The Project Gutenberg EBook of Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26,
May, 1873, by Various

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Title: Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873

Author: Various

Release Date: October 20, 2007 [EBook #23095]

Language: English

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LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE

OF

_POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE._

MAY, 1873.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1873, by J. B.
LIPPENCOTT & Co., in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at
Washington.

Transcriber's Note: Minor typos have been corrected and footnotes moved
to the end of the article.




THE ROUMI IN KABYLIA.

THIRD PAPER.


[Illustration: THE AMIN OF KALAA.]

Emerging from these gloomy _caflons_, and passing the Beni-Mansour, the
village of Thasaerth (where razors and guns are made), Arzou (full of
blacksmiths), and some other towns, we enter the Beni-Aidel, where
numerous white villages, wreathed with ash trees, lie crouched like
nests of eggs on the summits of the primary mountains, with the
magnificent peaks of Atlas cut in sapphire upon the sky above them. At
the back part of an amphitheatre of rocky summits, Hamet, the guide,
points out a little city perched on a precipice, which is certainly the
most remarkable site, outside of opera-scenery, that we have ever seen.
It is Kalaa, a town of three thousand inhabitants, divided into four
quarters, which contrive, in that confined situation, to be perpetually
disputing with each other, although a battle would disperse the whole of
the tax-payers over the edges. Although apparently inaccessible but by
balloon, Kalaa may be approached in passing by Bogni. It is hard to give
an idea of the difficulties in climbing up from Bogni to the city, where
the hardiest traveler feels vertigo in picking his way over a path often
but a yard wide, with perpendiculars on either hand. Finally, after many
strange feelings in your head and along your spinal marrow, you thank
Heaven that you are safe in Kalaa.

[Illustration: COURTYARD IN KALAA.]

[Illustration: KALAA.]

[Illustration: OURIDA, THE LITTLE ROSE.]

The inhabitants of Kalaa pass for rich, the women promenade without
veils and covered with jewels, and the city is clean, which is rare in
Kabylia. There are four amins (or sheikhs) in Kalaa, to one of whom we
bear a letter of introduction. The _anaya_ never fails, and we are
received with cordiality, mixed with stateliness, by an imposing old man
in a white bornouse. "_Enta amin?_" asks the Roumi. He answers by a
sign of the head, and reads our missive with care. Immediately we are
made at home, but conversation languishes. He knows nothing but the pure
Kabyle tongue, and cannot speak the mixed language of the coasts, called
Sabir, which is the pigeon-French of Algiers and Philippeville.

"_Enta sabir el arbi?_"--"Knowest thou Arabic?" asks our host.

"_Makach_"--"No," we reply. "_Enta sabir el Ingles?_"--"Canst thou speak
English?"

"_Makach_"--"Nay," answers the beautiful old sage, after which
conversation naturally languishes.

But the next morning, after the richest and most assiduous
entertainment, we see the little daughter of the amin playing in the
court, attended by a negress. The child-language is much the same in all
nations, and in five minutes, in this land of the Barbarians, on this
terrible rock, we are pleasing the infant with wiles learnt to please
little English-speaking rogues across the Atlantic.

The amin's daughter, a child of six years, forms with her slave a
perfect contrast. She is rosy and white, her mouth is laughing, her
peeping eyes are laughing too. What strikes us particularly is the
European air that she has, with her square chin, broad forehead, robust
neck and sturdy body. A glance at her father by daylight reveals the
same familiar type. Take away his Arab vestments, and he would almost
pass for a brother of Heinrich Heine. His child might play among the
towers of the Rhine or on the banks of the Moselle, and not seem to be
outside her native country. We have here, in a strong presentment, the
types which seem to connect some particular tribes of the Kabyles with
the Vandal invaders, who, becoming too much enervated in a tropical
climate to preserve their warlike fame or to care for retiring,
amalgamated with the natives. The inhabitants on the slopes of the
Djordjora, reasonably supposed to have descended from the warriors of
Genseric, build houses which amaze the traveler by their utter
unlikeness to Moorish edifices and their resemblance to European
structures. They make bornouses which sell all over Algeria, Morocco,
Tunis and Tripoli, and have factories like those of the Pisans in the
Middle Ages.

[Illustration: KABYLE SHOWING GERMANIC ORIGIN.]

Contrast the square and stolid Kabyle head shown in the engraving on
this page with the type of the Algerian Arab on page 494. The more we
study them, or even rigidly compare our Arab with the amin of Kalaa, the
more distinction we shall see between the Bedouin and either of his
Kabyle compatriots. The amin, although rigged out as a perfect Arab,
reveals the square jaw, the firm and large-cut mouth, the breadth about
the temples, of the Germanic tribes: it is a head of much distinction,
but it shows a large remnant of the purely animal force which entered
into the strength of the Vandals and distinguished the Germans of
Cæsar's day. As for the Kabyle of more vulgar position, take away his
haik and his bornouse, trim the points of his beard, and we have a
perfect German head. Beside these we set a representative Arab head,
sketched in the streets of Algiers. See the feline characteristics, the
pointed, drooping moustache and chin-tuft, the extreme retrocession of
the nostrils, the thin, weak and cruel mouth, the retreating forehead,
the filmed eye, the ennui, the terrestrial detachment, of the Arab. He
is a dandy, a creature of alternate flash and dejection, a wearer of
ornaments, a man proud of his striped hood and ornamental agraffes. The
Kabyle, of sturdier stuff, hands his ragged garment to his son like a
tattered flag, bidding him cherish and be proud of the rents made by
Roumi bayonets.

[Illustration: TYPE OF ALGERIAN ARAB.]

It must be admitted that the Kabyles, with a thousand faults, are far
from the fatalism, the abuse of force and that merging of individualism
which are found with the Islamite wherever he appears. Whence, then,
have come these more humane tendencies, charitable customs and movements
of compassion? There are respectable authorities who consider them, with
emotion, as feeble gleams of the great Christian light which formerly,
at its purest period, illuminated Northern Africa.

It is the opinion of some who have long been conversant with the Kabyles
that the deeper you dive into their social mysteries the more traces you
find of their having once been a Christian people. They observe, for
instance, a set of statutes derived from their ancestors, and which, on
points like suppression of thefts and murders, do not agree with the
Koran. We have spoken of their name for the law--_kanoun_: evidently the
resemblance of this to [Greek: _chanôn_] must be more than accidental.
Another sign is the mark of the cross, tattooed on the women of many of
the tribes. These fleshly inscriptions are an incarnate evidence of the
Christian past of some of the Kabyles, particularly such as are probably
of Vandal origin. They are found especially among the tribes of the
Gouraya, are probably a result of the Vandal invasion, and consist in
the mark or sign of the cross, half an inch in dimension, on their
forehead, cheeks and the palms of their hands. It appears that all the
natives who were found to be Christians were freed from certain taxes by
their Aryan conquerors; and it was arranged that they should profess
their faith by making the cross on their persons, which practice was
thus universalized. The tattooing is of a beautiful blue color, and is
more ornamental than the patches worn by our grandmothers.

Our final inference, then, is, that the Kabyles preserve strong traces
of certain primitive customs, which in certain cases are attributable to
a Christian origin.

A true city of romance, a Venice isolated by waves of mountains, and
built upon piles whose beams are of living crystal, Kalaa, all but
inaccessible, attracts the tourist as the roc's egg attracted Aladdin's
wife. For ages it has been a city of refuge, a sanctuary for person and
property in a land of anarchy. Nowhere else are the proud Kabyles so
skillful and industrious--nowhere else are their women so much like
Western women in beauty and freedom.

[Illustration: KABYLE WOMEN]

The Kabyle woman preserves the liberty which the female of the Orient
possessed in the old times, before the jealousy of Mohammed made her a
bird in a cage, or, as the Arab poet says, "an attar which must not be
given to the winds." In Kabylia the women talk and gossip with the men:
their villages present pretty spectacles at sunset, when groups of
workers and gossipers mingled are seen laughing, chatting and singing to
the accompaniment of the drum. Some of these women are really handsome,
and are freely decorated, even in public, with the singular enamels
which are their peculiar manufacture, and with threads of gold in their
graceful _cheloukas_ or tunics.

But Kalaa, like the picturesque "Peasant's Nest" described by Cowper in
his _Task_, pays one natural penalty for the rare beauty of its site. It
pants on a rock whose gorges of lime are the seat of a perpetual thirst.
In vain have the suffering natives sunk seven basins in one alley of the
town, the cleft separating the quarter of the Son of David from that of
the children of Jesus (_Aissa_). The water only trickles by drops, and,
though plentiful in winter, deserts them altogether in the season when
their air-hung gardens, planted in earth brought up from the plains,
need it the most. As the mellowing of the season brings with it its
plague of aridity, recourse is had to the river at the bottom of the
ravine, the Oued-Hamadouch. Then from morning to night perpendicular
chains of diminutive, shrewd donkeys are seen descending and ascending
the precipice with great jars slung in network.

[Illustration: KABYLE GROUP.]

But the Hamadouch itself in the sultry season is but a thread of water,
easily exhausted by the needs of a population counting three thousand
mouths. Then the folks of Kalaa would die of thirst were it not for the
foresight of a marabout of celebrity, whom chance or miracle caused to
discover a hidden spring at the bottom of the rock. By the aid of
subscriptions among the rich he built a fountain over the sources of the
spring.

It is a small Moorish structure, with two stone pilasters supporting a
pointed arch. In the centre is an inscription forbidding to the pious
admirers of the marabout the use of the fountain while a drop remains in
the Hamadouch. To assist their fidelity, the spring is effectually
closed except when all other sources have peremptorily failed, in the
united opinion of three amins (Kabyle sheikhs). When the amins give
permission the chains which restrain the mechanism are taken off, and
the conduits are opened by means of iron handles operating on small
valves of the same metal. In the great droughts the fountain of Marabout
Yusef-ben-Khouia may be seen surrounded with a throng of astute,
white-nosed asses, waiting in philosophic calm amid the excitement and
struggle of the attendant water-bearers.

[Illustration: YUSEF'S FOUNTAIN.]

Seen hence, from the base of the precipice, where abrupt pathways trace
their zigzags of white lightning down the rock, and where no vegetation
relieves the harsh stone, the town of Kalaa seems some accursed city in
a Dantean _Inferno_. Seen from the peaks of Bogni, on the contrary, the
nest of white houses covered with red tiles, surmounted by a glittering
minaret and by the poplars which decorate the porch of the great mosque,
has an aspect as graceful as unique. In a vapory distance floats off
from the eye the arid and thankless country of the Beni-Abbes. On every
level spot, on every plateau, is detected a clinging white town,
encircled with a natural wreath of trees and hedges. They are all
visible one from the other, and perk up their heads apparently to signal
each other in case of sudden appeal: it is by a telegraphic system from
distance to distance that the Kabyles are collected for their
incorrigible revolutions. Two ruined towers are pointed out, called by
the Kabyles the Bull's Horns, which in 1847 poured down from their
battlements a cataract of fire on Bugeaud's _chasseurs d'Orléans_, who
climbed to take them, singing their favorite army-catch as well as they
could for want of breath:

    As-tu vu la casquette, la casquette,
    As-tu vu la casquette du Père Bugeaud?

Far away, at the foot of the Azrou-n'hour, an immense peak lifting its
breadth of snow-capped red into the pure azure, the populous town of
Azrou is spread out over a platform almost inaccessible.

[Illustration: THE LATEST IMPROVED REAPER.]

What a strange landscape! And what a race, brooding over its nests in
the eagles' crags! Where on earth can be found so peculiar a people,
guarding their individuality from the hoariest antiquity, and snatching
the arts into the clefts of the mountains, to cover the languid races of
the plains with luxuries borrowed from the clouds! The jewelry and the
tissues, the bornouses and haiks, the blacksmith-work and ammunition,
which fill the markets of Morocco, Tunis and the countries toward the
desert, are scattered from off these crags, which Nature has forbidden
to man by her very strongest prohibitions.

We are now in the midst of what is known as Grand Kabylia. The coast
from Algiers eastward toward Philippeville, and the relations of some of
the towns through which we have passed, may be understood from the
following sketch:

[Illustration]

The scale of distances may be imagined from the fact that it is
eighty-seven and a half miles by sea from Algiers to Bougie. The country
known as Grand Kabylia, or Kabylia _par excellence_, is that part of
Algeria forming the great square whose corners are Dellys, Aumale, Setif
and Bougie. Though these are fictitious and not geographical limits,
they are the nearest approach that can be made to fixing the nation on a
map. Besides their Grand Kabylia, the ramifications of the tribe are
rooted in all the habitable parts of the Atlas Mountains between Morocco
and Tunis, controlling an irregular portion of Africa which it is
impossible to define. It will be seen that the country of the tribe is
not deprived of seaboard nor completely mountainous. The two ports of
Dellys and Bougie were their sea-cities, and gave the French infinite
trouble: the plain between the two is the great wheat-growing country,
where the Kabyle farmer reaps a painful crop with his saw-edged sickle.

In this trapezoid the fire of rebellion never sleeps long. As we write
comes the report of seven hundred French troops surrounded by ten
thousand natives in the southernmost or Atlas region of Algeria. The
bloody lessons of last year have not taught the Kabyle submission. It
seems that his nature is quite untamable. He can die, but he is in his
very marrow a republican.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]




OUR HOME IN THE TYROL


CHAPTER I

"Do not go to the Tyrol," said some of our friends in Rome. "You will be
starved. It is a beautiful country, but with the most wretched
accommodation and the worst living in the world."

"Come to Perugia, where it is always cool in summer," said a painter.
"You can study Perugino's exquisite 'Annunciation' and other gems of the
Umbrian school, and thus blend Art with the relaxation of Nature."

"Come rather to Zemetz in the Engadine, where good Leonhard Wohlvend of
the Lion will help us to bag bears one day and glaciers the next,"
exclaimed a sporting friend, the possessor of the most exuberant
spirits.

[Illustration: SHRINE AT ADELSHEIM.]

"But," remarked the fourth adviser, a lady, "I recommend, after all, the
Tyrol. I went weak and ill last year to the Pusterthal, and returned to
Rome as fresh and strong as a pony. I found the inns very clean and the
prices low; and if you can live on soup, delicious trout and char,
fowls, veal, puddings and fruit, you will fare famously at an outside
average of five francs a day."

As this advice exactly coincided with our own inclinations, we naturally
considered it the wisest of all, especially as the invitation to
bear-hunts and glacier-scrambles was not particularly tempting to our
party. The kind reader will perceive this for himself when he learns
that it consisted of an English writer, who, still hale and hearty in
spite of his threescore years and ten, regarded botany as the best rural
sport; his wife, his faithful companion through many years of sunshine
and shadow, who had grown old so naturally that whilst anticipating a
joyful Hereafter she still clothed this present life with the poetic
hues of her girlhood; their daughter, the present narrator; and their
joint friend, another Margaret, who, whilst loyal to her native country,
America, had created for herself, through her talent, her love of true
work and her self-dependence, a bright social and artistic life in
Italy. As for Perugia, our happy quartette had plenty of opportunities
for studying the old masters in the winter months. Now we were anxious
to exchange the oppressive, leaden air of the Italian summer for the
invigorating breezes of the Alps.

Yet how fresh and graceful Italy still looked as we traveled northward
in the second week of June! The affluent and at the same time gentle
sunshine streamed through the broad green leaves of the vines, which
were flung in elegant festoons from tree to tree. It intensified the
bright scarlet of the myriad poppies, which glowed amongst the brilliant
green corn. It lighted up the golden water-lilies lying on the surface
of the slowly-gliding streams, and brought into still greater contrast
the tall amber-colored campanile or the black cypress grove cut in sharp
outline against the diaphanous blue sky. We knew, however, that fever
could lurk in this very luxury of beauty, while health was awaiting us
in the more sombre scenes of gray mountain and green sloping pasture. We
traveled on, therefore, by the quickest and easiest route, and alighting
from the express-train to Munich at the Brixen station on the Brenner
Pass, were shortly deposited, bag and baggage, at that comfortable and
thoroughly German inn, the renowned Elephant.

We prided ourselves on being experienced travelers, and consequently
immediately secured four places in the Eilwagen, which was to start from
the inn at six o'clock the next morning for our destination, Bruneck. We
handed over our luggage to the authorities, partook of supper and then
retired contentedly to rest--in the case of the two Margarets to the
soundest of slumbers--until in the morning we were suddenly awoke, not
by the expected knock of the chambermaid, but by a hurrying to and fro
of feet, and the sound of several eager voices resounding through the
echoing corridors. Fortunately, it was not only perfectly light, but
exhausted Nature had enjoyed its allotted spell of sleep; for we found,
to our astonishment, that it was past five o'clock. The storm continued
outside no whit abated, and in the midst of the human hubbub the
father's voice sounded clear and distinct.

"The British lion is roaring," exclaimed Margaret: then, snatching at my
attire, I was in the midst of the disturbance in a very few minutes.

My father stood at his door and held in his upraised hand a pair of
villainous boots, old and "clouted," fit for the Gibeonites, very
different from the substantial English aids to the understanding which
he had placed in all good faith outside his door the previous night. A
meagre-faced chambermaid was wringing her hands beside him. Two waiters
vociferated, whilst a third, whose eyes were still heavy with sleep, was
blindly groping at the other doors.

"My excellent London boots, made on a special last, have disappeared,"
said my father, trying to moderate his indignation, "and this vile
rubbish has been substituted in their stead.--Where is your master?" he
demanded of the sobbing woman. "Fetch either your master or my boots."

"Herr Je! Herr Je! I've hunted high and low, up stairs and down,"
murmured the weeping maid, "and the gracious gentleman's boots are
nowhere."

"Sir," said a little round-headed man, who seemed to have his wits about
him, "I know very well that these are not your boots. I cleaned your
grace's boots, and placed them at your door at four o'clock. It is some
beggarly Welschers who have crept up stairs and exchanged for them,
unawares, their old leather hulks."

"Ah yes," said the wailing woman: "three Welschers, who came for the
fair, slept in the barn, and had some bread and cheese before they left,
an hour ago."

In the midst of this explanation the door of No. 2 was slightly opened,
and an arm in a shirt sleeve appeared and drew in a pair of boots.
Hardly, however, was the door closed when the bell of No. 2 began to
ring violently.

"Heavens! another pair gone!" exclaimed a waiter. Then with one accord
the whole bevy of distracted servants rushed to No. 2, declaring their
innocence.

"My good people, I cannot understand one word you say," replied a mild
English voice. "I request you to be gone, and let one of you bring me my
own proper boots."

The British lion--who, it must be owned, had reason to roar--became
calmed at the evident innocence of the servants and the gentle sounds of
this British lamb. He therefore went to the rescue, and explained the
matter to No. 2, who in his turn meekly expostulated: "Very vexatious!
Dear me! My capital boots made expressly for Alpine climbing! But we
must make the best of it, my dear sir."

Maids and men still remained in an excited group, when at this juncture
the head-waiter appeared, bringing with him the landlord, a respectable
middle-aged man, who, bowing repeatedly, assured the gentlemen of his
extreme annoyance at the whole affair, especially as it compromised the
fame of his noted house. Indeed, he would gladly refund the loss were
the two pairs of boots not forthcoming.

Forthcoming! How could they be forthcoming when at this moment the clock
was striking six, and the Eilwagen (Margaret termed it the _oil-wagon_)
was to start at once, and we with it, though minus breakfast? The
British lamb departed hurriedly, but we were detained to be told of
another complication. Not only were the boots gone, but the royal
imperial post-direction of Austria, after duly weighing and measuring
our luggage, had adjudged it too heavy and bulky for the roof of its
mail-coach. It would, however, restore our money, and even suggest
another mode of conveyance, but take us by its Eilwagen it would not.

"The delay is indeed advantageous, mein Herr," said the landlord,
addressing my father, who walked about in slippers, "as time will
thereby be gained for a thorough investigation of the boot question."

One trouble always modifies another. The disappearance of the boots made
us bear the departure of the Eilwagen philosophically. Nay, at the
conclusion of a substantial breakfast of hot coffee, ham and eggs we
began greatly to enjoy ourselves. Rejected by the post-direction for the
Eilwagen, we felt at liberty to choose our time of departure. For the
present, therefore, acting as our own masters, we leisurely sauntered
out of doors, admired the clean, attractive exterior of the roomy inn,
and smiled at the fresco of the huge elephant, which, possessed of
gigantic tusks and diminutive tail, carried a man, spear in hand, on his
back. A giant bearing a halbert, accompanied by two youths in tunics,
completed the group. An inscription informed us that this was the first
elephant which had ever visited Teutschland, and that the inn derived
its name from the fact of the august quadruped sleeping there on its
journey, which took place in the sixteenth century. The worthy landlord
had also ordered a fresco to be painted on his inn to the honor of the
Virgin. She was depicted standing upon the crescent moon, and her aid
was invoked by the good man in rhyme to protect the house "from
lightning's rod, O thou Mother of God! From rain and fire, and sickness
dire;"--but, alas! there was no mention of thieves.

We were deploring the fact when the worthy Wirth appeared in person,
attended by a slim youth in blue-and-silver uniform, whom he introduced
to us with considerable emphasis as representing the police. The officer
of justice stepped forward and with a low bow took the length and
breadth of the Welschers' offending, and promised that the Austrian
government would do its best to see the distinguished, very noble
Herrschaft righted. We cannot be quite certain that he promised that the
emperor would seek the boots in person, but something was said about
that mighty potentate. At the assurance of governmental interference how
could the British lion fail of being pacified? He declared that the
landlord had acted as a gentleman, shook hands with him, and returning
to the house exchanged his slippers for his second pair of boots--very
inferior in make and comfort to the missing treasures--and then
conferred with the landlord as to the best method for the continuance of
our journey.

The Herr Wirth, with whom and the whole household we had now become
excellent friends, declared that with our unusual amount of luggage the
only plan was a "separat Eilfahrt," which means a separate
express-journey to Bruneck. It had, however, its advantages: we should
travel quickly and with the greatest ease. As we were willing to accede
to his proposition, he handed us over to his clerks in the royal
imperial post-bureau, who, having received a round sum of florins,
filled in and sanded an important document, which being delivered to us
conveyed the satisfactory information that we four individuals, whose
ages, personal appearance and social position the head-official had
magnanimously passed over with a compassionate flourish, were, on this
fourteenth day of June, 1871, to be conveyed to the town of Bruneck in
the caleche No. 1990; which said vehicle would be duly furnished with
cloth or leather cushions, one foot-carpet, two lamps, main-braces,
axletree, etc., including one portion of grease. So far, well and good,
but on our inquiring when the said No. 1990 would be ready to start, the
head-official merely looked over his spectacles at his subordinate, who
in his turn, leaning back in his tall chair and stroking his beard,
called out, "Klaus! Klaus!"--a call which was answered by a tall,
stolid-looking man, also in livery, who seemed to occupy the post of
official hostler.

"Klaus," demanded the second chef, "the Herrschaft ask when the vehicle
will be ready."

Klaus gave an astonished stare, and articulated some rapid sounds in a
dialect quite unintelligible to us.

"Precisely," returned the subordinate. "The horses are sent for, and
when they arrive the Herrschaft will be expedited forthwith."

Whereupon the clerks of the post-direction became suddenly immersed in
the duties of their office. We took the hint and good-naturedly retired.

It certainly looked like business when outside we perceived Klaus
dragging forth with all his might and main, from a dark and dusty
coach-house, a still dustier old coach. Darker it was not, for the color
was that of canary, emblazoned with the black double-headed Austrian
eagle. This, then, was the caleche No. 1990. It had the air of a veteran
officer in the imperial army who had not seen active service for many a
long day.

Klaus was too busy to pay much attention to us. He pulled the piece of
antiquity into the street, and with an uneasy expression, as if he knew
before-hand what he had to expect, he tried and tugged at one of the
door-handles. "Sacrament!" he muttered as he at last let go and began
hunting in the boot of the coach, under the driver's cushion and in
secret nooks and corners, which proved, at the best, mere receptacles
for fag-ends of whipcord and cobwebs.

"It is gone, sure enough, the key of the right-hand door." I am afraid
it had disappeared three years before, at least, to the fellow's
knowledge, for he added in an apologetic but hopeful tone, "It matters
not the least, for, see you, all the inns are on the left-hand side."

A glimpse into the coach-house had convinced us of the fact of this
vehicle alone being at our disposal; so we determined to manage as best
we might, and bore even philosophically the smell of the musty,
dust-filled cushions, which Klaus triumphantly pulled out of the open
door and beat, as it were, within an inch of their lives.

Briefly, to make two long hours short after several tedious quarters of
expectation, a square-set, rosy-faced and middle-aged postilion appeared
round the far corner of the village street, resplendent in silver lace
and yellow livery, leading three gaunt but sturdy horses. In ten minutes
my father was seated on the box and we ladies inside, receiving the good
wishes of Klaus, of the landlord, the men and the maids, now all smiles
and curtsies, and with the postilion blowing triumphantly his horn we
dashed out of the quaint, dreamy little cathedral town of Brixen.

The road speedily began to ascend, and we looked down from a
considerable height on the vast Augustine monastery of Neustift, with
its large church, its picturesque cluster of wings, refectories and
separate residences of every stage of architecture, lying snugly amongst
vineyards, Spanish chestnuts and fig trees. Ever upward, by but above
the waters of the rapid Brienz, until at the fortress of Mühlbach we
entered the Pusterthal proper.

This old fort commands the valley and spans the road. Our driver, who,
according to Austrian regulation, went on foot wherever the ascent was
particularly steep, could not enter into our admiration of its romantic
position. Hans--for such was his name--could not perceive any grace or
beauty in a scene which had often disturbed his imagination and awakened
his fear. "Ah," said he, "it is a God-forsaken spot. It is here that
many slaughtered Bavarians wander about at night with candles, seeking
for their bodies or their souls--I know not which. Look you! My
grandmother came from Schliers in Bavaria, and the two countries speak
the same language. However, in my father's day, in 1809, Emperor Franz
drove the Bavarians and French out of this part of the Tyrol. It was in
April, when the Austrian Schatleh came marching through the Pusterthal
with his soldiers, and drove the Bavarians before him. Though these were
only a handful, they would not make truce, but broke down all the
bridges in their retreat. They wanted to burn the bridge at Lorenzen,
only the country-folks with blunderbusses, cudgels and pitchforks
protected it, and made them run; so they marched on, pursued by the
Landsturm, to this fortress, where they fought like devils until many
were killed, and the others, at their wits' end, managed to push on to
Innsbruck. Yes, glorious days, and long may the Tyrolese cry God,
Emperor and Fatherland! But those wandering spirits make my flesh
creep. Ugh!"

The road now allowed of the horses being put to a lively trot,
interrupting further conversation. We drove steadily on, stopping at
comfortable inns in large well-to-do villages, where even the poorest
appeared to enjoy in their houses unlimited space. The landlords
politely demanded our journey-certificate, solemnly inserted the hour of
our arrival and departure, and confirmed the important fact of our
remaining exactly the same number of travelers as at the beginning of
our journey. We exchange Hans for a youthful Jacobi, and Jacobi for an
aged Seppl, who all agreed in their livery if not in their ages; each
stage also being at a slightly higher elevation, so that by degrees we
had changed the Italian vegetation, which had lingered as far as the
neighborhood of Brixen, for the more northern crops of young oats and
flax. Yet one prominent reminder of comparatively adjacent Italy
accompanied us the greater portion of the three hours' drive. Hundreds
of agile, swarthy figures were busily boring, blasting, shoveling and
digging for the new railway, which is to convey next season shoals of
passengers and civilization, rightly or wrongly so called, into this
great yet primitive artery of Southern Tyrol, the Pusterthal already
forming, by means of the Ampezzo, a highway between Venice and the
Brenner Pass. As the morning advanced the busy sounds of labor ceased,
and we saw groups of dark-eyed men reclining in the shade of the rocks,
partaking of their frugal dinners of orange-colored polenta--_plenten_,
as our Seppl called it.

So onward by soft slopes bordered by mountain-ridges, all scarped and
twisted, having dark green draperies of pine trees cast round their
strong limbs, with bees humming in the aromatic yet invigorating breeze
fresh from the snow-fields, and swallows wheeling in the clear blue air,
until we reached a fertile amphitheatre. A confusion of flourishing
villages was scattered over its verdant meadows, and here and there on a
jutting rock or mountain-spur a solitary mediaeval tower or imposing
castle stood forth, the most conspicuous of all being a fortress
situated on a natural bulwark of rock. Half around its base a little
town, which appeared stunted in its growth by the course of the river,
confidingly rested. A hill covered with wood screened the other side of
the castle, whilst exactly opposite a broad valley ran northward, hemmed
in by lofty snow-fields and glaciers that sparkled in the noonday sun.
Natural hummocks or knolls covered with wood broke the uniformity of
this upland plain, which still ascended eastward to the higher, bleaker
Upper Pusterthal. This valley continues to mount to yet more sterile
regions, until, reaching the great watershed of the Toblacher Plain,
which sends part of its streams to the Adriatic, the others to the more
distant Black Sea, it gradually dips down again to the fruitful
wine-regions of Lienz.

[Illustration: BRUNECK.]

We have now, however, to do with Bruneck, where our venerable 1990 had
safely deposited us at the modern inn, the Post. We might almost style
it the fashionable inn, for it was kept by a gentleman of noble birth
and the representative of the province, who, having a large family of
growing children, had wisely let his gentility take care of itself and
permitted his guests to be entertained at their own rather than at his
expense. As the noble landlady was suffering from headache, the dapper
waitress took charge of us, provided us with rooms, and then installed
us at the early _table-d'hôte_, where a number of the officers of the
garrison, with some other regular diners, whom we learnt to recognize in
time as the town bailiff, the apothecary and the advocate, were
despatching, in the midst of great clatter and bustle, the inevitable
_kalbsfleisch_ and _mehlspeis_.

The lady who had recommended us to go to the Pusterthal had likewise
assured us that the Post at Bruneck would satisfy all our requirements.
In this she was mistaken. It is true that tastes differ, especially
amongst tourists, who may be divided into two classes--those who merely
care for the country, let them disguise it as they will, when they can
endue it with the features of their town-life; and those who love the
country for the sake of Nature, and thus endeavor to carry trails of
freshness back with them to town. Now, it was all artificial dust and
din that we desired to get rid of. We had traveled in search of verdant
meadows, brawling streams and sweet-scented woods. We could not find
solace and relaxation in sitting at the windows of our respectable inn
to watch every passer-by on the dusty boulevard below, in spending half
the day indoors, let it be ever so comfortably, or in merely turning out
in the evening to shop in the puny town, whilst we bemoaned the want of
a circulating library and a brass band. It was even more intolerable, as
the Post had been built perversely with its back to the fine view of the
glaciers. Moreover, the whole establishment was in the hands of
bricklayers, painters and glaziers, who were enlarging and repairing it
for the comfort and convenience of future but certainly not of present
visitors.

As trade was evidently flourishing, we had not the slightest hesitation
in ringing for Maria, the _kellnerin_, and consulting with her about the
mode of our procuring country lodgings as soon as possible. Maria was a
good-natured girl and willing to serve us, but our ideas could not be so
easily carried out as we had anticipated. One of us had the folly to
suggest vacant rooms being to let in the castle.

"Gracious!" replied Maria, casting her eyes up to the sky. "In the
castle! Why, that's crown property, and filled with the military.
Really, I don't know how I can help you, since the gentlemen officers
have engaged for themselves every apartment inside or outside the town."

We spoke of the many neighboring villages, which were filled with grand
old houses.

Maria declared they were better outside than inside, and that the Bauers
who dwelt in them could scarcely find bedding for their cattle, much
less for Christian gentlefolks. "There is the Herr Apotheker's house at
Unterhofen, but he will not let that. There is the Hof at Adelsheim:
it's out of the question. There is also Frau Sieger's in the same
village, but that is let to the Herr Major for the season. Look you! you
had better go to Frau Sieger. Stay, I will send Lina with you."

Lina proved to be one of the blossoms of the noble family tree. She led
my mother and me to Frau Sieger, but what came of our afternoon's
expedition deserves to be told in a fresh chapter.


CHAPTER II.

Now, this house-hunting was a piece of business to be got through as
soon as possible. Nevertheless, three hours elapsed before we returned
to the hotel. We found the father and Margaret leaning their heads out
of a corridor window, and when we asked them what they were about, she
replied, "We have been wishing that the grand old mansion in yonder
village were only a _pension_, where we could obtain rooms. But have you
met with any success?"

"A _pension_! That sounds like Meran or Switzerland, instead of this
primitive Pusterthal. Only let us have tea, and we will tell you what we
have done."

"Very good! We will be patient; but you do not look dissatisfied with
your afternoon," said my father.

Nor in truth were we. Sipping our mild tea, we related our adventures.
The little girl Lina had taken us into the town, which consisted of one
narrow street in the shape of a half-moon, where houses of all ages and
ranks squeezed against each other and peeped into each other's windows
with the greatest familiarity. In one of the largest of these Frau
Sieger lived. Her husband was the royal imperial tobacco agent, and the
house was crammed full of chests of the noxious and obnoxious weed, the
passages and landing being pervaded with a sweet, sickly smell of
decomposing tobacco. In the parlor, however, where Frau Sieger sat
drinking coffee with her lady friends, the aromatic odor of the beverage
acted as a disinfectant. The hostess drew us aside, listened
complacently to our message, and then graciously volunteered to let us
rooms under her very roof.

We should have chosen chemical works in preference! There was, then,
nothing to be done but to take leave with thanks. Accompanied by the
little Lina, we passed under the town-gate, and whilst sorely perplexed
perceived a pleasant village, at the distance of about a mile, lying on
the hillside in a wealth of orchards and great barns. The way thither
led across fields of waving green corn, the point where the path
diverged from the high-road being marked by a quaint mediaeval shrine,
one of the many shrines which, sown broadcast over the Tyrol, are
intended to act as heavenly milestones to earth-weary pilgrims.

[Illustration: ADELSHEIM--OUR HOME IN THE TYROL.]

That was the village of Adelsheim, Lina said, where their own
country-house was situated, and Freieck, belonging to Frau Sieger; and
there, at the farther extremity of the village, was Schönburg, where old
Baron Flinkenhorn lived. The biggest house of all on the hill was the
Hof, and that below, with the gables and turrets, the carpenter's.

The bare possibility of finding a resting-place in that little Arcadia
made us determine to go thither. We would try the inn, and then the
carpenter's.

The inn proved a little beer-shop, perfectly impracticable. A woman with
a bright scarlet kerchief bound round her head, who was washing outside
the carpenter's, told us in Italian that she and her husband, an
overseer on the new railway, occupied with their family every vacant
room, which was further confirmed by the carpenter popping his head out
of an upper window, and in answer to Lina's question giving utterance to
an emphatic "_Na, na, I hab koan_" ("No, no, I have none").

Lina was so sure that the Hofbauer would not let rooms, for he was a
wealthy man and owned land for miles around, that she stayed at a
respectful distance whilst we approached nearer to at least admire the
grand old mansion, even if it were closed against us as a residence. The
village was full of marvelous old houses rich in frescoes, oriel
windows, gables and turrets, but this dwelling, standing in a dignified
situation on an eminence, was a prince amongst its compeers. The
architecture, which was Renaissance, might belong to a bad style, but
the long slopes of roof, the jutting balconies, the rich iron-work on
the oblong façade, the painted sun-dial and the coats-of-arms now fading
away into oblivion, the grotesque gargoyle which in the form of a
dragon's head frowned upon the world,--each detail, that had once been
carefully studied, helped to form a complete whole which it was a
pleasure to look upon. The grand entrance, no longer used, was guarded
by a group of magnificent trees, the kings of the region. Traces of an
old pleasure-garden and the dried-up basin of a fountain were visible
within.

At this point in the narrative Margaret exclaimed, "None other than my
would-be _pension_! I have known it from the first, so pray do not keep
me on tenterhooks. Were you or were you not successful? Yet all hope has
died within me already, for such a treasure-trove we never could get."

"Well, listen," said the mother. "As we were admiring the house, a
handsome, fair-haired young man, one's perfect ideal of a peasant, came
along the road, bowed to us, and when we expressed our interest in the
mansion said that he was the son of the house, and that we might see the
rooms if we liked. Grand old rooms they are, with a great lack of
furniture, but nevertheless perfectly charming. The young man, who is
named Anton, thought his father would probably have no objection to let
us rooms. At all events, we could all go over and see the Hofbauer at
ten o'clock to-morrow morning, when he would be in: he was in his fields
this afternoon. The whole, in fact, was a pastoral poem."

The next day we were as punctual as clock-work. A pleasant, comely young
peasant woman, who looked as if she had lived on fresh air all her life,
met us in the great stone entrance-hall. She told us that her father
would soon be at liberty, and that, with our permission, she would again
show us the rooms if we wished to see them. This promised well. Fetching
a huge bunch of handsome iron-wrought keys, she conducted us into the
great hall of the first floor, hung with large unframed pictures of the
Holy Sacrament. Then unlocking a handsome door which had once been green
and gold, we entered the vast reception-room, almost bereft of
furniture, but possessing a pine floor of milky whiteness and a
remarkably fine stove of faience eight feet high. My father measured the
length of the apartment: it was forty feet, and could have seated a
hundred guests. The casements were filled with old lozenge-shaped glass
set in lead, and the fine old iron trellis-work on the outside of the
windows gave a wonderfully mediaeval look to the apartment. There was,
moreover, a magnificent bay window, which formed a little room of
itself, besides a second room much less, which, with carved wood
wainscot and ceiling, could have served as an oratory.

Margaret's delight was unbounded. The father smiled quietly, and we the
pioneers could scarcely refrain our pride and pleasure. But there was
more to be seen. Crossing the great hall once more, we entered a large
and beautiful room overlooking the main entrance. This had other
furniture besides its handsome porcelain stove and inlaid floor of dark
wood. There was not only a comfortable modern bed, but chairs, sofa and
table; a chest of drawers too, which was covered with innumerable
religious knickknacks--little sacred pictures in glass frames, miniature
saints, and artificial flowers in small china pots. Having dipped her
finger in a holy-water shell hanging on the wall, our guide drew back a
long chintz curtain which covered the end of the room, and showed us a
large and handsome chapel below. A fald-stool ran along the front of the
window which, with an additional lattice of gilt and carved wood,
separated the room from the church. This had evidently been in old times
the apartment of the lord and his lady, and here they had knelt and
listened to the holy office without mingling with their dependants
below. This room, if we had the good fortune to obtain lodgings in the
mansion, was to belong to the poetess, for it was full of inspiration
and old-world memories.

Then out again into the hall and up another flight of stone stairs,
through a second great lobby into a corridor, which communicated on
either side with two charming rooms, spotlessly clean and perfectly
empty, if I except the stoves; but still, if we chose, these two rooms
could be Margaret's and mine, and the corridor as well, with a beautiful
balcony which commanded an enchanting view of the rich Pusterthal up and
down, right and left, with a row of jagged, contorted dolomite mountains
thrown into the bargain. All this was to be ours if only the Hofbauer
would have us. So down we went, casting longing looks around us--down
into the entrance-hall, where a crowd of poor people were streaming out
of the _stube_, the parlor of the family, such as in the midland
counties of England would be called the house-place, and so into the
grassy court in front, where we awaited with anxious hearts the fiat of
the Hofbauer.

We were not long kept waiting. In another minute the master of the house
stood before us, a tall, thin, elderly man, dressed in the full costume
of the district--an embroidered cloth jacket, black leather breeches,
which displayed a broad band of naked knee, green ribbed stockings,
shoes and buckles, with a silver cord and tassel on his broad beaver
hat. Saluting us with the grace and ease of a courtier, he apologized
for keeping us waiting, but he had been entertaining the poor of the
parish at dinner, according to an old custom of his. These simple
Tyrolese dined, then, at ten o'clock in the morning!

An elderly woman, also tall and spare, now appeared in a bright blue
linen apron, that half hid her thickly-plaited black woolen petticoat,
which was short enough to give full effect to scarlet knit stockings and
low, boat-shaped shoes. She carried in her hand a plate of large hot fat
cakes, which she pressed upon us; then pitied the smallness of our
appetites, and urged two apiece at least. Two mouthfuls, however, were
sufficient, as the cakes were not only extremely greasy, but filled with
white curds, aniseed and chives. Having received in good part this
intended hospitality, we were rejoiced to hear the Hofbauer express his
perfect willingness that we should take up our abode at the mansion. We
need merely pay him a trifle, but we must furnish ourselves the extra
bedsteads. Moidel, his daughter, could cook for us, for she understood
making dishes for bettermost people, having been sent by him to Brixen
for a year to learn cooking; for what was a moidel (maiden) good for
that could not cook? He should not make any charge for her services.
Also, if we saw any bits of furniture about the house that suited us we
might take them; and lastly, we could stay until Jacobi, the 25th of
July, but on that day the best bedroom must be given up, as it belonged
to his son, the student, who would return from Innsbruck about that day.
All this was charming. We promised to procure beds and bedding in
Bruneck, and arranged to take possession of our new quarters on the
following morning.

I will not enter into the rashness of our promise respecting the
bedsteads, merely hinting at the difficulties and complications which
beset us. Some of these can be imagined when it is known that, firstly,
there proved not to be an upholsterer, nor even a seller of old
furniture, at Bruneck; and that, secondly, the officers and soldiers of
the garrison now quartered there occupied by night every available spare
bed in the township. So it seemed until in our embarrassment the
landlady of the Post arose from her bed to help us to procure some. The
interview ended again with the prudent advice, "Go to Frau Sieger." We
went, and that incomparable lady, who bore us no malice for refusing her
rooms, generously provided for a small sum three bedsteads and an
amazing, and what appeared to us superfluous, amount of bolsters,
pillows, feather beds, winter counterpanes; but she would hear no nay,
declaring, "It often turned very chilly in the Pusterthal, and at such
times a warm bed was a godsend."

We now began to dream of beds of roses, but we were mistaken: we were
crying before we were out of the wood. We arrived at the Hof the
following afternoon with our bag and baggage, and found Moidel,
otherwise Maria, busily preparing the newly-erected bed in the
state-room. She received us cordially, until my mother, laying her shawl
on the bedstead belonging to the house, remarked that she wished that
for herself.

Maria seemed suddenly thunderstruck. She turned a deep red, and with a
gesture of astonishment let drop a pillow, exclaiming, "Heavens alive!
that is the Herr Student's bed!"

She fled from the chamber, bringing back her aunt to the rescue. The
latter looked stern and aggrieved. "Never, never! no one must lay his
head on that pillow but the student," she cried. Had my mother asked to
repose on the altar of the chapel they could not have been more
dumbfoundered.

As Frau Sieger's beds were truly spare, and as she could merely provide
three, this second complication ended in the family giving up a bed of
their own--one which was adorned at the head and foot with a cross, a
bleeding heart and sacred monogram--one, in fact, which bore more marks
of sanctity about it than the sacred bed of the student. It was obvious
that this mysterious individual was consecrated to the Church, and that
even before his ordination all that he touched was holy.

The storm had again given place to sunshine, and the two quiet women
passed gently to and fro with coarse but sweet-scented linen, which they
fetched from an old chest adorned with red tulips, a crown of thorns and
the legend "K. M., 1820," on a bright blue ground. Good old Kaetana!
That chest had once been crammed full to overflowing with linen which,
like other young women, she had spun for her own dowry, but when the
Hofbauerin died Kathi became the housekeeper and mother to the little
children. Thus the contents of the chest had gradually decreased, until
the maiden aunt drew forth the four last pair of new sheets for these
passing strangers. She felt it no sacrifice. It would have grieved her
more to touch the piles of fine new linen which she and Moidel had spun
through many a long winter evening, and which were now safely hidden
away in the great mahogany wardrobe, which the Hofbauer, in harmony with
the more luxurious ideas of the age, had given to his daughter. It
occupied the place of honor in the great saloon, having three companion
chests of drawers of lesser dimensions, which the father at the same
time had presented to each of his sons. That of the eldest, Anton, was
emptied by the owner and placed by him at our disposal; that of the
second, the student, was carefully guarded from the sun by a covering
formed of newspapers; the third, belonging to Jacobi, the youngest,
appeared to us filled with books. Jacob was shy, and some days elapsed
before we became acquainted. Anton, however, appeared modestly ready to
attend to our least beck and call. The first evening, perceiving that we
had no candlesticks, we conferred with Anton.

"Freilich," he said. "We have none of our own, but I am sure that, as
you will take care of them, there can be no great harm in lending you
some of the Virgin's." We demurred at first, but with a smile on his
open, ingenuous face he added, "The Herrschaft may be quite sure that I
would not sin against my conscience." He then brought half a dozen
plated candlesticks from the little sacristy, which he committed to our
care.

The reader must not suppose that this was a disused chapel: far from it.
In the dusk of the summer evening a murmuring chant like the musical hum
of bees pervaded the vast old mansion, which was otherwise hushed in
perfect silence. It was the Rosenkranz (or rosary) repeated by the
household in the chapel. The Hofbauer knelt on one side near the altar,
and led the service, his two sons, the four men-servants, the aunt and
Moidel, with the three maid-servants, reciting the responses on their
respective sides. The even-song over, the household quietly retired to
rest.

Chance had graciously brought us to the Hof in the midst of preparations
for the festival of the Holy Father. On Sunday, June 18, the whole
Catholic world was to celebrate the astounding fact of Pio Nono having
exceeded the days of Saint Peter. We, who had come from Rome, where
thirty upstart papers were denouncing time-honored usages and formulas,
where many of the people had begun to sneer at the Papacy and to take
gloomy views of the Church, were not prepared for the religious fervor
and devotion to the Papal See which greeted us in the Tyrol, especially
at Bruneck, where from time immemorial a race of the staunchest
adherents to Rome had flourished. The mere fact that we came from the
Eternal City clothed us with brilliant but false colors. Endless were
the questions put to us about the health and looks of the Holy Father,
whom they believed to be kept in a dungeon and fed on bread and water--a
diet, however, turned into heavenly food by the angels. Perhaps the most
perplexing question of all was, whether the Herr Baron Flinkenhorn, who
had been born in exactly the same year as the Holy Father, bore the
faintest resemblance to that saintly martyr. We could but shake our
heads as the old nobleman was pointed out to us on the morning of the
festival. Decrepit and bent with age, he shuffled along by the side of
his old tottering sister, an antiquated couple dressed in the French
fashions of 1810. They hardly perceived, so blind and old were they, the
bows and greetings which they received. They knew, however, that it was
Pio's festival, and they made great offerings to the Church and to the
poor.

Deafness even has its compensations. Thus this old couple had not been
kept awake all night by the ringing of bells and the firing of small
cannon, which had continued incessantly since the setting of the sun had
ushered in the festival on the previous evening. The firing lasted all
day--a popular but very startling and disturbing mode of expressing joy
and satisfaction. Bruneck wreathed and flagged its houses: there were
processions, the prettiest being considered that of the female pupils of
the convent of the Sacred Heart, who walked in white, bearing lilies. At
night the good Sisters made a grand display of sacred transparencies in
their convent windows--rhymes about the age of Saint Peter and the Pope;
the Virgin rescuing the sinking vessel of the Church; Saint Peter seated
on his emblematic rock, with his present successor at his side; and so
forth--all wondered, gaped at and admired by the people, until the great
spectacle of the evening commenced. As soon as night had fairly set in a
hundred fires blazed upon the mountains--far as the eye could reach, for
miles and many miles, one dazzling gigantic illumination. Papal
monograms, crosses, tiaras shone forth in startling proportions. High
up, far from any human habitation, on the verge of the snow, in
clearings of the mountain forests, on Alpine pastures, these fiery
letters had been patiently traced by toiling men and lads. Anton and
Jacobi were not behind-hand, and by means of two hundred little bonfires
had devised the papal initials on the upland common behind the house.
The illumination, however, had not begun to reach its full splendor when
one quick flash of lightning succeeded another, followed by a rolling
artillery of thunder, the precursors of heavy down-pouring rain. In five
minutes the storm had extinguished every bright emblem, and plunged the
illuminated mountains into impenetrable blackness. The weather, grimly
triumphant, drove lads and lasses drenched to their homes. So ended the
festival, but in the morning, in dry clothes, every one had the pleasure
of imagining how beautiful the spectacle would have been but for the
rain.

MARGARET HOWITT.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]




WILMINGTON AND ITS INDUSTRIES.

CONCLUDING PAPER.


[Illustration: OLD SWEDES' CHURCH.]

We have pointed out the metropolis of Delaware as being a distinctly
Northern city, planted in the distinct South. Among other things, this
complication has led to some singularities in its settlement. As a
community regulated by the most liberal traditions of Penn, but placed
under the legal conditions of a slave State, it has held a position
perfectly anomalous. No other spot could be indicated where the
contrasts of North and South came to so sharp an edge; and there are few
where a skilled pen could set down so many curiosities of folk-lore and
confusions of race. The Dutch, the Swedes and the English Quakers formed
the substratum, upon which were poured the _émigrés_ of the French
Revolution and the fugitives from Santo Domingo. The latter sometimes
brought slaves who had continued faithful, and who retained their
serfdom under the laws of Delaware. The French _bonnes_ stood on
washing-benches in the Brandywine, and taught the amazed Quaker wives
that laundry-work could be done in cold water. The names of grand old
French families, prefaced by the proprietarial forms of _le_ and _du_,
became mixed by marriage with such Swedish names as Svensson and such
Dutch names as Staelkappe. (The first Staelkappe was a ship's cook,
nicknamed from his oily and glossy bonnet.) As for the refugees from
Santo Domingo, they absolutely invaded Wilmington, so that the price of
butter and eggs was just doubled in 1791, and house-rents rose in
proportion. They found themselves with rapture where the hills were rosy
with peach-blossoms, and where every summer was simply an extract from
Paradise.

We cannot linger, as we fain would do, over the quaint and amusing
_Paris en Amerique_ which reigned here for a period following the events
of '93. At Sixth and French streets lived a marchioness in a cot, which
she adorned with the manners of Versailles, the temper of the Faubourg
St. Germain and the pride of Lucifer. This Marquise de Sourci was
maintained by her son, who made pretty boxes of gourds, and afterward
boats, in one of which he was subsequently wrecked on the Delaware,
before the young marquis was of age to claim his title. In a farm-house,
whose rooms he lined with painted canvas, lived Colonel de Tousard. On
Long Hook Farm resided, in honor and comfort, Major Pierre Jaquette, son
of a Huguenot refugee who married a Swedish girl, and became a Methodist
after one of Whitefield's orations: as for the son, he served in
thirty-two pitched battles during our Revolution. Good Joseph Isambrie,
the blacksmith, used to tell in provincial French the story of his
service with Bonaparte in Egypt, while his wife blew the forge-bellows.
_Le Docteur_ Bayard, a rich physician, cured his compatriots for
nothing, and Doctor Capelle, one of Louis XVI.'s army-surgeons, set
their poor homesick old bones for them when necessary. Monsieur
Bergerac, afterward professor in St. Mary's College, Baltimore, was a
teacher: another preceptor, M. Michel Martel, an _émigré_ of 1780, was
proficient in fifteen languages, five of which he had imparted to the
lovely and talented Theodosia Burr. Aaron Burr happened to visit
Wilmington when the man who had trained his daughter's intellect was
lying in the almshouse, wrecked and paralytic, with the memory of all
his many tongues gone, except the French. Some benevolent Wilmingtonians
approached Burr in his behalf, showing the colonel's own letter which
had introduced him to the town.

[Illustration: GRACE CHURCH.]

"I wrote that letter when I _knew_ him," said the diplomatic Colonel
Burr, "but I know him no more."

The day quickly came when Burr's speech of denial was reflected upon
himself, and those who then honored him "knew him no more."

Another French teacher, by the by, was not of Gallic race, but that of
Albion _le perfide_: this was none other than William Cobbett, with his
reputation all before him, known only to the Wilmington millers for the
French lessons he gave their daughters and the French grammar he had
published. He lived on "Quaker Hill" from 1794 to 1796. He then went to
Philadelphia, and began to publish _Peter Porcupine's Gazette_. "I mean
to shoot my quills," said Cobbett, "wherever I can catch game." With the
sinews of Wilmington money he soon made his way back to England, became
a philosopher, and sat in the House of Commons. Another British exile
was Archibald Hamilton Rowan, an Irish patriot, and one of the "United
Irishmen" of 1797. Escaping from a Dublin jail in woman's clothes, he
found his way to Wilmington after adventures like those of Boucicault's
heroes; lived here several years in garrets and cottages, carrying
fascination and laughter wherever he went among his staid neighbors; and
after some years flew back to Ireland, glorious as a phoenix, resuming
the habits proper to his income of thirty thousand pounds a year.

[Illustration: WEST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH.]

A familiar figure on the wharves of Wilmington was the gigantic one of
Captain Paul Cuffee, looking like a character in a masquerade. His
athletic limbs forced into the narrow garments of the Quakers, and a
brim of superior development shading his dark negro face, he talked
sea-lingo among the trading captains, mixed with phrases from Robert
Barclay and gutturals picked up on the coast of Sierra Leone. Captain
Cuffee owned several vessels, manned by sailors as black as shoemaker's
wax, and he conducted one of his ships habitually to the African ports.
Coming back rich from Africa, this figure of darkness has often led its
crew of shadows into port at the Brandywine mouth, passing modestly
amongst the whalers and wheat-shallops, dim as the Flying Dutchman and
mum as Friends' meeting. It is possible that from some visit of his
arose the legend that Blackbeard, the terrible pirate, who always hid
his booty on the margins of streams, had used the Brandywine for this
purpose. At any rate, some clairvoyants, in their dreams, saw in 1812
the glittering pots of Blackbeard's gold lying beneath the rocks of
Harvey's waste-land, next to Vincent Gilpin's mill. They paid forty
thousand dollars for a small tract, and searched and found nothing; but
Job Harvey hugged his purchase money.

[Illustration: ST. JOHN'S PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CHURCH.]

Latrobe the architect lived here in the first quarter of the century,
midway between Philadelphia (where he was building waterworks and banks)
and Washington (where he was seating a young nation in legislative halls
worthy of its greatness); using Wilmington meanwhile as a pleasant
retirement, where he could wear his thinking-cap, educate his beautiful
young daughter, and mix with the French and other cultured society of
the place. Here, too, about fifty years ago, a pretty French girl used
to play and eat peaches, maintained by funds mysteriously supplied from
Louisiana, and ignorant of all connections except a peculating guardian.
It was little Myra Clark (now Mrs. Gaines), who woke up one day to find
herself the heroine of the greatest of modern lawsuits, and the credited
possessor of a large part of New Orleans--the same who has recently
gained a million, while she expects to gain a million more, and to be
richer than Lady Burdett-Coutts.

Thus has the pretty city ever played its part as a storing-house where
things and people and ideas might be set by to ripen. It is not
wonderful that it now and then found itself, quite unintentionally, a
museum, where the far-brought rarities were living souls. In a heavenly
climate, just where the winged songsters of the South held tryst with
those of the North, and where the plants of both latitudes embowered the
gardens together, Nature arranged a new garden wherein were brought
together almost all the races that had diverged from Babel.

The antiquities we have been examining, however, yield in age to the
venerable walls which were built to shelter a worship no longer
promulgated among us. The Swedes' churches of Philadelphia and
Wilmington are among the oldest civilized fabrics to be found in this
new country of ours. That of Wilmington was built in 1698, and that at
Wicaco in Philadelphia in 1700. Rudman, a missionary from Sweden,
preached the first sermon to the Wilmingtonians in May, 1699; and after
him a succession of Swedish apostles arrived, trembling at their own
courage, and feeling as our preachers would do if assigned to posts in
Nova Zembla or Patagonia. The salary offered was a hundred rixdollars,
with house and glebe, and the creed was the Lutheran doctrines according
to "the Augsburg Confession of Faith, free from all human superstition
and tradition." Dutch ministers alternated peaceably with the Swedish
ones, who bore such Latinized names as Torkillus, Lokenius, Fabricius,
Hesselius, Acrelius. The last wrote in his own language an excellent
history of the Swedish settlements on the Delaware, only a part of which
has been rendered into English by the New York Historical Society.
William Penn proved his tolerance by giving the little church a folio
Bible and a shelf of pious books, together with a bill of fifty pounds
sterling. The building was planted half a mile away from the then city,
in the village of Christinaham. Its site was on the banks of the
Christine, and its congregation, in the comparative absence of roads,
came in boats or sleighs, according to the season. The church was well
built of hard gray stone, with fir pews and a cedar roof: iron letters
fixed in the walls spelled out such holy mottoes as "LUX L. I. TENEBR.
ORIENS EX ALTO," and "SI DE. PRO NOBIS QUIS CONTRA NOS," and
commemorated side by side the names of William III., king of England,
William Penn, proprietary, and Charles XI. of Sweden. Swedish services
were continued up to about the epoch of the Revolution, when, the
language being no longer intelligible in the colony, they were merged
into English ones: the last Swedish commissary, Girelius, returned by
order of the archbishop in 1786, and the intercourse between the
American Swedish churches and the ecclesiastical see in the fatherland
ceased for ever. The oldest headstone in the churchyard is that of
William Vandevere, who died in 1719. Service was long celebrated by
means of the chalice and plate sent over by the Swedish copper-miners to
Biorch, the first missionary at Cranehook, and the Bible given by Queen
Anne in 1712. The sexes sat separately. In our grandfathers' day the old
sanctuary used to be dressed for Christmas by the sexton, Peter Davis:
he was a Hessian deserter, with a powder-marked face and murderous
habits toward the English language. Descending from their sledges and
jumpers, the congregation would crowd toward the bed of coals raked out
in the middle of the brick floor from the old cannon stove: to do this
they must brush by the cedars which "Old Powderproof" had covered with
flour, in imitation of snow; and then Dutch Peter, as they complimented
him on his efforts, would whisper the astonishing invocation, "God be
tankful for all dish plessins and tings!"

[Illustration: CAR-BUILDING WORKS.]

[Illustration: RESIDENCE OF JOB JACKSON, ESQ.]

Modern improvement has a particular spite against the landmarks of
antiquity. The railroad to Baltimore slices off a part of the Swedish
graveyard--an institution much more ancient than the church which stands
on it. And the rock by old Fort Christina, upon which Governor
Stuyvesant--Irving's Stuyvesant--stood on his silver leg and took the
surrender of the Swedish governor-general, is now quarried out and
reconstructed into Delaware Breakwater.

Doubtless we dwell too fondly on the old memories, but it appears that
the souvenirs of this region are somewhat remarkable for their contrast
of nationalities. Perhaps the colonization of other spots would yield
better romances than any we have to offer; yet we cannot help feeling
that a better pen than ours would find brilliant matter for literary
effects in the paradise revealed to good Elizabeth Shipley by her
dream-guide.

Delawarean Wilmington is perhaps hardly known to the general public
except through two of its products. Everybody buys Wilmington matches,
and everybody knows that Du Pont's powder is made in the vicinity.
Ignoring the foundries and shipyards, the popular imagination recognizes
but these two commodities--the powder which could blow up the
obstructions to all the American harbors, and the match which could
touch off the train. A million dollars' worth of gunpowder and three
hundred thousand dollars' worth of matches are the annual product.

[Illustration: CAR-WHEEL CASTING WORKS.]

Eleuthère Irenée Du Pont, a French gentleman of honorable family,
appeared in Wilmington in 1802. The town had at that time hardly three
thousand inhabitants. He amazed all the quidnuncs by buying, for fifty
thousand dollars, Rumford Dawes' old tract of rocks on the Brandywine,
which everybody knew was perfectly useless. The stranger was pitied as
he began to blast away the stone. Out of a single rock, separated into
fragments, he built a cottage: it was a lonely spot, and the snakes from
the fissures were in the habit of sharing the contents of his
well-bucket. Such was the beginning of the Eleuthère Powder-works. M. Du
Pont, who died some forty years ago, was much beloved for his
benevolence and probity. In 1825, La Fayette, during his celebrated
visit of reminiscence, was the guest of the brave old Frenchman for
several days, during which he examined the battle-ground of Brandywine.
He here received the ball with which he got his wound in that battle,
from the hands of Bell McClosky, a kind of camp-follower and nurse, who
had extracted the bullet with her scissors and preserved it. The
general wrote in the album of Mademoiselle Du Pont the following
graceful sentiment:

     "After having seen, nearly half a century ago, the bank of the
     Brandywine a scene of bloody fighting, I am happy now to find
     it the seat of industry, beauty and mutual friendship.

    "LA FAYETTE.

    "JULY 25, 1825."

While on a Revolutionary topic we may mention that among a great many
relics of '76 preserved in the town is the sword of General Wayne--"Mad
Anthony"--a straight, light blade in leather scabbard, possessed by Mr.
W. H. Naff.

[Illustration: JESSUP & MOORE'S PAPER-MILLS.]

The citizens of this pleasant town have ever been orderly and pious,
just as they have ever been loyal. Their religious institutions have
grown and flourished. Godfearing and unspeculative, they have attached
themselves to such creeds as appealed most powerfully to the heart with
the least possible admixture of form. "The words _Fear God_" says
Joubert, "have made many men pious: proofs of the existence of God have
made many men atheists." Since the day when Whitefield poured out his
eloquence among the Brandywine valleys and touched the hearts of the
French exiles, Methodism, with its almost entire absence of dogma, has
had great success in the community. This success is now indicated by a
rich congregation, and a church-building that would be called noble in
any city. Grace Church, on Ninth and West streets, is a large Gothic
temple, seating nearly eight hundred persons--warmed, frescoed and
heavily carpeted inside, and walled externally with brownstone mixed
with the delicate pea-green serpentine of Chadd's Ford. The architect
was a native Wilmingtonian--Thomas Dixon--now of Baltimore. The windows,
including a very brilliant oriel, are finely stained: the font is a
delicate piece of carving, the organ is grand, and the accommodations
for Sunday-schools and lectures are of singular perfection. Few shrines
in this country show better the modern movement of Methodism toward
luxury and elegance, as compared with the repellant humiliations of
Wesley's day.

It is to be hoped that this advance in attractiveness does not indicate
any lapse in the more solid qualities of spiritual earnestness.
"Whenever this altar," well said Bishop Simpson in dedicating
the building on the centenary anniversary of the rise of
Methodism--"whenever this altar shall be too fine for the poorest
penitent sinner to kneel here, the Spirit of God will depart, and that
of Ichabod will come in."

We have indicated the Swedish Lutheran missionaries exhorting under the
roof of their antique church in a language which their congregations
were beginning to forget, and afterward in a broken English hardly more
intelligible. Their place is largely taken now by predicators of the
faith of John Knox, with a plentiful following of pious believers. Among
the family of Presbyterian kirks in Wilmington the youngest is a large
brick edifice built in 1871, for sixty-one thousand dollars, on Eighth
and Washington streets, able to seat nearly a thousand persons, most
comfortably and invitingly furnished, and supplied with lecture-,
infant- and Sunday-school-rooms, together with a huge kitchen,
suggesting the _agapæ_ or love-feasts of the primitive Christians.
Meantime, Anglicanism does not lack supporters. The descendants of
Monsieur Du Pont, cultured and influential, have done much to advance
the creed, and about fifteen years ago Mr. Alexis I. Du Pont, pulling
down a low tavern in the suburbs, prepared to erect a church upon the
site, to be built mainly through his own liberality. Unhappily, Mr. Du
Pont died from the effects of an explosion at the powder-works ten weeks
after the laying of the corner-stone; but the building was soon
completed through the pious munificence of his widow, and the Bible of
St. John's Protestant Episcopal Church now rests on its lectern upon the
site of the old liquor-bar, and the gambling-den of former days is
replaced by its pews. The rector is Mr. T. Gardiner Littell, a man of
eminent goodness and intelligence. St. John's has a beautiful open roof,
stained windows and a fine organ: it can offer seats to seven hundred
worshipers.

[Illustration: "AT THE SIGN OF SHAKESPEARE."]

These few specimen churches--and especially the last, which blots out a
grogshop--are good instances, with the large congregations they
accommodate, of the way in which a sane, flourishing manufacturing
community provides for the spiritual needs of its members. The tone and
moral well-being which Boz found, or thought he found, among the
operatives at Lowell are largely realized here. But our picture of
Wilmington as a hive of industry is not yet complete, and before we
enter upon the highly-interesting problem of its dealings with its
working family, we should enter a few more of its sample manufactories.

[Illustration: OFFICE OF THE DAILY COMMERCIAL.]

Take car-building, for an example, in which the reputation of this town
is known to the initiated of all the States and many foreign countries.
Travelers are at this moment spinning in Wilmington-made
railway-carriages over the extremest parts of North and South America,
admiring, through Wilmington-made windows, every possible variety of
winter and tropical scenery, on which they comment in English, German,
French, Spanish and all civilized languages. Such a migratory product as
a rail-car is an active messenger of fame for the place of its
fabrication. We examine, as a fair type, the Jackson and Sharp Company's
works, claimed to be the largest in the New World, and only exceeded by
a few British and Continental establishments. The buildings have
frontage upon the Brandywine and Christine streams, as well as on the
principal railroad. Here are a congeries of two-story buildings, which
are together fifteen hundred feet in length by a width of seventy feet.
Five miles of heating-pipes warm the rooms for a thousand workmen. There
is something logical and consecutive in the arrangement here, which
makes it the best spot on the face of the earth for an enthusiast who
should wish to demonstrate, what all loyal Americans believe in, the
vast superiority of our form of railway-carriage. The cars proceed, in
perfectly regular order, from raw material to completion with the
progressive march of a quadratic equation in algebra. They seem to be
arranged to demonstrate a theory. First the visitor sees lumber in
stock, a million feet of it; then, across one end of a long room, the
mere sketch or transparent diagram of a car; then, a car broadly filled
in; and so on, up to the last glorious result, upholstered with velvet
and smelling of varnish. The cars are on rails, upon which they move,
side on, as if by a principle of growth, the undeveloped ones
perpetually pushing up their more forward predecessors, until the last
perfect carriage is ejected from the fifteen-hundredth foot of the
building's length. Each one, gathering material and ornament as it rolls
steadily along in its crablike side-fashion, becomes at last a vehicle
of perfect luxury; and then, with one final plunge into the open air, it
leaves its diversely-destined neighbors, and changes for ever its
sidelong motion for the forward roll which will carry it through a long
existence. A very large proportion of this company's work is on "palace"
cars of the Pullman type, those extravagances of luxury of which Europe
is just now applying to Wilmington to learn the lesson. Narrow-gauge
cars for the West, in supplying which they are the pioneers, gaudy cars
for South America, and sturdy, solid ones for Canada, are all gently
riding forward, side to side, in this inexorable chain of destiny, and
diverging at the front door on their widely-different errands. Besides
the manufacture of cars, the company builds every sort of coasters and
steamers. The class of workmen it employs is often of a particularly
high grade. German painters quote Kotzebue and sing the songs of Uhland
as they weave their graceful harmonies of line and color over the
panels; and the sculptors who carve antique heads over the doorways of
palace cars make the place merry with studio jokes from the Berlin
Academy. It is evident that a community of artists like this, furnishing
the æsthetic department to an immense manufactory, will also elevate the
tone of the industrial society outside, if they can but be kept free
from vice and supplied with means of culture; more of which anon.
Meantime, as a kind of standard of what the manufacturers themselves
arrive at in prosecuting the amenities of life, we will quote the fine
residence of Mr. Job Jackson, a magnate of the company.

The wheel on which the car is mounted is of course another specialty,
turned off in another manufactory. We leave the rooms where the work
goes on with easy smoothness like a demonstration in a lecture-hall, and
come to raging, roaring, deafening furnaces and hammers. The
hollow-chested artists give way to cyclops. Here we are in the Lobdell
Car-wheel Company's premises. Negligently leaning up against each other,
like wafers in the tray of an ink-stand, are wheels that will presently
whiz over the landscapes of Russia, of Mexico, of England; wheels that
will behave rashly and heat their axles; wheels that will lie turned up
in the air at the bottoms of viaducts; and wheels that in various ways
will see astonishing adventures, because in railway-transit there are
telescopings and wheels within wheels. The English and the foreign trade
of the Lobdell Company is due to its manufacture of wheels in the
material or process lately known as chilled iron. This manufacture has
not yet penetrated the British intellect. Take the foreman of an English
car-manufactory, tell him that you will supply him a wheel about as
durable as a wheel with a steel tire at less than half the cost, and he
will laugh at you for an impudent idiot. But they _use_ our wheels. The
"chilling" of iron, when poured into a mould partly iron-faced, is very
singular: as the melted metal hardens against the metallic boundary, its
granulation changes to a certain depth, and the outside becomes
excessively strong: species of crystals seem to form, presenting their
ends to the surface, and meeting the wear and tear there to be
experienced. The use of this fact secures, in many manufactures, a
hardness approaching that of steel, without increase of cost. This
company employs the process both for car-wheels and for the large
cylinders (or "rolls") used in paper-mills. It is not to be supposed
that the work is all rude and rough, like ordinary iron casting. The
polishing of the large cylinders almost suggests diamond-cutting, it is
so fine. So true is the finish that a pair of these broad rolls, perhaps
five feet across, may be approached so near each other that the light
showing between them is decomposed: a blade of blue or violet light,
inexpressibly thin and of the width of the cylinders, passes through the
entire distance. As for the "chilling" of iron, it was applied first to
wheels in Baltimore, in 1833, by Mr. Ross Winans; and then, during the
same year, Mr. Bonney and his nephew, George G. Lobdell, established the
business we see, which has gradually grown to its present capacity of
three hundred wheels per day.

[Illustration: FOUNTAIN.]

[Illustration: "IN MEMORY OF THE SOLDIERS AND SAILORS OF DELAWARE WHO
FELL IN THE STRUGGLE FOR THE UNION."]

The use of such cylinders as we have just seen under the difficult
process of polishing is only understood when we explore some large
paper-mill, where they take the place of the old-fashioned frame of wire
gauze which produced the hand-made paper. We may select the splendid
works of Messrs. Jessup & Moore on the Brandywine. Our welcome is sure
to be a cordial one, for among the largest customers of the firm are the
publishers of _Lippincott's Magazine_. The process of paper-making by
the Fourdrinier machine was so fully explained in our Number for last
November that it is useless now to repeat the details. But it would
never do to leave the Brandywine without a glance at least at one of its
principal manufactures. The mill of Jessup & Moore uses the strength of
the torrent as an auxiliary to its steam-power of seven hundred and
fifty horses. The machinery is made by Pusey, Jones & Co., whose iron
ships and machine-shops we have already examined: the rolls of admirable
accuracy are from the shops of J. Morton Poole & Co. The paper-making
process--the vast revolving boiler of twelve feet by twenty-six; the
countless sacks of filthy rags, that have clothed peasants of the Black
Forest, beggars on the steps of St. Peter's and Egyptian fellahs; their
reduction to purity, and hardening from pulp to snowy continuities of
endless, marginless paper,--all this is of rare interest in the
watching, but has been told until the public is satiated. We leave the
banks of the Brandywine and the wharves of Christine, and try to lose
ourselves in the thickly-built heart of the city.

Even here the implacable business spirit exhibits itself at every turn.
In place of the placid millers and quaint refugees of the last century
at their doors, we see the shops, the storehouses of manufacturers'
supplies, the hotel and the theatre; and, pervading all, the vast throng
of artisans, providing such problems of local government and education
as the last century never dreamed of.

[Illustration: HIGH-SCHOOL.]

In almost all the industries of the city you are struck by the ancestral
aspect of the trades, the continuance of a business from father to son,
or the gradual change of firms by the absorption of partners. Boughman,
Thomas & Co., established in a handsome, modern-looking bookstore,
represent a business as old as 1793, uninterrupted since the time when
the founder, James Wilson, hung the sign of Shakespeare at his door. The
young girl of the period, who goes to their place from one of the model
seminaries of which Wilmington is so full to buy a little paper for
confidential notes or perhaps a delicate valentine, sees the old brown
advertisement framed against the wall, and behind it, in sign-painting
of her great-grandfather's time, the head of him who wrote _Romeo and
Juliet_.

While in this literary vein we would say a word of the newspapers.
These, the true finger-posts of thought in a community, are apt in
manufacturing cities to be conservative and timid, as trade is timid.
The very special attitude of Wilmington, however--a Yankee town in
perpetual protest with a Bourbon State--has inspired its press with
peculiar political energy. No more vehement Republican organ can be
found in the land, for instance, than the Wilmington _Commercial_: it is
not in its columns that you will see ingenious defences of the
whipping-post at Newcastle or of the crushing taxes levied at Dover,
whereby a lazy State feeds greedily upon a hard-working metropolis. The
_Commercial_ (Jenkins & Atkinson) is a staunch Administration sheet,
sound on the subject of industrial protection, and highly appreciated by
the manufacturers. Founded in 1866, it was, we believe, the sole daily
until eighteen months ago, when some of the sober-sided weeklies began
to understand that they must bestir themselves and put forth a diurnal
appearance. The _Gazette_ (C. P. Johnson), a paper nearly one hundred
years old, now appears daily, and expresses the opinions of the State
Assembly, where the Senate has but a single Republican member, and the
House of Representatives stands fourteen Democrats to seven Republicans.
Here the conservative thought of Kent and Sussex counties is kneaded up
into the requisite coherency and eloquence. _Every Evening_ (Croasdale &
Cameron), a smart paper without political bias, flies around the city as
the shadows begin to lengthen, selling at one cent a sheet, and liked by
everybody.

[Illustration: HOUSE OF COLONEL HENRY McCOMB.]

To be candid, however, we do not suspect that this unique old city
thinks through its newspapers. The circumstances here are so peculiar,
the neighborhood so close, activity so concentrated, and the
circumjacent neighborhood so little congenial, that an order of things
has been established unusual in modern times. Mind acts on mind by
personal contact; the strong men meet and support each other; the Board
of Trade assembles daily in beautiful rooms, and discusses every
interest as quickly as it arises. It is like the order of things of old,
ere the press and telegraph undertook to express our views before we had
formed them ourselves. We are reminded of the guilds of labor in ancient
Flanders or the _fondachi_ of Venice. The State of Delaware, meanwhile,
comes up and looks in at the windows, only half satisfied with the rapid
fortunes making by the civic trades. What the Delaware yeomen know is,
that they have broad acres of sunny land, on which they are perpetually
wanting advances of money. They therefore instruct their legislators to
fix a legal rate of interest, and to fix it low. The abuse which
naturally follows on this blind policy is, that the wealth created by
the splendid industries of Wilmington is constantly leaving the State to
seek investment where usury is not kept down by old-fashioned
legislation. Richard Burton, the Anatomist of Melancholy, saw a somewhat
similar state of things among the unproductive and ale-tippling scholars
with whom he lived at Oxford, but he was keen enough to feel an envy of
the livelier marts of commerce. "How many goodly cities could I reckon
up," says Burton, "that thrive wholly by trade, where thousands of
inhabitants live singular well by their fingers' ends! As Florence in
Italy by making cloth of gold; great Milan by silk and all curious
works; Arras in Artois by those fair hangings; many cities in Spain,
many in France, Germany, have none other maintenance, especially those
within the land.... In most of _our_ cities" (continues the mortified
Englishman), "some few excepted, we live wholly by tippling-inns and
ale-houses."

[Illustration: CLAYTON HOUSE.]

The average Delawarean of 1873 is the average Oxford gossip of 1620,
with the scholarship left out. But he has the unfortunate advantage for
mischief that he is in a position to enact laws over the producers of
"all curious works." These anomalies, however, must soon pass away with
the march of the age, leaving Wilmington less individual perhaps, but
more free.

[Illustration: OPERA-HOUSE AND MASONIC HALL.]

How deftly, by the by, Burton picks up the distinction between an inland
city, living by handicraft, and a port city, handling weighty materials
and feeding freely on commerce! His livers by their finger-ends are
especially "those within the land." Just so the great capital of France,
arbitrarily concentred amongst her provinces, and deprived of a port,
can only thrive by her exceptional genius in fine and easily-moved
_articles de Paris_. The site now under our consideration, however,
means to have no such one-sided success. If her horoscope be not cast
amiss, this American Glasgow will both make whatever human ingenuity can
make, and she will also distribute. One of the first things she intends
to do is to tap the stream of food, fuel and lumber destined for the
South, and now laid up in the winter in Philadelphia by the closing of
the Delaware, and send it to the Southern consumer by her cheap
water-transport. Connected with this enterprise will be the
multiplication of her steam colliers, ultimately scattering the crop of
breadstuffs to the South Atlantic and Gulf States (if not the Eastern),
and coming home with ballast of the varied iron ores those States abound
in. When Delaware Bay begins to be whitened with the sails of returning
coal-vessels, or lashed with the wheels of steam carriers, bringing in
the oxides and magnetite ores of North Carolina and the hematite and
other varieties of the extreme South, to mix with the rail-brought ores
of interior localities, then Wilmington proposes to be the chosen centre
of industry in cast iron. This production, it is now well understood, is
no longer carried on most advantageously in the neighborhood of any one
great natural deposit of ore. The important thing is to be at a meeting
of all varieties of the metal: chemistry then selects the proportions
for mixture, and the best stock is produced with scarcely any greater
expense than the lowest grade. The situation at the head of Delaware Bay
is one where every choice of the ores can be easily swept together by
rail or water. It also controls fuel, by both means of carriage, from
either of the great anthracite regions--a matter of special importance
in this time of "strikes," as the operatives of both districts rarely
throw up work at the same time. Wilmington thus proposes to obtain its
iron at three dollars per ton less than Pittsburg.

[Illustration: PARLOR-MATCH FACTORY.]

To properly digest these advantages, the city needs a large furnace,
centrally located, to work for all the foundries and forges of the
place. This construction is now being earnestly advocated, and will
doubtless soon take form.

Thus we see the northernmost of the slave-State cities leaping up to
catch first the advantages of perfect commercial union under the new
regime. Affiliated with the South, inspired by the North, we should
watch her as a standard and a type.

Meantime, her labor problem, as a city crammed with proletarians, she
meets with consummate tranquillity. The paternal relations between the
good old Brandywine millers and their journeymen are continued through
the immense operations of the present day. A singular harmony has thus
far subsisted between employers and employed: the prosperity and calm
which travelers used to praise among the operatives of New England mills
are perhaps now best seen here. To this result both Nature and man
contribute. The country round about is so bounteous, is such a garden,
that the pay of the workman represents a far higher grade of social life
than anywhere else in manufacturing regions. Rents so far are low, but a
beneficent system is in active operation amongst the working-classes
which helps a man to own his own house, and avoid the teasing periodical
drain of rent.

This is the associative system, here in faultless operation, by which
the fragments of a large piece of ground are paid for by degrees and
cleared of all incumbrance in eight or nine years by the profit on the
contributed moneys. This plan is assisted by the best men in the town,
who participate in the associations, receive themselves a reasonable
profit, and supply the credit and advantages necessary for the safety
of wholesale enterprises. They have thus far worked with their workmen
for the latter's profit, with perfect honor and without a stain of
scandal. The great advantage, after all, is to themselves; for a workman
owning his own home, accumulating comforts and a family, is indissolubly
tied to the city and its peaceful order.

Various plans for the improvement of the workmen are afoot, including a
"Holly-Tree Inn" for the supply of harmless refreshment and evening
relaxation, the ground for which is bought and a stock-company forming.
A public park, for which a beautiful stretch of the Brandywine, on Adams
street and north of Levering Avenue, is recommended, is already engaging
the attention of the citizens as a necessary provision. A "fountain
society" is in active operation, offering cool, wholesome drink to the
thirsty workman and the tired beast: the principal of its
fountain-structures forms a memorial monument to a young gentleman who
had distinguished himself by his liberality in preparing scientific
lectures for the free entertainment of the working public. Shut up in
the public hall among the materials of his lecture, he was found dead
from the result of some solitary experiment--slain by his own kindness.
A rich monument to the soldiers and sailors slain in the civil war was
unveiled in 1871: it is formed of a pillar from the old United States
Bank, surmounted by an eagle cast from captured cannon.

But the best thing a manufacturing town can do for her workman is to
educate his children. During the old aristocratic days of Wilmington she
was satisfied with the reputation of her private tutors and of her young
ladies' seminaries, where "sweet girl-graduates in their golden hair"
cultivated cheeks like the surrounding peaches, while they learned
Shakespeare, musical glasses and the use of the globes. It was not until
1852 that the Delaware Legislature chartered a board of education for
the town. In these twenty years fifteen schools have been put up, with
five thousand attenders. Schoolhouse No. 1, shown in the illustration,
accommodates four hundred and thirty-six pupils, and furnishes an
education, in the words of the late Bishop Potter, "good enough for the
richest and cheap enough for the poorest."

The choice streets of the city are filling up with tasteful residences.
As a specimen we present the house of Colonel McComb, an old favorite of
Wilmington, where his familiar appellation of "Harry McComb" is as often
uttered day by day as it was at Washington during the exposure by its
owner of Congressional honesty and piety--or magpiety.

A hotel of the first class has been erected, and baptized with the
commemorative name of the Clayton House. It has one hundred and five
chambers and every improvement. A very characteristic fact, showing the
spirit of integrity and goodness which here travels hand in hand with
modern enterprise, is that the owners sacrificed full _three-quarters_
of the rent they could have obtained, in order to keep it pledged as a
temperance house. Another elegant building has been put up by the
Masonic fraternity for their own purposes and those of the Board of
Trade, etc., including a handsome opera-house on the ground floor. The
auditorium is praised for its acoustic properties by Parepa-Rosa,
Wallack, Davenport and other performers, seats about fifteen hundred,
and is furnished with the inevitable drop-curtain by Russell Smith.
Faced with iron painted white, and very rich in mouldings and ornaments,
the building presents as cheery a front to enter as any similar place of
attraction known to the American tourist. The Masonic rooms above, and
those of the Board of Trade, Historical Society, etc., are provided with
every beauty and comfort.

Here are the indications of a prospering, laboring, thinking, virtuous
city of the New World. We have tried to sketch it both as a city with a
past and a city with a future. Could we have selected one for
illustration that would be a better or sharper concentration of all that
is good in American life?




MARIE FAMETTE AND HER LOVERS.


I.

Marie Famette is the prettiest girl in the market-place of Aubette. Her
eyes are of such a sweet, soft blue, deeply shaded by long black lashes:
her eyebrows are not black, but they are of a much darker tint than her
hair, which (so much of it as can be seen under her full white
cap-border) is a golden yellow. But it is not her eyes and her hair that
make Marie so attractive: she has charmed young and old alike ever since
she came, a toddling damsel of two years, and took her place beside her
mother in the market-place of Aubette.

Madame Famette's was the best fruit-stall of the market. No one else
could show such baskets of peaches and hampers of pears; and as to the
citrouilles and potirons, their reputation was so established that by
ten o'clock there was little to be seen of them among the glowing
vegetables which decked the stall. Such radishes were not to be seen
elsewhere--white and purple, as thick as carrots; and the carrots
themselves like lumps of red gold, lying nestling beneath their
feathered tops or setting off the creamy whiteness of the cauliflowers
ranged in a formal row in front of them.

But Marie had always eclipsed all other beauty in the stall, and now
that she had grown too big to be patted on the cheek and kissed by
grown-up admirers, she had a host of victims in the sturdy young
countrymen who came in to Aubette--either to bring mothers and sisters
with their produce or to purchase for themselves.

Madame Famette has weak health, and lately Marie comes often to the
market by herself, and is able to flirt to her heart's content,
unchecked by her mother's presence. She is so bright, so arch, so ready
with a sparkling answer, that it is no wonder her stall is always
thronged and that her fruit and her vegetables disappear so rapidly.

There is an extra buzz in the market to-day. It is September, the epoch
of the Mascaret, for the dreaded flood-tide seldom visits the Seine more
than twice a year, and always draws dwellers in the neighboring towns to
see its autumn fury. There is an influx of strange faces in the little
place beneath the richly-sculptured spire of Notre Dame--the cathedral
of Aubette, as strangers call it, although it is only the parish church
of the quaint little town--and a certain extra excitement is
communicated to the settlers under the canvas-covered booths and to the
humbler sellers of wares in baskets. Mademoiselle Lesage, a short, plump
young woman dressed in black, flits in and out of the chattering crowd
more busily than usual. Mademoiselle holds herself of a rank above the
country-folk who bring in their poultry and garden produce to Aubette.
In token of this she wears a round black mushroom-shaped hat, and a
holland apron with two deep pockets in virtue of her office; for
Mademoiselle Lesage has an enterprising spirit. She found herself at
thirty years old left alone in the world with an ugly face and with an
insufficient "dot." Mademoiselle Lesage is ambitious: she does not care
to marry a very poor man, and she has managed to give the town council
of Aubette such security that it allows her to farm the market yearly
for some hundreds of francs. Watch her collecting her dues. She goes
rapidly from stall to stall, jingling her pockets, laughing and chatting
with the farmers' wives, all the time keeping a hawk's eye on the
basket-carriers, not one of whom may presume to sell so much as an onion
without the weekly toll of one sou. She darts in and out among them, and
her pockets swell out in front as if they were stuffed with apples.

She has left Marie Famette's stall till the last. She crosses over to it
now as quickly as she can go, but there is no means of darting in and
out here, as there was just now among the basket-women. Old Floris
Marceau has covered a good-sized space with his heap of green and yellow
melons, and he stands behind these marchandéing, gesticulating,
brandishing the knife with which he slices his citrouilles and
inveighing against the folly of his customers. "Will mam'selle believe,"
he says, addressing her as she approaches, and wiping his knife on his
often-patched blouse, "they come to buy fruit of a respectable
vegetable-seller and they don't know the price of a melon? Ten sous for
a cantaloupe like that!" His blue eyes gleamed furiously under his
frowning gray eyebrows. "Ten sous! I told them to be off and buy
chickens." He broke into a laugh, and pointed to a tall, bent old
gentleman, who seemed covered with confusion at this public rebuke, and
sidled his way out of the throng without attempting an answer.

"Buy a turkey, m'sieur?" A smiling, dark-eyed woman in a close-setting
white cap went on with the joke and pointed to her basket, but the old
gentleman had had enough: he hurried away with a rueful glance at the
basket in which, divided only by the handle, sat two fat turkey poults
and two chickens. One of the turkeys stirred and got a wing free, but it
was remorselessly tucked in again and reduced to passive endurance, with
"Keep quiet then, ne soyez pas bête."

Mademoiselle Lesage approaches Marie's stall at a leisurely pace: she
wishes to see her ground before she speaks. By the extra sweetness of
her smile one might suppose that mademoiselle loved the gay little
beauty: "Bonjour, Marie. Madame Famette trusts you alone again, I see?"

Marie does exactly that which Mademoiselle Lesage intended to make her
do: she starts violently and she looks annoyed.

Elise Lesage glances quickly from Marie to the two young men who stand
beside her. One of these, tall, well-dressed, with a Jewish face, and a
sparkling pin in his brilliant blue scarf, is Alphonse Poiseau, the son
of Monsieur Poiseau of the large clockmaker's and jeweler's shop at the
corner of the place next the church: the other is Nicolas Marais, a
handsome, gypsy-looking fellow with no decided occupation. He is
sometimes at work on his uncle's farm at Vatteville, and when he falls
out with his uncle and tires of Vatteville he comes across the Seine and
gets employed by Léon Roussel, the chief timber-merchant of Aubette.

People say that old Marais, the miser of Vatteville, means to make
Nicolas his heir; but Nicolas takes no pains to please the old man: he
goes here and there at his pleasure, a favorite wherever he shows his
handsome dark eyes and his saucy smile. The men like him as much as the
women do, he has such a ready, amusing tongue, and he never says a
spiteful word; so that more than one of the keen, observant
poultry-sellers standing beside their baskets near Marie's stall have
commented on the scowl with which for full five minutes Léon Roussel has
regarded Nicolas. Léon Roussel is a middle-sized, in no way
remarkable-looking person, with honest brown eyes and a square, sensible
face. His father, the wealthy timber-merchant on the Yvetôt road, died
when he was a boy, and Léon is one of the most prosperous citizens of
Aubette, and well thought of by all. Léon is ostensibly in consultation
with Monsieur Houlard, tailor and town councillor, but as he stands at
the worthy's shop-door he is raised above the level of the place, and is
exactly opposite the stall of Marie Famette.

"Nicolas is out of favor with Monsieur Roussel: he has worked badly in
the lumber-yard," says La Mère Robillard.

"Chut! chut!" says her gossip, Madelaine Manget, and she gives at the
same time a pat to a refractory chicken. "Nicolas looks too hard at
Marie Famette. Ma foi! there are men in the manger as well as dogs. If
Monsieur Léon wants Marie to be for his eyes only, why does he not ask
for her and marry her, the proud simpleton?"

"Ah, but look you, Madelaine, Léon is not proud: he never turns a poor
man from his door without a morsel to quiet hunger, and he must be
clever or his business would not prosper."

La Mère Manget shrugs her shoulders. "Will you then not buy turkeys at
eleven francs the couple, ma belle dame?" she cries shrilly to a
passer-by.

While Marie Famette recovers herself, Nicolas answers Mam'selle Lesage.
"Pardon, Mam'selle Lesage, but Mam'selle Marie is not alone," he says,
raising his hat with exquisite politeness--Alphonse Poiseau tries to
follow suit, but his bow is stiff and pompous--"the whole market is her
body-guard, and she permits Monsieur Poiseau and myself to act as
sentinels." He throws an insinuating glance at Marie, which deepens the
gloom on Léon Roussel's face.

Elise Lesage has taken in the whole situation, and she knows exactly
where to look for the timber-merchant. An uneasy consciousness makes
Marie follow her glance: she looks red and confused when she sees Léon's
stern, disapproving face. His eyes are fixed on her as she looks across,
but he withdraws them instantly and turns to Monsieur Houlard.

Marie bites her pretty red under-lip: she can hardly keep from crying:
"If we were alone and he scolded me, I would not mind; but he has no
right to frown at me before the whole town. It is enough to compromise
me. It will be said presently that I am a bold girl, while I only amuse
myself, and never move a step from my stall to speak to any one. It is
too bad!"

She gulps down a lump in her throat, and gives Nicolas Marais a smile
that makes the clockmaker long to knock his rival's head against the
gray buttress of the old church.

"Sentinels!" Elise Lesage laughs. "Is Marie afraid, then, that some one
will steal her?"

"Marie is afraid of nothing, Mademoiselle Lesage." The little beauty is
glad to be able to vent her vexation on some one. "What right has she to
call me Marie?" she says to Nicolas in a very audible under-tone.

Mademoiselle's black eyes close till they look like lines: Marie does
not see her face, but Nicolas Marais shivers, he hardly knows why.

A restraint has come over the merry trio, and Nicolas abhors restraint.
"Tiens!" he says carelessly, "there is a fresh bevy of basket-women,
Mam'selle Lesage."

Elise darts off like a greyhound, and Marie forgets her vexation and
laughs out merrily at Nicolas's ruse: "She is such a busybody!" The girl
glances across to see what has become of Léon: he is talking to
Mademoiselle Lesage.

Alphonse Poiseau has kept silence, but he has observed. "I should not
like to offend mam'selle," he says, "her eyes are so like a snake's."


II.

Market has come and gone again. Marie Famette was not happy as she went
home last Saturday, but to-day her heart aches sorely as she goes along
the dusty road to St. Gertrude. Last Saturday was the first market-day
this year that Léon Roussel has not helped her into her cart and taken a
friendly leave of her; but he disappeared before market was over, and
to-day he was not there at all.

"And he might have walked home with me!" Tears are in poor little
Marie's eyes. Léon Roussel has seemed her own special property, and he
has not been to her mother's house for a fortnight. "And if he had been
at market to-day, he would have been content with me: poor Nicolas must
be ill indeed to stay away from market. Ma foi! I have been dull alone.
Elise Lesage was civil, for a wonder: I hope she will give old Marais's
note safely to his nephew. I wonder why she goes to see Nicolas?"

As she says the word a strange foreboding seizes Marie: she cannot tell
what causes it, but her old dislike to Elise rises up, mingled with a
kind of fear. "I ought to have given Nicolas the note myself; and yet--"

The road is very long and very dusty to-day: it is never an interesting
way out of Aubette, except that being cut on the hillside it is raised
high, the little river meandering through the osier meadows on the left,
and also commands a fine view of the beautiful old church. But Marie
does not turn back to look at the church: her heart is too heavy to take
interest in anything out of herself. She has left the cart behind to
bring out crockery and some new chairs which she has purchased for her
mother, and she wishes she had stayed in Aubette till her cargo was
packed. All at once a new thought comes, and her eyes brighten. A wood
clothes the hilly side of the road, but on the left there is a steep
descent into the valley, and the road is bordered either by scattered
cottages or by an irregular hawthorn hedge. A little way on there is a
gap in this hedge, and looking down there is a long steep flight of
steps with wooden edges. At the foot stands a good-sized house divided
now into several cottages. The walls are half-timbered with wood set
crosswise in the plaster between two straight rows. Ladders, iron hoops
and a bird-cage hang against the wall, and over the door is a wooden
shelf with scarlet geraniums. There is a desolate garden divided into
three by a criss-cross fence and a hedge, and over the last a huge
orange citrouille has clambered and lies perched on the top.

Marie knows that Nicolas Marais sometimes lodges in one of the cottages,
but she knows too that the property belongs to Léon Roussel, and that he
lives close by. A blush comes to the girl's cheeks: she may see Léon
there. She stops and looks down: Elise Lesage is coming out of the
doorway, but she is talking over her shoulder to some one behind her.
Marie sees her put her fingers into one of the brown holland pockets,
pull out a note and give it to her companion.

Marie draws a deep breath: "How I wronged her! Ever since I gave her
that note I have felt anxious and troubled. She seems so spiteful to me
that I feared she might somehow get me into trouble with it, and yet I
don't know how."

There were footsteps coming along the road, but Marie did not look
round: in the quick revulsion of feeling toward Elise she was eager to
make atonement. She leaned on the hand-rail that went down the steps,
waiting for Mademoiselle Lesage: if she had listened she would have
noticed that the footsteps had come nearer and had suddenly ceased.

Nicolas Marais came forward out of the cottage, and then Elise looked up
and saw Marie. She smiled and nodded. "I am coming," she called up in
her rasping voice; and she did seem in high haste to get to Marie
Famette, but Marie saw that she looked beyond her at some one or
something else. The girl looked over her shoulder, and there was Léon
Roussel, but he did not care to look at her. His eyes were fixed sternly
on Nicolas Marais, but Nicolas did not seem to care for his employer's
anger: he was smiling rapturously up at Marie, and as she now looked at
him he first kissed his hand and then put the note to his lips and
kissed it twice.

Marie grew crimson. Elise, who had just reached the top of the steps,
laughed, and Léon Roussel stood an instant pale and defiant, and then
turned back toward Aubette.

"Stay, stay, Monsieur Léon!" Elise darted after him; then, stopping
suddenly, she nodded back at Marie: "Stop and talk to Nicolas, mon
enfant: I will make it all right for you with Monsieur Roussel;" and she
hurried on in pursuit.

But Marie was too angry with Nicolas to give him even a moment: "How
dare he kiss his hand to me? And oh, Léon will think that I wrote that
note to him, and how can I ever tell him the truth? Will Elise Lesage
tell him?"

She had just a faint hope; and then she reproached herself. Why should
not Mademoiselle Lesage tell the truth? She was cross and spiteful, but
then, poor thing! she was old and ugly. "And it may be," Marie thought,
"that one is not half thankful enough for one's gifts, and that it is
very irritating to be plain. It is Alphonse Poiseau who has made me
think evil of Elise, and one should not cherish evil thoughts."

Marie went home happier and lighter-hearted: that little glimpse of
Léon had quieted the sore longing at her heart, and at first the joy of
having seen him made her dwell less on his stern looks and his avoidance
of herself.

She came to the broad grassed turning that leads off the main road to
St. Gertrude. A saddled donkey was grazing on one side, and on the other
an old woman sat on a stone post. She jumped up when she saw Marie. She
had looked tall as she sat: she was as broad as she was long now she
stood erect in her dark striped gown and black jacket, and white cap
with its plain border and lappets pinned together over her forehead.

"Well, well, well!" She spoke in a short bustling voice--a voice that
would have been cheering if it had been less restless. "Hast thou then
seen Léon Roussel, Marie? Hast thou learned the reason of his absence?"

Marie's tender, sweet look vanished: she tossed her pretty head and
pouted: "Léon was not at the market, but I saw him as I came home; only
he was not close to me, so we did not speak."

"Didst thou see that vaurien Nicolas?"

"Yes, I saw him."

Marie blushed, and her mother burst out into angry words: "Foolish,
trifling child that thou art! thou lovest that black-eyed gypsy boy; and
for him, the idle vagabond, thou hast flung away the best _parti_ in
Aubette. Ciel! what do I say? In Bolbec itself there is no one with
better prospects than Léon Roussel." Madame Famette always failed in
managing her daughter.

Marie smiled and kept down her indignation. "I hardly know that," she
said: "old Marais will make Nicolas his heir, and there is no saying how
rich a miser is." She crossed the road, caught the donkey by the bridle,
and held him ready for her mother to mount.

Madame Famette went on grumbling, but Mouton the donkey soon drew her
anger on himself; and by the time the three reached the triangle of
gray, half-timbered cottages which surround the old church of St.
Gertrude, the easy, sieve-like nature of the woman had recovered from
its vexation.

"Holà, Jeanne, Jeanne! run there and take Mouton from Mam'selle Marie,
who is tired with the market. Come, thou, mon cher, and tell me the
news." Madame Famette rolled off her donkey, and then rolled on into the
house.


III.

Marie Famette was ill--much too ill to go to market.

"I will go. Do not vex thyself, my child, and I will see our good doctor
and bring thee back a tisane." The bustling woman, with her blue eyes
and light eyelashes, bent down and kissed Marie's forehead, and then
departed.

"A tisane!" The bright blue eyes were so dull and languid now, half
closed by the heavy white eyelids. "I wonder if even Doctor Guéroult is
wise enough to cure the heart when it aches like mine? Ah, Léon, I did
not think you could be so hard, so cruel; and how could he know, how
could he see into my heart, while I stood laughing so foolishly with
Nicolas and Monsieur Poiseau? If Elise Lesage had not teased me about
Léon, it might have been different, but I could not let her think I
cared for him after what she said." She leaned back her head and cried
bitterly.

Madame Famette was more serious than usual on her way to the market.
Matters were getting tangled, she thought. Léon Roussel had begun to be
a regular Sunday visitor at the cottage, and now three weeks and more
had gone by and he had not come; and a gossip who had walked home from
church with her overnight had told Madame Famette that Mam'selle Lesage
was going to marry a Monsieur Roussel: whether it was Léon or a Monsieur
Roussel of some other place than Aubette her gossip could not affirm;
and in this uncertainty the mother's heart was troubled. She was very
proud of Marie's beauty and graceful ways, and she had thought it a just
tribute when the young timber-merchant had asked her permission to call
at the cottage; and now, just when she had been expecting that his aunt,
La Mère Thérèse, the superior of the Convent du Sacré Coeur in Aubette,
would send for her in order that the demand for her daughter's hand and
the preliminaries of the marriage might be settled, had come first Léon
Roussel's strange absence and the visits of Nicolas Marais, and now the
gossip about Elise Lesage.

"I will know the right of it to-day," Madame Famette thinks, and she
lashes out at Mouton in an unusual fashion.

The first customer at her stall is Madame Houlard, the wife of the
tailor and town councillor. "How is Marie?" she says: "the market does
not seem itself without Marie Famette."

Madame Famette smiles, but she sighs too: "My poor little girl is ill;"
and then her eyes rove round the market, and fix on Mademoiselle Lesage
bustling in and out among her clients. "Have you then heard that Elise
Lesage is to be married?" she says in a low, cautious voice.

Madame Houlard's flat, good-tempered face grows troubled: "Ah yes, I
have heard some talk; and listen to that noisy fellow;" then she points
to Floris Marceau, who is gesticulating and vehement as usual.

She is surprised to find her arm tightly grasped by the large hand of
the fruit-seller: "Madame Houlard, tell me the truth: who is to marry
with Elise Lesage?"

Madame Houlard leads a very tranquil life: her husband is the most
placid man in Aubette, and she has never had any children to disturb the
calm of existence. She is ruffled and shocked by Madame Famette's
vehemence. She bridles and releases her plump arm: "Ma foi, my friend!
what will you? Gossip comes, and gossip goes. I believe all I hear--that
is but convenable--but then, look you, I am quite as willing to believe
in the contradiction which so frequently follows. One should never
excite one's self about anything: be sure of this, my friend, it is bad
for the nerves. What is salsify a bundle to-day?"

Madame Famette, as has been said, has a sieve-like nature with regard to
the passing away of wrath, but still her anger is easily roused. "It
would be simpler to tell me what you have heard," she says in a very
snappish accent. "When I want a lecture I can get it from monsieur le
curé."

Madame Houlard had felt unwilling to tell her news, but this aggravating
sentence goaded it out of her mouth: "It is to Monsieur Roussel, the
timber-merchant, that Elise Lesage is to be married: see, he is talking
to her now." There is a slight tone of satisfaction in Madame Houlard's
smooth voice, and yet in her heart she is sorry for her friend's
disappointment. All the market-place of Aubette had given Léon Roussel
to the charming Marie.

"Léon Roussel! Why, she is as old as he is--older; and, ma foi! how
ugly! and her parents--no one knows where they came from; and she--she
is nothing but a money-grubber."

The day was tedious to Madame Famette. She tried to speak to Léon, but
he avoided her with a distant bow. There was not even Alphonse Poiseau
to help her: only little Pierre Trotin came and carried her baskets to
the donkey-cart. She called at the doctor's house, but she could not see
him. Madame Famette's heart had not been so heavy since her husband
died. "It is that serpent"--she wiped her eyes on a huge blue-and-yellow
pocket handkerchief--"who has done it all; and my poor unsuspecting
child has flirted with Nicolas, and made the way easy. Ciel! what do I
know? It is possible that Marie loves Nicolas, and is willing to throw
herself away on a vaurien with a pair of dark eyes; and the news will
not grieve her as it has grieved me."

She met her servant Jeanne at the entrance of the road, and gave up the
donkey-cart to her care. Then she went on sorrowfully and silently to
find Marie. The door stood ajar, just as she had left it. She went in
more quietly than usual, but Marie heard her. The girl sat just where
her mother had left her: the loaf of bread lay untouched. It was plain
that Marie had gone without breakfast. Her face was very pale, and her
eyes fixed strainingly on her mother, but she did not speak.

Madame Famette's vexation had made her cross, and Marie's pale face
increased her trouble: "How naughty thou art then, Marie! I set thee a
knife and a plate: thou hadst but to stretch out thy hand. Ciel! but the
market tires!" She cut a slice of bread for her daughter, and then she
seated herself.

"Mother"--Marie bent forward and shaded her eyes with her hand--"didst
thou see Léon Roussel?"

Madame's shoulders went up to her ears in a heave of disgust: "Thou
mayest as well know it, Marie: Léon Roussel is promised to Elise Lesage,
and they were together in the market. See what thy folly has caused!"

But Marie scarcely heard her mother's reproaches. The blood flew up to
her face, and then it left her paler than before. She bent lower--lower
yet, until she overbalanced and fell like a crushed lily at her mother's
feet.


IV.

"How is Marie Famette?" Monsieur Houlard the tailor asks of Monsieur
Guéroult the doctor of Aubette, as he meets him hurrying through the Rue
de la Boucherie.

"She is better, the poor child! but she must be careful this winter."
Then, seeing Houlard look anxious, the good doctor says, "But she is so
far better that I have discontinued my visits: I have given Marie leave
to come to Aubette."

"That is good news," says Houlard as the doctor shoots past him, and the
tailor tells the next person he meets that Marie Famette is as well as
ever, and is coming to market as usual.

It is Léon Roussel to whom he tells this, and Monsieur Houlard is pained
at the young man's want of interest.

"One would have thought," he says to his wife when he reaches his shop,
"that Roussel was displeased with Marie for recovering her health."

"Perhaps he thinks she will make a fool of herself, now she is well
again, by marrying Nicolas Marais: I hear they are lovers."

"It is a pity," says the dutiful husband. "Girls should not choose for
themselves. You did not, my dear, and that is why our life has gone so
easily."

But Marie is not really as strong as the doctor pronounces her to be:
her cheeks are hollow, and the color on them is feverish and uncertain.
If she could get away from home she would have more chance of mending.
Madame Famette's sorrow at her daughter's changed looks expands itself
in querulous remonstrance on the folly of flirting and on the
good-for-nothing qualities of Nicolas Marais. Nicolas has come to
inquire for Marie, but Madame Famette has received him so uncourteously
that the poor fellow contents himself with hovering about on the chance
of meeting Marie alone. But he never sees her, although the rumor grows
strong in St. Gertrude, and is wafted on to Aubette, that Nicolas and
Marie will be married as soon as she gets well enough to see about
wedding-clothes.

It is the beginning of October, a bright clear morning. The red and
yellow leaves come swiftly to the ground with a sudden snap from the
twigs that held them: the rabbits move about briskly, and a couple of
field-mice in search of winter stores run across the road nearly under
Marie's feet. Marie's cheeks are rosy with the fresh, crisp air, but she
does not look gay or happy. Life seems to have got into a hard knot
which the poor little girl finds no power to untie. Market-day used to
be a fête to Marie, but to-day she considers it a penance to be sent in
to Aubette. She is not going to hold her stall--ah no, she is not nearly
strong enough for such a task--but Madame Famette has a severe attack of
rheumatism, and Jeanne cannot be trusted to buy the weekly provision of
groceries. Marie shrinks as she goes along at the thought of meeting
Léon Roussel. There is another thought, which she will not face--that it
is possible Léon and Elise Lesage will be together in the market-place.
"I need not go into the Grande Place at all," the poor child says. "I
can get all I want in the Rue des Bons Enfants;" and she goes there when
she reaches Aubette.

But Marie has miscalculated her strength. She grows suddenly so white
that Monsieur le Blanc, the épicier of the Rue des Bons Enfants, takes
her into his daughter's room and makes her lie down on the little sofa.
Marie lies there with widely-opened eyes, wondering how she shall get
back to St. Gertrude.

"You are to lie still till Thérèse comes back from market," the old man
says, "and then she will arrange about your going home."

Marie lies gazing dreamily at the blue-papered ceiling. "I used to think
Thérèse le Blanc a cross old maid," she ponders: "shall I be a cross old
maid too?" And then the pale, stricken girl holds up her thin hand and
sighs: "I shall not be old: I shall die soon. Poor mother! she will
forgive Nicolas when I am gone away."

There is a bustle in the shop, but Marie does not heed it. She smiles
when Thérèse comes in, but she is too weak to talk--too weak to make any
objection when she hears that a farmer who lives some miles beyond St.
Gertrude has undertaken to convey her in his huge green-hooded wagon as
far as the cross-road.

Thérèse stands over her while she eats a piece of bread and drinks a
glass of wine, and then the farmer, a stout old Norman in a gray blouse,
helps her into the back of the wagon, and makes a resting-place for her
on some of the hay still left unsold, under the lofty arched roof.


V.

"Get up my friend, get up: you will reach Yvetôt sooner if I give you a
lift than if you wait. The diligence does not leave Aubette till six
o'clock, remember, and my old horses get over the ground surely if not
quickly."

Marie rouses from a sort of doze, but she cannot see the farmer or the
wayfarer to whom he speaks: a pile of new fruit-baskets fills up the
middle of the huge vehicle, and makes a wall between Marie and the
driving-seat.

"Well, mon gars, it is a long time since I saw you, and the town-gossip
of Aubette tells me more of your affairs than you ever condescend to
inform your cousin of. Your mother was different, Léon. Dame! I could
never pass her door after your father died but she would stop my wagon
and ask me for just five minutes' counsel. But you young ones are all
alike: the world has got a new pivot, it seems, for this generation, and
it will move round more easily when we graybeards are all kicked out."

"I don't think so, for one." Marie had known she must hear Léon
Roussel's voice, and yet her heart throbbed at his first words. "But, my
cousin, what is the news that thou hast learned about me in Aubette?"

"Well, the news varies: sometimes I hear thee coupled with one girl, and
then again with another, till I do not know what to think, Léon. I am
afraid thou art fickle."

There was a pause. Marie raised herself on one elbow and listened
breathlessly: it never came to her mind that she was listening to talk
not intended for her ears.

"Well, man"--the farmer seemed nettled--"why not speak out and say thou
art promised to old Lesage's daughter?"

"Because I am not promised to her."

Marie stifled a sob. It seemed as if her heart could not much longer
hold in its agitation, she longed so intensely for the farmer's next
question and for Léon's answer.

"Art thou promised to the beauty of the market, the little Marie?"

There was no pause this time. Léon's words came out rapidly with bitter
emphasis: "Marie Famette is going to marry Marais of Vatteville."

"Marry! Ma foi! I hear the girl is very ill. I forget--there is a sick
girl in the wagon now."

It seemed to the listener that Léon spoke heedless of the farmer's last
words: "Once again the town-gossip has deceived you, Michel. I heard a
week ago, and Houlard had just learned it from the Doctor Guéroult, that
Marie Famette is as well and gay as ever. I believe she has come back to
the market."

No reply. The silence that followed oppressed Marie: a sense of
guilt stole over her. It was not likely that old Michel Roussel knew who
she was when he helped her into the wagon: she remembered now that Léon
had told her of his rich cousin at Yvetôt; she knew she must get out
soon, and then Léon would see her and know that she had heard him. She
felt sick with shame. Would it not have been more honest to have
betrayed her presence? It was too late now. "And I could not--I have not
the courage." Marie crouched closer under the wall of baskets.

Suddenly, Léon spoke. "Well, Michel, I will get out here," he said.

The wagon stopped. Marie heard farewells exchanged, and then on they
jogged again to St. Gertrude.

Marie's heart was suddenly stilled: its painful throbbing and fluttering
had subsided--it sank like lead. Léon was gone, and she had flung away
her only chance of telling him that Nicolas Marais never had been--never
could be--more to her than a friend.

"Oh what a fool I am! I may often see him, but how can I say this? And
just now the way was open!"

When Farmer Roussel stopped the wagon again, and came round to the back
to help Marie out, he found her sobbing bitterly.

"Here we are at St. Gertrude, but--Ma foi! but this is childish, ma
belle," he said kindly, "to go spoiling your pretty eyes because you
feel ill. Courage! you will soon be well if you eat and drink and keep a
light heart." He helped her down tenderly, and shook both her hands in
his before he let her go. "Well," he said as he rolled up on to the
seat, "I wonder I had not asked for a kiss. She is rarely pretty, poor
child!"

Marie stood still just where she had found her mother seated on that
evening which it seemed to the girl had begun all her misery; but till
now through all there had been hope--the hope given by disbelief in
Léon's engagement to Elise Lesage. Now there was the sad, terrible
certainty that Léon believed her false. Marie knew that though she had
never pledged faith, still her eyes had shown Léon feelings which no
other man had seen in them. For a moment she felt nerved to a kind of
desperation: she would go and seek Léon, and tell him the truth that
some one had set on foot this false report of her promise to Nicolas
Marais. She turned again toward the high-road, and then her heart sank.
How could she seek Léon? He did not love her, and if she made this
confession would it not be a tacit owning of love for himself? The
weight at her heart seemed to burden her limbs: she dragged on toward
home wearily and slowly.

The road turns suddenly into St. Gertrude, and takes a breathing-space
at a sharp angle with a breadth of grass, bordered by a clump of nut
trees. Before Marie reached the nut trees she saw Léon Roussel standing
beside them. She stopped, but he had been waiting for her coming: he
came forward to meet her.

When he saw her face he looked grieved, but he spoke very coldly: "I
have been to your cottage to inquire for you"--he raised his hat, but he
made no effort to take her hand--"and then I heard you were expected
home from Aubette. I did not know how ill you had been till to-day,
Marie: I had been told you were quite recovered."

His cold, hard manner wounded her: "Oh, I am better, thank you;" but as
she spoke her sight grew dizzy: she would have fallen if Léon had not
caught her in his arms. She felt that he clasped her closely for an
instant, and then he loosed his hold.

"Thank you!" She freed herself. "I am better. I will go home now,
Monsieur Roussel."

He took off his hat mechanically, and Marie turned toward St. Gertrude.

But she did not move: she had no power to go forward. An impulse
stronger than her will was holding her. She looked round: Léon had not
moved--he stood with his eyes fixed on the ground.

"I must tell you something," she said. Léon started: he had never heard
Marie speak in such a humble tone. "I was in the wagon just now, and I
listened to your talk with Monsieur Michel." Her cheeks grew crimson.
"But, Monsieur Roussel, you are in error about me. Nicolas Marais is my
friend"--Léon's face grew so stern that her eyes drooped and her voice
faltered--"but he will never be more to me. He has always been my
friend."

Léon came close to her and took her hand: "Marie"--his voice was so
harsh and severe that she shrunk from him--"you must tell the truth, and
you must not be angry if I doubt you. My child, did I not see Nicolas
kiss the letter you sent him, and look at you as he kissed it?"

"Did Elise Lesage tell you I wrote that letter?" But Marie's fear had
left her. She smiled up at her lover, once more his own arch, bright
Marie: "How dared you believe her, Léon? I have a great mind not to tell
you the truth."

But Léon Roussel was satisfied, for while she spoke his arm had folded
round her again, and he was much too happy to trouble himself about
Nicolas Marais.

       *       *       *       *       *

Léon and Marie are to be married in November, and Mam'selle Lesage has
been so indisposed that for two consecutive Saturdays she has sent a
deputy to collect sous in the market of Aubette.

KATHARINE S. MACQUOID.




SALMON FISHING IN CANADA.


Fifty years ago, when the manners and habits of the Americans were very
different from what they now are, there lived in Boston two gentlemen so
far in advance of their age as to devote much time to shooting and
fishing. These pursuits were denounced by the Puritans and their
descendants as a sinful waste of time, and there is a letter extant from
one of the early Massachusetts governors, in which he reproaches himself
for indulging in "fowling," the rather because, as he confesses, he
failed to get any game. These two bold Bostonians were wont to go to
Scotland for salmon-fishing, having a belief that the salmon of the
American rivers were too uncultivated in their taste to rise at a fly.
However this may have been in 1820, the salmon of the Dominion are
to-day as open to the attractions of a well-tied combination of feathers
and pig's-wool, as those of the rivers of Norway or Scotland; and as,
under the protection which the Canadian rivers now enjoy, the fish are
becoming plentiful, sport is offered in the numerous streams which flow
into the St. Lawrence, the Bays of Chaleur and Miramichi, and the Gulf
of St. Lawrence, probably superior to any now to be found elsewhere.

Having last year paid a visit to one of these beautiful rivers, I
propose to give an account of my introduction to the art and mystery of
salmon-fishing, to the end that other anglers, whose exploits have
hitherto been confined to the capture of a pound trout or a four-pound
pickerel, may know the joy of feeling the rush of a twenty-pound salmon
fresh run from the sea--the most brilliant, active and vigorous of the
finny tribes, the king of the river, using the term in its original
sense--the strongest, the ablest, the most cunning. A late writer on
English field-sports says: "I assert that there is no single moment with
horse or gun into which is concentrated such a thrill of hope, fear,
expectation and exultation as that of the rise and successful striking
of a heavy salmon."

And first, let me say something of the system of protection to these
fisheries adopted by the Canadian government, which renders this sport
possible. Finding that under the constant slaughter of salmon and trout,
by the Indians with spears and by the whites with nets, the fish were
becoming not only scarce, but in danger of extinction, the government
interfered, and a few years ago passed laws the effects of which are
already apparent. Certainly, a paternal government is sometimes a good
thing. On our side the line a ring of wealthy men, with a large capital
in nets, seines, pounds, etc., will, as has been seen in Rhode Island,
depopulate a coast in a few years of its food-fishes, leaving nothing
for increase; and when the poor fishermen, whose living depends on these
free gifts of God, ask for protection from the legislature, the ring is
too powerful, one of its members being perhaps governor of the State.

In the year 1858 the colonial government resumed possession of all the
salmon and sea-trout fisheries in Lower Canada, and after the enactment
of a protective law offered them for lease by public tender. A list is
given of sixty-seven salmon rivers which flow into the St. Lawrence and
the Saguenay, and of nine which flow into the Bay of Chaleur. There are
also tributaries of these, making over one hundred rivers which by this
time contain salmon, and many of them in great abundance. Licenses are
granted by the government for rod-fishing in these rivers on payment of
sums ranging from one hundred to five hundred dollars the season for a
river, according to its size, accessibility, etc. These rivers are
generally taken by parties of anglers, but of late I learn that licenses
for single rods have been granted, so that all may be accommodated.
Applications for a river or part of one can be made to Mr. William F.
Whitcher of Ottawa, who is at the head of the Fisheries Department. Our
party of four persons had obtained, through the courtesy of Messrs.
Brydges and Fleming of the Intercolonial Railway of Canada, the upper
part of the Restigouche, a river flowing into the Bay of Chaleur, and
one of the best in the Dominion. Three of us had never killed a salmon,
though we were familiar with other kinds of fishing. We had, however,
for teacher one who for fifty years had been a salmon-fisher--first as a
boy in Ireland, and since that for many years in Canada, in most of
whose rivers he had killed salmon. As an angler he was a thorough
artist, as a woodsman he was an expert, and as a companion he was most
agreeable. Among the Indians, who have the habit of naming every person
from some personal trait, he was known as "the Kingfisher," and by that
name I shall call him. The second of our party, who procured the right
of fishing the Restigouche, and made up the party, I shall call Rodman,
which suits him both as fisherman and in his professional character of
engineer. The third, being a tall man of rather military aspect, we knew
as "the Colonel;" and the fourth, who writes this narrative, shall be
called "the Scribe."

Behold us, then, at Quebec in the last week of June, making our
preparations--laying in stores for camping out, and buying
fishing-tackle, which for this kind of sport is best procured in Canada.
On the 25th of June our thirty-one packages were on board the steamer
Miramichi, piled on the upper deck, with many more of the same
appearance--tents, buffalo robes, camp-chests, salmon-rods and
gaff-handles--belonging to other parties bound on the same errand as
ourselves. Three were British officers going to the Upsalquitch, men of
the long-whiskered, Dundreary type, who soon let us know with many
haw-haws that they had fished in Norway, and had killed salmon on the
estate of my Lord Knowswho in Scotland, while guests of that nobleman.
There were two Londoners in full suits of tweed, with Glengarry bonnets,
who were bound to the Cascapediac: they tried to imitate the bearing of
the military men; and why not? As Thackeray says, "Am I not a snob and a
brother?" There was a party of Americans on their way to a Gaspé
river--veteran anglers, who had frequented these rivers for some years.
The rest of the company was made up of Canadians from Montreal and
Quebec, many of them pleasure-seekers--stout elderly men, with equally
full-fed, comfortable-looking wives, and rosy-faced daughters with
straight, slender figures, by and by to emulate the rounded proportions
of their mammas. The young men were mostly equipped with white canvas
shoes and veils twisted round their hats--for what purpose I have not
been able to discover, but it seems to be the correct thing for the
Canadian tourist.

Four hundred and fifty miles from Quebec we reach the entrance of Gaspé
Bay, at the head of which fine sheet of water, in a landlocked harbor,
stands the town of Gaspé, distinguished as the place where Jacques
Cartier landed in 1534. It is now a great fishing-station, employing
thousands of men along the coast in the cod-fishery. Here are fine
scenery, clear bracing air, good sea-bathing, excellent salmon- and
trout-fishing and a comfortable hotel. What more can a well-regulated
mind desire? Into Gaspé Bay flow the Dartmouth, the York and the St.
John--good salmon-rivers, while both they and the smaller streams abound
with sea-trout and brook-trout. Thirty miles south of Gaspé is the
little town of Perce, also a fishing-station. Near this stands a rock of
red sandstone, five hundred feet long and three hundred high, with an
open arch leading through it, under which a boat can pass. It stands a
mile from the shore in deep water, and its top affords a secure
breeding-place for hundreds of sea-fowl.

South of Gaspé Bay we pass the mouths of the Bonaventure and the Grand
and Little Cascapediac--rivers well stocked with salmon--and reach
Dalhousie on the Bay of Chaleur about midnight on the 28th. We land in a
small boat in the darkness, and soon find ourselves at the comfortable
tavern of William Murphy, where we breakfast the next morning on
salmon-trout and wild strawberries. The town contains about six hundred
inhabitants, and has a pleasant seat along the bay. Its principal
industry seems to be lumber, or deals, which mean three-inch plank, in
which shape most of the pine and spruce exported from the Dominion find
their way to England. Here they also put up salmon and lobsters for the
American market--America meaning the United States. Two steamers touch
here weekly, and there is a daily mail and telegraphic communication
with the outside world. A few tourists, mostly from Montreal and Quebec,
fill two or three small boarding-houses.

The next morning we started in wagons for Matapedia, thirty miles up the
river, where we expected to secure canoes and Indians for our trip to
the upper waters of the Restigouche. Our road was good, following a
terrace about fifty feet above the river, which here is about a mile in
width, and flows placidly through a wide valley, with high hills on both
sides covered with a growth of spruce and cedar. Fifteen miles above
Dalhousie, at the head of navigation for large vessels, lies the village
of Campbellton. Here the character of the river changes: it becomes more
narrow and rapid, the hills come down closer to the shore, and it
assumes the features of a true salmon-river. It was formerly one of the
most famous in the provinces, and the late Robert Christie, for many
years member for Gaspé, used to take two thousand tierces of salmon
annually from the Restigouche.

Here we fall in with the Intercolonial Railway, which has its western
terminus at Rivière du Loup, below Quebec, and its eastern at Halifax.
The line is to cross the river at Matapedia on an iron bridge, and
follow down the valley. About 1 P. M. we crossed the ferry in a
row-boat, just below Fraser's hotel. The river is deep, swift and very
clear, with a rocky bank, from which they are getting out stone for the
abutments of the bridge. This bridge, and another similar one where the
line crosses the Miramichi, are building at Phoenixville, Pennsylvania,
and we saw at Campbellton a large bark discharging her cargo, consisting
of the bridge-work ready to set up.

We arrived at Fraser's in time to partake of a fine boiled salmon, and
we observe a constant improvement in this fish. Those in Montreal were
better than those in the States; those in Quebec still better; those we
ate on board the Gulf steamer a shade finer still. At Dalbousie we
thought that salmon had reached perfection, but were undeceived by those
upon Fraser's table, which far surpassed all that we had yet tasted in
succulence and flavor.

We had hoped to go up the river on the morrow, Saturday, but found it
was a great festival of the Catholic Church, and the Indians would not
start till Monday. Great was the indignation of the British officers who
were preparing to go up the other river. To be delayed by the religious
scruples of an Indian was too absurd. But even the "superior race" had
to submit. So the next day we all went down the river trout-fishing.

I went about two miles to the "flat lands," and fished some pretty pools
and rapids: the day was very bright and hot, so that I thought the trout
would not rise to a fly, and I put on a small spoon, which I dropped
into the rapids at the end of a long rod. After catching three or four
they grew suspicious, and I changed my lure for an artificial minnow,
and with it I had better success, though I have often tried it in
Western trout-streams ineffectually. I got about a dozen, from four
ounces to a pound weight: they were sea-trout, _Salmo Canadensis_, and
the first of that species that I ever saw. They are handsome and active
fish, lighter in color than the brook-trout, with silvery sides and
belly. The flesh is red like a salmon, and is of higher flavor, I think,
than that of _Salmo fontinalis_. My companions, Rodman and Kingfisher,
both used the fly, and got, I think, more fish than I did.

The next day, June 30th, was Sunday, and the law of the Dominion
prohibits fishing on that day. The weather was intensely hot, and we
stayed in the house and enjoyed the fine scenery all about us. At night
a heavy thunder-storm cooled the air for our next day's journey.

_July 1._ Our canoes and Indians arrived this morning about ten o'clock,
and instead of being shepherds of the forest, with their blankets tied
with yellow strings, they had no blankets at all, but wore coats and
trowsers--yea, even boots, which I had always been told had no business
in a canoe. There were four bark canoes and eight Mic-macs--one boat for
each of us--and as we had a large amount of baggage and provisions, it
was thought best to send off the canoes with these, while we went in
wagons across a great bend of the river to the house of Mr. John Mowatt,
the river overseer. We crossed the Matapediac in a dug-out: this is a
tributary of the Restigouche, which comes in at Fraser's. On the other
side we found wagons which took us to Mowatt's, seven miles over the
hills, arriving at 4 P. M. The canoes arrived about sunset, having come
twelve miles since noon against a strong current.

_July 2._ Starting in the morning at sunrise, the canoes took us six
miles by seven o'clock, when we stopped in the woods for breakfast. The
river has a very strong current, and from two to three miles an hour is
all that can be done against it with setting-poles when there is a heavy
load in the canoe. In places the water was too shallow even for a bark,
and the men stepped over-board and lifted her along. The Restigouche is
a beautiful river, with few islands or obstructions of any kind: the
water is perfectly transparent, and very cold--the chosen haunt of the
salmon. We see few houses or farms: rounded hills, from three to nine
hundred feet high, border the stream, leaving only a narrow strip of
beach, which is free from bushes or fallen trees. These are probably all
swept away by the ice in the spring freshets. The hills somewhat
resemble those on the Upper Mississippi, except that here there are none
of those cliffs of yellow limestone which are remarkable on the great
river of the West. About eight miles farther on we stopped for dinner
near a cold brook, from which I took half a dozen trout. In the
afternoon we proceeded five or six miles, and then camped for the night
upon a rocky beach, and, though somewhat annoyed by the sand-flies, we
slept well upon our beds of spruce boughs.

_July 3._ Broke camp at 5 A. M., and went up six miles to a place
called Tom's Brook, where we breakfasted. Here I killed a dozen trout
with the spoon. Six miles from Tom's Brook we came to the first
salmon-pool, of which there were six in the portion of the river
assigned to us--viz.: First, Big Cross Pool; second, Lower Indian-house
Pool; third, Upper Indian-house Pool; fourth, Patapediac Pool, called by
the Indians Paddypajaw; fifth, Red Bank Pool; sixth, Little Cross Pool.
These pools are the places where the salmon rest in their journey from
the sea to the headwaters of the river. They are usually in spots where
there is a strong but not violent current, perhaps six or eight feet
deep, running off to shoal water on one side of the river. The pools
have been found by the Indians, who search for them by night with
torches, which show the fish as they lie near the bottom, and they do
not differ materially in appearance from other parts of the river where
no salmon are to be found.

The salmon is what is called _anadromous_--that is, though an inhabitant
of the ocean for most of the year, it ascends the fresh-water rivers in
summer to spawn. In this function it is guided by curious instincts. The
female deposits her eggs in swift shallow water at the heads of streams,
in trenches dug by herself and the male fish in the gravelly bottom; but
it must not be fresh gravel: it must have been exposed to the action of
water for at least two years, or they will have none of it; and if a
freshet should bring new gravel from the banks, they will abandon the
place and seek for new spawning-grounds. It is only when the salmon are
resting in these pools that they will take a fly.

The first pool was at a point where the river made a short turn around a
large rock: the current was swift, with a hole at the foot of the rapid
perhaps twenty feet deep, with a rock bottom. Here our leader,
Kingfisher, rigged his salmon-rod, put on two flies and began to cast. I
trolled in the swift water as we proceeded, and with my spoon took a few
small trout. A salmon rose to the fly of Kingfisher, but was not
hooked; this was the first fish that we saw. (The term "fish" is always
applied to the salmon by anglers: other inhabitants of the water are
spoken of as "trout" or "bass;" a salmon is a "fish.") Although we had
seen none before, our keen-eyed Indians had seen many as we came up the
river.

We then went on to the Lower Indian-house Pool, two miles farther, and
Kingfisher made a few casts; but raising no fish, we went up a mile
farther to our camping-ground, an island between the two pools, having
plenty of wood upon it, with a cold spring brook close by--an old and
famous camping-place for salmon-fishers--and here we intended to make
our permanent quarters. We had four tents--one to sleep in, fitted with
mosquito-bars; one for an eating-tent, with canvas top and sides of
netting: in it was a rough table and two benches, hewed out with an axe
by one of our men. There was also a tent for storing provisions and for
the cook, for we had brought with us a man for this important office. A
fourth tent for the Indians, and a cooking-stove with camp-chests and
equipage, completed our outfit, which all belonged to Kingfisher, and
represented the results of many years' experience in camping out. The
cooking-stove is made of sheet iron and packs in a box, and is one of
the most valuable utensils in the woods.

It took the rest of the day to make the camp, and in the evening
Kingfisher and the Colonel went in their canoe to the lower pool, and
the former killed two salmon, weighing eighteen and twenty-two pounds.
These, our first fish, were objects of much interest to us new hands.
The Colonel took his first lesson in salmon-fishing, and thought he
could do it himself.

_July 4._ We proposed to celebrate this day by each of us killing a
salmon, but I thought it would be prudent first to go out with
Kingfisher and see how he did it, before attempting it myself. So I got
into his canoe, and the Indians paddled us to Upper Pool, within sight
of our camp but for a bend in the river. Kingfisher had the canoe
anchored within casting distance of the channel, and there, as he sat
in the bottom of the boat, he made his casts with a nineteen-foot rod,
first about twenty-five feet, and rapidly letting out more line he
increased the length of his casts to sixty feet perhaps, the big
salmon-flies falling lightly on the water, first across the channel to
the right; then letting the current take the flies down to the end of
the line, he drew them round to the left in a circle; then raising them
slowly from the water, he repeated the process, thus fishing over all
the water within his reach. Now the Indians raise the anchor and let the
canoe drop down a few feet. At the first cast after this change of
ground a bulge in the water showed where a salmon had risen at the fly
and missed it. "We will rest him for five minutes," said Kingfisher, and
lighted his pipe for a smoke. Then he changed his fly for a larger and
more brilliant one, and at the first cast a big fish rolled over at the
fly and went off with a rush, making the reel whiz.

"I've got him," said Kingfisher, calmly putting up his pipe and bringing
his rod to a nearly perpendicular position, which threw a great strain
on the mouth of the salmon from the spring of the rod. He ran about
twenty-five yards, and then leaped six feet into the air. Kingfisher
dropped the point of his rod as the fish leaped, and then raised it as
the salmon went away with twenty yards more of line.

"Up anchor, Hughey: we must follow him." So they plied their paddles
after the salmon, who was making down stream, Kingfisher reeling up his
line as fast as possible. Up went the salmon again, striking at the line
with his tail as he came down; but this trick failed, and he then
sulked, by diving into the depths of the river and remaining there
motionless for half an hour. Suddenly he rose and made for the heavy
current, from which Kingfisher tried to steer him into the still water
near the shore, where it was about three feet deep, and where he could
be played with more safety. After about forty minutes' play the fish was
coaxed alongside the canoe, evidently tired out and having lost his
force and fury, when Hughey struck the gaff into him near the tail, and
lifted him into the canoe, where he struggled very little, so nearly
beaten was he.

"About nineteen pounds, I think," said Kingfisher, who from long
experience could name the weight of a fish very correctly.

Returning to the spot where he had hooked the fish, Kingfisher after a
few casts rose and hooked another, which he killed in twenty-five
minutes--a fish of twelve pounds. After seeing the method of this artist
I was presumptuous enough to suppose that I could do it also, and I
determined to open the campaign the next day.

_July 5._ Bent on salmon-killing, I was off this morning at five, hoping
to bring home a fish for breakfast. The Upper Indian-house Pool is for
Rodman and me to-day, the others going to Patapedia, three miles above.
Kingfisher fitted me out with a Castle Connell rod, quite light and
pliable, with which he has killed many a fish; a click reel, which
obliges the fish to use some force in getting out the line: of this I
have one hundred yards of oiled silk, with a twelve-feet gut
casting-line, to the end of which is looped a brilliant creature almost
as large as a humming-bird--certainly the likeness of nothing inhabiting
earth, air or water. Mike and Peter, my Indians, took me to the pool,
and I began casting at the place where Kingfisher got his salmon
yesterday, while Rodman took the upper end of the pool, which was three
or four hundred yards in length. I had fished for trout in a bark canoe,
and knew how crank a vessel it is; so I did not attempt to stand up and
cast, but seated myself upon the middle cross-bar with my face turned
down stream, and began to imitate the casting of Kingfisher as well as I
could. I had fished but a few yards of water when the quick-eyed Peter
cried, "Lameau!" which is Mic-mac for salmon. He had seen the rise of
the fish, which I had not. And here I may observe that good eyes are
necessary to make a salmon-fisher, and a near-sighted person like the
Scribe can never greatly excel in this pursuit. All the salmon which I
hooked fastened themselves: I had only this part in it, that I was the
fool at one end of the rod. I waited five minutes, according to rule,
and cast again. "Habet!" There can be no mistake this time: my eyes were
good enough to see the savage rush with which he seized my fly and
plunged with it down to the depths.

"Hold up your rod!" cries Peter, who saw that, taken by surprise, I was
dropping the point of it. I raised it nearly upright, and this, with the
friction of the reel, caused the fish, which had started to run after he
felt the prick of the hook, to stop when he had gone half across the
river, and make his leap or somersault.

"A twenty-pounder," said Mike.

When he leaped I ought to have dropped my point, so that he should not
fall on the line, but I did nothing of the sort. I felt much as I once
did in the woods of Wisconsin when a dozen deer suddenly jumped up from
the long grass all about me, and I forgot that I had a gun in my hands.
I had so much line out that, as it happened, no bad consequences
followed, and the fish started for another run, at the end of which he
made his leap, and coming down he struck my line with his tail, and was
gone! Slowly and sadly I wound up my line, and found the gut broken
close to the hook, and my beautiful "Fairy" vanished.

Then I looped on another insect phenomenon, and went on casting. Rodman,
I perceived, was engaged with a salmon on the other bank. Presently I
raise and hook another, but he directly shakes out the hook.

I move slowly down the pool, casting on each side--which I find is hard
work for the back and shoulders--when, just opposite the big rock where
Kingfisher raised his second fish yesterday, I feel a pluck at my fly
and see a boil in the water. The robber runs away twenty yards and
leaps, then turns short round and comes at me, as if to run down the
canoe and drown us all. I wind up my line as fast as possible, but,
alas! it comes in, yard after yard, so easily that I perceive all
connection between the fish and me is at an end.

"He got slack line on you," said Peter.

By this time it was seven o'clock, and I returned home to breakfast with
what appetite I had, a sadder if not a wiser man. Rodman brought in a
nine-pound fish, and Kingfisher had three--thirteen, ten and twenty-one
pounds. The Colonel had made a successful _début_ with a fifteen-pound
fish.

As we sat at breakfast Rodman asked, "How many salmon did you ever kill
in a day, Kingfisher?"

_Kingfisher._ "I once killed thirty-three in one day: that was in the
Mingan, a North Shore river, where the fish are very numerous, but
small--not over ten pounds on an average. I knew a man once to kill
forty-two in a day there, but he had extra strong tackle, with double
and treble gut, and being a big strong fellow he used to drag them out
by main force."

_The Colonel._ "If he had played his fish as you do here, there would
not have been time in the longest day to kill forty-two. You average
half an hour to a salmon, which would have taken twenty-one hours for
his day's work."

_Kingfisher._ "True enough, but those little fellows in the Mingan can
be killed in ten or fifteen minutes."

_Rodman._ "And what was the longest time you ever spent in killing a
salmon?"

_Kingfisher._ "Once fishing in the Moisie, where the fish are very
large, I hooked a salmon at five in the morning and lost him at six in
the evening: he was on for thirteen hours, but he sulked at the bottom
most of the time, and I never saw him at all."

_Scribe._ "Perhaps it was no fish at all."

_Kingfisher._ "It might have been a seal, but Sir Edmund Head, who was
with me, and I myself, thought it was a very large salmon and hooked
foul, so that I could not drown him. I think from his play that it was a
salmon: he ran many times round the pool, but swam deep, as heavy fish
are apt to do. How do you like the cooking of this salmon?"

_Scribe._ "I think it is perfect. The salmon have been growing better
ever since we entered the Dominion, but we have reached perfection now.
Is this the Tweedside method?"

_Kingfisher._ "It is. Put your fish in boiling water, well salted, boil
a minute to a pound, and when done serve it with some of the water it
was boiled in for sauce. You can't improve a fresh-caught salmon with
Worcestershire or Harvey."

The day proving very hot, we stayed in camp till evening, when
Kingfisher and the others went to the nearest pool for salmon, and I
went trout-fishing to the little rapids and took a dozen of moderate
size. Kingfisher brought in four fish--seven, ten, seventeen and
eighteen pounds; Rodman got two--twelve and sixteen pounds; the Colonel
failed to secure one which he had hooked.

_July 6._ To-day Kingfisher and the Colonel take the Upper Indian-house
Pool, and Rodman and I go to the Patapedia. We start at 4 A. M., so as
to get the early fishing, always the best. It takes an hour to pole up
the three miles, the current being very strong, and when we arrive the
pool is yet white with the morning mist. It is a long smooth rapid, with
a channel on one side running close to the high gravelly bank, evidently
cut away by spring freshets. On the other side comes in a rushing brook
or small river called the Patapedia. Rodman took the head of the pool,
and I the middle ground. I fished down some fifty yards without moving
anything, when, as I was bringing home my fly after a cast, it was taken
by a good fish. Away he went with a wicked rush full forty yards, in
spite of all I could do, then made a somersault, showing us his huge
proportions. A second and a third time he leaped, and then darted away,
I urging my men to follow with the canoe, which they did, but not
quickly enough. This was a terribly strong fish: though I was giving him
all the spring of the rod, I could not check him. When he stopped
running he began to shake his head, or, as the English fishing-books
say, "to jigger." In two minutes he jiggered out the hook and departed.

I had changed rods and lines to-day, having borrowed one from Rodman--a
Montreal rod, larger and stiffer than the other: although heavier, I
could cast better with it than with the Irish rod. Unluckily, there were
only about seventy yards of line on the reel, and the next fish I hooked
proved to be the most furious of all, for he first ran out forty yards
of line, and before I could get much of it wound up again, he made
another and a longer run, taking out all my line to the end, where it
was tied to the reel: of course he broke loose, taking away my fly and
two feet of casting-line. By this time the sun was high in the heavens,
and we returned to camp--Rodman with a salmon of seventeen pounds and a
grilse of five pounds.

A salmon has properly four stages of existence. The first is as a
"parr," a small bright-looking fish, four or five inches long, with
dark-colored bars across the sides and a row of red spots. It is always
found in the fresh water, looks something like a trout, and will take a
fly or bait eagerly. The second stage is when it puts on the silvery
coat previous to going to sea for the first time: it is then called a
"smolt," and is from six to eight inches long, still living in the river
where it was hatched. In the third stage, after its return from the sea
to its native river, it is called a "grilse," and weighs from three to
six pounds. It can be distinguished from a salmon, even of the same
size, by its forked tail (that of the salmon being square) and the
slight adhesion of the scales. The grilse is wonderfully active and
spirited, and will often give as much play as a salmon of three times
his size. After the second visit of the fish to the sea he returns a
salmon, mature, brilliant and vigorous, and increases in weight every
time he revisits the ocean, where most of his food is found, consisting
of small fish and crustacea.

As we dropped down the stream toward the camp we saw a squirrel swimming
across the river. Paddling toward him, Peter reached out his pole, and
the squirrel took refuge upon it and was lifted on board--a pretty
little creature, gray and red, about half the size of the common gray
squirrel of the States. He ran about the canoe so fearlessly that I
think he must have been unacquainted with mankind. He skipped over us as
if we had been logs, with his bead-like eyes almost starting from his
head with astonishment, and then mounting the prow of the canoe,

    On the bows, with tail erected,
    Sat the squirrel, Adjidaumo.

Presently we paddled toward the shore, and he jumped off and disappeared
in the bushes, with a fine story to tell to his friends of having been
ferried across by strange and friendly monsters. Kingfisher got eleven
salmon to-day, and the Colonel one.

_July 7_ was Sunday, and the pools were rested, as well as ourselves,
from the fatigues of the week. Kingfisher brought out his materials and
tied a few flies, such as he thought would suit the river. This he does
very neatly, and I think he belongs to the old school of anglers, who
believe in a great variety of flies.

It may not perhaps be generally known that there are two schools among
fly-fishers. The "formalists" or entomologists hold that the natural
flies actually on the water should be studied and imitated by the
fly-maker, down to the most minute particulars. This is the old theory,
and whole libraries have been written to prove and illustrate it, from
the _Boke of St. Albans_, written by the Dame Juliana Berners in 1486,
down to the present day. The number of insects which we are directed to
imitate is legion, and the materials necessary for their manufacture are
of immense variety and difficult to procure. These teachers are the
conservatives, who adhere to old tradition. On the other side are the
"colorists," who think color everything, and form nothing: they are but
a section, though an increasing one, of the fly-fishing community. Their
theory is, that all that a fish can distinguish through the watery
medium is the size and color of the fly. These are the radicals, and
they go so far as to discard the thousand different flies described in
the books, and confine themselves to half a dozen typical varieties,
both in salmon- and trout-fishing. Where learned doctors disagree, I,
for one, do not venture to decide; but when I remember that on some days
no fly in my book would tempt the trout, and that at other times they
would rise at any or all flies, it seems to me that the principal
question is, Are the trout feeding or not? If they are, they will take
almost anything; if not, the most skillful hand may fail of tempting
them to rise. As to salmon, I think no one will pretend that the
salmon-flies commonly used are like anything in Nature, and it is
difficult to understand what the keen-eyed salmon takes them for. Until,
then, we can put ourselves in the place of the salmon and see with his
eyes, we must continue to evolve our flies from our own consciousness.
My small experience seems to show me that in a salmon-fly color is the
main thing to be studied.

But to return to Kingfisher, who has been all this time softening some
silk-worm gut in his mouth, and now says in a thick voice, "Do you know,
colonel, I lost my chance of a wife once in this way?"

_Colonel._ "How was that? Did you steal some of the lady's feathers?"

_Kingfisher._ "No, it was in this way: I was a lad of about seventeen,
but I had a sweetheart. I was at college, and had but little time for
fishing, of which I was as fond as I am now. One evening I was hastening
toward the river with my rod, with my mouth full of flies and gut, which
I was softening as I am now. Turning the corner of a narrow lane, I met
my beloved and her mother, both of whom were precise persons who could
not take a joke. Of course I had to stop and speak to them, but my mouth
was full of hooks and gut, and the hooks stuck in my tongue, and I only
mumbled. They looked astonished. Perhaps they thought I was drunk:
anyway, the young lady asked what was the matter. 'My m--m--mouth is
full of guts,' was all that I could say; and the girl would never speak
to me afterward."

_Rodman._ "That was lucky, for you got a wife better able to bear with
your little foibles."

_Kingfisher._ "I did, sir."

_July 8._ Rodman and I were to take the Upper Indian-house Pool to-day,
the others going to the Patapedia. Kingfisher and I exchanged Indians:
he, having a man who was a better fisherman than either of mine, kindly
lent him to me, that I might have a better chance of killing a salmon, I
being the only one of the party who had not succeeded in doing so. I
found in my book a casting-line of double gut: it was only two yards
long, but I thought I had better trust to it than the single gut which
the fish had been breaking for me the last two days. I also found in my
book a few large showy salmon-flies tied on double gut: with these I
started, determined to do or die. I was on the pool at 5 A. M., and had
raised two salmon, and caught two large trout, which often took our
flies when we were casting for bigger fish. At 6.30 I raised and hooked
a big fish, which ran out twenty yards of line, and then stopped. I
determined to try the waiting method this time, and not to lose my fish
by too much haste; so I let him have his own way, only holding him with
a tight hand. Joe, I soon saw, understood his part of the business: he
kept the canoe close behind the fish, so that I should always have a
reserve of line upon my reel. My salmon made two runs without showing
himself: he pulled hard, and was evidently a strong fish. He now tried
to work himself across the river into the heavy current. I resisted
this, but to no purpose: I could not hold him, and I thought he was
going down the little rapid, where I could not have followed, when he
steered down through the still and deep water, and went to the bottom
near the camp. There he stayed, sulking, for more than an hour, and I
could not start him. The cook came down from his fire to see the
conflict; Joe lighted his pipe and smoked it out; old Captain Merrill,
who lived on the opposite bank, came out and hailed me, "Reckon you've
got a big one this time, judge;" and still my line pointed to the bottom
of the river, and my hands grew numb with holding the rod.

    They have tied me to the stake: I cannot fly,
    But, bear-like, I must fight the course.

Suddenly, up from the depths came the salmon, and made off at full speed
down the river, making his first leap as he went, which showed him to be
a twenty-pounder at least. We followed with the canoe. On the west side
of the island ran the main channel, wide and deep, gradually increasing
in swiftness till it became a boiling torrent. Into this my fish
plunged, in spite of all my resistance, and all we could do was to
follow. But I soon lost track of him and control of him: sometimes he
was ahead, and I could feel him; sometimes he was alongside, and the
line was slack and dragging on the water, most dangerous of positions;
sometimes the canoe went fastest, and the salmon was behind me. My men
handled the canoe admirably, and brought me through safe, fish and all;
for when we emerged into the still pool below, and I was able to reel
up, I felt him still on the hook, but unsubdued, for he made another run
of thirty yards, and leaped twice.

"That's good," said Joe: "that will tire him."

For the first two hours of the struggle the fish had been quiet, and so
had saved his strength, but now he began to race up and down the pool,
trying for slack line. But Joe followed him up sharply and kept him well
in hand. Now the fish began to jigger, and shook his head so hard and so
long that I thought something must give way--either my line or his
spinal column. After about an hour of this kind of work I called to
Rodman, who was fishing not far off, and asked him to come alongside and
play my fish for a few minutes, so that I might rest my hands, which
were cramped with holding the rod so long; which he did, and gave me
fifteen minutes' rest, when I resumed the rod. The fish now seemed
somewhat spent, for he came to the surface and flounced about, so that
we could see his large proportions. Still, I could not get him
alongside, and I told Joe to try to paddle up to him, but he immediately
darted away from us and headed up stream, keeping a parallel course
about fifty feet off, so that we could see him perfectly through the
clear water. After many efforts, however, he grew more tame, and Louis
paddled the canoe very carefully up to him, while Joe stood watching his
chance with the gaff, which he put deep in the water. At last I got the
fish over it, when with a sudden pull the gaff was driven into him just
behind the dorsal fin; but he was so strong that I thought he would have
taken the man out of the canoe. The water flew in showers, and the big
salmon lay in the bottom of the boat!

I could hardly believe my eyes. That tremendous creature caught with a
line no thicker than a lady's hair-pin! I looked at my watch: it was
eleven o'clock, just four hours and a half. "Well, I have done enough
for to-day, Joe: let us go home to breakfast." Arrived at the camp, we
weighed the salmon and measured him--twenty-four pounds, and forty
inches long--a male fish, fresh run from the sea, the strongest and most
active of his kind. It had been my luck to hook these big ones: I wished
that my first encounters should be with fish of ten or twelve pounds.
Rodman came in with two--fourteen and sixteen pounds.

That evening I went again to the same pool, and soon hooked another good
fish with the same fly; but though he was nearly as large as the first,
weighing twenty-two pounds, I killed him in thirty minutes. He fought
hard from the very first, running and vaulting by turns without any
stop, so that he soon tired himself out. Rodman got another this
evening, and Kingfisher brought seven from the Patapedia, and the
Colonel one. Thirteen is our score to-day.

_July 9._ Rodman and I went this morning to the Patapedia, but raised no
salmon. Either some one had been netting the pool that night, or
Kingfisher had killed all the fish yesterday. I got a grilse of four
pounds, which made a smart fight for fifteen minutes, and Rodman hooked
another, but lost him. That evening we went again to the pool, and I
killed a small but very active salmon of nine pounds, which fought me
nearly an hour: Rodman got a grilse of five pounds. Strange to say,
neither Kingfisher nor the Colonel killed a fish to-day, so that I was
for once "high line."

Having killed four salmon, I concluded to retire. I found the work too
hard, and determined to go to Dalhousie and try the sea-trout fishing in
that vicinity. So, after an hour's fly-fishing at the mouth of the brook
opposite our camp, in which I got a couple of dozen, hooking two at a
cast twice, and twice three at a cast, I started at seven o'clock on the
10th, and ran down with the current and paddles forty miles to Fraser's
in seven hours--the same distance which it took us two days and a half
to make going up stream.

Of all modes of traveling, to float down a swift river in a bark canoe
is the most agreeable; and when paddled by Indians the canoe is the
perfection of a vessel for smooth-water navigation. Where there are
three inches of water she can go--where there is none, a man can carry
her round the portage on his back. Her buoyancy enables her to carry a
heavy load, and, though frail, the elasticity of her material admits of
many a blow and pinch which would seriously damage a heavier vessel. The
rifle and axe of the backwoodsman, the canoe and the weapons of the
Indian, are the result of long years of experiment, and perfectly meet
their necessities.

The rest of the party remained and fished five days more, making ten
days in all, and the score was eighty-five salmon and five grilse, the
united weight of which was fourteen hundred and twenty-three pounds. The
salmon averaged sixteen and a half pounds each: the three largest
weighed thirty, thirty, and thirty-three pounds. Nearly two-thirds of
the whole were taken by Kingfisher, and our average for three rods was
three fish per day each.

It is asserted by Norris in the _American Angler's Book_ that the salmon
of the American rivers are smaller than those of Europe, that in the
Scottish rivers many are still taken of twenty and twenty-five pounds
weight, and that on this side of the Atlantic it is as rare to take them
with the rod over fifteen pounds. If this statement was correct when
Norris wrote, ten years ago, then the Canadian rivers have improved
under the system of protection, for, as above stated, our catch in the
Restigouche averaged over sixteen pounds, and nearly one-third of our
fish were of twenty pounds or over.

Yarrel, in his work on British fishes, says that in 1835 he saw 10
salmon in the London market weighing from 38 to 40 pounds each. Sir
Humphry Davy is said to have killed a salmon in the Tweed that weighed
42 pounds: this was about 1825. The largest salmon ever seen in London
was sold there in 1821: it weighed 83 pounds. But with diminished
numbers the size of the salmon in Scottish waters has also diminished.
In the _Field_ newspaper for August and September, 1872, I find the
following report of the fishing in some of those rivers: The
Severn--average size of catch (considered very large) is 16 pounds; fish
of 30, 40 and 50 pounds have been taken. The Tay--one rod, one day in
August, 7 fish; average weight, 18 pounds. The Tweed--two rods, one
day's fishing, 12 fish; average, 20 pounds. The Eaine--fish run from 12
to 20 pounds.

In Lloyd's book on the _Sports of Norway_ we find the following reports
of the salmon-fishing in that country, where the fish are supposed to be
very large: In the river Namsen, Sir Hyde Parker in 1836 killed in one
day 10 salmon weighing from 30 to 60 pounds. This is considered the best
of the Norwegian rivers, both for number and size of fish. The
Alten--Mr. Brettle in 1838 killed in fifteen days 194 fish; average, 15
pounds; largest fish, 40 pounds. Sir Charles Blois, the most successful
angler, in the season of 1843 killed in the Alten 368 fish; average, 15
pounds: largest fish, 50 pounds. The Steenkjaw--one rod killed in
twenty days 80 salmon; average, 14 pounds. The Mandall--one rod killed
35 fish in one day. The Nid--two rods killed in one day 19 fish; largest
fish, 38 pounds.

The following records are from Canadian rivers prior to 1871:
Moisie--two rods in twenty-five days, 318 fish; average 15-1/7 pounds;
three largest, 29, 29 and 32 pounds. Godbout--three rods in forty days,
194 fish; average, 11-1/8 pounds; three largest, 18, 19 and 20 pounds.
St. John--two rods in twenty-two days, 199 fish; average, 10 pounds.
Nipisiquit--two rods, 76 fish; average, 9-1/2 pounds. Mingan--three rods
in thirty-two days, 218 fish; average, 10-1/5 pounds. Restigouche,
1872--three rods in ten days, 85 fish; average, 16-1/2 pounds; three
largest, 30, 30 and 33 pounds.

The greatest kill of salmon ever recorded was that of Allan Gilmour,
Esq., of Ottawa, who killed in the Godbout in 1867, in one day, 46
salmon, averaging 11-1/2 pounds, or one fish about every fifteen
minutes.

The largest salmon taken with the fly in an American river have been out
of the Grand Cascapediac, on the north shore of the Bay of Chaleur. In
1871, by the government report, there were 44 salmon killed with the
fly--two of 40 pounds, one of 38, and four others of over 30 pounds;
average weight, 23 pounds. In the same river in 1872, Mr. John Medden of
Toronto, with three other rods, killed 2 fish of 45 pounds, 4 of between
40 and 45, 5 of between 35 and 40 pounds, 7 of between 30 and 35 pounds,
15 of between 25 and 30 pounds, 16 of between 20 and 25, besides smaller
ones not enumerated.

From these data it would seem that the average size of the Canadian
salmon is as great as those of Norway, and very nearly equal to those of
the Scottish rivers; while the number of fish taken in a day in the
Canadian rivers, particularly in those on the north shore of the St.
Lawrence, surpasses the best catch of either the Scottish or Norwegian
rivers.

S. C. CLARKE.




A PRINCESS OF THULE.

BY WILLIAM BLACK.


CHAPTER VI.

AT BARVAS BRIDGE.

Very soon, indeed, Ingram began to see that his friend had spoken to him
quite frankly, and that he was really bent on asking Sheila to become
his wife. Ingram contemplated this prospect with some dismay, and with
some vague consciousness that he was himself responsible for what he
could not help regarding as a disaster. He had half expected that Frank
Lavender would, in his ordinary fashion, fall in love with Sheila--for
about a fortnight. He had joked him about it even before they came
within sight of Sheila's home. He had listened with a grim humor to
Lavender's outbursts of admiration, and only asked himself how many
times he had heard the same phrases before. But now things were looking
more serious, for the young man had thrown himself into the prosecution
of his new project with all the generous poetic enthusiasm of a highly
impulsive nature. Ingram saw that everything a young man could do to win
the heart of a young girl Lavender would do; and Nature had dowered him
richly with various means of fascination. Most dangerous of all of these
was a gift of sincerity that deceived himself. He could assume an
opinion or express an emotion at will, with such a genuine fervor that
he himself forgot how recently he had acquired it, and was able to
convince his companion for the moment that it was a revelation of his
inmost soul. It was this charm of impetuous sincerity which had
fascinated Ingram himself years before, and made him cultivate the
acquaintance of a young man whom he at first regarded as a somewhat
facile, talkative and histrionic person. Ingram perceived, for example,
that young Lavender had so little regard for public affairs that he
would have been quite content to see our Indian empire go for the sake
of eliciting a sarcasm from Lord Westbury; but at the same time, if you
had appealed to his nobler instincts, and placed before him the
condition of a certain populace suffering from starvation, he would have
done all in his power to aid them: he would have written letters to the
newspapers, would have headed subscriptions, and would have ended by
believing that he had been the constant friend of the people of India
throughout his life, and was bound to stick to them to the end of it.

As often as not he borrowed his fancies and opinions from Edward Ingram
himself, who was amused and gratified at the same time to find his
humdrum notions receive a dozen new lights and colors when transferred
to the warmer atmosphere of his friend's imagination. Ingram would even
consent to receive from his younger companion advice, impetuously urged
and richly illustrated, which he had himself offered in simpler terms
months before. At this very moment he could see that much of Lavender's
romantic conceptions of Sheila's character was only an exaggeration of
some passing hints he, Ingram, had dropped as the Clansman was steaming
into Stornoway. But then they were ever so much more beautiful. Ingram
held to his conviction that he himself was a distinctly commonplace
person. He had grown reconciled to the ordinary grooves of life. But
young Lavender was not commonplace: he fancied he could see in him an
occasional flash of something that looked like genius; and many and many
a time, in regarding the brilliant and facile powers, the generous
impulses and the occasional ambitions of his companion, he wondered
whether these would ever lead to anything in the way of production, or
even of consolidation of character, or whether would merely remain the
passing sensations of an indifferent idler. Sometimes, indeed, he
devoutly wished that Lavender had been born a stonemason.

But all these pleasant and graceful qualities, which had made the young
man an agreeable companion, were a serious danger now; for was it not
but too probable that Sheila, accustomed to the rude and homely ways of
the islanders, would be attracted and pleased and fascinated by one who
had about him so much of a soft and southern brightness with which she
was wholly unfamiliar? This open-hearted frankness of his placed all his
best qualities in the sunshine, as it were: she could not fail to see
the singular modesty and courtesy of his bearing toward women, his
gentle manners, his light-heartedness, his passionate admiration of the
self-sacrifice of others, and his sympathy with their sufferings. Ingram
would not have minded much if Lavender alone had been concerned in the
dilemma now growing imminent: he would have left him to flounder out of
it as he had got out of previous ones. But he had been surprised and
pained, and even frightened, to detect in Sheila's manner some faint
indications--so faint that he was doubtful what construction to put on
them--of a special interest in the young stranger whom he had brought
with him to Borva.

What could he do in the matter, supposing his suspicions were correct?
Caution Sheila?--it would be an insult. Warn Mackenzie?--the King of
Borva would fly into a passion with everybody concerned, and bring
endless humiliation on his daughter, who had probably never dreamed of
regarding Lavender except as a chance acquaintance. Insist upon Lavender
going south at once?--that would merely goad the young man into
obstinacy. Ingram found himself in a grievous difficulty, afraid to say
how much of it was of his own creation. He had no selfish sentiments of
his own to consult: if it were to become evident that the happiness of
Sheila and of his friend depended on their marrying each other, he was
ready to forward such a project with all the influence at his command.
But there were a hundred reasons why he should dread such a marriage. He
had already mentioned several of them to Lavender in trying to dissuade
the young man from his purpose. A few days had passed since then, and it
was clear that Lavender had abandoned all notion of fulfilling those
resolutions he had vaguely formed. But the more Ingram thought over the
matter, and the further he recalled all the ancient proverbs and stories
about the fate of intermeddlers, the more evident it became to him that
he could take no immediate action in the affair. He would trust to the
chapter of accidents to save Sheila from what he considered a disastrous
fate. Perhaps Lavender would repent. Perhaps Mackenzie, continually on
the watch for small secrets, would discover something, and bid his
daughter stay in Borva while his guests proceeded on their tour through
Lewis. In any case, it was not at all certain that Lavender would be
successful in his suit. Was the heart of a proud-spirited, intelligent
and busily-occupied girl to be won in a matter of three weeks or a
month? Lavender would go south, and no more would be heard of it.

This tour round the island of Lewis, however, was not likely to favor
much any such easy escape from the difficulty. On a certain morning the
larger of Mr. Mackenzie's boats carried the holiday party away from
Borva; and even at this early stage, as they sat at the stern of the
heavy craft, Lavender had arrogated to himself the exclusive right of
waiting upon Sheila. He had constituted himself her companion in all
their excursions about Borva which they had undertaken, and now, on this
longer journey, they were to be once more thrown together. It did seem a
little hard that Ingram should be relegated to Mackenzie and his
theories of government; but did he not profess to prefer that? Like most
men who have got beyond five-and-thirty, he was rather proud of
considering himself an observer of life. He stood aside as a spectator,
and let other people, engaged in all manner of eager pursuits, pass
before him for review. Toward young folks, indeed, he assumed a
good-naturedly paternal air, as if they were but as shy-faced children
to be humored. Were not their love-affairs a pretty spectacle? As for
himself, he was far beyond all that. The illusions of love-making, the
devotion and ambition and dreams of courtship, were no longer possible
to him, but did they not constitute on the whole a beautiful and
charming study, that had about it at times some little touches of
pathos? At odd moments, when he saw Sheila and Lavender walking together
in the evening, he was himself half inclined to wish that something
might come of the young man's determination. It would be so pleasant to
play the part of a friendly counselor, to humor the follies of the young
folks, to make jokes at their expense, and then, in the midst of their
embarrassment and resentment, to go forward and pet them a little, and
assure them of a real and earnest sympathy.

"Your time is to come," Lavender said to him suddenly after he had been
exhibiting some of his paternal forbearance and consideration: "you will
get a dreadful twist some day, my boy. You have been doing nothing but
dreaming about women, but some day or other you will wake up to find
yourself captured and fascinated beyond anything you have ever seen in
other people, and then you will discover what a desperately real thing
it is."

Ingram had a misty impression that he had heard something like this
before. Had he not given Lavender some warning of the same kind? But he
was so much accustomed to hear those vague repetitions of his own
remarks, and was, on the whole, so well pleased to think that his
commonplace notions should take root and flourish in this goodly soil,
that he never thought of asking Lavender to quote his authority for
those profound observations on men and things.

"Now, Miss Mackenzie," said the young man as the big boat was drawing
near to Callernish, "what is to be our first sketch in Lewis?"

"The Callernish Stones, of course," said Mackenzie himself: "it iss
more than one hass come to the Lewis to see the Callernish Stones."

Lavender had promised to the King of Borva a series of water-color
drawings of Lewis, and Sheila was to choose the subjects from day to
day. Mackenzie was gratified by this proposal, and accepted it with much
magnanimity; but Sheila knew that before the offer was made Lavender had
come to her and asked her if she cared about sketches, and whether he
might be allowed to take a few on this journey and present them to her.
She was very grateful, but suggested that it might please her papa if
they were given to him. Would she superintend them, then, and choose the
topics for illustration? Yes, she would do that; and so the young man
was furnished with a roving commission.

He brought her a little sepia sketch of Borvabost, its huts, its bay,
and its upturned boats on the beach. Sheila's expressions of praise, the
admiration and pleasure that shone in her eyes, would have turned any
young man's head. But her papa looked at the picture with a critical
eye, and remarked, "Oh yes, it is ferry good, but it is not the color of
Loch Roag at all. It is the color of a river when there is a flood of
rain. I have neffer at all seen Loch Roag a brown color--neffer at all."

It was clear, then, that the subsequent sketches could not be taken in
sepia, and so Lavender proposed to make a series of pencil-drawings,
which could be washed in with color afterward. There was one subject,
indeed, which since his arrival in Lewis he had tried to fix on paper by
every conceivable means in his power, and that was Sheila herself. He
had spoiled innumerable sheets of paper in trying to get some likeness
of her which would satisfy himself, but all his usual skill seemed
somehow to have gone from him. He could not understand it. In ordinary
circumstances he could have traced in a dozen lines a portrait that
would at least have shown a superficial likeness: he could have
multiplied portraits by the dozen of old Mackenzie or Ingram or Duncan,
but here he seemed to fail utterly. He invited no criticism, certainly.
These efforts were made in his own room, and he asked no one's opinion
as to the likeness. He could, indeed, certify to himself that the
drawing of the features was correct enough. There was the sweet and
placid forehead with its low masses of dark hair; there the short upper
lip, the finely-carved mouth, the beautifully-rounded chin and throat;
and there the frank, clear, proud eyes, with their long lashes and
highly-curved eyebrows. Sometimes, too, a touch of color added warmth
to the complexion, put a glimmer of the blue sea beneath the long black
eyelashes, and drew a thread of scarlet round the white neck. But was
this Sheila? Could he take this sheet of paper to his friends in London
and say, Here is the magical princess whom I hope to bring to you from
the North, with all the glamour of the sea around her? He felt
instinctively that there would be an awkward pause. The people would
praise the handsome, frank, courageous head, and look upon the bit of
red ribbon round the neck as an effective artistic touch. They would
hand him back the paper with a compliment, and he would find himself in
an agony of unrest because they had misunderstood the portrait, and seen
nothing of the wonder that encompassed this Highland girl as if with a
garment of mystery and dreams.

So he tore up portrait after portrait--more than one of which would have
startled Ingram by its truth--and then, to prove to himself that he was
not growing mad, he resolved to try a portrait of some other person. He
drew a head of old Mackenzie in chalk, and was amazed at the rapidity
and facility with which he executed the task. Then there could be no
doubt as to the success of the likeness nor as to the effect of the
picture. The King of Borva, with his heavy eyebrows, his aquiline nose,
his keen gray eyes and flowing beard, offered a fine subject; and there
was something really royal and massive and noble in the head that
Lavender, well satisfied with his work, took down stairs one evening.
Sheila was alone in the drawing-room, turning over some music.

"Miss Mackenzie," he said rather kindly, "would you look at this?"

Sheila turned round, and the sudden light of pleasure that leapt to her
face was all the praise and all the assurance he wanted. But he had more
than that. The girl was grateful to him beyond all the words she could
utter; and when he asked her if she would accept the picture, she
thanked him by taking his hand for a moment, and then she left the room
to call in Ingram and her father. All the evening there was a singular
look of happiness on her face. When she met Lavender's eyes with hers
there was a frank and friendly look of gratitude ready to reward him.
When had he earned so much before by a simple sketch? Many and many a
portrait, carefully executed and elaborately framed, had he presented to
his lady friends in London, to receive from them a pretty note and a few
words of thanks when next he called. Here with a rough chalk sketch he
had awakened an amount of gratitude that almost surprised him in the
most beautiful and tender soul in the world; and had not this princess
among women taken his hand for a moment as a childlike way of expressing
her thanks, while her eyes spoke more than her lips? And the more he
looked at those eyes, the more he grew to despair of ever being able to
put down the magic of them in lines and colors.

At length Duncan got the boat into the small creek at Callernish, and
the party got out on the shore. As they were going up the steep path
leading to the plain above a young girl met them, who looked at them in
rather a strange way. She had a fair, pretty, wondering face, with
singularly high eyebrows and clear, light-blue eyes.

"How are you, Eily?" said Mackenzie as he passed on with Ingram.

But Sheila, on making the same inquiry, shook hands with the girl, who
smiled in a confidential way, and, coming quite close, nodded and
pointed down to the water's edge.

"Have you seen them to-day, Eily?" said Sheila, still holding the girl
by the hands, and looking at the fair, pretty, strange face.

"It wass sa day before yesterday," she answered in a whisper, while a
pleased smile appeared on her face, "and sey will be here sa night."

"Good-bye, Eily: take care you don't stay out at night and catch cold,
you know," said Sheila; and then, with another little nod and a smile,
the young girl went down the path.

"It is Eily-of-the-Ghosts, as they call her," said Sheila to Lavender as
they went on: "the poor thing fancies she sees little people about the
rocks, and watches for them. But she is very good and quiet, and she is
not afraid of them, and she does no harm to any one. She does not belong
to the Lewis--I think she is from Islay--but she sometimes comes to pay
us a visit at Borva, and my papa is very kind to her."

"Mr. Ingram does not appear to know her: I thought he was acquainted
with every one in the island," said Lavender.

"She was not here when he has been in the Lewis before," said Sheila;
"but Eily does not like to speak to strangers, and I do not think you
could get her to speak to you if you tried."

Lavender had paid but little attention to the "false men" of Callernish
when first he saw them, but now he approached the long lines of big
stones up on this lonely plateau with a new interest; for Sheila had
talked to him about them many a time in Borva, and had asked his opinion
about their origin and their age. Was the central circle of stones an
altar, with the other series marking the approaches to it? Or was it the
grave of some great chieftain, with the remaining stones indicating the
graves of his relations and friends? Or was it the commemoration of some
battle in olden times, or the record of astronomical or geometrical
discoveries, or a temple once devoted to serpent-worship, or what?
Lavender, who knew absolutely nothing at all about the matter, was
probably as well qualified as anybody else to answer these questions,
but he forbore. The interest, however, that Sheila showed in such
things he very rapidly acquired. When he came to see the rows of stones
a second time he was much impressed by their position on this bit of
hill overlooking the sea. He sat down on his camp-stool with the
determination that, although he could not satisfy Sheila's wistful
questions, he would present her with some little sketch of these
monuments and their surroundings which might catch up something of the
mysterious loneliness of the scene.

He would not, of course, have the picture as it then presented itself.
The sun was glowing on the grass around him, and lighting up the tall
gray pillars of stone with a cheerful radiance. Over there the waters of
Loch Roag were bright and blue, and beyond the lake the undulations of
moorland were green and beautiful, and the mountains in the south grown
pale as silver in the heat. Here was a pretty young lady, in a rough
blue traveling-dress and a hat and feather, who was engaged in picking
up wild-flowers from the warm heath. There was a gentleman from the
office of the Board of Trade, who was sitting on the grass, nursing his
knees and whistling. From time to time the chief figure in the
foreground was an elderly gentleman, who evidently expected that he was
going to be put into the picture, and who was occasionally dropping a
cautious hint that he did not always wear this rough-and-ready sailor's
costume. Mackenzie was also most anxious to point out to the artist the
names of the hills and districts lying to the south of Loch Roag,
apparently with the hope that the sketch would have a certain
topographical interest for future visitors.

No: Lavender was content at that moment to take down the outlines of the
great stones and the configuration of lake and hill beyond, but by and
by he would give another sort of atmosphere to this wild scene. He would
have rain and darkness spread over the island, with the low hills in the
south grown desolate and remote, and the waters of the sea covered with
gloom. No human figure should be visible on this remote plain, where
these strange memorials had stood for centuries, exposed to western
gales and the stillness of the winter nights and the awful silence of
the stars. Would not Sheila, at least, understand the bleakness and
desolation of the picture? Of course her father would like to have
everything blue and green. He seemed a little disappointed when it was
clear that no distant glimpse of Borva could be introduced into the
sketch. But Sheila's imagination would be captured by this sombre
picture, and perhaps by and by in some other land, amid fairer scenes
and in a more generous climate, she might be less inclined to hunger for
the dark and melancholy North when she looked on this record of its
gloom and its sadness.

"Iss he going to put any people in the pictures?" said Mackenzie in a
confidential whisper to Ingram.

Ingram got up from the grass, and said with a yawn, "I don't know. If he
does, it will be afterward. Suppose we go along to the wagonette and see
if Duncan has brought everything up from the boat?"

The old man seemed rather unwilling to be cut out of this particular
sketch, but he went nevertheless; and Sheila, seeing the young man left
alone, and thinking that not quite fair, went over to him and asked if
she might be permitted to see as much as he had done.

Lavender shut up the book.

"No," he said with a laugh, "you shall see it to-night. I have
sufficient memoranda to work something out of by and by. Shall we have
another look at the circle up there?"

He folded up and shouldered his camp-stool, and they walked up to the
point at which the lines of the "mourners" converged. Perhaps he was
moved by a great antiquarian curiosity: at all events, he showed a
singular interest in the monuments, and talked to his companion about
all the possible theories connected with such stones in a fashion that
charmed her greatly. She was easily persuaded that the Callernish
"Fir-Bhreige" were the most interesting relics in the world. He had seen
Stonehenge, but Stonehenge was too scattered to be impressive. There
was more mystery about the means by which the inhabitants of a small
island could have hewn and carved and erected these blocks: there was,
moreover, the mystery about the vanished population itself. Yes, he had
been to Carnac also. He had driven down from Auray in a rumbling old
trap, his coachman being unable to talk French. He had seen the
half-cultivated plain on which there were rows and rows of small stones,
scarcely to be distinguished from the stone walls of the adjoining
farms. What was there impressive about such a sight when you went into a
house and paid a franc to be shown the gold ornaments picked up about
the place? Here, however, was a perfect series of those strange
memorials, with the long lanes leading up to a circle, and the tallest
of all the stones placed on the western side of the circle, perhaps as
the headstone of the buried chief. Look at the position, too--the silent
hill, the waters of the sea-loch around it, and beyond that the
desolation of miles of untenanted moorland. Sheila looked pleased that
her companion, after coming so far, should have found something worth
looking at in the Lewis.

"Does it not seem strange," he said suddenly, "to think of young folks
of the present day picking up wild-flowers from among these old stones?"
He was looking at a tiny bouquet which she had gathered.

"Will you take them?" she said, quite simply and naturally offering him
the flowers. "They may remind you some time of Callernish."

He took the flowers, and regarded them for a moment in silence, and then
he said gently, "I do not think I shall want these to remind me of
Callernish. I shall never forget our being here."

At this moment, perhaps fortunately, Duncan appeared, and came along
toward the young people with a basket in his hand.

"It wass Mr. Mackenzie will ask if ye will tek a glass o' whisky, sir,
and a bit o' bread and cheese. And he wass sayin' there wass no hurry at
all, and he will wait for you for two hours or half an hour whatever."

"All right, Duncan: go back and tell him I have finished, and we shall
be there directly. No, thank you, don't take out the whisky--unless,
Miss Mackenzie," added the young man with a smile, "Duncan can persuade
you."

Duncan looked with amazement at the man who dared to joke about Miss
Sheila taking whisky, and without waiting for any further commands
indignantly shut the lid of the basket and walked off.

"I wonder, Miss Mackenzie," said Lavender as they went along the path
and down the hill--"I wonder what you would say if I happened to call
you Sheila by mistake?"

"I should be glad if you did that. Every one calls me Sheila," said the
girl quietly enough.

"You would not be vexed?" he said, regarding her with a little surprise.

"No: why should I be vexed?" she answered; and she happened to look up,
and he saw what a clear light of sincerity there was shining in her
eyes.

"May I then call you Sheila?"

"Yes."

"But--but--" he said, with a timidity and embarrassment of which she
showed no trace whatever--"but people might think it strange, you know;
and yet I should greatly like to call you Sheila; only, not before other
people perhaps."

"But why not?" she said with her eyebrows just raised a little. "Why
should you wish to call me Sheila at one time and not at the other? It
is no difference whatever, and every one calls me Sheila."

Lavender was a little disappointed. He had hoped, when she consented in
so friendly a manner to his calling her by any name he chose, that he
could have established this little arrangement, which would have had
about it something of the nature of a personal confidence. Sheila would
evidently have none of that. Was it that she was really so simple and
frank in her ways that she did not understand why there should be such a
difference, and what it might imply, or was she well aware of
everything he had been wishing, and able to assume this air of
simplicity and ignorance with a perfect grace? Ingram, he reflected,
would have said at once that to suspect Sheila of such duplicity was to
insult her; but then Ingram was perhaps himself a trifle too easily
imposed on, and he had notions about women, despite all his
philosophical reading and such like, that a little more mingling in
society might have caused him to alter. Frank Lavender confessed to
himself that Sheila was either a miracle of ingenuousness or a thorough
mistress of the art of assuming it. On the one hand, he considered it
almost impossible for a woman to be so disingenuous; on the other hand,
how could this girl have taught herself, in the solitude of a savage
island, a species of histrionicism which women in London circles strove
for years to acquire, and rarely acquired in any perfection? At all
events, he said to himself, while he reserved his opinion on this point,
he was not going to call Sheila Sheila before folks who would know what
that meant. Mr. Mackenzie was evidently a most irascible old gentleman.
Goodness only knew what sort of law prevailed in these wild parts; and
to be seized at midnight by a couple of brawny fishermen, to be carried
down to a projecting ledge of rock--! Had not Ingram already hinted that
Mackenzie would straightway throw into Loch Roag the man who should
offer to carry away Sheila from him?

But how could these doubts of Sheila's sincerity last? He sat opposite
her in the wagonette, and the perfect truth of her face, of her frank
eyes and of her ready smile met him at every moment, whether he talked
to her or to Ingram, or listened to old Mackenzie, who turned from time
to time from the driving of the horses to inform the stranger of what he
saw around him. It was the most brilliant of mornings. The sun burned on
the white road, on the green moorland, on the gray-lichened rocks with
their crimson patches of heather. As they drove by the curious
convolutions of this rugged coast, the sea that lay beyond these
recurring bays and points was of a windy green, with here and there a
streak of white, and the fresh breeze blowing across to them tempered
the fierce heat of the sun. How cool, too, were those little fresh-water
lakes they passed, the clear blue and white of them stirred into
wavelets that moved the reeds and left air-bubbles about the
half-submerged stones! Were not those wild-geese over there, flapping in
the water with their huge wings and taking no notice of the passing
strangers? Lavender had never seen this lonely coast in times of gloom,
with those little lakes become sombre pools, and the outline of the
rocks beyond lost in the driving mist of the sea and the rain. It was
altogether a bright and beautiful world he had got into, and there was
in it but one woman, beautiful beyond his dreams. To doubt her was to
doubt all women. When he looked at her he forgot the caution and
distrust and sardonic self-complacency his southern training had given
him. He believed, and the world seemed to be filled with a new light.

"That is Loch-na-Muirne," Mackenzie was saying, "and it iss the Loch of
the Mill; and over there that is Loch-a-Bhaile, and that iss the Loch of
the Town; but where iss the loch and the town now? It wass many hundreds
of years before there will be numbers of people in this place; and you
will come to Dun Charlobhaidh, which is a great castle, by and by. And
what wass it will drive away the people, and leave the land to the moss,
but that there wass no one to look after them? 'When the natives will
leave Islay, farewell to the peace of Scotland.' That iss a good
proverb. And if they have no one to mind them, they will go away
altogether. And there is no people more obedient than the people of the
Highlands--not anywhere; for you know that we say, 'Is it the truth, as
if you were speaking before kings?' And now there is the castle, and
there wass many people living here when they could build that."

It was, in truth, one of those circular forts the date of which has
given rise to endless conjecture and discussion. Perched up on a hill,
it overlooked a number of deep and narrow valleys that ran landward,
while the other side of the hill sloped down to the sea-shore. It was a
striking object, this tumbling mass of dark stones standing high over
the green hollows and over the light plain of the sea. Was there not
here material for another sketch for Sheila? While Lavender had gone
away over the heights and hollows to choose his point of view a rough
and ready luncheon had been spread out in the wagonette, and when he
returned, perspiring and considerably blown, he found old Mackenzie
measuring out equal portions of peat-water and whisky, Duncan flicking
the enormous "clegs" from off the horses' necks, Ingram trying to
persuade Sheila to have some sherry out of a flask he carried, and
everybody in very good spirits over such an exciting event as a roadside
luncheon on a summer forenoon.

The King of Borva had by this time become excellent friends with the
young stranger who had ventured into his dominions. When the old
gentleman had sufficiently impressed on everybody that he had observed
all necessary precaution in studying the character and inquiring into
the antecedents of Lavender, he could not help confessing to a sense of
lightness and vivacity that the young man seemed to bring with him and
shed around him. Nor was this matter of the sketches the only thing that
had particularly recommended Lavender to the old man. Mackenzie had a
most distinct dislike to Gaelic songs. He could not bear the monotonous
melancholy of them. When Sheila, sitting by herself, would sing these
strange old ballads of an evening, he would suddenly enter the room,
probably find her eyes filled with tears, and then he would in his
inmost heart devote the whole of Gaelic minstrelsy and all its authors
to the infernal gods. Why should people be for ever saddening themselves
with the stories of other folks' misfortunes? It was bad enough for
those poor people, but they had borne their sorrows and died, and were
at peace. Surely it was better that we should have songs about
ourselves--drinking or fighting, if you like--to keep up the spirits, to
lighten the serious cares of life, and drown for a while the
responsibility of looking after a whole population of poor,
half-ignorant, unphilosophical creatures.

"Look, now," he would say, speaking of his own tongue, "look at this
teffle of a language! It has no present tense to its verbs: the people
they are always looking forward to a melancholy future or looking back
to a melancholy past. In the name of Kott, hef we not got ourselves to
live? This day we live in is better than any day that wass before or iss
to come, bekass it is here and we are alive. And I will hef no more of
these songs about crying, and crying, and crying!"

Now Sheila and Lavender, in their mutual musical confidences, had at an
early period discovered that each of them knew something of the older
English duets, and forthwith they tried a few of them, to Mackenzie's
extreme delight. Here, at last, was a sort of music he could
understand--none of your moanings of widows and cries of luckless girls
to the sea, but good common-sense songs, in which the lads kissed the
lasses with a will, and had a good drink afterward, and a dance on the
green on their homeward way. There was fun in those happy Mayfields, and
good health and briskness in the ale-house choruses, and throughout them
all a prevailing cheerfulness and contentment with the conditions of
life certain to recommend itself to the contemplative mind. Mackenzie
never tired of hearing those simple ditties. He grew confidential with
the young man, and told him that those fine, common-sense songs recalled
pleasant scenes to him. He himself knew something of English village
life. When he had been up to see the Great Exhibition he had gone to
visit a friend living in Brighton, and he had surveyed the country with
an observant eye. He had remarked several village-greens, with the
May-poles standing here and there in front of the cottages, emblazoned
with beautiful banners. He had, it is true, fancied that the May-pole
should be in the centre of the green; but the manner in which the waves
of population swept here and there, swallowing up open spaces and so
forth, would account to a philosophical person for the fact that the
May-poles were now close to the village-shops.

"Drink to me only with thine eyes," hummed the King of Borva to himself
as he sent the two little horses along the coast-road on this warm
summer day. He had heard the song for the first time on the previous
evening. He had no voice to speak of; he had missed the air, and these
were all the words he remembered; but it was a notable compliment all
the same to the young man who had brought these pleasant tunes to the
island. And so they drove on through the keen salt air, with the sea
shining beside them and the sky shining over them; and in the afternoon
they arrived at the small, remote and solitary inn of Barvas, placed
near the confluence of several rivers that flow through Loch Barvas (or
Barabhas) to the sea. Here they proposed to stop the night, so that
Lavender, when his room had been assigned to him, begged to be left
alone for an hour or two, that he might throw a little color into his
sketch of Callernish. What was there to see at Barvas? Why, nothing but
the channels of the brown streams, some pasture-land and a few huts,
then the unfrequented lake, and beyond that some ridges of white sand
standing over the shingly beach of the sea. He would join them at
dinner. Mackenzie protested in a mild way: he really wanted to see how
the island was to be illustrated by the stranger. There was a greater
protest, mingled with compassion and regret, in Sheila's eyes; but the
young man was firm. So they let him have his way, and gave him full
possession of the common sitting-room, while they set off to visit the
school and the Free-Church manse and what not in the neighborhood.

Mackenzie had ordered dinner at eight, to show that he was familiar with
the ways of civilized life; and when they returned at that hour
Lavender had two sketches finished.

"Yes, they are very good," said Ingram, who was seldom enthusiastic
about his friend's work.

But old Mackenzie was so vastly pleased with the picture, which
represented his native place in the brightest of sunshine and colors,
that he forgot to assume a critical air. He said nothing against the
rainy and desolate version of the scene that had been given to Sheila:
it was good enough to please the child. But here was something
brilliant, effective, cheerful; and he alarmed Lavender not a little by
proposing to get one of the natives to carry this treasure, then and
there, back to Borvabost. Both sketches were ultimately returned to his
book, and then Sheila helped him to remove his artistic apparatus from
the table on which their plain and homely meal was to be placed. As she
was about to follow her father and Ingram, who had left the room, she
paused for a moment and said to Lavender, with a look of frank gratitude
in her eyes, "It is very good of you to have pleased my papa so much. I
know when he is pleased, though he does not speak of it; and it is not
often he will be so much pleased."

"And you, Sheila?" said the young man, unconscious of the familiarity he
was using, and only remembering that she had scarcely thanked him for
the other sketch.

"Well, there is nothing that will please me so much as to see him
pleased," she said with a smile.

He was about to open the door for her, but he kept his hand on the
handle, and said, earnestly enough, "But that is such a small matter--an
hour's work. If you only knew how gladly I would live all my life here
if only I could do you some greater service--"

She looked a little surprised, and then for one brief second reflected.
English was not wholly familiar to her: perhaps she had failed to catch
what he really meant. But at all events she said gravely and simply,
"You would soon tire of living here: it is not always a holiday." And
then, without lifting her eyes to his face, she turned to the door, and
he opened it for her and she was gone.

It was about ten o'clock when they went outside for their evening
stroll, and all the world had grown enchanted since they had seen it in
the colors of the sunset. There was no night, but a strange clearness
over the sky and the earth, and down in the south the moon was rising
over the Barvas hills. In the dark green meadows the cattle were still
grazing. Voices of children could be heard in the far distance, with the
rumble of a cart coming through the silence, and the murmur of the
streams flowing down to the loch. The loch itself lay like a line of
dusky yellow in a darkened hollow near the sea, having caught on its
surface the pale glow of the northern heavens, where the sun had gone
down hours before. The air was warm and yet fresh with the odors of the
Atlantic, and there was a scent of Dutch clover coming across from the
sandy pastures nearer the coast. The huts of the small hamlet could but
faintly be made out beyond the dark and low-lying pastures, but a long,
pale line of blue smoke lay in the motionless air, and the voices of the
children told of open doors. Night after night this same picture, with
slight variations of position, had been placed before the stranger who
had come to view these solitudes, and night after night it seemed to him
to grow more beautiful. He could put down on paper the outlines of an
every-day landscape, and give them a dash of brilliant color to look
well on a wall; but how to carry away, except in the memory, any
impression of the strange lambent darkness, the tender hues, the
loneliness and the pathos of those northern twilights?

They walked down by the side of one of the streams toward the sea. But
Sheila was not his companion on this occasion. Her father had laid hold
of him, and was expounding to him the rights of capitalists and various
other matters. But by and by Lavender drew his companion on to talk of
Sheila's mother; and here, at least, Mackenzie was neither tedious nor
ridiculous nor unnecessarily garrulous. It was with a strange interest
the young man heard the elderly man talk of his courtship, his marriage,
the character of his wife, and her goodness and beauty. Was it not like
looking at a former Sheila? and would not this Sheila now walking before
him go through the same tender experiences, and be admired and loved and
petted by everybody as this other girl had been, who brought with her
the charm of winning ways and a gentle nature into these rude wilds? It
was the first time he had heard Mackenzie speak of his wife, and it
turned out to be the last; but from that moment the older man had
something of dignity in the eyes of this younger man, who had merely
judged of him by his little foibles and eccentricities, and would have
been ready to dismiss him contemptuously as a buffoon. There was
something, then, behind that powerful face, with its deep-cut lines, its
heavy eyebrows and piercing and sometimes sad eyes, besides a mere
liking for tricks of childish diplomacy. Lavender began to have some
respect for Sheila's father, and made a resolution to guard against the
impertinence of humoring him too ostentatiously.

Was it not hard, though, that Ingram, who was so cold and
unimpressionable, who smiled at the notion of marrying, and who was
probably enjoying his pipe quite as much as Sheila's familiar talk,
should have the girl all to himself on this witching night? They reached
the shores of the Atlantic. There was not a breath of wind coming in
from the sea, but the air seemed even sweeter and cooler as they sat
down on the great bank of shingle. Here and there birds were calling,
and Sheila could distinguish each one of them. As the moon rose a faint
golden light began to tremble here and there on the waves, as if some
subterranean caverns were lit up and sending to the surface faint and
fitful rays of their splendor. Farther along the coast the tall banks of
white sand grew white in the twilight, and the outlines of the dark
pasture-land behind grew more distinct.

But when they rose to go back to Barvas the moonlight had grown full and
clear, and the long and narrow loch had a pathway of gold across,
stretching from the reeds and sedges of the one side to the reeds and
sedges of the other. And now Ingram had gone on to join Mackenzie, and
Sheila walked behind with Lavender, and her face was pale and beautiful
in the moonlight.

"I shall be very sorry when I have to leave Lewis," he said as they
walked along the path leading through the sand and the clover; and there
could be no doubt that he felt the regret expressed in the words.

"But it is no use to speak of leaving us yet," said Sheila cheerfully:
"it is a long time before you will go away from the Lewis."

"And I fancy I shall always think of the island just as it is now--with
the moonlight over there, and a loch near, and you walking through the
stillness. We have had so many evening walks like this."

"You will make us very vain of our island," said the girl with a smile,
"if you will speak like that always to us. Is there no moonlight in
England? I have pictures of English scenery that will be far more
beautiful than any we have here; and if there is the moon here, it will
be there too. Think of the pictures of the river Thames that my papa
showed you last night--"

"Oh, but there is nothing like this in the South," said the young man
impetuously. "I do not believe there is in the world anything so
beautiful as this. Sheila, what would you say if I resolved to come and
live here always?"

"I should like that very much--more than you would like it, perhaps,"
she said with a bright laugh.

"That would please you better than for you to go always and live in
England, would it not?"

"But that is impossible," she said. "My papa would never think of living
in England."

For some time after he was silent. The two figures in front of them
walked steadily on, an occasional roar of laughter from the deep chest
of Mackenzie startling the night air, and telling of Ingram's being in a
communicative mood. At last Lavender said, "It seems to me so great a
pity that you should live in this remote place, and have so little
amusement, and see so few people of tastes and education like your own.
Your papa is so much occupied--he is so much older than you, too--that
you must be left to yourself so much; whereas if you had a companion of
your own age, who could have the right to talk frankly to you, and go
about with you, and take care of you--"

By this time they had reached the little wooden bridge crossing the
stream, and Mackenzie and Ingram had got to the inn, where they stood in
front of the door in the moonlight. Before ascending the steps of the
bridge, Lavender, without pausing in his speech, took Sheila's hand and
said suddenly, "Now don't let me alarm you, Sheila, but suppose at some
distant day--as far away as you please--I came and asked you to let me
be your companion then and always, wouldn't you try?"

She looked up with a startled glance of fear in her eyes, and withdrew
her hand from him.

"No, don't be frightened," he said quite gently. "I don't ask you for
any promise. Sheila, you must know I love you--you must have seen it.
Will you not let me come to you at some future time--a long way
off--that you may tell me then? Won't you try to do that?"

There was more in the tone of his voice than in his words. The girl
stood irresolute for a second or two, regarding him with a strange,
wistful, earnest look; and then a great gentleness came into her eyes,
and she put out her hand to him and said in a low voice, "Perhaps."

But there was something so grave and simple about her manner at this
moment that he dared not somehow receive it as a lover receives the
first admission of love from the lips of a maiden. There had been
something of a strange inquiry in her face as she regarded him for a
second or two; and now that her eyes were bent on the ground it seemed
to him that she was trying to realize the full effect of the concession
she had made. He would not let her think. He took her hand and raised it
respectfully to his lips, and then he led her forward to the bridge. Not
a word was spoken between them while they crossed the shining space of
moonlight to the shadow of the house; and as they went indoors he caught
but one glimpse of her eyes, and they were friendly and kind toward him,
but evidently troubled. He saw her no more that night.

So he had asked Sheila to be his wife, and she had given him some timid
encouragement as to the future. Many a time within these last few days
had he sketched out an imaginative picture of the scene. He was familiar
with the passionate rapture of lovers on the stage, in books and in
pictures; and he had described himself (to himself) as intoxicated with
joy, anxious to let the whole world know of his good fortune, and above
all to confide the tidings of his happiness to his constant friend and
companion. But now, as he sat in one corner of the room, he almost
feared to be spoken to by the two men who sat at the table with steaming
glasses before them. He dared not tell Ingram: he had no wish to tell
him, even if he had got him alone. And as he sat there and recalled the
incident that had just occurred by the side of the little bridge, he
could not wholly understand its meaning. There had been none of the
eagerness, the coyness, the tumult of joy he had expected: all he could
remember clearly was the long look that the large, earnest, troubled
eyes had fixed upon him, while the girl's face, grown pale in the
moonlight, seemed somehow ghost-like and strange.


CHAPTER VII.

AN INTERMEDDLER.

But in the morning all these idle fancies fled with the life and color
and freshness of a new day. Loch Barvas was ruffled into a dark blue by
the westerly wind, and doubtless the sea out there was rushing in,
green and cold, to the shore. The sunlight was warm about the house. The
trout were leaping in the shallow brown streams, and here and there a
white butterfly fluttered across the damp meadows. Was not that Duncan
down by the river, accompanied by Ingram? There was a glimmer of a rod
in the sunshine: the two poachers were after trout for Sheila's
breakfast.

Lavender dressed, went outside and looked about for the nearest way down
to the stream. He wished to have a chance of saying a word to his friend
before Sheila or her father should appear. And at last he thought he
could do no better than go across to the bridge, and so make his way
down the banks of the river.

What a fresh morning it was, with all sorts of sweet scents in the air!
And here, sure enough, was a pretty picture in the early light--a young
girl coming over the bridge carrying a load of green grass on her back.
What would she say if he asked her to stop for a moment that he might
sketch her pretty costume? Her head-dress was a scarlet handkerchief,
tied behind: she wore a tight-fitting bodice of cream-white flannel and
petticoats of gray flannel, while she had a waistbelt and pouch of
brilliant blue. Did she know of these harmonies of color or of the
picturesqueness of her appearance as she came across the bridge in the
sunlight? As she drew near she stared at the stranger with the big, dumb
eyes of a wild animal. There was no fear, only a sort of surprised
observation in them. And as she passed she uttered, without a smile,
some brief and laconic salutation in Gaelic, which of course the young
man could not understand. He raised his cap, however, and said
"Good-morning!" and went on, with a fixed resolve to learn all the
Gaelic that Duncan could teach him.

Surely the tall keeper was in excellent spirits this morning. Long
before he drew near, Lavender could hear, in the stillness of the
morning, that he was telling stories about John the Piper, and of his
adventures in such distant parts as Portree and Oban, and even in
Glasgow.

"And it wass Allan M'Gillivray of Styornoway," Duncan was saying as he
industriously whipped the shallow runs of the stream, "will go to
Glasgow with John; and they went through ta Crinan Canal. Wass you
through ta Crinan Canal, sir?"

"Many a time."

"Ay, jist that. And I hef been told it iss like a river with ta sides o'
a house to it; and what would Allan care for a thing like that, when he
hass been to America more than twice or four times? And it wass when he
fell into the canal, he was ferry nearly trooned for all that; and when
they pulled him to ta shore he wass a ferry angry man. And this iss what
John says that Allan will say when he wass on the side of the canal:
'Kott,' says he, 'if I wass trooned here, I would show my face in
Styornoway no more!' But perhaps it iss not true, for he will tell many
lies, does John the Piper, to hef a laugh at a man."

"The Crinan Canal is not to be despised, Duncan," said Ingram, who was
sitting on the red sand of the bank, "when you are in it."

"And do you know what John says that Allan will say to him the first
time they went ashore at Glasgow?"

"I am sure I don't."

"It wass many years ago, before that Allan will be going many times to
America, and he will neffer hef seen such fine shops and ta big houses
and hundreds and hundreds of people, every one with shoes on their feet.
And he will say to John, 'John, ef I had known in time I should hef been
born here.' But no one will believe it iss true, he is such a teffle of
a liar, that John; and he will hef some stories about Mr. Mackenzie
himself, as I hef been told, that he will tell when he goes to
Styornoway. But John is a ferry cunning fellow, and will not tell any
such stories in Borva."

"I suppose if he did, Duncan, you would dip him in Loch Roag?"

"Oh, there iss more than one," said Duncan with a grim twinkle in his
eye--"there iss more than one that would hef a joke with him if he was
to tell stories about Mr. Mackenzie."

Lavender had been standing listening, unknown to both. He now went
forward and bade them good-morning, and then, having had a look at the
trout that Duncan had caught, pulled Ingram up from the bank, put his
arm in his and walked away with him.

"Ingram," he said suddenly, with a laugh and a shrug, "you know I always
come to you when I'm in a fix."

"I suppose you do," said the other, "and you are always welcome to
whatever help I can give you. But sometimes it seems to me you rush into
fixes, with the sort of notion that I am responsible for getting you
out."

"I can assure you nothing of the kind is the case. I could not be so
ungrateful. However, in the mean time--that is--the fact is, I asked
Sheila last night if she would marry me."

"The devil you did!"

Ingram dropped his companion's arm and stood looking at him.

"Well, I knew you would be angry," said the younger man in a tone of
apology. "And I know I have been too precipitate, but I thought of the
short time we should be remaining here, and of the difficulty of getting
an explanation made at another time; and it was really only to give her
a hint as to my own feelings that I spoke. I could not bear to wait any
longer."

"Never mind about yourself," said Ingram somewhat curtly: "what did
Sheila say?"

"Well, nothing definite. What could you expect a girl to say after so
short an acquaintance? But this I can tell you, that the proposal is not
altogether distasteful to her, and that I have her permission to speak
of it at some future time, when we have known each other longer."

"You have?"

"Yes."

"You are quite sure?"

"Certain."

"There is no mistake about her silence, for example, that might have led
you into misinterpreting her wishes altogether?"

"Nothing of the kind is possible. Of course I could not ask the girl for
any promise, or anything of that sort. All I asked was, whether she
would allow me at some future time to ask her more definitely; and I am
so well satisfied with the reply that I am convinced I shall marry her."

"And is this the fix you wish me to help you out of?" said Ingram rather
coldly.

"Now, Ingram," said the younger man in penitential tones, "don't cut up
rough about it. You know what I mean. Perhaps I have been hasty and
inconsiderate about it; but of one thing you may be sure, that Sheila
will never have to complain of me if she marries me. You say I don't
know her yet, but there will be plenty of time before we are married. I
don't propose to carry her off to-morrow morning. Now, Ingram, you know
what I mean about helping me in the fix--helping me with her father, you
know, and with herself, for the matter of that. You can do anything with
her, she has such a belief in you. You should hear how she talks of
you--you never heard anything like it."

It was an innocent bit of flattery, and Ingram smiled good-naturedly at
the boy's ingenuousness. After all, was he not more lovable and more
sincere in this little bit of simple craft, used in the piteousness of
his appeal, then when he was giving himself the airs of a
man-about-town, and talking of women in a fashion which, to do him
justice, expressed nothing of his real sentiments?

Ingram walked on, and said in his slow and deliberate way, "You know I
opposed this project of yours from the first. I don't think you have
acted fairly by Sheila or her father, or myself who brought you here.
But if Sheila has been drawn into it, why, then, the whole affair is
altered, and we've got to make the best of a bad business."

"I was sure you would say that," exclaimed the younger man with a
brighter light appearing on his face. "You may call me all the hard
names you like: I deserve them all, and more. But then, as you say,
since Sheila is in it, you'll do your best, won't you?"

Frank Lavender could not make out why the taciturn and sallow-faced man
walking beside him seemed to be greatly amused by this speech, but he
was in no humor to take offence. He knew that once Ingram had promised
him his help he would not lack all the advocacy, the advice, and even
the money--should that become necessary--that a warm-hearted and
disinterested friend could offer. Many and many a time Ingram had helped
him, and now he was to come to his assistance in the most serious crisis
of his life. Ingram would remove Sheila's doubts. Ingram would persuade
old Mackenzie that girls had to get married some time or other, and that
Sheila ought to live in London. Ingram would be commissioned to break
the news to Mrs. Lavender--But here, when the young man thought of the
interview with his aunt which he would have to encounter, a cold shiver
passed through his frame. He would not think of it. He would enjoy the
present hour. Difficulties only grew the bigger the more they were
looked at: when they were left to themselves they frequently
disappeared. It was another proof of Ingram's kindliness that he had not
even mentioned the old lady down in Kensington who was likely to have
something to say about this marriage.

"There are a great many difficulties in the way," said Ingram
thoughtfully.

"Yes," said Lavender with much eagerness, "but then, look! You may be
sure that if we get over these, Sheila will know well who managed it,
and she will not be ungrateful to you, I think. If we ever should be
married, I am certain she will always look on you as her greatest
friend."

"It is a big bribe," said the elder man, perhaps a trifle sadly; and
Lavender looked at him with some vague return of a suspicion that some
time or other Ingram must himself have been in love with Sheila.

They returned to the inn, where they found Mackenzie busy with a heap of
letters and newspapers that had been sent across to him from Stornoway.
The whole of the breakfast-table was littered with wrappers and big blue
envelopes: where was Sheila, who usually waited on her father at such
times to keep his affairs in order?

Sheila was outside, and Lavender saw her through the open window. Was
she not waiting for him, that she should pace up and down by herself,
with her face turned away from the house? He immediately went out and
went over to her, and she turned to him as he approached. He fancied she
looked a trifle pale, and far less bright and joyous than the ordinary
Sheila.

"Mr. Lavender," she said, walking away from the house, "I wish very much
to speak to you for a moment. Last night it was all a misfortune that I
did not understand; and I wish you to forget that a word was ever spoken
about that."

Her head was bent down, and her speech was low and broken: what she
failed to explain in words her manner explained for her. But her
companion said to her, with alarm and surprise in his tone, "Why,
Sheila! You cannot be so cruel! Surely you need not fear any
embarrassment through so slight a promise. It pledges you to nothing--it
leaves you quite free; and some day, if I come and ask you then a
question I have not asked you yet, that will be time enough to give me
an answer."

"Oh no, no!" said the girl, obviously in great distress, "I cannot do
that. It is unjust to you to let you think of it and hope about it. It
was last night everything was strange to me--I did not understand
then--but I have thought about it all the night through, and now I
know."

"Sheila!" called her father from the inside of the inn, and she turned
to go.

"But you do not ask that, do you?" he said. "You are only frightened a
little bit just now, but that will go away. There is nothing to be
frightened about. You have been thinking over it, and imagining
impossible things: you have been thinking of leaving Borva altogether--"

"Oh, that I can never do!" she said with a pathetic earnestness.

"But why think of such a thing?" he said. "You need not look at all the
possible troubles of life when you take such a simple step as this.
Sheila, don't be hasty in any such resolve: you may be sure all the
gloomy things you have been thinking of will disappear when we get close
to them. And this is such a simple thing. I don't ask you to say you
will be my wife--I have no right to ask you yet--but I have only asked
permission of you to let me think of it; and even Mr. Ingram sees no
great harm in that."

"Does _he_ know?" she said with a start of surprise and fear.

"Yes," said Lavender, wishing he had bitten his tongue in two before he
had uttered the word. "You know we have no secrets from each other; and
to whom could I go for advice but to your oldest friend?"

"And what did he say?" she asked with a strange look in her eyes.

"Well, he sees a great many difficulties, but he thinks they will easily
be got over."

"Then," she said, with her eyes again cast down and a certain sadness in
her tone, "I must explain to him too, and tell him I had no
understanding of what I said last night."

"Sheila, you won't do that!" urged the young man. "It means nothing--it
pledges you to nothing."

"Sheila! Sheila!" cried her father cheerily from the window, "come in
and let us hef our breakfast."

"Yes, papa," said the girl, and she went into the house, followed by her
companion.

But how could she find an opportunity of making this explanation?
Shortly after breakfast the wagonette was at the door of the little
Barvas inn, and Sheila came out of the house and took her place in it
with an unusual quietness of manner and hopelessness of look. Ingram,
sitting opposite to her, and knowing nothing of what had taken place,
fancied that this was but an expression of girlish timidity, and that it
was his business to interest her and amuse her until she should forget
the strangeness and newness of her position. Nay, as he had resolved to
make the best of matters as they stood, and as he believed that Sheila
had half confessed to a special liking for his friend from the South,
what more fitting thing could he do than endeavor to place Lavender in
the most favorable light in her eyes? He began to talk of all the
brilliant and successful things the young man had done as fully as he
could before himself. He contrived to introduce pretty anecdotes of
Lavender's generosity; and there were plenty of these, for the young
fellow had never a thought of consequences if he was touched by a tale
of distress, and if he could help the sufferer either with his own or
any one else's money. Ingram talked of all their excursions together, in
Devonshire, in Brittany and elsewhere, to impress on Sheila how well he
knew his friend and how long their intimacy had lasted. At first the
girl was singularly reserved and silent, but somehow, as pleasant
recollections were multiplied, and as Lavender seemed to have been
always the associate and companion of this old friend of hers, some
brighter expression came into her face and she grew more interested.
Lavender, not knowing whether or not to take her decision of that
morning as final, and not wholly perceiving the aim of this kindly chat
on the part of his friend, began to see at least that Sheila was pleased
to hear the two men help out each other's stories about their pedestrian
excursions, and that she at last grew bold enough to look up and meet
his eyes in a timid fashion when she asked him a question.

So they drove along by the side of the sea, the level and well-made road
leading them through miles and miles of rough moorland, with here and
there a few huts or a sheepfold to break the monotony of the undulating
sky-line. Here and there, too, there were great cuttings of the
peat-moss, with a thin line of water in the foot of the deep black
trenches. Sometimes, again, they would escape altogether from any traces
of human habitation, and Duncan would grow excited in pointing out to
Miss Sheila the young grouse that had run off the road into the heather,
where they stood and eyed the passing carriage with anything but a
frightened air. And while Mackenzie hummed something resembling, but
very vaguely resembling, "Love in thine eyes sits beaming," and while
Ingram, in his quiet, desultory, and often sardonic fashion, amused the
young girl with stories of her lover's bravery and kindness and
dare-devil escapades, the merry trot of the horses beat time to the
bells on their necks, the fresh west wind blew a cloud of white dust
away over the moorland behind them, there was a blue sky shining all
around them, and the blue Atlantic basking in the light.

They stopped for a few minutes at both the hamlets of Suainabost and
Tabost to allow Sheila to pay a hurried visit to one or two of the huts,
while Mackenzie, laying hold of some of the fishermen he knew, got them
to show Lavender the curing-houses, in which the young gentleman
professed himself profoundly interested. They also visited the
school-house, and Lavender found himself beginning to look upon a
two-storied building with windows as something imposing and a decided
triumph of human skill and enterprise. But what was the school-house of
Tabost to the grand building at the Butt? They had driven away from the
high-road by a path leading through long and sweet-smelling pastures of
Dutch clover; they had got up from these sandy swathes to a table-land
of rock; and here and there they caught glimpses of fearful precipices
leading sheer down to the boiling and dashing sea. The curious
contortions of the rocks, the sharp needles of them springing in
isolated pillars from out of the water, the roar of the eddying currents
that swept through the chasms and dashed against the iron-bound shore,
the wild sea-birds that flew about and screamed over the rushing waves
and the surge, naturally enough drew the attention of the strangers
altogether away from the land; and it was with a start of surprise they
found themselves before an immense mass of yellow stone-work--walls,
house and tower--that shone in the sunlight. And here were the
light-house-keeper and his wife, delighted to see strange faces and most
hospitably inclined; insomuch that Lavender, who cared little for
luncheon at any time, was constrained to take as much bread and cheese
and butter and whisky as would have made a ploughman's dinner. It was a
strange sort of meal this, away out at the end of the world, as it were.
The snug little room might have been in the Marylebone road: there were
photographs about, a gay label on the whisky-bottle, and other signs of
an advanced civilization; but outside nothing but the wild precipices of
the coast, a surging sea that seemed almost to surround the place, the
wild screaming of the sea-birds, and a single ship appearing like a mere
speck on the northern horizon.

They had not noticed the wind much as they drove along; but now, when
they went out on to the high table-land of rock, it seemed to be blowing
half a gale across the sea. The sunlight sparkled on the glass of the
lighthouse, and the great yellow shaft of stone stretched away upward
into a perfect blue. As clear a blue lay far beneath them when the sea
came rushing in among the lofty crags and sharp pinnacles of rock,
bursting into foam at their feet, and sending long jets of white spray
up into the air. In front of the great wall of rock the sea-birds
wheeled and screamed, and on the points of some of the islands stood
several scarts, motionless figures of jet black on the soft brown and
green of the rock. And what was this island they looked down upon from
over one of the bays? Surely a mighty reproduction by Nature herself of
the Sphynx of the Egyptian plains. Could anything have been more
striking and unexpected and impressive than the sudden discovery of this
great mass of rock resting in the wild sea, its hooded head turned away
toward the north and hidden from the spectator on land, its gigantic
bulk surrounded by a foam of breakers? Lavender, with his teeth set hard
against the wind, must needs take down the outlines of this strange
scene upon paper, while Sheila crouched at her father's side for
shelter, and Ingram was chiefly engaged in holding on to his cap.

"It blows here a bit," said Lavender amid the roar of the waves. "I
suppose in the winter-time the sea will sometimes break across this
place?"

"Ay, and over the top of the lighthouse too," said Mackenzie with a
laugh, as though he was rather proud of the way his native seas behaved.

"Sheila," said Ingram, "I never saw _you_ take refuge from the wind
before."

"It is because we will be standing still," said the girl with a smile
which was scarcely visible, because she had half hidden her face in her
father's great gray beard. "But when Mr. Lavender is finished we will go
down to the great hole in the rocks that you will have seen before, and
perhaps he will make a picture of that too."

"You don't mean to say you would go down there, Sheila?" said Ingram,
"and in this wind?"

"I have been down many times before."

"Indeed, you will do nothing of the kind, Sheila," said her father: "you
will go back to the lighthouse if you like--yes, you may do that--and I
will go down the rocks with Mr. Lavender; but it iss not for a young
lady to go about among the rocks, like a fisherman's lad that wants the
birds' eggs, or such nonsense."

It was quite evident that Mackenzie had very little fear of his daughter
not being able to accomplish the descent of the rocks safely enough: it
was a matter of dignity. And so Sheila was at length persuaded to go
across the plain to a sheltered place, to wait there until the others
should clamber down to the great and naturally-formed tunnel through the
rocks that the artist was to sketch.

Lavender was ill at ease. He followed his guide mechanically as they
made their way, in zigzag fashion, down the precipitous slopes and over
slippery plateaus; and when at last he came in sight of the mighty arch,
the long cavern, and the glimmer of sea and shore that could be seen
through it, he began to put down the outlines of the picture as rapidly
as possible, but with little interest in the matter. Ingram was sitting
on the bare rocks beside him, Mackenzie was some distance off: should he
tell his friend of what Sheila had said in the morning? Strict honesty,
perhaps, demanded as much, but the temptation to say nothing was great.
For it was evident that Ingram was now well inclined to the project, and
would do his best to help it on; whereas, if once he knew that Sheila
had resolved against it, he too might take some sudden step--such as
insisting on their immediate return to the mainland--which would settle
the matter for ever. Sheila had said she would herself make the
necessary explanation to Ingram, but she had not done so: perhaps she
might lack the courage or an opportunity to do so, and in the mean time
was not the interval altogether favorable to his chances? Doubtless she
was a little frightened at first. She would soon get less timid, and
would relent and revoke her decision of the morning. He would not, at
present at any rate, say anything to Ingram.

But when they had got up again to the summit of the rocks, an incident
occurred that considerably startled him out of these vague and anxious
speculations. He walked straight over to the sheltered spot in which
Sheila was waiting. The rushing of the wind doubtless drowned the sound
of his footsteps, so that he came on her unawares; and on seeing him she
rose suddenly from the rock on which she had been sitting, with some
effort to hide her face away from him. But he had caught a glimpse of
something in her eyes that filled him with remorse.

"Sheila," he said, going forward to her, "what is the matter? What are
you unhappy about?"

She could not answer; she held her face turned from him and cast down;
and then, seeing her father and Ingram in the distance, she set out to
follow them to the lighthouse, Lavender walking by her side, and
wondering how he could deal with the distress that was only too clearly
written on her face.

"I know it is I who have grieved you," he said in a low voice, "and I
am very sorry. But if you will tell me what I can do to remove this
unhappiness, I will do it now. Shall I consider our talking together of
last night as if it had not taken place at all?"

"Yes," she said in as low a voice, but clear and sad and determined in
its tone.

"And I shall speak no more to you about this affair until I go away
altogether?"

And again she signified her assent, gravely and firmly.

"And then," he said, "you will soon forget all about it; for of course I
shall never come back to Lewis again."

"Never?"

The word had escaped her unwillingly, and it was accompanied by a quick
upturning of the face and a frightened look in the beautiful eyes.

"Do you wish me to come back?" he said.

"I should not wish you to go away from the Lewis through any fault of
mine, and say that we should never see you again," said the girl in
measured tones, as if she were nerving herself to make the admission,
and yet fearful of saying too much.

By this time Mackenzie and Ingram had gone round the big wall of the
lighthouse: there were no human beings on this lonely bit of heath but
themselves. Lavender stopped her and took her hand, and said, "Don't you
see, Sheila, how I must never come back to Lewis if all this is to be
forgotten? And all I want you to say is, that I may come some day to see
if you can make up your mind to be my wife. I don't ask that yet: it is
out of the question, seeing how short a time you have known anything
about me, and I cannot wish you to trust me as I can trust you. It is a
very little thing I ask--only to give me a chance at some future time,
and then, if you don't care for me sufficiently to marry me, or if
anything stands in the way, all you need do is to send me a single word,
and that will suffice. This is no terrible thing that I beg from you,
Sheila. You needn't be afraid of it."

But she was afraid: there was nothing but fear and doubt and grief in
her eyes as she gazed into the unknown world laid open before her.

"Can't you ask some one to tell you that it is nothing dreadful--Mr.
Ingram, for example?"

"I could not."

"Your papa, then," he said, driven to this desperate resource by his
anxiety to save her from pain.

"Not yet--not just yet," she said almost wildly, "for how could I
explain to him? He would ask me what my wishes were: what could I say? I
do not know. I cannot tell myself; and--and--I have no mother to ask."
And here all the strain of self-control gave way, and the girl burst
into tears.

"Sheila, dear Sheila," he said, "why won't you trust your own heart, and
let that be your guide? Won't you say this one word _Yes_, and tell me
that I am to come back to Lewis some day, and ask to see you, and get a
message from one look of your eyes? Sheila, may not I come back?"

If there was a reply it was so low that he scarcely heard it; but
somehow--whether from the small hand that lay in his, or from the eyes
that sent one brief message of trust and hope through their tears--his
question was answered; and from that moment he felt no more misgivings,
but let his love for Sheila spread out and blossom in whatever light of
fancy and imagination he could bring to bear on it, careless of any
future.

How the young fellow laughed and joked as the party drove away again
from the Butt, down the long coast-road to Barvas! He was tenderly
respectful and a little moderate in tone when he addressed Sheila, but
with the others he gave way to a wild exuberance of spirits that
delighted Mackenzie beyond measure. He told stories of the odd old
gentlemen of his club, of their opinions, their ways, their dress. He
sang the song of the Arethusa, and the wilds of Lewis echoed with a
chorus which was not just as harmonious as it might have been. He sang
the "Jug of Punch," and Mackenzie said that was a teffle of a good
song. He gave imitations of some of Ingram's companions at the Board of
Trade, and showed Sheila what the inside of a government office was
like. He paid Mackenzie the compliment of asking him for a drop of
something out of his flask, and in return he insisted on the King
smoking a cigar which, in point of age and sweetness and fragrance, was
really the sort of cigar you would naturally give to the man whose only
daughter you wanted to marry.

Ingram understood all this, and, was pleased to see the happy look that
Sheila wore. He talked to her with even a greater assumption than usual
of fatherly fondness; and if she was a little shy, was it not because
she was conscious of so great a secret? He was even unusually
complaisant to Lavender, and lost no opportunity of paying him indirect
compliments that Sheila could overhear.

"You poor young things!" he seemed to be saying to himself, "you've got
all your troubles before you; but in the mean time you may make
yourselves as happy as you can."

Was the weather at last about to break? As the afternoon wore on the
heavens became overcast, for the wind had gone back from the course of
the sun, and had brought up great masses of cloud from the rainy
south-west.

"Are we going to have a storm?" said Lavender, looking along the
southern sky, where the Barvas hills were momentarily growing blacker
under the gathering darkness overhead.

"A storm?" said Mackenzie, whose notions on what constituted a storm
were probably different from those of his guest. "No, there will be no
storm. But it is no bad thing if we get back to Barvas very soon."

Duncan sent the horses on, and Ingram looked out Sheila's waterproof and
the rugs. The southern sky certainly looked ominous. There was a strange
intensity of color in the dark landscape, from the deep purple of the
Barvas hills, coming forward to the deep green of the pasture-land
around them, and the rich reds and browns of the heath and the
peat-cuttings. At one point of the clouded and hurrying sky, however,
there was a soft and vaporous line of yellow in the gray; and under
that, miles away in the west, a great dash of silver light struck upon
the sea, and glowed there so that the eye could scarcely bear it. Was it
the damp that brought the perfumes of the moorland so distinctly toward
them--the bog-myrtle, the water-mint and wild thyme? There were no birds
to be heard. The crimson masses of heather on the gray rocks seemed to
have grown richer and deeper in color, and the Barvas hills had become
large and weird in the gloom.

"Are you afraid of thunder?" said Lavender to Sheila.

"No," said the girl, looking frankly toward him with her glad eyes, as
though he had pleased her by asking that not very striking question. And
then she looked round at the sea and the sky in the south, and said
quietly, "But there will be no thunder: it is too much wind."

Ingram, with a smile which he could scarcely conceal, hereupon remarked,
"You're sorry, Lavender, I know. Wouldn't you like to shelter somebody
in danger or attempt a rescue, or do something heroic?"

"And Mr. Lavender would do that if there was any need," said the girl
bravely, "and then it would be nothing to laugh at."

"Sheila, you bad girl! how dare you talk like that to me?" said Ingram;
and he put his arm within hers and said he would tell her a story.

But this race to escape the storm was needless, for they were just
getting within sight of Barvas when a surprising change came over the
dark and thunderous afternoon. The hurrying masses of cloud in the west
parted for a little space, and there was a sudden and fitful glimmer of
a stormy blue sky. Then a strange soft yellow and vaporous light shot
across to the Barvas hills, and touched up palely the great slopes,
rendering them distant, ethereal and cloud-like. Then a shaft or two of
wild light flashed down upon the landscape beside them. The cattle shone
red in the brilliant green pastures. The gray rocks glowed in their
setting of moss. The stream going by Barvas Inn was a streak of gold in
its sandy bed. And then the sky above them broke into great billows of
cloud--tempestuous and rounded masses of golden vapor that burned with
the wild glare of the sunset. The clear spaces in the sky widened, and
from time to time the wind sent ragged bits of yellow cloud across the
shining blue. All the world seemed to be on fire, and the very smoke of
it, the majestic masses of vapor that rolled by overhead, burned with a
bewildering glare. Then, as the wind still blew hard, and kept veering
round again to the north-west, the fiercely-lit clouds were driven over
one by one, leaving a pale and serene sky to look down on the sinking
sun and the sea. The Atlantic caught the yellow glow on its tumbling
waves, and a deeper color stole across the slopes and peaks of the
Barvas hills. Whither had gone the storm? There were still some banks of
clouds away up in the north-east, and in the clear green of the evening
sky they had their distant grays and purples faintly tinged with rose.

"And so you are anxious and frightened, and a little pleased?" said
Ingram to Sheila that evening, after he had frankly told her what he
knew, and invited her further confidence. "That is all I can gather from
you, but it is enough. Now you can leave the rest to me."

"To you?" said the girl with a blush of pleasure and surprise.

"Yes. I like new experiences. I am going to become an intermeddler now.
I am going to arrange this affair, and become the negotiator between all
the parties; and then, when I have secured the happiness of the whole of
you, you will all set upon me and beat me with sticks, and thrust me out
of your houses."

"I do not think," said Sheila, looking down, "that you have much fear of
that, Mr. Ingram."

"Is the world going to alter because of me?"

"I would rather not have you try to do anything that is likely to get
you into unhappiness," she said.

"Oh, but that is absurd. You timid young folks can't act for yourselves.
You want agents and instruments that have got hardened by use. Fancy the
condition of our ancestors, you know, before they had the sense to
invent steel claws to tear their food in pieces--what could they do with
their fingers? I am going to be your knife and fork, Sheila, and you'll
see what I shall carve out for you. All you've got to do is to keep your
spirits up, and believe that nothing dreadful is going to take place
merely because some day you will be asked to marry. You let things take
their ordinary course. Keep your spirits up--don't neglect your music or
your dinner or your poor people down in Borvabost--and you'll see it
will all come right enough. In a year or two, or less than that, you
will marry contentedly and happily, and your papa will drink a good
glass of whisky at the wedding and make jokes about it, and everything
will be as right as the mail. That's my advice: see you attend to it."

"You are very kind to me," said the girl in a low voice.

"But if you begin to cry, Sheila, then I throw up my duties. Do you
hear? Now look: there goes Mr. Lavender down to the boat with a bundle
of rugs, and I suppose you mean me to imperil my precious life by
sailing about these rocky channels in the moonlight? Come along down to
the shore; and mind you please your papa by singing 'Love in thine eyes'
with Mr. Lavender. And if you would add to that 'The Minute Gun at Sea,'
why, you know, I may as well have my little rewards for intermeddling
now, as I shall have to suffer afterward."

"Not through me," said Sheila in rather an uncertain voice; and then
they went down to the Maighdean-mhara.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]




AT ODDS.


    The snow had lain upon the ground
      From gray November into March,
    And lingering April hardly saw
      The tardy tassels of the larch,
    When sudden, like sweet eyes apart,
      Looked down the soft skies of the spring,
    And, guided by alluring signs,
      Came late birds on impatient wing.

    And when I found a shy white flower--
      The first love of the amorous sun,
    That from the cold clasp of the earth
      The passion of his looks had won--
    I said unto my brooding heart,
      Which I had humored in its way,
    "Give sorrow to the winds that blow:
      Let's out and have a holiday!"

    My heart made answer unto me:
      "Where are the faint white chestnut-blooms?
    Where are the thickets of wild rose--
      Dim paths that lead to odorous glooms?"
    "They are not yet. But listen, Heart!
      I hear a red-breast robin call:
    I see a golden glint of light
      Where lately-loosened waters fall."

    I waited long, but no reply
      Came from my strangely silent heart:
    I left the open, sunlit mead,
      And walked a little way apart,
    Where gloomy pines their shadows cast,
      And brown pine-needles made below
    A sober covering for the place,
      Where scarce another thing could grow.

    And then I said unto my heart,
      "Now, we are in the dark, I pray
    What is it I must do for thee
      That thou mayst make a holiday?
    Was ever fresher blue above?
      Was ever blither calm around?
    The purple promise of the spring
      Is writ in violets on the ground.

    "Comes, blown across my face, the breath
      Of apple-blossoms far away:
    Hast thou no memories, my heart,
      As sweet and beautiful as they?"
    And while I spoke I stood beside
      A low mound fashioned like a grave,
    And covered thick with last year's leaves,
      Set in the forest's spacious nave.

    And there I heard a little sound,
      The flutter of a feeble wing,
    And saw upon the grave-like mound
      A bird that never more would sing.
    I took it up, and first I laid
      The quivering plumage to my cheek,
    Then tenderly upon my breast,
      And sorrowed, seeing it so weak.

    Up spoke my sore reproachful heart:
      "And now how happens it, I pray,
    Thou dost not press the wounded bird
      To sing and make a holiday?"
    I made no answer then, but went
      Into the dark wood's darkest deep,
    And on my breast the bird lay dead,
      And all around was still as sleep.

    "There be that walk among the graves,"
      At length, "repining heart," I said--
    "Who carry slain loves in their breasts,
      Yet smile like angels o'er their dead.
    And thou! Why wilt thou shame me thus,
      Saying, for ever, Nay and Nay?"
    Then said my heart, "To conquer pain
      Is not to make a holiday.

    "And they who walk upon the heights,
      Not hurtled by the passing storm,
    Have carried long in lower lands
      The grievous burdens that deform
    The small of faith, the weak of heart,
      The narrow-minded and untrue,
    Who doubt if any heaven is left
      When clouds are blown across its blue.

    "And they are not of those who seek
      To put unsolvèd things away,
    Too early saying to their hearts,
      'Come out, for it is holiday!'
    And often 'tis the shallowest soul
      That makes unseemly laughter ring,
    That dares not bide amid its ghosts,
      And, lest it weep, must try to sing.

    "Wait till the tooth of pain is dulled;
      Wait till the wound is overgrown:
    Not in a day the moss hath made
      So fair this once unsightly stone."
    Then was I silent, but less wroth,
      Content my heart should have its way.
    Believing that in God's fit time
      We yet should keep our holiday.

HOWARD GLYNDON.




PHILADELPHIA ZOOLOGICAL GARDENS.


Zoological gardens for Philadelphia have been a dream for many years,
and spasmodic efforts have been made from time to time to produce the
reality, but as yet nothing tangible has resulted. The idea has been too
inchoate to develop much enthusiasm, and year after year our citizens
have returned from enjoying the delights of foreign gardens, and mildly
wondered, in the true Philadelphia style, why we should not have them.
Nor is this marvelous when we consider the present condition of the
proposed Centennial Exhibition, which, it is mortifying to confess,
languishes for want of proper support. It cannot be denied that in this
undertaking an opportunity is presented that would be eagerly seized,
with all its attendant labor and expense, by any one of the States, and
that it was with great difficulty, and only because of the self-evident
incongruity of holding it elsewhere, that we were permitted by the
national authorities to celebrate the anniversary in Philadelphia. It is
in connection with this, and as a part thereof, that the Zoological
Gardens deserve immediate attention, as an additional, and next to the
grand exhibition itself the principal, attraction to the hundreds of
thousands who will visit the City of Brotherly Love on the Fourth of
July, 1876. The plan on the next page shows the ground which has been
granted by the Commissioners of the Fairmount Park to the Philadelphia
Zoological Society. The gentlemen who have taken the matter in hand are
well known for their energy and breadth of view, and if sustained in
their endeavors will carry out the scheme in a manner worthy of this
great and growing city.

In undertaking this work the managers have the advantage of the
experience and counsel of similar societies in the Old World, and
particularly of the magnificent London Zoological Gardens, the officers
of which are extremely interested in the success of the enterprise here,
and are prepared to aid, by advice and contributions, the Philadelphia
Garden. A description of the English society may be useful in forming an
opinion of the feasibility and advantages of the proposed scheme. The
London Zoological Society was organized in 1826, under the auspices of
Sir Humphry Davy, Sir Stamford Raffles and other eminent men, for the
advancement of zoology and animal physiology, and for the introduction
and acclimatization of subjects of the animal kingdom. By the charter,
granted March 27, 1829, Henry, marquis of Lansdowne, George, Lord
Auckland, Charles Baring Wall, Joseph Sabine and Nicholas Aylward
Vigors, Esqs., were created the first fellows. These gentlemen were
empowered to admit such other persons to be fellows, honorary members,
foreign members and corresponding members as they might think fit, and
to appoint twenty-one of the fellows to be the council, which should
manage the entire affairs of the society and elect members thereof until
the 29th of May following; at which time and annually thereafter the
society should hold a meeting, and by ballot remove five of this
council, and elect five others in their place, being fellows of the
society, who, with those remaining, should constitute the council for
the ensuing year. It will thus be seen that every year five of the
council are voted out, and five others elected in their stead, thus
retaining a large proportion of managers acquainted with the workings of
the organization.

[Illustration: PLAN OF THE PROPOSED ZOOLOGICAL GARDENS.]

By the by-laws fellows are required to pay twenty-five dollars
initiation fee and fifteen dollars per annum, or one hundred and fifty
dollars at once in lieu of such dues. Annual subscribers pay the same
amount yearly, but no initiation fee, and they are not permitted to vote
at elections. Ladies are admitted as fellows upon the same terms and
with the same privileges; with the addition, however, that they are
allowed to vote by proxy.

Fellows have personal admission to the Gardens, with two companions,
daily, and receive orders, to be signed by them, admitting two persons
on each Saturday and Sunday in the year. They are also entitled to
twenty free tickets of admission. Sundays are set apart specially for
fellows and their friends, the general public not being admitted.

The society has business and scientific meetings--the latter
monthly--and these are very largely attended and of the most interesting
character. New and remarkable subjects of zoology are exhibited, papers
and communications on animal physiology and zoology are read, and
animated discussions carried on. An abstract of the proceedings is
regularly forwarded to the scientific journals and newspapers. The
society also publishes a large variety of zoological matter, which is
furnished to fellows at one-fourth less than the price to strangers.
Every addition to the collection of the society has its picture taken
upon its entrance, and very handsome colored plates of those which are
rare or curious are inserted in these publications. The sales from this
source realized last year over thirty-seven hundred dollars.

In 1871 the income of the society was $123,101, of which $69,000 were
from admissions to the Gardens, $9507 from Garden sales and rent of
refreshment-rooms, $3750 from the society's publications, and $39,415
from dues of fellows and annual subscribers. The expenses for the same
year were $106,840, the principal items being--salaries, wages and
pensions, $21,790; cost and carriage of animals, $10,560; provisions,
$20,430; menagerie expenses, $10,480; Garden expenses, $3465. The annual
income has so much exceeded the expenses during the last ten years that
the society has been able to devote over two hundred and thirty thousand
dollars of such surplus to the permanent embellishment of its Gardens,
and still retain some fifty thousand dollars as a reserve fund.

In the collection of the society are 590 quadrupeds, 1227 birds and 255
reptiles--altogether 2072. The quantity and various kinds of food--the
knowledge of the tastes and necessities of the animals--the temperature,
ventilation, habitations and so on of such a large assortment of
different species--necessitate the employment of trained and skillful
servants and scientific officers. It has been seen that the provisions
and menagerie expenses alone exceed $30,000, and it must be remembered
that the most difficult part, the brain-work, the knowledge--without
which the whole would be a failure--is furnished the society by its
council entirely free.

The collection of living animals is the finest in existence, and is
daily increasing. Scattered everywhere are its corresponding members,
keeping it advised of every opportunity to augment its stores: its
agents have penetrated and are still exploring the desert and the
jungle, braving the heats of the equator, and the terrible winters of
the ice-bound regions of the globe, to furnish every possible link in
the grand procession of organized life.

A large proportion of the most wonderful and valuable part of the
collection has been presented by crowned heads and governors of
different countries, British consuls, other zoological societies,
British naval and military officers stationed in foreign ports and
posts, Englishmen of wealth and travelers. The donations to the society
for the year 1871 would alone be sufficient to establish a Garden at
Fairmount Park which would be the finest in America. They amounted to
over five hundred in number, and include almost every description of
animal, from a tiger to a monkey, and from an imperial eagle to a
humming-bird. With our present connection by rail and steamer with the
East and West Indies, and other distant regions, let it only be
generally known that such a Garden as is now proposed exists in
Philadelphia, and it will receive contributions from all parts of the
world. The Philadelphia society has already had numerous offers of
animals, birds and reptiles, and the promise of any number for the mere
cost of transportation. The officers of the Smithsonian Institution at
Washington have expressed their willingness and desire to hand over to
any proper association the many curious animals constantly offered it.
The societies of Europe, many of whose managers have been in
communication with the one started here, are extremely anxious that a
collection of American animals, birds, reptiles and fishes shall be
made. It will be wholly unique, and will attract zoologists from every
part of the world, permitting them, for the first time, to study the
habits of many new species. This continent has a wealth of subjects of
the animal kingdom as yet almost unexplored. The birds are absolutely
innumerable, and the immense rivers produce fishes of the most marvelous
character and but little known. In the Berlin Garden, rapidly becoming a
rival to the one in London, one of the greatest attractions, if not the
chief, is the American beaver: an assemblage of a number of these on the
banks of the Schuylkill, giving an opportunity of witnessing their
astonishing sagacity, would of itself be an attractive exhibition.

The Zoological Society of Philadelphia was incorporated by act of the
Legislature of Pennsylvania, approved March 21, 1859. The site selected
at that time, and approved by City Councils, was five acres of the
extreme south-eastern corner of the then Park, consisting of Sedgeley
and Lemon Hill, and containing about two hundred acres. A meeting of
certain prominent and influential citizens interested in the subject was
held, and the matter carefully discussed. At subsequent meetings a
constitution and by-laws were adopted, officers elected and plans
proposed for raising the necessary funds. The officers of the society at
that time were as follows: President, Dr. William Camac;
Vice-Presidents, William R. Lejée and James C. Hand; Recording
Secretary, Fairman Rogers; Corresponding Secretary, Dr. John L. LeConte;
Treasurer, P. Pemberton Morris; Managers, Frederick Graeff, Thomas
Dunlap, Charles E. Smith, John Cassin, William S. Vaux, J. Dickinson
Sergeant, Dr. Wilson C. Swann, W. Parke Foulke, Francis R. Cope and
Samuel Powel; Trustees of the Permanent Fund, Evans Rogers, Charles
Macalester and James Dundas.[A]

Soon after this the rebellion broke out, and in the clash of arms, the
terrible anxieties of the times, and the fevered pursuit of wealth that
followed the inflation of the currency, the subject of zoological
gardens entirely disappeared. Many of those whose names appear as
officially connected with the association, and whose purses and
influence would now be warmly exerted in its favor, have passed away, to
the irreparable loss of the society. Those who remain have revived the
project with sanguine hopes of its accomplishment. The increased wealth
since the inception of the idea in 1859, the enlarged size of the Park,
the growth of the city and the prospect of the Centennial, have widened
the views of the society, and it is confidently anticipated that a
Garden will be established, with a collection and all the necessary
appurtenances, that will equal in a few years the superb one of London.
The strangers that will flock here in 1876 will one and all visit the
Zoological Gardens if in any sort of condition for display at that time.
In 1851, the year of the great Exhibition of London, the number of
visitors to the Zoological Gardens increased from 360,402 in the year
before to 667,243; and in 1862, the time of the second and
International Exhibition, it leaped from 381,337 in 1861 to 682,205. The
number of visitors to the London Garden has been steadily on the
increase since its foundation. In 1863 the largest number up to that
time, except the Exhibition years, was 468,700, and by regular
progression annually it reached in 1871 the large amount of 595,917
persons.

The situation of our proposed Gardens is most admirable in every way.
Stretching along the west bank of the Schuylkill for nearly a third of a
mile; opposite the principal entrance to the Park on one side, and the
West Philadelphia approach by Thirty-fifth street on the other; directly
on the route to the Centennial Exhibition; contiguous to the great
railroad artery of the United States, the Pennsylvania Central, a
sideling from which will enter the receiving-house of the society
(marked D on the plan), and thus enable animals and curiosities from all
parts of the United States to be carried without change of cars directly
to the Gardens, or from the East Indies, China, Japan, South America and
the Pacific islands with but one trans-shipment, while the canal
alongside enables freights of all kinds and from any part of the world
to be deposited at the very entrance-gates; the ground rolling and
fertile, rising in the centre, and sufficiently elevated to be away from
the floods of the river; larger by some acres than the Zoological Garden
of London; interspersed with handsome trees, many of them of noble size,
planted by John Penn, whose family mansion, "Solitude," still stands
(35) within the proposed enclosure, and with slight alterations will
make a handsome museum for the society; the old West Philadelphia
Waterworks (20) only needing an engine to force the water into the lake,
around which will be the abodes of the aquatic animals, and from whence
the natural slope of the land will permit the irrigation of the whole
tract; the great sewer for the use of the western portion of the city,
now in process of construction, passing through the southern end of the
Garden, and running along the bank of the river to empty below the dam;
convenient to all parts of the city by means of the city railways and
the Reading Railroad;--these and many other advantages, which an
examination of the illustration of the grounds will naturally suggest,
produce a combination unsurpassed and unsurpassable anywhere. Is it
exaggeration to say that the Philadelphia Zoological Gardens, once
properly established, would not only be regarded with pride and
affection by the citizens, but very materially benefit the whole city?
Imagine the grounds handsomely laid out in walks and drives, bordered
with grass and flowers, terraced from the river; tables and chairs
scattered about on the green sward under the trees; a band of music; the
cool breezes from the Schuylkill; opposite, the beautiful Lemon Hill
Park, with its broad drive alongside the bank: could anything be more
attractive and wholesome to the hundreds of thousands who through the
hot months of this uncommonly hot city are obliged to remain within its
limits?

Assuming, then, the advantages of a Zoological Garden in Philadelphia,
what is necessary for success and what business inducements (to consider
it in that light) can the society hold out to obtain sufficient money to
procure its collection of living animals, and provide for their suitable
accommodation and increase? The number of members is now two hundred,
who pay five dollars initiation and the same amount annually, which
gives them continual admission to the proposed Garden. Fifty dollars
secures a life-membership free from any further subscription. The sum
now in the treasury is two thousand dollars, and although at the last
meeting twenty-one new names were proposed, and many more persons have
announced their intention of joining, it is apparent that by this means
the society will never accomplish its object. Begging subscriptions,
without offering a pecuniary return therefor, is repugnant to the
officers, and the following plan has been adopted for procuring the
necessary funds. Certificates of stock are to be issued of not less than
fifty dollars each. All receipts derived from the Gardens and
collections of the society are to be applied annually--first, to the
maintenance of the establishment; second, to the payment of six per
cent. on the stock; and third, any balance remaining to go to the
gradual extension of the collections of the society and the improvement
of its grounds.

It will be observed that stockholders can never receive a larger
dividend than six per cent. per annum, and this only in case the
receipts exceed the expenditures. There are therefore two points to be
considered by those willing to invest--first, the character of the
managers, and second, the prospect of the pecuniary success of the
enterprise. The first is a matter of acquaintance and reputation: the
second can be demonstrated in favor of the society, if honestly and
efficiently managed, with almost mathematical accuracy.

The main entrance to our Gardens will be directly opposite the Lansdowne
drive, at the west end of Girard Avenue Bridge. The Park Commissioners'
Report for 1872 gives the recorded number of pleasure carriages and
sleighs entering the Park at this point and at the Green street gate,
during the year, as 363,138, of equestrians 26,255, and of pedestrians
385,832. These, in the words of the report (p. 60), "allowing three
persons for each vehicle, will make a total of one million five hundred
and one thousand four hundred and ten visitors passing these two
entrances; and supposing the number of persons coming by the other ten
entrances to be not more than those recorded at these two, we shall have
three millions as the approximate number of visitors."

It will hardly be asserted that there is any prospect of this number
diminishing, nor will it be denied that it is most probable it will
steadily increase, and during the year of the Centennial be more than
quadrupled. It is reasonable to believe that few would resist the
pleasure of driving, riding or walking through the Zoological Gardens,
so invitingly at hand. Saturdays should be cheap days, say at half
price, and the money that would be received at the admission-gates upon
that one day alone would dissolve any fears of their six per cent, in
the minds of stockholders.

Relieved of the expense of securing the ground, a sum of three or four
hundred thousand dollars would enable the society to secure a solid
basis, and to open the Gardens upon a scale that would make them the
great feature of Philadelphia. In a very few years it could buy up all
its certificates of stock and own its collections free. The handsome
surplus, before alluded to, accruing annually to the London society
shows that this is not chimerical. The city railways are interested in
this movement, and should subscribe liberally. It is proposed in the
Legislature to charter a railroad running north and south in West
Philadelphia, and if this be done it will render the Garden still more
accessible.

The Commissioners of the Park warmly advocate its establishment, and do
not hesitate to say it will be a most magnificent addition and the most
entertaining resort at Fairmount. City Councils have already endorsed
it, and devoted space for its location. There remains nothing but the
assistance of the moneyed and public-spirited men of Philadelphia to
accomplish the undertaking. The stock books of the society are now open
for subscriptions, and to prevent the loss of another year ground must
be broken in the coming spring. It is most desirable that upon June 1st
the society may be in a condition to throw open to the public the
nucleus of a collection. Once actually begun, public interest will be
aroused, and, the people convinced that there is a prospect of success,
it will not be permitted to fail. Certain it is that too much time has
already been wasted in such a needed improvement, and that the
Zoological Gardens of Philadelphia will be permanently established now
or never.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] Since this article was written the vacancies in the board of
managers have been filled by the election of Messrs. George W. Childs,
Anthony J. Drexel, Henry C. Gibson, J. Vaughan Merrick, Clarence H.
Clark and Theodore L. Harrison.




BERRYTOWN.


CHAPTER VI.

Mrs. Guinness up stairs in her closet gave thanks every day to Heaven
for the blessed result: down stairs she nagged and scolded Kitty from
morning until night. Peter supposed it was in order to maintain her
authority, but it appeared there were other reasons.

"The girl disappoints me, now that one looks at her as a woman," she
said to her husband at breakfast one day, while Kitty sat opposite
placidly eating a liberal supply of steak and cakes. She looked up
inquiringly. "Yes," vehemently, "at your age I could not have eaten a
meal a week after I was engaged. Whenever I heard your father's step I
was in a tremor from head to toe. You receive Mr. Muller as though you
had been married for years. Not a blush! As cool as any woman of the
world!"

"But I don't feel any tremor," helping her father to butter.

"It's immodest!"

Kitty blushed now, but whether from anger or shame no one could tell;
for she remained silent. She laid down her knife and fork the next
moment, however, and rose.

"What I fear is this," said her mother, raising her voice--"Mr. Muller's
disappointment. He looks for a womanly, loving wife--"

"And I'm not one?" Poor Kitty stood in the doorway swinging her
sun-bonnet. She was just then certainly not a morbid, despairing woman,
who had made a terrible mistake: nothing but a scared child whom anybody
would have hurried to comfort and humor. "I want to do what's right, I'm
sure;" and her red under lip began to tremble and the water to gather in
her eyes. She sat down to hear the rest of the lecture, but her mother
stopped short. Presently, when the chickens came clucking, she went to
mix their meal as usual, very pale and dolorous.

In an hour she put her head in at the shop-window, her eyes sparkling:
"There's two new chicks in the corn-bin nest, and they're full-blooded
bantams, I'm sure, father."

"She's not fit to be married!" cried Mrs. Guinness excitedly. "She is
both silly and unfeeling. God only knows how I came to be the mother of
such a child! The great work before her she cares nothing about; and as
for Mr. Muller, she doesn't value him as much as a bantam hen. It's her
narrow intellect. Her brain is small, as Bluhm said."

It was his wife's conscience twitting her, Peter knew. "I would not be
uneasy," he said with a cynical smile. "You can't bring love out of her
by that sort of friction." But he was himself uneasy. If Catharine had
been gloomy, or even thoughtful, at the prospect of her marriage, he
would have cared less. But she came in that very day in glee at the
sour, critical looks with which some envious young women of the church
had followed her; and when her mother called her up stairs to look at a
trunkful of embroidered under-clothing which she had kept for this
crisis, he could hear Kitty's delighted chatter and giggle for an hour.
Evidently her cup of pleasure was full for that day. Was his little girl
vulgar, feeble in both heart and mind, as her mother said?

Kitty was on trial that day. Miss Muller called and swept her off to the
Water-cure in the afternoon. She meant to interest her in the
Reformatory school for William's sake. She began by explaining the
books, and the system of keeping them. "It is my brother's wish you
should keep the accounts," she said.

"Accounts! oh yes, of course."

The tone was too emphatic. Miss Muller looked up from the long lines of
figures and found Kitty holding her eyes open by force. Evidently she
had just had a comfortable nap.

Whereupon Maria began to patiently dilate on the individual cases of
the boys to be reformed; and terrible instances they were of guilt and
misery.

"She whimpered a little," she said afterward to her brother. "I'll do
her justice: she did, a little. But they ought to have brought tears
from a log; and the next minute, seeing those wonderful eyes of hers
fixed on me with a peculiar thoughtfulness, I asked her what was she
thinking of, and found she was studying 'how I did that lovely French
twist in my back hair.' No. There's nothing in her--nothing. Not an
idea; but that I did not expect. But not even a feeling or principle to
take hold of. Take my word, William. You are going to marry fine eyes
and pink cheeks. Nothing more."

Mr. Muller cared for nothing more. If there had been an answering hint
of fire in eyes or cheeks to the rush of emotion he felt at the sight of
them, he would have been content. But Catharine's face was very like a
doll's just now--the eyes as bright and unmeaning, the pink as
unchanging. In vain he brought her flowers; in vain, grown wiser by
love, led her out in the moonlight to walk, or, flushed and quaking
himself, read in a shrill, uncertain voice absurd fond little sonnets he
had composed to her. Kitty was always attentive, polite and indifferent.
She never went to her old seat during the whole summer, never opened one
of the old books over which she and Peter used to pore. He showed her a
new edition of the _Pilgrim's Progress_ one day, with illustrations:
"See what Bell and Daldy have done for our old friend, Catharine."

"This allegory all seems much ado about nothing," she said presently,
filliping over the leaves. "Really, I can't see that there is any
wilderness in the world, or devils to fight in or out of pits. At least
for me."

Speculations on life from Kitty! A month ago she would have gone no
farther than the pictures. "There's nothing worse for me than nice
dresses and a wedding, and three hundred children to bring up for the
Lord, with a smell of beef-and-cabbage over it all. Good gracious!
Don't you know I'm joking, father?" seeing his face. She laughed and
hugged him, and hugged him again. "As for the children, I love them of
course, poor little wretches!"

Peter scowled over her back as she hung on him. Was it sheer silliness?
Or had certain doors in her nature never been opened, even enough for
her to know all that lay behind them? He pushed her off, holding her by
both wrists: "Are you quite willing to marry Mr. Muller? Do you love
him? Think what it is to marry without love. For God's sake tell me,
Catharine!"

"Yes, I love him. Certainly. Why," kindling into animation, "I've worn
his ring for a month. Haven't you seen it?" turning her hand about and
looking at the blue turquoise against the white dimples with a delighted
chuckle.

There was a storm that evening: the thunder was deafening; the rain
dashed heavily against the little square windows of the Book-house.
Catharine was alone. As soon as she made sure of that, Peter having gone
to the city and her mother to a meeting, she put on her waterproof cloak
and overshoes, and sallied out. Not by any means as heroines do who rush
out into the tempest to assuage fiercer storms of rage or despair
within. But there was something at this time in Kitty's blood which,
though it would not warm her cheeks at Mr. Muller's approach, was on
fire for adventure. To go out alone in the rain was to the
chicken-hearted little simpleton what a whaling-voyage would be to a
runaway boy. She came in after an hour drenched to the skin, went up
stairs to change her clothes, and ran down presently to cuddle before
the fire. Now was the time to think rationally, she thought, her elbow
on a chair, her chin pillowed in her soft palm. Here was her marriage
just at hand. She had looked forward to marriage all her life. Five
minutes she gave to the long-vexed question of whether her wedding-veil
should cover her face or not, "It would shade my nose, and in frosty
weather my nose always will be red." What queer little hooked noses the
Mullers all had! and that reflection swung her mind round to her lover
and his love-making, where it rested, until suddenly the fire grew a
hazy red blotch and her head began to bob.

"I did not use to be so thick-headed," rousing herself, and staring
sleepily at the rain-washed window and the crackling fire. She sang a
little hymn to herself, that simplest of all old ditties:

     I think, when I hear that sweet story of old.

It made her tender and tearful, and brought her feet close to her
Saviour, as those other children upon whose head He laid his hands. "I
ought to be thankful that I have work for Him," she thought. "How I
envied Mary McKean when she sailed to India as a missionary! And here
are the heathen ready-made for me," proceeding very earnestly to think
over the state of the wretched three hundred. But her head began to nod
again, and the fire was suddenly dashed out in blackness. She started up
yawning. It was all so dreary! Life--Then and there our wholesome Kitty
would have made her first step toward becoming the yearning, misplaced
Woman of the Time, but for a knock which came at the door.

There had been an occasional roll of thunder, and the rain beat steadily
upon the roof. The first knock failed to rouse her. At the second a man
burst in, and stopped as suddenly in the dark end of the shop, shading
his eyes from the glare: then he came tiptoeing forward. Even in this
abrupt breaking in out of the storm there was something apologetic and
deprecating about the man. As he came up, still sheltering his eyes, as
though from the surprise of Kitty's loveliness, and not the fire, he had
the bearing of a modest actor called before the curtain for bouquets.

"I had not expected--_this_" with a stage wave of the hand toward
Catharine.

Now Kitty's pink ears, as we know, were always pricked for a compliment,
and her politeness was apt to carry her over the verge of lying; but she
was hardly civil now: she drew coldly back, wishing with all her heart
that her lover, fat, simple, pure-minded little Muller, were here to
protect her. Yet Mrs. Guinness, no doubt, would have said this man was
made of finer clay than the clergyman. Both figure and face were small
and delicate: his dress was finical and dainty, from the fur-topped
overshoes to the antique seal and the trimming of his gray moustache. He
drew off his gloves, holding a white, wrinkled hand to the fire, but
Catharine felt the colorless eyes passing over her again and again.

"Your business," she said, "is probably with my father?"

"Your father is Peter Guinness? No. My business hardly deserves the
name, in fact," leisurely stopping to smooth and fold the yellow gloves
between his palms, in order to prolong his sentences. "It was merely to
leave a message for his son, for Hugh Guinness."

"Hugh Guinness is dead."

"Dead!" For an instant the patting of the gloves ceased, and he looked
at her steadily; then, with a nod of comprehension, he went on: "Oh, it
is not convenient for Hugh to be alive just now? We are old comrades,
you see: I know his ways. I know he was in Delaware a year ago. But I
have no time now to go to Delaware. The message will no doubt reach him
if left with you." He had made the gloves into a square package by this
time, and, flattening it with a neat pat or two, put it in his pocket,
turning to her with a significant smile.

"Hugh Guinness is dead," said Catharine. "He died in Nicaragua five
years ago. Your business with him ended then."

"And yet--" coming a step nearer, "yet if Guinness were in his grave
now, I fancy he would think my business of more importance to him than
life itself would be." He was talking against time, she saw--talking
while he inspected her to see whether she were willfully lying or
believed what she said. He was a man who by rule believed the worst: the
disagreeable, incredulous smile came back. "These are the days when
ghosts walk, as you know." After a moment's pause: "And Hugh may come
to rap and write with the rest. So, even admitting that he is dead, it
would be safer for you to receive the message. It matters much to him."

"What is it?" she said curiously. "There is no use in wasting so many
words about the matter."

"Tell him--" lowering his voice. "No," with a sudden suspicious glance
at her. "No need of wasting words, true enough. Give him this. There's
an address inside. Tell him the person who sent it waits for him there."
He took out of his pocket a small morocco case, apparently containing a
photograph, and laid it down on the table.

"Take it back. Hugh Guinness has been dead for years. I will not take
charge of it."

"No, he's not dead," coolly buttoning his coat again. "I suppose you
believe what you say. But he was in Delaware, I tell you, last October.
If he asks about me, tell him I only acted as a messenger in the matter.
I've no objection to doing him that good turn."

He nodded familiarly, put on his hat, and went out as suddenly as he had
come. When he was gone she heard the rain drenching the walnuts outside,
dripping, dripping; the thunder rolled down the valley; the fire
crackled and flashed. There, on the table, in the dirty morocco case,
lay a Mystery, a tremendous Life-secret, no doubt, of which she, Kitty,
held the clue. It was like Pepita when she found the little gold key
that unlocked the enchanted rooms. Hugh Guinness living? To be restored
to his father? She was in a fever of delight and excitement. When she
opened the case she found a beautiful woman's face--a blonde who seemed
sixteen to Kitty, but who might be sixty. The Mystery enlarged: it quite
filled Kitty's horizon. When she put the case in her pocket, and sat
down, with red cheeks and bright eyes, on the rug again, I am sure she
did not remember there was a Reform school or a Muller in the world.

At last Peter was heard in the porch, stamping and shaking: "Oh, I'm
dry as a toast, Jane, what with the oil-skin and leggings. Yes, take
them. Miss Vogdes wants tea in the shop, eh? All right! Why child,"
turning up her face, "your cheeks burn like a coal. Mr. Muller been
here?"

"Oh dear, no!" pushing him into a chair. "Is there nothing to think of
but Mullers and marrying?"

She poured out the tea, made room for the plates of cold chicken and
toast among the books, and turned the supper into a picnic, as she had
done hundreds of times, gossiping steadily all the while. But Mr.
Guinness saw that there was something coming.

When the tea was gone she sat down on the wooden bench beside him,
leaning forward on his knee: "Father, you promised once to show me
before I went away all that you had belonging to--your other child."

Guinness did not speak at once, but sat smoking his cigar. It went out
in his mouth. He made a motion to rise once or twice, and sat down
again. "To-night, Kitty?"

"Yes, to-night. We are alone."

He got up at last slowly, going to a drawer in the oak cases which she
had never seen opened. Unlocking it, he took out one or two Latin
school-books, a broken fishing-rod, a gun and an old cap, and placed
them before her. It was a hard task she had set him, she saw. He lifted
the cap and pointed to a long red hair which had caught in the button,
but did not touch it: "Do you see that? That is Hugh's. I found it there
long after he was gone. It had caught there some day when the boy jerked
the cap off. He was a careless dog! Always jerking and tearing!"

Catharine was silent until he began putting the things back in the
drawer: "Father, there's no chance, is there? You could not be mistaken
in that report from Nicaragua? You never thought it possible that your
son might yet be alive?"

"Hugh's dead--dead," quietly. But his fingers lingered over the book and
gun, as though he had been smoothing the grave-clothes about his boy.

"The proof was complete, then?" ventured Kitty.

He turned on her: "Why do you talk to me of Hugh, Catharine? I can tell
you nothing of him. He's dead: isn't that enough? Christian folks would
say he was a man for whom his friends ought to think death a safe
ending. They have told me so more than once. But he was not altogether
bad, to my mind." He bent over the drawer now. Kitty saw that he took
hold of the red hair, and drew it slowly through his fingers: his face
had grown in these few minutes aged and haggard.

"'Behold, how he loved him!'" she thought. He had been the old man's
only son. Other men could make mourning for their dead children, talk of
them all their lives; but she knew her mother would not allow Peter to
even utter his boy's name.

"I'm sure," she said vehemently from where she stood by the fire, "he
was not a bad man. _I_ remember Hugh very well, and I remember nothing
that was not lovable and good about him;" the truth of which was that
she had a vague recollection of a freckle-faced boy, who had tormented
her and her kittens day and night, and who had suddenly disappeared out
of her life. But she meant to comfort her father, and she did it.

"You've a good, warm heart, Kitty. I did not know that anybody but me
remembered the lad."

She snuggled down on the floor beside him, drawing his hand over her
hair. Usually there is great comfort in the very touch of a woman like
Kitty. But Peter's hand rested passively on her head: her cooing and
patting could not touch his trouble to-day.

"Your mother will need you, my dear," he said at last, as soon as that
lady's soft steady step was heard in the hall. Kitty understood and left
him alone.

"Mother," she said, coming into the chamber where Mrs. Guinness, her
pink cheeks pinker from the rain, lay back in her easy-chair, her
slippered feet on the fender--"mother, there is a question I wish to ask
you."

"Well, Catharine?"

"When did Hugh die? How do you know that he is dead?"

Mrs. Guinness sat erect and looked at her in absolute silence.
Astonishment and anger Kitty had expected from her at her mention of the
name, but there was a certain terror in her face which was
unaccountable.

"What do you know of Hugh Guinness? I never wished that his name should
cross your lips, Catharine."

"I know very little. But I have a reason for wishing to know when and
how he died. It is for father's sake," she added, startled at the
increasing agitation which her mother could not conceal.

Still, Mrs. Guinness did not reply. She was not a superstitious woman:
she felt no remorse about her treatment of her stepson. There had been
evil tongues, even in the church, to lay his ruined life at her door,
and to say that bigotry and sternness had driven him to debauchery and a
drunkard's death. She knew she had done her duty: she liked best to
think of herself as a mother in Israel. Yet there had always been a
dull, mysterious terror which linked Hugh Guinness and Catharine
together. It was there he would revenge himself. Some day he would put
out his dead hand from the grave to work the child's destruction. She
had reasoned and laughed at her own folly in the matter for years. But
the belief was there. Now it was taking shape.

She would meet it face to face. She stood up as though she had been
going to throttle some visible foe for ever: "I shall tell you the
truth, Catharine. Your father has never known it. He believes his son
died in Nicaragua fighting for a cause which he thought good. I let him
believe it. There was some comfort in that."

"It was not true, then?"

"No." She rearranged the vases on the mantel-shelf, turned over the
illuminated texts hanging on the wall, until she came to the one for the
day. She was trying to convince herself that Hugh Guinness mattered
nothing to her.

"He died," she said at last, "in New York, a reprobate, as he lived."

"But where? how?"

"What can that matter to you?" sharply. "But I will tell you where and
how. Two winters ago a poor, bloated, penniless wretch took up his
lodging in a cheap hotel in New York. He left it only to visit the
gambling-houses near. An old friend of mine recognized Hugh, and warned
me of his whereabouts. I went up to the city at once, but when I reached
it he had disappeared. He had lost his last penny at dice."

"Then he _is_ still alive?"

"God forbid! No," correcting herself. "A week later the body of a
suicide was recovered off Coney Island and placed in the Morgue. It was
horribly mutilated. But I knew Hugh Guinness. I think I see him yet,
lying on that marble slab and his eyes staring up at me. It was no doing
of mine that he lay there."

"No, mother, I am sure that it was not," gently. "If your conscience
reproaches you, I wish he were here that you could try and bring him
into the right path at last."

"My conscience does not trouble me. As for Hugh--Heaven forbid that I
should judge any man!--but if ever there was a son of wrath predestined
to perdition, it was he. I always felt his day of grace must have passed
while he was still a child."

Kitty had no answer to this. She went off to bed speedily, and to sleep.
An hour or two later her mother crept softly to her bedside and stood
looking at her. The woman had been crying.

"Lord, not on her, not on her!" she cried silently. "Let not my sin be
laid up against her!" But her grief was short-lived. Hugh was dead. As
for his harming Kitty, that was all folly. Meanwhile, Mr. Muller and the
wedding-clothes were facts. She stooped over Kitty and kissed
her--turned down the sheet to look at her soft blue-veined shoulder and
moist white foot. Such a little while since she was a baby asleep in
this very bed! Some of the baby lines were in her face still. It was
hard to believe that now she was a woman--to be in a few days a wife.

She covered her gently, and stole away nodding and smiling. The ghost
was laid.

As for Kitty, she had gone to bed not at all convinced that Hugh
Guinness was dead. It was a more absorbing Mystery, that was all. But it
did not keep her awake. She did not spin any romantic fancies about him
or his dark history. If he were alive, he was very likely as
disagreeable and freckle-faced a man as he had been a boy. But the
secret was her own--a discovery; a very different affair from this
marriage, which had been made and fitted on her by outsiders.


CHAPTER VII.

"Gone! You don't mean that your mother and Mr. Guinness have gone to
leave you for a month!" Mr. Muller was quite vehement with annoyance and
surprise.

"At least a month," said Catharine calmly. "Mrs. Guinness always goes
with my father on his summer journey for books, and this year she
has--well, things to buy for me."

It was the wedding-dress she meant, he knew. He leaned eagerly in at the
window, where he stood hoping for a blush. But none came. "Purl two and
knit one," said Kitty to her crochet.

"I certainly do not consider it safe or proper for you to be left
alone," he blustered mildly after a while.

"There is Jane," glancing back at the black figure waddling from the
kitchen to the pump.

"Jane! I shall send Maria up to stay with you, Catharine."

"You are very kind! It is so pleasant to be cared for!" with a little
gush of politeness and enthusiasm. "But dear Maria finds the house damp.
I will not be selfish. You must allow me to be alone."

He looked at her furtively. Was there, after all, an obstinate,
unbendable back-bone under the soft feathers of this his nestling dove?
He was discomfited at every turn this evening. He had hoped that Kitty
would notice that his little imperial had been retrimmed; and he
had bought a set of sleeve-buttons, antique coins, at a ruinous price,
in hopes they would please her. She looked at neither the one nor the
other. Yet she had a keen eye for dress--too keen an eye indeed. Only
last night she had spent an hour anxiously cutting old Peter's hair and
beard, and Mr. Muller could not but remember that he was a handsome
young fellow, and do what she would with Peter, he was old and beaked
like a parrot. "Besides, he is only her stepfather," he reasoned, "and I
am to be her husband: she loves me."

_Did_ she love him? The question always brought a pain under his plump
chest and neat waistcoat which he could not explain; he thrust it
hastily away. But he loitered about the room, thinking how sweet it
would be if this childish creature would praise or find fault with
buttons or whiskers in her childish way. Kitty, however, crocheted on
calmly, and saw neither. The sun was near its setting. The clover-fields
stretched out dry and brown in its warm light, to where the melancholy
shadows gathered about the wooded creeks.

Mr. Muller looked wistfully out of the window, and then at her. "Suppose
you come and walk with me?" he said presently.

Kitty glanced out, and settled herself more comfortably in her
rocking-chair. "It is very pleasant here," smiling.

He thought he would go home: in fact, he did not know what else to do.
The room was very quiet, they were quite alone. The evening light fell
on Catharine; her hands had fallen on her lap; she was thinking so
intently of her Mystery that she had forgotten he was there. How white
her bent neck was, with the rings of brown hair lying on it! There was a
deeper pink than usual on her face, too, as though her thoughts were
pleasant. He came closer, bent over her chair, touched her hair with one
chubby finger, and started back red and breathless.

"Did you speak?" said Kitty, looking up.

"I'm going home. I only wanted to say good bye."

"So soon? Good-bye. I shall see you to-morrow, I suppose?" taking up her
work.

"Yes, Kitty--"

"Well?"

"I have never bidden you good-bye except by shaking hands. Could I kiss
you? I have thought about that every day since you promised to marry
me."

The pleasant rose-tinge was gone now: even the soft lips, which were
dangerously close, were colorless: "You can kiss me if you want to. I
suppose it's right."

The little man drew back gravely. "Never mind; it's no matter. I had
made up my mind never to ask for it until you seemed to be able to give
me real wifely love."

She started up. "I can do no more than I have done," vehemently. "And
I'm tired of hearing of myself as a wife. I'd as soon consider myself as
a grandmother."

Mr. Muller waited a moment, too shocked and indignant to speak: then he
took up his hat and went to the door. "Good-night, my child," he said
kindly, "To-morrow you will be your better self."

Kitty knew nothing of better selves: she only felt keenly that two
months ago such rudeness would have been impossible to her. Why was she
growing vulgar and weak?

The air stirred the leaves of the old Walnuts outside: the black-coated,
dapper figure had not yet passed from under them. He was so gentle and
pious and good! Should she run after him? She dropped instead into her
chair and cried comfortably till a noise in the shop stopped her, and
looking through the dusky books she saw a man waiting. She got up and
went in hastily, looking keenly at his face to find how long he had been
there, and how much he had seen. It wore, however, an inscrutable
gravity.

Most of Peter's old customers sold to themselves during his absence, but
this was a stranger. He stood looking curiously at the heaped books and
the worn sheepskin-covered chair, until she was close to him: then he
looked curiously at her.

"I have had some correspondence with Mr. Guinness about a copy of
Quadd's _Scientific Catalogues_."

"Mr. Guinness is not at home, but he left the book," said Kitty, alertly
climbing the steps. Bringing the book, she recognized him as Doctor
McCall, who had once before been at the shop when her father was gone.
He was a young man, largely built, with a frank, attentive face, red
hair and beard, and cordial voice. It was Kitty's nature to meet anybody
halfway who carried summer weather about him. "My father hoped you would
not come for the book until his return," she said civilly. "Your letters
made him wish to see you. You were familiar, he told me, with some old
pamphlets of which few customers know anything."

"Probably. I could not come at any other time," curtly, engrossed in
turning over the pages of his book. Presently he said, "I will look over
the stock if you will allow me. But I need not detain you," glancing at
her work in the inner room. Kitty felt herself politely dismissed. Nor,
although Doctor McCall stayed for half an hour examining Peter's
favorite volumes as he sat on his high office-stool and leaned on his
desk, did he once turn his eyes on the dimpling face making a
picturesque vignette in the frame of the open window. When he had
finished he came to the door. "I will call for the books I have chosen
in an hour;" and then bowed distantly and was gone.

He had scarcely closed the gate when the back door creaked, and Miss
Muller came in smiling, magnetic from head to foot, as her disciples in
Berrytown were used to allege.

"And what is our little dove afraid of in her nest?" pinching Kitty's
cheek as though she had been a dove very lately fledged indeed. She had
always in fact the feeling when with Kitty that through her she suffered
to live and patted on the back the whole ignoble, effete race of
domestic women. Catharine caught sight of her satchel, which portended a
visit of several days.

"Pray give me your hat and stay with me for tea," she said sweetly.

Miss Muller saw through her stratagem and laughed: "Now, that is just
the kind of finesse in which such women delight!" she thought
good-humoredly, going into the shop to lay off her hat and cape. The
next moment she returned. Her face was bloodless. The muscles of the
chin twitched.

"Who has been here?" she cried, sitting down and rubbing her hands
violently on her wrists. "Oh, Catharine, who has been here?"

Now Kitty, a hearty eater with a slow brain, and nerves laid quite out
of reach under the thick healthy flesh, knew nothing of the hysterical
clairvoyant moods and trances familiar to so many lean, bilious American
women. She ran for camphor, carbonate of soda and arnica, bathed Miss
Muller's head, bent over her, fussing, terrified, anxious.

"Is it a pain? Is it in your stomach? Did you eat anything that
disagreed with you?" she cried.

"Eat! I believe in my soul you think of nothing but eating!" trying
resolutely to still the trembling of her limbs and chattering of her
teeth. "I was only conscious of a presence when I entered that room.
Some one who long ago passed out of my life, stood by me again." The
tears ran weakly over her white cheeks.

"Somebody in the shop!" Kitty went to it on tiptoe, quaking at the
thought of burglars. "There's nobody in the shop. Not even the cat,"
turning back reassured. "How did you feel the Presence, Maria? See it,
or hear it, or smell it?"

"There are other senses than those, you know," pacing slowly up and down
the room with the action of the leading lady in a melodrama; but her
pain or vision, whatever it was, had been real enough. The cold drops
stood on her forehead, her lips quivered, the brown eyes turned from
side to side asking for help. "When _he_ is near shall I not know it?"
she said with dry lips.

Kitty stole up to her and touched her hand. "I'm so glad if you are in
love!" she whispered. "I thought you would think it foolish to care for
love or--or babies. I used to care for them both a great deal."

"Pshaw! Now listen to me, child," her step growing steadier. "Oh dear!
Haven't you any belladonna? Or coffea? That would set me right at once.
As for a husband and children, they are obstructions to a woman--nothing
more. If my head was clear I could make you understand. I am a free
soul. I have my work to do. Marriage is an accident: so is
child-bearing. In nine cases out of ten they hinder a woman's work. But
when I meet a kindred soul, higher, purer than mine, I give allegiance
to it. My feeling becomes a part of my actual life; it is a spiritual
action: it hears and sees by spiritual senses. And then--Ah, there is
something terrible in being alone--_alone_! She called this out loudly,
wringing her hands. Kitty gave a queer smile. It was incredible to her
that a woman could thus dissect herself for the benefit of another.

"But she's talking for her own benefit," watching her shrewdly. "If
there's any acting about it, she's playing Ophelia and Hamlet and the
audience all at once.--Was it Doctor McCall you fancied was in the
shop?" she asked quietly.

Miss Muller turned, a natural blush dyeing her face and neck: "He has
been here then?--Oh, there! there he is!" as the young man came in at
the gate. She passed her hands over her front hair nervously, shook down
her lace sleeves and went out to meet him. Kitty saw his start of
surprise. He stooped, for she was a little woman, and held out both his
hands.

"Yes, John, it is I!" she said with a half sob.

"Are you really so glad to see me again, Maria?" She caught his arm for
her sole answer, and walked on, nestling close to his side.

"It may be spiritual affinity, but it looks very like love," thought
Kitty. It was a different love from any she had known. They turned and
walked through the gate down into the shadow of the wooded creeks, the
broad strong figure leaning over the weaker one. Kitty fancied the
passion in his eyes, the words he would speak. She thought how she had
noticed at first sight that there was unusual strength and tenderness in
the man's face.

"There will be no talk there of new dresses or reformatory schools, I'm
sure of that," she said, preparing to go to bed. She felt somehow
wronged and slighted to-night, and wished for old Peter's knee to rest
on. She had no friend like old Peter, and never would have.

REBECCA HARDING DAVIS.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]




OVERDUE.


    The beads from the wine have all vanished,
      Which bubbled in brightness so late;
    The lights from the windows are banished,
      Close shut is the gate
    Which yesterday swung wide in joyance,
      And beckoned to fate.

    The goblet stands idle, untasted,
      Or, tasted, is tasteless to-night;
    The breath of the roses is wasted;
        In sackcloth bedight,
    The soul, in the dusk of her palace,
        Sits waiting the light.

    Ah! why do the ships waft no token
      Of grace to this sorrowful realm?
    Must suns shine in vain, while their broken
        Rays clouds overwhelm?
    Tender Breeze, if some sail bear a message,
        Rule thou at the helm!

    But if haply the ruler be coming,
      Drug the sea-sirens each with a kiss:
    Stroke the waves into calmest of humming
        Over ocean's abyss:
    Speed him soft from the shore of the stranger
        To the haven of this.

    And the soul-bells in joyous revival
      Shall peal all the carols of spring;
    The roses and ruby wine rival
        Each other to bring,
    In the crimson and fragrance of welcome,
        Delight to the king.

MARY B. DODGE.




QUEEN VICTORIA AS A MILLIONAIRE.


Queen Victoria either is or ought to be a very wealthy woman. Her income
was at the beginning of her reign fixed at £385,000 a year. This sum, it
was understood, would, with the exception of £96,000 a year, be divided
between the lord steward, the lord chamberlain and the master of the
horse, the three great functionaries of the royal household. Of the
residue £60,000 were to be paid over to the queen for her personal
expenses, and the remaining £36,000 were for "contingencies." It is
probable, however, that the above arrangements have been much modified,
as time has worked changes.

The prince-consort had an allowance of £30,000 a year. The queen
originally wished him to have £100,000, and Lord Melbourne, then prime
minister, who had immense influence over her, had much difficulty in
persuading her that this sum was out of the question, and gaining her
consent to the government's proposing £50,000 a year to the House of
Commons, which, to Her Majesty's infinite chagrin, cut the sum down
nearly one-half.

During the happy days of her married life the expenditure of the court
was very much greater than it has been since the prince's death.
Emperors and kings were entertained with utmost splendor at Windsor.
During the emperor of Russia's visit, for instance, and that of Louis
Philippe, one or two hundred extra mouths were in one way or another fed
at Her Majesty's expense. The stables, too, were formerly filled with
horses--and very fine ones they were--whereas now the number is greatly
reduced, and many of those in the royal mews are "jobbed"--_i.e._ hired
by the week or month, as occasion requires, from livery stables. This
poverty of the master of the horse's department excited much angry
comment on the occasion of the princess Alexandra's state entry into
London.

But besides the previously-mentioned £60,000 a year, and what residue
may be unspent from the rest of the "civil list," as the £385,000 is
called, Queen Victoria has two other sources of considerable income. She
is in her own right duchess of Lancaster. The property which goes with
the duchy of Lancaster belonged originally to Saxon noblemen who rose
against the Norman Conqueror. Their estates were confiscated, and in
1265 were in the possession of Robert Ferrers, earl of Derby. This
nobleman took part with Simon de Montfort in his rebellion, and was
deprived of all his estates in 1265 by Henry III., who bestowed them on
his youngest son, Edmund, commonly called Edmund Crouchback, whom he
created earl of Lancaster. From him dates the immediate connection
between royalty and the duchy. In 1310, Thomas, second earl of
Lancaster, son of Edmund Crouchback, married a great heiress, the only
child of De Lacy, earl of Lincoln. By this alliance he became the
wealthiest and most powerful subject of the Crown, possessing in right
of himself and his wife six earldoms, with all the jurisdiction which
under feudal tenure was annexed to such honors. In 1311 he became
involved in the combination formed by several nobles to induce the king
to part with Piers de Gaveston. The result of this conspiracy was that
the unhappy favorite was lynched in Warwick Castle. The king, Edward
II., was at first highly incensed, but ultimately pardoned the
conspirators, including the earl of Lancaster; but that very imprudent
personage, subsequently taking up arms against his sovereign, was
beheaded.

In 1326 an act was passed for reversing the attainder of Earl Thomas in
favor of his brother Henry, earl of Lancaster. Earl Henry left a son and
six daughters. The son was surnamed "Grismond," from the place of his
birth. He greatly distinguished himself in the French wars under Edward
III., and was the second knight companion of the Order of the Garter,
Edward "the Black Prince" being the first. Ultimately, to reward his
many services, Edward III. created him, about 1348, duke of Lancaster,
and the county of Lancaster was formed into a palatinate or
principality. This great and good nobleman who seems to have been the
soul of munificence and piety, died in 1361, leaving two daughters to
inherit his vast possessions, but on the death of the elder without
issue the whole devolved on the second, Blanche, who married John of
Gaunt (so called because born at Ghent in Flanders, in March, 1340), son
of Edward III. He was created duke of Lancaster, played a prominent part
in history, and died in 1399, leaving a son by Blanche--Henry
Plantagenet, surnamed Bolingbroke, from Bullingbrook Castle in
Lincolnshire, the scene of his birth. He became King Henry IV., and thus
the duchy merged in the Crown, and is enjoyed to-day by Queen Victoria
as duchess of Lancaster.

Her revenue from this source has been steadily increasing. Thus in 1865
it was £26,000; in 1867, £29,000; in 1869, £31,000; in 1872 £40,000. The
largest of these figures does not probably represent a fifth of the
receipts of John of Gaunt, but the duchy of Lancaster, like that of
Cornwall, suffered far a long time from the fraud and rapacity of those
who were supposed to be its custodians. Managed as it now is, it will
probably have doubled its present revenue before the close of the
century.[B]

The other source is still more strictly personal income. On the 30th of
August, 1852, there died a gentleman, aged seventy-two, of the name of
John Camden Neild. He was son of a Mr. James Neild, who acquired a large
fortune as a gold- and silversmith. Mr. James Neild was born at Sir
Henry Holland's birthplace, Knutsford, a market-town in Cheshire, in
1744. He came to London, when a boy, in 1760, the first year of George
III.'s reign, and was placed with one of the king's jewelers, Mr.
Hemming. Gradually working his way up, he started on his own account in
St. James's street, a very fashionable thoroughfare, and made a large
fortune. In 1792 he retired. He appears to have been a man of rare
benevolence and some literary ability. He devoted himself to remedying
the condition of prisons, more especially those in which persons were
confined for debt: indeed, his efforts in this direction would seem to
have rivaled those of Howard, for in the course of forty years Mr. Neild
visited most of the prisons in Great Britain, and was for many years
treasurer, as well as one of the founders, of the society for the relief
of persons imprisoned for small debts. He described his prison
experiences in a series of papers in the _Gentleman's Magazine_, which
were subsequently republished, and highly praised by the _Edinburgh
Review_. Mr. Neild had three children, but only one, John Camden Neild,
survived him. This gentleman succeeded to his father's very large
property in 1814.

Mr. James Neild had acquired considerable landed estate, and was sheriff
of Buckinghamshire in 1804. His son received every advantage in the way
of education, graduated M.A. at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was
subsequently called to the bar. He proved, however, the very reverse of
his benevolent father. He was a miser born, and hid all his talents in a
napkin, making no use of his wealth beyond allowing it to accumulate.
From the date of the death of his father, who left him £250,000, besides
real estate, he had spent but a small portion of his income, and allowed
himself scarcely the necessaries of life. He usually dressed in a blue
coat with metal buttons. This he did not allow to be brushed, inasmuch
as that process would have worn the nap. He was never known to wear an
overcoat. He gladly accepted invitations from his tenantry, and would
remain on long visits, because he thus saved board. There is a story of
how a benevolent gentleman once proffered assistance, through a chemist
in the Strand, in whose shop he saw what he supposed to be a broken-down
old gentleman, and received for reply, "God bless your soul, sir! that's
Mr. Coutts the banker, who could buy up you and me fifty times over." So
with Mr. Neild: his appearance often made him an object of charity and
commiseration, nor would it appear that he was at all averse to being so
regarded. Just before railway traveling began he had been on a visit to
some of his estates, and was returning to London. The coach having
stopped to allow of the passengers getting refreshment, all entered the
hotel except old Neild. Observing the absence of the pinched,
poverty-stricken-looking old gentleman, some good-natured passenger sent
him out a bumper of brandy and water, which the old niggard eagerly
accepted.

A few days before his death he told one of his executors that he had
made a most singular will, but that he had a right to do what he liked
with his own. When the document was opened it was found that, with the
exception of a few small legacies, he had left all "to Her Most Gracious
Majesty Queen Victoria, begging Her Majesty's most gracious acceptance
of the same, for her sole use and benefit, and that of her heirs."
Probably vanity dictated this bequest. To a poor old housekeeper, who
had served him twenty-six years, he left nothing; to each of his
executors, £100. But the queen made a handsome provision for the former,
and presented £1000 to each of the latter; and she further raised a
memorial to the miser's memory.

The property bequeathed to her amounted to upward of £500,000; so that,
supposing Her Majesty to have spent every penny of her public and duchy
of Lancaster incomes, and to have only laid by this legacy and the
interest on it, she would from this source alone now be worth at least
£1,000,000. Be this as it may, even that portion of the public which
survives her will probably never know the amount of her wealth, for the
wills of kings and queens are not proved; so that there will be no
enlightenment on this head in the pages of the _Illustrated London
News_.

Both Osborne House in the Isle of Wight, and Balmoral, were bought prior
to Mr. Neild's bequest. These palaces are the personal property of Her
Majesty, and very valuable: probably the two may, with their contents,
be valued at £500,000 at the lowest. The building and repairs at these
palaces are paid for by the queen herself, but those of all the palaces
of the Crown are at the expense of the country, and about a million has
been expended on Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle during the present
reign.

The claims made on the queen for charity are exceedingly numerous. They
are all most carefully examined by the keeper of her privy purse, and
help is invariably extended to proper objects. But whilst duly
recognizing such calls upon her, the queen has never been regarded as
open-handed. Her munificence, for example, has not been on the scale of
that of the late queen Adelaide, the widow of William IV. It is to be
remembered that her father suffered all his life from straitened
circumstances, and indeed it was by means of money supplied by friends
that the duchess of Kent was enabled to reach England and give birth to
its future sovereign on British soil. Although the duke died when his
daughter was too young to have heard from him of these pecuniary
troubles, she was no doubt cautioned by her mother to avoid all chance
of incurring them; and a circumstance in itself likely to impress their
inconvenience on her memory was that one of the first acts of her reign
was to pay off, principal and interest, the whole of her father's
remaining liabilities.

A good deal of sympathy is felt in England for the prince of Wales in
reference to his money-matters. His mother's withdrawal from
representative functions throws perforce a great deal of extra expense
upon him, which he is very ill able to bear. He is expected to subscribe
liberally to every conceivable charity, to bestow splendid presents
(here his mother has always been wanting), and in every way to vie with,
if not surpass, the nobility; and all this with £110,000 a year, whilst
the dukes of Devonshire, Cleveland, Buccleuch, Lords Westminster, Bute,
Lonsdale and a hundred more noblemen and gentlemen, have fortunes double
or treble, no lords and grooms in waiting to pay, and can subscribe or
decline to subscribe to the Distressed Muffin-makers' and Cab-men's
Widows' Associations, according to their pleasure, without a murmur on
the part of the public.

About five years ago the press generally took this view of the subject,
and a rumor ran that the government fully intended to ask for an
addition to the prince's income; but nothing was done. We have reason to
believe that the hesitation of the government arose from the
well-grounded apprehension that it would bring on an inquiry as to the
queen's income and what became of it. Opinion ran high among both Whigs
and Tories that if Her Majesty did not please to expend in
representative pomp the revenues granted to her for that specific
purpose, she should appropriate a handsome sum annually to her son. It
may be urged, "Perhaps she does so," and in reply it can only be said
that in such case the secret is singularly well kept, and that those
whose position should enable them to give a pretty shrewd guess at the
state of the case persist in averring the contrary. However, it will no
doubt be all the better for the royal family in the end. The queen is a
sagacious woman. She no doubt fully recognizes the fact that the British
public will each year become more and more impatient of being required
to vote away handsome annuities for a succession of princelings, whilst
at the same time it may look with toleration, if not affection, upon a
number of gentlemen and ladies who ask for nothing more than the cheap
privilege of writing "Royal Highness" before their names. If, then,
Queen Victoria be by her retirement and frugality accumulating a fortune
which will make the royal family almost independent of a parliamentary
grant in excess of the income which the Crown revenues represent, she is
no doubt acting with that deep good sense and prudence which are a part
of her character. And here we may just explain that the Crown revenues
are derived from the property which has always been the appanage of the
English sovereign from the Norman Conquest. For a long time past the
custom has been to give this up to the country, with the understanding
that it cannot be alienated, and to accept, in lieu thereof, a
parliamentary grant of income. This Crown property is of immense value.
It includes a large strip of the best part of London. All the clubs in
Pall Mall, for instance, the Carlton, United Service, Travelers',
Reform; Marlborough House, The Guards Club, Stafford House, Carlton
House Terrace, Carlton Gardens--which pay the highest rents in
London--stand on Crown land; as do Montague House, the duke of
Buccleuch's, Dover House, etc. But this property suffers very much from
the fact of its being inalienable. It can only be leased. The whole of
the New Forest is Crown land, and it is estimated that if sold it would
fetch millions, whereas it is now nearly valueless. If the royal family
could use their Crown lands, just as those noblemen who have received
grants from sovereigns use theirs, it would be the wealthiest in
England, and would have no need to come to Parliament for funds.

Half of the people who howl about the expense of royalty know nothing
about these Crown lands, which really belong to royalty at least as much
as the property of those holding estates originally granted by kings
belongs to such proprietors, and if exception were taken to such tenures
scarcely any title in England would be safe.

Taking her, then, for all in all, Queen Victoria is not only the best,
but probably the cheapest, sovereign England ever had; and her people,
although inclined, as is their wont, to grumble that she doesn't spend a
little more money, feel that she has so few faults that they can well
afford to overlook this. Deeply loved by them, she is yet more
respected.

REGINALD WYNFORD.

FOOTNOTES:

[B] How the revenues of the duchy of Cornwall have grown under the
admirable management instituted by the late prince-consort, who
discovered that peculation and negligence were combining to dissipate
his eldest son's splendid heritage, the following will show. In 1824 the
gross revenue had fallen to £22,000: in 1872 it was nearly £70,000! Loud
were the howls of the peculators against "that beastly German" when His
Royal Highness took it in hand. But "he knew he was right," and had his
reward. When the prince of Wales came of age, instead of having from
£13,000 to £14,000, net, a year from his duchy, as the last prince of
Wales had, there was a revenue of £50,000 a year clear, and cash enough
to buy Sandringham. The income is now increasing at the rate of about
£3000 a year, on the average. By net revenue is meant the clear sum
which goes into the prince's pocket. Of course his father's prudence and
energy saved the country a large sum, which it would otherwise have been
compelled to vote for maintaining the prince's establishment.

George IV. had on his marriage, when prince of Wales, £125,000 a year,
besides his duchy revenues, £28,000 for jewelry and plate, and £26,000
for furnishing Carlton House. The present prince of Wales has nothing
from the country but £40,000 a year, and his wife has £10,000 a year. No
application has ever been made for money to pay his debts or to assist
him in any way.




CRICKET IN AMERICA


Cricket is the "national game" of England, where the sport has a
venerable antiquity. Occasional references to the game are found in old
books, which would place its origin some centuries back. The most
ancient mention of the game is found in the _Constitution Book of
Guildford_, by which it appears that in some legal proceedings in 1598 a
witness, then aged fifty-nine, gave evidence that "when he was a scholar
in the free schoole at Guldeford he and several of his fellowes did
runne and plaie there at _crickett_ and other plaies." The author of
_Echoes from Old Cricket Fields_ cites the biography of Bishop Ken to
show that he played cricket at Winchester College in 1650, one of his
scores, cut on the chapel-cloister wall, being still extant; and the
same writer reproduces as a frontispiece to his "opusculum" an old
engraving bearing date 1743, in which the wicket appears as a skeleton
hurdle about two feet wide by one foot high, while the bat is the Saxon
_crec_ or crooked stick, with which the game was originally played, and
from which the name cricket was doubtless derived.

In England the game is universally played: all classes take equal
interest in it, and it is a curious fact that on the cricket-ground the
lord and the laborer meet on equal terms, the zest of the game
outweighing the prejudice of caste. The government encourages it as a
physical discipline for the troops, and provides all barracks with
cricket-grounds. Every regiment has its club, and, what is odd, the navy
furnishes many crack players. It is the favorite _par excellence_ at all
schools, colleges and universities; every county, every town and every
village has its local club; while the I Zingari and its host of rivals
serve to focus the ubiquitous talent of All England. The public enjoy
it, merely as spectators, to such a degree that a grand match-day at
Lord's is only second in point of enthusiasm to the Derby Day. Special
trains carry thousands, and the field presents a gay picture framed in a
quadrangle of equipages. It is sometimes difficult, even by charging
large admission-fees, to keep the number of spectators within convenient
limits. Notwithstanding the motley assemblage which a match always
attracts, so unobjectionable are the associations of the cricket-field
that clergymen do not feel it unbecoming to participate in the
diversion, either as players, umpires or spectators.

In this country, while cricket is known in a few localities, it has
never been generally adopted. In New York a few English residents have
for years formed the nucleus of a somewhat numerous fraternity, and the
announcement that an _American Cricketer's Manual_ will be published in
that city during the present season indicates that home interest in the
sport is on the increase. But the chief thriving-place of native
American cricket is conceded to be Philadelphia, and it will be
interesting, perhaps, to take a retrospect of the progress of the game
in this city.

Tradition carries us back as far as the year 1831 or 1832, when cricket
was first played on the ground of George Ticknor, Esq., west of the old
bridge below Fairmount, by a few Englishmen, who shortly afterward
organized themselves under the name of the Union Club. Some of our older
native cricketers remember taking their first lessons from the three
brothers, George, Prior and John Ticknor, who, with Joseph Nicholls,
William Richardson, John M. Fisher, John Herrod, George Parker, Samuel
Dingworth, Jonathan Ainsworth, John Kenworthy and George Daffin, met on
Saturday afternoons and holidays. In subsequent years a few enthusiastic
spirits practiced with home-made bats on the Camden common, and thence
we trace the feeble but growing interest in the game, until in 1854 the
Philadelphia Cricket Club was organized, with J. Dickinson Sergeant
(who still fills the office) as president, William Rotch Wister as
secretary, and Hartman Kuhn (third), James B. England, Morton P. Henry,
Thomas Hall, Thomas Facon, Dr. Samuel Lewis, William M. Bradshaw, Henry
M. Barlow, R. Darrell Stewart, S. Weir Mitchell and (last, but not
least) Tom Senior among its founders. Then came the Germantown Club, of
native American boys, organized in 1855, whose highest ambition, for
many years, was to play the Philadelphia Club, "barring Tom Senior,"
then the only fast round-arm bowler in the country. Next came the
Olympian, the Delphian, the Keystone Cricket Clubs, and a host of lesser
lights, whose head-quarters were at West Philadelphia; and soon after
the now famous Young America Cricket Club was formed by the lamented
Walter S. Newhall, partly as a training-club for the Germantown. Well
did it fulfill its purpose until the breaking out of the war, when the
members of the Germantown Club changed the bat for the sabre almost in a
body, and the club went out of existence.

With calmer times the old love of cricket came back, and through the
energy of Mr. Charles E. Cadwalader the Germantown Club was reorganized,
and the _esprit de corps_ was such that before the club had taken the
field the roll showed more than twice its former numbers. Through the
spirit of its patrons, and especially by the kindness of H. Pratt
McKean, Esq. (part of whose country-seat was tendered for a
cricket-ground), the new life of the Germantown Cricket Club was
successfully inaugurated on the 17th of October, 1866, by a victory in
its opening match with the St. George Club of New York. That was a
red-letter day, when Major-General Meade, on behalf of the ladies of
Germantown, and amid the huzzas of thousands of its friends, presented
to the club a handsome set of colors, and, hoisting them to the breeze,
alluded in his own graceful style to the memories of the past, and the
achievements which he predicted the future would witness on this
magnificent cricket-field.

But what is cricket? Descriptions of lively things are apt to be dull,
and it is indeed no easy task to render a detailed description of
cricket intelligible, much less entertaining, to the uninitiated. The
veriest enthusiast never thought the forty-seven "laws of cricket" light
reading, and, resembling as they do certain other statutes whose only
apparent design is to perplex the inquiring layman, they would, if cited
here, be "caviare to the general."

But come with us, in imagination, on a bright May-day to a great
match--say on the Germantown cricket-ground. You will find a glorious
stretch of velvet turf, seven acres of living carpet, level and green as
a huge billard-table, skirted on the one hand by a rolling landscape,
and hedged on the other by a row of primeval oaks. Flags flaunt from the
flag-staffs, and the play-ground is guarded by guidons. The pavilion is
appropriated to the players, and perchance the band: the grand stand is
already filling with spectators. Old men and children, young men and
maidens, are there--the latter "fair to see," and each predicting
victory for her favorite club. For it must be known that on the
Germantown ground party spirit always runs high among the belles, many
of whom are good theoretical cricketers, and a few of whom always come
prepared with blanks on which to keep the neatest of private scores.
During the delay which seems inseparable from the commencement of a
cricket-match some of the players, ready costumed in cricket apparel,
"take care," if they do not "beware," of the aforesaid maidens; others,
impatient for the call of "time," like jockeys cantering before the
race, disport themselves over the field, practicing bowling, batting,
and, in ball-players' parlance, "catching flies." The whole picture is
one of beauty and animation, and that spirit must indeed be dull which
does not yield to the exhilarating influences of such a scene.

Cricket is usually played by eleven players on each side, the tactics of
each party being directed by a captain. Two umpires are appointed, whose
decrees, if sometimes inscrutable, are always irreversible, and whose
first duty it is to "pitch the wickets." Having selected the ground,
they proceed to measure accurately a distance of twenty-two yards, and
to erect a wicket at either extremity. Each "wicket" consists of three
wooden "stumps," twenty-eight inches long, sharpened at the bottom,
whereby they may be stuck perpendicularly in the ground, and grooved at
the top, in order to receive two short sticks or "bails," which rest
lightly across their tops. When pitched, the wickets face each other,
and each presents a parallelogram twenty-seven inches high by eight
inches broad, erect and firm-looking, while in fact the lightest touch
of the ball or any other object would knock off the bails and reduce it
to its elements. Each of these wickets is to be the _locus in quo_ not
only of a party rivalry, but also of an exciting individual contest
between the bowler and the batsman, the former attacking the fortress
with scientific pertinacity, and the "life" of the latter depending on
its successful defence. The "popping-crease" and the "bowling-crease"
having been white-washed on the turf--the one marking the batsman's
safety-ground, and the other the bowler's limits--all is now ready for
play. The captains toss a copper for choice of innings, and the winner
may elect to send his men to the bat. He selects _two_ representatives
of his side, who, having accoutred themselves with hand-protecting
gloves and with leg-guards, take position, bat in hand, in front of each
wicket. All the eleven players on the _out_ side are now marshaled by
their captain in their proper positions as fielders, one being deputed
to open the bowling. For a few moments the new match ball--than which,
in a cricketer's estimation,

    A carbuncle entire, as big as thou art,
    Were not a richer jewel--

is passed round among the fielders, just to get their hands in; which
ball, we may mention, is nine inches in circumference, weighs five and a
half ounces, is in color not unlike a carbuncle, and nearly as hard. The
umpires take their respective position, and at the word "Play!" the
whole party, like a pack of pointers, strike attitudes of attention,
more or less graceful, and the game begins.

The _bowler_, stepping briskly up to his crease, delivers the ball, and,
whether it be a "fast round-arm" or a "slow under-hand," his endeavor is
so to bowl it that the ball shall elude the batsman's defence and strike
the wicket. The _batsman_ endeavors, first and foremost, to protect his
wicket, and, secondly, if possible, to hit the ball away, so that he may
make a run or runs. This is accomplished when he and his partner at the
other wicket succeed in changing places before the ball is returned to
the wicket by the fielders.

The several ways in which a batsman may be put out are these: 1. "Bowled
out," if the bowler succeeds in bowling a ball which evades the
batsman's defence and strikes the wicket. 2. "Hit wicket," if the
batsman, in playing at the ball, hits his wicket accidentally with his
bat or person. 3. "Stumped out," if the batsman, in playing at a ball,
steps out of his ground, but misses the ball, which is caught by the
wicket-keeper, who with it puts down the wicket before the batsman
returns his bat or his body within the popping-crease. 4. "Caught out,"
if any fielder catches the ball direct from the striker's bat or hand
before it touches the ground. 5. "Run out," if the batsman, in
attempting to make a run, fails to reach his safety-ground before the
wicket to which he is running is put down with the ball. 6. "Leg before
wicket," if the batsman stops with his leg or other part of his body a
bowled ball, whose course in the opinion of the umpire was in a line
with the wickets, and which if not so stopped would have taken the
wicket.

At every ball bowled, therefore, the batsman must guard against all
these dangers: he must, without leaving his ground, and avoiding "leg
before wicket," play the ball so that it will not strike the wicket and
cannot be caught. Having hit it away, he can make a run or runs only if
he and his partner can reach their opposite wickets before the ball is
returned by the fielders and a wicket put down. All the fielders are in
active league against the batsman, whose single-handed resistance will
be of little avail unless he exceeds mere defence and adds his quota of
runs to the score of his side. To excel in this requires, in addition to
a scientific knowledge of the game, cool presence of mind, a quick eye,
a supple wrist, a strong arm, a swift foot and a healthy pair of lungs.
Thus the nobler attributes of the man, mental and physical, are brought
into play. As the Master in _Tom Brown's School-days_ remarks: "The
discipline and reliance on one another which cricket teaches are so
valuable it ought to be an unselfish game. It merges the individual in
the eleven: he does not play that he may win, but that his side may."

Four balls, sometimes six, are said to constitute an "over," and at the
completion of each over the bowler is relieved by an alternate, who
bowls from the opposite wicket, the fielders meantime crossing over or
changing places, so as to preserve their relative positions toward the
active batsman for the time being. Any over during which no runs are
earned from the bat is said to be a "maiden" over, and is scored to the
credit of the bowler as an evidence of good bowling. In addition to the
runs earned on hits there are certain "extras," which, though scored as
runs in favor of the _in_ side, are not strictly runs, but are imposed
rather as penalties for bad play by the outs than as the result of good
play by the ins. Thus, should the bowler bowl a ball which, in the
opinion of the umpire, is outside the batsman's reach, it is called a
"wide," and counts one (without running) to the batsman's side; should
the bowler in delivering a ball step beyond the bowling-crease, or if he
jerks it or throws it, it is a "no ball," and counts one (without
running) to the batsman's side; but if the batsman hits a no ball he
cannot be put out otherwise than by being "run out." If he makes one or
more runs on such a hit, the no ball is condoned, and the runs so made
are credited as hits to him and his side. The umpire must take especial
care to call "no ball" instantly upon delivery--"wide ball" as soon as
it shall have passed the batsman, and not, as a confused umpire once
called, "No ball--wide--out." Again, should a ball which the batsman has
not touched pass the fielders behind the wicket, the batsmen may make a
run or runs, which count to their side as "byes:" should the ball,
however, missing his bat, glance from the batsman's leg or other part of
his body, and then pass the fielders, the batsmen may make a run or
runs, which count to their side as "leg-byes."

The game thus proceeds until each batsman of the _in_ side is in turn
put out, except the eleventh or last, who, having no partner to assume
the other wicket, "carries out his bat," and the innings for the side is
closed. The other side now has its innings, and, _mutatis mutandis_, the
game proceeds as before. Usually two innings on each side are played,
unless one side makes more runs in one innings than the other makes in
both, or unless it is agreed in advance to play a "one-innings match."

So much for the matter-of-fact details of the game of cricket. To enter
into the more interesting but less tangible combination of science,
chance and skill to which cricket owes not a little of its fascination,
would extend this article far beyond its assigned limits. The science of
"length-balls" and "twisting lobs," the skill in "forward play" or "back
play," the chances of "shooters" and "bailers," are balanced in a happy
proportion, and to a cricketer form a tempting theme. But we must
content ourselves by referring those disposed to pursue the subject to
such books as _The Cricket Field_, _The Theory and Practice of Cricket_,
_Felix on the Bat_, _Cricket Songs and Poems_, and to other similar English
publications on the game, which are so numerous that if collected they
would make quite a cricket library.

Nor can we here refer to the incidental pleasures which a cricket-match
affords independently of participation in the game itself. These are
depicted, from a lady's point of view, by Miss Mitford in _Our
Village_; where a pretty bit of romance is interwoven with a description
of a country cricket-match, the very recollection of which draws from
the graceful authoress this admission: "Though tolerably eager and
enthusiastic at all times, I never remember being in a more delicious
state of excitation than on the occasion of that cricket-match. Who
would think that a little bit of leather and two pieces of wood had such
a delightful and delighting power?"

And this sentiment is echoed by scores of the fair spectators at our
home matches. When, for example, during the last international match at
Germantown, one of the English Gentlemen Eleven said to a lady, "We were
told we should have a fine game at Philadelphia, but, really, I had no
idea we should be honored by the presence of so many ladies," her reply
expressed the sentiments of a numerous class: "Oh, I used to come to a
match occasionally _pour passer le temps_. At first the cricket seemed
to me more like a solemn ceremonial than real fun, but now that I
understand the points I like the game for its own sake; and as for a
match like this, I think it is perfectly lovely!" Another of the English
Eleven--a handsome but modest youth--on being escorted to the grand
stand and introduced to a party of ladies, became so abashed by
unexpectedly finding himself in the midst of such a galaxy of beauties
(and, as a matter of course, the conscious cynosure of all eyes) that,
blushing to suffusion, and forgetting to lift his hat, he could only
manage to stammer out, "Aw, aw--I beg pardon; but--aw--aw--I fancy
there's another wicket down, and I must put on my guards, you know;"
whereupon he beat a hasty retreat.[C]

A game which has for centuries in England afforded healthful recreation
to all classes must needs possess some value beyond that of mere
physical exercise. Not that we would undervalue the latter advantage.
Improvement in health usually keeps pace with improvement in cricket.
Mr. Grace, the "champion cricketer of the world," is hardly less a
champion of muscular physique: he sought in vain for a companion to walk
to town, late at night, from the country-seat of the late Mr. Joshua
Francis Fisher, where the cricketers, after a long day's play, had been
entertained at dinner--a distance of more than ten miles. We heartily
concur in the favorite advice of a physician, renowned alike for his
social wit and professional wisdom, who prescribed "a rush of blood to
the boots" to all professional patients and head-workers--men who,
happening to possess brains, are prone to forget that they have bodies.
In no way can this inverse apoplexy be more healthfully or pleasantly
induced than by a jolly game of cricket. That the sport is adapted to
American tastes and needs we are convinced, and that it may find a
_habitat_ throughout the length and breadth of our land is an end toward
which we launch this humble plea in its interest.

Now we hardly expect all the readers of _Lippincott's Magazine_
forthwith to become cricketers, but we venture to suggest, by way of
moral, that some of them may take a hint from Mr. Winkle, who, when
asked by Mr. Wardle, "Are you a cricketer?" modestly replied, "No, I
don't play, _but I subscribe to the club here_."

ALBERT A. OUTERBRIDGE.

FOOTNOTES:

[C] The following extract from the diary of Mr. Fitzgerald, captain of
the English Gentlemen Eleven of 1872, has been published in England, and
will be read with interest:

"_Sept 21, 1872._ Philadelphia, seventh match. Lost the toss. Ground
fair to the eye, and immense attendance. The bowling and fielding on
both sides quite a treat to the spectators. Total for the English Twelve
(first innings), 105. Not considered enough, but a good score against
such bowling and fielding--quite first-class.

"_Sept. 24._ Second innings. With but 33 to get, the Twelve looked sure
of victory, but a harder fight was never yet seen. Bowling and fielding
splendid; excitement increasing. Fall of Hadow--ringing cheers. Advent
of Appleby--fracture of Francis. Seven down for 29. Frantic state of
Young America. The English captain still cheerful, but puffing rather
quickly at his pipe. Six 'maidens' at each end. The spell broken by
splendid hit of 'the tormentor.'

"This was the best and most closely-contested match of the campaign, and
the scene presented at the finish would lose nothing in excitement and
interest by comparison with 'Lord's' on a grand match-day."

A book of _Transatlantic Cricket Notes_ has been announced in England as
in preparation by Mr. Fitzgerald.




OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.


IRISH AGENTS.

The Irish papers mentioned a few months ago the death of Mr. Stuart
Trench, whose _Realities of Irish Life_ excited so much attention three
years ago. Mr. Trench was the most eminent of a class of men peculiar to
Ireland, and growing out of the unfortunate condition of that country.
He was an agent, which means overlooker and manager of the estates of
absentee landlords.

In England, except on very extensive properties, landlords do not employ
an agent of this sort, and even where they do his duties are of a very
different character. There the landlords, being nearly always in the
country, if not on their estates, look after their business themselves,
and have merely an overlooker, who does not occupy the position of a
gentleman, to superintend and report to them what may be needful, whilst
the rents are collected by a solicitor. This is the case in Scotland
also.

But in Ireland this would never do. Even where the landlord is resident
he almost always has an agent, to save himself the great trouble which
would otherwise be entailed on him, while to the non-resident an agent
is imperatively necessary.

Most Irish property is still subdivided into very small farms, and this
is in itself a source of constant trouble. The tenants get into arrear
or become hopelessly insolvent: they very often refuse to quit their
holdings nevertheless, and have to be coaxed, bought or turned out, as
the case may be; which several processes have to be accomplished by the
agent. Then he is compelled to see in many cases that they don't exhaust
the land by a repetition of the same crops, and in fact to superintend,
either by himself or his sub-agents, in a hundred ways which would never
be necessary in England, where the farms are large and their holders of
a different class.

He also represents the landlord socially, and is frequently the great
man of the district, duly invested with magisterial and other county
offices. The office of agent has therefore in Ireland had a high social
standing, and agencies are eagerly sought by the younger sons of
gentlemen, and even noblemen.

There are three or four estates whose agencies are regarded as special
prizes, and of these Mr. Trench held one, the marquis of Lansdowne's.
That nobleman--who is descended from the ancient Fitzmaurices, earls of
Kerry, and the celebrated _savant_ Mr. William Petty, who first surveyed
Ireland, and took the opportunity of helping himself pretty freely to
some very nice "tit-bits" as "refreshers" by the way--has a very
extensive property in Queens county and the wild maritime county of
Kerry, in which his ancestors were in bygone days a sort of kings.

Probably Lord Lansdowne's agency was worth to Mr. Trench quite $5000 a
year, equal in Kerry, where living is still very cheap, to $15,000 in
New York City; and he had two or three other agencies in addition.

On the smaller properties the agent is usually paid five per cent., on
the large by fixed salary. The best agency of all is that of Lord
Pembroke, who owns the most valuable portion of Dublin and a great deal
of adjoining land.

When the duties and risks of an agent are considered, he can by no means
be regarded as highly paid. Very many agents have lost their lives, and
others are exposed to continual danger. They are sometimes harsh,
tyrannical and overbearing, but far less so now, when railroad, press
and telegraph let light in upon all parts of the country, than formerly,
when they were left to themselves, and as long as the rents were duly
paid no heed was taken of their operations.

To do an agent's work well great firmness and knowledge of the Irish
character is required, and in some districts in the West a knowledge of
the Irish language is very desirable and absolutely requisite.

When an agency becomes vacant a proprietor receives innumerable
applications for the vacant office, often from persons ludicrously
ignorant of its duties. Thus, some time ago a seeker of such an office
accompanied his application--he was a retired army officer--by a sketch
of a sort of watch-tower whence he proposed to watch the tenantry, and
fire upon them as occasion required! With few exceptions the agents on
large estates are gentlemen bred to the business, whose fathers have
been agents, and have thus early become initiated into the mysteries of
the office.

Many Irish landlords are, and still more used to be, very much in the
hands of their agents, of whom they have borrowed money, and further
depend on for support in elections. Instances are by no means wanting of
men now holding high rank as country gentlemen whose fathers and
grandfathers grew rich out of estates confided to them to manage by
negligent, reckless landlords, who gradually fell completely into the
meshes of their managers.


RANDOM BIOGRAPHIES.

JULIUS CÆSAR. An ancient Roman of celebrity. He advertised to the effect
that he had rather be first at Rome than second in a small village. He
was a man of great muscular strength. Upon one occasion he threw an
entire army across the Rubicon. A general named Pompey met him in what
was called the "tented field," but Pompey couldn't hold a Roman candle
to Julius. We are assured upon the authority of Patrick Henry that
"Cæsar had his Brutus." The unbiased reader of history, however, will
conclude that, on the contrary, Brutus rather _had_ Cæsar. This Brutus
never struck me as an unpleasant man to meet, but he did Cæsar. After
addressing a few oral remarks to Brutus in the Latin language, Cæsar
expired. His subsequent career ceases to be interesting.

JOHN PAUL JONES. An American naval commander who sailed the seas during
the Revolution, with indistinct notions about gold lace or what he
should fly at the main. He was fond of fighting. He would frequently
break off in the middle of a dinner to go on deck and whip a British
frigate. Perhaps he didn't care much about his meals. If so, he must
have been a good _boarder_.

LUCREZIA BORGIA. Daughter of old Mr. Borgia, a wealthy Italian
gentleman. Lucrezia was one of the first ladies of her time. Beautiful
beyond description, of brilliant and fascinating manners, she created an
unmistakable sensation. It was a burning sensation. Society doted upon
her. Afterward it anti-doted.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. A philosopher and statesman. When a boy he associated
himself with the development of the tallow-chandlery interest, and
invented the Boston dip. He was lightning on some things, also a
printer. He won distinction as the original _Poor Richard_, though he
could not have been by any means so poor a Richard as McKean Buchanan
used to be. Although born in Boston and living in Philadelphia, he yet
managed to surmount both obstacles, and to achieve considerable note in
his day. They show you the note in Independence Hall.

MARK TWAIN. A humorous writer of the nineteenth century. As yet, I have
not had the honor of his acquaintance, but when I do meet him I shall
say something jocose. I know I shall. I have it. My plan will be to
inveigle him into going over a ferry to "see a man." As we pass up the
slip on the other side, I shall draw out my flask, impromptu-like, with
the invitation, "Mark, my dear fellow, won't you take something?" He
will decline, of course, or else he isn't the humorist I take him for. I
shall then consider it my duty to urge him. Fixing my eye steadily upon
him, so he can understand that I am terribly in earnest, I shall proceed
to apostrophize that genial victim as follows:

    "Take, I give it willingly,
    For invisibly to thee,
    Spirits, Twain, have crossed with me."

Then I presume we shall go and "see a man."

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. The man who discovered America two points off the
port-bow. One day, in his garden, he observed an apple falling from its
tree, whereupon a conviction flashed suddenly through his mind that the
earth was round. By breaking the bottom of an egg and making it stand on
end at the dinner-table, he demonstrated that he could sail due west and
in course of time arrive at another hemisphere. He started a line of
emigrant packets from Palos, Spain, and landed at Philadelphia, where he
walked up Market street with a loaf of bread under each arm. The
simple-hearted natives took him out to see their new Park. On his second
voyage Columbus was barbarously murdered at the Sandwich Islands, or
rather he would have been but for the intervention of Pocahontas, a
lovely maiden romantically fond of distressed travelers. After this
little incident he went West, where his intrepidity and masterly
financial talent displayed itself in the success with which he acquired
land and tobacco without paying for them. As the savages had no railroad
of which they could make him president, they ostracized him--sent him to
the island of St. Helena. But the spirit of discovery refused to be
quenched, and the next year we find him landing at Plymouth Rock in a
blinding snow-storm. It was here that he shot an apple from his son's
head. To this universal genius are we indebted also for the exploration
of the sources of the Nile, and for an unintelligible but
correspondingly valuable scientific report of a visit to the valley of
the Yellowstone. He took no side in our late unhappy war; but during the
Revolution he penetrated with a handful of the _garde mobile_ into the
mountain-fastnesses of Minnesota, where he won that splendid series of
victories which, beginning with Guilford Court-house, terminated in the
glorious storming of Chapultepec. Ferdinand and Isabella rewarded him
with chains. Genoa, his native city, gave him a statue, and Boston has
named in his honor one of her proudest avenues. One day he rushed naked
from the bath, exclaiming, "Eureka!" and the presumption is that he was
right. He afterward explained himself by saying that he cared not who
made the laws of a people, so long as he furnished their ballots.
Columbus was cruelly put to death by order of Richard III. of England,
and as he walked to the scaffold he exclaimed to the throng that stood
around him, "The world moves." The drums struck up to drown his words.
Smiling at this little by-play, he adjusted his crimson mantle about him
and laid his head upon the block. He then drank off the cup of hemlock
with philosophic composure. This great man's life (which, by the way,
was not insured) teaches the beautiful moral lesson that an excess of
virtue is apt to be followed by a redundancy of happiness, and that he
who would secure the felicity of to-day must disdain alike the
evanescent shadows of yesterday and the intangible adumbrations of the
morrow.

S. Y.


THE CRIES OF THE MARCHANDS.

The other morning I was lying quietly in bed, waiting for the bonne to
fetch my café noir, when a most extraordinary sound caught my ear. The
cries of Paris marchands early in the morning are curious enough
usually, but this one exceeded in quaintness all that I had heard since
my arrival. Between the words "Chante, chante, Adrienne!" a horrible
braying broke forth, resounding through our quiet faubourg in a manner
which brought many a _bonnet de nuit_ to the windows. I got up to see
what was the matter.

"Chante, chante, Adrienne!" re-echoed again over the smooth asphalte.

By this time a crowd of gamins--the gamins are always up, no matter how
early--had gathered in the middle of the street around the object of the
disturbance. It was a marchand of vegetables in a greasy blouse, leading
an ass. There was a huge pannier on the ass's back full of kitchen
vegetables, which the marchand was crying and praising to our sleepy
faubourg. With an economy worthy of Silhouette, the scamp had taught
Adrienne--for that was the beast's name--to bray every time he said
"Pommes de terre, de terre--terre!" As often as he said this, or
"Chante, Adrienne, chante!" Adrienne would switch her tail and _chante_
lugubriously, setting the whole neighborhood in commotion. So adroitly
had he trained the creature--with her thigh-bones sticking in peaks
through her hide, and a visage of preternatural solemnity--that when her
master but lifted his finger Adrienne would go through her part with
admirable gravity, thus helping her lord to get his daily bread. I
laughed till the bonne came with my coffee, and was glad to see the
pannier gradually emptying as the grotesque procession defiled through
our street, with a rear-guard of exhilarated urchins poking at poor meek
Adrienne in a manner the most _méchant_. And so on they went till the
peasant and his invaluable assistant were quite out of hearing.

There is no end to the originality of the Parisians. If you but go to a
kiosque to get a _Figaro_, the white-capped marchande has something
clever to say. The rain, the air, the clouds, the sun are full of
_esprit_ for her--are to her banques de France, upon which she has an
unlimited credit--_credit fonder_, if you will, _credit mobilier_, or
what not. The _conducteur_ who stands behind his omnibus and obligingly
helps you in, says _Merci_! with an accent so exquisite that it is like
wit or poetry or music, utterly throwing you into despair after your
months and months of travail and dozens and dozens of louis lavished on
incompetent professors.

"Pronounce that for me, please," said I one day to a gentleman who had
just spoken some word whose secret of pronunciation I had been trying to
filch for weeks--some delicate little jewel of a word, faint as a
perfume, expressive as only a tiny Parisian word can be--and he did so
in the politest manner in the world, adding some little witticism which
I do not recall. Whereupon I went home and instantly dismissed my
"professor."

But to return to our theme, the cries of the marchands. It would take a
pen like Balzac's, as curiously versatile, as observant, as full of
individual ink, to catch all the shades of these odd utterances. You may
recollect as you lay in your sweet English bed in London, just as the
fog was lifting over the great city early in the morning, the distinct
individuality of the voices which, although you did not see their
owners, told each its story of sunrise thrift and industry as it cried
to you the early peas or the wood or the melons of the season. You may
remember, too, how perplexing, how fantastic, many of those cries were,
making it impossible for you to understand what they meant, or why a
wood-huckster, for example, should give vent to such lachrymose
sentimentality in vending his fagots. But quite different is the Paris
marchand. With a physiognomy of voice--if the expression be
pardoned--quite as marked as the cockney's, what he says is yet
perfectly clear, often shrewd, gay, cynical, sometimes even spiced with
jocularity, as if it were pure fun to get a living, and the world were
all a holiday.

Some years ago a marchand was in the habit of visiting our neighborhood
whose specialty it was to vend _baguettes_, or small rods for beating
carpets, tapestry and padded furniture. His cry was--"Voilà des
baguettes! Battez vos meubles, battez vos tapis, battez vos _femmes_
pour UN sou!"

It is said that as this gay chiffonnier went one morning by the
fish-markets uttering this jocose cry, a squad of those formidable
_poissardes_, the fishwomen of Paris, got after him, and administered a
sound thrashing with his own baguettes. Such is the vengeance of the
French-woman!

But there is a curious pathos in many of these cries--queer searching
tones which go to the heart and set one thinking; tones that come again
in times of revolution, and gather into the terrible roar of the
Commune. I sometimes wonder if they ever sell anything, those strange
sad voices of the early morning struggling up from the street. They are
the voices of Humanity on its mighty errand of bread and meat. Some
dozen or so traverse our quarter through the day--some of feeble old
women, full of sharp complaint; some of strong, quick-stepping men; some
of little children with faint modest voices, as if unused to the cruel
work of getting a living. It is these poor people who walk from
Montmartre to Passy in the morning, and in the evening fish for drowned
dogs or pick up corks along the canal of the Porte St. Martin. For a dog
it is said they get a franc or two, and corks go at a few sous a
hundred.

Such is an inkling of the life-histories wafted through our summer
windows by the voices of the street. Well, the sun is brilliant, the
Champs are crowded with the world, the jewelers of the Palais Royal are
driving a thriving trade, the great boulevards are margined by long
lines of absinthe drinkers. Who cares? Only it is a little disagreeable
in the early morning to have one's sleep broken by the pathos of life.
Let us sleep well on our wine, and dine to-morrow at the Grand Hotel. We
shall forget the misery of these patient voices which visit us with
their prayer for subsistence every day.

G. F.


THE ANGEL HUSSAR.

I think some of the best talks I have had in my life have been with
chance companions on whom I have happened in the course of a roving
life--sometimes in a restaurant, sometimes in the railroad-car or
steamboat, and not unfrequently in the smoking-room of a hotel.

If you have ever been in Dublin, you know Dawson street, and in Dawson
street the Hibernian Hotel. I am not prepared to endorse all the
arrangements of that hostelry, nor indeed of any other in that part of
the United Kingdom called Ireland: I have suffered too much in them.
Still, I will say that the Hibernian is to be praised for a really
comfortable and handsome smoking-room, containing easy-chairs deservedly
so called, and a capital collection of standard novels. One raw
evening in the spring of 1871 I sauntered in, and found some
gentlemanlike-looking fellows there, who proved pleasant company, and
presently a remarkably _distingué_-looking young man, with an
unmistakably military cut, came in and sat down near me. We fell to
talking. He was quartered at the Curragh, and was up in Dublin _en
route_ for the Newmarket spring meeting. He told me that he made some
£700 a year by the turf. "I've a cousin, you see, who is a great
sporting man, and thus I'm 'in with a stable,' and get put up to tips,"
he said. "But for this the turf would be a very poor thing to dabble
in." And this led to a talk about officers' lives and their
money-affairs. "Oh," he said, "you've no notion of the number who go to
utter grief. Why now, I'll tell you what happened to me last season in
London. I was asked to go down and dine with some fellows at Richmond;
and being awfully late, I rushed out of the club and hailed the first
hansom I could see with a likely horse in Pall Mall. I scarcely looked
at the man, but said, 'Now I want to get down to the Star and Garter by
eight: go a good pace and I'll pay you for it.' Well, he had a stunning
good horse, and we rattled away at a fine rate; and when I got out I was
putting the money into his hand, when he said, 'Don't you know me,
B----?' I looked up in amazement, and in another moment recognized a man
whom I had known in India as the greatest swell in the ---- Hussars, the
smartest cavalry corps in the service, and who, on account of his
splendid face and figure, went by the sobriquet of 'the Angel Hussar.'

"Well, it gave me quite a shock. 'Good Heavens, H----!' I said, 'what in
the world does this mean?' 'Mean, old fellow? It means that I'd not a
farthing in the world, and didn't want to starve. It's all my own cursed
folly. I've made my bed, and must lie on it.' I pressed a couple of
sovereigns into his hand, and made him promise to call on me next day.
He came and gave me the details of his descent, the old story of
course--wine and its alliterative concomitant, conjoined with utter
recklessness." "Well, and could you help him?" "I'm glad to say I could.
I got him the place of stud-groom to a nobleman in the south of
Ireland: he's turned over a new leaf, is perfectly steady, and doing as
well as possible."

       *       *       *       *       *

NOTES.

There is an old story that Augustus, being once asked by a veteran
soldier for his aid in a lawsuit, told the petitioner to go to a certain
advocate. "Ah," replied the soldier, "it was not by proxy that I served
you at Actium!" So struck, continues the tradition, was Augustus with
this response, that he personally took charge of the soldier's cause,
and gained it for him. Possibly it may be on the theory that his
subjects "do not serve him by proxy" when he needs their services that
the Austrian kaiser even to this day holds personal audiences with his
people regarding their private desires or grievances. Evidently
traditional, this custom is so singular as to merit a more general
notice than it habitually receives: indeed, its existence might be
doubted by the foreign reader, did not a Hungarian journal, _Der Osten_,
furnish a detailed description of it. The only prerequisite to an
audience would seem to be the lodging of the subject's name and rank
with one of the emperor's secretaries, who thereupon appoints the day
and hour for his appearance at the palace. If the emperor has been long
absent from Vienna, his next audience-day is always a trying one, as the
waiting-room is then crowded with hundreds of both sexes, and all ranks
and ages. They are in ordinary dress, too, so that the imperial
ante-chamber presents a motley and picturesque scene--the gold-broidered
coat of the minister of state and the brilliant uniform of the army
mingling with the citizen's plain frock, with the Tyrolean or Styrian
hunter's jacket, with the _bunda_ of the Hungarian, with the long, fur
lined linen overcoat of the Polish peasant; while the rustling silks of
the elegant city lady are side by side with the plain woolen skirt of
the farmer's wife. Each of these in regular turn, as written on the list
from which he calls them, a staff-officer ushers into the emperor's
study. There the petitioner states his case. The emperor listens
without interruption, then receives the written statements and
documents, sometimes asks a question, but generally dismisses the
visitor with a simple formula of assurance that a decision will be duly
rendered. There is evidently much form in the matter, as if it were but
the empty perpetuation of some ancient ceremony designed to show that
the monarch is the father of all his people, and hence is personally
interested in their individual troubles. But yet it appears that the
emperor _does_ listen to the harangues, for he is occasionally known to
affix his initials to some documents; which act is always interpreted as
a good sign, it being equivalent to a special recommendation to the
secretaries, indicating that _primâ facie_ the cause has seemed to the
sovereign to be just. However, the precaution of a written statement is
always taken, because it would be impossible for him to remember all the
oral explanations. Only a few weeks after each of these audiences the
suitors are individually notified of the result. The emperor's sense of
etiquette does not allow him to give any sign of impatience during the
interview, though some of the visitors are as long-winded and
importunate as Mark Twain pretends to have been at one of President
Grant's receptions. The emperor answers the German, Hungarian, Tzech,
Croat or Italian each in the suitor's own tongue. It is quite possible
that in the preliminary registry of the names and condition of suitors
care is taken that the emperor shall not be subjected to too great
annoyance from any abuse of this curious and interesting privilege.

Among the canonizations of the past few months a notable place must be
assigned to that of the beatified Benoît Labre. That he was faithful in
doctrine needs hardly be said, but it was his manner of life which
procured him this posthumous honor, in order that those who read of his
career may rank him among those saints who, as in Tickell's line, have
both "taught and led the way to heaven," and may seek to imitate his
example. The decree of canonization, in reciting his characteristic
virtues, says that though of very honorable birth, yet, scorning earthly
things as dross, he clothed himself in rags, and ate and drank only what
chanty gave him. His shelter was the Coliseum or the doorways or desert
places of Rome. He washed not, neither did he yield to the effeminacy of
the comb; his hair and nails grew to what length Nature wished: in short
(for some of the additional details are better fancied than described),
he so utterly neglected his person that he became an object of avoidance
to many or all. But his neglected body was after death placed under a
glass shrine in the church of the Madonna del Monti. The decree calls
upon others to follow the example of the blessed Benoît, or at least as
far as the measure of spiritual strength in each will allow; but we
apprehend that many will modestly confess that the peculiar virtues of
the saint are inimitable.




LITERATURE OF THE DAY.


Little Hodge. By the author of "Ginx's Baby." New York: Dodd & Mead.

The pamphlet has changed since the days of Swift and Dr. Johnson, and
the modern method, which seeks to influence opinion by means of a short,
pointed story, is certainly a gain in persuasiveness and pictorial
vigor. It is hard to say what the dean of Saint Patrick's would have
thought of _The Battle of Dorking_, or _Ginx's Baby_, or _Lord Bantam_,
or _Little Hodge_, by the author of the last two of these. The dean's
ferocity of expression no modern writer can allow himself; and the
engine of a tremendous intellect is by no means apparent, as it was in
his work, behind the efforts of our modern pamphleteers. But the nerves
of pity, when exquisitely touched, are as apt to influence action as the
feelings of hate or scorn, and Swift's proposal, from the depths of his
bleeding heart, to fat and eat the Irish children, was no more adapted
to produce reformed legislation than is the picture in _Little Hodge_ of
the ten deserted children starving under the thatch, the eldest girl
frozen and pallid, the father shot by a gamekeeper, after having failed
to support his motherless brood. Swift would have put in some matchless
touches, but the picture seems adapted to our day of average, mechanical
commonplace. It has a nerve of tenderness in it which will work upon the
gentler souls of our communities. The father of _Little Hodge_ is
represented as an honest field-laborer, working for Farmer Jolly at nine
shillings a week. The birth of his manikin baby and the accompanying
death of his wife increase his cares past bearing. He thereupon commits
three crimes in succession: he applies to Jolly for an increase of pay,
he joins the agrarian movement of a year ago, and he attempts to run
away and find work elsewhere. He is inexorably, minutely and witheringly
punished for these several acts, and at last gets his only chance of
comfort in a violent death, leaving his poor problems unsolved and his
children naked and starving. Such a picture, if drawn by a foreigner,
would arouse English indignation from shore to shore; but it is
home-drawn. The only foreign delineation is in the author's Jehoiachin
Settle, a stage Yankee, whose avocation is planting English children in
Canada after the manner of Miss Rye. Settle is a preposterous failure,
but every other limb of the writer's argument is strong and operative.


At His Gates. By Mrs. Oliphant. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co.

The author of _Miss Marjoribanks_, who is said to keep writing first a
good novel and then a poor novel in careful alternation, will leave her
friends in some doubt as to which category she means her last story to
be placed in, for it is impossible to call it poor, and
conscience-rending to call it good. It is long, and depicts many
persons, of whom only one, Mr. Burton's cynical wife, is at all
original. Mr. Burton aforesaid, a pompous business-man, places "at his
gates," just outside his villa walls, the widow of a man whom he has
used as a catspaw. The catspaw was a guileless artist, whom Burton has
tempted to take a directorship in his bank when the latter was about to
break, he himself retiring in time. The poor painter, in despair, jumps
into the water, and his wife, who is proud and aristocratic, is
condemned to be the pensioner and neighbor of a vulgar villain, every
favor from whom is a conscious insult. Presently the tables are turned.
Whether the asphyxiated artist really comes undrowned again, and returns
rich from America, nothing could persuade us to tell, as we disapprove
of the premature revelation of plots. But the tiresome Burton, at any
rate, is bound to come to grief, and his headstrong young daughter to
run off with his partner in atrocity, a man as old as her father, and
his wife to adapt her cold philosophy to a tiny house in the best part
of London. There is one scene, worth all the rest of the book, where
this lady tries to bargain with her son, whom she is really fond of, for
a manifestation of his love: she is about to yield to his opinion that
she should give up her own private settlement to the creditors of her
ruined husband, and then, just as she is consenting to this sacrifice,
not disinterestedly but maternally, the boy blurts out his passion for a
_parvenu_ girl, the lost painter's daughter in fact--a rival whom he
introduces to her in the moment of her supreme tenderness. She simply
observes, "You have acted according to your nature, Ned--like the rest."
If there were ten such chapters in the book as the one containing this
scene, the novel would be something immortal, instead of what it
is--railway reading of exceptional merit. It forms the first of a
"Library of Choice Fiction" projected by Messrs. Scribner, Armstrong &
Co., of which it forms a very encouraging standard of interest.


Memoirs of Madame Desbordes-Valmore. By Sainte-Beuve. With a Selection
from her Poems. Translated by Harriet W. Preston. Boston: Roberts
Brothers.

Sainte-Beuve, with whom the art of female biography seems to have died,
and who has given us so many softly touched and profoundly understood
portraits, is here engaged with one of his own personal friends and
contemporaries. This is no study of a heroine long dead, and draped in
the obsolete and winning costume of the Empire or the Revolution, but of
an anxious woman concerned with the hardship and grime of our own day,
"amid the dust and defilement of the city, on the highway, always in
quest of lodgings, climbing to the fifth story, wounded on every angle."
Only sympathy and a poetic touchstone could bring out the essence and
sweetness of a nature so unhappily disguised; but Sainte-Beuve,
discarding with a single gesture her penitential mask and hood, finds
Madame Desbordes-Valmore "polished, gracious, and even hospitable,
investing everything with a certain attractive and artistic air, hiding
her griefs under a natural grace, lighted even by gleams of merriment."
The poor details of her life he contrives to lose under a purposed
artlessness of narrative and a caressing superfluity of loyal eulogy. We
learn, however, that Mademoiselle Desbordes was born at Douai in 1786,
and died in Paris in 1859. Daughter of a heraldic painter, the
necessities of her family obliged her to make a voyage, as a child, to
Guadeloupe, in the hope of receiving aid from a rich relative, and a
little later to go upon the stage. In the provinces, and occasionally at
Paris, she played in the role of _ingénue_ with an exquisite address,
succeeding because such a part was really a natural expression of
herself: she thus won the abiding friendship of the great Mars, who
turned to the young comédienne a little-suspected and tender side of her
own character. Mademoiselle Desbordes' artistic charm was infinite, and
she controlled with innocent ease the fountain of tears, whitening the
whole parterre with pocket-handkerchiefs when she appeared as the
Eveline, Claudine and Eulalie of French sentimental drama. But she felt
keenly the social ostracism which was still strong toward the stage of
1800, and bewailed in her poetry the "honors divine by night allowed, by
day anathematized." In 1817 she married an actor, M. Valmore, who
subsequently disappeared into obscure official life, accepting with joy
a position as catalogue-maker in the National Library. Her relatives,
and even her eldest daughter, received small government favors, while
her own little pension, when it came, was so distasteful that for a
long time she could not bring herself to apply for the payments. She was
a confirmed patriot, shrank from the favors of the throne, was ill for
six weeks after Waterloo, and hailed with delight the revolution of '48,
which for some time stopped her pension and impoverished her. After
twenty years of the stage she retired into the greater privacy of
literature, and published various collections of verse which struck a
note of pure transparent sentiment rare in the epoch of Louis Philippe.
She had, in an uncommon degree, the gift of intelligent admiration: her
addresses to the great men of her time appear to be as far as possible
from a spirit of calculation or self-interest, but they secured her an
answering sympathy all the more valuable as it was never bargained for.
Michelet said, "My heart is full of her;" Balzac wrote a drama at her
solicitation; Lamartine, taking to himself a published compliment which
she had intended for another, replied with twenty beautiful stanzas;
Victor Hugo wrote to her, "You are poetry itself;" Mademoiselle Mars,
when past the age of public favor, took from her the plain counsel to
retire with kindness and actual thanks; Dumas wrote a preface for her;
Madame Recamier obtained her pension; the brilliant Sophie Gay, now
Madame Émile de Girardin, wrote of her poetry, "How could one depict
better the luxury of grief?" M. Raspail, the austere republican, called
her the tenth muse, the muse of virtue; and Sainte-Beuve himself,
thinking less of her literary life than of her family life and manifold
compassions, terms her the "Mater Dolorosa of poetry." His memoir,
however, is valuable for its own grace as much as for the modest
sweetness of its subject: without his friendly eloquence the name of
Madame Desbordes-Valmore would not have got beyond a kind of personal
circle of native admirers, nor the present translator have rendered for
foreign ears the whispering story of her pure deeds and the plaintive
numbers of her verse.


Memoir of a Brother. By Thomas Hughes, Author of "Tom Brown's
School-days." London: Macmillan & Co.

Here is a book that was never meant to be dissected and analyzed by
critics and reviewers. It is not hard to imagine the "discomfort and
annoyance" which the writer has (he tells us) felt in consenting to
give to the public a memoir compiled for a private family circle. Still,
on the whole, it is altogether well, and there is good reason to call
attention to it, for there is much benefit in the book for many readers.
It is the loving record of a life that, from first to last, never
challenged the world's attention--that was connected with no great
movement or event, political, theological or social; but a life, all the
same, that was lived with a truth, an earnestness and a straightness
that won the affection and respect of all who came within its influence,
and will, or we are much mistaken, glow warmly in the hearts and
memories of just all whose eyes now light upon this story of it.

How many boys--ay, and grown men and women too--got up from _Tom Brown's
School-days_ consciously the better from the reading of it! But there
was withal a vague feeling of incompleteness, an unsatisfied longing.
The story left off too soon. One wanted to know more of Tom after his
school-days. And then, it was, after all, a novel, a fiction. One would
have liked to come across that Tom, and perhaps felt half afraid that he
might not readily be found outside the cover of the volume. It is true
that that longing to know something of the hero's after-life which is
one accompaniment of the perusal of a thoroughly good work of fiction
was, in the case of Tom Brown, partially gratified. Everybody had the
chance of seeing _Tom Brown at Oxford_, and watching their old
favorite's course through undergraduate days to that haven and final
goal of fiction-writers, marriage. But there he is lost to view for good
and all, and one is left to the amiable hypothesis that he lived happy
all his days, without being either shown how he managed to do so, or
taught how we might manage to do likewise.

Now this _Memoir of a Brother_ may be said just to supply the want that
we have here endeavored to indicate. It is the whole life--the child
life, the school-boy life, the college life and the adult, responsible
life in the world and as a family head--of a real flesh-and-blood,
actualized Tom Brown; and it stands out depicted with an intense
naturalness of coloring that charms one more than the laborious effects
of imaginative biography.

George Hughes, the subject of the memoir before us, was the eldest son
of a Berkshire squire, and little more than a year older than his
brother and biographer. Very pleasant is the glimpse of child life in an
English county forty years ago that is given in the story of his first
years. From the first he showed the calm fearlessness, the practicality
and the helpfulness which seem to have been among his most prominent
characteristics. These qualities, and with them a rigorous
conscientiousness, a sensitive unselfishness, and--no trifling advantage
in these or any other days--a splendid _physique_, he took with him, and
preserved alike unaltered, through Rugby, Oxford and after years. Little
wonder that the possessor of such gifts became a Sixth-form boy and
football captain at his public school, and achieved boating and
cricketing successes, an honorable degree, and the repute of being the
most popular man of his day at the university. Most people who take an
interest in boat-racing, and many who do not, have heard of that famous
race upon the Thames at Henley, in which a crew of _seven_ Oxford
oarsmen snatched victory from a (not _the_) Cambridge "eight;" but not
everybody knows--for the feat was done now thirty years ago, and names
are lost while the memory of a fact survives--that George Hughes pulled
the stroke-oar of that plucky seven-oared boat.

Oxford days over, and after a three-years' spell of private tutoring--a
not uncommon temporary resort of English graduates while they are making
up their minds as to what profession or business to take up for life--we
find George Hughes settled in London, reading law in Doctors' Commons.
By this time his biographer, who has been close by his side, and
following his lead in work and play, through all the years of school and
college life, is at work in London too, and the two brothers are again
together under one roof. The similarity, one may almost say
identicality, of the circumstances of their bringing up might, but that
such things, luckily, don't always go by rule, have led one to expect to
find in them, now full-grown and thoughtful men, something like a
coincidence of sympathies and opinions. Nothing of the sort. George is
by temperament and conviction a Tory of the kindly, old-fashioned
school: his younger brother has become an advanced Liberal, an
enthusiastic promoter of workingmen's associations, and a leading
spirit among the so-called Christian Socialists. Needless to add that,
though never for one moment sundered one from the other in heart or
affection by differences of opinion, the two could not work together in
this field. Downright, practical George has his objections, and states
them. Listen: "'You don't want to divide other people's property?' 'No.'
'Then why call yourselves Socialists?' 'But we couldn't help ourselves:
other people called us so first.' 'Yes, but you needn't have accepted
the name. Why acknowledge that the cap fitted?' 'Well, it would have
been cowardly to back out. We borrow the ideas of these Frenchmen, of
association as opposed to competition, as the true law of industry and
of organizing labor--of securing the laborer's position by organizing
production and consumption--and it would be cowardly to shirk the name.
It is only fools who know nothing about the matter, or people interested
in the competitive system of trade, who believe or say that a desire to
divide other people's property is of the essence of Socialism.' 'That
may be very true, but nine-tenths of mankind, or, at any rate, of
Englishmen, come under one or the other of these categories. If you are
called Socialists, you will never persuade the British public that this
is not your object. There was no need to take the name. You have weight
enough to carry already, without putting that on your shoulders.... The
long and short of it is, I hate upsetting things, which seems to be your
main object. You say that you like to see people discontented with
society as it is, and are ready to help to make them so, because it is
full of injustice and abuses of all kinds, and will never be better till
men are thoroughly discontented. I don't see these evils so strongly as
you do, don't believe in heroic remedies, and would sooner see people
contented, and making the best of society as they find it. In fact, I
was bred and born a Tory, and I can't help it.'" However, our biographer
tells us, "he (George) continued to pay his subscription, and to get his
clothes at our tailors' association till it failed, which was more than
some of our number did, for the cut was so bad as to put the sternest
principles to a severe test. But I could see that this was done out of
kindness to me, and not from sympathy with what we were doing."

After a few years of law-work in the ecclesiastical courts, the call of
a domestic duty took George Hughes--not, one may well imagine, without a
severe struggle--from the active practice of his profession, and bade
him be content thenceforward with home life. Idle or inactive of course
a man of prime mental and bodily vigor could not be. The violoncello,
farming, volunteering, magistrate's work, getting up laborers'
reading-rooms and organizing Sunday evening classes for the big boys in
his village, gave outlets enough for his superfluous energies. And
meanwhile he was now become a pater-familias, and had boys of his own to
send to Rugby, and to encourage and advise in their school-life by
letters which--and it is paying them a high compliment to say so--are
almost as good as those which his father had, thirty years before,
addressed to him at the same place. It is impossible to overestimate the
advantage to a school-boy of having a father who can appreciate and
sympathize with boyish thoughts and aims, and knows how to use his
natural mentorship wisely. We shall be much surprised if readers do not
find the letters from George's father to him, and his to his own boys,
among the most attractive parts of this book. Like most men who care
heartily for anything, George Hughes always continued to feel a strong
interest in public affairs, though circumstances had "counted him out of
that crowd" who do the outside working of them. He had a considerable
gift of rhyming, and that incident of the ex-prince imperial's "baptism
of fire" with which the late Franco-Prussian war opened drew from him
some vigorously indignant lines. Here are a few of them:

    By! baby Bunting,
    Daddy's gone a-hunting,
    Bath of human blood to win,
    To float his baby Bunting in,
                  By, baby Bunting,

    What means this hunting?
    Listen, baby Bunting--
    Wounds--that you may sleep at ease,
    Death--that you may reign in peace,
                  Sweet baby Bunting.

    Yes, baby Bunting!
    Jolly fun is hunting.
    Jacques in front shall bleed and toil,
    You in safety gorge the spoil,
                  Sweet baby Bunting.

    Perpend, my small friend,
    After all this hunting,
    When the train at last moves on,
    Daddy's gingerbread _salon_
                  May get a shunting.

It is not our place here to do more than record how that suddenly, in
the early summer of last year, the true strong man was struck down by
inflammation of the lungs and passed away. What the loss must be to all
whom his influence touched the pages before us sufficiently attest. It
is perhaps well, though, that no life can be faithfully lived in the
world without leaving such sore legacies of loss behind it.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Books Received._

The Relation of the Government to the Telegraph; or, a Review of the Two
Propositions now Pending before Congress for Changing the Telegraphic
Service of the Country. By David A. Wells. With Appendices. New York.

The Country Physician. An Address upon the Life and Character of the
late Dr. Frederick Dorsey. By John Thomson Mason. Second edition.
Baltimore: William K. Boyle.

Addresses delivered on Laying the Cornerstone of an edifice for the
Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, October 30, 1872.
Philadelphia: Collins.

Mysteries of the Voice and Ear. By Prof. O. N. Rood, Columbia College,
New York. With Illustrations. New Haven: C. C. Chatfield & Co.

The Poems of Henry Timrod. Edited, with a Sketch of the Poet's Life, by
Paul H. Hayne. New York: E. J. Hale & Son.

Modern Leaders: Being a Series of Biographical Sketches. By Justin
McCarthy. New York: Sheldon & Co.

The Complete Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier. Household
edition. Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co.

The Earth a Great Magnet. By Alfred Marshal Mayer, Ph. D. New Haven:
C. C. Chatfield & Co.

The Two Ysondes, and Other Verses. By Edward Ellis. London: Basil
Montagu Pickering.

Jesus, the Lamb of God. By Rev. E. Payson Hammond. Boston: Henry Hoyt.

Social Charades and Parlor Operas. By M. T. Calder. Boston: Lee &
Shepard.

The Yale Naught-ical Almanac for 1873. New Haven: C. C. Chatfield & Co.

Julia Reid: Listening and Led By Pansy. Boston: Henry Hoyt.






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