+
+In a preceding paper I have sought to trace the main lines of spiritual
+growth, as these appear in Goethe's great picture. But is such growth
+possible in this world? Do the circumstances in which modern men are
+placed comport with it? Or is it, perhaps, a cherub only _painted_ with
+wings, and despite the laws of anatomy? These questions are pertinent.
+It concerns us little to know what results the crescent powers of life
+might produce, if, by good luck, Eden rather than our struggling
+century, another world instead of this world, were here. This world, it
+happens, is here undoubtedly; our century and our place in it are facts,
+which decline to take their leave, bid them good morning and show them
+the door how one may. Let us know, then, what of good sufficing may be
+achieved in their company. If Goethe's picture be only a picture, and
+not a possibility, we will be pleased with him, provided his work prove
+pleasant; we will partake of his literary dessert, and give him his meed
+of languid praise. But if, on the other hand, his book be written in
+full, unblinking view of all that is fixed and limitary in man and
+around him, and if, in face of this, it conduct growth to its
+consummation, then we may give him something better than any
+praise,--namely, heed.
+
+Is it, then, written in this spirit of reality? In proof that it is so,
+I call to witness the most poignant reproach, save one, ever uttered
+against it by a superior man. Novalis censured it as "thoroughly modern
+and prosaic." Well, _on one side_, it is so,--just as modern and prosaic
+as the modern world and actual European civilization. What is this but
+to say that Goethe faces the facts? What is it but to say that he
+accepts the conditions of his problem? He is to show that the high
+possibilities of growth can be realized _here_. To run off, get up a
+fancy world, and then picture these possibilities as coming to fruition
+_there_, would be a mere toying with his readers. Here is modern
+civilization, with its fixed forms, its rigid limits, its traditional
+mechanisms. Here is this life, where men make, execute, and obey laws,
+own and manage property, buy and sell, plant, sail, build, marry and
+beget children and maintain households, pay taxes, keep out of debt, if
+they are wise, and go to the poorhouse, or beg, or do worse, if they are
+unwise or unfortunate. Here such trivialities as starched collars,
+blacked boots, and coats according to the mode compel attention. Society
+has its fixed rules, by which it enforces social continuity and
+connection. To neglect these throws one off the ring; and, with rare
+exceptions, isolation is barrenness and death. One cannot even go into
+the street in a wilfully strange costume, without establishing
+repulsions and balking relations between him and his neighbors which
+destroy their use to each other. Every man is bound to the actual form
+of society by his necessities at least, if not by his good-will.
+
+To step violently out of all this puts one in a social vacuum,--a
+position in which few respire well, while most either perish or become
+in some degree monstrous. It is necessary that one should live and work
+with his fellows, if he is to obtain the largest growth. On the other
+hand, to be merely in and of this--a wheel, spoke, or screw, in this
+vast social mechanism--makes one, not a man, but a thing, and precludes
+all growth but such as is obscure and indirect. Thousands, indeed, have
+no desire but to obtain some advantageous place in this machinery.
+Meanwhile this enormous conventional civilization strives, and must
+strive, to make every soul its puppet. Let each fall into the routine,
+pursue it in some shining manner, asking no radical questions, and he
+shall have his heart's desire. "Blessed is he," it cries, "who
+handsomely and with his whole soul reads upwards from man to position
+and estate,--from man to millionnaire, judge, lord, bishop! Cursed is he
+who questions, who aims to strike down beneath this great mechanism, and
+to connect himself with the primal resources of his being! There are no
+such resources. It is a wickedness to dream of them. Man has no root but
+in tradition and custom, no blessing but in serving them."
+
+As that assurance is taken, and as that spirit prevails, man forfeits
+his manhood. His life becomes mechanical. Ideas disappear in the forms
+that once embodied them; imagination is buried beneath symbol; belief
+dies of creed, and morality of custom. Nothing remains but a world-wide
+pantomime. Worship itself becomes only a more extended place-hunting,
+and man the walking dummy of society. And then, since man no longer is
+properly vitalized, disease sets in, consumption, decay, putrefaction,
+filling all the air with the breath of their foulness.
+
+The earlier part of the eighteenth century found all Europe in this
+stage. Then came a stir in the heart of man: for Nature would not let
+him die altogether. First came recoil, complaint, reproach, mockery.
+Voltaire's light, piercing, taunting laugh--with a screaming wail inside
+it, if one can hear well--rang over Europe. "Aha, you are found out! Up,
+toad, in your true shape!" Then came wild, shallow theories, half true;
+then wild attempt to make the theories real; then carnage and chaos.
+
+Accompanying and following this comes another and purer phase of
+reaction. "Let us get out of this dead, conventional world!" cry a few
+noble spirits, in whose hearts throbs newly the divine blood of life.
+"Leave it behind; it is dead. Leave behind all formal civilization; let
+us live only from within, and let the outward be formless,--momentarily
+created by our souls, momentarily vanishing."
+
+The noblest type I have ever known of this _extra-vagance_, this
+wandering outside of actual civilization, was Thoreau. With his purity,
+as of a newborn babe,--with his moral steadiness, unsurpassed in my
+observation,--with his indomitable persistency,--by the aid also of that
+all-fertilizing imaginative sympathy with outward Nature which was his
+priceless gift,--he did, indeed, lend to his mode of life an
+indescribable charm. In him it came at once to beauty and to
+consecration.
+
+Yet even he must leave out marriage, to make his scheme of life
+practicable. He must ignore Nature's demand that humanity continue, or
+recognize it only with loathing. "Marriage is that!" said he to a
+friend,--and held up a carrion-flower.
+
+Moreover, the success of his life--nay, the very quality of his
+being--implied New England and its civilization. To suppose him born
+among the Flathead Indians were to suppose _him_, the Thoreau of our
+love and pride, unborn still. The civilization he slighted was an air
+that he breathed; it was implied, as impulse and audience, in those
+books of his, wherein he enshrined his spirit, and whereby he kept its
+health.
+
+A fixed social order is indirectly necessary even to him who, by rare
+gifts of Nature, can stand nobly and unfalteringly aside from it. And it
+is directly, instantly necessary to him who, either by less power of
+self-support or by a more flowing human sympathy, _must_ live with men,
+and _must_ comply with the conditions by which social connection is
+preserved.
+
+The problem, therefore, recurs. Here are the two terms: the soul, the
+primal, immortal imagination of man, on the one side; the enormous,
+engrossing, dehumanizing mechanism of society, on the other. A noble few
+elect the one; an ignoble multitude pray to its opposite. The
+reconciling word,--is there a reconciling word?
+
+Here, now, comes one who answers, Yes. And he answers thus, not by a
+bald assertion, but by a picture wherein these opposites lose their
+antagonism,--by a picture which is true to both, yet embraces both, and
+shapes them into a unity. That is Goethe. This attempt represents the
+grand _nisus_ of his life. It is most fully made in "Wilhelm Meister."
+
+Above the world he places the growing spirit of man, the vessel of all
+uses, with his resource in eternal Nature. Then he seizes with a
+sovereign hand upon actual society, upon formal civilization, and of it
+all makes food and service for man's spirit. This prosaic civilization,
+he says, is prosaic only in itself, not when put in relation to its true
+end. So he first recognizes it with remorseless verity, depicts it in
+all its littleness and limitation; then strikes its connection with
+growth: and lo, the littleness becomes great in serving the greater; the
+harsh prosaicism begins to move in melodious measure; and out of that
+jarring, creaking mechanism of conventional society arise the grand
+rolling organ-harmonies of life.
+
+That he succeeds to perfection I do not say. I could find fault enough
+with his book, if there were either time or need. There is no need: its
+faults are obvious. In binding himself by such unsparing oaths to
+recognize and admit all the outward truth of society, he has, indeed,
+grappled with the whole problem, but also made its solution a little
+cumbrous and incomplete. Nay, this which he so admits in his picture was
+also sufficiently, perhaps a touch more than sufficiently, admitted in
+his own being. He would have been a conventionalist and epicurean,
+unless he had been a seer. He would have been a mere man of the world,
+had he not been Goethe. But whereas a man of the world reads up from man
+to dignity, estate, and social advantage, he reverses the process, and
+reads up from these to man. Say that he does it with some stammering,
+with some want of the last nicety. What then? It were enough, if he set
+forth upon the true road, though his own strength fail before the end is
+reached. It is enough, if, falling midway, even though it be by excess
+of the earthly weight he bears, he still point forward, and his voice
+out of the dust whisper, "There lies your way!" This alone makes him a
+benefactor of mankind.
+
+This specific aim of Goethe's work makes it, indeed, a novel.
+Conventional society and the actual conditions of life are, with respect
+to eternal truth, but the _novelties_ of time. The novelist is to
+picture these, and, in picturing, subordinate them to that which is
+perpetual and inspiring. Just so far as he opens the ravishing
+possibilities of life in commanding reconciliation with the formal
+civilization of a particular time, he does his true work.
+
+The function of the poet is different. His business it is simply to
+_refresh_ the spirit of man. To its lip he holds the purest ichors of
+existence; with ennobling draughts of awe, pity, sympathy, and joy, he
+quickens its blood and strengthens its vital assimilations. The
+particular circumstances he uses are merely the cup wherein this wine of
+life is contained. This he may obtain as most easily he can; the world
+is all before him where to choose.
+
+The novelist has no such liberty. His business it is to find the ideal
+possibilities of man _here_, in the midst of actual society. He shall
+teach us to free the heart, while respecting the bonds of circumstance.
+And the more strictly he clings to that which is central in man on the
+one hand, and the more broadly and faithfully he embraces the existing
+prosaic limitations on the other, the more his work answers to the whole
+nature of his function. Goethe has done the latter thoroughly, his
+accusers themselves being judges; that he has done the other, and how he
+has done it, I have sought to show in a preceding paper. He looks on
+actual men and actual society with an eye of piercing observation; he
+depicts them with remorseless verity; and through and by all builds,
+builds at the great architectures of spiritual growth.
+
+Hence the difference between him and satirists like Thackeray, who
+equal him in keenness of observation, are not behind him in verity of
+report, while surpassing him often in pictorial effect,--but who bring
+to the picture out of themselves only a noble indignation against
+baseness. They contemn; he uses. They cry, "Fie!" upon unclean
+substances; he ploughs the offence into the soil, and sows wheat over
+it. They see the world as it is; he sees it, and through it. They probe
+sores; he leads forth into the air and the sunshine. They tinge the
+cheek with blushes of honorable shame; he paints it with the glow of
+wholesome activity. Their point of view is that of pathology; his, that
+of physiology. The great satirists, at best, give a medicine to
+sickness; Goethe gives a task to health. They open a door into a
+hospital; he opens a door _out_ of one, and cries, "Lo, the green earth
+and blue heaven, the fields of labor, the skies of growth!"
+
+On the other hand, by this relentless fidelity to observation, by his
+stern refusal to give men supposititious qualities and characters, by
+his resolute acceptance of European civilization, by his unalterable
+determination to practicable results, by always limiting himself _to
+that which all superior men might be expected not merely to read of with
+gusto, but to do_, he is widely differenced from novelists like the
+authoress of "Consuelo." He does not propose to furnish a moral luxury,
+over which at the close one may smack the lips, and cry, "How sweet!" No
+gardener's manual ever looked more simply to results. His aim is, to get
+something _done_, to get _all_ done which he suggests. Accordingly, he
+does not gratify us with vasty magnanimities, holy beggaries voluntarily
+assumed, Bouddhistic "missions"; he shows us no more than high-minded,
+incorruptible men, fixed in their regards upon the high ends of life,
+established in noble, fruitful fellowship, willing and glad to help
+others so far as they can clearly see their way, not making public
+distribution of their property, but managing it so that it shall in
+themselves and others serve culture, health, and all well-being of body
+and mind. Wealth here is a trust; it is held for use; its uses are, to
+subserve the high ends of Nature in the spirit of man. Lothario seeks
+association with all who can aid him in these applications. So intent is
+he, that he _loves_ Theresa because she has a genius at once for
+economizing means and for seeing where they may be applied to the
+service of the more common natures. He keeps the great-minded,
+penetrating, providential Abbe in his pay, that this inevitable eye may
+distinguish for him the more capable natures, and find out whether or
+how they may be forwarded on their proper paths. Here are no sublime
+professions, but a steady, modest, resolute, discriminate doing.
+
+For suggestion of what one may really _do_, and for impelling one toward
+the practicable best, I find this book worth a moonful of "Consuelos."
+The latter work has, indeed, beautiful pictures; and simply as a picture
+of a fresh, sweet, young life, it is charming. But in its aim at a
+higher import I find it simply an arrow shot into the air, going _so_
+high, but at--nothing! If one crave a moral luxury, it is here. If he
+desire a lash for egoism, this, perhaps, is also here. If he is already
+praying the heavens for a sufficing worth and work in life, and is
+asking only the _what_ and _how_, this book, taken in connection with
+its sequel, says, "Distribute your property, and begin wandering about
+and 'doing good.'"
+
+I decline. After due consideration, I have fully determined to own a
+house, and provide each day a respectable dinner for my table, if the
+fates agree; to secure, still in submission to the fates, such a
+competency as will give me leisure for the best work I can do; to
+further justice and general well-being, so far as is in me to further or
+hinder, but always on the basis of the existing civilization; to cherish
+sympathy and good-will in myself, and in others by cherishing them in
+myself; to help another when I clearly can; and to give, when what I
+give will obviously do more service toward the high ends of life, in
+the hands of another than in my own. Toward carrying out these purposes
+"Consuelo" has not given me a hint, not one; "Wilhelm Meister" has given
+me invaluable hints. Therefore I feel no great gratitude to the one, and
+am profoundly grateful to the other.
+
+It is not the mere absence of suffering, it is not a pound of beef on
+every peasant's plate, that makes life worth living. Health, happiness,
+even education, however diffused, do not alone make life worth living.
+Tell me the quality of a man's happiness before I can very rapturously
+congratulate him upon it; tell me the quality of his suffering before I
+can grieve over it without solace. Noble pain is worth more than ignoble
+pleasure; and there is a health in the _dying_ Schiller which beggars in
+comparison that of the fat cattle on a thousand hills. All the world
+might be well fed, well clothed, well sheltered, and very properly
+behaved, and be a pitiful world nevertheless, were this all.
+
+Let us get out of this business of merely improving _conditions_. There
+are two things which make life worth living. First, the absolute worth
+and significance of man's spirit in its harmonious completeness; and
+hence the absolute value of culture and growth in the deepest sense of
+the words. Secondly, the relevancy of actual experience and the actual
+world to these ends. Goethe attends to both these, and to both in a
+spirit of great sanity. He fixes his eye with imperturbable steadiness
+on the central fact, then with serene, intrepid modesty suggests the
+relevancy to this of the world as it is around us, and _then trusts the
+healthy attraction of the higher to modify and better the lower_. Give
+man, he says, something to work _for_, namely, the high uses of his
+spirit; give him next something to work _with_, namely, actual
+civilization, the powers, limits, and conditions which actually exist in
+and around him; and if these instruments be poor, be sure he will begin
+to improve upon them, the moment he has found somewhat inspiring and
+sufficing to do with them. Actual conditions will improve precisely in
+proportion as _all_ conditions are utilized, are placed in relations of
+service to a result which contents the soul of men. And to establish in
+this relation all the existing conditions of life, natural and
+artificial, is the task which Goethe has undertaken.
+
+I invite the reader to dwell upon this fact, that, the moment life has
+an inspiring significance, and the moment also the men, industries, and
+conditions around us become instrumental toward resolving that, in this
+moment one must begin, so far as he may, bettering these conditions. If
+I hire a man to work in my garden, how much is it worth to me, if he
+bring not merely his hands and gardening skill, but also an appreciable
+soul, with him! So soon as that fact is apparent, fruitful relations are
+established between us, and sympathies begin to fly like bees, bearing
+pollen and winning honey, from each heart to the other. To let a man be
+degraded, or stupid, or thwarted in all his inward life, when I _can_
+make it otherwise? Not unless I am insensate. To allow anywhere a
+disserviceable condition, when I could make it serviceable? Not in full
+view of the fact that all which thwarts the inward being of another
+thwarts me. If there be in the world a man who might write a grand book,
+but through ill conditions cannot write it, then in me and you a door
+will remain closed, which might have opened--who knows upon what
+treasure? With the high ends of life before him, no man can _afford_ to
+be selfish. With the fact before him that formal civilization is
+instrumental, no man can afford to run away from it. With the fact in
+view that each man needs every other, and needs that every other should
+do and be the best he can, no one can afford to withhold help, where it
+can be rendered. Finally, seeing that means are limited, and that the
+means and services which are crammed into others, without being
+spiritually assimilated, breed only indigestion, no one must throw his
+services about at random, but see where Nature has prepared the way for
+him, and there in modesty do what he can.
+
+To strike the connection, then, between the inward and the outward,
+between the spiritual and the conventional, between man and society,
+between moral possibility and formal civilization,--to give growth, with
+all its immortal issues, a place, and means, and opportunity,--this was
+Goethe's aim; and if the execution be less than perfect, as I admit, it
+yet suggests the whole; and if the shortcoming be due in part to his
+personal imperfections, which doubtless may be affirmed, it yet does not
+mar the sincerity of his effort. His hand trembles, his aim is not
+nicely sure, but it is an aim at the right object nevertheless.
+
+There are limits and conditions in man, as well as around him, to which
+the like justice is done. Such are Special Character, Natural Degree and
+Vocation, Moral Imperfection, and Limitation of Self-Knowledge. Each of
+these plays a part of vast importance in life; each is portrayed and
+used in Goethe's picture. But, though with reluctance, I must merely
+name and pass them by. Enough to say here, that he sees them and sees
+through them. Enough that they appear, and as means and material. Nor
+does he merely distinguish and harp upon them, after the hard analytic
+fashion one would use here; but, as the violinist sweeps all the strings
+of his instrument, not to show that one sounds _so_ and another _so_,
+but out of all to bring a complete melody, so does this master touch the
+chords of life, and, in thus recognizing, bring out of them the
+melodious completeness of a human soul.
+
+One inquiry remains. What of inspirational impulse does Goethe bring to
+his work? He depicts growth; what leads him to do so? Is it nothing but
+cold curiosity? and does he leave the reader in a like mood? Or is he
+commanded by some imperial inward necessity? and does he awaken in the
+reader a like noble necessity, not indeed to write, but to _live_?
+
+The inspiration which he feels and communicates is art infinite,
+unspeakable reverence for Personality, for the completed, spiritual
+reality of man. Literally unspeakable, it is the silent spirit in which
+he writes, sovereign in him and in his work,--the soul of every
+sentence, and professed in none. You find it scarcely otherwise than in
+his manner of treating his material. But there you _may_ find it: the
+silent, majestic homage that he pays to every _real_ grace and spiritual
+accomplishment of man or woman. Any smallest trait of this is delineated
+with a heed that makes no account of time or pains, with a venerating
+fidelity and religious care that _unutterably_ imply its preciousness.
+Indeed, it is one point of his art to bestow elaborate, reverential
+attention upon some minor grace of manhood or womanhood, that one may
+say, "If this be of such price, how priceless is the whole!" He resorts
+habitually to this inferential suggestion,--puzzling hasty readers, who
+think him frivolously exalting little things, rather than hinting beyond
+all power of direct speech at the worth of the greater. In landscape
+paintings a bush in the foreground may occupy more space than a whole
+range of mountains in the distance: perhaps the bush is there to show
+the scale of the drawing, and intimate the greatness, rather than
+littleness, of the mountains.
+
+The undertone of every page, should we mask its force in hortatives,
+would be,--"Buy manhood; buy verity and completeness of being; buy
+spiritual endowment and accomplishment; buy insight and clearness of
+heart and wholeness of spirit; pay ease, estimation, estate,--never
+consider what you pay: for though pleasure is not despicable, though
+wealth, leisure, and social regard are good, yet there is no tint of
+inherent grace, no grain nor atom of man's spiritual substance, but it
+outweighs kingdoms, outweighs all that is external to itself."
+
+But hortatives and assertions represent feebly, and without truth of
+tone, the subtile, sovereign persuasion of the book. This is said
+sovereignly by _not_ being said expressly. We are at pains to affirm
+only that which may be conceived of as doubtful, therefore admit a
+certain doubtfulness by the act of asserting. When one begins to
+asseverate his honesty, his hearers begin to question it. The last
+persuasion lies in assumptions,--not in assumptions made consciously and
+with effort, but in those which one makes because he cannot help it, and
+even without being too much aware what he does. All that a man of power
+assumes utterly, so that he were not himself without assuming it, he
+will impress upon others with a persuasion that has in it somewhat of
+the infinite. Jesus never said, "There is a God,"--nor even, "God is our
+Father,"--nor even, "Man is immortal"; he took all this as implicit
+basis of labor and prayer. Implicit assumptions rule the world; they
+build and destroy cities, make and unmake empires, open and close
+epochs; and whenever Destiny in any powerful soul has ripened a new
+truth to this degree,--made it for him an _inevitable_ assumption--then
+there is in history an end and a beginning. Goethe's homage to
+Personality, to the full spiritual being of man, is of this degree, and
+is a soul of eloquence in his book.
+
+Nor can we set this aside as a piece of blind and gratuitous sentiment.
+Blind and gratuitous sentiment is clearly not his forte. Every line of
+every page exhibits to us a man who has betaken himself, once for all,
+to the use of his eyes. All sentiment, as such, he ruled back, with a
+sovereign energy, into his heart,--and then, as it were, compelling his
+heart into his eyes, made it an organ for discerning truth. His head was
+an observatory, and every power of his soul did duty there. He enjoyed,
+he suffered, intensely; but behind joy and pain alike lay the sleepless
+questioner, demanding of each its message. And this, the supreme
+function, the exceeding praise and preciousness of the man, the one
+thing that he was born to do, and religiously did, this has been made
+his chief reproach.
+
+No zealot, then, no sentimentalist, no devotee of the god Wish, have we
+here; but an imperturbable beholder, whose dauntless and relentless
+eyeballs, telescopic and microscopic by turns, can and will see what the
+fact _is_. If the universe be bad, as some dream, he will see how bad;
+if good, he will perceive and respect its goodness. A man, for once,
+equal to the act of seeing! Having, as the indispensable preliminary,
+encountered himself, and victoriously fought on all the fields of his
+being the battle against self-deception, he now comes armed with new and
+strange powers of vision to encounter life and the world,--ready either
+to soar of dive,--above no fact, beneath none, by none appalled, by none
+dazzled,--a falcon, whose prey is truth, and whose wing and eye are well
+mated. And _he_ it is who sets that ineffable price on the being of a
+real man.
+
+This is manifested in many ways, all of them silent, rather than
+obstreperous and obtrusive. It is shown by a certain gracious, ineffable
+expectation with which for the first time he approaches any human soul,
+as if unknown and incalculable possibilities were opening here; by a
+noble ceremonial which he ever observes toward his higher characters,
+standing uncovered in their presence; by the space in his eye, not
+altogether measurable, which a man of worth is perceived to fill. Each
+of his principal characters has an atmosphere about him, like the earth
+itself; each has a vast perspective, and rounds off into mystery and
+depths of including sky.
+
+The common novelist holds his characters in the palm of his hand, as he
+would his watch; winds them up, regulates, pockets them, is exceedingly
+handy with them. He may continue some little, pitiful puzzle about them
+for his readers; but _he_ can see over, under, around them, and can make
+them stop or go, tick or be silent, altogether at pleasure. To Goethe
+his characters are as intelligible and as mysterious as Nature herself.
+He sees them, studies them, and with an eye how penetrating, how subtile
+and sure! But over, under, and around them he would hold it for no less
+than a profanity to pretend that he sees. They come upon the scene to
+prove what they are; he and the reader study them together; and when
+best known, their possibilities are obviously unexhausted, the unknown
+remains in them still. They go forward into their future, with a real
+future before them, with an unexplained life to live: not goblets whose
+contents have been drained, but fountains that still flow when the
+traveller who drank from them has passed on. Jarno, for example, a man
+of firm and definite outlines, and drawn here with masterly
+distinctness, without a blur or a wavering of the hand in the whole
+delineation, is yet the unexplained, unexhausted Jarno, when the book
+closes. He goes forward with the rest, known and yet unknown, a man of
+very definite limitations, and yet also of possibilities which the
+future will ever be defining.
+
+In this sense, the book, almost alone among novels, consists with the
+hope of immortality. In average novels, there is nothing left of the
+hero when the book ends. "He is utterly married," as "Eothen" says.
+Utterly, sure enough! He ends at the altar, like a burnt-out candle over
+which the priest puts an extinguisher to keep it from smoking. One yawns
+over the last page, not considering himself any longer in company. Think
+of giving perpetuity to such lives! What could they do but get
+unmarried, and begin fussing at courtship again? But when Goethe's
+characters leave the stage, they seem to be rather entering upon life
+than quitting it; possibility opens, expectation runs before them, and
+our interest grows where observation ceases.
+
+Goethe looks at Personality as through a telescope, and sees it shade
+away, beyond its cosmic systems, into star-dust and shining nebulae; he
+inspects it as with a microscope, and on that side also resolves it only
+in part. He brings to it all the most spacious, all the most delicate
+interpretations of his wit, yet confessedly leaves more beyond.
+
+Now it is this large-eyed, liberal regard of man, this grand, childlike,
+all-credent appreciation, which distinguishes the earlier and Scriptural
+literatures. Abraham fills up all the space between earth and heaven.
+Later, we arrive at limitations and secondary laws; we heap these up
+till the primal fact is obscured, is hidden by them. Then ensues an
+impression of man's littleness, emptiness, insignificance, utter,
+mechanical limitation. Then sharp-eyed gentlemen discover that man has a
+trick of dressing up his littleness in large terms,--liberty, intuition,
+inspiration, immortality,--and that he only is a philosopher, who cannot
+be deceived by this shallow stratagem. Your "philosopher" sees what men
+are made of. Populaces may fancy that man is central in the world, that
+he is the all-containing vessel of its uses: but your philosopher,
+admirable gentleman, sees through all that; he is superior to any such
+vulgar partiality for that particular species of insect to which he
+happens to belong. "A fly thinks himself the greatest of created
+beings," says philosopher; "man flatters himself in the same way; but I,
+I am not merely man, I am philosopher, and know better."
+
+The early seers and poets had not attained to this sublime
+superciliousness of self-contempt; for this, of course, is a fruit to be
+borne only by the "progress of the species." They are still weak enough
+to believe in gods and godlike men, in spirit and inspiration, in the
+ineffable fulness and meaning of a noble life, in the cosmic
+relationship of man, in the _divineness_ of speech and thought. In their
+books man is placed in a large light; honor and estimation come to him
+out of the heavens; what he does, if it be in any profound way
+characteristic, is told without misgiving, without fear to be
+superfluous; he is the care, or even the companion, of the immortals. To
+go forth, therefore, from our little cells of criticism and controversy,
+and to enter upon the pages where man's being appears so spacious and
+significant,--where, at length, it is really _imagined_,--is like
+leaving stove-heated, paper-walled rooms, and passing out beneath the
+blue cope and into the sweet air of heaven.
+
+Quite this epic boldness and wholeness we cannot attribute to Goethe. He
+is still a little straitened, a little pestered by the doubting and
+critical optics which our time turns upon man, a little victimized by
+his knowledge of limitary conditions and secondary laws. Nevertheless, a
+noble man is not to his eye "contained between hat and boots," but is of
+untold depth and dimension. He indicates traits of the soul with that
+repose in his facts and respect for them which Lyell shows in spelling
+out terrestrial history, or Herschel in tracing that of the solar
+system. Observe how he relates the plays of a child,--with what grave,
+imperial respect, with what undoubting, reverential minuteness! He does
+not say, "Bear with me, ladies and gentlemen; I will come to something
+of importance soon." This is important,--the formation of suns not more
+so.
+
+In this respect he stands in wide contrast to the prevailing tone of the
+time. It seems right and admirable that Tyndale should risk life and
+limb in learning the laws of glaciers, that large-brained Agassiz should
+pursue for years, if need be, his microscopic researches into the
+natural history of turtles; and were life or eyesight lost so, we should
+all say, "Lost, but well and worthily." But ask a conclave of sober
+_savans_ to listen to reports on the natural-spiritual history of babies
+and little children,--ask them to join, one and all, in this piece of
+discovery, spending labor and lifetime in watching the sports, the
+moods, the imaginations, the fanciful loves and fears, the whole baby
+unfolding of these budding revelations of divine uses in Nature,--and
+see what they will think of your sanity. You may, indeed, if such be
+your humor, observe these matters, nay, even write books upon them, and
+still escape the lunatic asylum,--_provided_ you do so in the way of
+pleasantry. In this case, the gravest _savant_, if he have children, may
+condescend to listen, and even to smile. But ask him to attend to this
+_in his quality of man of science_, and no less seriously than he would
+investigate the history of mud-worms, and you become ridiculous in his
+eyes.
+
+Goethe is guiltless of this inversion of interest. Truth of outward
+Nature he respects; truth of the soul he reverences. He can really
+_imagine_ men,--that is, can so depict them that they shall not be mere
+bundles of finite quantities, a yard of this and a pound of that, but so
+that the illimitable possibilities and immortal ancestries of man shall
+look forth from their eyes, shall show in their features, and give to
+them a certain grace of the infinite. The powers which created for the
+Greeks their gods are active in him, even in his observation of men; and
+this gives him that other eye, without which the effigies of men are
+seen, but never man himself. And because he has this divine eye for the
+inner reality of personal being, and yet also that eagle eye of his for
+conditions and limits,--because he can see man as central in Nature, the
+sum of all uses, the vessel of all significance, and yet has no
+"carpenter theory" of the universe,--and because he can discern the
+substance and the _revealing_ form of man, while yet no satirist sees
+more clearly man's accidental and concealing form,--because of this,
+history comes in him to new blood, regaining its inspirations without
+forfeiture of its experience.
+
+Carlyle has the same eye, but less creative, and tinctured always with
+the special humors of his temperament; yet the attitude he can hold
+toward a human personality, the spirit in which he can contemplate it,
+gives that to his books which will keep them alive, I think, while the
+world lasts.
+
+Among the recent writers of prose fiction in England, I know of but one
+who, in a degree worth naming in this connection, has regarded and
+delineated persons in the large, old, believing way. That one is the
+author of "Counterparts." In many respects her book seems to me weak;
+its theories are crude, its tone extravagant. But man and woman are
+wonderful to her; and when she names them in full voice of admiration,
+one thinks he has never heard the words before. And this merit is so
+commanding, that, despite faults and imbecilities, it renders the book
+almost unique in excellence. Sarona is impossible: thanks for that noble
+impossibility! Impossible, he yet embodies more reality, more true
+suggestion of human possibility and resource, than a whole swarming
+limbo of the ordinary heroes of fiction,--very credible, and the more's
+the pity! He is finely _imagined_, and poorly _conceived_,--true, that
+is, to the inspiring substance of man, but not true to his limitary
+form: for imagination gives the revealing form, conception the form
+which limits and conceals.
+
+In spite, therefore, of marked infirmities and extravagances, the book
+remains a superior, perhaps a great work. The writer can look at a human
+existence with childlike, all-believing, Homeric eyes. That creative
+vision which of old peopled Olympus still peoples the world for her,
+beholding gods where the skeptic, critical eye sees only a medical
+doctor and a sick woman. So is she stamped a true child of the Muse,
+descended on the one side from Memory, or superficial fact, but on the
+other from Zeus, the _soul_ of fact; and being gifted to discern the
+divine halo on the brows of humanity, she rightly obtains the laurel
+upon her own.
+
+Goethe, at least, rivals her in this Olympic intelligence, while he
+combines it with a practical wisdom far profounder, with a survey and
+fulness of knowledge incomparably wider and more various, with a tone
+tempered to the last sobriety, for the whole of actual life, which no
+man of the world ever surpassed, and no seer ever equalled. And thus I
+must abide in my opinion, that he has given us the one prose epic of the
+world, up to this date. In other words, he has best reconciled World
+with the final vessel of its uses, Man,--and best reconciled actual
+civilization and the fixed conditions of man with the uses of that in
+which all the meaning of his existence is summed, his seeing and unseen
+spirit.
+
+
+
+
+DOCTOR JOHNS.
+
+
+XXXIV.
+
+Reuben has in many respects vastly improved under his city education. It
+would be wrong to say that the good Doctor did not take a very human
+pride in his increased alertness of mind, in his vivacity, in his
+self-possession,--nay, even in that very air of world-acquaintance which
+now covered entirely the old homely manner of the country lad. He
+thought within himself, what a glad smile of triumph would have been
+kindled upon the face of the lost Rachel, could she but have seen this
+tall youth with his kindly attentions and his graceful speech. May-be
+she did see it all,--but with far other eyes, now. Was the child
+ripening into fellowship with the sainted mother?
+
+The Doctor underneath all his pride carried a great deal of anxious
+doubt; and as he walked beside his boy upon the thronged street, elated
+in some strange way by the touch of that strong arm of the youth, whose
+blood was his own,--so dearly his own,--he pondered gravely with
+himself, if the mocking delusions of the Evil One were not the occasion
+of his pride? Was not Satan setting himself artfully to the work of
+quieting all sense of responsibility in regard to the lad's future, by
+thus kindling in his old heart anew the vanities of the flesh and the
+pride of life?
+
+"I say, father, I want to put you through now. It'll do you a great deal
+of good to see some of our wonders here in the city."
+
+"The very voice,--the very voice of Rachel!" says the Doctor to himself,
+quickening his laggard step to keep pace with Reuben.
+
+"There are such lots of things to show you, father! Look in this store,
+now. You can step in, if you like. It's the largest carpet-store in the
+United States, three stories packed full. There's the head man of the
+firm,--the stout man in a white choker; with half a million, they say:
+he's a deacon in Mowry's church."
+
+"I hope, then, Reuben, that he makes a worthy use of his wealth."
+
+"Oh, he gives thunderingly to the missionary societies," said Reuben,
+with a glibness that grated on the father's ear.
+
+"You see that building yonder? That's Gothic. They've got the finest
+bowling-alleys in the world there."
+
+"I hope, my son, you never go to such places?"
+
+"Bowl? Oh, yes, I bowl sometimes: the physicians recommend it; good
+exercise for the chest. Besides, it's kept by a fine man, and he's got
+one of the prettiest little trotting horses you ever saw in your life."
+
+"Why, my son, you don't mean to tell me that you know the keeper of this
+bowling-alley?"
+
+"Oh, yes, father,--we fellows all know him; and he gave me a splendid
+cigar the last time I was there."
+
+"You don't mean to say that you smoke, Reuben?" said the old gentleman,
+gravely.
+
+"Not much, father: but then everybody smokes now and then. Mowry--Dr.
+Mowry smokes, you know; and they say he has prime cigars."
+
+"Is it possible? Well, well!"
+
+"You see that fine building over there?" said Reuben, as they passed on.
+
+"Yes, my son."
+
+"That's the theatre,--the Old Park."
+
+The Doctor ran his eye over it, and its effigy of Shakspeare upon the
+niche in the wall, as Gabriel might have looked upon the armor of
+Beelzebub.
+
+"I hope, Reuben, you never enter those doors?"
+
+"Well, father, since Kean and Mathews are gone, there's really nothing
+worth the seeing."
+
+"Kean! Mathews!" said the Doctor, stopping in his walk and confronting
+Reuben with a stern brow,--"is it possible, my son, that I hear you
+talking in this familiar way of play-actors? You don't tell me that you
+have been a participant in such orgies of Satan?"
+
+"Why, father," says Reuben, a little startled by the Doctor's
+earnestness, "the truth is, Aunt Mabel goes occasionally, like 'most all
+the ladies; but we go, you know, to see the moral pieces, generally."
+
+"Moral pieces! moral pieces!" says the Doctor, with a withering scowl.
+"Reuben! those who go thither take hold on the door-posts of hell!"
+
+"That's the Tract Society building yonder," said Reuben, wishing to
+divert the Doctor, if possible, from the special object of his
+reflections.
+
+"Rachel's voice!--always Rachel's voice!"--said the Doctor to himself.
+
+"Would you like to go in, father?"
+
+"No, my son, we have no time; and yet"--meditating, and thrusting his
+hand in his pocket--"there is a tract or two I would like to buy for
+you, Reuben."
+
+"Go in, then," says Reuben. "Let me tell them who you are, father, and
+you can get them at wholesale prices. It's the merest song."
+
+"No, my son, no," said the Doctor, disheartened by the blithe air of
+Reuben. "I fear it would be wasted effort. Yet I trust that you do not
+wholly neglect the opportunities for religious instruction on the
+Sabbath?"
+
+"Oh, no," says Reuben, gayly. "I see Dr. Mowry off and on, pretty often.
+He's a clever old gentleman,--Dr. Mowry."
+
+Clever old gentleman!
+
+The Doctor walked on oppressed with grief,--silent, but with lips moving
+in prayer,--beseeching God to take away the stony heart from this poor
+child of his, and to give him a heart of flesh.
+
+Reuben had improved, as we said, by his New York schooling. He was quick
+of apprehension, well informed; and his familiarity with the
+counting-room of Mr. Brindlock had given him a business promptitude
+that was specially agreeable to the Doctor, whose habits in that regard
+were of woful slackness. But religiously, the good man looked upon his
+son as a castaway. It was only too apparent that Reuben had not derived
+the desired improvement from attendance at the Fulton-Street Church.
+That attendance had been punctual, indeed, for nearly all the first year
+of his city life, in virtue of the inexorable habit of his education;
+but Dr. Mowry had not won upon him by any personal magnetism. The city
+Doctor was a ponderously good man, preaching for the most part ponderous
+sermons, and possessed of a most imposing friendliness of manner. When
+Reuben had presented to him the credentials from his father, (which he
+could hardly have done, save for the urgency of the Brindlocks,) the
+ponderous Doctor had patted him upon the shoulder, and said,--
+
+"My young friend, your father is a most worthy man,--most worthy. I
+should be delighted to see you following in his steps. I shall be most
+glad to be of service to you. Our meetings for Bible instruction are on
+Wednesdays, at seven: the young men upon the left, the young ladies on
+the right."
+
+The Doctor appeared to Reuben a man solemnly preoccupied with the
+immensity of his charge; and it seemed to him (though it was doubtless a
+wicked thought of the boy) that the ponderous minister would have
+counted it a matter of far smaller merit to instruct, and guide, and
+save a wanderer from the country, than to perform the same offices for a
+good fat sinner of the city.
+
+As we have said, the memory of old teachings for a year or more made any
+divergence from the severe path of boyhood seem to Reuben a sin; and
+these divergencies so multiplied by easy accessions as to have made him,
+after a time, look upon himself very confidently, and almost cheerily,
+as a reprobate. And if a reprobate, why not taste the Devil's cup to the
+full?
+
+That first visit to the theatre was like a bold push into the very
+domain of Satan. Even the ticket-seller at the door seemed to him on
+that eventful night an understrapper of Beelzebub, who looked out at him
+with the goggle eyes of a demon. That such a man could have a family, or
+family affections, or friendships, or any sense of duty or honor, was to
+him a thing incomprehensible; and when he passed the wicket for the
+first time into the vestibule of the old Park Theatre, the very usher in
+the corridor had to his eye a look like the Giant Dagon, and he
+conceived of him as mumbling, in his leisure moments, the flesh from
+human bones. And when at last the curtain rose, and the damp air came
+out upon him from behind the scenes as he sat in the pit, and the play
+began with some wonderful creature in tight bodice and painted cheeks,
+sailing across the stage, it seemed to him that the flames of Divine
+wrath might presently be bursting out over the house, or a great
+judgment of God break down the roof and destroy them all.
+
+But it did not; and he took courage. It is so easy to find courage in
+those battles where we take no bodily harm! If conscience, sharpened by
+the severe discipline he had known, pricked him awkwardly at the first,
+he bore the stings with a good deal of sturdiness. A sinner, no
+doubt,--that he knew long ago: a little slip, or indeed no slip at all,
+had ranked him with the unregenerate. Once a sinner, (thus he pleasantly
+reasoned,) and a fellow may as well be ten times a sinner: a bad job
+anyhow. If in his moments of reflection--these being not yet wholly
+crowded out from his life--there comes a shadowy hope of better things,
+of some moral poise that should be in keeping with the tenderer
+recollections of his boyhood,--all this can never come, (he bethinks
+himself, in view of his old teaching,) except on the heel of some
+terrible conviction of sin; and the conviction will hardly come without
+some deeper and more damning weight of it than he feels as yet. A heavy
+cumulation of the weight may some day serve him a good turn. Thus the
+Devil twists his vague yearning for a condition of spiritual repose into
+a pleasantly smacking lash with which to scourge his grosser appetites;
+so that, upon the whole, Reuben drives a fine, showy team along the
+high-road of indulgence.
+
+Yet the minister's son had no love for gross vices; there were human
+instincts in him (if it maybe said) that rebelled against his more
+deliberate sinnings. Nay, he affected with his boon companions an
+enjoyment of wanton excesses that he only half felt. A certain
+adventurous, dare-devil reach in him craved exercise. The character of
+Reuben at this stage would surely have offered a good subject for the
+study and the handling of Dr. Mowry, if that worthy gentleman could have
+won his way to the lad's confidence; but the ponderous methods of the
+city parson showed no fineness of touch. Even the father, as we have
+seen, could not reach down to any religious convictions of the son; and
+Reuben keeps him at bay with a banter, and an exaggerated attention to
+the personal comforts of the old gentleman, that utterly baffle him.
+Reuben holds too much in dread the old catechismal dogmas and the
+ultimate "anathema maran-atha."
+
+So it was with a profound sigh that the father bade his son adieu after
+this city visit.
+
+"Good bye, father! Love to them all in Ashfield."
+
+So like Rachel's voice! So like Rachel's! And the heart of the old man
+yearned toward him and ached bitterly for him. _"O my son Absalom! my
+son! my son Absalom!"_
+
+
+XXXV.
+
+Maverick hurried his departure from the city; and Adele, writing to Rose
+to announce the programme of her journey, says only this much of
+Reuben:--"We have of course seen R----, who was very attentive and kind.
+He has grown tall,--taller, I should think, than Phil; and he is quite
+well-looking and gentlemanly. I think he has a very good opinion of
+himself."
+
+The summer's travel offered a season of rare enjoyment to Adele. The
+lively sentiment of girlhood was not yet wholly gone, and the
+thoughtfulness of womanhood was just beginning to tone, without
+controlling, her sensibilities. The delicate attentions of Maverick were
+more like those of a lover than of a father. Through his ever watchful
+eyes, Adele looked upon the beauties of Nature with a new halo on them.
+How the water sparkled to her vision! How the days came and went like
+golden dreams!
+
+Ah, happy youth-time! The Hudson, Lake George, Saratoga, the Mountains,
+the Beach,--to us old stagers, who have breasted the tide of so many
+years, and flung off long ago all the iridescent sparkles of our
+sentiment, these are only names of summer thronging-places. Upon the
+river we watch the growth of the crops, or ask our neighbors about the
+cost of our friend Faro's new country-seat; we lounge upon the piazzas
+of the hotels, reading price-lists, or (if not too old) an editorial; we
+complain of the windy currents upon the lake, and find our chiefest
+pleasure in a trout boiled plain, with a dressing of Champagne sauce; we
+linger at Fabian's on a sunny porch, talking politics with a rheumatic
+old gentleman in his overcoat, while the youngsters go ambling through
+the fir woods and up the mountains with shouts and laughter. Yet it was
+not always thus. There were times in the lives of us old travellers--let
+us say from sixteen to twenty--when the great river was a glorious
+legend trailing its storied length through the Highlands; when in every
+opening valley there lay purple shadows whereon we painted castles; when
+the corridors and shaded walks of the "United States" were like a fairy
+land, with flitting skirts and waving plumes, and some delicately gloved
+hand beating its reveille upon the heart; and when every floating film
+of mist along the sea, whether at Newport or Nahant, tenderly entreated
+the fancy.
+
+But we forget ourselves, and we forget Adele. In her wild exuberance of
+joy Maverick shares with a spirit that he had believed to be dead in him
+utterly. And if he finds it necessary to check from time to time the
+noisy effervescence of her pleasure, as he certainly does at the first,
+he does it in the most tender and considerate way; and Adele learns,
+what many of her warm-hearted sisters never do learn, that a well-bred
+control over our enthusiasms in no way diminishes the exquisiteness of
+their savor.
+
+Maverick should be something over fifty now, and his keenness of
+observation in respect to feminine charms is not perhaps so great as it
+once was; but even he cannot fail to see, with a pride that he makes no
+great effort to conceal, the admiring looks that follow the lithe,
+graceful figure of Adele, wherever their journey may lead them. Nor,
+indeed, were there any more comely toilettes for a young girl to be met
+with anywhere than those which had been provided for the young traveller
+under the advice of Mrs. Brindlock.
+
+It may be true--what his friend Papiol had predicted--that Maverick will
+be too proud of his child to keep her in a secluded corner of New
+England. For his pride there is certainly abundant reason; and what
+father does not love to see the child of whom he is proud admired?
+
+Yet weeks had run by and Maverick had never once broached the question
+of a return. The truth was, that the new experience was so charming and
+so engrossing for him, the sweet, intelligent face ever at his side was
+so full of eager wonder, and he so delightfully intent upon providing
+new sources of pleasure and calling out again and again the gushes of
+her girlish enthusiasm, that he shrunk instinctively from a decision in
+which must be involved so largely her future happiness.
+
+At last it was Adele herself who suggested the inquiry,--
+
+"Is it true, dear papa, what the Doctor tells me, that you may possibly
+take, me back to France with you?"
+
+"What say you, Adele? Would you like to go?"
+
+"Dearly!"
+
+"But," said Maverick, "your friends here,--can you so easily cast them
+away?"
+
+"No, no, no!" said Adele,--"not cast them away! Couldn't I come again
+some day? Besides, there is your home, papa; I should love any home of
+yours, and love your friends."
+
+"For instance, Adele, there is my book-keeper, a lean Savoyard, who
+wears a red wig and spectacles,--and Lucille, a great, gaunt woman, with
+a golden crucifix about her neck, who keeps my little parlor in
+order,--and Papiol, a fat Frenchman, with a bristly moustache and
+iron-gray hair, who, I dare say, would want to kiss the pet of his dear
+friend,--and Jeannette, who washes the dishes for us, and wears great
+wooden sabots"----
+
+"Nonsense, papa! I am sure you have other friends; and then there's the
+good godmother."
+
+"Ah, yes,--she indeed," said Maverick; "what a precious hug she would
+give you, Adele!"
+
+"And then--and then--should I see mamma?"
+
+The pleasant humor died out of the face of Maverick on the instant; and
+then, in a slow, measured tone,--
+
+"Impossible, Adele,--impossible! Come here, darling!" and as he fondled
+her in a wild, passionate way, "I will love you for both, Adele; she was
+not worthy of you, child."
+
+Adele, too, is overcome with a sudden seriousness.
+
+"Is she living, papa?" And she gives him an appealing look that must be
+answered.
+
+And Maverick seems somehow appalled by that innocent, confiding
+expression of hers.
+
+"May-be, may-be, my darling; she was living not long since; yet it can
+never matter to you or me more. You will trust me in this, Adele?" And
+he kisses her tenderly.
+
+And she, returning the caress, but bursting into tears as she does so,
+says,--
+
+"I will, I do, papa."
+
+"There, there, darling!"--as he folds her to him; "no more tears,--no
+more tears, _cherie_!"
+
+But even while he says it, he is nervously searching his pockets, since
+there is a little dew that must be wiped from his own eyes. Maverick's
+emotion, however, was but a little momentary contagious sympathy with
+the daughter,--he having no understanding of that unsatisfied yearning
+in her heart of which this sudden tumult of feeling was the passionate
+outbreak.
+
+Meantime Adele is not without her little mementos of the life at
+Ashfield, which come in the shape of thick double letters from that good
+girl Rose,--her dear, dear friend, who has been advised by the little
+traveller to what towns she should direct these tender missives; and
+Adele is no sooner arrived at these postal stations than she sends for
+the budget which she knows must be waiting for her. And of course she
+has her own little pen in a certain travelling-escritoire the good papa
+has given her; and she plies her white fingers with it often and often
+of an evening, after the day's sight-seeing is over, to tell Rose, in
+return, what a charming journey she is having, and how kind papa is, and
+what a world of strange things she is seeing; and there are descriptions
+of sunsets and sunrises, and of lakes and of mountains, on those
+close-written sheets of hers, which Rose, in her enthusiasm, declares to
+be equal to many descriptions in print. We dare say they were better
+than a great many such.
+
+Poor Rose feels that she has only very humdrum stories to tell in return
+for these; but she ekes out her letters pretty well, after all, and what
+they lack in novelty is made up in affection.
+
+"There is really nothing new to tell," she writes, "except it be that
+our old friend, Miss Almira Tourtelot, astonished us all with a new
+bonnet last Sunday, and with new saffron ribbons; and she has come out,
+too, in the new tight sleeves, in which she looks drolly enough. Phil is
+very uneasy, now that his schooling is done, and talks of going to the
+West Indies about some business in which papa is concerned. I hope he
+will go, if he doesn't stay too long. He is such a dear, good fellow!
+Madame Arles asks after you, when I see her, which is not very often
+now; for since the Doctor has come back from New York, he has had a new
+talk with mamma, and has quite won her over to _his view of the matter_.
+So good bye to French for the present! Heigho! But I don't know that I'm
+sorry, now that you are not here, dear Ady.
+
+"Another queer thing I had almost forgotten to tell you. The poor Boody
+girl,--you must remember her? Well, she has come back on a sudden; and
+they say her father would not receive her in his house,--there are
+_terrible stories_ about it!--and now she is living with an old woman
+far out upon the river-road,--only a little garret-chamber for herself
+and _the child she brought back with her_. Of course _nobody_ goes near
+her, or looks at her, if she comes on the street. But--the queerest
+thing!--when Madame Arles heard of it and of her story, what does she do
+but _walk far out to visit her_, and talked with her in her broken
+English for an hour, they say. Papa says she (Madame A.) must be a very
+bad woman or a very good woman. Miss Johns says _she always thought she
+was a bad woman_. The Bowriggs are, of course, very indignant, and I
+doubt if Madame A. comes to Ashfield again with them."
+
+And again, at a later date, Rose writes,--
+
+"The Bowriggs are all off for the winter, and the house closed. Reuben
+has been here on a flying visit to the parsonage; and how proud Miss
+Eliza was of _her nephew_! He came over to see Phil, I suppose; but Phil
+had gone two weeks before. Mamma thinks he is _fine-looking_. I fancy he
+will never live in the country again. When shall I see you again, _dear,
+dear_ Ady? I have _so much_ to talk to you about!"
+
+A month thereafter Maverick and his daughter find their way back to
+Ashfield. Of course Miss Johns has made magnificent preparations to
+receive them. She surpassed herself in her toilette on the day of their
+arrival, and fairly astonished Maverick with the warmth of her welcome
+to his child. Yet he could not help observing that Adele met it more
+coolly than was her wont, and that her tenderest words were reserved for
+the good Doctor. And how proud she was to walk with her father upon the
+village street, glancing timidly up at the windows from which she knew
+those stiff old Miss Hapgoods must be peeping out! How proud to sit
+beside him in the parson's pew, feeling that the eyes of half the
+congregation were fastened on the tall gentleman beside her! Ah, happy
+daughter! may your beautiful filial pride never have a fall!
+
+Important business letters command Maverick's early presence abroad;
+and, after conference with the Doctor, he decides to leave Adele once
+more under the roof of the parsonage.
+
+"Under God, I will do for her what I can," said the Doctor.
+
+"I know it, I know it, my good friend," says Maverick. "Teach her
+self-reliance; she may need it some day. And mind what I have said of
+this French woman. Adele seems to have a _tendresse_ that way. Those
+French women are very insidious, Johns."
+
+"You know their ways better than I," said the Doctor, dryly.
+
+"Good! a smack of the old college humor there, Johns. Well, well, at
+least you don't doubt the sacredness of my love for Adele?"
+
+"I trust, Maverick, I may never doubt the sacredness of your love in any
+direction. I only hope you may direct it where I fear you do not."
+
+"God bless you, Johns! I wish I were as good a man as you."
+
+A little afterwards Maverick was humming a snatch from an opera under
+the trees of the orchard; and Adele went bounding toward him, to take
+the last walk with him for so long,--so long!
+
+
+XXXVI.
+
+Autumn and winter passed by, and the summer of 1838 opened upon the old
+quiet life of Ashfield. The stiff Miss Johns, busy with her household
+duties, or with her stately visitings. The Doctor's hat and cane in
+their usual place upon the little table within the door, and of a Sunday
+his voice is lifted up under the old meeting-house roof in earnest
+expostulation. The birds pipe their old songs, and the orchard has shown
+once more its wondrous glory of bloom. But all these things have lost
+their novelty for Adele. Would it be strange, if the tranquil life of
+the little town had lost something of its early charm? That swift French
+blood of hers has been stirred by contact with the outside world. She
+has, perhaps, not been wholly insensible to those admiring glances which
+so quickened the pride of the father. Do not such things leave a hunger
+in the heart of a girl of seventeen which the sleepy streets of a
+country town can but poorly gratify?
+
+The young girl is, moreover, greatly disturbed at the thought of the new
+separation from her father for some indefinite period. Her affections
+have knitted themselves around him, during that delightful journey of
+the summer, in a way that has made her feel with new weight the parting.
+It is all the worse that she does not clearly perceive the necessity for
+it. Is she not of an age now to contribute to the cheer of whatever home
+he may have beyond the sea? Why, pray, has he given her such uninviting
+pictures of his companions there? Or what should she care for his
+companions, if only she could enjoy his tender watchfulness? Or is it
+that her religious education is not yet thoroughly complete, and that
+she still holds out against a full and public avowal of all the
+doctrines which the Doctor urges upon her acceptance? And the thought of
+this makes his kindly severities appear more irksome than ever.
+
+Another cause of grief to Adele is the extreme disfavor in which she
+finds that Madame Arles is now regarded by the townspeople. Her
+sympathies had run out towards the unfortunate woman in some
+inexplicable way, and held there even now, so strongly that contemptuous
+mention of her stung like a reproach to herself. At least she was a
+countrywoman, and alone among strangers; and in this Adele found
+abundant reason for a generous sympathy. As for her religion, was it not
+the religion of her mother and of her good godmother? And with this
+thought flaming in her, is it wonderful, if Adele toys more fondly than
+ever, in the solitude of her chamber, with the little rosary she has
+guarded so long? Not, indeed, that she has much faith in its efficacy;
+but it is a silent protest against the harsh speeches of Miss Eliza, who
+had been specially jealous of the influence of the French teacher.
+
+"I never liked her countenance, Adele," said the spinster, in her solemn
+manner; "and I am rejoiced that you will not be under her influence the
+present summer."
+
+"And I'm sorry," said Adele, petulantly.
+
+"It is gratifying to me," continued Miss Eliza, without notice of
+Adele's interruption, "that Mr. Maverick has confirmed my own
+impressions, and urged the Doctor against permitting so unwise
+association."
+
+"When? how?" said Adele, sharply. "Papa has never seen her."
+
+"But he has seen other French women, Adele, and he fears their
+influence."
+
+Adele looked keenly at the spinster for a moment, as if to fathom the
+depth of this reply, then burst into tears.
+
+"Oh, why, why didn't he take me with him?" But this she says under
+breath, and to herself, as she rushes into the Doctor's study to
+question him.
+
+"Is it true, New Papa, that papa thought badly of Madame Arles?"
+
+"Not personally, my child, since he had never seen her. But, Adaly, your
+father, though I fear he is far away from the true path, wishes you to
+find it, my child. He has faith in the religion we teach so imperfectly;
+he wishes you to be exposed to no influences that will forbid your full
+acceptance of it."
+
+"But Madame Arles never talked of religion to me"; and Adele taps
+impatiently upon the floor.
+
+"That may be true, Adaly,--it may be true; but we cannot be thrown into
+habits of intimacy with those reared in iniquity without fear of
+contracting stain. I could wish, my child, that you would so far subdue
+your rebellious heart, and put on the complete armor of righteousness,
+as to be able to resist all attacks."
+
+"And it was for this papa left me here?" And Adele says it with a smile
+of mockery that alarms the good Doctor.
+
+"I trust, Adaly, that he had that hope."
+
+The good man does not know what swift antagonism to his pleadings he has
+suddenly kindled in her. The little foot taps more and more impatiently
+as he goes on to set forth (as he had so often done) the heinousness of
+her offences and the weight of her just condemnation. Yet the antagonism
+did not incline her to open doubt; but after she had said her evening
+prayer that night, (taught her by the parson,) she drew out her little
+rosary and kissed reverently the crucifix. It is so much easier at this
+juncture for her tried and distracted spirit to bolster its faith upon
+such material symbol than to find repose in any merely intellectual
+conviction of truth!
+
+Adele's intimacy with Rose and with her family retained all its old
+tenderness, but that good fellow Phil was gone. A blithe and merry
+companion he had been! Adele missed his kindly attentions more than she
+would have believed. The Bowriggs have come to Ashfield, but their
+clamorous friendship is more than ever distasteful to Adele. Over and
+over she makes a feint of illness to escape the noisy hilarity. Nor,
+indeed, is it wholly a feint. Whether it were that her state of moral
+perturbation and unrest reacted upon the physical system, or that there
+were other disturbing causes, certain it was that the roses were fading
+from her cheeks, and that her step was losing day by day something of
+its old buoyancy. It is even thought best to summon the village doctor
+to the family council. He is a gossiping, kindly old gentleman, who
+spends an easy life, free from much mental strain, in trying to make his
+daily experiences tally with the little fund of medical science which he
+accumulated thirty years before.
+
+The serene old gentleman feels the pulse, with his head reflectively on
+one side,--tells his little jokelet about Sir Astley Cooper, or some
+other worthy of the profession,--shakes his fat sides with a cheery
+laugh,--"And now, my dear," he says, "let us look at the tongue. Ah, I
+see, I see,--the stomach lacks tone."
+
+"And there's dreadful lassitude, sometimes, Doctor," speaks up Miss
+Eliza.
+
+"Ah, I see,--a little exhaustion after a long walk,--isn't it so, Miss
+Maverick? I see, I see; we must brace up the system, Miss Johns,--brace
+up the system."
+
+And the kindly old gentleman prescribes his little tonics, of which
+Adele takes some, and throws more out of the window.
+
+Adele does not mend, and the rumor is presently current upon the street
+that "Miss Adeel is in a decline." The spinster shows a solicitude in
+the matter which almost touches the heart of the French girl. For Adele
+had long before decided that there could be no permanent sympathy
+between them, and had indulged latterly in no little bitterness of
+speech toward her. But the acute spinster had forgiven all. Never once
+had she lost sight of her plan for the ultimate disposal of Adele and of
+her father's fortune. Of course the life of Adele was very dear to her,
+and the absence of Phil she looked upon as Providential.
+
+Weeks pass by, but still the tonics of the kindly old physician prove of
+little efficacy. One day the Bowriggs come blustering in, as is their
+wont.
+
+"Such assurance! Did you ever hear the like? Madame Arles writes us that
+she is coming to see Ashfield again, and of course coming to us. The air
+of the town agrees with her, and she hopes to find lodgings."
+
+The eyes of Adele sparkle with satisfaction,--not so much, perhaps, by
+reason of her old sympathy with the poor woman, which is now almost
+forgotten, as because it will give some change at least to the dreary
+monotony of the town life.
+
+"Lodgings, indeed!" says the younger Miss Bowrigg. "I wonder where she
+will find them!"
+
+It is a matter of great doubt, to be sure,--since the sharp speech of
+the spinster has so spread the story of her demerits, that not a
+parishioner of the Doctor but would have feared to give the poor woman a
+home.
+
+Adele still has strength enough for an occasional stroll with Rose, and,
+in the course of one of them, comes upon Madame Arles, whom she meets
+with a good deal of her old effusion. And Madame, touched by her
+apparent weakness, more than reciprocates it.
+
+"But you suffer, you are unhappy, my child,--pining at last for the sun
+of Provence. Isn't it so, _mon ange_? No, no, you were never meant to
+grow up among these cold people. You must see the vineyards, and the
+olives, and the sea, Adele; you must! you must!"
+
+All this, uttered in a torrent, which, with its _tutoiements_, Rose can
+poorly comprehend.
+
+Yet it goes straight to the heart of Adele, and her tongue is loosened
+to a little petulant, fiery _roulade_ against the severities of the life
+around her, which it would have greatly pained poor Rose to listen to in
+any speech of her own.
+
+But such interviews, once or twice repeated, come to the knowledge of
+the watchful spinster, who clearly perceives that Adele is chafing more
+and more under the wonted family regimen. With an affectation of tender
+solicitude, she volunteers herself to attend Adele upon her short
+morning strolls, and she learns presently, with great triumph, that
+Madame Arles has established herself at last under the same roof which
+gives refuge to the outcast Boody woman. Nothing more was needed to seal
+the opinion of the spinster, and to confirm the current village belief
+in the heathenish character of the French lady. Dame Tourtelot was
+shrewdly of the opinion that the woman represented some Popish plot for
+the abduction of Adele, and for her incarceration in a nunnery,--a
+theory which Miss Almira, with her natural tendency to romance,
+industriously propagated.
+
+Meantime the potions of the village doctor have little effect, and
+before July is ended a serious illness has declared itself, and Adele is
+confined to her chamber. Madame Arles is among the earliest who come
+with eager inquiries, and begs to see the sufferer. But she is
+confronted by the indefatigable spinster, who, cloaking her denial under
+ceremonious form, declares that her state of nervous prostration will
+not admit of it. Madame withdraws, sadly; but the visit and the claim
+are repeated from time to time, until the stately civility of Miss Johns
+arouses her suspicions.
+
+"You deny me, Madame. You do wrong. I love Adele; she loves me. I know
+that I could comfort her. You do not understand her nature. She was born
+where the sky is soft and warm. You are all cold and harsh,--cold and
+harsh in your religion. She has told me as much. I know how she suffers.
+I wish I could carry her back to France with me. I pray you, let me see
+her, good Madame!"
+
+"It is quite impossible, I assure you," said the spinster, in her most
+aggravating manner. "It would be quite against the wishes of my brother,
+the Doctor, as well as of Mr. Maverick."
+
+"Monsieur Maverick! _Mon Dieu_, Madame! He is no father to her; he
+leaves her to die with strangers; he has no heart; I have better right:
+I love her. I must see her!"
+
+And with a passionate step,--those eyes of hers glaring in that strange
+double way upon the amazed Miss Eliza,--she strides toward the door, as
+if she would overcome all opposition. But before she has gone out, that
+cruel pain has seized her, and she sinks upon a chair, quite prostrated,
+and with hands clasped wildly over that burden of a heart.
+
+"Too hard! too hard!" she murmurs, scarce above her breath.
+
+The spinster is attentive, but is untouched. Her self-poise never
+deserts her. And not then, or at any later period, did poor Madame Arles
+succeed in overcoming the iron resolve of Miss Johns.
+
+The good Doctor is greatly troubled by the report of Miss Eliza. Can it
+be possible that Adele has given a confidence to this strange woman that
+she has not given to them? Cold and harsh! Can Adele, indeed, have said
+this? Has he not labored with a full heart? Has he not agonized in
+prayer to draw in this wandering lamb to the fold? He has seen, indeed,
+that the poor child has chafed much latterly, that the old serenity and
+gayety are gone. But is it not a chafing under the fetters of sin? Is it
+not that she begins to see more clearly the fiery judgments of God which
+will certainly overwhelm the wrongdoers, whatever may be the
+unsubstantial and evanescent graces of their mortal life?
+
+Yet, with all the rigidity of his doctrine, which he cannot in
+conscience mollify, even for the tender ears of Adele, it disturbs him
+strangely to hear that she has qualified his regimen as harsh or severe.
+Has he not taught, in season and out of season, the fulness of God's
+promises? Has he not labored and prayed? Is it not the ungodly heart in
+her that finds his teaching a burden? Is not his conscience safe? Yet,
+for all this, it touches him to the quick to think that her childlike,
+trustful confidence is at last alienated from him,--that her affection
+for him is so distempered by dread and weariness. For, unconsciously, he
+has grown to love her as he loves no one save his boy Reuben;
+unconsciously his heart has mellowed under her influence. Through her
+winning, playful talk, he has taken up that old trail of worldly
+affections which he had thought buried forever in Rachel's grave. That
+tender touch of her little fingers upon his cheek has seemed to say,
+"Life has its joys, old man!" The patter of her feet along the house has
+kindled the memories of other gentle steps that tread now silently in
+the courts of air. Those songs of hers,--how he has loved them! Never
+confessing even to Miss Eliza, still less to himself, how much his heart
+is bound up in this little winsome stranger, who has shone upon his
+solitary parsonage like a sunbeam.
+
+And the good man, with such thoughts thronging on him, falls upon his
+knees, beseeching God to "be over the sick child, to comfort her, to
+heal her, to pour down His divine grace upon her, to open her blind eyes
+to the richness of His truth, to keep her from all the machinations and
+devices of Satan, to arm her with true holiness, to make her a golden
+light in the household, to give her a heart of love toward all, and most
+of all toward Him who so loved her that He gave His only begotten Son."
+
+And the Doctor, rising from his attitude of prayer, and going toward the
+little window of his study to arrange it for the night, sees a slight
+figure in black pacing up and down upon the opposite side of the way,
+and looking up from time to time to the light that is burning in the
+window of Adele. He knows on the instant who it must be, and fears more
+than ever the possible influence which this strange woman, who is so
+persistent in her attention, may have upon the heart of the girl. The
+Doctor had heretofore been disposed to turn a deaf ear to the current
+reproaches of Madame Arles for her association with the poor outcast
+daughter of the village; but her appearance at this unseemly hour of the
+night, coupled with his traditional belief in the iniquities of the
+Romish Church, excited terrible suspicions in his mind. Like most holy
+men, ignorant of the crafts and devices of the world, he no sooner
+blundered into a suspicion of some deep Devil's cunning than every
+footfall and every floating zephyr seemed to confirm it. He bethought
+himself of Maverick's earnest caution; and before he went to bed that
+night, he prayed that no designing Jezebel might corrupt the poor child
+committed to his care.
+
+The next night the Doctor looked again from his window, after blowing
+out his lamp, and there once more was the figure in black, pacing up and
+down. What could it mean? Was it possible that some Satanic influence
+could pass over from this emissary of the Evil One, (as he firmly
+believed her to be,) for the corruption of the sick child who lay in the
+delirium of a fever above?
+
+The extreme illness of Adele was subject of common talk in the village,
+and the sympathy was very great. On the following night Adele was far
+worse, and the Doctor, at about his usual bedtime, went out to summon
+the physician. At a glance he saw in the shadow of the opposite houses
+the same figure pacing up and down. He hurried his steps, fearing she
+might seek occasion to dart in upon the sick-chamber before his return.
+But he had scarcely gone twenty paces from his door, when he heard a
+swift step behind, and in another instant there was a grip, as of a
+tigress, upon his arm.
+
+"Adele,--how is she? Tell me!"
+
+"Ill,--very ill," said the Doctor, shaking himself from her grasp, and
+continued in his solemn manner, "it is an hour to be at home, woman!"
+
+But she, paying no heed to his admonition, says,--
+
+"I must see her,--I _must_!"--and dashes back toward the parsonage.
+
+The Doctor, terrified, follows after. But he can keep no manner of pace
+with that swift, dark figure that glides before him. He comes to the
+porch panting. The door is closed. Has the infuriated woman gone in? No,
+for presently her grasp is again upon his arm: for a moment she had
+sunk, exhausted by fatigue, or overcome by emotion, upon the porch. Her
+tone is more subdued.
+
+"I entreat you, good Doctor, let me see Adele!--for Christ's sake, if
+you be His minister, let me see her!"
+
+"Impossible, woman, impossible!" says the Doctor, more than ever
+satisfied of her Satanic character by what he counts her blasphemous
+speech. "Adaly is delirious,--fearfully excited; it would destroy her.
+The only hope is in perfect quietude."
+
+The woman releases her grasp.
+
+"Please, Doctor, let me come to-morrow. I must see her! I will see her!"
+
+"You shall not," said the Doctor, with solemnity,--"never, with my
+permission. Go to your home, woman, and pray God to have mercy on you."
+
+"Monster!" exclaimed she, passionately, as she shook the Doctor's arm,
+still under her grasp; and murmuring other words in language the good
+man did not comprehend, she slipped silently down the yard,--away into
+the darkness.
+
+
+
+
+DOWN THE RIVER.
+
+
+She was of pure race, black as her first ancestor,--if, indeed, she ever
+had an ancestor, and were not an indigenous outcrop of African soil,--so
+black that the sun could gild her. Her countenance was as unlovely as it
+is possible for one to be that owns the cheeriest of smiles and the most
+dazzling of teeth. It would have been difficult to say how old she was,
+though she had the effect of being undersized, and, with sharp
+shoulders, elbows, and knees, seemed scarcely possessed of a rounded
+muscle in all her lithe and agile frame.
+
+Nevertheless, she was a dancer by profession,--if she could have
+dignified her most frequent occupation by the title of profession. With
+a thin blue scarf turbaned round her head in floating ends, and with
+scanty and clinging array otherwise, tossing a tambourine, and singing
+wild, meaningless songs, she used to whirl and spring on the grass-plot
+of an evening, the young masters and mistresses smiling and applauding
+from the verandah, while the wind-blown flame of a flaring pitch-pine
+knot, held by little Pluto, gave her strange careering shadows for
+partner.
+
+She had not yet been allotted to any particular task by day, now running
+errands of the house, now tending the sick, now, in punishment of
+misdemeanors, relieving an exhausted hand in the field,--for, though all
+along the upland lay the piny woods of the turpentine-orchards, she
+belonged to an estate whose rich lowlands were devoted to
+cotton-bearing. But whatever she did by day, she danced by night, with
+her wild gyration and gesture, as naturally as a moth flies; and when
+not in demand with the seigniory, was wont to perform in even keener
+force and fire at the quarters, to an admiring circle of her own kind,
+with ambitious imitators on the outskirts.
+
+It was not, however, an indiscriminate assemblage even there that
+encouraged her rude art. There are circles within circles, and the more
+decorous of the slaves gave small favor to the young posturer, although
+the patronage she received from the house enabled her to meet their
+disapprobation defiantly; while to the younger portion, in the vague
+sense that there was something wrong about it, her dance became
+surrounded by all the attraction and allurement of seeing life. It was
+not that the frowning ones did not go through many of the same motions
+themselves; but theirs were occasioned by the frenzy of the religious
+excitement, where pious rapture and ecstasy were to be expressed by
+nothing but the bodily exertion of the Shout: the objectless dance of
+the dancer was a thing beyond their comprehension, dimly at first, and
+then positively, associated with sin. But she laughed them down with a
+gibe; she felt triumphant in the possession of her secret, known to none
+of them: her dance was not objectless, but the perpetual expression of
+all emotions, whether of beauty or joy or gratitude or praise. Some one
+at the house had given her a pair of little hoops with bells attached,
+which she was wont to wear about her ankles, and it afforded her
+malicious enjoyment to scatter her opponents by the tintinnabulation of
+her step. For all that levity, she was not destitute of her peculiar
+mode of adoration. For the religion of the Shout she had no absorbents
+whatever; she furtively watched it, and openly ridiculed it; but she had
+a religion of her own, notwithstanding,--a sort of primitive and grand
+religion, Fetich though it was. She reasoned, that the kindly brown
+earth produces us, bears us along on its flight, nourishes us, gives us
+the delights of life, takes us back into its bosom at last. She
+worshipped the great dark earth, imparted to it her confidence, asked of
+it her boons. As she grew older, and her logic or her fancy
+strengthened, she might have felt the sun supplying the earth, and the
+beings of the earth, with all their force, and have become a
+fire-worshipper, until further light broke on her, and she sought and
+found the Power that feeds the very sun himself. But at present the dust
+of which she was made was what she could best comprehend. So, fortified
+by her inward faith, and feeling herself fast friends with the ancient
+earth, she continued to ring her silver bells and spin her bare
+twinkling feet with contented disregard of those, few of whom in their
+unseemly worship had the faintest idea of what it was that ailed them.
+
+Although known by various titles on the plantation, objurgatory among
+the hands, facetious among the heads, such as Dancing Devil, Spinning
+Jenny, Tarantella, Herodias's Daughter,--which last, simplifying itself
+into Salome, became in its diminutives the most prevalent,--the creature
+had a name of her own, the softest of syllables. Black and uncouth as
+she was, a word, one of those the whitest and most beautiful, named her;
+and since they tell us that every appellation has its significance for
+the wearer, we must suppose that somewhere in her soul that white and
+blossoming thing was to be found which answered to the name of Flor.
+
+She possessed a kind of freehold in the cabin of an old negress yclept
+Zoe; but she seldom claimed it, for Zoe was outspoken; she preferred,
+instead, to lie down by night on a mat in Miss Emma's room, in a corner
+of the staircase, on the hall-floor, oftenest fallen wherever sleep
+happened to overtake her;--having so many places in which to lay her
+head was very like having none at all. She was at the bidding of every
+one, but seldom received a heavy blow; as for a round of angry words,
+she liked nothing better. She fell heir to much flimsy finery, as a
+matter of course, and to many a tidbit, cake or sweetmeat; she made
+herself gaudy as a butterfly with the one, and never went into a corner
+with the other. Of late, however, the finery and the delicates had
+become more uncommon things: Miss Emma wore a homespun gingham, her
+muslins, and Miss Agatha's, draped the windows,--for curtains and
+carpets had all gone to camp; bacon had ceased to be given out to the
+hands, who lived now on corn-meal and yams; the people at the house were
+scarcely better off,--for, though, as no army had passed that way, the
+chickens still peopled the place, they were reserved for special
+occasions, and it was only at rare intervals that one indulged at table
+in the luxury of a fowl. This was no serious regret to Flor on her own
+account: the less viands, the less dishes, she could oftener pause in
+the act of wiping a plate and perform an original hornpipe by herself,
+tossing the thin translucent china, and rapping it with her knuckles
+till it rang again. She had, however, a pang once when she saw Miss
+Emma lunching with relish on cold sweet potato. She spent all the rest
+of the day floating on the tide in an old abandoned scow secured by a
+long rope to the bank, and afterwards wading up and down the bed of a
+brook that ran into the river, until, having left a portion of her
+provision, to be sure, at Aunt Zoe's cabin, she busied herself over a
+fire out-of-doors, and served up at last before Miss Emma as savory a
+little terrapin stew as ever simmered on coals, capering over her
+success, and standing on her head in the midst of all her scattered
+embers, afterwards, with pure delight. The next day she came in at noon
+from the woods, a mile down the river-bank, with her own dark lips cased
+and coated in golden sweets, and, after a wordy skirmish with the cook,
+presented to Miss Emma a great cake of brown and fragrant honey from a
+nest she had discovered and neglected in better seasons, and said
+nothing about her half-dozen swollen and smarting stings. Mas'r Rob
+having shouldered his gun and taken himself off, and Mas'r Andersen
+having followed his example, but not his footsteps, long ago, there was
+nobody to fill the deficiencies of the larder with game; and thus Flor,
+with her traps and nets and devices, making her value felt every day,
+became, for Miss Emma's sake, a petted person, was put on more generous
+terms with those above her, and allowed a freedom of action that no
+other servant on the place dreamed of desiring. Such consideration was
+very acceptable to the girl, who was well content to go fasting herself
+a whole day, provided Miss Emma condescended to her offerings, and, in
+turn, vouchsafed her her friendship. She had no such daring aspirations
+towards the beautiful Miss Agatha, young Mas'r Andersen's wife, and
+admired her at an awful distance, never venturing to offer her a bit of
+broiled lark, or set before her a dish of crabs,--beaming back with a
+grin from ear to ear, if Miss Agatha so much as smiled on her, breaking
+into the wildest of dances and shuffling out the shrillest of tunes
+after every such incident. Moreover, Miss Agatha was hedged about with a
+dignity of grief, and the indistinct pity given her made her safe from
+other intrusion; for Mas'r Andersen, in bringing home a Northern wife,
+had brought home Northern principles, and, in his sudden escape forced
+to leave her in the only home she had, was away fighting Northern
+battles. This was a dreadful thing, and Mas'r Andersen was a traitor to
+somebody,--so much Flor knew,--it might be the Government, it might be
+the South, it might be Miss Agatha; her ideas were nebulous. Whatever it
+was, Mas'r Rob and his gun were on the other side, and woe be to Mas'r
+Andersen when they met! Mas'r Rob and his friends were beating back the
+men that meant to take away Flor and all her kind to freeze and starve;
+'twas very good of him, Flor thought, and there ceased consideration.
+Meanwhile, wherever Mas'r Andersen might be, and whether he were so much
+as alive or not, Miss Agatha was not the one that knew; and Flor adapted
+many a rigadoon to her conjectured feelings, now swaying and bending
+with sorrow and longing, head fallen, arms outstretched, now hands
+clasped on bosom, exultant in welcome and possession.
+
+The importance to which Flor gradually rose by no means led her to the
+exhibition of any greater decorum; on the contrary, it seemed to impart
+to her the secret of perpetual motion; and, aware of her impunity, she
+danced with fresher vigor in the very teeth of her censurers and their
+reproaches.
+
+"Go 'long wid yer capers, ye Limb!" said Zoe to her, late one afternoon,
+as she entered with the half of a rabbit she had caught, and, having
+deposited it, went through the intricacies of her most elaborate figure
+in breathless listening to an unheard tune. "Ef I had dem sticks o'
+legs, dey'd do berrer work nor twirlin' me like I was a factotum."
+
+At this, Flor suddenly spun about on the tip of one toe for the space of
+three minutes, with a buzzing noise like that of a top in hot motion,
+pausing at last to inquire, "Well, Maum Zoe, an' w'at's dat?" and be
+off again in another whirl.
+
+"I'd red Mas'r Henry ob sich a wurfless nigger."
+
+"Wurfless?" inquired Flor, still spinning.
+
+"Wuss 'n wurfless."
+
+"How 'd y' do it?"
+
+"I'd jus' foller dat ar Sarp," said Zoe, turning over the rabbit, and
+considering whether a pepper-corn and a little onion out of her own
+patch wouldn't improve the broth she meant to make of it.
+
+"Into de swamps?" said Flor, in a high key. "Sarp's a fool. I heerd
+Mas'r Henry say so. Dey'll gib him a blue-pill, for sartain."
+
+"Humph!" said Aunt Zoe, as if she could say a great deal more.
+
+"Tell ye w'at, Maum Zoe," replied Flor, shaking her sidelong head at
+every syllable, and accentuating her remarks with her forefinger and
+both her little sparkling eyes, "I'll 'form on ye for 'ticin' Mas'r
+Henry's niggers run away."
+
+"None o' yer sass here!" said Maum Zoe, with a flashing glance.
+
+"You take my rabbit, you mus' _hab_ my sass," answered Flor, delicacy
+not being ingrain with her. "W'at 'ud I cut for to de swamps, d' ye
+s'pose?" she said, slapping the soles of her feet in her emphasis, and
+pausing for breath. "Dar neber was a lash laid on dat back"----
+
+"No fault o' dat back, dough," interposed Aunt Zoe.
+
+"Dar neber was a lash on dat back. Dar a'n't a person on de place hab
+sich treatem as dis yere Limb o' yourn. Miss Emma done gib me her red
+ribbins on'y Sa'd'y for my har. An' Mas'r Henry, he jus' pass an' say to
+me, 'Dono w'at Miss Emma 'd do widout ye, Lomy. Scairt, ye hussy!' So!"
+
+"'Zackly. We's 'mos' w'ite, we be! How much dey do make ob us up to de
+house! De leopard hab change him spots, an' we hab change our skin! W'at
+'s de use o' bein' free, w'en we's w'ite folks a'ready? Tell me dat!"
+said Aunt Zoe, turning on her witheringly, rising from a deep curtsy and
+smoothing down her apron. "Tell ye w'at, ye Debil's spinster!" added
+she, with a sudden change of tone, as Flor began to mimic one of Miss
+Agatha's opera-tunes and with her hands on her hips slowly balance up
+and down the room, and came at last, bending far on one side, to leer up
+in the face of her elder with such a smile as Cubas was wont to give her
+Spanish lover in the dance. "So mighty free wid yer dancin', 'pears like
+you'll come to dance at a rope's end! W'at's de use o' talkin' to you?
+'Mortal sperit, it 's my b'lief dat ar mockin'-bird in de branches hab
+as good a lookout!"
+
+"Heap better," said Flor acquiescently, and beginning to hold a
+whistling colloquy with the hidden voice.
+
+"You won't bring him down wid yer tunes. He knows w'en he's well off;
+he's free, he is,--swingin' onto de bough, an' 'gwine whar he like."
+
+"Leet de chil' alone, Zoe," said a superannuated old woman sitting in
+the corner by the fire always smouldering on Zoe's hearth, and leaning
+her white head on her cane. "You be berrer showin' her her duty in her
+place dan be makin' her discontented."
+
+"She doan' make me disconnected, Maum Susie," said Flor. "'F he's free,
+w'at's he stayin' here for? Dar 's law for dat. Doan' want none o' yer
+free niggers hangin' roun' dis yere. Chirrup!"
+
+"Dar's a right smart chance ob 'em, dough, jus' now," said Aunt Zoe,
+chuckling at first, and then breaking into the most boisterous of
+laughs, "Seems like we's all ob us, ebery one, free as Sarp hisse'f.
+Mas'r Linkum say so. Yah, ha, ha!"
+
+"Linkum!" said Flor. "Who dat ar? Some o' yer poor w'ite trash? Mas'r
+Henry doan' say so!"
+
+"W'a' 's de matter wid dat ar boy Sarp, Zoe?" recommenced Flor, after a
+pause. "Mus' hab wanted suffin,--powerful,--to lib in de swamp, hab de
+dogs after him, an' a bullet troo de head mos' likely."
+
+"Jus' dat. Wanted him freedom," said Zoe suddenly, with crackling
+stress, her eyes getting angry in their fervor, as she went on. "Wanted
+him body for him own. Tired o' usin' 'noder man's eyes, 'noder man's
+han's. Wanted him han's him own, wanted him heart him own! Had n' no
+breff to breathe 'cep' w'at Mas'r Henry gib out. Di'n' t'ink no t'oughts
+but Mas'r Henry's. Wanted him wife some day to hisse'f, wanted him
+chillen for him own property. Wanted to call no man mas'r but de Lord in
+heaben!"
+
+"Wy, Maum Zoe, how you talk! Sarp had n' no wife."
+
+"Neber would, w'ile he wor a slave."
+
+"Hist now, Zoe!" said the old woman.
+
+"I jus' done b'lieve you's a bobolitionist!" said Flor, with wide eyes
+and a battery of nods.
+
+"No 'casion, no 'casion," said Zoe, with the deep inner chuckle again.
+"We's done 'bolished,--dat's w'at we is! We's a free people now. No more
+work for de 'bominationists!" And on the point of uncontrollable
+hilarity, she checked herself with the dignity becoming her new
+position. "You's your own nigger now, Salome," said she.
+
+"We? No, t'ank you. I 'longs to Miss Emma."
+
+"You haan' no understandin' for liberty, chil'. Seems ef 'twas like
+religion"----
+
+"Ef I wor to tell Mas'r Henry, oh, wouldn' you cotch it?"
+
+"Go 'long!" cried Zoe, looking out for a missile. "Doan' ye bring no
+more o' yer rabbits here, ef ye 'r' gwine to fetch an' carry"----
+
+"Lors, Aunt Zoe, 'pears like you's out o' sorts. Haan' I got nof'n
+berrer to do dan be tellin' tales ob old women dat's a-waitin' for de
+Lord's salvation?" said Flor, with a twang of great gravity,--and
+proceeded thereat to make her exit in a series of lively somersaults
+through the room and over the threshold.
+
+Aunt Zoe, who, ever since she had lost the use of her feet, had been a
+little wild on the subject of freedom, knew very well within that Flor
+would make no mischief for her; but, except for the excited state into
+which the news brought by some mysterious plantation runner had thrown
+her, she would scarcely have been so incautious. As it was, she had
+dropped a thought into Flor's head to ferment there and do its work. It
+was almost the first time in her life that the girl had heard freedom
+discussed as anything but a doubtful privilege. First awakening to
+consciousness in this state, it was with effort and only lately she had
+comprehended that there could be any other: a different condition from
+one in which Miss Emma was mistress and she was maid seemed at first
+preposterous, then fabulous, and still unnatural: nevertheless, there
+was a flavor of wicked pleasure in the thought. Flor looked with a sort
+of contempt on the little tumbling darkies who had never entertained it.
+Ever since she was born, however, she had frequently fancied she would
+like the liberty of rambling that the little wild creatures of the wood
+possess, but had felt criminal in the desire, and recently she had found
+herself enjoying the immunity of the mocking-bird on the bough, and was
+nearly as free in her going and coming as the same bird on the wing.
+
+During the weeks that followed this conversation Flor's dances flagged.
+They existed, to be sure, but with an angularity that made them seem
+solutions of problems, rather than expressions of emotion; they were
+merely mechanical, for she had lost all interest in them. They became at
+last so listless as to exhibit, to more serious eyes, signs of grace in
+the girl. Flor wondered, if Zoe had spoken the truth, that nothing
+appeared changed on the plantation: all their own masters, why so
+obsequious to the driver still? This was one of the last of the great
+places; behind it, the small farms, with few hands, ran up the
+mountains; why was there no stampede of these unguarded slaves? She
+hardly understood. She listened outside the circle of the fire on the
+ground at night, where two or three old women mumbled together; she
+inferred, that, though no one of them would desert Mas'r Henry, they
+enjoyed the knowledge that they were at liberty to do so, if they
+wished. Flor laughed a bit at this, thinking where the poor things could
+possibly go, and how they could get there, if they would; but in her
+heart of hearts--though all the world but this one spot was a barren
+wilderness, and she never could desire to leave her dear Miss Emma, nor
+could find happiness away from her--it seemed a very pleasant thing to
+think that her devotion might be a voluntary affair, and she stayed
+because she chose. Still she was skeptical. The abstract question
+puzzled her a little, too. How came Mas'r Henry to be free? Because he
+was white; that explained itself. But Miss Emma--she was white, too, and
+yet somehow she seemed to belong to Mas'r Henry. She wondered if Mas'r
+Henry could sell Miss Emma; and then the thought occurred, and with the
+thought the fear, that, possibly, some day, he might sell her, Flor
+herself, away from Miss Emma and all these pleasant scenes. After such a
+thought had once come, it did not go readily. Flor let it
+linger,--turned it over in her mind; gradually familiarized with its
+hurt, it seemed as if she had half said farewell to the place. Better
+far to be a runaway than to be sold. But if it came to that, whither
+should she run? what was this world beyond? who was there in this sad
+wide world to take care of a little black image? And if she waited for
+it to come to that, could she get away at all? It was no wonder that in
+the midst of such new and grave speculations the girl's dance grew
+languid and her sharp tongue still. The earth was just as beautiful as
+ever, the skies were as deep, the flowers as intense in tint, the
+evening air laden with jasmine-scents as delicious as of old; but in
+these few weeks Flor had reached another standpoint. It seemed as if a
+film had fallen from her eyes, and she saw a blight on every blossom.
+
+It was about this time, spring being at its flush, that some passing
+guest mentioned the march of a regiment, the next day, from Cotesworth
+Court-House to the first railroad-station, on its way to the seat of
+war. The idea of the thing filled Miss Emma with enthusiasm. How they
+would look, so many together, in the beautiful gray uniform too, to any
+one standing on Longfer Hill! She longed to see the faces of men when
+they took their lives in their hand for a principle. She had practised
+the Bonny Blue Flag till there was nothing left of it; but if a band
+played it in the open air, with the rising and falling of the wind, and
+under waving banners and glittering guidons all the men with their pale
+faces and shining eyes went marching by----
+
+The end of it was, that, as her father would never have listened to
+anything of the kind, Flor privately informed her of a short cut down
+the river-bank and round the edge of the swamp to the foot of Longfer
+Hill,--a walk they could easily take in a couple of hours. And as nobody
+was in the habit of missing Flor much, and her young mistress would be
+supposed, after her custom, to be spending half the day in naps, they
+accordingly took it. Nevertheless, it was an exceedingly secret affair,
+for Mas'r Henry had always strictly forbidden his daughter to leave his
+own grounds without fit escort.
+
+This expedition seemed to Flor such a proud and gratifying confidence,
+that in her pleasure she forgot to think; she only danced round about
+her mistress, with a return of her old exuberance, till the more quiet
+path of the latter resembled a straight line surrounded by an arabesque
+of fantastic flourishes. But, in fact, the young patrician, unaccustomed
+to exertion, was well wearied before they reached the river-bank. They
+had yet the long border of the swamp to skirt, and there towered Longfer
+Hill. Why could they not go across, she wondered. They would sink, Flor
+answered her; and then the moccasins! But there were all those green
+hummocks,--skipping from one to another would be mere play,--and there
+were no moccasins for miles. And before Flor could gainsay her, she had
+sprung on, keeping steadily ahead, in a determination to have her own
+way; and with no other course left her, Flor followed, though, at every
+spring, alighting on the hummocks that Miss Emma had trodden, the water
+splashed up about her bare ankles, and her heart shook within her at the
+thought of fierce runaways haunting these inaccessible hollows, and the
+myths of the deeper district. Before long, she had overtaken her young
+mistress, and they paused a moment for parley. Miss Emma was convinced,
+that, if it were no worse than this, it would be delightful. Flor
+assured her that she did not know the way any longer, for their winding
+path between the tall cypresses veiled in their swinging tangles of
+funereal moss had confused her, and she could only guess at the
+direction of Longfer Hill. This, then, was an adventure. Miss Emma took
+the responsibility all upon herself, and plunged forward. Miss Emma must
+know best, of course, concerning everything. Nothing loth, and gayly,
+Flor plunged after.
+
+The hummocks on which they went were light, spongy masses of greenery.
+Their footprints filled at once behind them with clear dark water; there
+were glistening little pools everywhere about them; the ground was so
+covered with mats of brilliant blossoms that what appeared solid for the
+foot was oftenest the most treacherous place of all; and at last they
+stayed to take breath, planting themselves on the trunk of a fallen tree
+so twisted and twined with variegated vines and flowers, and deadly,
+damp fungi, that it was like some gorgeous dais-seat. Behind them and
+beside them was the darkness of the cypress groves. Before them extended
+a smooth floor, a wide level region, carpeted in the most vivid verdure
+and sheeted with the sunshine, an immense bed of softest moss, underlaid
+with black bog, quaking at every step, and shaking a thousand diamonds
+into the light. Scarcely anything stirred through all the stretch; at
+some runnel along its nearer margin, where upon one side the more broken
+swamp recommenced, a rosy flamingo stood and fished, and, still remoter,
+the melancholy note of a bird tolled its refrain, answered by an echoing
+voice from some yet inner depth of forest far away. Save for this, the
+silence was as intense as the vastness and color of the scene, till it
+opened and resolved itself into one broad insect hum. The children took
+a couple of steps forward, under their feet the elastic sod sank and
+rose with a spurt of silver jets; they sprang back to their seats, and
+the shading tree above shook down a shining shower in rillets of silver
+rain. They remained for a minute, then, resting there. Singularly
+enough, Longfer Hill, which had previously been upon their left, now
+rose far away upon the right. When at length they comprehended its
+apparition, they looked at one another in complete bewilderment. Miss
+Emma began to cry; but Flor took it as only a fresh complication of this
+world, that was becoming for her feet a maze of intricacy.
+
+"We must go back," said Miss Emma, at last. "I'm sure, if I'd
+known----Of course we never can cross here. The very spoonbill wades.
+Oh, why didn't----Well, there's no blame to you, Floss. I've nobody to
+thank but myself; that's a comfort."
+
+"Lors, Miss Emma, it's my fault altogeder. I should n' neber told ye.
+An' as for gwine back, it's jus' as bad as torrer."
+
+"We can't stay here all night! Oh, I'm right tired out! If I could lie
+down"----
+
+"'Twouldn' do no way, Miss Emma," answered Flor, in a fright for her
+friend, as a quick, poisonous-looking lizard slid along the log, like a
+streak of light, in the wake of a spider which was one blotch of scarlet
+venom.
+
+Far ahead, the strong sun, piercing the marsh, drew up a vapor, that,
+blue as any distant haze in one part and lint-white in another, made
+itself aslant into low, delicious, broken prisms, melting all between.
+This, more than anything else, told the extent of the bog before them,
+and, hot as it was now, betrayed the deathly chill lurking under such a
+coverlet at night. In every other direction lay the cypress jungle; and
+whether they saw the front or back of Longfer Hill, and on which side
+the river ran, steering for which they could steer for home, they had
+not the skill to say. Thus, what way to go they still were undecided,
+when, at something moving near them, they started to their feet in a
+faint terror, delaying only a single instant to gaze at it,--a serpent,
+that, coiled round the stem above, had previously seemed nothing but a
+splendid parasite, and that just lifted its hooded head crusted with
+gems, and flickered a long cleft tongue of flame over them, while
+loosening in great loops from its basking-place. They vouchsafed it no
+second look, but, with one leap over the log, through the black mire,
+and from clump to clump of moss, sped away,--if that could be called
+speed which was hindered at each moment by waylaying briers and
+entangling ropes of blossoming vines, by delays in threatening quagmires
+and bewilderments in thickets beset by clouds of insects, by trips and
+stumbles and falls and bruises, and many a pause for tears and
+complaints and ejaculations of despair.
+
+Meanwhile the heat of the day was mitigated by thin clouds sliding over
+the sun and banking up the horizon, though the hot wind still blew
+sweetly and steadily from the open quarter of the sky.
+
+"Oh, what has become of us?" cried Miss Emma at length, when the shadows
+began to thicken, and out of the impenetrable forest and morass about
+them they could detect no path.
+
+"We's los' into de swamp, Miss Emma," answered Flor, in a kind of gloomy
+defiance of the worst of it,--"da' 's all."
+
+"And here we shall die!" cried the other.
+
+And she flung herself, face down, upon the floor.
+
+Flor was beside her instantly, taking her head upon her knee. Her own
+heart was sinking like lead; but she plucked it up, and for the other's
+sake snapped her fingers at Fortune.
+
+"Lors, Miss, dar's so many berries we caan' starve nowes. I's 'bout to
+build a fire soon's it's dark; dis yere's a dry spot, ye see now. An',
+bress you, dey'll be out after us afore mornin',--de whole farm-full."
+
+"With the dogs!" cried Miss Emma. "Oh, Floss, that I should live for
+that! to be hunted in the swamp with dogs!"
+
+Flor was silent a moment or two. The custom personally affected her for
+the first time; worse than the barbarity was the indignity.
+
+"Dey aren't trained to hunt for you, Miss Emma," she said, more gloomily
+than she had ever spoken before. "Dey knows de diff'unce 'tween de dark
+meat and de light."
+
+And then she laughed, as if her words meant nothing.
+
+"They never shall touch _you_, Flor, while I'm alive!" suddenly
+exclaimed Miss Emma, throwing her arms about her.
+
+"Lors, Miss, how you talk!" cried Flor, and then broke into a gust of
+tears. "To t'ink ob you a-carin' so much for a little darky, Miss!"--and
+she set up a loud howl of joyful sorrow.
+
+"You're the best friend I've got!" answered Miss Emma, hugging her with
+renewed warmth. "I love you worlds better than Agatha! And I'll never
+let you leave me! Oh, Flor! what shall we do?"
+
+Flor looked about her for reply, and then scrambled up a sycamore like a
+squirrel.
+
+It was apparently an island in the swamp on which they were: for the
+earth, though damp, was firm beneath them; and there was a thick growth
+of various trees about, although most were draped to the ground in the
+long, dark tresses of Spanish moss, waving dismally to and fro, with a
+dull, heavy motion of grief. On every other side from that by which they
+had come it appeared to be inaccessible, surrounded, as well as Flor
+could see, by glimmering sheets of water, which probably were too full
+of snags and broken stumps, still upright, for the navigation of boats
+by any hands but those thoroughly acquainted with their wide region of
+stagnant pools. This island was not, however, a small spot, but one that
+comprised a variety of surfaces, having not only marsh and upland within
+itself, but something that in the distance bore a fearful resemblance to
+a young patch of standing corn, a suspicion confirmed into certainty by
+a blue thread of smoke ascending a little way and falling again in a
+cloud. Once, upon seeing such a sight, Flor might have fallen to the
+ground herself,--this could be no less than the abode of those sad
+runaways, those mythical Goblins of the Swamp,--but it would have been
+because she had forgotten then that she was not one of the strong white
+race that reared her. Now, at this moment, she felt a thrill of kinship
+with these creatures, hunted for with bloodhounds, as she would be
+to-morrow, perhaps.
+
+"May-be I'll not go back," said Flor.
+
+She slipped down the tree, and went silently to work, heaping a bed of
+the hanging moss, less wet than the ground itself, for her young
+mistress. Miss Emma accepted it passively.
+
+"Oh, it's like sleeping on hearse-curtains!" was all she said.
+
+It was already evening, but growing darker with the clouds that went on
+piling their purple masses and awaiting their signal. Suddenly the
+sweet, soft breeze trembled and veered, there was a brief calm, and the
+wind had hauled round the other way. A silence of preparation, answered
+by a long, low note of thunder, and the war had begun in heaven.
+
+Miss Emma buried her face in the moss. But Flor, secretly relishing a
+good thunder-gust, drew up her knees and sat with equanimity, like a
+little black judge of the clouds; for, in the moment's dull, indifferent
+mood, she felt prepared for either fate. It was long before the rain
+came; then it plunged, a brief downfall, as if a cloud had been ripped
+and emptied,--a suffocating terror of rain, teeming with more appalling
+intimations than anything else in the world. But the wind was a blind
+tornado. The boughs swung over them and swept them; the swamp-water was
+lifted, and gluts of it slapped in Flor's face. She saw, not far away, a
+great solitary cypress rearing its head, and bearing aloft a broad
+eagle's nest, hurriedly seized in the grasp of the gale, twisted,
+raised, and snapped like a straw. The child began to shudder strangely
+at the breath of this blast that cried with such clamor out of the black
+vaults above, this unknown and tremendous power beneath which she was
+nothing but a mote; she suffered an unexplained awe, as if this fearful
+wind were some supernatural assemblage of souls fleeting through space
+and making the earth tremble under their wild rush. All the while the
+heavy thunders charged on high in one unbroken roar, across whose base
+sharp bolts broke and burst perpetually; and with the outer world
+wrapped in quivering curtains of blue flame, now and then a shaft of
+fire lanced its straight spear down the dense darkness of the woods
+behind in ghastly illumination, and a responsive spire shot up in some
+burning bush that blackened almost as instantly. Flor fancied that the
+lightning was searching for her, a runaway herself, and the burning bush
+answered, like a sentinel, that here she was. She cowered at length and
+sought the protection of the blind earth, full of awe and quaking, till
+by-and-by the last discharge, muffled and ponderous, rolled away, and,
+save for a muttered growl in some far distant den, the world was still
+and dark again.
+
+Flor spoke to her mistress, and found, that, utterly worn out with
+fatigue and fright and exhausted electricity, she was asleep. She then
+got up and wrung out the rain from portions of her own and Miss Emma's
+dress, and heaped fresh armfuls of moss upon the sleeper in an original
+attempt at the pack; then she proceeded to explore the neighborhood, to
+see if there were any exit in other directions from the terrors of the
+swamp.
+
+Stars began to struggle through and confuse their rays with the
+ravelled edges of the clouds. She groped along from tree to tree,
+looking constantly behind her at the clear, light opening of sky beneath
+which Miss Emma lay.
+
+Perhaps she had come farther than she knew; for all at once, in the
+dread stillness that nothing but the dripping dampness broke, a sound
+smote her like a pang. It was an innocent and simple sound enough, a
+man's voice, clear and sweet, though measured somewhat, and suppressed
+in volume, chanting a slow, sad hymn, that had yet a kind of rejoicing
+about it:--
+
+    "Oh, no longer bond in Egypt,
+    No longer bond in Egypt,
+    No longer bond in Egypt.
+      The Lord hath set him free!"
+
+It came from a hollow below her. Flor pushed aside the great, glistening
+leaves in silence, and looked tremblingly in. There were half-burnt
+brands on a broad stone, throwing out an uncertain red glimmer; there
+was an awning of plaited reeds reaching from bough to bough; there was
+an old man stretched upon the ground, and a stalwart man sitting beside
+him and chanting this song, as if it were a burial-service: for the old
+man was dead.
+
+Flor began to tremble again, with that instinctive animal antipathy to
+death and dissolution. But in an instant a rekindling gleam of the
+embers, hardly quenched, shot over the singer's face. In the same
+instant Flor shook before the secret she had learned, Sarp was a
+runaway, to be sure; and runaways ate little girls, she knew. But Flor,
+having lately encouraged incredulity, could hardly find it in her heart
+to believe that the fact of having stolen himself could have so utterly
+changed the old nature of Sarp, the kind butler, who always had a
+pleasant word for her when others had a cuff. Yet should she hail him?
+Ah, no, never! But then--Miss Emma! Her young mistress would die of
+starvation and the damp.
+
+"Sarp!" whispered Flor, huskily.
+
+The man started and sprang to his feet, alert and ready, waiting for his
+unseen enemy,--then half relapsed, thinking it might be nothing but the
+twitter of a bird.
+
+"It's me, Sarp."
+
+Who that was did not seem so plain to Sarp; he darted his swift glance
+in her direction, then at one step parted the bushes and dragged her
+through, as if it were game that he had trapped.
+
+"Oh, Sarp!" cried Flor, falling at his feet. "Doan' yer kill me now! I
+di'n' mean to ha' found yer. I's done los' in de swamp, wid"----
+
+But Flor thought better of that.
+
+The man raised her, but still held her out at arm's length, while he
+listened for further sound behind her.
+
+"Oh, jus' le' go, Sarp, an' I'll dance for you till I drap!" she cried.
+
+"Is it a time for dancing," he replied, "and the earth open for
+burying?"
+
+"Lors, Sarp!" cried Flor, shrinking from the shallow grave she had not
+seen, "how's I to know dat?"--and she gave herself safe distance.
+
+"Help me yere, then," said he.
+
+But Flor remained immovable, and Sarp was obliged to perform by himself
+the last offices for the old slave, who, living out his term of
+harassments and hungers, had grown gray and died in the swamps. He went
+at last and brought an armful of broken sweet-flowering boughs and
+spread them over the place.
+
+"Free among the dead," he said; then turned to Flor, who, having long
+since seen daylight through the darkness of her fears, proceeded glibly
+and volubly to pour out her troubles, on his beckoning her away, and to
+demand the help she had refused to render.
+
+"There's the boat," said Sarp, reflectively. "And the rain will float it
+'most anywheres to-night. But--come so far and troo so much to go back?"
+
+Flor flung up her face and held her head back proudly.
+
+"Yes, Sah! Doan' s'pose I'd be stealin' Mas'r Henry's niggers?"
+
+For, having meditated upon it an hour ago, she was able to repel the
+charge vigorously.
+
+"Go'n' to stay a slave all your life?"
+
+"All Miss Emma's life."
+
+"And--afterwards"----
+
+"Den I'll go back to de good brown earth wid her," said Flor, solving
+the problem promptly.--"I doan' see de boat."
+
+"Ah, she'll make as brown dust as you,--Miss Emma,--that's so! But the
+spirit, Lome!"
+
+"Sperit?" said Flor, looking uneasily over her shoulder with her
+twinkling eyes.
+
+"The part of you that doan' die, Lome."
+
+"I haan' nof'n ter do wid dat; dat 'longs to dem as made it; none o' my
+lookout; dono nof'n 'bout it, an' doan' want ter hear nof'n about it!"
+said Flor; for, reasoning on the old adage of a bird in the hand being
+worth two in the bush, she thought it more important just at present to
+save her body than to save her soul, admitting that she had one, and
+felt haste to be of more behoof than metaphysics.
+
+There was a moon up now, and Flor could see her companion's dark face
+above her, a mere mass of shade; it did not reassure her any to remember
+that her own was just as black.
+
+"Lome," said Sarp, setting his back against a tree like one determined
+to have attention, "never mind about the boat yet. You 've heard Aunt
+Zoe say how't the grace of the Lord was free?"
+
+"Yes, I's heerd her kerwhoopin'. I 's in a hurry, Sarp!"
+
+"But 's how't the man that refuses to accept it, when it's set before
+him, is done reckoned a sinner?"
+
+"S'pose I has?"--and in her impatience she began to dance outright.
+
+"It's jus' so with the present hour," he continued, not giving her time
+to interpose about escape again. "You have liberty offered you. If you
+refuses, how can you answer for it when your spirit 'pears afore the
+Judge? You choose him, and you choose righteousness, you chooses the
+chance to make yourself white in the Lord's eyes,--your spirit, Lome.
+Refuse, and you take sin and chains and darkness; you gets to deserve
+the place where they hab their share of fire and brimstone."
+
+"Take mine wid 'lasses," said Flor, who, though inwardly a trifle cowed,
+never meant to show it. "W'a' 's de use o' boderin' 'bout all dat ar,
+w'en dar 's Miss Emma a-cotchin' her deff, an' I 's jus' starved? Ef you
+'s go'n' to help us, Sarp"----
+
+"You don' know what chains means, chil'," said the imperturbable Sarp.
+"They're none the lighter because you can't see 'em. It a'n't jus' the
+power to sell your body and the work of your hands; it's the power to
+sell your soul! Ef Mas'r Henry hab de min',--ef Mas'r Henry have the
+mind, I say, to make you go wrong, can you help it while you 's a
+slave?"
+
+"'Taan' no fault o' mine ter be bad, ef I caan' help it. Come now," said
+Flor sullenly, seeing little hope of respite,--"should t'ink 'twas de
+Ol' Sarpint hisself!"
+
+"And 'taan' no virtue of yours to be good, ef you caan' help it; you 'd
+jus' stay put--jus' between--in de brown earth, as you said. You 'd
+never see that beautiful land beyond the grave, wid the river of light
+flowing troo der place, an' the people singing songs before the great
+white t'rone."
+
+"Tell me 'bout dat ar, Sarp," said Flor, forgetfully.
+
+"Dey 's all free there, Lome."
+
+"How was dis dey got dere? Could n' walk nowes, an' could n' fly"----
+
+"Haan' you seen into Miss Emma's prayer-book the angels with wings high
+and shining all from head to foot?"
+
+"Yes," said Flor,--"_Angels_."
+
+"And one of them you 'll be, Lome, ef you jus' choose,--ef, for
+instance, you choose liberty to-day."
+
+"Lors now, Sarp, I doan' b'lieb a word you say! Get out wid yer
+conundrums! Likely story, little black nigger like dis yere am be put
+into de groun' an' 'come out all so great an' w'ite an' shinin'-like!"
+
+"'For God shall deliver my soul from the power of the grave.'
+_'Shall.'_ That's a promise,--a promise in the Book. Di'n't yer eber
+plant a bean, Lome,--little hard black bean? And did a little hard black
+bean come up? No, but two wings of leaves, and a white blossom jus'
+ready to fly itself, and so sweet you could smell it acrost de field. So
+they plant your body in the earth, Lome"----
+
+"You go 'long, Sarp! Ef you plant beans, beans come up," said Flor,
+decisively.
+
+This direct and positive confutation rather nonplussed Sarp, his theory
+not being able at once to assimilate his fact, and he himself feeling,
+that, if he pushed the comparison farther, he would reach some such
+atrocity as that, if the white and shining flower produced in its season
+again the black bean from which it sprung, so the white and shining soul
+must once more clothe itself in the same sordid, unpurified body from
+which it first had sprung. He had a vague glimmer that perhaps his
+simile was too material, and that this very body was the clay in which
+the springing, germinating soul was planted to bloom out in heaven, but
+dared not pursue it unadvised, for fear of the quicksands into which it
+might betray him. He merely tied a knot in the thread of his discourse
+by answering,--
+
+"Jus' so. The bean planted, the bean comes up. You planted, and what
+follows?"
+
+"I come up," said Flor, consentingly, and quite as if he had got the
+better of the discussion.
+
+Then he rose, and Flor led the way back to Miss Emma,--having first,
+upon Sarp's serious hesitation, pledged herself for Miss Emma's secrecy
+and gratitude with tears and asseverations.
+
+In spite of the fact that he had never meant nor cared to see it again,
+there was something pleasant to Sarp in the face of the sleeper upturned
+in a moonbeam. He stooped and lifted her tenderly, and laid her head on
+his shoulder. The young girl opened her eyes vacantly, but heard Flor's
+voice beside her still,--
+
+"Doan' ye be scaret now, honey! Bress you, 's a true frien': he'll get
+us shet ob dis yere swamp mighty sudd'n!"
+
+And soothed by the dreamy motion, entirely fatigued, borne swiftly along
+in strong arms, under the low, waving boughs in the dim forest darkness,
+she was drowsed again with slumber, from which she woke only on being
+placed in the bottom of a skiff to turn over into a deeper dream than
+before. Flor nodded triumphantly to her companion, in the beginning,
+keeping pace beside him with short runs,--there could be no fear of
+babble about that of which one knew nothing,--and took her seat at last
+in the boat as he directed, while with a long pole he pushed out into
+the deeper water away from the shadow of the shore, and then went
+steering between the jags and gnarls, that, half protruding from the
+dark expanses, seemed the heads of strange and preternatural monsters.
+Now and then a current carried them; now and then their boatman sculled,
+now and then in shallower places poled along; sometimes he rested, and
+in the intervals took occasion to continue his missionary labor upon
+Flor,--his first object being to convince her she had a soul, and his
+second that in bondage every chance to save that soul alive was against
+her. Then he drew slight pictures of a different way of things, such as
+had solaced his own imagination, rude, but happy idyls of freedom: the
+small house, one's own; the red light in the window, a guiding star for
+weary feet at night coming home to comfort and smiles and cheer; no
+dark, haunting fear of a hand to reach between one and those loved
+dearest; no more branding like cattle, manhood and womanhood
+acknowledged, met with help and welcome and kind hands, cringing no
+more, but standing erect, drinking God's free sunshine, and growing
+nearer heaven. How much or how little of all his dream poor Sarp
+realized, if ever he reached the land of his desire at all, Heaven only
+knows. But Flor listened to him as if he recited some delightful
+fairy-tale,--charming indeed, but all as improbable as though one were
+telling her that black was white. Then, too, there was another dream of
+Sarp's,--the dream of a whole race loosening itself from the clinging
+clod. Flor got a glimmer of his meaning,--only a glimmer; it made her
+heart beat faster, but it was so grand she liked the other best.
+
+So, creeping through narrow creeks, now they skirted the edges of the
+long, low, flat morass,--now wound round the giant trunk of a fallen
+tree that nearly bridged the pool whose dark mantle they severed,--now
+pushed the boat's head up into a wall of weeds, that bent back and let
+it through the deep cut flooded by the rain, where the wild growth shut
+off everything but the high hollow of a luminous sky, with
+ribbon-grasses and long prickly leaves brushing across their faces from
+either side, here and there a sudden dwarf palmetto bristling all its
+bayonets against the peaceful night, and all the way singular uncouth
+shapes of vegetation, like conjurations of magic, cutting themselves out
+with minuteness upon the vast clear background so darkly and weirdly
+that the voyagers seemed to be sliding along the shores of some new,
+strange under-world,--now they got out, and, wading ankle-deep in plashy
+bog, drew the boat and its slumberer heavily after them,--now went
+slowly along, afloat again, on the broad lagoons, which the moon, from
+the deep far heaven, shot into silver reaches, and, with the trees, a
+phantom company of shadows, weeping in their veils along the farther
+shore, with all the quaint outlines of darkness, the gauzy wings that
+flitted by, the sweet, wild scents across whose lingering current they
+drifted, the broad silence disturbed only by the lazy wash of a seldom
+ripple, made their progress, through heavy gloom and vivid light, an
+enchanted journey.
+
+At length they lifted overhanging branches, and glided out upon a sheet
+of open water, a little lake fed by natural springs; and here, paddling
+over to the outlet, a tide took them down a swift brook to the river.
+Sarp stemmed this tide, made the opposite bank of the brook, and paused.
+
+"Have you chosen, Lome?" said he. "Will you go back with me, and so on
+to the Happy Land of Freedom? Not that I'll have my own liberty till
+I've earned it,--till I've won a country by fighting for it. But I'll
+see you safe; and if I'm spared, one day I'll come to you. Will you go?"
+
+Flor hung back a moment. "I'd like to go, Sarp, right well," said she,
+twisting up the corner of her little tatter of an apron. "But dar am
+Miss Emma, you see."
+
+"We can leave her on the bank here. She'll be all right when de day
+breaks, and fin' the house herself. There's as good as she without a
+roof this night."
+
+"She's neber been use' to it. She would n' know a step o' de way. Oh,
+no, Sarp! I 'longs to Miss Emma; she could n' do widout me. She'd jus'
+done cry her eyes out an' die,--'way here in de wood. No, Sarp, I mus'
+take her back. She's delicate, Miss Emma is. I'd like to go right well,
+Sarp,--'ta'n't much ob a 'sapp'intment,--I's use' to 'em,--I'd like for
+to go wid you."
+
+Lingering, irresolute, she stood up in the swaying skiff, keeping her
+balance as if she were dancing; then, the motion, perhaps, throwing her
+back into her old identity, she sprang to the shore like a cat. Sarp
+laid Miss Emma beside her, and then shot away, back over all the
+desolate reaches and lonely shining pools; and Flor, with a little wail
+of despair, hid her face on the ground, that her weakened and bewildered
+little mistress might not see the flood of tears that wet the grass
+beneath it.
+
+It was between two and three o'clock in the morning, when, chilled,
+draggled, and dripping wet, they reached the house. Lights were moving
+everywhere about it: no one had slept there that night. There was a
+great shout from high and low as the two forlorn little objects crept
+into the ray. Miss Emma was met with severe reproaches, afterwards with
+tears and embraces; and cordial drinks and hot flannels were made ready
+for her in a trice. As for Flor, she was warmed after another
+fashion,--being sent off for punishment; and, in spite of the
+implorations of Miss Emma and the interference of Miss Agatha, the order
+was executed. It was the first time she had ever received such reward of
+merit in form; and though it was a slight affair, after all, the hurt
+and wrong rankled for weeks, and, instead of the gay, dancing imp of
+former days, henceforth a silent, sullen shadow slipped about and
+haunted all the dark places of the house.
+
+Mas'r Henry, being a native of Charleston, was also a gentleman of
+culture, and fond of the fine arts to some extent. Indeed, looking at it
+in a poetical view, the feudality of slavery, even more than the
+inevitable relation of property, was his strong tie to the institution.
+He had a contempt for modern progress so deeply at the root of his
+opinions that he was only half aware of it; and any impossible scheme to
+restore the political condition of what we call the Dark Ages, and
+retain the comforts of the present one, would have found in him a hearty
+advocate. One of his favorite books was a little green-covered volume,
+printed on coarse paper, and smelling of the sea which it had crossed: a
+book that seemed to bring one period of those past centuries up like a
+pageant,--so vividly, with all the flying dust of their struggle in the
+sunbeam before him, did its opulent vitality reproduce, in their
+splendors and their sins, the actual presences of those dead men and
+women, now more unreal substance than the dust of their shrouds. He
+liked to carry this mediaeval Iliad round with him, and, taking it out
+at propitious places, go jotting his pencil down the page. He had heard
+it called an incomprehensible puzzle of poetry; it gave him pleasure,
+then, to unriddle and proclaim it plain as print. He was thus
+delectating himself one day, while Flor, still in her phase of
+moodiness, stood behind Miss Agatha's chair; and, the passage pleasing
+him, he read it aloud to Miss Agatha, whom, in the absence of his son,
+her husband, he was wont to consider his opponent in the abstract,
+however dear and precious in the concrete.
+
+    "As, shall I say, some Ethiop, past pursuit
+    Of all enslavers, dips a shackled foot,
+    Burnt to the blood, into the drowsy, black,
+    Enormous watercourse which guides him back
+    To his own tribe again, where he is king;
+    And laughs, because he guesses, numbering
+    The yellower poison-wattles on the pouch
+    Of the first lizard wrested from its couch
+    Under the slime, (whose skin, the while, he strips
+    To cure his nostril with, and festered lip,
+    And eyeballs bloodshot through the desert blast,)
+    That he has reached its boundary, at last
+    May breathe; thinks o'er enchantments of the South,
+    Sovereign to plague his enemies, their mouth,
+    Eyes, nails, and hair; but, these enchantments tried
+    In fancy, puts them soberly aside
+    For truth, projects a cool return with friends,
+    The likelihood of winning mere amends
+    Erelong; thinks that, takes comfort silently,
+    Then from the river's brink his wrongs and he,
+    Hugging revenge close to their hearts, are soon
+    Offstriding to the Mountains of the Moon."
+
+Flor stood listening, with eyes that shone strangely out of the gloom of
+her face.
+
+"Well, child," said her master to Miss Agatha, "how does that little
+monodrame strike you? Which do you find preferable, tell me, Ashantee at
+home or Ashantee abroad? civilized or barbarized? the institution or the
+savage? Eh, Blossom," turning to Flor, "what do you think of the
+condition of that ancestor of yours?"
+
+"Mas'r Henry," said Flor, gravely, "he was free."
+
+"Eh? Free? What! are you bitten, too?"
+
+And Mas'r Henry laughed at the thought, and pictured to himself his
+dancer dancing off altogether, like the swamp-fire she was. Then his
+tone changed.
+
+"Flor," said he, sternly, "who has been talking to you lately? Do you
+know, Agatha? I have seen this for some time. I must learn what one
+among the hands it is that in these times dares breed disaffection."
+
+"No one's talked to me, Sah," said Flor,--"no one onter der place."
+
+"Some one off of it, then."
+
+"Mas'r Henry, I's been havin' my own t'oughts. Mas'r knows I could n'
+lebe Miss Emma nowes. Could n' tief her property nowes. But ef Mas'r
+Henry 'd on'y jus' 'sider an' ask li'l' Missy for to make dis chil' a
+presen' ob myse'f"----
+
+"So that's what it means!" And Mas'r Henry smiled a moment at the
+ludicrous idea presented to him.
+
+"Flor," said he then, abruptly, "I have never heard the whole of that
+night in the swamp. It must be told."
+
+"Lors, Sah! So long ago, I's done forgot it!"
+
+"You may have till to-morrow morning to quicken your memory."
+
+"Haan' nof'n' more to 'member, Mas'r."
+
+"You heard me. You have your choice to repeat it either now or to-morrow
+morning."
+
+"Could n' make suf'n', whar nof'n' was. Could n' tink o' nof'n' all ter
+once. Could n' tell nof'n' at all in a hurry," said Flor, with a
+twinkle. "Guess I'll take tell de mornin', any-wes, Mas'r." And she was
+off.
+
+And Mas'r Henry went, back to his book,--the watcher nodding on his
+spear,--and all the stormy scenes he expected soon to realize in his own
+life, when the sword of conscription had numbered his old head with the
+others.
+
+Flor went out from the presence defiant, as became a rebel.
+
+Although that special mode of martyrdom was not proper to the
+plantation, and Flor felt in herself few particles of the stuff of which
+martyrs are made, she was determined, that, as to telling so much as
+that Sarp was still in the swamp, let alone betraying the way to his
+late habitat,--even were she able,--she never would do it, though burned
+at the stake. The determination had a dark look; nevertheless, two
+glimmers lighted it: one was the hope, in a mistrust of her own
+strength, that Sarp had already gone; the other was a perception that
+the best way to keep Sarp's secret was to make off with it. She began to
+question what authority Mas'r Henry had to demand this secret from her;
+she answered in her own mind, that he had no authority at all;--then she
+was doubly determined that he should not have it. She had heard talk of
+chivalry at table and among guests; she had half a comprehension of what
+it meant; she wondered if this were not a case in point,--if it were,
+after all, the color, and not the sex, that weighed. That aroused her
+indignation, aroused also a feeling of race: she would not have changed
+color that moment with the fairest Circassian of a harem, could the
+white slave have appeared in all the dazzle of her beauty.--Mas'r Henry
+had called that man, of whom he read aloud to-day, her ancestor. She
+knew what that was, for she had heard Miss Emma boast of her
+progenitors. But he was free; then it followed that she was not a slave
+by nature, only by vicious force of circumstance. Mas'r Henry had no
+right to her whatever; instead of her stealing herself, he was the thief
+who retained her against her will. What could be the name of the country
+where that man had lived? It was somewhere a long way from this place,
+down the river, perhaps beyond the sea;--there were others there, then,
+still, most likely. Flor had an idea that among them she might be a
+superior, possibly received with welcome, invested with honors;--she
+lingered over the pleasant vision. But how was one ever to find the
+spot? Ah, that book of Mas'r Henry's would tell, if she could but take
+it away to those kind people Sarp had told of. So she meditated awhile
+on the curious travels with Sordello for a guide-book, till old
+affections smote her for having thought of taking the thing, when "Mas'r
+Henry set so by it," and she put the vision aside, endeavoring to recall
+in its place all that Sarp had told her of the North. She realized then,
+personally, what a wide world it was. Why should she stay shut in this
+one point upon it all: a hill and the fir wood behind her; marshes on
+this side; woods again on the other; low hills far away before her; out
+of them all, the dark torrent of the river showing the swift way to
+freedom and the great sea? She drew in a full breath, as if close air
+oppressed her.--A bird flew over her then, high above her head,
+careering in fickle circles, and at length sailing down out of sight far
+into other heavens. Flor watched him bitterly; she comprehended Zoe's
+scorn of her past content;--if only she had wings to spread! But Sarp
+had told her, that, if she went away, she would one day have wings. None
+of Sarp's other arguments weighed a doit,--but wings to roam with over
+this beautiful world! The liberty of vagabondage! She watched the clouds
+chasing one another through the sunny heaven, watched their shadows
+chasing along the fields and hills below; her heart burned that
+everything in the world should be more free than she herself. She felt
+the wind fanning over her on its way, she took the rich odors that it
+brought, she looked after the flower-petal that fluttered away with it,
+she saw the strong sunshine penetrating among the shadows of a jungly
+spot and catching a thousand points of color in the gloom, she
+recognized the constant fluent interchange among all the atoms of the
+universe;--why was she alone, capable of flight, chained to one
+spot?--She gazed around her at the squalor and the want, the brutish
+shapes and faces, her own no better, at the narrow huts; thought of the
+dull routine of work never to enrich herself, the possibility of
+purchase and cruelty;--she sprung to her feet, all her blood boiling; it
+seemed out of the question for her to endure it another moment.--Mas'r
+Henry had told her once that he could make his fortune with her dancing,
+if he chose; she stood as much in need of a fortune as Mas'r Henry,--why
+not make it for herself? why not be off and away, her own mistress,
+earning and eating her own bread, sending some day for Zoe, finding Sarp
+in those far-off happy latitudes?--It occurred to her, like a discovery
+of her own, that, doing the work she was bidden, taking the food she was
+given, whipped at will, and bought and sold, she was no better than one
+among the cattle of the place;--the sudden sense of degradation made
+even her dark cheek burn. She laid a hand down on the earth, her great
+Teraph, to see if it were possible it could still be warm and such a
+wrong done to her its child. Then, all at once, she understood that wood
+and river were open to her fugitive feet, and if she stayed longer in
+slavery, it was the fault of no one but herself.--She stood up, for some
+one called her; she obeyed the call with alacrity, for she found it in
+her power to do so or not as she chose. She felt taller as she stepped
+along, and held up her head with the dignity of personality. She
+acknowledged, perhaps, that she was no equal of Miss Emma's,--that the
+creative hand, making its first essay on her, rounded its complete work
+in Miss Emma; but she declared herself now no mere offshoot of the
+sod,--she was a human being, a being of beating pulses and affections,
+and something within her, stifled here, longing to soar and away.
+
+It was dark before Flor had ceased her novel course of thinking, pursued
+through all her little tasks,--beautiful star-lighted dark, full of
+broken breezes, soft and warm, and loaded with passionate spices and
+flower-breaths; she was alone again, under the shadows of the trees,
+entirely surrendered to her whirling fancies. In these few hours she had
+lived to the effect of years. She was neither hungry nor tired; she was
+conscious of but a single thing,--her whole being seemed effervescing
+into one wild longing after liberty. It was not that she could no longer
+brook control and be at the beck of each; it was a natural instinct,
+awakened at last in all the strength of maturity, that would not let her
+breathe another breath in peace unless it were her own,--that made her
+feel as though her chains were chafing into the bone,--that taught her
+the unutterable vileness and loathliness of bonds,--that convicted her,
+in being a slave, of being something foul upon the fair face of
+creation. She sat casting about for ways of escape. It was absurd to
+think she could again blunder on that secure retreat of the swamp before
+being overtaken; no boats ever passed along down the foaming river; if
+she were some little mole to hide and burrow in the ground till danger
+were over,--but no, she would rather front fear and ruin than lose one
+iota of her newly recognized identity. But there was no other path of
+safety; she clutched the ground with both hands in her powerlessness; in
+all the heaven and earth there seemed to be nothing to help her.
+
+So at last Flor rose; since she could not get away, she must stay; as
+for the next day's punishment, she could laugh at it,--it was not its
+weight, but its wickedness, that troubled her; but escape, some time,
+she would. Lying in wait for method, ambushed for opportunity, it would
+go hard, if all failed. Of what value would life be then? she could but
+throw that after. So at some time, that was certain, she would
+go,--when, it was idle to say; it might be years before affairs were
+more propitious than now,--but then, at last, one day, the place that
+had known her should know her no more. Nevertheless, despite all this
+will and resolution, the heart of the child had sunk like a plummet at
+thought of leaving everything, at fear of future fortune; this
+deferring, after all, was half like respite.
+
+Flor drew near the out-door fire, where Zoe and one or two others busied
+themselves. Something excited them extremely, it was plain to see and
+hear. Flor, beyond the circle of the light, strained her ears to listen.
+It was only a crumb of comfort that she obtained, but one of those
+miraculous crumbs to which there are twelve baskets of fragments: the
+Linkum gunboats were down at the mouth of the river. Oh! heaven a boat's
+length off! A day and night's drifting and rowing; then climbing the
+side slaves, treading the deck freemen,--the shackles fallen, the hands
+loosened, the soul saved!
+
+But the boat? There was not such a thing along these banks. Improvise
+one. That was not possible. Flor listened, and the wild gasps of hope
+died out again into the dulness of despair. Some other time,--not this.
+As she stood still, idly and hopelessly hearkening to the mutter of the
+old women, with the patches of flickering fire-light falling on their
+faces in strange play and revelation, there stole upon her ear a sweeter
+and distincter sound, the voice of Miss Agatha, as, leaning out upon the
+night, she sang a plaint that consorted with her melancholy mood,
+learned in her Northern home in happier hours, without a thought of the
+moment of misery that might make it real.
+
+    Sooner or later the storms shall beat
+    Over my slumber from head to feet;
+    Sooner or later the winds shall rave
+    In the long grass above my grave.
+
+    I shall not heed them where I lie,
+    Nothing their sound shall signify,
+    Nothing the headstone's fret of rain,
+    Nothing to me the dark day's pain.
+
+    Sooner or later the sun shall shine
+    With tender warmth on that mound of mine;
+    Sooner or later, in summer air,
+    Clover and violet blossom there.
+
+    I shall not feel in that deep-laid rest
+    The sheeted light fall over my breast,
+    Nor ever note in those hidden hours
+    The wind-blown breath of the tossing flowers.
+
+    Sooner or later the stainless snows
+    Shall add their hush to my mute repose;
+    Sooner or later shall slant and shift
+    And heap my bed with their dazzling drift.
+
+    Chill though that frozen pall shall seem,
+    Its touch no colder can make the dream
+    That recks not the sweet and sacred dread
+    Shrouding the city of the dead.
+
+    Sooner or later the bee shall come
+    And fill the noon with his golden hum;
+    Sooner or later on half-paused wing
+    The blue-bird's warble about me ring,--
+
+    Ring and chirrup and whistle with glee,
+    Nothing his music means to me,
+    None of these beautiful things shall know
+    How soundly their lover sleeps below.
+
+    Sooner or later, far out in the night,
+    The stars shall over me wing their flight;
+    Sooner or later my darkling dews
+    Catch the white spark in their silent ooze.
+
+    Never a ray shall part the gloom
+    That wraps me round in the kindly tomb;
+    Peace shall be perfect for lip and brow
+    Sooner or later,--oh, why not now!
+
+Little of this wobegone song touched Flor even enough to let her know
+there was some one in the world more wretched than herself. The last
+word, the last phrase, rang in her ears like a command,--now, why not
+now?--waiting for times and chances, hesitating, delaying, since go she
+must,--then why not now? What more did she need than a board and two
+sticks? Here they were in plenty. And with that, a bright thought, a
+fortunate memory,--the old abandoned scow! And if, after all, she
+failed, and went to watery death, did not the singer tell in how little
+time all would be quiet and oblivious once again? Oh, why not now?
+
+Perhaps Flor would never have been entirely subjected to this state of
+mind but for an injury that she had suffered. Miss Emma had been
+rendered ill by the night's exposure in the swamp. In consequence of her
+complicity in this crime, Flor had been excluded from her young
+mistress's room during her indisposition, and ever since had not only
+been deprived of her companionship, but had not even been allowed to
+look upon her from a distance. A single week of that made life a desert.
+Too proud to complain, Flor saw in this the future, and so recognized,
+it may be, that it would be easy to part from the place, having already
+parted with Miss Emma. She drew nearer to the group now, and stood there
+long, while they wondered at her, gazing into the fire, her head fallen
+upon her breast. There was only one thing more to do: her little
+squirrel; nothing but her front of battle had kept it safe this many a
+day; were she once gone, it would be at the mercy of the first gridiron.
+Nobody saw the tears, in the dark and the distance, fast falling over
+the tiny sacrifice; but the cook might have guessed at them, when Flor
+brought her last offering, and begged that it might be prepared and
+taken in to Miss Emma.
+
+How many things there were to do that evening! One wanted water, and
+another wanted towels, and a third wanted everything there was to want.
+Last of all, little Pluto came running with his unkindled torch,--Mas'r
+Henry wanted dancing.
+
+Flor rummaged for her castanets, her tambourine, her ankle-rings,--they
+had all been thrown hither and thither,--and at length, as Pluto's torch
+flared up, ran tinkling along the turf, into the glow; and her voice
+broke, as she danced, into high, clear singing, triumphant singing, that
+welled up to the very sky, and made the air echo with sweetness. As she
+sang, all her slender form swayed to the tune, posturing, gesturing,
+bending now, now almost soaring, while, falling in showers of twinkling
+steps, her fleet feet seemed to weave their way on air. What ailed the
+girl? all asked;--such a play of emotion of mingled sorrow and ecstasy,
+never before had been interpreted by measure; so a disembodied spirit
+might have danced, and her dusky hue, the strange glancing lights thrown
+upon her here and there by the torch, going and coming and glittering at
+pleasure, made her appear like a shadow disporting before them. At
+length and slowly, note by note, with wild lingering turns to which the
+movement languished, her tone fell from its lofty jubilance to a happy
+flute-like humming; she waved her arms in the mimic tenderness of
+repeated and passionate farewells; then, still humming, faint and low
+and sweet, tripped off again, through the glow, along the turf, into the
+shadow, and out of sight; and it seemed to the beholders as if a
+fountain of gladness had gushed from the sod, and, playing in the light
+a moment, had run away down to join the river and the breaking sea.
+
+Mas'r Henry called after Flor to throw her a penny; but she failed to
+reappear, and he tossed it to Pluto instead, and forgot about her.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So, bailed out and stuffed with marsh-grass in its crazy cracks, the old
+scow was afloat, the rope was cut, and by midnight it went drifting down
+the river. Waist-deep in shoal water, its appropriator had dragged it
+round inside the channel's ledge of rocks, with their foam and
+commotion, to the somewhat more placid flow below, and now it shot away
+over the smooth, slippery surface of the stream, that gave back
+reflections of the starbeams like a polished mirror.
+
+Terrified by the course along the rapid river, the little creature
+crouched in the bottom of the scow, now breathless as it sped along the
+slope, now catching at the edge as in some chance eddy or flow it
+swirled from side to side, or, spinning quite round, went down the other
+way. But by-and-by gathering courage, she took her station, kneeling
+where with the long poles, previously provided, she could best direct
+her galley and avoid the dangers of a castaway. Peering this way and
+that through the darkness, carried along without labor, spying countless
+dangers where none existed, passing safely by them all, coming into a
+strange region of the river, she began to feel the exhilaration of
+venturous voyagers close upon unknown shores; the rush of the river and
+the rustle of the forest were all the sounds she heard; she was speeding
+alone through the darks of space to find another world. But, with time,
+a more material sensation called her back,--her feet were wet. What if
+the scow should founder! She flew to the old sun-dried gourd, and bailed
+away again till her arms were tired. When she dared leave the gourd, she
+was more calmly floating along and piercing an avenue of mighty gloom;
+the river-banks had reared themselves two walls of stone, and over them
+a hanging forest showed the heavens only like a scarf of stars caught
+upon its tree-tops and shaking in the wind. The deep loneliness made
+Flor tremble; the water that upbuoyed her was blackness itself; the way
+before her was impenetrable; far up above her opened that rent of
+sky,--so far, that she, a little dark waif among such tremendous
+shadows, was all unguessed by any guardian eye.
+
+But not for heaven itself bodily before her would she have turned about,
+she who was all but free. The thought of that rose in her heart like
+strong wings beating onward;--feverishly she followed.
+
+Flor perceived now that the old scow was being borne along with a
+strong, steady-motion, unlike its first fitful drift; it brought her
+heart to her throat,--for just so, it seemed to her, would a torrent set
+that was hastening to plunge over the side of the earth. She remembered,
+with a start of cold horror, Zoe's dim tradition of a fall far off in
+the river. She had never seen one, but Zoe had stamped its terrors
+deeply. Still down in the gloom itself she could see nothing but the
+slowly lightening sky overhead, the drowning stars, the rosy flush upon
+the dark old tips feathering against a dewy grayness that was like
+powdered light. But gradually she heard what conquered all necessity of
+seeing,--heard a continuous murmurous sound that filled all the air and
+grew to be a sullen roar. It seemed like the dread murmur from the world
+beyond the grave, the roar in earthly ears of that awful silence. Flor's
+quick senses were not long at fault. She seized her poles, and with all
+her might endeavored to push in towards the side and out of the main
+channel. Straws would have availed nearly as much; far faster than she
+went in shore she drove down stream. It was getting to be morning
+twilight all below; a soft, damp wind was blowing in her face; in the
+distance she could see, like the changing outline of a phantom, a low
+cloud of mist, wavering now on this side, now on that, but forever
+rising and falling and hovering before her. She knew what it was. If she
+could only bring her boat to that bank,--precipice though it was,--there
+must be some broken piece to catch by! She toiled with all her puny
+strength, and the great stream laughed at her and roared on. Suddenly,
+what her wildest efforts failed to do, the river did itself,--dividing
+into twenty currents for its plunge, some one of the eddies caught the
+old scow in its teeth and sent it whirling along the inmost current of
+all, close upon the shore. The rock, whose cleft the river had
+primevally chosen, was here more broken than above; various edges
+protruded maddeningly as Flor skimmed by almost within reach. Twice she
+plucked at them and missed. One flat shelf, over which the thin water
+slipped like a sheet of molten glass, remained and caught her eye; she
+was no longer cold or stiff with terror, but frantic to save herself; it
+was the only chance, the last; shooting by, she sprang forward, pole in
+hand, touched it, fell, caught a ledge with her hands while the fierce
+flow of the water lifted her off her feet, scrambled up breathlessly and
+was safe, while the scow swept past, two flashing furlongs, poised a few
+moments after on the brink of the fall, went majestically over, and came
+up to the surface below in pieces.
+
+Flor wrung her hands in dismay. She had not understood her situation
+before. There was no escape now, it seemed,--not even to return. Nothing
+was possible save starving to death on this ledge,--and after that, the
+vultures. She sat there for a little while in a kind of stupor. She saw
+the light falling slowly down, as it had fallen millions of mornings
+before, and bringing out all blue and purple shadows on the wet old
+rock; she saw the current ever hurrying by to join the tumult of the
+cataract; she heard the deep, sweet music of the waters like a noisy
+dream in her ears. With the shock of her wreck coming at the instant
+when she fancied herself so swiftly and securely speeding on towards
+safety and freedom, she felt indifferent to all succeeding fate. What if
+she did die? who was she? what was she? nothing but an atom. What odds,
+after all? The solution of her soliloquy was, that, before the first ray
+of sunshine reached down and smote the dark torrent into glancing
+emerald, she began to feel ravenously hungry, and found it a great deal
+of odds, after all. She rose to her feet, grasping cautiously at the
+slippery rock, and searched about her. There was another ledge close at
+hand, corresponding to the one on which she stood; she crept forward and
+transferred herself, with an infinitude of tremors, from this to that;
+there was a foothold just beyond; she gained it. Up and down and all
+along there were other projections, just enough for a hand, a foot: a
+wet and terrible pathway; to follow it might be death, to neglect it
+certainly was. What had she danced for all her days, if it had not made
+her sure and nimble footed? Under her the foam leaped up, the spectral
+mist crept like an icy breath, the spray sprinkled all about her,
+swinging herself along from ledge to ledge, from jag to jag, like a
+spider on a viewless thread. Now she hung just above the fall, looking
+down and longing to leap, with nothing but a shining laurel-branch
+between her and the boiling pits below; now, at last, a green hillside
+sloped to the water's edge, sparkling across all its solitude with ten
+thousand drops of dew, a broad, blue morning heaven bent and shone
+overhead, and having raced the river in the moment's light-heartedness
+of glee at her good hap, she sat some rods below, looking up at the fall
+and dipping her bleeding and blistered feet in and out of the cool and
+rapid-running river.
+
+What was there now to do? To go back,--to go back,--not if she were torn
+by lions! That was as impossible for her as to reverse a fiat of
+creation. God had said to her,--"Let there be light." How could she,
+then, return to darkness? To keep along on land,--it might be weeks
+before she reached the quarter of the gunboats,--she would be seized as
+a stray, and lodged in jail, and sold for whom it might concern. But
+with her scow gone to pieces, what other thing was there to do? So she
+sat looking up at the spurting cascades, with their horns of silver
+leaping into the light, and all the clear brown and beryl rush of their
+crystalline waters, and longing for her scow. If she had so much as the
+bit of bark on which the squirrels crossed the river! She looked again
+about her for relief. The rainbow at the foot of all the falls, in its
+luminous, steady arch, seemed a bridge solid enough for even her little
+black feet, had one side of the stream been any surer haven than the
+other; and as she sought out its bases, her eye lighted on something
+curiously like a weed swaying up and down. She picked her way to it, and
+found it wedged where she could loosen it,--two planks still nailed to a
+stout crossbar. She floated it, and held it fast a moment. What if she
+trusted to it,--with neither sail nor rudder, as before, but now with
+neither oar nor pole? On shore, for her there were only ravening wolves;
+waterfalls were no worse than they, and perhaps there were no more
+waterfalls. She stepped gingerly upon the fragment, seated and balanced
+herself, paddled with her two hands, and thought to slip away. In spite
+of everything, a kind of exultation bubbled up within her,--she felt as
+if she were defying Destiny itself.
+
+When, however, Flor intrusted herself to the stream, the stream received
+the trust and seemed inclined to keep it; for there she stayed: the
+planks tilted up and down, the water washed over her, but there were the
+falls at nearly the same distance as when she embarked, and there they
+stayed as well. The water, too, was no more fresh and sweet, but had a
+salt and brackish taste. The sun was nearly overhead, and she was in an
+agony of apprehension before she saw the falls slide slowly back, and in
+one of a fresh succession of wonders, understanding nothing of it, she
+found herself, with a strange sucking heave under her, falling on the
+ebb-tide as before she had fallen on the mountain-current.
+
+Gentle undulations of friendly hills seemed now to creep by; and through
+their openings she caught glimpses of cotton-fields. There was a wicked
+relish in her thoughts, as she pictured the dusky laborers at work
+there, and she gliding by unseen in the idle sunshine. She passed again
+between high banks of red earth, scored by land-slides, with springs
+oozing out half-way up, and now and then clad in a mantle of vivid
+growth and color,--a thicket of blossoming pomegranate darkening on a
+sunburst of creamy dogwood, or a wild fig-tree sending its roots down to
+drink, with a sweet-scented and gorgeous epiphyte weaving a flowery
+enchantment about-them, and making the whole atmosphere reel with
+richness. But all this verdant beauty, the lush luxuriance of
+grape-vines, of dark myrtle-masses, of swinging curtains of convolvuli
+almost brushing her head as she floated by,--nothing of this was new to
+Flor, nothing precious; she could have given all the beauty of earth and
+heaven for a crust of bread just then. She thought of the plantation
+with a dry sob, but would not turn her face. She could not move much,
+indeed, her position was so ticklish; hardy wretch as she was, she had
+already become faint and famished: she contrived, resting her arms on
+the crossbar, at last, to lay her head upon them; and thus lying,
+perpetually bathed by the soft, warm dip and rise of the water, the pain
+of hunger left her, and she saw the world waft by like a dream.
+
+Slowly the evening began to fall. Flor marked the bright waters dim and
+put on a bloomy purple along which rosy and golden shadows wandered and
+mingled, stars looked timidly up from beneath her, and just over her
+shoulder, as if all the daylight left had gathered in that one little
+curved line, lay the suspicion of the tenderest new moon, like some
+boatman of the skies essaying to encourage her with his apparition as he
+floated lightly down the west. Flor paid heed to the spectacle in its
+splendid quiet but briefly; her eyes were fixed on a great trail of
+passion-flowers that blew out a gale of sweetness from their broad blue
+disks. She had reached that hanging branch, lavishly blossoming here on
+the wilderness, and had hung upon the tide beneath it for a while, till
+she found herself gently moving back again; and now she swung slightly
+to and fro, neither making nor losing headway, and, fond of such
+sensuous delights, half content to lie thus and do nothing but breathe
+the delicious odor stealing towards her, and resting in broad airy
+swaths, it seemed, upon the bosom of the stream around her. By-and-by,
+when the great blue star, that last night at the zenith seemed to
+suspend all the tented drapery of the sky, hung there large and lovely
+again, Flor, gazing up at it with a confused sense of passion-flowers in
+heaven, half woke to find herself sliding down stream at last in
+earnest. Her brain was very light and giddy; all her powers of
+perception were momentarily heightened; she took notice of her seesawing
+upon the ebb and flow, and understood that washing up and down the
+shores, a mere piece of driftwood, life would long have left her ere she
+attained the river's mouth, if she were not stranded by the way. The
+branch of a cedar-tree came dallying by with that, brought down from
+above the falls; she half rose, and caught at it, and fell back, but she
+kept hold of it by just a twig, and, fatigued with the exertion, drowsed
+away awhile. Waking again, after a little, her fingers still fast upon
+it, she drew it over, fixed it upright as she could, and spread her
+petticoat about it at the risk of utter capsize. The soft sweet wind
+beat against the sail as happily as if it had been Cleopatra's weft of
+purple silk, and carried her on, while she lay back, one arm around her
+jury-mast, and half indifferently unconscious again. She had meant, on
+reaching the gunboats,--ah, inconceivable bliss!--to win her way with
+her feet; with willowy graces and eloquent pantomime, to have danced
+along the deck and into favor trippingly: now, if she should have
+strength enough left to fall on her knees, it would be strange. She
+clung to the crossbar in a little while from blind habit; the rest of
+her body seemed light and powerless. She was neither asleep nor awake
+now, suffering nothing save occasionally a wild flutter of hope which
+was joy and anguish together; but all things began mingling in her mind
+in a species of delirium while she gave them attention, afterwards slid
+by blank of all meaning but beauty. The lofty cypresses on the edge
+above loomed into obelisks, and stood like shafts of ebony against a
+glow of sunrise that stirred down deep in the night; dew-clouds, it
+seemed, hung on them, and lifted and lowered when their veils of moss
+waved here and there; the glistering laurel-leaves shivered in a network
+of light and shade like imprisoned spirits troubling to be free; but
+where the great magnolias stood were massed the white wings of angels
+fanning forth fragrances untold and heavenly, and one by one slowly
+revealing themselves in the dawn of another day. It seemed as if great
+and awful spirits must be leading this little being into light and
+freedom.
+
+So the river lapsed along, and the sun blazed, and a torture of thirst
+came and went as it had come and gone before; and sometimes swiftly,
+sometimes slowly, the veering winds and the pendulous tides carried the
+wreck and its burden along. Flor had planned, before she started, that
+all her progress should be made by night; by day she would haul up among
+the tall rushes or under the lee of some stump or rock, and so escape
+strange sail and spying eyes. But there had been no need of this, for no
+other boat had passed up or down the river since she sailed. If there
+had, she could no more have feared it. She stole by a high deserted
+garden, the paling broken half away. A tardy almond-tree was stirring
+its tower of bloom in the sunshine up there; oranges were reddening on
+an overhanging bough, whose wreaths of snowy sweetness made the air a
+passionate delight; a luscious fruit dropped, with all its royal gloss,
+into the river beside her, and she could not put out a hand to catch it.
+She saw now all that passed, but no longer with any afterthoughts of
+reference to herself; so sights might slip across the retina of a dead
+man's eye; her identity seemed fading from her, as from some substance
+on the point of dissolution into the wide universe. She felt like one
+who, under an aesthetic influence, seems to himself careering through
+mid-air, conscious only of motion and vanishing forms. Cultured uplands
+and thick woods peopled with melodies all stole by, mere picture; the
+long snake of the river crept through green meadowy shores haunted by
+the cluck and clutter of the marsh-hen; from a bluff of the bank broke a
+blaze of fire and a yelping roar, and something slapped and skipped
+along the water,--a ball from a Rebel battery to bring the strange craft
+to,--others followed and danced like demons through the hissing tide
+that rocked under her and plunged up and down, tilting and turning and
+half drowning the wreck. Flor looked at them all with wide eyes, at the
+battery and at the bluff, and went by without any more sensation than
+that dazed quiet in which, at the time, she would have gone down to
+death with the soft waters laying their warm weight on her head, not
+even thanking Fortune that in giving her a slippery plank gave her
+something to elude either canister or catapult. Occasionally she felt a
+pain, a strange parched pain; it burned awhile, and left her once more
+oblivious. She slept a little, by fits and starts; sometimes the very
+stillness stirred her. She listened and heard the turtle plumping down
+into the stream, now and then the little fishes leaping and plashing,
+the eels slipping in and out among the reeds and sedges at the side; far
+away in the broad marshes, that, bathed in dim vapor, now lay all about
+her, the cry of a bittern boomed; she saw a pair of herons flapping
+inland over the gray swell of the water; there were some great purple
+phantoms, darkly imagined monsters; looming near at hand:--all the
+phantasmagoria drifted by,--and then, caught in the currents playing
+forever by noon or night round the low edges of sand-bars and islets,
+she was sweeping out to sea like chaff.
+
+The sun was going down, a mere redness in the curdling fleecy haze; the
+weltering seas rose and fell in broad sheets of burnished silver, the
+monotone of their music followed them, a cool salt wind blew over them
+and freshened them for storm. Flor rose on her arm and looked back,--the
+breeze roused her; pain and fear and hope rose with her and looked back
+too. Eager, feverish, fierce, recollecting and desiring and imprecating,
+her dry lips parted for a shriek that the dryer throat had at first no
+power to utter. In such wild longing pangs it seemed her heart would
+burst as it beat. The low land, the great gunboats, all were receding,
+and she was washing out to sea, a weed.--Well, then, wash!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The stem of the boat rose lightly, riding over the rollers; the sturdy
+arms kept flashing stroke; the great gulfs gaped for a life, no matter
+whose; night would darken down on them soon;--pull with a will!
+
+They heard her voice as they drew near: she had found it again, singing,
+as the swan sings his death-song, loud and clear,--singing to herself
+some song of her old happy dancing-days, while the spray powdered over
+her and one broad wave lifted and tossed her on to the next,--no note of
+sorrow in the song, and no regret.
+
+It was but brief delay beside her; then they pulled back, the wind
+piping behind them,--nearer to that purple cloud with its black plume of
+smoke, up the side and over; all the white faces crowding round her,
+pallid blots; one dark face smiling on her like Sarp's; friendship and
+succor everywhere about her; and over her, blowing out broadly upon the
+stormy wind, that flag whose starry shadow nowhere shelters a slave.
+
+
+
+
+ABRAHAM LINCOLN.
+
+SUMMER, 1865.
+
+
+    Dead is the roll of the drums,
+      And the distant thunders die,
+      They fade in the far-off sky;
+    And a lovely summer comes,
+      Like the smile of Him on high.
+
+    Lulled the storm and the onset.
+      Earth lies in a sunny swoon;
+      Stiller splendor of noon,
+    Softer glory of sunset,
+      Milder starlight and moon!
+
+    For the kindly Seasons love us;
+      They smile over trench and clod,
+    (Where we left the bravest of us,)--
+      There's a brighter green of the sod,
+    And a holier calm above us
+      In the blessed Blue of God.
+
+    The roar and ravage were vain;
+      And Nature, that never yields,
+    Is busy with sun and rain
+    At her old sweet work again
+      On the lonely battle-fields.
+
+    How the tall white daisies grow
+      Where the grim artillery rolled!
+    (Was it only a moon ago?
+      It seems a century old,)--
+
+    And the bee hums in the clover,
+      As the pleasant June comes on;
+    Aye, the wars are all over,--
+      But our good Father is gone.
+
+    There was tumbling of traitor fort,
+      Flaming of traitor fleet,--
+    Lighting of city and port,
+      Clasping in square and street.
+
+    There was thunder of mine and gun,
+      Cheering by mast and tent,--
+    When--his dread work all done,
+    And his high fame full won--
+      Died the Good President.
+
+    In his quiet chair he sate,
+      Pure of malice or guile,
+    Stainless of fear or hate,--
+      And there played a pleasant smile
+    On the rough and careworn face;
+      For his heart was all the while
+    On means of mercy and grace.
+
+    The brave old Flag drooped o'er him,
+      (A fold in the hard hand lay,)--
+      He looked, perchance, on the play,--
+    But the scene was a shadow before him,
+      For his thoughts were far away.
+
+    'Twas but the morn, (yon fearful
+      Death-shade, gloomy and vast,
+      Lifting slowly at last,)
+      His household heard him say,
+    "'Tis long since I've been so cheerful,
+      So light of heart as to-day."
+
+    'Twas dying, the long dread clang,--
+      But, or ever the blessed ray
+      Of peace could brighten to-day,
+      Murder stood by the way,--
+    Treason struck home his fang!
+    One throb--and, without a pang,
+      That pure soul passed away.
+
+    Idle, in this our blindness,
+      To marvel we cannot see
+      Wherefore such things should be,
+    Or to question Infinite Kindness
+      Of this or of that Decree,
+
+    Or to fear lest Nature bungle,
+      That in certain ways she errs:
+    The cobra in the jungle,
+        The crotalus in the sod,
+      Evil and good are hers;--
+      Murderers and torturers!
+        Ye, too, were made by God.
+
+    All slowly heaven is nighing,
+      Needs that offence must come;
+    Ever the Old Wrong dying
+    Will sting, in the death-coil lying,
+      And hiss till its fork be dumb.
+
+    But dare deny no further,
+      Black-hearted, brazen-cheeked!
+    Ye on whose lips yon murther
+      These fifty moons hath reeked,--
+
+    From the wretched scenic dunce,
+      Long a-hungered to rouse
+    A Nation's heart for the nonce,--
+    (Hugging his hell, so that once
+      He might yet bring down the house!)--
+
+    From the commons, gross and simple,
+      Of a blind and bloody land,
+        (Long fed on venomous lies!)--
+      To the horrid heart and hand
+        That sumless murder dyes,--
+    The hand that drew the wimple
+        Over those cruel eyes.
+
+    Pass on,--your deeds are done,
+    Forever sets your sun;
+      Vainly ye lived or died,
+    'Gainst Freedom and the Laws,--
+    And your memory and your cause
+      Shall haunt o'er the trophied tide
+
+    Like some Pirate Caravel floating
+      Dreadful, adrift--whose crew
+    From her yard-arms dangle rotting,--
+      The old Horror of the blue.
+
+    Avoid ye,--let the morrow
+      Sentence or mercy see.
+    Pass to your place: our sorrow
+    Is all too dark to borrow
+      One shade from such as ye.
+
+    But if one, with merciful eyes,
+    From the forgiving skies
+      Looks, 'mid our gloom, to see
+    Yonder where Murder lies,
+    Stripped of the woman guise,
+      And waiting the doom,--'tis he.
+
+    Kindly Spirit!--Ah, when did treason
+      Bid such a generous nature cease,
+    Mild by temper and strong by reason,
+      But ever leaning to love and peace?
+
+    A head how sober! a heart how spacious!
+      A manner equal with high or low;
+    Rough, but gentle; uncouth, but gracious;
+      And still inclining to lips of woe.
+
+    Patient when saddest, calm when sternest,
+      Grieved when rigid for justice' sake;
+    Given to jest, yet ever in earnest,
+      If aught of right or truth were at stake.
+
+    Simple of heart, yet shrewd therewith;
+      Slow to resolve, but firm to hold;
+    Still with parable and with myth
+      Seasoning truth, like Them of old;
+    Aptest humor and quaintest pith!
+      (Still we smile o'er the tales he told.)
+
+    And if, sometimes, in saddest stress,
+      That mind, over-meshed by fate,
+      (Ringed round with treason and hate,
+    And guiding the State by guess,)
+      Could doubt and could hesitate,--
+    Who, alas! had done less
+      In the world's most deadly strait?
+
+    But how true to the Common Cause!
+      Of his task how unweary!
+    How hard he worked, how good he was,
+      How kindly and cheery!
+
+    How, while it marked redouble
+      The howls and hisses and sneers,
+    That great heart bore our trouble
+      Through all these terrible years,--
+
+    And, cooling passion with state,
+      And ever counting the cost,
+    Kept the Twin World-Robbers in wait
+      Till the time for their clutch was lost!
+
+    How much he cared for the State,
+      How little for praise or pelf!
+    A man too simply great
+      To scheme for his proper self.
+
+    But in mirth that strong heart rested
+      From its strife with the false and violent,--
+    A jester!--So Henry jested,
+      So jested William the Silent.
+
+    Orange, shocking the dull
+      With careless conceit and quip,
+    Yet holding the dumb heart full
+      With Holland's life on his lip![D]
+
+    Navarre, bonhomme and pleasant,
+      Pitying the poor man's lot,
+    Wishing that every peasant
+      A chicken had in his pot;
+
+    Feeding the stubborn bourgeois,
+      Though Paris still held out;
+    Holding the League in awe,
+      But jolly with all about.
+
+    Out of an o'erflowed fulness
+      Those deep hearts seemed too light,--
+    (And so 'twas, murder's dulness
+      Was set with sullener spite.)
+
+    Yet whoso might pierce the guise
+      Of mirth in the man we mourn
+    Would mark, and with grieved surprise,
+      All the great soul had borne,
+    In the piteous lines, and the kind, sad eyes
+      So dreadfully wearied and worn.
+
+    And we trusted (the last dread page
+      Once turned of our Doomsday Scroll)
+      To have seen him, sunny of soul,
+    In a cheery, grand old age.
+
+    But, Father, 'tis well with thee!
+      And since ever, when God draws nigh,
+    Some grief for the good must be,
+      'Twas well, even so to die,--
+
+    'Mid the thunder of Treason's fall,
+      The yielding of haughty town,
+    The crashing of cruel wall,
+      The trembling of tyrant crown!
+
+    The ringing of hearth and pavement
+      To the clash of falling chains,--
+    The centuries of enslavement
+      Dead, with their blood-bought gains!
+
+    And through trouble weary and long
+      Well hadst thou seen the way,
+    Leaving the State so strong
+      It did not reel for a day;
+
+    And even in death couldst give
+      A token for Freedom's strife,--
+    A proof how republics live,
+      And not by a single life,
+
+    But the Right Divine of man,
+      And the many, trained to be free,--
+    And none, since the world began,
+      Ever was mourned like thee.
+
+    Dost thou feel it, O noble Heart!
+      (So grieved and so wronged below,)
+    From the rest wherein thou art?
+    Do they see it, those patient eyes?
+    Is there heed in the happy skies
+      For tokens of world-wide woe?
+
+    The Land's great lamentations,
+      The mighty mourning of cannon,
+        The myriad flags half-mast,--
+    The late remorse of the nations,
+      Grief from Volga to Shannon!
+        (Now they know thee at last.)
+
+    How, from gray Niagara's shore
+      To Canaveral's surfy shoal,--
+    From the rough Atlantic roar
+      To the long Pacific roll,--
+      For bereavement and for dole,
+    Every cottage wears its weed,
+      White as thine own pure soul,
+    And black as the traitor deed!
+
+    How, under a nation's pall,
+      The dust so dear in our sight
+        To its home on the prairie passed,--
+    The leagues of funeral,
+      The myriads, morn and night,
+        Pressing to look their last!
+
+    Nor alone the State's Eclipse;
+      But how tears in hard eyes gather,--
+    And on rough and bearded lips,
+    Of the regiments and the ships,--
+      "Oh, our dear Father!"
+
+    And methinks of all the million
+      That looked on the dark dead face,
+    'Neath its sable-plumed pavilion,
+      The crone of a humbler race
+    Is saddest of all to think on,
+      And the old swart lips that said,
+    Sobbing, "Abraham Lincoln!
+      Oh, he is dead, he is dead!"
+
+    Hush! let our heavy souls
+      To-day be glad; for agen
+    The stormy music swells and rolls
+      Stirring the hearts of men.
+
+    And under the Nation's Dome,
+      They've guarded so well and long,
+    Our boys come marching home,
+      Two hundred thousand strong.
+
+    All in the pleasant month of May,
+      With war-worn colors and drums,
+    Still, through the livelong summer's day,
+      Regiment, regiment comes.
+
+    Like the tide, yesty and barmy,
+      That sets on a wild lee-shore,
+    Surge the ranks of an army
+      Never reviewed before!
+
+    Who shall look on the like agen,
+      Or see such host of the brave?
+    A mighty River of marching men
+        Rolls the Capital through,--
+      Rank on rank, and wave on wave,
+        Of bayonet-crested blue!
+
+    How the chargers neigh and champ,
+    (Their riders weary of camp,)
+      With curvet and with caracole!--
+    The cavalry comes with thundrous tramp,
+      And the cannons heavily roll.
+
+    And ever, flowery and gay,
+    The Staff sweeps on in a spray
+      Of tossing forelocks and manes;
+    But each bridle-arm has a weed
+    Of funeral, black as the steed
+      That fiery Sheridan reins.
+
+    Grandest of mortal sights
+      The sun-browned ranks to view,---
+    The Colors ragg'd in a hundred fights,
+      And the dusty Frocks of Blue!
+
+    And all day, mile on mile,
+    With cheer, and waving, and smile,
+    The war-worn legions defile
+      Where the nation's noblest stand;
+    And the Great Lieutenant looks on,
+      With the Flower of a rescued Land,--
+    For the terrible work is done,
+    And the Good Fight is won
+      For God and for Fatherland.
+
+    So, from the fields they win,
+      Our men are marching home,
+      A million are marching home!
+    To the cannon's thundering din,
+      And banners on mast and dome,--
+    And the ships come sailing in
+      With all their ensigns dight,
+      As erst for a great sea-fight.
+
+    Let every color fly,
+      Every pennon flaunt in pride;
+    Wave, Starry Flag, on high!
+    Float in the sunny sky,
+      Stream o'er the stormy tide!
+    For every stripe of stainless hue,
+    And every star in the field of blue,
+    Ten thousand of the brave and true
+      Have laid them down and died.
+
+    And in all our pride to-day
+      We think, with a tender pain,
+    Of those so far away,
+      They will not come home again.
+
+    And our boys had fondly thought,
+      To-day, in marching by,
+    From the ground so dearly bought,
+    And the fields so bravely fought,
+      To have met their Father's eye.
+
+    But they may not see him in place,
+      Nor their ranks be seen of him;
+    We look for the well-known face,
+      And the splendor is strangely dim.
+
+    Perished?--who was it said
+      Our Leader had passed away?
+    Dead? Our President dead?--
+      He has not died for a day!
+
+    We mourn for a little breath,
+      Such as, late or soon, dust yields;
+    But the Dark Flower of Death
+      Blooms in the fadeless fields.
+
+    We looked on a cold, still brow:
+      But Lincoln could yet survive;
+      He never was more alive,
+    Never nearer than now.
+
+    For the pleasant season found him,
+      Guarded by faithful hands,
+      In the fairest of Summer Lands:
+    With his own brave Staff around him,
+      There our President stands.
+
+    There they are all at his side,
+      The noble hearts and true,
+      That did all men might do,--
+    Then slept, with their swords, and died.
+
+    Of little the storm has reft us
+      But the brave and kindly clay
+    ('Tis but dust where Lander left us,
+      And but turf where Lyon lay).
+
+    There's Winthrop, true to the end,
+      And Ellsworth of long ago,
+      (First fair young head laid low!)
+    There 's Baker, the brave old friend,
+      And Douglas, the friendly foe:
+
+    (Baker, that still stood up
+      When 'twas death on either hand:
+    "'Tis a soldier's part to stoop,
+      But the Senator must stand.")
+
+    The heroes gather and form:--
+      There's Cameron, with his scars,
+    Sedgwick, of siege and storm,
+      And Mitchell, that joined his stars.
+
+    Winthrop, of sword and pen,
+      Wadsworth, with silver hair,
+    Mansfield, ruler of men,
+      And brave McPherson are there.
+
+    Birney, who led so long,
+      Abbott, born to command,
+    Elliott the bold, and Strong,
+      Who fell on the hard-fought strand.
+
+    Lytle, soldier and bard,
+      And the Ellets, sire and son,
+    Ransom, all grandly scarred,
+    And Redfield, no more on guard,
+      (But Alatoona is won!)
+
+    Reno, of pure desert,
+      Kearney, with heart of flame,
+    And Russell, that hid his hurt
+      Till the final death-bolt came.
+
+    Terrill, dead where he fought,
+      Wallace, that would not yield,
+    And Sumner, who vainly sought
+      A grave on the foughten field
+
+    (But died ere the end he saw,
+      With years and battles outworn).
+    There's Harmon of Kenesaw,
+    And Ulric Dahlgren, and Shaw,
+      That slept with his Hope Forlorn.
+
+    Bayard, that knew not fear,
+      (True as the knight of yore,)
+    And Putnam, and Paul Revere,
+      Worthy the names they bore.
+    Allen, who died for others,
+      Bryan, of gentle fame,
+    And the brave New-England brothers
+      That have left us Lowell's name.
+
+    Home, at last, from the wars,--
+      Stedman, the staunch and mild,
+      And Janeway, our hero-child,
+    Home, with his fifteen scars!
+
+    There's Porter, ever in front,
+      True son of a sea-king sire,
+    And Christian Foote, and Dupont
+    (Dupont, who led his ships
+    Rounding the first Ellipse
+      Of thunder and of fire).
+
+    There's Ward, with his brave death-wounds,
+      And Cummings, of spotless name,
+    And Smith, who hurtled his rounds
+      When deck and hatch were aflame;
+
+    Wainwright, steadfast and true,
+      Rodgers, of brave sea-blood,
+    And Craven, with ship and crew
+      Sunk in the salt sea flood.
+
+    And, a little later to part,
+      Our Captain, noble and dear--
+      (Did they deem thee, then, austere?
+    Drayton!--O pure and kindly heart!
+      Thine is the seaman's tear.)
+
+    All such,--and many another,
+      (Ah, list how long to name!)
+    That stood like brother by brother,
+      And died on the field of fame.
+
+    And around--(for there can cease
+      This earthly trouble)--they throng,
+    The friends that had passed in peace,
+      The foes that have seen their wrong.
+
+    (But, a little from the rest,
+      With sad eyes looking down,
+      And brows of softened frown,
+    With stern arms on the chest,
+    Are two, standing abreast,--
+      Stonewall and Old John Brown.)
+
+    But the stainless and the true,
+      These by their President stand,
+    To look on his last review,
+      Or march with the old command.
+
+    And lo, from a thousand fields,
+      From all the old battle-haunts,
+    A greater Army than Sherman wields,
+      A grander Review than Grant's!
+
+    Gathered home from the grave,
+      Risen from sun and rain,--
+    Rescued from wind and wave,
+      Out of the stormy main,--
+    The Legions of our Brave
+      Are all in their lines again!
+
+    Many a stout Corps that went,
+    Full-ranked, from camp and tent,
+      And brought back a brigade;
+    Many a brave regiment,
+      That mustered only a squad.
+
+    The lost battalions,
+      That, when the fight went wrong,
+    Stood and died at their guns,--
+      The stormers steady and strong,
+
+    With their best blood that bought
+      Scarp, and ravelin, and wall,--
+    The companies that fought
+      Till a corporal's guard was all.
+
+    Many a valiant crew,
+      That passed in battle and wreck,--
+    Ah, so faithful and true!
+      They died on the bloody deck,
+    They sank in the soundless blue.
+
+    All the loyal and bold
+      That lay on a soldier's bier,--
+      The stretchers borne to the rear,
+    The hammocks lowered to the hold.
+
+    The shattered wreck we hurried,
+      In death-fight, from deck and port,--
+    The Blacks that Wagner buried,
+      That died in the Bloody Fort!
+
+    Comrades of camp and mess,
+      Left, as they lay, to die,
+    In the battle's sorest stress,
+      When the storm of fight swept by:
+    They lay in the Wilderness,--
+      Ah, where did they not lie?
+
+    In the tangled swamp they lay,
+      They lay so still on the sward!--
+    They rolled in the sick-bay,
+    Moaning their lives away;--
+      They flushed in the fevered ward.
+
+    They rotted in Libby yonder,
+      They starved in the foul stockade,--
+    Hearing afar the thunder
+      Of the Union cannonade!
+
+    But the old wounds all are healed,
+      And the dungeoned limbs are free,--
+    The Blue Frocks rise from the field,
+      The Blue Jackets out of the sea.
+
+    They've 'scaped from the torture-den,
+      They've broken the bloody sod,
+    They're all come to life agen!--
+    The Third of a Million men
+      That died for Thee and for God!
+
+    A tenderer green than May
+      The Eternal Season wears,--
+    The blue of our summer's day
+      Is dim and pallid to theirs,--
+    The Horror faded away,
+      And 'twas heaven all unawares!
+
+    Tents on the Infinite Shore!
+      Flags in the azuline sky,
+    Sails on the seas once more!
+      To-day, in the heaven on high,
+    All under arms once more!
+
+    The troops are all in their lines,
+      The guidons flutter and play;
+    But every bayonet shines,
+      For all must march to-day.
+
+    What lofty pennons flaunt?
+    What mighty echoes haunt,
+      As of great guns, o'er the main?
+      Hark to the sound again!
+    The Congress is all-ataunt!
+      The Cumberland's manned again!
+
+    All the ships and their men
+      Are in line of battle to-day,--
+    All at quarters, as when
+      Their last roll thundered away,--
+    All at their guns, as then,
+      For the Fleet salutes to-day.
+
+    The armies, have broken camp
+      On the vast and sunny plain,
+      The drums are rolling again;
+    With steady, measured tramp,
+      They're marching all again.
+
+    With alignment firm and solemn,
+      Once again they form
+    In mighty square and column,--
+      But never for charge and storm.
+
+    The Old Flag they died under
+      Floats above them on the shore,
+    And on the great ships yonder
+      The ensigns dip once more,--
+    And once again the thunder
+      Of the thirty guns and four!
+
+    In solid platoons of steel,
+      Under heaven's triumphal arch,
+    The long lines break and wheel;
+      And the word is, "Forward, march!"
+
+    The colors ripple o'erhead,
+      The drums roll up to the sky,
+    And with martial time and tread
+      The regiments all pass by,--
+    The ranks of our faithful Dead,
+      Meeting their President's eye.
+
+    With a soldier's quiet pride
+      They smile o'er the perished pain,
+      For their anguish was not vain,--
+    For thee, O Father, we died!
+      And we did not die in vain.
+
+    March on, your last brave mile!
+      Salute him, Star and Lace,
+    Form round him, rank and file,
+      And look on the kind, rough face;
+    But the quaint and homely smile
+      Has a glory and a grace
+    It never had known erewhile,--
+      Never, in time and space.
+
+    Close round him, hearts of pride!
+    Press near him, side by side,--
+      Our Father is not alone!
+    For the Holy Right ye died,
+    And Christ, the Crucified,
+      Waits to welcome his own.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[D] "His temperament was cheerful. At table, the pleasures of which in
+moderation were his only relaxation, he was always animated and merry;
+and this jocoseness was partly natural, partly intentional. In the
+darkest hours of his country's trial, he affected a serenity he was far
+from feeling; so that his apparent gayety at momentous epochs was even
+censured by dullards, who could not comprehend its philosophy, nor
+applaud the flippancy of William the Silent. He went through life
+bearing the load of a people's sorrows with a smiling face."--Motley's
+_Rise of the Dutch Republic_.
+
+Perhaps a lively national sense of humor is one of the surest exponents
+of advanced civilization. Certainly a grim sullenness and fierceness
+have been the leading traits of the Rebellion for Slavery; while
+Freedom, like a Brave at the stake, has gone through her long agony with
+a smile and a jest ever on her lips.
+
+
+
+
+REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
+
+
+_Letters to Various Persons_, By HENRY D. THOREAU. Boston:
+Ticknor & Fields.
+
+The prose of Thoreau is daily winning recognition as possessing some of
+the very highest qualities of thought and utterance, in a degree
+scarcely rivalled in contemporary literature. In spite of whim and
+frequent over-refining, and the entire omission of many important
+aspects of human life, these wondrous merits exercise their charm, and
+we value everything which lets us into the workshop of so rare a mind.
+These letters, most of which were addressed to a single confidential
+friend, give us Thoreau's thoughts in undress, and there has been no
+previous book in which we came so near him. It is like engraving the
+studies of an artist,--studies many of which were found too daring or
+difficult for final execution, and which must be shown in their original
+shape or not at all. To any one who was more artist than thinker this
+exhibition would be doing wrong; but to one like Thoreau, more thinker
+than artist, it is an act of justice.
+
+The public, being always eager for the details of personal life, and
+therefore especially hungry for private letters, will hardly make this
+distinction. All is held to be right which gives us more personality in
+print. One can fancy the exasperation of a gossip, however, on opening
+these profound and philosophic leaves. There is almost no private
+history in them; and even of Thoreau's beloved science of Natural
+History, very little. He does, indeed, begin one letter with "Dear
+Mother, ... Pray have you the seventeen-year locust in Concord?" which
+recalls Mendelssohn's birthday letter to his mother, opening with two
+bars of music. But even such mundane matters as these occur rarely in
+the book, which is chiefly made up of pure thought, and that of the
+highest and often of the most subtile quality.
+
+Thoreau had, in literature as in life, a code of his own, which, if
+sometimes lax where others were stringent, was always stringent in
+higher matters, where others were lax. Even the friendship of Emerson
+could not coerce him into that careful elaboration which gives dignity
+and sometimes a certain artistic monotony to the works of our great
+essayist. Emerson never wilfully leaves a point unguarded, never allows
+himself to be caught in undress. Thoreau spurns this punctiliousness,
+and thus impairs his average execution; while for the same reason he
+attains, in favored moments, a diction more flowing and a more lyric
+strain than his teacher ever allows himself, at least in prose. He also
+secures, through this daring, the occasional expression of more delicate
+as well as more fantastic thoughts. And there is an interesting passage
+in these letters where he rather unexpectedly recognizes the dignity of
+literary art as art, and states very finely its range of power. "To look
+at literature,--how many fine thoughts has every man had! how few fine
+thoughts are expressed! Yet we never have a fantasy so subtile and
+ethereal, but that _talent merely_, with more resolution and faithful
+persistency, after a thousand failures, might fix and engrave it in
+distinct and enduring words, and we should see that our dreams are the
+solidest facts that we know." The Italics are his own, and the glimpse
+at his literary method is very valuable.
+
+One sees also, in these letters, how innate in him was that grand
+simplicity of spiritual attitude, compared with which most confessions
+of faith seem to show something hackneyed and second-hand. It seems the
+first resumption--unless here again we must link his name with
+Emerson's--of that great strain of thought of which Epictetus the slave
+and Marcus Aurelius Antoninus the sovereign were the last previous
+examples. Amid the general _Miserere_, here is one hymn of lofty cheer.
+There is neither weak conceit nor weak contrition, but gratitude for
+existence, and a sublime aim. "My actual life," he says, "is a fact in
+view of which I have no occasion to congratulate myself; but for my
+faith and aspiration I have respect. It is from these that I speak.
+Every man's position is, in fact, too simple to be described.... I am
+simply what I am, or I begin to be that.... I know that I am. I know
+that another is who knows more than I, who takes interest in me, whose
+creature, and yet whose kindred, in one sense, am I. I know that the
+enterprise is worthy. I know that things work well. I have heard no bad
+news." (p. 45.)
+
+"Happy the man," he elsewhere nobly says, "who observes the heavenly
+and the terrestrial law in just proportion; whose every faculty, from
+the soles of his feet to the crown of his head, obeys the law of its
+level; who neither stoops nor goes on tiptoe, but lives a balanced life,
+acceptable to Nature and to God." And then he manfully adds,--"These
+things I say; other things I do." Manfully, not mournfully; for his
+life, though in many ways limited, was never, in any high sense,
+unsuccessful; nor did he ever assume for one moment the attitude of
+apology.
+
+These limitations of his life no doubt impaired his thought also, in
+certain directions. The letters might sometimes exhibit the record of
+Carlyle's lion, attempting to live on chicken-weed. Here is a man of
+vast digestive power, who, prizing the flavor of whortleberries and wild
+apples, insists on making these almost his only food. It is amazing to
+see what nutriment he extracts from them; yet would not, after all, an
+ampler bill of fare have done better? Is there not something to be got
+from the caucus and from the opera, which Thoreau abhorred, as well as
+from the swamps which he justly loved? Could he not have spent two hours
+rationally in Boston elsewhere than at the station-house of the railway
+that led to Concord? His habits suggest a perpetual feeling of privation
+and effort, and he has to be constantly on the alert to repel
+condolence. This one-sidedness of result is a constant drawback on the
+reader's enjoyment, and it is impossible to leave it out of sight. Yet
+all criticism seems like cavilling, when one comes upon a series of
+sentences like these:--
+
+"Do what you love.... Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good
+for something. All fables, indeed, have their morals; but the innocent
+enjoy the story. Let nothing come between you and the light. Respect men
+as brothers only. When you travel to the Celestial City, carry no letter
+of introduction. When you knock, ask to see God,--none of the servants.
+In what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions; know
+that you are alone in the world." (p. 46.)
+
+This suggests those wonderful strokes in the "Indenture" in "Wilhelm
+Meister," and Goethe cannot surpass it.
+
+His finest defence of his habitual solitude occurs in these letters
+also, and has some statements whose felicitousness can hardly be
+surpassed. "As for any dispute about solitude and society, any
+comparison is impertinent.... It is not that we love to be alone, but
+that we love to soar; and when we do soar, the company grows thinner and
+thinner, till there is none at all. It is either the tribune on the
+plain, a sermon on the mount, or a very private ecstasy still higher up.
+We are not the less to aim at the summits, though the multitude does not
+ascend them. Use all the society that will abet you." (p. 139.)
+
+And since the unsocial character of Thoreau's theory of life has been
+one of the most serious charges against it, his fine series of thoughts
+on love and marriage in this volume become peculiarly interesting. "Love
+must be as much a light as a flame." "Love is a severe critic. Hate can
+pardon more than love." "A man of fine perceptions is more truly
+feminine than a merely sentimental woman." "It is not enough that we are
+truthful; we must cherish and carry out high purposes to be truthful
+about." These are sentences on which one might spin commentaries and
+scholia to the end of life; and there are many others as admirable.
+
+His few verses close the volume,--few and choice, with a rare flavor of
+the seventeenth century in them. The best poem of all, "My life is like
+a stroll upon the beach," is not improved by its new and inadequate
+title, "The Fisher's Boy." The three poems near the end, "Smoke,"
+"Mist," and "Haze," are marvellous triumphs of language; the thoughts
+and fancies are as subtile as the themes, and yet are embodied as
+delicately and accurately as if uttered in Greek.
+
+
+_France and England in North America._ A Series of Historical
+Narratives. By FRANCIS PARKMAN, Author of "History of the
+Conspiracy of Pontiac," "Prairie and Rocky Mountain Life," etc. Part
+First. Pioneers of France in the New World. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co.
+
+It has been known for nearly a score of years within our literary
+circles, that one of the richest and least wrought themes of our
+American history had been appropriated by the zeal and research of a
+student eminently qualified by nature, culture, and personal experience
+to develop its wealth of interest. While very many among us may have
+been aware that Mr. Parkman had devoted himself to the task of which we
+have before us some of the results, only a narrower circle of friends
+have known under what severe physical embarrassments and disabilities he
+has been restrained from maturing those results. He has fully and sadly
+realized, within his own different range, the experience which he so
+aptly phrases as endured by his hero, the adventurous and dauntless
+Champlain. When that great pioneer, midway in his splendid career, was
+planning one of his almost annual voyages hitherward, at one of the most
+emergent periods of his enterprise, he was seized on board his vessel in
+France with a violent illness, and reduced, as Mr. Parkman says, to that
+"most miserable of all conflicts, the battle of the eager spirit against
+the treacherous and failing flesh." Mr. Parkman has known well what
+these words mean. In his case, as in that of Champlain, it was not from
+the burden of years and natural decay, but from the touch of disease in
+the period of life's full vigor in its midway course, that mental
+activity was restrained. When, besides the inflictions of a racked
+nervous system, the author suffered in addition a malady of the eyes,
+which limited him, as he says, to intervals of five minutes for reading
+or writing, when it did not wholly preclude them, we may well marvel at
+what he has accomplished. And the reader will marvel all the more that
+the hindrances and pains under which the matter of these pages has been
+wrought have left no traces or transfer of themselves here. It may be
+possible that an occasional twinge or pang may have concentrated the
+terse narrative, or pointed the sharp and shrewd moralizings of these
+pages; for there is an amazing conciseness and a keen epigrammatic
+sagacity in them. But there is no languor, no feebleness, no sleepy
+prosiness, to indicate where vivacity flagged, and where an episode or
+paragraph was finished after the glow had yielded to exhaustion.
+
+Mr. Parkman's theme is one of adventure on the grandest scale, with
+novel conditions and elements, and under the quickening of master
+passions of a sort to give to incidents and achievements a most romantic
+and soul-absorbing interest. Only incidentally, and then most slightly,
+does he have to deal with state affairs, with court intrigues, or with
+diplomatic complications. He has to follow men into regions and scenes
+in which there is so much raw material, and so much of the originality
+of human conditions and qualities, that no precedents are of avail, and
+it is even doubtful whether there are principles that have authority to
+guide or that may be safely recognized. Nor could he have treated his
+grand theme with that amazing facility and skill, which, as his work
+manifests them, will satisfy all his readers that the theme belongs to
+him and he to it, had not his native tastes, his training, and his
+actual experience brought him into a most intelligent sympathy with his
+subject-matter. Without being an adventurer, in the modern sense of the
+term, he has the spirit which filled the best old sense of the word. He
+has been a wide traveller and an explorer. Familiar by actual
+observation with the scenes through which he has to follow the track of
+the pioneers whom he chronicles, he has also acquainted himself by
+foot-journeys and canoe-navigation under Indian guides with scenes and
+regions still unspoiled of their wilderness features. He has crossed the
+Rocky Mountains by the war-path of the savages, and penetrated far
+beyond the borders of civilization in the direction of the northern ice
+on our continent. He is skilled in native woodcraft, in the phenomena of
+the forest and the lake, the winding river and the cataract. He has
+watched the aspects of Nature through all the seasons in regions far
+away from the havoc and the finish of culture. He has been alone as a
+white man in the squalid lodges of the Indians, has lived after their
+manner up to the edge of the restraints which a civilized man must
+always take with him, and has consented to forego all that is meant by
+the word comfort, that he might learn actually what our
+transcendentalists and sentimentalists are so taken with theoretically.
+He knows the inner make and furnishings of the savage brain and heart,
+the qualities of their thought and passions, their superstitions,
+follies, and vices; and while he deals with them and their ways with the
+right spirit and consideration of a high-toned Christian man, he yields
+to no silly inventiveness of fancy or romance in portraying them. They
+are barely human, and they are hideous and revolting in his pages, as
+they are in real life. Mr. Parkman knows them for just what they are,
+and as they are. Helped by natural adaptation and sympathy to put
+himself into communication with them sufficiently to analyze their
+composition and to scan their range of being, he has presented such a
+portraiture and estimate of them as will be increasingly valuable while
+they are wasting away, to be known to future generations only by the
+record.
+
+It is through Mr. Parkman's keen observation and discernment, as a
+traverser of wild regions and a student of aboriginal life and
+character, that his pages are made to abound with such vivid and
+vigorous delineations. He has great skill in description, whether on a
+grand scale or in the minutest details of adventure or of scenery. He
+can touch by a phrase, most delicately or massively, the outline and the
+features of what he would communicate. He can strip from field,
+river-bank, hill-top, and the partially cleared forests all the things
+and aspects which civilization has superinduced, and can restore to them
+their primitive, unsullied elements. He gives us the aroma of the wild
+woods, the tints of tree, shrub, and berry as the autumn paints them,
+the notes and screams and howls of the creatures which held these haunts
+before or with man; and though we were reading some of his pages on one
+of the hottest of our dog-days, we felt a grateful chill come over us as
+we were following his description of a Canadian winter.
+
+Mr. Parkman's subject required, for its competent treatment, a vast
+amount of research and a judicious use of authorities in documents
+printed or still in manuscript. Happily, there is abundance of material,
+and that, for the most part, of prime value. The period which his theme
+covers, though primeval in reference to the date of our own English
+beginnings here, opens within the era when pens and types were
+diligently employed to record all real occurrences, and when rival
+interests induced a multiplication of narratives of the same events, to
+the extent even of telling many important stories in two very different
+ways. The element of the marvellous and the superstitious is so
+inwrought with the documentary history and the personal narratives of
+the time, exaggeration and misrepresentation were then almost so
+consistent with honesty, that any one who essays to digest trustworthy
+history from them may be more embarrassed by the abundance than he would
+be by the paucity of his materials. Our author has spared no pains or
+expense in the gathering of plans, pamphlets, and solid volumes, in
+procuring copies of unpublished documents, and in consulting all the
+known sources of information. He discriminates with skill, and knows
+when to trust himself and to encourage his readers in relying upon them.
+
+It has been with all these means for faithful and profitable work in his
+possession, gathered around him in aggravating reminders of their
+unwrought wealth, and with a spirit of craving ardor to digest and
+reproduce them, that Mr. Parkman has been compelled to suffer the
+discipline of a form of invalidism which disables without destroying or
+even impairing the power and will for continuous intellectual
+employment. Brief intervals of relief and a recent period of promise and
+hopefulness of full restoration have been heroically devoted to the
+production of that instalment of his whole plan which we have in the
+volume before us.
+
+That plan, as his first and comprehensive title indicates, covers a
+narration of the initiatory schemes and measures for the exploration and
+settlement of the New World by France and England. As France had the
+precedence in that enterprise, this first volume is fitly devoted to its
+rehearsal. The French story is also far more picturesque, more brilliant
+and sombre, too, in its details. There is more of the wild, the
+romantic, and the tragic in it. Mr. Parkman briefly, but strikingly,
+contrasts the spirit which animated and the fortunes which befell the
+representatives of the two European nations,--the one of which has
+wrought the romance, the other of which has moulded the living
+development, of North America.
+
+Under the specific title of this volume,--the "Pioneers of France in the
+New World,"--the author gives us historical narratives of stirring and
+even heroic enterprise in two localities at extreme points of our
+present territory: first, the story of the sadly abortive attempt made
+by the Huguenots to effect a settlement in Florida; and second, the
+adventures, undertakings, and discoveries of Champlain, his predecessors
+and associates, in and near Canada. The volume is touchingly dedicated
+to three near kinsmen of the author,--young men who in the glory and
+beauty of their youth, the joy and hope of parents who yielded the
+costly sacrifice, gave themselves to the deliverance of our country from
+the ruin plotted for it by a slave despotism.
+
+Mr. Parkman mentions--allowing to it in his brief reference all the
+weight which it probably deserves--a vague tradition, which, had it been
+sustained by fact, would have introduced an entirely new element into
+the conditions involved in the rival claims to the right of colonizing
+and possessing America, as practically contested by European nations.
+The Pope's Bull which deeded the whole continent to Spain, as if it
+were a farm, reinforced the claim already conventionally yielded to her
+through right of discovery. For anything, however, to the knowledge of
+which Columbus came before his death, or even his immediate successors
+before their death, all the parts of America which he saw or knew might
+have been insulated spaces, like those in which he actually set up
+Spanish authority. What might have been the issue for this continent, or
+rather for the spaces which it covers, had it been really divided by the
+high seas into three immense islands like Australasia, so that Spain,
+France, and England might have made an amicable division between them,
+would afford curious matter for speculation. The tradition referred to
+is, that the continent had been actually discovered by a Frenchman four
+years before the first voyage of Columbus hitherward. A vessel from
+Dieppe, while at sea off the coast of Africa, was said to have been
+blown to sight of land across the ocean on our shores. A mariner,
+Pinzon, who was on board of her, being afterwards discharged from French
+service in disgrace, joined himself to Columbus, and was with him when
+he made his great discovery. It may have been so. But the story,
+slenderly rooted in itself, has no support. Spain was the claimant, and,
+so far as the bold and repeated attempt of the Huguenots to contest her
+claims in Florida was thwarted by a diabolical, yet not unavenged
+ruthlessness of resistance, Spain made good her asserted right.
+
+Mr. Parkman sketches rapidly some preliminary details relating to
+Huguenot colonization in Brazil and early Spanish adventures. The zeal
+of the French Huguenots had anticipated that of the English Puritans in
+seeking a Transatlantic field for its development. A philosophical
+historian might find an engaging theme, in tracing to diversities of
+national character, to the aims which stirred in human spirits, and to
+fickle circumstances of date or place, the contrasted issues of failure
+and success in the different enterprises. To human sight or foresight,
+the Huguenots had the more hopeful omens at the start. But religious
+zeal and avarice, combined in a way most cunningly adapted to
+contravene, if that were possible, the Saviour's profound warning, "No
+man can serve two masters," were, after all, only combined in a way to
+bring them into the most shameful conflict. The Huguenot at the South
+shared with the Spaniard the lust for gold; and the backers alike of
+Roman and Protestant zeal in Canada divided their interest between the
+souls of the Indians and the furs and skins of wild animals.
+
+The heroic and the chivalric elements in the spirit and prowess of these
+early adventurers give a charm even to the narratives which reveal to us
+their fearful sufferings and their atrocities. Physically and morally
+they must have been endowed unlike those who now hoe fields, make shoes,
+and watch the wheels of our thrifty mechanisms. Avarice and zeal, the
+latter being sometimes substituted by a daring passion for the romantic,
+nerved men, and women too, to undertakings and endurances which shame
+our enfeebled ways. The partners in these enterprises were never
+homogeneous in character, as were eminently the Colonists of New
+England. They were of most mixed and discordant materials. Prisons were
+ransacked for convicts and desperadoes; humble artisans and peasants
+were accepted as laborers; roving mariners, whose only sure port of rest
+would be in the abyss, were bribed for transient service, the condition
+always exacted being that they must be ready for the nonce to turn
+landsmen for fighting in swamp or bush. These, with a sprinkling of
+young and impoverished nobles, and one or two really towering and master
+spirits, in whom either of the two leading passions was the spur, and
+who could win through court patronage a patent or a commission, made in
+every case, either South or North, the staple material of French
+adventure.
+
+After a graphic sketch of the line of Spanish notables in the New
+World,--of Ponce de Leon, of Garay, Ayllon, De Narvaez, and De
+Soto,--Mr. Parkman concisely reviews the successive attempts at a
+settlement in Florida by Frenchmen. His central figures here are Admiral
+De Coligny and his agents, Villegagnon, Ribaut, and Laudonniere. They
+had no fixed policy towards the Indians, and they followed the worst
+possible course with them. They wholly neglected tillage, and so were in
+constant peril of starvation. They were lawless and disorderly in their
+fellowship, and were always at the mercy of conspirators among
+themselves.
+
+Beginning about the year 1550, and embracing the quarter of a century
+following, there transpired on the coast of Florida a series of acts of
+mingled heroism and barbarity not easily paralleled in any chapter of
+the world's history. Menendez, under his commission as Adelantado,
+having effected the first European settlement in North America at St.
+Augustine, and the French having established a river fort named
+Caroline, the struggle which could not long have been deferred was
+invited. We have here a double narrative. While the French commander,
+Ribaut, is shipwrecked in an enterprise by sea against St. Augustine,
+Menendez, by land, after a most harassing tramp through forest and
+swamp, successfully assails Fort Caroline. Though he has pledged his
+honor to spare those who surrendered to his mercy, he foully breaks his
+pledge, as no faith was to be kept with heretics. A brutal massacre,
+which shocked even his Indian allies, signalized his victory. An
+inscription on the trees under which he slaughtered his victims
+announced that vengeance was wreaked on them, "not as Frenchmen, but as
+heretics."
+
+These atrocities were in their turn avenged, after a similar fashion and
+in the same spirit, by Dominique de Gourgues. It is doubtful whether he
+was a Huguenot; but he felt, as the French monarch and court did not,
+the rankling disgrace of this bloody catastrophe. An intense hater of
+the Spaniards, he gave his whole spirit of chivalry and prowess, in the
+approved fashion of the age, to avenge the insult to France. Providing
+himself with three small vessels, navigable by sail or oar, he gathered
+a fit company for his enterprise; but not till well on his way did he
+reveal to them his real purpose, in which they proved willing
+coadjutors. He found the Spaniards at their forts had alienated the
+Indians, who readily leagued with him. By a bold combination and a
+fierce onslaught he carries the Spanish works, and retaliates on his
+fiendish and now cowering prisoners by hanging them, "not as Spaniards,
+but as traitors, robbers, and murderers." De Gourgues came to do this,
+not to make another attempt for a permanent settlement in the interest
+of France. He therefore destroyed the forts, and with a friendly parting
+from his red allies, much to their sorrow, returned home. Thus closes
+one episode in the world's tragic history.
+
+Turning now towards the North, Mr. Parkman takes a comprehensive review
+of the hazy period of history covered by traditions and imperfect
+records, with vague relations of adventure by Normans, Basques, and
+Bretons, on fishing expeditions to Newfoundland and the main coast.
+These were followed by three exploring enterprises and partial
+settlements, between 1506 and 1518. Verrazzano, with four ships, coasted
+along our shores, and was for fifteen days the guest of some friendly
+Indians at Newport, the centre of our modern fashionable summer-life.
+Jaques Cartier made two voyages in 1534-5, gave the name of St. Lawrence
+to the river, and visited the sites of Quebec and Montreal. A third
+voyage was planned for 1541, to be followed by a reinforcement by J. F.
+de la Roque, Sieur de Roberval. Its arrival being delayed, the famished
+settlers, wasted by the scurvy, and dreading another horrid winter of
+untold sufferings, returned home. Roberval renewed the occupancy of
+Quebec, and then there is a chasm and a broken story.
+
+La Roche, in 1598, left forty convicts, adventurers in his crew, on
+Sable Island, merely for a temporary sojourn while he should coast on.
+Being blown back to France in his vessel, these forlorn exiles were left
+for five years on that dreary waste, and only twelve survivors then
+remained to be rescued. Some wild cattle that had propagated from
+predecessors left by luckless wanderers on a previous voyage, or which
+had swum ashore from a wreck, had furnished them a partial supply.
+Pontgrave and Chauvin attempted a settlement at Tadoussac, the dismal
+wilderness at the mouth of the Saguenay, thenceforward the rendezvous of
+European and Indian traders. All these were preliminary anticipations of
+the real occupancy of New France. Champlain, Poutrincourt, and
+Lescarbot, in 1607, established at Port Royal the first agricultural
+colony in the New World. Then began that series of futile and vexatious
+dealings on the part of the French court, in granting and withdrawing
+monopolies, conflicting commissions and patents, with confused purposes
+of feudalism and restricted privilege, which embarrassed all effective
+progress, and visited chagrin and disappointment on every devoted
+adventurer.
+
+The great picture on Mr. Parkman's canvas is Champlain. That really
+noble-souled, heroic, and marvellous man, whom our author appreciates,
+yet with sagacious discrimination presents to the life, is a splendid
+subject for his admirable rehearsal. At the age of thirty-three he
+becomes the most conspicuous, and, on the whole, the most intelligent,
+agent of the French interest in these parts of the world. Dying at
+Quebec at the age of sixty-eight, and after twenty-seven years of
+service to the colony, he had probably drawn his life through more and
+a greater variety of perils than have ever been encountered by man. He
+was dauntless and all-enduring, fruitful in resource, self-controlled
+and persevering, and, though not wiser than his age, purer and more
+true. He was as lithesome as an Indian, and could outdo him in some
+physical efforts and endurance. His almost yearly voyages between France
+and Quebec led him through strange contrasts of court and wilderness
+life; but he was the same man in both. His discovery of the lake which
+bears his name, his journey to Lake Huron, under the lure of the
+impostor Vignau, encouraging his own dream of a passage through the
+continent to India, and his many tramps for Indian warfare or discovery,
+are most attractive episodes for our author.
+
+Mr. Parkman relates incidentally the massacre in Frenchman's Bay, the
+efforts and cross purposes of the Recollets and the Jesuit missionaries,
+and furnishes a vivid sketch of the fortunes of the settlement under
+threatened assaults from Indians and in a temporary surrender to the
+English. He intimates the matter which he has yet in store. May we enjoy
+the coveted pleasure of reading it!
+
+
+_Hesperus, or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days._ A Biography. From the German of
+J. P. Fr. Richter. Translated by CHARLES T. BROOKS. In Two
+Volumes. Boston: Ticknor and Fields.
+
+This romance, the first work of Jean Paul's which won the attention of
+his countrymen, is called "Hesperus," apparently for no reason more
+definite than that the heroine, like a fair evening-star, beams over the
+fortunes of the other personages, and becomes at length the morning-star
+of one. The supplementary title of "Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days" is a
+quaint subdivision of the volumes into as many chapters, each of which
+is a "Dog-Post-Day," because it purports to be dispatched in a bottle
+round a dog's neck to an island within the whimsical geography which the
+author loved to construct, and in which he pretended to dwell. Truly,
+the ordinary _terra-firma_ was of little consequence for home-keeping
+purposes to Jean Paul, as the reader will doubtless confess before he
+has proceeded far through the maze of Extra Leaves, Intercalary Days,
+Extra Lines, Extra Shoots, and Extorted Anti-critique. And the divisions
+which are busied with the story, instead of carrying it forward, stray
+with it in all directions, like a genuine summer vagabond to whom direct
+travel is a crime against the season. Many charming things are gathered
+by the way; but if the reader is in haste to arrive, or thinks it would
+not be amiss at least to put up somewhere, his patience will be severely
+tried. We do not recommend the volumes for railway-reading, nor to
+clergymen for the entertainment of sewing-bees, nor to the devourer of
+novels, in whose life the fiction that must be read at one sitting forms
+an epoch. It is a good _vade-mecum_ for a voyage round either Cape; its
+digressive character suits the listless mood of the sea-goer, and he can
+drop, we will not say the thread, but the entanglement, in whatever
+watch he pleases.
+
+Let no one expect the critic to sketch the plot of this romance. It is a
+grouping of motives and temperaments under the names of men and women,
+concerning whom many subtile things are said and hinted; and they are
+pushed into and out of complicated situations, by stress of brilliant
+authorship, without lifting their fingers. There is no necessary
+development nor movement: the people are like the bits of glass which
+shake into the surprising patterns of the kaleidoscope. The relation of
+the parties to each other is a great mystification, bunglingly managed:
+we cannot understand at last how Victor, the hero of the chief
+love-passage, turns out to be the son of a clergyman instead of a lord,
+and Flamin the son of a lord in spite of the plain declaration on the
+first page that he belongs to a clergyman. No key-notes of expectation
+and surmise are struck; the reader is as blind as the old lord who is
+Victor's reputed father, and not a glimmer of light reaches him till
+suddenly and causelessly he is dazed. The author has emphasized his
+sentiments, but has not shaded and brought out the features of his
+story. It is plain, that, when he began to write, not the faintest
+notion of a _denouement_ had dawned upon his fancy. The best-defined
+action in the book results from Flamin's ignorance that he is Clotilde's
+brother, for he is thus jealous of his friend Victor's love for her. How
+break off Flamin's love for his unknown sister? How rescue Victor from
+his self-imposed delicacy and win for him a bride? This is the substance
+of the story, hampered by wild, spasmodic interpolations and intrigues
+and didactic explanations.
+
+The reader must also become inured, by a course of physical training, to
+resist the fiery onslaughts of a sentimentality which was the first
+ferment of Jean Paul's sincere and huge imagination. See, for instance,
+Vol. II. p. 229. And we cannot too much admire the tact which Mr. Brooks
+has brought to the decanting of these seething passages into tolerable
+vernacular limits. Sometimes, indeed, he misses a help which he might
+have procured for the reader, to lift him, with less danger of
+dislocation, to these pinnacles of passion, by transferring more of the
+elevated idiom of the style: for, in some of the complicated paragraphs,
+a too English rendering of the clauses gives the sentiment a dowdy and
+prosaic air. We should not object to an occasional inversion of the
+order, even where Jean Paul himself is more direct than usual; for this
+always appeared to us to lend a racy German flavor to the page. No doubt
+Jean Paul needs, first of all, to be made comprehensible; but if his
+style is too persistently Anglicized, many places will be reached where
+the sense itself must suffer for want of the picturesqueness of the
+German idiom. The quaintness will grow flat, the color of the sentiment
+will almost disappear, the rich paragraphs will run thinly clad,
+disenchanted like Cinderella at midnight. Some of Mr. Carlyle's
+translations from the German are invigorated by this Teutonicizing of
+the English, and by the sincerity of phrases transferred directly as
+they first came molten from the pen. This may be pushed to the point of
+affectation; but judiciously used, it is suited to Jean Paul's fervor
+and abandonment.
+
+There is also a rhythm in his exalted moments, a delicate and noble
+swing of the clauses, not easy to transfer: as in the Eighth
+Dog-Post-Day, the paragraph commencing, "Wehe groeszere Wellen auf mich
+zu, Morgenluft!" "Thou morning-air, break over me in greater waves!
+Bathe me in thy vast billows which roll above our woods and meadows, and
+bear me in blossom clouds past radiant gardens and glimmering streams,
+and let me die gently floating above the earth, rocked amid flying
+flowers and butterflies, and dissolving with outspread arms beneath the
+sun; while all my veins fall blended into red morning-flakes down to the
+flowers," etc. But this may appear finical to Mr. Brooks. We certainly
+do not press it critically against his great and general success. Such a
+paragraph as, for instance, the closing one upon page 340 of Vol. II. is
+very trying to the resources of the translator. Here Mr. Brooks has
+sacrificed to literalness an opportunity to sort the confused clauses
+and stop their jostling: this may be done without diluting the
+sentiment, and is within the translator's liberty.
+
+It always seemed to us that the finest part of "Hesperus," and one of
+the finest passages of German literature, is contained in the Ninth
+Dog-Post-Day and some pages of the Tenth. The Ninth, in particular,
+which is a perfect idyl, describes Victor's walk to Kussewitz: all the
+landscape is made to share and symbolize his rapture: the people in the
+fields, the framework of an unfinished house, the two-wheeled hut of the
+shepherd, are not only well painted, but turned most naturally to the
+help of interpreting his feeling. The chapter has also a direct and
+unembarrassed movement, which is rare in this romance. And it is
+beautifully translated.
+
+The reader must understand that Victor is called by various names; so
+that, if he merely dips into the book, as we suspect he will until his
+sympathy is enlisted by some fine thought, his ignorance will increase
+the frantic and dishevelled state of the story. Victor is Horion,
+Sebastian, and Bastian; a susceptible youth, profoundly affected by the
+presence of noble or handsome women, and brought into situations that
+test his delicacy. He smuggles a declaration of love into a watch which
+he sells, in the disguise of an Italian merchant, to the Princess
+Agnola, on occasion of her first reception at the court of her husband.
+He is ashamed of this after he begins to know Clotilde, who is one of
+Jean Paul's pure and noble women; and he is at one time full of dread
+lest the Princess had read his watch-paper, and at another full of pique
+at the suspicion that she had not. Being court-physician and oculist, he
+has frequent opportunities to visit Agnola, and there is one rather
+florid occasion which the midnight cry of the street-watch man
+interrupts. But all this time, the inflammable Victor was indulging a
+kind of tenderness for Joachime, maid-of-honor and attractive female. As
+the love for Clotilde deepens, he must destroy these partialities for
+Agnola and Joachime. This is no easy matter; what with the watch-paper
+and various emphatic passages of something more than friendship, the
+true love does not at once stand forth, that he may find "the
+partition-wall between love and friendship with women to be very visible
+and very thick." But one day the accursed watch-paper flutters into
+Joachime's hand, who at once takes it for a declaration of love to
+herself, and beams with appropriate tenderness. Victor, seized with
+sudden coldness and resolution, confesses all to Joachime; and the
+story, released from its feminine embarrassments, would soon reach a
+honeymoon, if it were not for the difficulty of deciding the parentage
+and relationship of the various characters. A wise child knows its own
+father; but no endowment of wisdom in the reader will harmonize the
+genealogy of this romance. A birth-mark of a Stettin apple, which is
+visible only in autumn when that fruit is ripening, plays the part of
+Box's strawberry in the farce, and with as much perspicuity.
+
+However, the characters are all respectably connected at last, and the
+reader does not care to understand how they were ever disconnected: for
+Lord Horion's motive in putting the children of the old Prince out of
+the way, and keeping up such an expensive mystification, can be
+justified only by an interesting plot. But American readers have learned
+by this time, much to their credit, not to apply to Jean Paul for the
+sensation of a cunningly woven narrative, like that of the English
+school, which furnishes verisimilitude to real life that is quite as
+improbable, though less glaringly so, than his departures from it.
+"Hesperus" is filled with pure and noble thought. The different types of
+female character are particularly well-defined; and if Jean Paul
+sometimes affects to say cynical things of women, he cannot veil his
+passionate regard for them, nor his profound appreciation of the
+elements of their influence in forming true society and refining the
+hearts of men. Notice the delicacy of the "Extra Leaf on Houses full of
+Daughters." It is chiefly with the women of his romances that Jean Paul
+succeeds in depicting individuals. And when we recollect the corrupt and
+decaying generation out of which his genius sprang, like a newly created
+species, to give a salutary shock to Gallic tastes, and lend a sturdy
+country vigor to the new literature, we reverence his faithfulness, his
+incorruptible humanity, his contempt for petty courts and faded manners,
+his passion for Nature, and his love of God. All these characteristics
+are so broadly printed upon his pages that the obsoleteness of the
+narrative does not hide them.
+
+In view of a second edition, we refer to Mr. Brooks's consideration a
+few places, with wonder at his general accuracy in the translation of
+obscure passages and the explanation of allusions.
+
+Vol. I. page 22. _Sakeph-Katon_ (Zaqueph Qaton) is an occasional
+pause-accent of the Hebrew, having the sense of "elevator minor," and is
+peculiar to prose.
+
+Page 68. The famous African Prince Le Boo deserves a note.
+
+Page 111. _Ripieno_ is an Italian musical term, meaning that which
+accompanies and strengthens.
+
+Page 114. _Graenswildpret_ does not mean "frontier wild-game," but game
+that, straying out of one precinct into another, gets captured: stray
+game, or impounded waif.
+
+Page 139. The note gives the sense, but the corresponding passage in the
+text would stand clearer thus: "not a noble heart, by any means; for
+such things Le Baut's golden key, though bored like a cannon, could
+fasten rather."
+
+Page 179. A note required: the passage of Shakspeare is, "Antony and
+Cleopatra," Act V., Scene 2:--
+
+    "His face was as the heavens; and therein stuck
+    A sun and moon; which kept their course, and lighted
+    The little O, the earth."
+
+_Territory of an old lady_ should be "prayer of an old lady." _Gebet_,
+not _Gebiet_.
+
+Page 209. _Eirunde Loch_ would be better represented by its anatomical
+equivalent, _foramen ovale_. It should be closed before birth; in the
+rare cases where it is left open after birth, the child lives half
+asphyxiated.
+
+Page 224, note. _Semperfreie_ is not from the Latin, but comes from
+_sendbarfreie_, that is, eligible, free to be sent or elected to
+offices, and consequently, immediately subject to the _Reich_, or Holy
+Roman Empire.
+
+Page 235. An _Odometer_ is an apparatus for measuring distances
+travelled by whatsoever vehicle.
+
+Page 275. _Incunabula_ means specimens of the first printed edition of a
+work; also the first impressions of the first edition, the firstlings of
+old editions.
+
+Page 317. _Wackelfiguren_ means figures made of _Wacke_, a greenish-gray
+mineral, soft and easily broken.
+
+Page 322. The note is equivocal, since the phrase is used by fast women
+who keep some one in their pay.
+
+Vol. II., page 122. _Columbine_ is not equivalent to ballet-dancer; it
+is the old historical personage of the pantomime, confederate and lover
+of Harlequin, who protects her from false love.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No.
+96, October 1865, by Various
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ATLANTIC MONTHLY ***
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